Well, I'm back after a short hiatus. Part of the reason for my silence was that there was very little I felt like writing about (or doing, really) in the wake of 9/11. Another reason was that I was out of town and away from the internet last weekend, taking part in my research group's retreat. Things are slowly settling down again. It's a beautiful, rainy fall day here and I'm gearing up again for the blob of work that awaits me whenever I want to get started.

I went for a dental checkup on Monday. I have no objection to dentists per se, and in fact I've been very happy with this particular dentist. I do, however, feel anxious about these checkups because I have such terrible teeth. I have many fillings. Enough that I don't know how many I have. It must be up around fifteen or twenty. At least a dozen, at any rate. I have to wear a plastic night guard to prevent myself from grinding my teeth into oblivion, and my bite is rarely aligned. I gather a lot of this stems from large doses of antibiotics as a child -- apparently this can wear out the enamel on your teeth. But I'm sure part of it is hereditary as well.

Well I wasn't about to surrender my teeth just yet. After the last appointment, I was pretty diligent. We bought a Sonicare toothbrush. I flossed almost every day and rinsed with a fluoride rinse. This was some pretty hardcore dental hygiene.

I guess all my hard work paid off, because according to this most recent appointment, I only need one filling. Hurray -- "only" one. I find it hard to feel excited when it's the rate at which I need new fillings that's leveling off, not the absolute number of fillings I have. There's a very large different between "only one each time" and "zero each time".

It's not even getting the fillings that bothers me. The needles, the drilling, those are all minor inconveniences. No, what bothers me is the constant reminder that in the long run, there's probably not much I can do about this problem. It seems that my best efforts merely slow the decay. It stands to reason that when any given tooth is made up more of amalgam than tooth material (which, by the pigeonhole principle, is the inevitable outcome of these repeat visits), it'll be time to consider whether the remaining organic part of the tooth is performing any useful function.

The sensible alternative, of course, would be to find a less observant dentist. Perhaps I'll take that opportunity next time I move.

You don't need me to provide commentary or interpretation of this week's events. Maybe at some point I'll try to put my feelings in words, for my own sake more than anybone else's. After all, one of the goals of thingo.net was to provide myself with the opportunity to understand my thoughts better by seeing them written down.

I would, however, call your attention to the following photograph, which I have ruthlessly reproduced from a photo essay at the Washington Post (taken by Ahmed Jadallah of Reuters):

Yes, that's Yasser Arafat, president of the Palestinian nation, donating blood to help New Yorkers. An incredible gesture -- he's putting aside any personal feelings about the US. Beyond any words of sympathy or rhetoric he could offer, he's helping through personal action. The latest news is that he's also attempting to rally the Islamic nations to support the US's campaign against terror.

There's really nothing specific or intelligible I can say about today. I won't attempt to make a statement, I just want to mark the day, perhaps to know that it really did happen.

I'll quickly refer to someone else's words, a little snippet I found via an interview on NPR. Here's a poem by Yeats, entitled "On being asked for a War Poem":

I think it better that in times like these
A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter's night.

I wish the poets did have an opportunity to set the statesmen right.

If you move the mouse over any of the [link] links on thingo.net entries, and look at the URL at the bottom of your browser, you'll notice that every entry has a unique integer index. Well, the index of this entry is 100! Here at thingo, we've survived the crazy ups and downs of the stock market, the flood of flagging and merging companies, and grown to a kind of website adulthood. We haven't had to lay off a single employee. We've never made desperate pitches to the VCs. We've never popped up an annoying browser advertisement on your screen. And that's how we're going to stay. We're sticking to our principles, dammit. An oasis of sanity in a vast web of uncertainty.

To celebrate the centennial, I made a few minor changes to the website that you probably won't even notice. I fixed the "blog style" and "summary style" links so that your choice of viewing style is better preserved across multiple pages. You can't set it as a preference that stays the same across multiple visits -- that would involve web cookies, and I don't want to burden you with those. But if you're viewing the current entries in summary style and click on an archive link, the archive will also be displayed in summary style. The next step is to make the "about" and "links" pages have the same property. See? I told you that you wouldn't notice.

So thanks to all of you out there in thingopolis who made this moment possible. And tune in again soon for another thrilling installment!

After pestering the people at the surplus property warehouse, people who frankly have better things to do with their time than help people like me with their idiotic requests, I finally received a photo of the EVENT 4 machine from a few auctions ago. Behold its incredible power! Its control of the very forces that bind the universe together! EVENT 4!

I suppose some of you will see this box as nothing more than a rusted hulk. I say to you: you are the rusted hulk, unbeliever! You just be glad the machine was unplugged when I stood there and pressed the magic button a couple of hundred times for fun.

Incidentally, the event4.net domain is taken, but event4.com and event4.org are wide open. Nah, never mind. I just renewed thingo.net for another two years.