I’ve unofficially been offered a position as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, at the excellent School of Natural Resources and Environment, in the excellent Environmental Spatial Analysis Lab, as a student of the excellent Dr. Dan Brown. That’s fantastic.

Of course there are funding issues and I’m waiting to hear from McGill so it’s not a lock. But it’s still fantastic.

In celebration I am changing the name of the this blog. It will no longer be subtitled “The Green Star Letters” (Josephine is stranded in Ontario right now anyway). Via a comment about the mental state of scientists from Bruce Sterling in his Long Now seminar, the Electrolog is going to version 2.2 as “Soaked in Cosmic Wonder”.

I don’t know if I’m still on the nomination committee for the MF Genius Awards, but if I have any sway I’m nominating the hell out of the guy who is making the upcoming Flyspy website. This blog explains it better than I can, but essentially it’s a tool for creating over-time graphs of the cost of flights from and to airports that you specify. The AirCanada website has been getting good at providing something like this functionality, but a general purpose website which can search across airlines a la Expedia et al and provide easy to digest graphical data is a brilliant edition to the problem of wringing best-value pricing information out of the airlines. It seems a whole lot as though the airlines have been using limitations on our access to knowledge of flight pricing (which is an immense and sticky hodgepodge of a topic, incidentally) as a way to leverage a little more money out of us, putting us on flights that are more expensive just because we aren’t aware that there is a slightly cheaper flight that we happened not to search for. Traditionally this is of course a function of the geniuned trickiness of developing effective search and retrieval tools for that information, but I feel like we should have been making much more progress on this problem than we have been. The last quantum leap was the introduction of the aggregate search sites, but this looks like another major step forward. I’m looking forward to it going live in a big way.

Now if only I was a student again and could get a student card I could afford to travel again.

Oh, hey, wait…

So I’m working as a daffodil picker. Before signing up I googled it, and found a rich list of folks who include daffodil picking in their lists of jobs they have had. For example:

Patricia Prime has been a kitchen hand, cook, nurse aide, daffodil picker, juggler, teacher aide, musician, labourer, guitar teacher, fruit-picker, busker, worked with the intellectually handicapped, etc.

Ed Heaver of Wrexham, Wales wants us to know that picking was very similar to chicken catching but smelt nicer.

giveasyouget has worked as a daffodil picker, pasty crimper, cleaner at student halls of residence, galley slave, staff canteen at a geriatric hospital (plenty of smiles there), packing for mail order, frozen prawn packing, sandwich factory and dinnerlady. Gallery slave?

The winner, Stephen J. Lyonshas been employed in nine different states as a tree planter, daffodil picker, dude ranch cook, ice cream vendor, magazine editor, phone solicitor, newspaper reporter, professional tofu maker, grain truck driver, assistant dairy herdsman, and agricultural extension editor. It goes on from there.

I take it people end up picking daffodils sometimes. I take it that’s life. There’s this whole world of work and you go out and do it and sometimes its the work you want to do and sometimes its the work that pays bills. Sometimes it has some recognizable romance, sometimes some filthy glory, and sometimes its daffodil picking. You know what? It sounds like life.

One morning last week it looked like this: