polymania

Passed

2008-04-20T15:55:00.000-06:00

First, the good news. We passed! That is, Cindy passed. The medical test was performed last Monday, and the tubes are all clear, with no blockages. What a relief.

In the hours before the test, we were both oddly nonchalant about the whole thing. We both knew how important this was, and perhaps because of that we felt no need to hype the occasion any further. We submitted to it with the perfunctory acceptance as we would have to a dental exam, frankly.

The test only took a matter of minutes. In fact, I was with Cindy in the post-procedure room for only about 5-10 minutes when the doctor came in with a few x-rays taken during the test, to show us the results. We knew how it went before we left the building, and I guess Cindy probably knew even before the procedure was even done, as they got to watch the fluid flowing in real time on an x-ray monitor. Needless to say, the drive home was a happy one.

The following day, we went back to the center for a consultation, to get some more details on the results of the test, and to figure out what to do going forward. Basically, we just keep trying, and see how things go for a few months afterwards, with the hope that the procedure itself helped clear out any remaining tube obstructions. It's still possible that another test and procedure may be necessary, but by continuing to try the 'old-fashioned' way for now, we make it easier to make a case for having insurance cover any future procedures. For now, we'll see how things go.

Another interesting topic we discussed was the idea that, based on Cindy's diligent reporting of her body temperatures (taken first thing in the morning every morning for the past six months), it seems likely that we actually have successfully conceived on a few occasions in the past year. Obviously, however, implantation has not occurred, and the reason for that is what we are trying to determine.

For my part, I am heartened to think that it is not because of any physical impairment either of mine or Cindy's that we've not been successful yet. For some reason, I find it easier to accept that it is either random chance that has prevented us, or perhaps a condition that effects implantation (like endometriosis) which can be treated if it isn't overly pervasive. Maybe that's because it doesn't speak to a genetic or congenital deficiency on our parts, nor would it be because we didn't 'do things right'. We're close - we sense that now.

tags:

The Test

2008-04-14T07:28:00.000-06:00

It's been a long road to get to this point. 3 years ago this wasn't even on our radar, although it was in the back of my mind. Now, we've been trying for over almost 2 years. And we kept thinking that we were just a month away, that the previous month we just didn't quite get the timing right. Month after month was the same result, sometimes delayed, often punctual, but always the same - not pregnant. For the better part of the last year we've sought the help of more holistic approaches - herbs, acupuncture, massage. These practices have their own health benefits, and we are grateful to them, but in the end they did not bring us what we are hoping for.

The emotional rollercoaster became too rough to ride. Too much dread and disappointment for what has become the inevitable monthly result. Finally last fall, I convinced Cindy that we need to see a medical professional and try to diagnose what is happening that prevents us from getting pregnant. It was not an easy job - Cindy has long been reticent to go this route, with reasonable justification. Still, I strongly felt it has been necessary, just to get us out of the rut we've been in and help us answer the scariest question one can have on a subject like this. One always need to be careful what questions to ask, because in the end you may find out answers that you don't like to hear.

We're going in for a more involved test today than the first one we did a month ago. This is the type of test Cindy was reluctant to take, but she has come around to accept as necessary. When it was first spelled out to me, I didn't realize the ultimate nature of the test - the determination of flow constriction in the fallopian tubes. What makes it so ultimate and is that Cindy absolutely refuses to go the IVF route, so that if it is found that the tubes are effectively closed off, then it will be that we can never have children. The tremendous cost and physical difficulty required for IVF makes me very sympathetic to Cindy's concerns, and as difficult as it would be to accept, I would still do so. It would be enormously sad, the import of which I have not fully considered at this point, mostly because I have wanted to be optimistic and have shielded myself from thinking about what this would mean.

If there isn't complete closure of the tubes, then hope remains, and we could still go the route of other non-drug or simpler medical procedures that would improve our chances for a more natural conception. I believe this is what we'll actually find with the Test, but I of course cannot be sure right now. Unlike the first test last month, Cindy herself is unsure of the result - this test measures something that not even she can know, which coming from someone who has a remarkable feel for what goes on invisibly deep inside, really means something. We've reached a level where one really can't have much of an intuition for such things. But I have been a 'rock' through this entire effort, offering consolation and hope for as long as we've been trying, assuaging her continuing doubts and fears, as if the act of merely believing that this is all possible can itself be the last hurdle to overcome. And I will continue to be that person, because right now that's all I've let myself be.

At least for one more day.

tags: personal, pregnancy, couples,

Just taking the quiz in the first place proves something....

2007-06-28T15:14:00.000-06:00

And while we're on the subject of self-evaluation:

77% Geek

My Valuable Physique

2007-06-28T14:07:00.001-06:00

$4225.00

Frankly I thought I'd be worth a little more, but I guess you need to have been exposed to some pretty nasty things to rake in the big bucks.

Holiday Travel Frenzy

2006-12-29T08:52:00.000-07:00

Well, that was interesting.

As you have probably heard by now, we had a remarkable blizzard in Colorado on the 20th, just a few days before our scheduled road trip to Kansas for Christmas. After postponing that trip a day so we could dig ourselves out of 16 inches of snow in Fort Collins, we did manage to make the round trip without a hitch. Yet as we prepared for our California trip on the 29th, we saw that *another* heavy snowstorm was on the way for this weekend. Every 6-12 hours or so, the forecast for Friday (our flying day) seemed to get worse and worse. Storm totals began to increase, forecast winds got faster, and the duration of storm kept bleeding further into the weekend. As we drove back from KS yesterday, we began to really worry about how we were going to get out to California (and therefore onto Hawaii early in January).

Our airline (Frontier) put up a notice on their company website yesterday afternoon announcing special suspensions of change fees for customers flying Friday who want to reschedule their flights for Thursday, just to get out of town before the onslaught. Even though we'd driven all day Wednesday and only gotten home around 4pm, we decided to try to move our flight day up from Friday to Thursday. However, the published 800 number for reservations was completely unreachable in the early evening. I even tried dialing the local Denver metro phone number for reservations, but only got busy signals. It wasn't looking good for being able to change our flight in time before the arrival of the storm.

I then decided to try to call a customer service number, with the goal of simply trying to talk a human being so I could figure out how to then reach a reservations agent. While going through that menu, it allowed me to connect to reservations by pressing 2 or something like that, so I decided to give that a shot. To my amazement it actually worked - I got put in the queue for talking to a real reservations agent. 25 minutes later I had a human voice on the other end of the line - huzzah. I have no idea if this is how all the other people in that queue got through, but I'm certain I would have never gotten through (at least not until very late) if I'd kept calling that 800 number. A helpful hint for the next time you need to reach a number that's impossible to connect to - do an end run like this around it.

After some finagling with the agent, she was able to get us two seats on the Thursday morning version of our Friday flight, as long as we were willing to sit in the Exit Row. (Yep, we're able-bodied, and our English is pretty good.) We jumped at it, knowing full well that meant we'd have to start packing right away, and not get any sleep before heading out to the airport in the wee hours of the morning after our 10-hour drive back to Colorado. It was like cramming for a final exam at 8am the next morning - consider it a "travel final". But we did it - we left the house at 2:30am and got to the airport at 4am, at the suggestion of the agent, and made our flight before a slew of Frontier cancellations of flights today, tonight, and tomorrow. And now, the forecast is for this storm to last perhaps all through the weekend! If we'd not jumped at this opportunity, it's quite likely we'd have had to cancel not only our California trip, but our whole Hawaii trip!

So now we're in sunny California, and it's beautiful here. We're a day early, but somehow we'll get by. We'll be able to do Hawaii after all, and Cindy is thrilled. And Colorado is shaping up to get hammered by yet another blizzard, a very rare thing for two major winter storms to hit within a week of each other. I'm sure all that snow will still be there when we get back.

POSTSCRIPT: we later found out that the flight we were originally scheduled to fly on for Friday was *not* cancelled, and in fact was one of the few flights out of Denver for Frontier that stayed on the schedule. It did leave an hour late, but arrived only a half hour behind the original arrival time.

Of course, we still believe we made the right call by leaving early. There was no reason to assume that our flight would have been one of the few to leave, not to mention that getting out to the airport last night would have been very difficult as well. Overnight it appears that Fort Collins received about 8.5 fresh inches of snow, with more on the way as we speak.

tags: travel, holidays

Colbert Report - not just for humans anymore

2006-11-30T14:11:00.000-07:00

I thought this was cute.

tags: Colbert Report, dogs

petty and vindictive

2006-11-15T20:29:00.000-07:00

Not that this is a surprise or anything, but thanks to Huffingtonpost (and apparently a mole deep inside the FoxNews rat's nest), we get a glimpse at the "fair and balanced" thinking that goes on with their editorial:

"Be on the lookout for any statements from Iraqi insurgents, who must be thrilled at the prospect of a Dem-controlled Congress." Right-o, Foxies. A little sore about last week's election results, perhaps?

tags: Fox News, unhinged

The Broken Record

2006-11-15T13:30:00.000-07:00

Many other bloggers have written extensively about the peculiar habit among war supporters to constantly defer on when things might finally stabilize or improve in Iraq. In fact, since mid-2003 or so, a term has come up in the liberal blogosphere, popularized especially by Atrios, which typifies this form of punting - it is aptly called the Friedman Unit, or F.U., named after its initial and most common practitioner, columnist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. A Friedman Unit is defined as "six months", which is usually the amount of time that the proponent says it will take before we can either 1) know how a certain strategy in Iraq is really proceeding, or 2) know if the country is really going to spiral out of control, requiring withdrawal or what-have-you. Of course, many other pro-war columnists and pundits and other ne'er-do-wells often use this same unit, in which case they advocate "staying the course" for at least another F.U.

As I mentioned, this kind of deferring has been going on ceaselessly in editorials and conservative blogs for over 3 years now, and we are constantly being told to wait "another six months" or so before making any real changes to our Iraq policy. In that time, the situation has clearly gotten worse and worse and worse, in spite of all the handwringing about "progress". Tens of thousands of civilians are dying every year now in sectarian and terrorist violence, both forms often intermixed to make them inseparable. Whatever window of opportunity there had been to make things better in Iraq with our presence has long since passed, but many in Washington (and even a few generals in Iraq) seem to think we just need to be more patient, even with the recent electoral results that strongly point to a desire to stop this insane policy.

So guess what we hear today at a Congressional hearing with Gen. John Abizaid:

"Our troop posture needs to stay where it is," for the time being, he said.

In one of the day's most contentious clashes, Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz., challenged Abizaid on his analysis of the situation and complained that he was advocating no major changes in U.S. policy. McCain, a possible 2008 presidential candidate, has called for adding thousands more U.S. combat troops in Iraq to help fight the insurgency and halt sectarian violence in Baghdad.

"I'm of course disappointed that basically you're advocating the status quo here today, which I think the American people in the last election said that is not an acceptable condition," McCain said.

In response, Abizaid said he was not arguing for the status quo. He said the key change that is needed now is to place more U.S. troops inside the Iraqi army and police units to train and advise these forces in planning and executing missions.

Pressed by Sen. Jack Reed (news, bio, voting record), D-R.I., on how much time the U.S. and Iraqi government have to reduce the violence in Baghdad before it spirals beyond control, Abizaid said, "Four to six months."

It just never changes, does it? "Stay the course" lives on.

tags: Iraq, quagmire

I've changed my name to Nielsen

2006-11-12T16:01:00.000-07:00

At least for a week, anyway. Yep, that's right, starting last Thursday and going 'til Wednesday, our house has become a Nielsen family. We got the call about this a few weeks ago during the time of all those aforementioned robocalls, and I'm glad I didn't reflexively hang up as I'd been tempted to do. After being asked a few questions about our household TVs, they arranged to sign us up and send us a diary to keep for this week.

So far after about 4 days, we actually don't have a lot in the diary. The simple fact is that we don't watch very much TV in this house. (But that's OK - they want to know if we're not watching as well.) We do watch a lot of Netflix, and we do record the Daily Show/Colbert Report combo Monday through Thursday. And of course we watch Lost, although last Wednesday was the last show for three months. Now, I do occasionally plop down on the couch and surf madly through channels, hoping to glom onto something interesting. But the Nielsen rules are to write down what you watch if you watch for more than 5 minutes - in my case, I rarely stay on a show for more than 10 seconds, unless it seems promising. (As you might guess, I only engage in this behavior when Cindy isn't home - she can't tolerate this kind of remote-control abuse. I suppose no one really can, unless you're the one with the remote.)

