Quite and intense conversation with a co-worker yesterday. "do people in different cultures look at death differently". My tack on the convesation was "do people in some cultural groups not fear or react the same as we do to death".

I argued that all humans react to the death of their friends and loved ones in a strong fashion. I believe it is in our instinctual behaviors to have a strong reaction to the death of those close to us. We talked about religious followers and cultural groups that appear to be not afraid of death. And groups that have different views of the afterlife. My observation of my small surroundings on the West coast of the U.S. is that all people, no matter their religious belief, have a strong reaction to the death of their loved ones.

On the computer programming side I have been using Ada to build some cgi-bin programs to search for data in text databases.

Have also looked at some of the operating system or kernel projects written in Ada. Ada OS projects

If a project is Open Source, then the code base should be transparent and readable/understadable to the largest possible population. That is one of the reasons I am looking at Ada now.