on me on Latour from Spain

Paloma García Díaz with THIS REVIEW. It’s in English, though the abstract is in both languages.

Levi with a few remarks on epistemology

Here.

two other airports

According to Jeremy T., Sea-Tac (Seattle) also has free wifi, as did Kansas City when he was there two years ago.

other free wifi airports

Along with Philly, Paul Schafer reminds me that Louis Armstrong International in New Orleans has free wifi, and he thinks he encountered the same deal somewhere in the Mountain Time Zone of the U.S., perhaps Salt Lake City, though he can’t remember exactly.

My father also saw that post, and wrote to remind me that our own home airport, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has free wifi as well. That’s the way it always should be.

Chicago O’Hare and London Heathrow both make you pay for that Boingo service, which I loathe. I loathe it because they set it up in such a way that it’s very easy to get an accidental subscription that you don’t need. This happened to me last year, and by the time I figured it out, they’d charged me for something like three months I didn’t need. It felt like a scam, not like an honest mistake. For that reason, I didn’t get online at all in Chicago yesterday, during my very brief two hours or so at the airport.

Paul’s tip on New Orleans reminds me of something… Is Louis Armstrong International the best name in the world for a relatively major airport? I just came through Leonardo da Vinci in Rome, which is also a very good one.

new doorman is promising

So I return to Cairo to find a new doorman on the job, after a couple of weeks without one as poor Alaa (but probably also guilty Alaa) went off to begin his 7-year sentence in military prison for burglary. Saddest story of the year so far, to see a basically harmless/mildly sneaky person make a giant error of judgment. He at least shouldn’t have committed burglary under our more-or-less martial law penal system of the moment.

But on a happier note, the new guy seems fantastic. Only within limits can we trust our first impression of a person, of course. But you really can get a basic, useful impression of a person’s attitude within 5 seconds or so, and while these impressions are often erratic as to their accuracy, they’re often surprisingly deep as well; if you could unpack everything you immediately sense about a person, you could probably write a number of pages on that immediate sense.

My immediate sense of Khalaf, the new guy, is that he’s honest, modest, helpful, and unimposing. The landlord was under some pressure to make the right choice this time. You know about my most recent doorman. The one before that was great. But what I only learned recently from a fellow tenant was that the guy before that received *20* years in prison after stabbing the assistant building superintendent in the hand! I didn’t like that doorman either, though I never expected him to attack his colleague with a knife.

I hope Khalaf stays for a long time, based on what I’ve seen on a first day’s worth of interactions.