So if we don't watch a whole lot (and I certainly knew that going in), then you might wonder why I agreed to participate in this. Well, I want my opinions on things to matter. I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore! I'm the kind of person who likes answering polls on the phone, even if the timing of the call isn't convenient. In fact, I wish I got polled more often, but then I suppose that's because I don't fit too neatly in demographic samples. I've always been a "strange duck" - at least that's what 56% of people who know me think.

tags: television, Nielsen family

Let me guess - they're Republicans?

2006-11-11T16:40:00.000-07:00

Stilly giddy after seeing the Democrats retake control of the House *and* the Senate last week, I came across an article describing a lawsuit recently filed by two college frat boys from South Carolina who appeared in the surprisingly successful movie Borat. They contend that they appeared unwillingly, but the really amusing nugget is included below:

The scene at issue in the lawsuit depicts Borat conducting a drunken interview with three college frat boys in a motor home. As the four grow increasingly inebriated, they make racist remarks about slavery and how minorities in the United States "have all the power."

Before filming the scene, the lawsuit says, producers interviewed the college students at their frat house, then took them "to a drinking establishment to 'loosen up"' and plied them with alcohol. After a period of "heavy drinking," the students were presented with consent forms, which they signed, it said.

According to the complaint, the frat boys were then escorted to a motor home for the filming of what they were told would be a "documentary-style" movie and "were encouraged to continue drinking, which they did."

"Believing the film would not be viewed in the United States and at the encouragement of (the filmmakers), plaintiffs engaged in behavior they otherwise would not have engaged in," the suit says.

"They took advantage of those kids for their own financial gain," plaintiffs' lawyer, Olivier Tailleiu, told Reuters.

Fallout from the movie, Tailleiu said, cost one of the students a job at a major corporation and another "a very prestigious internship."

So let me get this straight - you guys exposed yourselves as being racist assholes, and now you're upset that there are consequences? You're saying that you wouldn't have said things you truly believed if you thought people you know - human resource managers and mentors - might see you? My, how honorable.

This is what is called being sorry not for doing something wrong, but being sorry that you got caught. And how Republican-like to not own up to their own bad behavior, and instead trying to blame someone else for "tempting" them into saying obnoxious things. This lawsuit of course will go nowhere, and it's no wonder that these jerks want to remain unnamed in the suit. Borat is making a good chunk of money ($60M at last count so far) at the boxoffice and garnering no small amount of critical acclaim as well. I can't wait to see it myself.

tags: Borat, movies, Republicans

Robo-blicans

2006-11-06T19:30:00.000-07:00

I just received another pro-Marilyn robocall about 2 minutes ago.

I estimate that in the past month, I've received probably no fewer than 30 Republican robocalls, and maybe 4 Democratic robocalls. I've gotten calls from robo-Bill Owens, robo-George Bush, robo-Laura Bush, robo-Dick Cheney (which of course is redundant), robo-Marilyn Musgrave, robo-John McCain, robo-Anne Yeldell, and several other robo-Colorado Repubs. It is just a non-stop barrage of robo-blicans.

I start to wonder what they really hope to accomplish by annoying me and so many other people in the weeks and days before the election. I also find it humorously appropriate that an actual Republican human never calls me - no, instead of having a real conversation with a person, which presumably is the point of having a phone, they use it instead to send a one-way message - we talk, you listen. There's no dialogue here, just badgering propaganda, ceaselessly repeated. And I should also mention, joylessly, by the sound of it - robo-Bush sounded pretty annoyed that he even had to make such a desperate plea for my vote on behalf of one of his robo-supporters in what should have been an easy win.

So, yes, congrats to the robo-Repubs, who've figured out how to take the absolute worst of the internet and bring it to my phone. What next, are they going to tell me that I've just won the Polish lottery, or where to get Viagra or a Rolex real cheap?

tags: Republicans, robocalls

The Garbage Truck

2006-11-02T11:59:00.000-07:00

I'm looking out my office window into our cul-de-sac, and I see that our Waste Management garbage truck has stalled there. This is the second time in the past year that a garbage truck has broken down in our circle drive.

What does this mean??

tags: curses

Game 2

2006-10-10T08:51:00.000-06:00

On Saturday I had my second baseball game in my short 3-game fall season. I was excited to take the field and especially to bat again. The weather was perfect, sunny and very clear with no haze and with temperatures in the upper 70s. However, I noticed early on during warmups that I had some lingering tightness in my right quadricep. I tried to gently stretch it out and relax it, but to no avail. The game started, and I was in right field, hoping that I wouldn't have to run down any line drives. Fortunately, we had a very good pitcher who struck out the side each of the first two innings.

I came up to bat in the bottom of the second, and with two on and on a 2-2 pitch I slapped a blooping drive out over short into shallow left-center for my first hit in over 20 years! I was very excited, except when I ran to first my quad seized up hard on me, and I realized that I probably was not going to finish the game. I had never felt leg pain like that before - it was as if someone had pounded my upper thigh with a bat. The inning continued, and I eventually made it to second and even to third, but I gave up then, asking the coach to get a pinch-runner for me. I ended up sitting out the rest of the game, taking some generously offered Advil and icing my quad and gently walking around for the next 2 hours. What a bummer.

I had a lot of time to ponder how this happened. After some discussion, I've concluded that I caused this problem by overusing that muscle at the batting cages the previous day. At the cages I sampled some 'fast' and 'very fast' pitching, and found to my delight that not only could I catch up to it, I could slug it. It was great fun - however, I did note that my stance and swing probably could use some adjustment. I didn't feel any pain, but my forward leg (the right leg - I bat lefty) always seemed to be planting very hard when I swung. That's fine and all, except that muscle is not accustomed to being used so forcefully. That had to be the reason I felt this asymmetric leg pain - regular running soreness would have caused both left and right quads to feel some tightness, but batting would definitely not evenly distribute muscle use.

I've let 'Coach Nick' know that I'm day-to-day for Saturday's matinee game. The weather looks to be good again, a little cooler but still nice. I want to get out there and hit and catch and throw, but I can't afford to aggravate this quad pull, or whatever it is. Ah, the life of a ballplayer, battling injury just to make his mark.

tags: baseball

Post-game wrapup

2006-10-01T08:21:00.000-06:00

As mentioned yesterday, I played in my first baseball game since junior-high days. Overall I'd have to say I picked up pretty much where I left off...

The game didn't go so well for our side. The final score was something like 20-6. We fell behind in the second inning, and every inning after that the other side kept piling on a few more runs. Our pitching struggled, walking way too many, and giving up some gappers and bloop hits.

For my part, I was a little nervous, but I think I did OK. I was 0-1 in 3 plate appearances, with 2 walks and a run scored. I always walked a lot in little league - pitchers would often never throw me strikes. In the field I started in right field, and had 1 putout in 2 chances. That second chance was a flyball over my head - I had underplayed the batter. Ooops. In left field in the 7th inning, I had another misplay, which I conveniently blame on the sun. In those later innings I really was having trouble seeing the ball off the bat.

In the middle innings I actually got to play my favorite position of second base. I only had a couple chances to make plays there as it turns out - on a DP opportunity, the third baseman threw low and wide and the ball skipped out to right field. I probably should have done more to at least stop the throw, but in the end it didn't really matter.

We play again next Saturday, and I plan on hitting the cages sometime this week. I'll also use my George Brett glove next time - yeah, that's it. It was that Deion Sanders glove that messed me up!

tags: baseball

Put me in, coach

2006-09-30T09:34:00.000-06:00

I'm excited - today I'm going to suit up and play my first baseball game in at least 23 years.

Neighbor Nick, who I often go birding with, is also a baseball player and coach. He frequently plays in spring and fall leagues, managing his own team and also coaching his son Nick Jr. in little league. He approached me about a week ago asking if I'd be interested in playing in the fall league, which is generally a bit less hardcore and has a shorter schedule. I couldn't turn that down - I've been wondering what it would be like to get out there and face some live pitching after all this time.

Yesterday I went to the local batting cages and did 6 sessions with "medium" and "fast" pitching. After struggling through the first one, with lots of whiffs and chopped grounders, I finally started making some good contact, and getting the sweet spot on the ball, and driving it. Surprisingly, I felt that I was seeing the ball better in the fast-pitch cage than in the medium one. Nick did tell me that the pitching speeds in the league will be between 55-85. 85? God I hope not - that's pretty fast.

I'll be playing today, as well as the next two Saturdays. If it goes well, who knows, I may play again in the spring. It's like tryouts.

tags: baseball

When do we get to liberate ourselves?

2006-09-29T07:11:00.000-06:00

This makes me sick:

By passing the Military Commissions Act, the United States Congress has, in effect, given its stamp of approval to human rights violations committed by the USA in the “war on terror”. This legislation leaves the USA squarely on the wrong side of international law, and has turned bad executive policy into bad domestic law. Amnesty International will campaign for repeal of this act and fully expects the constitutionality of this legislation to be challenged in the courts.

In the “war on terror”, the US administration has resorted to secret detention, enforced disappearance, prolonged incommunicado detention, indefinite detention without charge, arbitrary detention, and torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Thousands of detainees remain in indefinite military detention in US custody in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. Congress has failed these detainees and their families. President Bush has defended the CIA’s use of secret detention and in the debates over the Military Commissions Act, members of Congress have done the same. This policy clearly violates international law.

Damn right it does. And remember, when an international treaty is ratified, it automatically becomes US law as well. Maybe Congress should bother reading that annoying Consitution they're constantly braying about.

(Note: When Amnesty International sees fit to send out an urgent press release about newly passed laws that violate basic human rights, you really should take it seriously. They know of what they speak.)

This bill is odious to me on so many levels, it's hard to know where to begin. First is that the Congress has once again abdicated its responsibility for oversight of the Executive Branch, and that it has done so for short-term political reasons. Whatever bluster that the Republicans made several years ago about rights to privacy and the intrusion of government into areas it shouldn't go is now moot, as they have completely surrendered whatever integrity they had left just to allow Bush the ability to define "outrages upon human dignity". John McCain, who gets so much "straight talker" mileage with the traditional media, is perhaps singularly responsible for shifting these goalposts. Of all people he should know better, but I guess his torture happened long enough ago that he's forgotten and is now more concerned about shoring up rightwing hardliner support for his obnoxious presidential ambitions than these silly rights protocols.

Secondly, for all the talk that Bush made about wanting more "clarity" in the law, the Congress has passed a bill that is in fact quite unclear about the extent to which the law applies. The political appeal of the bill is to make it seem that the Republican Party is going hard after "aliens" and "enemy combatants" - basically, "terr'ists". But the law could apply equally well to US citizens, especially with its suspensions of habeas corpus. (Think that's not true? Think again.) The military dictatorship of Argentina back in the '70s and '80s became infamous for "disappearing" people they considered troublemakers - and sadly, the door is now open for similar things to happen here. Even if that's not the real intent of those who approve this bill, it disgusts me that they cannot see past their own short-term political futures to realize what an affront this bill is to the core principles that make (or made?) this country great. What kind of freedom do you really have when the government reserves for itself the option of making you "go away" with no legal recourse left for you to resist?

Thirdly, I'm disgusted at the fact that 12 Democrats, including putative Democrat Joe Lieberman signed on to this travesty. Another one of them shamefully enough is my own Senator, Ken Salazar. When an opposition party can't even muster opposition to one of the gravest threats ever posed by an out-of-control legislature since the passing of the Alien and Sedition Acts, I begin to wonder whether Democrats winning back the House or Senate in a month will make any difference. Where's the spine? Where's the integrity? Why not stand up for what you believe? And if torture and suspension of that quaint notion of habeus corpus is what you believe in, why the hell should I vote for you? This is one reason why I just cannot sign on with the Democratic Party, as much as I am disgusted with Republicans. They just never seem to learn.

Over at Daily Kos, you can find a reader diary or two trying to reassure us all that in the end, this bill won't amount to anything because of its blatant unconstitutionality, and that either a new Democratic congress would quickly vote to reverse it or that the Supreme Court would throw it out upon its first challenge. I'd love to believe all that, but as I mentioned before, when 34 House Democrats and 12 Senate Democrats sign on to something as repugnant as this, I'm not confident that these bedwetters would suddenly switch their votes around when their own party takes over. (This of course assumes that such a takeover is a sure thing, which it hardly is.) In addition, I also have doubts that the highly politicized Supreme Court, whose conservative voices frequently blather about "interpreting" the Constitution as opposed to "legislating from the bench", won't simply punt on this issue out of concern for their favorite party's near-term political fortunes - they did it before in 2000 in Florida, and surely the stakes seem similar to them now.

