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My travels in early 2001: Andrew Hodges Back to Gran Canaria (1) |
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Gran Canaria: pages 1 | 2 | 3 America (east): pages 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 America (west): pages 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 and page 10 More pages will follow. | |
OUT OF THE UKAs midnight chimed on 31 December 2000, I was on my way to near-tropical Gran Canaria. I've been to Gran Canaria many times before to have some sun in midwinter. As you can see, I went after my Y2K. These pictures from previous visits show what I had in mind. | |
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OUT IN THE UKBut on my way that night I went to the OUTtintheUK meatspace party in Soho, London. | |
| OUTintheUK is a gay men's website run as a community service with impeccable dynamic HTML and no time-wasting advertisements. |
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OUTintheUK has well-organised, serious, funny threaded conversations. I have heard many dissertations by literary folk on the theme that the internet personalities is a world of fantasy personalities. The reality, however, can be the reverse: people reveal on-line much more than in physical social contact. Hence the arguments based on breathtaking chasms in knowledge and experience, the sounding off with unfounded speculation... After all this, it was odd to meet so many perfectly normal gay guys in a Soho pub. After an hour or so we went clubbing, and then at 4.30 I walked to Victoria and got the train to... | |
 | Gatwick AirportThis is it!It is 2001... (I once got a fan letter from Arthur C. Clarke.)
Well, it looks like business as usual. |
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I was expecting to be judging HAL-like programs for the Loebner Test in October 2001. (Actually I didn't, for reasons to be explained on a later webpage...) So as January 2001 dawned I was musing that things hadn't gone quite as Arthur C. Clarke imagined. Jack Good and Marvin Minsky hadn't created Artificial Intelligence. The international space station was not quite there yet, and Chinese megatons were not in orbit. Mobile phones, not videophone booths... but far more sex and shopping on the Internet than anyone dreamt of in 1969. I wasn't going to the moon with Pan Am but to the more down-to-earth |  |
Gran Canaria |
 Fantasy: postcard surfer | ...on the cheap holiday-carrier Air 2000. It was the first flight that made their futuristic name a thing of the past. Well, air traffic control didn't get metres and feet mixed up as NASA did, and we were not too late for the sun when we arrived. From Las Palmas airport we were taken south on the bus to Maspalomas in the artificially irrigated desert... and up to... |
Sonnenland |
 ...where it isn't ALWAYS sunny. |  But in cloudy skies, guys socialise |
...and soon the sun is back. |
 The boyz next door: a beautiful vista |
| Yes, this is Vista Bonita, Calle Einstein (yes, really!), Sonnenland, Maspalomas. I have gone with Man Around travel company. Of course, having gay men around is highly conducive to serious thinking, and as you can see I am looking very intellectual. | |
| I am reading books. Richard Dawkins's Unweaving the Rainbow attacks Stephen Jay Gould. Ian Stewart's The Collapse of Chaos attacks Richard Dawkins and of course Roger Penrose as well. But then, almost everyone attacks my guru Roger, usually without reading what he says. Richard Dawkins gives a fine account of electromagnetism, which is well away from his patch, so I tend to trust what he says about evolution. But Ian Stewart gives a wrong account of Roger Penrose's views on freewill and quantum indeterminacy. So I don't take on trust his line that the infra-structure of physics is irrelevant to macroscopic events. More down to earth, I am planning some Pascal programs for my forthcoming Continuing Education course on computer-based cryptography, which basically will pay for this holiday. Photo by Peter Twist. Try clicking on it to get me sorted. |
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