| | airplane encountersI'm flying back to DC today from a wedding (Elisabeth's brother, Michael got married) in LA and then business in Albuquerque. Both were nice and fun. On the plane today I sat in between two guys in the exit row - one had a large growth on his arm (large being a base the size of a dime and a height of the diameter of a dime but getting narrower farther away from his arm). It made me feel weird inside just to look at...must have been a little what St. Francis felt before he touched a leper for the first time and had that conversion experience. Anyway, just a random thought.
Then the guy on the other side of me was looking at some papers about a desalination plant in Texas. Turns out it's located inland for groundwater that is brackish. It's not nearly as salty as sea water but too salty to pass regulations for drinking water. Apparently the southwest has a lot of such water and it's an untapped resource. The tricky thing is what to do with the "waste" water resulting from the reverse osmosis procedure - it creates a waste stream of much saltier water that you can't just pour on the ground or inject underground. Thought that was interesting. He told me some about how he worked for a couple years after his B.S. and then went to grad school because that gave him a chance to figure out what he wanted to study and to do. He said it was hard to know what you want to do straight out of undergrad. It's always interesting to hear such things and how people go about making important decisions in their life. His company (his name is Paul and he's the VP of one branch of it) is building 3 plants in Phoenix as well. I told him I was working for the gov't/DOE and he was saying that consulting is more stimulating and innovative but that government work of course has much better job security. You have to work really hard in consulting and if you want to move up that will pay off, but it's still possible if you want to stay a bit more behind the scene, or 'in the backroom' as he said. I'm interested in environmental issues as well, so it was fun to talk about water desalination and ask him about how that works. Some countries are using nuclear power plants to provide the means for desalination (it is very energy intensive) and so I've been curious about it for a little while but haven't researched it much. He was also saying that there is a shortage of Masters' students in engineering and they have to go recruit people while they're still juniors to get them to sign on after they graduate from their undergrad even though they much prefer hiring people with their M.S. Interesting.
Then as we were landing a guy behind us saw the book I just started, "Putin's Russia" by Anna Politkovskaya, a much acclaimed journalist who was 'openly' assassinated about a year ago in Russia. It was fun to talk to him - he knew some Russian immigrants and they told him that Russia under Putin is much more like Soviet years and strict government/FSB (previously the KGB) control and influence. Interestingly, there are still lots of similarities between the Russian army now and what Tolstoy wrote about about 100 years ago. It added some valuable context to Tolstoy's writings and intense pacifism. He was so passionate about pacifism because he saw how much control the military held over common people and how horribly corrupt it was, and even supported by Christianity. Tolstoy's book "The Kingdom of God is Within You" is basically all about how important Jesus' teaching of nonviolence is and includes stories of nonviolent resistance to the military that are pretty cool. I was surprised though that there are so many similarities between the military then and now. I'll write up a selection or two from Politkovskaya's first chapter later. It's also sad that the U.S. doesn't really put much pressure on Russia about these things, although there has been some talk about how Russia is straying from democracy. Our media doesn't cover that in any amount of detail, though.
It was nice to get to talk to people on the plane...I've been stressed about thesis and it helped to put things in perspective. Still have lots of work ahead, though, and so I just gotta suck it up...
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| | Posted 10/10/2007 3:55 PM - 0 comments
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