What an awful day for this country. It certainly qualifies as one of those issues where, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."

tags: human rights, Geneva Conventions,

Blue Sky Thinking

2006-09-24T21:31:00.000-06:00

Cindy and I went on a hike today to Crosier Mountain. The trail is in the Roosevelt National Forest not far from Estes Park, and is about 7 miles round trip. With the fall color beginning to kick in, and with a cold blustery storm system having just blown through a couple days before, conditions were ideal for a beautiful day in the Ponderosa Pine between 7 and 9 thousand feet elevation.

From the summit rock outcrops, we had fantastic views of the Front Range and the high peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park, including Longs Peak. There'd been snow this past week above about 11,000 feet, although it began melting in the midday sun. Mount Evans was also visible, and was particularly wintry-looking. Visibility was great also in the direction of the plains, and we could see Fort Collins, Loveland, and Greeley quite clearly, and even some of the limestone buttes out on the Pawnee Grasslands, 50+ miles distant. And very far away to the south, we even saw Pikes Peak. All in all, the region we call the Front Range was looking mighty fine today.

On the hike back, we started talking, of all things, about TeeVee. That would seem like such a prosaic topic amidst all the aforementioned beauty and awe-inspiring vistas. But I brought it up as we traversed a part of the trail that passed through a particularly dull portion of Ponderosa Pine saplings, all about 15-20 years old, and very uniformly and densely distributed so that you could see nothing but these young, vulnerable trees. This section was about three-quarters of a mile long, and appeared to have been either heavily burned two decades ago, or clear-cut. Either way, it had turned into a rather depressing monoculture of trees, although based on the pileup of needles on the forest floor, it probably won't be long before this area goes up in another firestorm.

Anyway, back to TeeVee. We're huge fans of Lost, and we've just begun watching Season 2 on DVD via Netflix. We began talking about the intricacies of the show, and tried to make sense out of the myriad of clues, hints, motifs, and suggestions that make for a typical Lost episode. (Don't worry, no spoilers here.)

After a while the conversation got a little more "meta", and began discussing our concerns about how the show might end, and what has concerned us in the past when watching heavily arc-driven TV shows. For example, we were rather disappointed with the way Alias ended in its fifth year, after it's first two seasons were so much fun and so well-written. Given that Lost and Alias have the same creator, it's reasonable to wonder if Lost will also run out of gas before long. And can it stay engaging and taut to the end?

Back in the late 90s we became fans of the arc-driven sci-fi show Babylon 5. "B5" as we called it was something of a breakthrough show in that it was really the first sci-fi show besides Star Trek to find an audience, and it did so by portraying a universe riven with intrigue and not as idealistic as the Gene Roddenberry-inspired one. Instead of stand-alone episodes, a real story arc permeated the show, and in fact creator James Straczynski planned out the entire show from the beginning, knowing that after 5 years the show would end. Although the show had lower-grade production values and got bounced around a bit among networks, it did lay the groundwork for a new attitude toward TV series', one that allowed for more story depth and the possibility that important characters may actually (gasp!) die.

However, it doesn't take long to think of why network execs would be resistant to this kind of creative freedom. Heavy story arcs discourage new viewers, who require time and annoying exposition every episode to get them up to speed. Also, stories that have an end mean that there's a definite limit to what a studio can make moneywise off its initial investment in production and marketing. A show that runs 7, 8, or 10 years (think MASH, ER or Seinfeld) gets a lot of mileage out of the effort put into creating it, whereas a studio that has to keep inventing new material year after year finds itself struggling to establish any presence on the air. But a show that runs so many years can often only do so if the stories being told always guarantee a return to "normalcy" at the end of each show, to ensure that new viewers keep coming aboard and are not intimidated by not knowing some complicated backstory.

So what has saved the day for artistic expression in TV, and has allowed for more arc-driven series? Three letters - D V D. When you can continue to snag viewers on DVD even after a show ends, you still make money. This way, the writer/creator gets to tell more of the story they want, and the studio now has a new revenue stream from the buzz that said story generates - everyone's happy. 10 years ago, before the advent of TV on DVD, shows like B5 had an uphill climb to convince any major network that their story was worth telling. Now, complex story arcs are fairly common - if a viewer really wants to get on board 2 or 3 seasons into a series, no problem - just buy or rent the DVDs from the first season, and you'll get caught up in no time.

But really, we don't watch much TV. Honest.

tags: hiking, television shows, Lost, writing

Vision of Jesus

2006-09-22T17:18:00.000-06:00

You often hear about someone seeing the Virgin Mary in a waffle or a hedgerow. And when you actually see a photo of what is getting the true believers all excited, it turns out to be rather underwhelming. I mean really, you have to squint and tilt your head just right just to maybe, just maybe see what these people think they're seeing.

Well, finally I have seen a vision of Jesus that stares right back at you. It is one of the most convincing apparitions ever, and I think it is a real sign of Jesus' love for all of us.

But don't just take my word for it. See for yourself.

(Hat tip to Pharyngula.)

tags: Jesus, religion, apparitions

Fulfilling my Bush Bash quota

2006-09-13T07:28:00.000-06:00

I've generally stayed away from this topic (and most others, judging from my dearth of posts - heyoooooo! [rimshot]), but I had to include this one. Firedoglake is one of my favorite new online reads - I've been following it for about 4-5 months, and it is a whipsmart, passionate and articulate political blog.

One of the regular contributors TRex sounds off and tells it like it is:

Every time I am forced to listen to George W. Bush speak, I can feel my I.Q. dropping. His speech is a kind of thought-killing force field that emanates his mouth. Watching him attempt to complete a sentence or to speak off the cuff is like watching a drunk carry a crate of broken glass across an icy street. He doesn’t so much speak English as mud-wrestle it.

Whatever you think of the man, you have to admit, the assessment is still spot-on.

tags: Bush, politics

Noxious invasive weeds

2006-09-06T12:05:00.000-06:00

If there ever were something to really get me on board the whole "war on drugs",
this story from the San Francisco Chronicle would be it:

The discovery of 22,740 marijuana plants growing in and around Point Reyes National Seashore last week wasn't only the biggest pot seizure ever made in Marin County. It was an environmental mess that will take several months and tens of thousands of dollars to clean up.

The crops seized on the steep hillsides overlooking Highway 1 were planted by sophisticated growers who cleared vegetation, terraced land, drew water from streams through miles of irrigation hoses and doused acres of land with hundreds of pounds of fertilizer and pesticides.

Such operations are turning up in greater numbers within state and national parks throughout California. Federal officials estimate the state produces half of all the marijuana seized on public lands nationwide.

...

Cultivating marijuana on land managed by the Park Service, the National Forest Service and other agencies is a multibillion-dollar industry. So far this year, authorities have found more than 940,000 marijuana plants growing on state and federal land in the Golden State. With the harvest season beginning, officials expect to find more pot farms and surpass last year's haul of 1.1 million plants.

Federal officials believe as much as 80 percent of the marijuana on public land is grown by Mexican drug cartels that have turned to places like Point Reyes National Seashore, Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park and Whiskeytown National Recreation Area in this era of tightened border security; growing the drug here is far easier than smuggling it in. The plants found in Point Reyes last week were valued at around $50 million, Dell'Osso said.

The federal Office of National Drug Control policy estimates that growing 1 acre of marijuana damages 10 acres of land. Repairing that land is a costly, time-consuming process, and because the National Park Service does not allocate money specifically for the task, the funds come from each park's operating budget -- leaving less money for things like park programs and improvements.

"We have no budget for this," Dell'Osso said, noting that it is a problem "the powers-that-be need to start discussing."

...

Lt. Scott Anderson of the Marin County Sheriff's Department said the pot farm's similarities to those found in other national parks suggests it was the work of a Mexican cartel that probably employed undocumented immigrants.

The sites in Marin County are tucked away in remote canyons, sheltered beneath madrone and oak trees and surrounded by thick brush hacked away haphazardly. Trees have been stripped of their limbs to make room for the plants, leaving only a canopy of branches to hide the illicit crop.

Irrigation hoses as long as a mile each drew water from pools dug into the ground and fed by the springs and streams that course through the Tomales Bay watershed. The steep hillsides have been terraced, much like a vineyard, and are dotted with hundreds of deep holes that held as many as four marijuana plants apiece. The land is littered with empty 50-pound bags of fertilizer and gallon jugs of pesticide.

Investigators believe as many as three people tended each plot, and the amount of trash -- empty soda and beer cans, food wrappers, propane canisters and clothing -- suggests they'd been living there for at least several weeks but fled before officials reached the site. Authorities found animal traps, pellet guns and a rabbit hutch, leading them to believe the growers hunted for food.

With the last of the crops cleared away, park officials have begun assessing the damage. Once the trash is removed, the biggest priority will be protecting the land with straw and new ground cover to prevent the winter rains from washing it away. Beyond that, though, it's not yet known exactly what must be done to restore the land and what it will cost.

Sequoia-King's Canyon National Park has spent more than $72,000 during the past two years to clean up 81 cultivation sites that covered 10 acres, said Athena Demetry, a restoration ecologist at the park. Authorities have seized more than 100,000 marijuana plants within Sequoia-King's Canyon since 2004. The latest seizure came Aug. 9, when authorities found 2,152 marijuana plants growing within view of Moro Rock, a popular park destination.

Over the course of six weeks during the winter of 2005 and 2006, park rangers hauled almost 5 tons of trash and debris out of the park, removed 13 miles of irrigation hose, and repaired deep cuts and terraces made to 35 hillsides, Demetry said. Empty bags and bottles revealed the growers used at least 8,031 pounds of fertilizer, 15 pounds of rodenticide and 7.6 gallons of pesticide. An additional 80 grow sites still must be repaired.

...

Park rangers have for years stumbled upon small stands of marijuana, but the problem has exploded within the past five years and reached a point where they're having difficulty keeping up, Demetry said. Although individual cultivation sites rarely cover more than an acre, the growers have taken to scattering them over hundreds of acres to evade detection. That, she said, spreads the destruction over a far broader area, with far graver results.

"When we first saw them, we thought they were pretty small," she said. "But then we realized how many there were, and it became staggering. And there's a lot more out there."

I find it stunning that federal authorities are doing virtually nothing (i.e., spending nothing) to combat this, for all their rhetoric about fighting a "drug war". What that tells me is that they're not really serious about it, just like they're not really serious about fighting a "terror war". Not that I'm surprised by such insincerity, but still.

I will say though that stories like this make me even more amenable to the idea of legalizing and regulating marijuana. Doing that would create a legal, and more environmentally sustainable industry, and drive these cartel assholes out of our frickin' national parks. Yes, I know that's not terribly realistic in our currently puritanical society, but admit it - you know it would work. Sure, it would require some rethinking on a societal level about pot and what makes its use so stigmatized, but it pisses me off to know that drug cartels feel this free to use our national treasures, our natural birthright and the ecosystems for our wildlife for their own moneymaking ventures, and all virtually without interference from those who supposedly have a stake in the matter.

tags: war on drugs, cartels, marijuana, legalization, ecology

We're #1

2006-07-17T14:51:00.000-06:00

Well, at least that seems to be the opinion of the brains behind Money Magazine, in their most recent rating of the Top 10 Places to Live in the U.S..

I'd love to take full credit for this, considering that the anointment of Fort Collins to Best Small City status coincides quite nicely to my first full year of living here. And indeed, Fort Collins is a very nice place to live, on many levels - affordability, low crime, proximity to the mountains and other outdoor activities, a well-educated populace, a nice downtown, and so on. However, one look at the difference between the 2006 results, and the 2005 results, and you may be scratching your head, wondering just what the previous year's winners did to fall so competely of the charts in so short a time.

Last year's #1? Moorestown, NJ. This year, they didn't even make the Top 90. Did Moorestown suddenly become a crappy place to live? And how about last year's sole Colorado entrant, Louisville (down near Boulder)? They too disappeared - and yet Fort Collins, which didn't even muster a blip on Money's radar in 2005, skyrocketed to become the best small town to live in. If these kinds of chart movements make you a tad skeptical, then you're not alone.

