Trains

I was visiting a blog site of someone I admire earlier today and was reminded of this video again. I watched this video when it first came out, transfixed by someone who is dieing of pancreatic cancer give one of the most powerful and moving speeches of my life. He gave the speech for his three very young children. Dr. Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon professor, beloved teacher and an important researcher in the virtual reality field.

If you have 70 minutes and want to watch something meaningful, I humbly suggest this:

From New York Times: Keeping Priorities Straight, Even at the End.

The 70-minute talk, at www.cmu.edu/randyslecture, has been translated into seven languages, and this week Hyperion is publishing “The Last Lecture,” a book by Dr. Pausch and a collaborator, Jeff Zaslow, that tells the story behind the story of the lecture.

“The whole thing is very strange,” Dr. Pausch said over lunch at a diner near Norfolk, Va. “I just gave a talk. I gave talks my whole life.”

But of course, this wasn’t just any talk. “Let’s not ignore the obvious,” he said. “If I’d given that lecture but I weren’t dying, it wouldn’t have had the gravitas. Context is everything.”

Dr. Pausch, 47, is dying of pancreatic cancer, a disease that kills 95 percent of its victims, usually within months of diagnosis. Except for a pill bottle on the table in front of him, there were no outward signs of the deadly tumors growing inside him. Though he had just recently recovered from heart and kidney failure, he looked boyish, with a red knit shirt and a head of thick dark-brown hair.

Last fall, after doctors told him that he would probably have no more than six months of good health, Dr. Pausch stepped down from his academic duties and relocated to be closer to his family. But he decided to give one last lecture to a roomful of students and faculty members at Carnegie Mellon.

The lecture was not about cancer. Instead, he says, it was simply a father’s effort to digest a lifetime of advice for his children into one talk — a talk that Dr. Pausch knew he would not be around long enough to deliver in person. The children are Dylan, 6; Logan, 4; and Chloe, almost 2.

Although he could have set it up on a home video, he liked the idea that one day they would watch his last lecture and see their dad at work, in his element.

“I’m speaking only to them,” he said. “I didn’t set out to tell the world about how to live life.”

This band was founded in 1968. A friend used to play me their records from his massive record collection, now he lives in another country. Now we share youtube links which isn’t quite the same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_(band)

I have always had a fondness for trains. Traveling by train in far away lands can be fun and always seems to improve ones sense of adventure. All those adventure films like Indiana Jones, James Bond, etc usually involve trains. When I was a little younger I read all of Paul Theroux’s excellent travel writing books, many of which prominently featured trains. His book, The Great Railway Bazaar is a good book to start with. The Iron Rooster is also a good one to start with.

My father worked for the Canadian National Railway (CNR) for 30 years. I don’t see much snow where I live unless I go up into the mountains to ski. When I hear a train whistle blowing I usually get chills. Its a good feeling.

Anyways -- here are a series of videos of trains clearing snow. There is something beautiful and awe inspiring in these videos. Witness massive amounts of horsepower clearing snow. In the final video, a bunch of locomotives team up to get a snow plow train free from the grasp of the snow. Thomas the Tank Engine had better step up his very expensive wooden toy game! The Island of Sodor could use this power. How can you tell I have nieces and nephews?