PureGin.org

It's an incredible feeling to be able to relate the news that my mother seems to be doing great, at least as well as could be expected. Her specialists are very optimistic. She is undergoing prophylactic radiation therapy to avert possible metastasis to the brain, but it appears that the lung tumor is no longer detectable, after five rounds of chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

Mom is still dealing with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, but seems to be responding (slowly) to treatment.

If you know anyone who smokes - please, get them to stop!

Just over two months ago, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer.
She had been receiving treatment for neurological symptoms, which had
not been responding as well to treatment as her specialist had
expected. He suspected that there might be complicating factors, and
ordered tests that eventually revealed the presence of a cancerous
mass in Mom's left lung. His conscientiousness led to an early stage
detection, a glimmer of luck in a statistically grim landscape.

Mom had been a smoker for most of her adult life, and had succeeded in

I'm excited that I'll finally get to hear Wade Davis speak when the Atira Womens' Resource Society brings him to Vancouver to speak at a fundraiser for the Digital Storytelling Project.

Wade is one of those icons of our postmodern age - an explorer in a time when the very idea of exploration seems a thing of the past. He is a superstar academic, a guy who has let his curiosity lead him to parts of the world few people have ever seen, and who has let all that he has observed there shape a deeply felt and passionately articulated view of the planet.

Yes, using Elgg, of all things. The first, lengthly, 'bio-style' post introduces her to the world: Pamela Richardson. Thanks to Elgg's social networking, her Google rank for 'Pamela Richardson' was 3, even before she started posting. Another Pamela Richardson, who by some co-incidence also lives in Vancouver, has recently published a book and is climbing in the standings. And so the race is on!

Brian Jungen's Cetology I keep thinking about Brian Jungen's amazing work, on display at the Vancouver Art Gallery until April 30, 2006.

I arrived at the exhibition one afternoon, more or less on a whim, with almost no prior knowledge of his background or work. The word that popped into my head after a few minutes of seeing his work was 'magic' - in the sense of calling into being something that previously did not exist in this world; in the sense of recognizing the deep, or true, concealed or hidden nature or true being of something, by a deep understanding of that thing's relations in the world, by stripping away the surface or diversionary aspects, by finding hidden connections.

I bumped into Alex Waterhouse-Hayward at one of my favorite coffee shops a few days ago. Alex is a terrifically lively, interesting creative spirit - a working photographer and an artist, a writer, a gardener, an afficionado of music, a collector of t-shirts... I give up, it's impossible to put him in a box. Suffice it to say that it's always interesting to talk with him. Some of his photographs make the hair on my arms stand straight up.

I met webchick in person today - at the Starbucks on Monkland in Montreal, near to where my parents live, and - small world - near to where webchick lives!

The Starbucks features free WiFi - I was getting sustained downloads of approx. 450Mb/s, which annoyed the hell out of me because my crummy Shaw cable connection in Vancouver maxes out at less than 200Mb/s

I had lunch this week with Terry Coatta - Terry finished his Ph.D. at UBC about five years before I did, and went on to found Network Software Group, which was eventually bought out by Open Text Corporation. From leading the development group there, he joined Vancouver based startup Silicon Chalk as VP of development. Silicon Chalk, sadly, suffered from the difficulties of developing some truly new ideas in Vancouver's rather conservative venture capital environment (that's my take on it, anyway).

Francis Crick died on Wednesday, July 27, 2004 in La Jolla, California, of colon cancer. He was 88. The ramifications of his co-discovery of DNA appear still to be growing in depth and reach, over fifty years after the publication of this work. His fascination with science at the boundary between the living and the non-living turned in the past several decades to studying the relationship between the brain and the mind, a subject which may prove in time to have an even greater impact than his foundational work in molecular biology.

Happy Earth Day!

Buckminster Fuller coined the term "Spaceship Earth" in the 60's [His Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth dates from 1969; I can't find an earlier reference at the moment] to describe the closed system nature of our planet, and to capture the notion that all of Earth's inhabitants are, as it were, in the same cosmic boat.

Since then, the number of passengers has increased to 6.4 billion give or take a few 10s of millions. That's a more than 50% increase over the population in 1970. (see this population clock, based on US Census estimates).