So yes, it's just plain rankism. Although it may be that even Money Mag doesn't take these rank numbers all that seriously - I doubt they do, since surely even they recognize that something like "livability" doesn't change that markedly from year to year. Rank numbers are applied merely to supply cachet - it's what makes their readers pay attention. I suspect that what most of the time, Money doesn't even know about many smaller cities in the country to begin with, and in the case of Fort Collins, for them it became the "it" town of 2006, when all its legitimate noteworthy attributes were brought to their attention a year ago (apparently at the expense of poor ol' Moorestown). By next year, Fort Collins will likely disappear off their rankings once they become aware of yet another great small city that no one had told them about earlier. (To their credit, Naperville, IL remained in the top 5 - although whether that has to do with a sustained true livability quotient or just good marketing by the Naperville C of C, remains to be seen).

tags: rankings , meme , Fort Collins , rank

Interstates

2006-06-18T06:57:00.000-06:00

50 years ago today President Eisenhower signed a bill that created the U.S. Interstate highway system. This network of stopless highways is now over 46,000 miles long, and I got to wondering this morning just how many of these highways I've been on. It's not easy remembering which roads I've traveled, and I'm sure I've forgotten a few incidental short segments. I also don't know which interstates if any our family drove on during our long road trip to Georgia way back in the late 70s. But with the help of a road atlas I've pieced together the following list:

4,5,8,10,15,17,19,20,25,29,35,43,44,70,75,76,80,90,93,94,95,210,238,270,275,280,285,
380,405,435,470,505,515,580,635,670,680,710,780,880,980

The most mileage traversed on any interstate for me is probably I-80, with over 1300 miles covered between San Francisco and the Wyoming-Nebraska border. Next is likely I-10, from Santa Monica near LA to central Texas near Fredericksburg, which is about 1250 miles. After that mileage traversed on any given highway drops off quickly, and I think the shortest full segments of interstate I've been on are I-238 and I-780 in the Bay Area, each only a few miles in total length.

Wow, isn't that fascinating.

tags: Interstate, meme

A Thousand Words

2006-04-06T12:44:00.000-06:00

Even his supporters are throwing in the towel:

Tee hee. (Via Juanita.)

tags: Tom DeLay

Tragedy of the Prisoners

2006-03-28T23:16:00.000-07:00

At the risk of exposing my previous ignorance*, I'll mention that I finally got around to researching the definitions of a couple turns of phrase that I had long wondered about: the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons.

I had no idea that the concepts were even related. But now I do. I feel so much smarter already!

I don't know if I've said this enough, but Wikipedia kicks ass. In my mind it is perhaps the purest expression of the raison d'être of the WorldWideWeb.

* Although I have now addressed this aspect of my ignorance, I have a hunch that I am still quite ignorant of many other things. I'm not necessarily ashamed of that ignorance however. Maybe a little embarrassed at times, perhaps needlessly so, but still, I value learning, and therefore wince upon remembering how many times I have forgone learning in order to, oh, play video games or daydream.

tags: Wikipedia

Discomfort Food

2006-03-12T07:15:00.001-07:00

We went snowshoeing yesterday. When we head up to the hills we usually stock up on candy bars as snacks, owing to their high energy content and non-melting character in cold weather. Basically, it's a good excuse to eat things we don't ordinarily eat. It's also a throwback to our childhoods.

I had a flashback yesterday while on the trail. When I opened up my Hershey bar, I remembered on old TV commercial from what must have been the late 70s. It featured people of all ages and backgrounds enjoying their chocolate bar, set to a catchy tune (as that was the marketing ploy of the day, to write an actual song for your product as opposed to a soundbite or merely borrowing a pop song like what you have these days). The lyrics went something like this:

Hershey's is, the great American chocolate bar
Hershey's is blah blah blah no matter where you are
Even if you cross the wide world over
You don't have to go looking very far
'Cause Hershey's is
The great American chocolate bar
[fade out]

And as the song faded out there was this last sweeping helicopter shot of someone or of a parent and child on a grassy hilltop.

I remember feeling envious of all these people; they were having so much fun, eating chocolate bars and making real connections with the people around them. This commercial made me sad. Not sad enough to go out and spend lots of money on chocolate bars, as the marketers probably hoped, but sad enough to make me think I was a lonely kid.

As you can tell, my trauma continues to this day. So does anyone else remember this commercial?

tags: Hershey's, TV Commercials, nostalgia

The Most Evil Guys in the Room

2006-02-22T09:07:00.000-07:00

Do you ever watch a TV show or documentary, knowing full well beforehand that when it's over you are only going to be more angry or depressed than you are going in?

I just finished watching Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a documentary which details the rise and fall of Enron in the mid- to late-90s through 2004. It debuted at Sundance in 2005, but I wasn't able to see it then when I went a year ago January due to its pre-screening buzz.

What makes seeing it now so pertinent and relevant is that the main players in the colossal fraud perpetrated, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, are now on trial - the story is still being told. But what is clear is just how virulent the strain of greed was that permeated that "company", how exploitative they were of the inherent weaknesses of the system, and how completely they violated the trust of the honest rank-and-file workers who signed on with them and are now left with nothing. It also makes clear the complicity of major financial and government institutions - sometimes knowingly, sometimes not - when they believed there would be no repercussions. Despite its occasional inability to clarify the exact nature of the fraud (not surprising given the subject matter), the film does capture the human element, the basic nature and motivators of the duplicity, some truly damning moments on video, and the pervasive culture of corruption in Enron's energy traders and its devastating consequences. For that I highly recommend it, especially as someone who lived through the fraud perpetrated by them on California back in 2001, and most certainly overpaid some electric bills to those bastards as a result.

What was equally striking to me too was that, in spite of no real explicit attempt to make it so, the story makes for a stunningly apt metaphor for the current Presidency of the United States. The obscurantism, the arrogance, and of course the deflections consisting of character attacks whenever someone has the audacity to question just what is going on. I'd want them to also be taken down too, however like these Enron thugs I wouldn't put it past them to take everyone down with them.

tags: Enron, greed, Ken Lay, Kenny Boy, fraud, Jeff Skilling, movies, Smartest Guys in the Room

It made me feel....

2006-02-19T12:12:00.000-07:00

I'm jaded about many things, but I still have a soft spot for the Olympics. I try to watch them when I can, although that's become increasingly difficult with the way NBC broadcasts them. I swear, sometimes I believe they are doing their damnedest to sabotage the whole event with the way they cover them.

Try watching during primetime, and you'll quickly notice that you get three minutes of event coverage - THREE - followed by three minutes of commercials. And this goes on and on for hours. Well, actually I only know for certain that it goes on for at least half an hour, because that's about all I can stand before I just give up and switch the stupid thing off. Think about it - 30 minutes of commercials every hour. If you watch a race of any sort that naturally lasts 10 or 15 minutes, you can be assured that it will take you twice as long to see the whole thing, and even then you'll only see it in annoying 3-minute increments. Even as they are coming down the home stretch, they cut to commercials.

In case you were wondering, this is what the world looks like when marketing heads take over programming departments. I can't imagine watching any substantial amount of the Olympics these days anymore unless you have a TiVo.

Another kvetch of mine is the interviewing of athletes by the moron reporters and talking heads. One thing I've noticed is the preponderance of questions based not on specifics of the race or the training, but on the current emotional state of the athlete. Now I don't doubt that such things are relevant to an athlete's performance, but what I'm getting at is the prevailing significance attached to feelings, and not to any actual observable truth. "When you passed Sven Svennson going around that far turn, how did you feel?"

And that is why I am in love with Shani Davis, the recent winner of the 1000-meter long-track speed skating event. He didn't bite when the reporter asked "How does it feel to be the first African-American to win a medal at the Winter Olympics?" You could tell that the boneheads at NBC were just waiting for him to gush all romantic about how important it was to him, that he was proud to be a pioneer and all that, blah blah blah. He certainly could have said all that, and he had good reason to. But no, instead he coolly responded with a perfunctory nod and, "It feels pretty good." And that was it - dead air the rest of the time. The reporter was caught flatfooted and stammered to move on to the next dumb "How does it feel" question. When he again gave a short answer, the reporter asked, "Are you angry?" Again, the quest for finding out athletes feelings. As if the Olympics are just one big daytime-TV talk show.

Shani probably had other reasons for being as sullen as he was toward NBC. But regardless, for me it was a breath of fresh air to see someone who frankly didn't give a shit if he didn't offer any feel-good soundbites for NBC, set himself up for product endorsements, or simply play along with the charade that is the post-event interview. I don't necessarily begrudge other athletes for doing so, but you have to admit, it gets pretty tedious when you know pretty much what they're going to say every stinkin' time, doesn't it? How many times did I hear Dan Jansen's oh-so-insightful pre-race commentary about so-n-so, "I skated with him a few hours ago during warmups, and he's calm, relaxed, but energized." Really, Dan? He's not bitter, exhausted, and wound up like a coil spring? Thanks for the clarification, that's good to know! Ugh.

And that's pretty much how I feel about that whole matter.

tags: Olympics, NBC, Shani Davis, sports

Weather geek

2006-02-15T08:23:00.000-07:00

How do I know that deep at heart, I'm still a weather geek?

Because when I found this website called the Conditional Symmetric Instability Homepage, hosted at the National Severe Storms Lab in Oklahoma, my first thought was, "Sweeeet!" My second thought was, "Kids today, they don't know how lucky they have it. If only the web had been like this when I was in grad school..."

It's been a while since I've thought about such things, so it's time to brush up - especially with winter finally making its return to northern Colorado.

tags: meteorology, geeks, science

Neil Peart

2006-02-11T15:29:00.000-07:00

Neil Peart, the drummer for Rush, has his own web site, and diary page that's almost a blog but not quite. In his January 20th entry he talks about the initial efforts the band is making toward creation of their next album, and even admits the trepidation he feels when it's time for him to show the first draft of his lyrics to Geddy and Alex. (He writes all the lyrics for their songs, while Geddy and Alex write the music.)

...on the Rush front, just this past week Alex and Geddy and I have started work on some new songs. Although we are 3000 miles apart, the two of them at home in Toronto and me in California, last week I received an e-mail from Geddy saying that he and Alex had spent the day in his home studio, and not only did they have fun, but they also thought they’d written something good.

A couple of weeks ago I had written to both of them that I had spent some time at my Quebec place in November, and decided to see if I had any lyrical “muscles” built up. With the first snows of winter whipping around outside, the lake beginning to freeze over during the cold, still nights, I spent five days sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace. A pile of papers grew in an ever-widening circle around me, and in the end — after much forehead-wrinkling and gnashing of teeth — I felt that I had about six half-decent ideas under construction. I wasn’t that confident they were any good, mind you, but I never am until the other guys respond to them. And anyway, those words won’t come alive until after the “little miracle” of hearing them sung for the first time.

Later he digresses onto the topic of sports, something which true Rush fans like myself know is very important with the band even though it never comes up explicitly in the music. But he then said a couple things which surprised me:

There have been times when Alex and Geddy and I have been in the studio, for example, and I’ve gotten totally caught up in the hockey playoffs. During breaks in the recording, or while waiting to hear a mix, we would sit in front of the television, all anxious about something over which we had absolutely no control — and I would get all tense about the outcome.

And then after all that tension, there was no release — no reward. Inevitably, we were either disappointed by other people’s failure to win the game, or briefly elated by their victory. Even after a whole season of watching something that either tortures you with someone else’s failure, or even excites you with their transitory victory, you are left with… precisely nothing.

A few days ago I was hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains with South Park’s Matt Stone, and he was telling me that for him, growing up in the Denver area, everything had been centered on football. If the Broncos won on Sunday, his world would be a better place on Monday.

So he's buddies with Matt Stone? Interesting. But that wasn't the real surprise. Rather, it was his summation that a whole season's involvement with a beloved sports team, regardless of outcome, leaves you with nothing. I suppose that's true, as far as it goes. That is, to the extent that virtually anything we do with our lives and with our time is illusory, then perhaps it's fair to say that one is empty at the end of the season. But if that's true, then surely we are just as empty during the season? And that too may well be, but it doesn't ring true to me - or rather, it seems to miss the whole point altogether.

