Some Articles

From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Vanessa Petit’s article “Maya Indians remain almost invisible in South Florida” details the growing trend towards the emigration of Maya from their homeland in Guatemala and the Yucatán and Chiapas regions of Mexico.

From Ireland’s Central Statistics Office, the results of the 2002 census. For the first time since 1871, the territory of the Republic of Ireland is home to almost four million people. The census documents go into more detail about the country’s rapid growth.

Brisbane’s Courier Mail features John Wright’s article “A million expats in the great exodus”. Canada has long been concerned with emigration to points further afield, as Canadians go to wealthier areas which offer greater scope and reward for their talents (i.e. the United States). Australia’s neighbour New Zealand has experienced this sort of emigration since at least the 1970s. Now, it seems that Australia itself is beginning to undergo the same phenomenon.

Finally, from Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Paul Taylor’s article “Saturn nears Earth”. This article goes into more detail about the joint NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens probe to Saturn. The information revealed by the Huygens landing on Titan should be particularly interesting, given as how the dense nitrogen-methane atmosphere of that world prevents observation of the world’s surface from space.

Laptop

As of last night at 10 o’clock, I have a laptop, bought cheaply enough at 180 dollars. It’s old, granted, dating from 1997 with only 2 gigabytes of hard drive space, but it’s more than sufficiently powerful to use as a standalone computer in my office at Queen’s.

I wasn’t expecting to see this here.

Gollum’s acceptance speech at the MTV Movie Awards for Best Digital Performance is here. It’s in Quicktime format, and strong language is used. It’s rather hilarious, though.

Winter Term Courses

I decided to go over my courses for this coming semester, to bring myself entirely up to speed on my schedule.

813* – Topics in Medieval Literature I: Drama and Devotion – M. Pappano – Tues. 11:30 – 1:30 (Offered in the Winter term)

My Christmas

It went nicely. The gifts were good–Life of Pi, Fury, a portable CD tote, new clothes including a nice dark navy blue blazer–and were followed by pleasant time spent with the family (both nuclear and extended, via the latter’s visit). It was all quite good.

Ah, no

From the Globe and Mail:

Beagle 2 not yet calling home from Mars

Scientists waited in vain for a sign that Europe’s tiny Mars lander, the Beagle 2, had survived a landing on the Red Planet. Both a U.S. satellite and British radio telescope failed to pick up its signal.

Read more here.

[HOUSEKEEPING NOTE] Blogroll Addition

Gentlepeople, I’ve added Angua’s First Blog to my blogroll. Go, read!

Merry Christmas!

I’d like to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

I may get on-line between now and then to make a posting or two, but consider this my holiday message of note. 🙂

Yesterday was fun. I spent the afternoon with Steve It was nice to see everyone at london_calling‘s graduation party, meeting mitchellirons and bonjourananas for the first time, enjoying a nice dinner at the Rodd Charlottetown and afterwards drinks at 42nd Street, seeing creases after almost a year, and so on. The night ended quite decently, with tudor_rose and I sharing a cab driven by a man originally from Scotland via Toronto who, among other things, sang “Ballad of Glencoe”.