Also, ate cheese curds twice today, as well as Ethiopian food and grill-your-own steak place last night.  Then I spilled a whole cooler of melted ice on my crotch in the car.

So, yesterday was pretty fun, as I rode to Georgia Tech from our house for the first time (about 4 1/2 miles via the coffeeshop). There was this thingy from the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture’s Digital Media…department? at Bonnie’s school and I went to it and saw people we’ve had drinks with before (Judy’s friends Manu and Will) and talked about collaborative protest quilts with mandala-like qualities. What do you think about a digital media project where you can upload sound clips or video clips or pictures that would then reassemble randomly with all other contributed content to create a continuous video/flash stream? And in order to get around liability things, as things were assembled and played it the content would be destroyed, a la Philip K Dick’s idea of the biographical video that relatives could watch after the passing.

Anyway. They had this kiosk set up where you could do onsite registration and it would immediately print a label to affix on your badge. I was delirious by the end what with all the technology flying about and reconditioned my badge at the now-unsupervised kiosk despite Bonnie’s threats. Coincidentally, using “a” as your university and “student” as your occupation was very convenient. I am very pleased with the following:

Then, that evening, as I was conferring with RR, we heard 5 distinct gunshots near our house. The dog went crazy and Heather continued to sit on the couch and said it was prolly a car backfiring. About 2 min later we hear the first sirens and see the blue lights reflecting on our white painted porch railing. Indeed there was a shooting – and actually 2 that night about 5 blocks away for each! So we’re not sure if it was this or this that was happening at that moment.

I leave Seattle on the 21st of March for Thailand for my grandmother’s funeral
I arrive back in the US (first DC) on the 30th of March
I leave for Mongolia on June 1st.

Mongolians speak Mongolian, which is in the Altaic language group, which is related to Turkic, Siberian, and sometimes Korean and Japonic groups. I’m a bit vague as it gets into linguistic things after that.

I go into 3 months of training in-country, which includes homestay, intesive language and culture training, and stuff. I then get placed somewhere, partially depending on how I do in the training, I believe. So, I only know that what I will be doing will be health-related, but not much more than that. Speculatively, I would hazard that Mongolia + Health could include things like nutrition, rural health care, alcoholism (though I hear this is a taboo topic), and HIV/AIDS, but I’m not sure. Women’s status there is relatively good (compared to my last placement attempt in Turkmenistan), so I am feeling ok about this one.

If you are interested in what other people are doing in Mongolia or pictures already there, here are a few links that I’ve been following on and off: flickr photos from Khovd (West), the flickr person’s blog, and another blog.

Believe I will make this both a blog entry and a page so that people can refer to it easily

Rongrong, Alexis, and others: check it out. I may ask you how close the US system is to this later…

I am up to 3-ish jobs, 13 credits, and down to one nerve. I think that people should be paid according to effort – it seems it’d be a nicer way to live, except that you’d be ragged and who knows what the metrics would entail.

On the other hand, I learned the basics of multivariate analysis, how the US overthrew the Guatemalan government in the 50s for bananas, and that most people here don’t know the practice of pinning money to yourself on your b-day for people to add to.

Anyone want to work on some artistic-y projects?

In American politics and advertising, the expression astroturfing is used pejoratively to describe formal public relations projects which deliberately seek to engineer the impression of spontaneous and populist reactions to a politician, product, service, event, etc. by many diverse and distributed individuals acting of their own volition, when such reaction does not in fact actually exist.

Astroturfing is carefully designed to ”appear” as though it is the result of popular feeling, rather than manipulation. The astroturfing campaign attempts to gain legitimacy by affecting the appearance of having sprung forth spontaneously from “the people”, whereas it is actually centrally coordinated and engineered by a small group. The planners hope that the public at large will believe that so many seemingly independent viewpoints could not have been faked.

The term is wordplay based on “grassroots” efforts, which are truly spontaneous undertakings. AstroTurf refers to the bright green artificial grass used in some indoor sports stadiums. A “grassroots” action or campaign is one that is started spontaneously and is largely sustained by private persons, not politicians, corporations, or public relations firms. A “grassroots” campaign is perceived to come from the popular feelings of some mass of people and to not be a creation of the powerful.

Examples of these kinds of practices can be found throughout history, though there is a perception that use of astroturfing is increasing in reaction to the declining credibility of politicians and corporations.

See example: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007846.html

As generalizations irritate me, as well as snow-white clean reputations of professions (say, clergymen are always celibate when they’re supposed to be, judges never have penis pumps under their robes, nurses never deliberately euthanize patients without consent), I responded. And a flurry of posts commenced. Maybe the data is way off – but shouldn’t you check their facts to see if they are valid points? All I’m saying is never questioning your fundamentals – be that of yourself, your career, your profession, your faith – is to entrap yourself in a situation of oblivious comfort and disconnect with your people.

In my little niche of personal professional-land, if you lose touch of that essence – that people in your shoes can and will do what is wrong – you can’t honestly say you’re working as a partner with people in need. Rather, you’re parachuting in to provide them with all the help they’ll need to be better people.