For my part, the purpose of my interest in following teams isn't always explicable (nor likely rational), yet it's quite palpable and undeniable. I do derive a feeling of community from it, even when around those who root for other teams. Merely the act of pulling for a team provides a commonality with someone else, because for better or worse we have agreed to place some amount of importance on the outcome of the game, or season. Why would that sense of common ground vanish merely because the season ended? The tension may disappear, to be replaced by relief, joy, or anguish, but emptiness? That's just not in my experience. And if Neil's issue is instead with the vicariousness of spectating itself (which I don't think it is, but I just want to cover that ground), then he would be left in the odd position of suggesting that his very fan base is likely bereft of meaning at the end of Rush's own concerts.

None of this is to suggest that spectator sports are meaningful in the way that art or personal struggle or self-sacrifice are. It is only to say that they aren't utterly meaningless either.

Well, whatever. Even if I don't agree with Neil here, I still admire him greatly for his personal strength, his lyrics and his musical craft. Oh, and Rush ROCKS!!! Woohooo!!!

tags: Rush, Neil Peart, spectator sports, bands that totally rock

Altered States

2006-02-10T07:16:00.000-07:00

(Tip o' the hat to yooperprof)

Today's meme is yet another nifty web mapping tool, from the folks at douweosinga.com. There you can make your own customized map of states you've visited, using whatever criteria you prefer for what constitutes a 'visit'.

I didn't realize how biased I am towards the southwestern quarter of the country, including Hawaii.

tags: travel

Close Encounter

2006-02-09T11:05:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned previously we've been having a very windy winter. One of the side effects is that random garbage upwind makes its way into our yard, either in or around the junipers or the compost heap. On occasion though, I find things that you'd only see at flea markets or on Ebay.

This arrived in our front yard a couple days ago, after another windy day. As you can see it is a 45 single (actually it plays at 33 1/3) of the theme music from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the movie by Steven Spielberg. A strange and unlikely thing to find in your front yard, to be sure. But of all the vinyl owners in Fort Collins whose yard this record could have ended up in, it found the only one probably who also owns an intact version of this same record. (I even double-checked my own copy to make sure something horrendous hadn't somehow befallen it.)

Imagine my surprise to learn that someone just west of here (and there aren't too many of them, as we live on the west side of town) actually owned this record like I do until very recently. It's a "special complimentary single, not for resale", that came with the full soundtrack album as pictured here in this pilfered Ebay auction image. This record is almost 30 years old, and presumably it remained intact all that time, until it seems by appearances someone accidentally sat on it.

It has renewed in me a sense of purpose, to ensure that my copy of this record, of which only a few are extant (or are at least admittedly so), remain in good, playable condition for the years to come. Its memorable 5-note theme set to a snazzy disco beat cannot be allowed to perish from this earth. Besides, I don't want to risk disappointing our alien overlords when they come to greet us.

Cosmic Coincidences 'R' Us

tags: Close Encounters, disco, silliness, coincidences

Writing like a god

2006-02-09T08:45:00.000-07:00

My brother posted a wonderful quote about the art of writing on his blog about a month ago. I'm going to do the brotherly thing and steal something of his that he simply left lying around, and re-post it here.

“. . . I believe in writing – nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone. If you have a concept of the world, if you have not forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created that for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.”

tags: writing, Logos

Shame of the Union

2006-02-01T10:35:00.000-07:00

Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh admits:

I have a confession: I'm not sure when the last time was when I watched the State of the Union address. I think I may have watched it in 2003. But I'm not even certain of that. Perhaps a glance through the archives would show that I watched a bit of it last year, I don't know.

The truth is, I find it unwatchable.

...the thing itself (watching the actual production in real time) and then the imbecile chatter afterwards -- I just can't deal. I just find it unbearable.

Are there others out there like me?

Josh, Josh, Josh. Are you kidding? There are legions of us out here exactly like you. You couldn't pay me to watch that phony imcompetent jackass speak, especially for an hour. The only time I would ever watch him is if he ever had the courage to speak extemporaneously in front of a non-screened audience and would take non-scripted questions from them. Why should I (or any thoughtful individual) care to allot more precious free time to watching Potemkin Village townhall meetings, photo-ops, and campaign love-fests?

For my part, I think I watched the SOTU in 2002, after 9/11. That was chilling enough. Before that, I'm sure I missed most of Clinton's SOTUs as well. The whole thing has turned into a stupid charade, devoid of real information and more like a pure cheerleading event than an honest assessment of where we are and what we're doing. Until that changes, you can count me out.

tags: politics, SOTU

Which movie star am I most like?

2006-01-30T15:37:00.000-07:00

OK, so I was bored:

According to the Movies.com Which Movie Star Are You Like? quiz, you're:

Matt Damon

Your hard work has paid off! You're known as a talented, dedicated, nice guy, who wisely learned from his best pal's failure to keep his lip zipped about affairs of the heart. Also, unlike that unnamed pal, you don't seem to have let success go to your head.

Take this quiz at Movies.com

Not a bad choice, actually. For a while I was afraid I'd be compared to John Tuturro or Tobey Maguire.

tags: silliness, movies

Earthlike my ass

2006-01-28T11:15:00.000-07:00

When my Uncle Bill passed away 4 years ago, among other things I inherited his collection of VHS tapes of Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, that he recorded off TV when it was originally broadcast back in the early '80s. I had watched the show as a youngster back then, but hadn't seen it since. Well finally, this past week I started re-watching the series, and am surprised at how well the series has aged, in spite of the advances in astronomy and science in the past 25 years. Sagan was smart enough to make the scientific method and the spirit of free rational inquiry the real emphases of the series, and not focus solely on the latest summation of what has been learned by science at the time.

In one installment of the 13-part series, he speaks in front of a grade school class (he was quite good in that setting, better than you might think), talking to them about how planets around other stars will be discovered in the near future. He knew full well what he was talking about, for his predictions then have come to fruition in the past decade, with the discovery of over 100 so-called extrasolar planets. This is a burgeoning field of study, although most of the planets discovered thus far have been quite different from anything in our own solar system; the main methodologies can find bloated gas-giants that would make Jupiter shrivel in fear much easier than they can find smaller rocky spheres like Venus, Earth, or Mars. In time, that may change, but for now, that's all that can be done.

Still, refinements continue, and the limits keep getting pushed back. Earlier this week Nature published an article by over 70 collaborators from 30 institutions about the discovery of another extrasolar planet, this time using a method called gravitational microlensing, whereby the light of a more distant object is distorted by the gravitational field of the planet in question; and even though the planet itself cannot be seen directly, its existence can be safely inferred by the observed distortions of the light from that object, using Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. All in all, a very impressive accomplishment:

Located more than 20,000 light years away in the constellation Sagittarius, close to the center of our Milky Way galaxy, planet OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb is approximately five-and-a-half times the mass of Earth.

Orbiting a star one-fifth the mass of the sun at a distance almost three times that of Earth's orbit, the newly discovered planet is frigid: the estimated surface temperature is -364 degrees Fahrenheit (-220 degrees Celsius).

Although astronomers doubt this cold body could sustain organisms, researchers believe gravitational microlensing will bring opportunities for observing other rocky planets in the "habitable zones" of stars - regions where temperatures are perfect for maintaining liquid water and spawning life.

But here's what chaps my hide. The discoverers of course report that they have found "one of the most earth-like planets yet", which is true as far as it goes. But what does the traditional media say in their reports on this story?

Washington Post - Earth-like Planet Found Outside Solar System
CNN - New Technique Finds Earth-like Planet
Albuquerque Tribune - Team Spots Earth-Like Planet
BBC News - Small Earth-like Planet Found

Hell, even the US State Department - yes, Condi Rice's State Department - exacerbated the misperception with their release entitled, "Astronomers Find Distant Icy Earth-like Planet". Ugh.

Let's review this planet's resume: OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb (OGLE for short) orbits a star one-fifth as massive as our sun at a distance of about 300 million miles. A star that small will also have far less luminosity than our sun, since smaller stars have lower internal pressures and therefore maintain lower rates of nuclear energy generation. Basically, OGLE has a dimmer sun, and they orbit much further from that dim sun than we orbit ours. As a result, the surface temperature can't be much warmer than -350 degrees Fahrenheit. Oh, and OGLE is also 5 times as massive as the Earth, which means its gravity would be 5 times stronger.

So, would someone tell me how all this makes this planet "earth-like"?

Here's the deal - using the term "earth-like" is just a shorthand in planetary science circles for saying that the object is mostly solid material with a limited or non-existent atmosphere, in contrast to gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn, or other proto-stars like brown dwarfs. (Or Yavin, for all you Star Wars buffs.) However, I would submit that "earth-like" means something else entirely to the public at large - that it means having oceans, a breathable nitrogen and oxygen atmosphere, that it has landforms and volcanos and maybe palm trees and sandy beaches and all the ingredients you'd need to make margueritas and basically that it looks like our own Blue Marble. Such a planet is not what was found here, and it makes me wonder, what would the media say when such a planet were found? They've already shot their wad by claiming that we've found an "earth-like" planet. Are they going to say, "No, this time we mean it, a really REALLY earth-like planet has been found."

Maybe we should save our breathless headlines for the time when we really do find an "earth-like planet." Jus' sayin'.

tags: extrasolar planets, astronomy, Carl Sagan, traditional media, Nature, Earth-like planet

Natural History

2006-01-25T01:26:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it seems like good news is rare, but I think this story about the donation of a fossil-rich plot of ranchland in Wyoming definitely qualifies:

A Wyoming rancher with no connection to the University of Pittsburgh has given the school 4,700 acres of land littered with dinosaur fossils.

The university plans to maintain the land, valued at $7 million, for students and researchers in geology, archaeology and other disciplines. The university plans to team up on programs there with the University of Wyoming and Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

"They have a real gem out there," said Mary Dawson, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum who visited the ranch several years ago. The land is "littered with fossils."

Allen Cook of Wheatland, Wyo., said he was getting ready to sell part of his ranch and decided to donate land to the university after an appraiser put him in touch with Alec Stewart, dean of the university's honors college and the appraiser's graduate school classmate.

"The amazing thing is that Cook, who had absolutely no connection with the University of Pittsburgh, had decided that we would be good stewards for this treasure," Stewart said Tuesday.

The 57-year-old rancher said the university's interest "seemed kind of in line with what I'd like — that the land would be preserved."

I've said this before elsewhere, but it deserves repeating: fossils often have a monetary value associated with them, to collectors and others who value their aesthetic appeal. But to the paleontologist and the natural historian, these things are often priceless. In many cases there is no replication of these delicate preserved specimens, from many tens of millions of years ago. I am very relieved to hear that at least in this instance, an area with the potential for significant scientific discovery is in the hands of people who will greatly cherish it for that purpose. Kudos to the rancher for his foresight and thoughtfulness.

tags: natural history, fossils

Movies

2006-01-22T22:05:00.000-07:00

I see movies. Lots of them. But it wasn't always like that. Before I started working at Yahoo! back in 2000, I was hardly a movie fan - Cindy can tell you that. Asking me if I wanted to see some movie was like asking me if I wanted to wait in line at the DMV.

It wasn't that I disliked movies, per se. It just wasn't something I volunteered for - so many other things seemed like a better use of my time. Plopping down on the couch for two hours felt like willful surrender to sloth - unlike music, movies demand your attention the entire time. Perhaps it was a defense mechanism triggered by my short attention span. Of course, once the movie started, or if by some quirk I happened upon the movie while surfing channels, I'd watch it the same as anyone else, and even like it. The problem was just getting me to that starting point.

Then my tenure at Yahoo! began. I had originally been told at hiring that I'd join the Y! Music team (my first choice), but on my first day I was re-allocated to the Movies group. I was a bit disappointed, but as it turned out that was a blessing - several months later Yahoo acquired Launch (a streaming music startup based in Santa Monica), and the existing Y! Music team, with whom I had several friends, was disbanded, and told to find other slots in Yahoo. They were quite unhappy as you might expect, and I realized that I was lucky to not have to find a new job.

For much of the first year, my attitude remained mostly the same toward movies. There I was in my job, surrounded by movie buffs and programming with movie data, but mostly impervious to its influences. But that changed, geekily enough, when the first of the Lord of the Rings movies came out. I guess that's what it took, a beautifully realized story of grand scope and inspiration to help me appreciate how great a movie can be. I got more interested in movies as storytelling, and loved the movie adaptation of this book I'd grown so fond of (I'd read it back in early 2001). This interest carried over gradually to other movies, and by the time 2003 rolled around, I began a quest to see 100 movies in a year. If you're a Yahoo user (i.e., have email with them), you can see which movies I saw that year by logging in and seeing my movies of 2003, and subsequent years too.

