Nepal, social networks as graph theory, futon cover

I’m terribly jealous.

Some old friends of mine moved off to India, as I think I mentioned before. One of them is keeping a blog, and reading through her tales of her escapades and encounters in India and Nepal is making me long for my own carefree days of travel. I would give thousands of rupees to be in her shoes. (Admittedly, the exchange rate is in my favor, since there are currently about fifty rupees to the dollar.)

And yet I wouldn’t. She’s not just exploring, she’s re-settling. So things that would normally be exciting and exotic–like not speaking the language–become a burden: she’s going to have to learn Nepali and Tibetan in order to function at even the lowest levels. Finding someone to speak English with may be a challenge. That kind of thing. I don’t envy her her re-settling, only the gloriously exotic land she finds herself in.

I must go traveling again soon. In another few months I should have enough points on my credit card to take me somewhere exotic, like India. Must go soon.

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Just finished a course called Mastering the Integrated Program at Stanford’s Advanced Project Management certification program. Most of the course was pretty boring and/or straightforward, but there was one session taught by a sociology professor that had me on the edge of my seat. He was talking about social power through centrality (connectedness) and had a slide up there that was just like the diagrams I was drawing when I was trying to model social connectedness at Liberate! back when I was figuring out how to do organizational change there. So it was a tremendous rush of intellectual satisfaction and excitement when I realized that yes, the attempts I made at modeling relationships using graph theory were going in the right direction after all! And, better yet, the prof was kind enough to point me at the seminal book in the field, Social Network Analysis by Wasserman and Faust. I ordered a copy from the Stanford bookstore and will be looking eagerly to its arrival. I do so few intellectually/mathematically interesting things these days that a new theory/mental model will be most welcome.

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I’ve found the fabric for my futon cover, I think. It’s a dark burgundy duppioni, with dark burgundy silk strands woven against a very fine black synthetic (?) warp. Not super-heavy, but silk is remarkably strong and abrasion-resistant, so I’m hoping that will be enough. At worst, I suppose I can always make another one.

But I am really psyched about it–it’s going to match the silk wall hangings perfectly, and look oh-so-classy with the dark cherry furniture. I had really wanted a black leather couch because of the style…but a silk futon is pretty cool too.

More later…it’s late, I’m tired, I’m going to sleep.

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