I was excited to hear the national spelling bee was to be on "regular TV" a couple of days ago. I was very much in agreement with the news hour, in regards to "That it is great to see kids get this kind of recognition for mental achievement not just achievement in athletics". I remember writing a great paper regarding the "revenge of the nerds take II". Just like when Bill Gates and all the other non-bureaucratic engineers started to get real attention from their achievements we will see information savvy folks do the same. Forgive them they know not what they do. Ask the folks who are working the Google enterprise.
Central Asia
We are back from our most recent crazy trip. This time it was Central Asia and the "five stans" - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. We made all of our objectives. And we have now been to 104 countries. Angie has 95 and I have 94 countries. Together it is 104. These five countries were packed into 12 days, 7 flights, 2 high speed trains, 1 cable car ride, 1 horse ride, and lots of hours in car trips. They are all Muslim countries, but they are better characterized as former Soviet countries. Russian langauge is a strong second language in all of these countries. There isn't much English spoken in any of them. Angie being fluent in Russian made all the difference and did intrepreting for me as well as a couple of British backpackers we met in Turkmenistan. Tajikistan is the Country with the distinct langauage being a derivitive of Persian with the others being Turkic. Ethnically, Southern Uzbecs are Tajik. Interesting, the spelling of many...
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