So at that point, I found a new satisfaction with my job that I didn't have before. That 2003 quest was partly inspired by attending the Sundance Film Festival that year, where I got to see many advance showings, Q & A sessions with directors, and some celebrities around Park City. (I even have a photo of Morgan Freeman talking to an admirer on Main Street.) I mean, even with all this in mind, I hardly consider myself a movie buff, but it does help me feel more rooted in our culture, whatever that may be. At the very least, movies for better or worse are often as strong a bond between people as sports or religion. Even with their faults they become the language we speak, the memory we retain of where we've been in our lives, literally and metaphorically.

Lately Cindy and I have had a Netflix-supplied "Kurosawa Film Festival", where so far we've watched his classics Rashomon and Yojimbo. Really great movies - and Ran is next. We also have a "Jesus In The Movies" festival coming up soon, featuring The Greatest Story Ever Told, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Monty Python's Life of Brian. (Yes, we've left off Mel Gibson's movie, mostly because by all accounts it's a gratuitous gorefest, which is something we're just not into.)

Anyway, that's how I came around to cinema. So tell me, have you seen anything good recently?

tags: movies

The Germans are coming!

2006-01-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

Over the holidays Cindy and I sent out newsletters to friends and family, a growing trend it seems among those who send Christmas cards and the like. (In lieu of regular year-round contact, I guess it's easier to save all the family and household news for one annual digest.)

Anyway, I saw that Cindy wanted to send copies to her relatives in Germany and Switzerland. Recalling that there were some free online translation tools available, I thought, why not send them a translated copy of our newsletter, auf Deutsch? So I ran my highly idiomatic text through Alta Vista's Babelfish tool, and pieced together this bizarro-universe version of the newsletter for them. However, based on previous experience with these translation tools, I suspected that some of the translations were probably confusing and silly to native speakers, so as a check I asked a neighbor who's originally from Germany to proof it, and perhaps correct it too (he's a high-school teacher in literature, and thoroughly fluent).

Well, he thought it was terrible, and offered to do the translation himself. I was surprised, but very grateful that he'd want to take on this project. So we sat down a couple days later and over several hours we pounded through the newsletter and offered a much more reasonable German equivalent. We laughed as we corrected some of the more outrageous automated language abuses offered by Babelfish, like their overly literal translation of tenure-track (calling it something to the effect of a rail-position) and using my reference to our heat pump operating "full blast" as meaning it was literally exploding.

So, with a fully corrected version ready to submit for actual German readers, we sent it off, having included 1) a brief statement that we were planning a trip to Germany this coming summer, and 2) pleading with people to come visit anytime they wanted, for we were always happy to host visitors here. And so, a couple weeks later, Cindy got an email from cousin Gerald in Wolfsburg that he had already booked a grand trip to the US in August, including a week stay here in Fort Collins! Wow, that was fast. But we're very excited, and since we know for sure they're coming, Cindy and I have launched our crash course in learning German, or at least some German. Our way of self-learning is through language recordings by Pimsleur, online resources like those at Deutsch Welle, and hopefully chatting with our aforementioned neighbor and his 2-year old son, who already knows way more German than we may ever know.

There is a joke (more like a truism) that if a German says he speaks a little English, that really means he's fluent. And that if a German tells you he's fluent in English, that really means he speaks better than you. In any case, we look forward to having visitors and doing our part to spread some international goodwill. I figure that since the boneheads running our government aren't up to the task, someone's gotta do it.

tags: Germany, German Language, lost in translation

Cities of 2005

2006-01-15T07:31:00.000-07:00

It's been a few weeks: time for a new meme. Here I take the cue from Colorado Luis and list the towns, cities, or other locales in the world where I at least spent one night. The asterisk (*) indicates more than one night spent there.

Fort Collins, CO*
Park City, UT*
Florida City, FL*
Avon Park, FL*
Colorado Springs, CO*
Lima, Peru
Cuzco, Peru*
near Atalaya, Peru
near Fitzcarrald, Peru (yes, that one)*
Huaraz, Peru*
San Francisco, CA
Scotts Valley, CA
Hollister, CA*
Davis, CA*
near Las Animas, CO
Lenexa, KS (suburb of Kansas City)*
San Jose, Costa Rica*
near Las Horquetas, Costa Rica*
Key West, FL*

Yeesh, I got around, didn't I?

tags: travel

More Mountain Factoids

2006-01-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

I was scouting a survey route in eastern Colorado yesterday that I'll be on while helping out on the Winter Raptor Survey for the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory. On my drive back, I saw Longs Peak (as well as other surrounding peaks) in Rocky Mountain National Park come into view as I passed Road 137 in Weld County. Consulting a map, I estimate that the peak was 105 miles away when I first saw it. Cool.

Oh, and last week I caught a glimpse of Pikes Peak from north Fort Collins, up on a small ridge, on a beautiful clear morning. At that point my estimate is that I was 121 miles from the peak. I so love Colorado mountain watching in the winter.

That is all. Just thought you'd like to know. Carry on.

UPDATE (1/15/06): After a repeat trip east last Friday to do the actual survey, I can report that you can actually see Longs Peak from even further out than I originally thought. On a beautiful crystal-clear morning, I was able to see the peak just inside Logan County, which is about 113 miles from the peak.

tags: mountains, Colorado

Weather Blog vs. Weather Channel

2006-01-07T09:05:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered that the Weather Channel has a blog. I love it, because 1) the blog contributors are often the people I most like to see on the Weather Channel anyway, like Drs. Steve Lyons, Heidi Cullen, and Paul Kocin, and 2) no commercials. God, how I hate that the Weather Channel shows more commercials than any network I've ever seen - it's intolerable.

The posts are surprisingly good and not dumbed-down. It's refreshing to see some honest commentary that's not all pap, coming from people who regularly appear on TV.

tags: weather, The Weather Channel

Alias blogging

2006-01-06T07:30:00.000-07:00

About a year ago shortly after starting our Netflix subscription, Cindy and I decided to rent a couple Alias DVDs and see if we liked the series. We'd heard a lot about it from friends, but were "way behind" in TV watching the past few years. Of course, we were riveted from episode #1 - we found it to be expertly made, smartly paced, and highly entertaining. A new addiction had been found.

Alas, we couldn't really talk about the show with anyone in detail as it was evolving for us. Watching a series on DVD, especially Alias, is great in that it's much easier to remember plot details, and Alias has boatloads of intricate plot details. And of course you can watch several shows in the course of a week. But it also means that pretty much by definition, you're not up-to-date on the latest events in the show. And in early 2005, ABC was well into the 4th season of Alias, and we had just gotten started. So we had over 3 1/2 seasons to catch up. And given the amount of time it takes just to do that, with 22 episodes a season and the desire to watch some other things in our limited amount of TV-time besides alias, it was going to take even longer. But Cindy and I, we're committed, and we set ourselves to the task.

And it is with great relief to announce that as of yesterday evening, we finally caught up with the rest of the Alias-watching world, after finishing the most-recent of this season's 9 episodes broadcast so far. These had been taped on our VCR (sorry, TiVo lovers - we're still back in the TV-recording Stone Age). Of course we know there are only 13 episodes left for the entire series (this is its last season), but hey, at least we can talk about it now with other fans. It took a year to make up that deficit, and to hit this moving target, but we did it.

Spoiler Alert! - read no further if you're not caught up yourselves but want to watch the show the way it was intended, one episode at a time. I mean it! I'm going to offer some opinions on plot elements and the like.

We absolutely loved the first two seasons - we think they're extraordinary TV. We loved seeing how the takedown of SD-6 had to be slow and methodical, and that sometimes the bad guys had to be placated and allowed to continue in order to make progress in the longer term. We admire a show that has the courage (and the studio that permits it) to have some not-so-happy endings if it means telling a more compelling story. The season 2 cliffhanger was especially gripping - few shows would kill off such a regular and sympathetic character as Francie.

Season 3 was also good TV, but both of us felt some dissatisfaction at how Lauren's character evolved. The theme of presumably good characters turning out to be evil started to seem a little tired, and we noticed the complete nonexistence of any character in the show who was outside the world of espionage and intrigue. And once the season ended, we felt like the whole Covenant angle ended up being just a ruse played on the audience, especially with the Season 3 ending cliffhanger, which unless we're missing something, turned out to be far less of a mystery than it originally seemed to be. A secret report that Jack had killed Irina (or at least thought he did)? OK, that's significant, sure, but worth waiting all offseason to find out about?

Season 4 was in our opinion the weakest overall season. We love the characters and the "return" of a new improved SD-6, but the show seemed slow to move the plot along, taking about 8-10 episodes to really get started. I imagine there was a desire on the part of studio heads (or even JJ?) to let the audience get to know the characters better through longer exposition, but dammit, we're Alias addicts! We're used to breakneck pace in the show! Don't slow it down, keep it moving! Anyway, it was good to see some resolution on the whole Rambaldi device plot arcs. And we loved the brilliant twist in the season 4 ending cliffhanger, especially since we knew we wouldn't have to wait months to find out what happened to Vaughan and Syd in the car.

I think also part of the reason we were generally unsatisfied with Season 4 was that the whole season was a lot less about Syd and much more about virtually everyone else in the show. Again, we like the characters a lot, but when the emphasis is less on Syd, the show feels less focused and for us had less emotional impact. Part of what made the first couple seasons so compelling was being able to see the events of the show through the personality of Syd, who's so agreeable and admirable. When she's not the center of it, we had to depend on the personalities of characters we don't know quite as well.

Season 5 right off the bat felt to me like a return to centering the show on Syd, and sure enough, I find it much more interesting and emotive. It probably helps also that a lot is happening, and that Prophet 5 seems like a very worthy story arc. Seems, because hey, we don't know what the organization is all about, other than the episode 9 "cliffhanger" which shows Irina once again pulling some strings in a way not unlike how she was doing it 3 seasons ago. I do have a small problem with Prophet 5, wondering how an organization as comprehensive as they seem to be wasn't a bigger Rambaldi player in the last season or two, but hopefully we'll seem some explanation of this once the new eps start in March.

Ah yes, Alias. I know, it's just a TV show, but it's a damn good one. You can know that if only because Cindy and I can't stand watching TV (especially broadcast TV) unless it's particularly good. And just wait 'til I start talking about Arrested Development!

tags: television Alias

Windblown

2006-01-03T21:52:00.000-07:00

Yet another extremely windy day here on the Front Range. Winds 25 to 35 with gusts up to 45. What a strange winter this is shaping up to be, with so much wind and so little snow. We've had about 3 inches total snowfall so far this winter, but the past few weeks we're getting something like 3 High Wind Advisory days a week. It's making us mental.

Situations like this often seem to bring up the fatalistic streaks in us. Cindy commented to me that this prolonged delay in "real" winter just means we're gonna get it, and hard, real soon. And she's a climatologist!

tags: wind weather

OK, so it's 2006. I GET IT.

2006-01-02T22:58:00.000-07:00

Does this mean I need to start thinking about getting a job?

We got a situation here

2005-12-29T20:07:00.000-07:00

Another turbulent, windy day here in the Front Range today. Here's a glance at the NWS Boulder forecast discussion:


FXUS65 KBOU 292146
AFDBOU

AREA FORECAST DISCUSSION
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DENVER CO
245 PM MST THU DEC 29 2005

.SHORT TERM...UPPER TROF CONTINUES TO MOVE ACROSS SOUTHERN WYOMING
WITH ASSOCIATED SURFACE FRONT THROUGH LOGAN AND WASHINGTON COUNTIES.
TIGHT GRADIENT ACROSS THE AREA...WITH BORA SITUATION ACROSS THE
PLAINS. CURRENT GUSTS ARE BELOW HIGH WIND CRITERA. LATEST MODELS
SHOWING 850 MB WINDS AT 30 KTS THROUGH 00Z...THEN DROPS OFF AFTER
THAT. SO...HIGH WIND EVENT MARGINAL AT BEST AND NO HILITES AT THIS
TIME. AS GRADIENT RELAXES THIS EVENING...WINDS SHOULD DECREASE AS
WELL.

