Wampum

My last three days in New Dehli were my most comfortable days. I'd a room that was quieter and I was sleeping nights, and the work at the conference was going well. One morning the driver misunderstood which five star hotel he was supposed to deliver us to -- the Taj Mahal hotel or the Taj Palace, several kilometers distant. It was educational, like every prior wrong turn, and we glimpsed the Presidential Palace through the trees.

In the evenings we ate at family restaurants in the Chaina Market area of Karol Bagh, and walked back to our hotel down quiet streets. We felt safer than we'd felt walking around the prior conference hotel venue -- the up-scale hotels at LAX. We reached agreement how to handle variants in Farsi and Arabic for a particular label, and four of us started work to replace something fundamentally broken that has constrained how scripts are used in labels. We're Iranian, Pakistani, Indian (dots) and Indian (feathers).

Other than explaining that the "war of movement" (Summer-Fall of 1914) aka "the early contests", are different from the "war of attrition" (Winter 1914 - 8 August 1918) aka "now till the convention (modulo Texas)", and different from the general campaign, and different from the post-election legal effort to protect the vote, I had a week without the Hero Twins or their supporters. My co-workers seem to have understood me when I said the American Left had lost its candidates, and all that was left was cannibalism and witch hunts for orthodoxy in a Party that appears to be following the French to electoral defeat.

Outside one can glimpse the issues -- development in India and China, lack of development in Africa, the shoot-down of USA 193 link, link and link, as creeping militarization of space.

The return leg of the flight passed again over Afghanistan, then turned north and went directly over the pole, in darkness, so what sea ice there is this season couldn't be seen, then south to Chicago.