And sent an airmail special too

[austin_dern]

Incidentally I'm relieved to get word that a little package I sent a friend arrived. It was a couple of first-day covers, Singapore stamps commemorating the centennial of the founding of the National University of Singapore. It was founded as the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States Government Medical School, and we can only wonder why the name didn't stick. It was odd buying an envelope and stamps to mail an envelope with stamps on it, and I wonder what real collectors do. I'm not a stamp collector, but I sympathize with the hobby.

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, plans to open a Singapore branch next year, offering professional degrees in hotel and gambling management as at its William Harrah's College (see earlier comments about planned gambling casinos). There's been an outpost of the University of Chicago here for years, and I believe somewhere is a branch of the University of New South Wales. There are branches of the National University of Singapore in Shanghai, Silicon Valley, and Philadelphia. I think I'd feel less weird about this globalization of universities if they didn't all have locations so prominently in their names. It'd be less odd to have a Rutgers University, Canberra Campus, which doesn't exist, but give them time. But it will give me the chance to visit NUS, UNLV, UNSW, and the University of Chicago all in one day.

Trivia: In 17th and 18th century Holland, placing the square root sign after a number was taken to represent squaring the number. Source: A History of Mathematical Notations, Florian Cajori.

Currently Reading: Commune 2000 AD, Mack Reynolds. On the basis of 25-minute interviews with spokesmen for two-and-a-half communes (the last ends with the gang giving him LSD and putting him in his car), stupid alleged anthropologist Ted Swain concludes there's no book to be written about the commune phenomenon, since they're all the same except for superficial details. Just to be sure he hopes to conduct a detailed investigation of several days of interviews at one place. There are cabbages who are better anthropologists than this guy. Some of the commune folks bill themselves as libertarian-anarchists, but they're just trying to make themselves look good.

Comments

[patchoblack.livejournal.com]

o/` Your answer was goodbye and there was even postage due. o/`

Um...not exactly an upbeat little tune, is it?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

No, but I've already used ``Please Mr Postman'' and ``Return to Sender'' a couple times each, and I don't want to overdo things.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

This could be the basis for some design playfulness, with a collegiate competition of some kind offering a prize: "Deliver one piece of interoffice mail!" and an asterix, with, in far smaller type explaining the asterix's meaning, "To our Singaporean campus".

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Come to it, I don't know how far inter-office mail extends, when you get campuses this far apart. I think Rutgers would carry letters from the New Brunswick (central Jersey) to the Newark (north Jersey) and Camden (south Jersey) campuses, but they're all pretty close together, too.

Actually, I don't know how to send inter-office mail. I just wander into the office with a letter and a lost look and one of the secretaries promises to handle it.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

You realise now you'll have to include a GPS logger in some future interoffice mail, and discover its secret life. Would you be charged for an item that went internationally? Or even off-campus? My guess would be that anything off-campus would need to be sent conventionally, except where there's a "pipeline" established, where such mail can just hitch a ride. Many are life's hidden mysteries.

And I just noticed I typed "asterix" before.. oh well. It's a small price to pay for being introduced to basic classical phrases like "alea iacta est" at an early age. (Even if, for a long time, I thought it meant "die" in a foundry sense, rather than the gaming piece)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

In fact, there are many odd little mail pipelines running through Singapore. Some of it's the obvious closeness to Malaysia, or the obvious ties to the rest of the Commonwealth; some of it I just don't know what's going on.