I quickly realized that I didn't really know what a "Bora situation" was. I mean, I know it's one of those named winds of the world, but I wasn't even sure where it occurs and what specific meteorological phenomenon it refers to. With a little research (and remembering that an old acquaintance of mine, Jan Null, wrote an article for Weatherwise about it some years ago), I learned that it's basically a wintertine katabatic (downslope) wind of the Balkans and the northeast coast of the Adriatic in the Mediterranean. The name Bora is derived from the Greek God of the North Wind, Bureas, since the wind as it is experienced always seems to be from the north. It can be quite strong at times, as it originates at elevation in the Balkan Alps and the plateaus of western Russia, and descends rapidly to the sea through mountain valleys. The cold air, although warming adiabatically in its descent, is still too cold to be warmed as much as the air it displaces, and so often is felt as a cold wind nonetheless.

This certainly jibes with my experience today. The temp at 7 am was actually 50, but cooled about 5-7 degrees afterwards as the Bora situation began in earnest. You learn something new every day.

tags: meteorology wind weather

Layover and over and over

2005-12-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

Not to belittle anyone's plane travel horror story, but this one has to be up there as one of the worst ever. A 45 hour delay? Oy.

Via View From The Wing.

tags: Travel

Kanorado

2005-12-27T22:24:00.000-07:00

Cindy and I drove back from Kansas City today. Some ideas and musings that we had in the 10+ hours it took to get home...

K-State. We passed the exit for Manhattan, home of KSU. I recounted for Cindy my lone experience there, from 8th grade as a visiting member of a student orchestra, over 20 years ago. It's such a contrast to my experiences with KU in Lawrence, where I went dozens of times, including high school music camps and visits with relatives who were students there. It's funny to me (actually Cindy) how KSU is so vilified in my family circle, when in reality it's just a mid-sized state university in a remote small town in central Kansas.
The Sternberg Museum in Hays, KS. We stopped here for a pleasant hour-long visit during the trip back today. It's a somewhat ironic museum, through no fault of its own, if only because it is one with a fine collection of prehistoric fossils smack dab in the center of a state whose Board of Education makes dismissive, sneering commentary at the notions of biological evolution and Deep Time.
Exit 272, I-70 KS. Here, just outside Abilene, you'll find the "Lion's Den" adult superstore, whose large signpost is flanked by billboards put up by the local church pleading people not to go in there. The billboards have a quote to the effect that God is everywhere, watching everything. Presumably that includes God surveying the latest content offered on the racks inside the store. No prurient interest of course - merely factfinding, just like the store shoppers. In any case, why do such strongly Republican states like Kansas and Wyoming have such successful porn vendors there? I guess that's your wholesome red-state values in a nutshell.
An extremely windy day in western KS for our drive, with lots of tumbleweeds blowing evocatively across the freeway. Cindy got to wondering what a tumbleweed looks like, and where they grow, before they go a-tumbling. I have no idea - I never see areas that have bushes that look anything like potential tumbleweeds. I guess I'll have to look that up sometime.
To kill time on the drive we started talking about TV shows we watched as kids. (We've talked about this before, but never in such detail.) What shocked us both was the length of the list of shows we both watched - how did we ever do anything but watch TV, having seen all that television?
You can see Pikes Peak from I-70 as far as 15 miles east of Limon. My estimate from looking at my Raven map of Colorado is that that mountaintop is 88 miles away at that point. For some reason I just love factoids like that.

tags: Road Trips Colorado

Foursome

2005-12-25T13:10:00.000-07:00

Because I have a few moments to spare here on Christmas Day, here's another blog meme I came across on Washington Monthly a couple days ago....

Four jobs you've had in your life: lawn cutter, car washer for Enterprise, "Shelter Tech" at the Humane Society, software engineer

Four movies you could watch over and over: Dumb and Dumber, Tremors, Fellowship of the Ring, Field of Dreams

Four places you've lived: Kansas City, Tucson, Austin, Santa Cruz

Four TV shows you love to watch: Alias, Colbert Report, Pardon the Interruption, Arrested Development

Four places you've been on vacation: Costa Rica, Hawaii, Death Valley, Berlin

Four websites you visit daily: Daily Kos, Meteostar, SFgate.com, Royals.com message board

Four of your favorite foods: Poptarts, pecan pie, seafood enchiladas, saag paneer

Four places you'd rather be: New Zealand, Hawaii, Italy, California

tags: blog memes

A Colorado Mountain Retrospective

2005-12-21T17:04:00.000-07:00

You may recall my earlier posts about the laborious Pikes Peak Ascent and my flirtation with electrically-induced doom on Mt Bierstadt this summer. But not all my mountain experiences were so harrowing and overwrought. Yes, I actually had some pleasant times this year too, my first year in Mile-High Country. Here's a brief recollection of some of these happier times in 2005....

January 7 - on the hogback ridge separating Fort Collins from Horsetooth Reservoir. A nice place to go, especially since it's only a 40-minute walk from our house. In fact, on the right is a pic I took through my spotting scope of our house from the ridgetop - basically just turning the other way from the view on the left.

=============================================================

January 16 - Cindy and I went snowshoeing in Rocky Mountain National Park, at Bear Lake. Snowshoeing was a wonderful discovery - a very inexpensive activity that gets you out of the house and in the woods, even in the middle of winter. I know, a lot of people ski, but for me, this was a novelty. It also helps us actually look forward to colder weather and snow. It's not good to dread the inevitable.

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June 28 - we continued training for the Pikes Peak Ascent by doing more hikes in RMNP. Here we hiked up Twin Sisters, a grouping of peaks just east of Longs Peak which rise to about 11,000 feet. This hike proved to be much easier than we expected - we made the summit in about 3 hours, on a gorgeous day and with very few other people on the trail.

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September 4 - Perhaps our most successful and enjoyable summit experience this year was Mount Audubon. Audubon rises to about 13,200 feet, with about 3000 feet elevation gain on the trail. It's not a particularly difficult hike, but the trail is beautiful, and the mountain's location amid the Indian Peaks make it a fantastic summit. The hike is about 4-5 miles each way.

Part of what makes any hike special are the unexpected wildlife moments. On our way up we encountered this pika busily gathering materials for its winter nesting. Cute. We also came across a pair of White-tailed Ptarmigans not far from the trail. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of them to show you. Other birds seen up there included Pipits and Bluebirds.

We eventually reached the very windy summit, and judging from the multiple rock shelters strewn about (see right), it's safe to assume that that's often the case. Once there, we picked our favorite shelter and had lunch, but also took some time for a few pose shots. I'm on the right leaning into the wind. The pic on the left is Cindy, as we look south towards Mount Evans way in the distance.

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September 24 - by this time fall color was well underway, and we joined up with some colleagues of Cindy's to hike the Gem Lake trail in RMNP. We most anticipated looking at the aspens, and as you can see on the right they did not disappoint. On the left is a pic from a little ways up the trail looking south toward Longs Peak. Like many of the hikes we did, this was also pretty moderate, going from about 8500 to 10,000 feet elevation and doing it over about 3 miles.

There were a few other hikes of note. Back in February Cindy and I hiked up Grey Rock, a large granite outcrop less than an hours drive from Fort Collins up the Poudre River canyon. I thought I had pictures of that hike, but I can't seem to find them now. We also did a couple other springtime hikes up mountains along Big Thompson Canyon just outside Loveland. And, I did an unphotographed solo day-hike while Cindy was out of town back in early August up the Longs Peak trail, where I went as far as the Keyhole. The Keyhole is a rock formation at around 13,000 feet, but with another hour and a half or so of difficult hiking to do. Sure, I could have gone farther, but that was one occasion where I actually opted against the torturous epic. Instead, the Longs Peak summit (one of the toughest day hikes you could ever do, even with cooperative weather) will have to wait another year.

Wow. Looking back though, I realize that even this is just barely scratching the surface of what can be done in Colorado. We've basically been hitting the places that are the shortest drives from FoCo, but if we just stretched our range a bit, we could do lots more. Evans awaits. So does Elbert, and Greys and Torreys peaks, which aren't far from Bierstadt. Further afield are the San Juans, which many Coloradoans tell me are the jewels of the state. So many mountains, so little time.

tags: Colorado mountains nature hiking

Florida Epilogue

2005-12-20T23:27:00.000-07:00

We got back late last night. It was a nice trip, with 2 days down in Key West, about 24 hours in and around the Everglades, and 2 days visiting my Dad. The highlights:

Key West. I'm not sure what I expected, but I'd have to say that of all the beach towns or other tropical or subtropical locales I've been to, Key West is the least laid-back of them all. I mean, sure, it's not as intense as, say, Miami or whatever, but for a small town with lots of cozy places and two-story buildings and bungalows and palm trees, there sure is a lot of traffic and chi-chi boutiques. And it's also a contractors paradise - I don't know that I've seen a higher density of pickup trucks with ladders hauling around cinder blocks and whatnot anywhere.
It was just a little strange, that's all I'm saying. It's not a bad place - it's pretty, has some nice restaurants and some real character. But having been to Hawaii, I'd say this place had nothing of the tranquility that I usually associate with warm beaches. It also doesn't help when you see so many cars with out-of-state license plates, and many other tourists who refuse to dress down on their vacations. C'mon people, leave the dress shirts behind for once in your life. Sheesh.
While driving on the Florida turnpikes, I handed toll-takers dollar coins, for kicks. Two of them seemed to recognize the coins without too much trouble, but a third took a few seconds, looking it over, wondering what kind of scam I was pulling. This led to a discussion Cindy and I had about how bad the government has messed up with the circulation of these coins, to the point where people will gaze in amazement upon being handed one. I mean, they had no trouble replacing every single $20 bill - you never see the old ones anymore, right? So why can't they replace the dollar bills with coins? They can, they just don't seem to have the will.
Back to Key West - we went to Smather's Beach one day. It was a nice time, but there was one heavy-set older guy laid out on a towel not far from us who wedged his loose swimsuit up into his crotch to tan his buttocks. Oy. What really stunned me later was when he turned over, and had his junk hanging out of that loose suit for all the world to see. Could he really be so oblivious to not know? I'm not sure which is a scarier thought, that he didn't know what was going on, or that he did.
I'm not impressed with Florida drivers. Now, I'll grant that a large number of them are tourists, which may explain some of the idiocy we experienced, but there were other occasions where it had to be locals who were utterly clueless. For example, I've never seen so many people be so permissive about letting other drivers, especially tractor-trailer drivers, have the right-of-way even in situations when that clearly is unnecessary for safety or legality. Some drivers would just come to a stop along a throughway, and let in a loaded pickup or a semi even that was just waiting for traffic to pass. I couldn't figure it out - I've never seen that behavior anywhere else.
Cuban Spanish is spoken very fast, and is accented. Maybe someday I'll understand a word they're saying.
At restaurants in the Keys they serve a type of reef fish called a dolphin. Yes, a dolphin. That means they will advertise grilled dolphin on their menus, and when I first saw that I recoiled in horror, thinking they had gone after poor ol' Flipper. But no, they only mean what is referred to elsewhere as mahi-mahi. I confirmed this with the help of the Key West yellow pages, which has a surprising amount of useful info on local fishing rules and regs, and some good diagrams.
There's still flooding in the Everglades, after their heavy rain year and Wilma to boot. While biking around Shark Valley we saw about a foot or more of standing water virtually everywhere, extending as far as the eye could see. The grass still extends above it, but the ground is utterly saturated. When it rains a lot in south Florida, the water level stays very high, because there's nowhere for the water to go.
My Dad. He had a stroke back in late September, a brain-stem bleed that almost either killed him or rendered him a vegetable. But looking at him now, you'd never know anything like that had happened to him. He looked fantastic, especially for a 78-year old fellow - very chipper, in great spirits (as he should be, for someone with a new lease on life), and just as funny and inquisitive as I've ever known him to be. Very heartening to know that our family genes have that kind of wherewithal in them.

Anyway, those are just a few thoughts off the top of my head about the trip. Back to winter now.

tags: florida vacations

Key West

2005-12-13T20:10:00.000-07:00

Cindy and I are off to Florida for the next few days - see, we're a little low on Vitamin D. I'll have the laptop handy, although I probably won't be able to blog unless I happen to find some random Wi-Fi nearby.

For the 4-hour flight we're bringing along a couple DVDs that she'll be teaching for her class next spring, on Earth Sciences in the Popular Media. That means disaster (disastrous?) movies, like The Core and Volcano. Yeah, sounds like fun, can't wait.

tags: Florida vacations bad movies

Anti-normal

2005-12-07T20:38:00.000-07:00

I was just thinking this morning how abused the word 'normal' is in the modern lexicon.

