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+--- Thread: Ah, serendipity (/thread-3917.html)
Ah, serendipity - Ed Jewett - 06-06-2010
Being something of a pack-rat, or an iNTp, I keep and store stuff... some mentally, some in electronic systems, some physically (which is difficult when unsettled). Running in frenzied fashion through my synapses is the pressing question "Where in __ did I put the __ cord that connects from my iPod to my PC...?" so I can download, upload, re-synchronize and re-organize my mobile collection of 15,000 tunes (mostly jazz, still awaiting the upload of new acquisitions of Freddie Hubbard, Ahmad Jamal, Steely Dan, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Herbie Hancock, Takashi, and Keith Jarrett, plus future acquisitions of Jarrett -- The Moth and the Flame lights my wings -- and now more frenzied in the hunt since Tuesday will bring me eight discs from the eclectic and superbly-produced stables of Mapleshade
[ http://www.mapleshaderecords.com/index.php ].
In "box B17a", back in the corner, collecting dust, I found a stack of folders. (Alas, no cord...) Inside one of the folders was the collection of old print-outs and notes from a prior professional project in which I was a "subject matter expert" working for a major enterprise under a DARPA/TSWG contract in affiliation with the USDA to develop a "virtual exercise" aimed at helping train civilian emergency management personnel in how to handle a rapidly-moving biological threat. Originally, the thematic focus was "mad cow disease" but was changed to avian influenza. There has been a good deal of discussion here and elsewhere about the role of drills and exercises in recent events; two biggies come to mind, one on each side of the pond. 9/11 had multiple drills underway when the boxcutters sliced through history.
The discussion is partly illuminated by a quote which, if memory serves me correctly, comes from within the Operation Northwoods text:
""Our military posture throughout execution of the plan will allow a rapid change from exercise to intervention..."
(March 13, 1962, Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense]
But, inside that folder inside that "Box 17A" (at the bottom of the page on top of the stack, in my hand-written notes of the final meeting on 12/22/03 in which, with our PowerPoint and dialogue, we failed to convince the parties at the table to capture and keep something of the time, energy and intellectual development we had already put into our side of the project (the software itself, along with the "mapping", and my work on the game design and game engine concept) is this quote from the TSWG major-domo:
"We're making a kind of training that doesn't otherwise exist in the world, and thus we'll figure out just where and how it fits as we go."
Anthenagin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jvoztry5rg