Blogotron

Once I was in a dentist's waiting room and picked up one magazines from the coffee table. It was "Caras" (faces) or "Hola" (hello) - the Latinamerican version of what you would buy at the checkout in Meijer. Besides seminude pictures of models and tv-stars I found a rare moment of light in that issue: some sort of interview of a couple old & famous Argentinian writers (just to set the record straight, I'm from Uruguay and not Argentina). One was J.L. Borges, and i think the other Bioy Casares, but i'm not sure. One Autumn afternoon they took them to some square or park in Buenos Aires, where you'd usually find elderly people chatting and feeding bread to pigeons to kill time, and in this case they recorded the chat and published it (actually they were republishing the "interview" that had taken place during the 80's).

It was just a chat, albeit an intellectual one, and I'm not even sure if I had time to finish reading the article. However I read enough for that one and only little thing to get stuck in my mind. None of them read newspapers, and their dialogue went something like this:
- "It's a futile waste of time".
- "Yes! What makes the news today will be completely irrelevant and forgotten by everyone tomorrow".
You shouldn't take seriously anything in "Caras" - unless you want to know about the state of the art in plastic surgery in Argentina - but this was Borges! Not just any other story teller. The guy was a scholar in English Literature who travelled de world and wrote about labyrinths and mirrors and sand, gauchos and ancient Greeks, and refuting Nitsche with the second law of thermodynamics, and ended up in a cemetery in Geneva a few steps from Calvin. There was a lot of truth in it. Since then I've always felt a little guilt each time I see or read the news - even more now I'm subjected to the Sate News (MSU student's newspaper) or the local TV channels in my cable-less existence.

And now I'm blogging! A blogger in an era of information overflow, where people blog about the news, or even about other bloggers that blog about the news, and the news media have blogs set up in their own websites. If only I were using an old Remington typewriter... I'd have to give more careful consideration to my permanent words. I wouldn't fall prey of the lightness that comes with the 'delete' function of my keyboard. Oh well, at least I'm a blogger with a of mission - go green go science! - i guess it's something like that.. Geoff (Koch - do I have to introduce the characters?) can probably tell you better what it's supposed to be. Fortunately he's been refusing to tell us, his army of bloggers, what he had in mind when he set this up. It's better that way, so I can choose as my mission to write stuff that doesn't fades into oblivion too quickly, that is not just another source of online procrastination. Hopefully, the signal to noise ration in this lines, and the ones to follow, will be decent enough that some little part will also become stuck to your minds. At the same time i'll try to open a window into the mind of a physicist in the making and the add-the-adjective-you-like life inside a cyclotron (that's a figure of speech! we don't put anyone inside the cyclotron for too long, that could be pretty unhealthy).

Yet it's just a blog! I'll blog, to some degree, the truth and nothing but the truth. But don't take it too seriously - I know I won't - at the end this is nothing but a blog.

by the way.. who are we blogging to....who are you my dear reader??