Soft Landing

There are no roads to Ambunti, so I had to fly on this missionary supply plane in order to get there. There were pretty serious weight restrictions; they actually weighed me before I got on. In the bottom photo, you can see the Ambunti airstrip. It was a surprisingly smooth landing.

Adios 304

After a two year break, I finally made it back into 304 this summer. It was great as always.

I now have five flights and a canoe ride ahead of me, in order to visit some peeps.

Then seven flights and a bus ride in order to have a little color party and CTY reunion.

Greatest Moment this Summer

My favorite moment this summer may well have been when one of my students asked about one of the final shots in "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control". The shot is of a row of female circus performers balancing precariously on large rolling spheres. My student's initial response to these shots was to think that they were either (a) completely random, introduced only to give the movie the appearance of whimsical fancy, or (b) completely gratuitous, introduced only to depict a number of scantily clad women playing with large balls. However, in the context of our discussion, as we noted various externalist themes running throughout the movie, this shot immediately struck me as central for understanding the precarious nature of feedback loops (or tightly coupled systems more generally). And I immediately thought of more than a few similar shots in the movie that reinforce this same exact point.