Twitter and tourism...

Since we had to move our walk back a few days to coincide with a conference at Yasnaya Polyana, I find myself cooling my heels in Moscow. Spent some time with old friends, and wandered a bit around Tolstoy's Moscow...

Looks like I'll be able to send tweets from my crappy old cell phone. 21st century medium from a ten-year-old cell. But, hey, it works well enough. The tweets are copied to the right, or if you twitter, then subscribe!

Boots, on the ground... Moscow.

Our Collective of Extraordinary Professors meets today to do some final planning... We set out on Friday from Grivno and make it to Chekhov.

Daytona Beach News Journal

A short, mostly informative note about our walk, published by the News-Journal. 

A long walk with Tolstoy: June 3-10

We're finalizing plans for the walk to take place between June 3 and June 10. Here's a Google Map of our route. I'm going to try to get the Twitter machine to coordinate with the Blogger apparatus. I should be able to send updates to both on a daily or near-daily basis.

Lots of press interest this time... Should be interesting. 

Tolstoy hated Nietzsche

"All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking." (Nietzsche)

Our walk will take place at the end of May 2011.

Past Errors to Blame for Russia’s Peat Fires - NYTimes.com

Past Errors to Blame for Russia’s Peat Fires - NYTimes.com: "Among all the troubles that have been visited on Russia in this summer of record heat, wildfires, smoke and crop failure, perhaps none have been so persistent and impervious to remedy as the peat fires. Particularly maddening, many here say, is the knowledge that the problem is caused by humans."

Mission abort?

As I suspected, the temperatures predictions are rising as current data outweigh the historical averages in the models that the meteorologists use to project forecasts. The average, average high (the average of the projected highs from 8/6-8/10, from all the weather sites) is 92.66. In other words, unbearably hot. Importantly, today the static has begun to leave the system: This morning the standard deviation for Monday and Tuesday was about 9; with the midnight update to the European models, it's about 6.

Monday update: And it's official. Tom Newlin and I have spoken and decided to cancel the trip. I've already started planning for another attempt, this May, after classes end. Tolstoy made the trip in spring, and I'll hope for better conditions then!