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Note that since April 2014, I am publishing these items in my blog at http://runninginfog.wordpress.com/.

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Selected Recent Presentations and Publication

Story of the month ...

October 2009: On September 28, 2009, I was on a plane from San Francisco to Frankfurt. The Lufthansa layout of a 747 has no seat in front of 33A, so this is a good seat, and I was sitting there. 32B and 32C, the two seats next to the emergency exit were occupied by an elderly couple of Italian origin, maybe living in the U.S. - at least they spoke English very well and were reading English literature. Next to me, on 33B and 33C was an elderly French couple, with basically no knowledge of English - thus limiting conversations to a minimum. Both couples seemed friendly, in particular, the two elderly women kept smiling at me. But then, the expected unexpected happened. The Italian lady on 32B took possession of her personal world and lower the back of her seat to the maximum. The immediate reaction of the French lady on 33B was to put her hand on the top of the Italian lady's seat and shake it violently. She looked at me in disbelieve. How could this lady in front of her be so ignorant and arrogant and intrude into her space just because she might feel a little more comfortable that way. Peace left the area around rows 32 and 33, and it was clear that tension and conflict would prevail for the rest of the ~10 hour flight.

It is astonishing how easily little changes in our environment, particularly those that come completely out of our control, can turn a peaceful situation into a war-like state, and transform seemingly friendly old ladies into tense, aggressive fighters. Multiplying this capacity of individuals for rapid transformation by the billions, I am afraid that climate change, which will bring severe changes to many of us and intrude into our personal environment without us having much control over these changes, will lead to some rapid transformations of societies - with unpredictable consequences.


If you have a story, thought, or picture worth to be considered as story, thought or picture of the month, please feel free to inform me about it by sending an e-mail to hpplag@unr.edu.