What’s New with Wu

Truth is always better than fiction.  Governor Palin tried to fire Safety Bear.

Okay this is a very california thing to say, but there is definitely a feeling that McCain / Obama is with every day a contest of

power and aggression against inner peace and the focused mind

my bets are on the Buddha, go Obama go!

“Looking back on my time as CEO, I don’t believe AIG could have done anything differently,

Robert Willumstad, former CEO, AIG (Martin Sullivan on the right)

Unfortunately every time I come to Japan I want to do everything I’ve ever done here:  climb a mountain, visit onsen, eat soba, tonkatsu, sushi, go to kabuki - in short, do a repeat of every trip I’ve ever done

but even failing that, I will say this about japan, even if I do the same stuff here every time, it never gets old

This week I am flying around the world. That sounds more daunting than it is in reality - its just a few plane flights, nothing special.

Very impressed by the airports in Iceland and Copenhagen.

Copenhagen, in particular, comes close to the ideal that everything we deal with should be designed. I noticed this when I noticed that the design in Copenhagen extends all the way to the those bins used in the security line.

And I thought - yes, why do most places just use those ugly grey bins ?

Kate before jogging

My first full travel series -

I’m reading “The Wired Nation,” a 1970 piece by Ralph Lee Smith, assessing the great future of cable TV as a  medium of liberation.

Some is pretty spot on:

Looking a bit farther into the future, it may be that we ’ are heading toward a single, unified system of electronic . communications. “Before very long,” says Brenda Maddox in a booklet entitled “Communications: The Next Revolution,” issued by the London Economist, “information theory will have been brought to its logical conclusion in public communlcations; there will be a single unified network for all kinds of messages . . separate systems for telephones. telegraph, television and data - transmission will disappear

lnformatlon will flow through the Network as on-off digltal slgnals and appear as pictures, sound or print, according to the choice of those sending and receiving it.” The speed with which such a network could rattle off bundles of information is hard
to appreciate.

Meanwhile, other predictions may have been a little off:

Another local and community service potential of cable television is so important that it  must be separately discussed. CATV could arrest and reverse some ominous developments in American electoral politics.

Oh well.

What happens when you mix geek with weightlifter?  Yuri Vlasov, one of the greatest lifters of all time.

Google’s Free the Airwaves campaign!   I recorded this video in support, though for some reason I look kind of evil in the video.

No more Mr. Not Nice Guy.