Six Degrees South

Students at Sampoerna University usually graduate in person at the opulent headquarters of the Sampoerna Foundation.  Not this year, of course. Instead, we conducted a virtual ceremony, four months late, in our student center. Students joined online from all over the Indonesian archipelago and robots stood in their place, with each student able to witness the Rector, through the robot monitor, the moment he moved their tassels to signify their official transition to graduates.  Luckily, the robots stayed on their paths and followed the script and we had no glitches at all.  Kudos to our magnificent Student Affairs Team who did an extraordinary job organizing the event and successfully ordering all the regalia and shipping it to students from Sumatra to Papua New Guinea.

We had to be on campus today to rehearse for the Class of 2021's virtual graduation ceremony which has been delayed since June and will be conducted on Monday.  It was great to meet in person with the Student Affairs Team for the first time in 14 weeks.  Enjoyed delicious Chinese food and wonderful conversation.

Unlike most horribly complicated IKEA products, a four-year-old could have put this one together while blindfolded, but when you are mechanically inept like me you take pride in any triumph, no matter how pathetically small. By the way, the cute little Nordic IKEA name for my toilet paper holder is Balungen.

Border Patrol agents on horseback attacking and trampling Haitian immigrants. When you think of the atrocities committed by various government agencies against immigrants, outsiders, and people of color within our borders the past few decades, particularly recently, it's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish our nation from other authoritarian and neo-fascist police states, if one can even do so at all.

I came across Project Implicit because of a book I just finished reading.  Project Implicit is an amazing long-term study organized by Harvard University where the implicit associations and automatic preferences/biases that a person possesses are measured using a clever system of testing where you respond to images and words that are flashed across your computer screen.   I won't explain it in greater detail, so as not to influence how you take the tests online, but it is fascinating.  Go to implicit.harvard.edu to get started. After you register (it's free of charge), you are directed to a current study which you may opt out of, but if you navigate the site closely you can find archived tests where you can get your implicit associations and potential biases on a variety of subjects measured using the implicit system.  You might find the results interesting.  The images below indicate my results for a couple of the tests, which I found a bit surprising.  Then again, I have live

 Originally Published 9-12-2021 Got a one week free trial of Fubo, so I have access to every college football game in America.  If you really want to know the true religion of a large section of the U.S., it is football.  It is what captures the fervor of millions of Americans more than any faith. Watched the biggest religious gathering tonight: Arkansas against Texas. There will be massive celebration in the Land of Hillbillies tonight as Arkansas scored a decisive win. Meanwhile there will be great sorrow in our nation's version of the Republic of Gilead, as Texas received a severe drubbing. As for me, I have decided that I must cancel my Fubo subscription as I have watched four football games, two Premier League soccer matches, a baseball game, MSNBC, a U.S. Open tennis match, and the Stephen Colbert show in the 24 hours I've had the service. It's a fun change of pace to an unchanging routine, before I get rid of it.

Originally Published:  9-11-2021 9-11-2001 seemed like any other beautiful late summer day at the New York University campus at Villa La Pietra in Florence, Italy.  I was responsible for the student life of our campus.  Each semester we housed 100 study abroad students in two of the five villas on our 200 acre estate of gardens and groves of olive trees and cypruses.  And we were also responsible for 300 students scattered throughout the city in apartments NYU leased for them.  As you can tell from the pictures, La Pietra was a romantic Tuscan setting that seemed to come straight from a movie.  Mid-afternoon on the 11th got a call from the Head of Student Life for all the NYU abroad campuses who was situated about 20 blocks from the towers.  He told me that there had been an aviation accident and one of the Twin Towers had been hit.  At that point it sounded like a freak airplane crash.  It was when we learned of the second tower being hit that we knew something much more sinister was

There's an interesting feature called Google Maps Timeline that, by tracking a person's mobile phone location, provides one with a summary of all the places they have visited each month.  As you can see, I was a globetrotting fool during the month of August.  I think that lengthy excursion documented by Google Maps was a trip to the bank to wire some money.  It's a wonder I didn't acquire a serious case of jet lag from my journey, or taxi lag as the case may be. If nothing else, it's proof I am a good citizen who adhered to lockdown regulations and it shows my carbon footprint from travel, at least for one month, was almost as small as that of a mouse.

Didn't get much reading accomplished in August. Partly because it was my busy season of New Student Orientation and the start of the academic year, but also because I got bogged down with the main book I read. The book that bogged me down was The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. Earlier this year, I read his newest work, Klara and the Sun, which I zipped through and enjoyed immensely.  However, The Buried Giant, while it is a well-written and profound work, really was a book that didn't speak to me and I had trouble getting through more than about 15 pages a day.  The novel is a fable telling the tale of an elderly couple trying to find their long-lost son as they hike alone through the stark English landscape.  The story is set in the darkness of Post-Arthurian England and mixes realism with the exploits of dragons and knights. If you like Ishiguro, you might enjoy this book, but I found it tedious and I would strongly recommend reading Klara and the Sun instead. I also read a

It's no wonder the U.S. is a nation where the very large anti-vax crowd is eating horse de-wormer and dying because they refuse to wear masks.  If you stop and think about it, in a lot of ways, the U.S, is the most medieval, Dark-age country I've ever been in, and I have visited 39.  Here are some facts to support my assertion that the U.S. is a very backward country. *We don't use the metric system.  Every country in the world except us functions with the metric system.  But, talk to the average American about meters and liters and they cry and moan and say it's too hard, when in fact it is so much easier than then antiquated system we currently use.  We are just rigid and too ignorant to change. *We don't use celsius.  It's much simpler too.  In the celsius measurement system, water boils at 100 degrees and freezes at 0.  The Fahrenheit system is far less logical, but Americans are stubborn and unyielding and unwilling to use this system that the rest of the w