Finally, a Chance to Just Sit

I hope readers will pardon my absence from the blogosphere over the last week or so. Forces have conspired to keep me from this labor of love. Take tonight for instance.

I was all prepared to enjoy a long night of blogging when daughter #1 spiked a high fever. Naturally we were told she needed to be seen right away and off we went to urgent care. From the moment it was decided that we must go, I was telling myself that we were going there for nothing. That we would sit there for untold hours only to be told exactly what I was predicting all along. It's just a virus, it will run it's course.

Four hours, a urine sample, a throat swab, a blood test, and a chest x-ray later, the enterprising doctor enlightens us with the news that we were probably looking at a virus. It will run it's course. Oh...but here's some antibiotics.

I'm still not sure if the antibiotics are a "just in case" it's bacterial, or simply a way to make us feel as if we hadn't just thrown four hours of our lives down the toilet.

Anyway, here I sit now, and what would a blog entry be without links?

The missus sent me a website for the 2005 UCSB Disorientation Guide, which teaches students how to be as radical as they can be. Why? Clearly because college campuses are not radical enough.

You will certainly enjoy the list of 13 reasons to be radical, with all the obligatory links to Robert Fisk, waging peace, and Noam Chomsky.

Then again, there must be some reason this radicalism isn't catching on. Tom sent me this story, which may explain the lack of enthusiasm. It's a story worth reading, even if I steal the final paragraph as a teaser.

The long-run prospects for the world are amazing. Today we have more people living longer lives in freer societies and we have more scientists alive than lived in all previous periods combined, and they all get an education that is almost as long as a lifetime in earlier periods. Biotechnology, nanotechnology and robotics will create vast improvements. We will be richer, we will live longer and we will be healthier. Continents that we thought were doomed to misery will soon have the living standards we have today.