My orbit keeps intersecting with Milla Jovavich. When I was in the Peace Corps in Fiji, she shot Return to the Blue Lagoon on the island of Taveuni. I was on nearby Vanua Levu teaching mathematics, physics, and economics for five hours a day. She was apparently just 15 or 16. Since I taught Forms 6 and 7 students, she was likely younger than most of my students. There was a buzz about the film production in the paper and on the radio and I think I saw it a couple of times when it ran in the theater, though not because it was any good but purely because the theaters and banks were the only places with air conditioning. I spent my 25th birthday on Taveuni, drinking beer on both sides of the 180th meridian and pretending I had a 48-hour birthday.

She went on to a mixed career, from a brief appearance in Dazed and Confused to Chaplin, and on to The Fifth Element and the infamous Resident Evil films, which had a certain visual style despite otherwise being empty video game spin-outs.

In 1997, while I was a researcher at the now defunct Computing Research Laboratory at New Mexico State University, my wife and I bought a house in the old downtown of Las Cruces, New Mexico. I was an adaptable researcher, leaning into our institutional funding for natural language processing, computational linguistics, and information retrieval in support of the defense-intelligence community. I had side interests in evolutionary algorithms, artificial neural networks, and inference via minimum description length and related ideas that I would pursue as side projects, as well as serving as the faculty sponsor and participant in a performance arts group that had a cyberpunk edge to it.… Read the rest