shift 08 is happening soon, very soon, that is next week in Lisbon. I registered, and I fully planned to go, and that went the way that plans sometimes go. I wish that I could spill the beans of some fantastic adventure taking me to the far east and some never heard of kingdom for some romantic or otherwise adventure. Alas! There are no beans to be spilled here, and it is perhaps just a matter of choice. But this time this year, no Lisbon for me. The bit about time is always a lame excuse in my book. What do I mean when I say that I have no time for this or that? It could be that I am just being the real egoist whom I happen to be, and rather do this now. Period. I rather be doing what I am doing now.

So, but what is happening with tensoriana?

Actually not much. The basic idea of its creation is very much alive, and perhaps if I was not so busy working on that very idea, then much more would be happening with the website and the blog. Perhaps then Wall Street would not be crashing, and perhaps then there wouldn’t be a pathetic woman running for VP in a country that by sheer size has more to to say on fundamental governance matters than either you or I care to think about or are comfortable with. Perhaps then… only if… but what do you expect from me?

Now, you know that I am not into gender issues. I know it is a man’s world. I do not argue about that one, however it does not prevent me from either thinking or writing. Is it a white man’s world? Good question! I am glad that you thought of it. But then I recently heard James Watson on the matter of genetic differences, and I could not agree with the man more. We are all created alike, and some of us are more alike than others. I know that some of his remarks have gotten some feathers ruffled, what in fact has happened is that a lot of good people do not understand much of what is the fundamental architecture of life, and this is sad, very sad. Our technological society can ill afford to have so much ignorance around. If society is failing somewhere, it is failing in its recognition that education is an imperative. Actually access to education is a basic human right as chartered in the Declaration of Human Rights. So where is the problem? Why do we get side tracked about a few milligrams of melanin one way or the other?

Why is it that we value some aspects of intelligence more than others? But what is intelligence? We all know that spies only exist in James Bond movies and that what really happens in real life is a tad more mundane than the fantastic fiction. Oh, really. There are real life events and narratives that make James Bond sound like a dull character. Reality has always been much more fantastic than fiction. Fiction is only plausible, while reality does not have to adhere to plausibility. Oh, there is another kind of intelligence? Individual intelligence? Oh!

Last month I attended a fantastic conference in Geneva with what to me is a rather misleading name: Access to Knowledge. The fundamental issue is actually access to information, or as one of the speakers pointed out, access to justice. Access to knowledge boils down to the fundamental right of access to education, and that is a rough one on a global scale. When the most powerful country in the world – of which I am a citizen – has some of its influential figures – note that I am not using the word leader – all confused about one very basic biological function that we call reproductive biology, then I in my not so modest opinion see that there is a problem in education. When that same big numbers country can not manage to educate its influential figures in what are the basics of reproductive biology, how is sub-Saharan Africa going to manage to curb AIDS? There is the consoling idea that perhaps the former is not a prerequisite for the latter, and let’s hope so.

But I am biased, very biased. I was educated within the tradition of the scientific method, and was born loving the arts.

Shift your thinking, go ahead, do it! Technology, like life, is transient.