I've been home ten days -- and now I must begin packing for the next set of sojourns. On Tuesday I'll fly to the Bay Area for a meeting with cohorts and a standards-effort gathering the following day. XML continues to promise self-describing data solutions to all interoperability limitations, including the exchange of biotech research. The consortium which is meeting in Menlo Park on Wednesday is a passionate purveyor of such promise. We can solve all disease, if only we have a large enough understanding. Open systems, open networks and open exchange facilitates our studies in ways almost unimagined just a few years ago. This is indeed the dawn of the 21st century. But whose future will it be?

I came across a rather depressing web site during cyber-wanderings yesterday -- The Fourth Turning -- seems these two historians have come up with an interesting historical pattern among Anglo-American types, stretching over the last 400 years or so. Every 80 to 100 years, we repeat these cultural patterns which can be viewed as "seasonal" and which also have profound economic and societal impact -- we're at the cusp of the Fall and Winter pattern now, according to their reckoning. Winter will hit with full force around the mid 00s, if it hasn't begun all ready. The equivalent period from recent history would be the late 1920s and 1930s, when the stock market crashed so famously and the Great Depression was in vogue. Liz and I did a comparison of the 1929 Stock Market Crash with that of the recent NASDAQ decline, and there does seem to be a strong correlation, albeit within a highly compressed cycle. If the cylical magnitude of recent market quakes are equivalent to 1929-32 events, we're almost but not completely finished with this particular market era. June, according to the CNBC analysts, will be the bottom. Which corresponds quite nicely with the 1929 pattern. As all addicts know, hitting bottom is the first step toward recovery.

I come home late Thursday for a three night respite, then off to Austin. In addition to my imminent flight, over the next several weeks I'll be in Austin, Chicago, Taipei, Bejing, Tel Aviv and sleeping on a bus while visiting 5 universities in a week in Northern California -- preaching God's word; Java, XML, an Open Network Environment and the future of life as we know it. I don't know exactly how we'll get there....but I believe we will get there: a sustainable world filled with hope, opportunity, brotherhood, ethical communities, freedom and true wealth for all. That's the world I imagine, just one chemical reaction away; one short step into the adjacent possible, and we can be on such a path. Humanity can inherit the stars, if we choose to. If we believe we can. If it's not the destination, then it's the journey. Belief is our currency in any event.