quick update

Well I finally got that paper finished, but I'm kind of unsure about it. Some of my papers take years to totally come together though, but getting it out to review at a conference is a good first step. Some of the other fellows at the KLI have said they will give me comments on it, so I look forward to that.

Around the time I broke my finger I also broke my new little laptop. It took a couple weeks to get it to the shop, collect it, and just now I'm trying to reinstall my accounts on it but it keeps dying --- I don't think it's properly fixed :-(

Mom emailed that she didn't see that the epicenter of the quake was anywhere near Tibet. I'm not sure she looked at the picture I had put up of where Tibet was historically. But anyway, I have found the epicenter and it does look further East in current Sichuan than historic Tibet was. Nevertheless, certainly ethnic Tibetans lived in the capital which was strongly affected, so I still think it's a bit weird no one is mentioning them.

On the other other hand, it is also true that Tibet was pretty feudal before China got there, and in many ways is better off now. It seems like all over the world people would be better off if their languages and culture weren't actively repressed, they'd be less rather than more likely to start wars. But recently China was no longer repressing the religion at least, just moving a lot of their own people in. This article points out thats a lot like the US treated the natives in North America. Will says the Dalai Lama actually was also saying how great China had been for Tibet too and didn't want independence, he just wanted the agreement about Tibet's autonomy within China to be fully implemented, e.g. using their language in schools. There were only about 20 other people in the room with Will when he was there --- two were professors from China so there was a lot of discussion.

I gotta go -- we're taking the moms to an opera. I was waiting for my laptop to install an OS upgrade but it's just dead :-(.

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