I am … unhindered by talent

It’s hard to know how to say this.

“My father is fighting cancer.” Nope. Sounds too much like a back alley brawl, and this is a much bigger deal than that.

“My father is battling cancer.” Closer. Given the great chunks of medical machinery being brought to bear on his illness, “battle” seems more descriptive than “fight”. But battles are (usually) parts of wars, and I’m inclined to be more explicit about that. So…

“My father has become a foot soldier in humanity’s on-going war with cancer.”

This seems pretty apt. We (mostly my Mom) are the support staff, providing love and support and matériel, eagerly and nervously awaiting news from the front. But he’s the one in the trenches, dealing with the foot rot and the deafening machines of war and the crap rations.

The key diagnoses were last week, and luckily my wonderful sister was able to fly down from New York and be with them for several days of intense and difficult information gathering. A huge thanks to her for being there for all of us!

Dad’s got cancer of the throat. The doctors place the odds at 50/50, but the system is pretty complex and there are a whole host of things that could slip or crack. He’s got several weeks of radiation and chemo ahead, so it’s going to be a long slog (and probably a rough Christmas), but Dad and Mom and the doctors are all prepared for the fight. Saturday morning was the first skirmish; happily he came through that in excellent shape.

Everyone here in Morris has been really supportive and wonderful, for which we are extremely grateful. We’re going to take off the week of Thanksgiving and will drive down to be with my parents for that week. Until then, it’s fingers crossed and a lot of time on the phone.

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Google Alerts just turned up someone using one of my Flickr photos. Turns out that a bunch of Flickr photos (including the one above) is being used to illustrate a strange piece on the Canadian Far North that’s mostly photos from various people with little bits of connecting text.

If you’re really bored and (like me) you don’t do French very effectively, you can use Babel Fish to see it in various other languages.

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We always argue (hope?) that all this wonderful stuff we’re passing along at a liberal arts college will have some value down the road, often in strange and unexpected ways, but it’s awfully nice when concrete examples come our way, as two have done this week.

First, Kirsten Jaglo (UMM ‘94) was back on campus earlier in the week as the Latterell Visiting Alumna. She’s gone through a PhD in biology and a post doc at the University of California at San Franciso to her current position in the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Global Change as a American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow.

Her responsibilities include developing, negotiating and implementing U.S. international climate change policy and providing scientific expertise for the United States Agency for International Development.

She became fluent in Danish through multiple study abroad experiences in high school and while at UMM, and apparently found this quite useful in helping get a belligerent Dane to sit down and play nice during a negotation. I can just imagine the look of surprise on his (and everyone else’s) face when she shifted into Danish…

And just yesterday Cory, one of the fine folks at Monkey River Town, pointed out that some of the computing esoterica he learned from me back in the day has proved useful in the careful crafting of their mighty Philos-O-tron. In a recent response to the truly deep question “r u real?” the Philos-O-tron incorporated ideas from the classic Turing Test, unequivocally demonstrating the value of this sort of broad based education in the creation of on-line oracles.

See, you never know when this stuff might prove useful - Liberal arts rules!

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So Flickr has this notion of “interestingness”, which is some algorithmic measure of how “interesting” a photo might be to view. No such measure can be perfect, and as one might expect there are vast oceans of (digital) ink spilt debating the pros and cons of Flickr’s algorithm. (Mostly cons, I’m afraid, as people are much more inclined to whine about how their pictures aren’t ranked high enough than they are to celebrate those that are.)

I will not enter into that debate here.

Instead, I’ll note that my two most “interesting” images on Flickr (according to that measure) had for over a year been (in order) the wonderful sunset on Bending Lake (Ontario, Canada) from a fishing trip with my Dad, and a close up of a poppy in a Shakespeare garden in Stratford-upon-Avon (both above).

In the last month or two, however, all that’s changed, with two new images leaping into the top four. My “most interesting” image is now this shot from Denali National Park during our summer trip to Alaska:

While I quite like the picture, I was completely surprised by the level of response. (Further evidence that I’m a totally crap judge of these things.) I find the colors quite surreal, for example, and while they are pretty accurate (I didn’t fiddle very much), I’m surprised that others didn’t find it too fake looking. Strange.

The sunset remains in the second spot, but the new third “most interesting” is this sunset over a cornfield here in town:

In driving Sub-Evil Boy back and forth to Barrett for Prairie Fire Theater summer camp back in August, I spent a lot of time looking at the local prairie and thinking about photo possibilities. Most of these I never had time or opportunity to actually do anything about, but I went out one evening to take some shots of the sun setting on some wetlands that I thought would be nice. They’re OK, but this was the real find that evening. As I headed back to the house, I liked the way the setting sun was lighting up the corn in a USDA experimental plot at the edge of town. One thing led to another, and I ended up with this, which I’m quite fond of.

The poppy remains in fourth, which is nice. I like the poppy :-).

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I apologize to the faithful few (Donkey rules!) for the extended absence. I’ve been swamped with many things, including putting together my file for my application for full professor, classes, events, and stuff. WeatherGirl has made it clear that this level of silence is unacceptable, and that I am to post, and promptly. She’s right, so I will.

I have tons to say, which means that I’m paralyzed and will (for the moment) say very little…

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