Michael Agar
Ethknoworks LLC

It's been a long few weeks with a fair amount of travel. I'm just home from the fourth trip in the last month or so. I can't believe that there are still large numbers of people who don't know you have to take your shoes off when you go through airport security. So why don't they make you take your shoes off in Europe? This last flight, coming into Santa Fe airport on the new American nonstop from LAX, where passengers go when they die if they've been particularly evil, I'm looking out the window at the snow-capped Sangres and noticing that the airport is way, way down there. All of a sudden the pilot pulls back on the throttle and lowers the flaps so the regional jet shudders like someone said "bad plane" and whacked it with a newspaper. The plane turns towards the airport and the pilot banks it left and right to lose altitude like a skateboarder with an hour to kill. But it's still too high, so the pilot flies a full circle at low altitude and comes at the runway again. He, or she, who knows, except have you noticed how for awhile there there were girl pilots and now you mostly just see boys? Or maybe I'm just flying with the wrong airline. Anyway, the pilot didn't open the cockpit door as we deplaned. I sure wouldn't have after that aerial circus routine. What were they doing in there?

Now I get a break and I hope time to write a blog or two about the two main projects I describe on the home page, those two also explaining three of the four trips. Not for long though, the break. I'm heading off to Sweden to give some talks at a university and then at a regional health center in late April. I'll put abstracts on the blog as they develop. And then in the summer, the UK decided that I'm a "methodological innovator," an honor, and so I'm invited to their methods fair for grad students and junior faculty at Oxford. That event is more conversational, so it won't produce much in the way of abstracts before the fact. But with any luck there'll be a good story or two after. They asked me to do one of the "evening with" type conversational sessions. I've never offered an "evening with" session to the general public before. I'm not sure it's legal here. I'm betting it'll be a lot of fun.

I hate the traveling but enjoy the places I've been. The hell with that old poster from the 60s, life is a destination, not a journey.