In the interesting-coincidence department:

I've been interviewing for a position at Stanford U's Highwire Press. They're the 'internet imprint' of the library [http://highwire.stanford.edu], which means they publish academic journals online. This kind of work is SO up my ally it's not even funny. I think it's absolutely vital, in general, that scientific knowledge be shared across all disciplines. I'm a generalist. I've chosen to specialize in one or two things, and know 5 million other things well, and be vaguely acquainted with everything else. As a lifestyle, it works for me.

But we live in a world where it is entirely possible for a major advance in one field to not even be a blip on the radar of other disciplines, because of our emphasis, academically, on deep specialization in just one area, even when directly applicable to a problem in a not-obviously-related discipline. Now, I'm not saying that all astrophysicists need to study paleontology in depth, or that all geneticists must become crackerjack programmers. No, no, you hire people like me to be bridges for you, because I happen to be conversationally fluent in all 4 of those languages -- which means you can talk to me and I can talk to a geneticist, and between the 3 of us, sticky problems in 2 fields maybe get solved.

It is imperative that a medium for communication and data sharing like the Internet be used to its greatest capabilities, in order to facilitate flow of information across broad areas. Whether they're academic disciplines or geopolitical regions. By using the Internet to archive, index, and present academic journals, HighWire is contributing to that process. They're not just slapping PDF's up on a website, but re-organizing the presentation of the information in the journals to take advantage of the online format. Making it easier for information to flow. Damn, I like that.

Turns out the director I interviewed with is my friend Kim's soccer coach from high school. Now, this would never happen to me. I grew up in Alaska, and all of, oh, 2 of the people I knew from there are in the Lower 48 [barring family members]. So, it amuses the hell out of me when this happens to someone else.