Normal has many synonyms, which kinda sorta mean the same thing, but they don't. Basically though, if you break it down, it ends up meaning just a handful of things: average, in a roughly statistical sense; typical or expected; and healthy, in a social norm or biological sense.

Unfortunately, these meanings can get convoluted when the word normal is used, and different audiences can extract different meanings from what is intended. In climatology, a normal temperature may well be average, but it may not be typical. That's because the concept of normal as mathematical average ignores the existence of standard deviation, which is the typical deviation from the average. That can often be large, yet how many laypersons know of any distinction between average and typical? It's hard to do when the word 'normal' is used for both meanings.

Similarly, in medicine, a normal person may also be mathematically average among the populace, but might not be truly healthy in the sense of being "healthful". In that case, it's only intended to mean "typical", but many may take it to mean "expected", and along with that, "proper". What good does this confusion do anyone?

And in what sense is a normal person typical? Or expected? Or even a mathematical average? Probably not often, and yet I think most of us would come away with that idea even if it's not the intended one. The problem is that we carry all these distinct definitions of the word with us simultaneously, and can interpret the specific use of the word at a given time in a nearly random way. The more you think about it, the less that 'normal' has useful meaning. If you have to keep using other qualifiers to explain your use of the word 'normal', then maybe there's no point to using 'normal' in the first place.

tags: words semantics normal

The pressure is on

2005-12-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

The wind is howling out there this morning. Oh, it has howled on many days here in Fort Collins, but today could well be the windiest day we've experienced since moving here. And here's why: (Map courtesy of RAP/UCAR). This is the 1300Z (7am MST) surface pressure map. Between the 1039 high and the 1017 low, we have a very steep pressure gradient right across the mountains. With mountain effects like gap winds and rotors exacerbating the situation, the NWS has issued a high-wind warning for foothills locations:

URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DENVER CO
456 AM MST MON DEC 5 2005

...HIGH WINDS COLORADO NORTH CENTRAL MOUNTAINS AND EASTERN SLOPES TODAY...

.INCREASING WINDS ALOFT AND AN INCREASING CROSS MOUNTAIN SURFACE
PRESSURE GRADIENT WILL PRODUCE HIGH WINDS IN THE COLORADO NORTH
CENTRAL MOUNTAINS...ADJACENT EASTERN FOOTHILLS...WESTERN URBAN
CORRIDOR AND SOUTH PARK TODAY.

When they talk about winds aloft, they're referring to maps like this: (Also courtesy of RAP/UCAR). This depicts winds blowing at the 700mb level, which corresponds roughly to 10,000 feet elevation. See the close contour lines, and the little flag symbol with 4 long lines "blowing" toward the NW, around Denver? That means that the actual balloon sounding from this morning measured 40kt (~ 45mph) winds above Denver at around 10k ft. That's important because when the sun rises, winds aloft tend to get "mixed" down to the surface in the form of turbulent gusts. And when that happens at the same time there's a strong surface gradient, well, you're talking a very, very windy day. And potentially dangerous for highway travelers.

This time of year seems to see rapidly intensifying surface pressure systems, and when the highs and lows get onto opposite sides of the Front Range, that's when we get the gusty mountain winds. Good thing I had all our leaves raked weeks ago!

tags: weather meteorology wind

The obscure-movie meme

2005-12-04T22:30:00.000-07:00

Although I may have missed the boat on this blog meme, I thought I'd go ahead and offer my thoughts on obscure movies that I think are pretty good. By obscure, I will refer to any movie that didn't see much light of day among the larger moviegoing populace, although not necessarily a definitive "arthouse" offering. And by good, that can mean well-executed, thoughtful, or just plain fun to watch.

Live From Shiva's Dance Floor - not so much a movie, more like a short. But I got to see it while attending the Sundance Film Festival in 2003, and was impressed with its meaningful commentary on 9/11 and its impact on the city of NY. Maybe some would disagree, but I still think Timothy Speed Levitch qualifies as obscure.
Waking Life - speaking of Speed Levitch, this film briefly starring him by Richard Linklater is also probably more a documentary than a movie. Still, a fun mix of animated imagery and live action and very intriguing philosophizing, albeit perhaps in a late-night-college-dorm-bullshit-session kinda way.
Roger Dodger - manipulative cynicism meets fawning naïveté. It doesn't give in to any maudlin tendencies, but also doesn't leave you as jaded as its main character either.
Stir of Echoes - hard to call a movie starring Kevin Bacon "obscure", but it was greatly overshadowed by The Sixth Sense, which preceded it and had a similar ambience. That's too bad, because this was a fine movie in its own right.
Talk To Her - Almodovar at his best. Very touching, and one scene in particular is perhaps the absolute funniest laugh-out-loud-in-the-theater moments I've ever had.
Unknown White Male - also a documentary, but a really excellent one about a real-life event of someone losing every long-term memory of theirs. If you enjoyed Memento, then this one is a real must-see.

I do see from the list at milkriverblog that others have mentioned Brazil, Rabbit-Proof Fence, and Whale Rider as well. I love all these movies too, but I don't know if I'd call Brazil "obscure". Oh well, if we call Brazil obscure, then I'll go ahead and add Donnie Darko to my list too.

tags: movies

< your favorite team here > Country

2005-12-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

Now this is cool:Go to the site and look at all the maps there - you can magnify it more and read the finer print.

It's fun to tinker around with their clickable statistics. One thing that jumped out at me is the breakdown of loyalties of NFL and MLB fans in the Salt Lake City area. At least among the respondents, a majority of them pull for the San Francisco 49ers and the Boston Red Sox. Whaaaa? Granted, these are self-selected responses and only a small (but growing) number of them, but still, not what I would have expected.

Weatherblogging

2005-12-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

Haven't done nearly enough of this these past couple years....

Let's take a look at the overnight forecast discussion from the Boulder NWS office:

FXUS65 KBOU 031023
AFDBOU

AREA FORECAST DISCUSSION
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DENVER CO
320 AM MST SAT DEC 3 2005

.SHORT TERM...TDA-TNGT...BANDED JET STREAM INDUCED SNW SHWRS CONT
TO GRADUALLY MOVE OFF THE MTNS AND OVR THE NERN PLAINS THIS MRNG
WHILE RADAR CONTS TO SHW AMPLE PCPN OVR WRN CO WITH MORE PCPN
FORMING FARTHER TO W OVR NRN UT. MDLS CONT TO SHW COOLING ALF
THRU PRD AND MSTR OVR MTNS UP TO NR H5 LVL SO WILL KEEP HI POPS
IN MTNS THRU PRD. OROGRAPHIC SNW MDL GAVE ONLY LGT AMTS OF SNWFL.
GUD DYNAMICS TDA AND UPWRD Q-G OMEGA BUT AMS BCMS SUBSIDENT TNGT.
SO WILL KEEP THREAT OF PCPN OVR PLAINS TDA BUT ONLY IN MTNS TNGT.
GFS TENDS TO HANG ON TO MSTR OVR PLAINS LONGER THAN GFS. TEMPS
WILL BE MUCH COOLER ESPCLY ON PLAINS. WILL MAKE ONLY SML CHNGS
TO MOS TEMP GDNC VALUES WHICH ARE CONSISTENT WITH H7 TEMPS.
WILL CANCEL WNTR STRM WRNG FOR MTNS WITH MRNG FCST ISSUANCE.

We had our first real snowfall of the season last night. It was only about an inch or so, but we awoke to see white streets, yards, and rooftops. However, the sky has cleared off the past hour or so, and the satellite image shows some clear air upstream of where we are (in the black circle):
That huge patch of white in the southeast central part of the state is the larger snowfield - in Fort Collins we were on the very northern fringe of the snowfall. Cindy reported to me on a walk up the local ridgetop here this morning before the sun came out that the snow ended just north of town, and didn't seem to even extend that far east of here either. The satellite seems to suggest that too. By now though, any snow here in the direct sun has melted.

One thing I still have a hard time understanding is why forecasters still think of "dynamics" and "Q-G omega" as somehow separate entities. They're the same freakin' thing! I may not be in meteorology anymore, but if there was one thing that stays with me, it's that. Ugh.

tags: weather, meteorology, national weather service

Thanksgiving is not where it belongs

2005-12-01T23:16:00.000-07:00

It's November, when winter weather begins to lay siege too much of North America. Trees are all bereft of leaves, snow has fallen most likely in the northern tier of states, skiers may be hitting the slopes in a few choice locations like Utah, Colorado, or California...and the winter holidays, Christmas et al., are only weeks away. Schools will soon empty nationwide, from kindergartens to every public and private university. Non-retail businesses prepare to have their employees vacating for a de facto December shut-down. Stores have already begun with the decorations, and millions of Americans prepare travel plans for those holidays that are just around the corner.

So would someone please explain to me, why on goddess' green earth do we have another family holiday just 3 weeks before the biggest holiday season of them all?

Every year those same aforementioned millions of Americans set out to reunite with family and friends - mostly family - in late November, one of the worst travel times of the year. Tens of millions of extra miles will be driven or flown, beyond that which would otherwise occur, to commemorate a holiday that is allegedly a harvest festival. In late November. Seriously, why?

From an academic perspective, this is really silly. Classes have to undergo a major interruption, just a week or two before the term is about to end anyway. Some college students end up taking the whole week off, treating it as the Autumn analog of Spring Break. Not that you can blame them, because these students have mostly been in classes for up to 12, 13, even 14 weeks straight. But it's not truly a week off, it's at most 4 days. A long weekend, at best.

I understand and appreciate the sentimental and wholesome nature of Thanksgiving, and far be it from me to want to take it away from anyone. I don't propose that at all - instead, I want to make it better. I want to improve Thanksgiving. And the way to improve Thanksgiving is to move Thanksgiving. Catchy, eh? Mend it don't end it.

Let's have Thanksgiving in October, say, the third week. Sometime between the 17th and the 24th, something like that, over a full month earlier than what it is now. Think of the advantages: we can celebrate a real harvest festival at a time when real food is being harvested - what a concept! We can also do the big holiday travel thing like before, except it is far less likely to be disrupted by nasty winter storms. In other words, you're less likely to get stranded in an airport with overpriced concessions, or on some lonely stretch of interstate in a blizzard with no extra blankets. Also, the days are longer and warmer, so you can spend more time outside with the family, enjoying the fall color. The Canadians already have the right idea, with the celebration of their version in the second week of October - why should they have all the fun? Why do we deny ourselves a better time of year for this important holiday?

And for all you religiously inclined folks - now you get a nice wholesome family holiday to steal the thunder from Satan-worshiping Halloween. And for all you witches and warlocks, now you can combine your pagan rituals with a nice turkey dinner with everyone in your coven. It's really a win-win. Academia gets a nice break smack dab in the middle of the term, when they need it the most. (Those on the quarter system, who just started in early October, well....you get a nice early vacation.) And late November is freed up to start a real runup to the holiday shopping season, without having to worry about a short one every few years, as is under the current system.

We can do this - we need to do this. The current system is silly and causes completely unnecessary inconvenience. Just because the date was established many decades ago (1939 if Wikipedia is to be believed) is no reason we can't adjust it for our modern era. So tell your friends and family - let's get this thing done. The way to improve Thanksgiving is to move Thanksgiving.

UPDATE: A man after my own heart: Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune apparently thinks the same way I do. Good man.

tags: Thanksgiving, holidays

IDiocy

2005-11-30T21:37:00.000-07:00

Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers notes the latest silliness from one of the most ardent Intelligent Design advocates, William Dembski:

William Dembski asks an odd question:

Ask yourself, Why do biological systems exhibit molecular machines at the smallest level permissible by the properties of matter? “Evolution” provides less and less a convincing answer.

I have a different question. What process or protein would the Intelligent Design creationists not call a "molecular machine"?

Myers fumbles a little in his answer; however, one of the commenters, Martin Striz, provided the best summary of why notions of irreducible complexity and the specious "747 built by a tornado" arguments are fundamentally unsound. He writes:

In one sense, a machine is any system that performs a thermodynamically improbable transformation. A car doesn't spontaneously drive you to the mall, but given energy input and your coordination, it will make that transformation (of your location). Machines at the macro level are human-made systems designed to make such nonspontaneous events happen.

Enzymes are also systems that make chemical transformations with low thermodynamic velocity more probable. Except that enzymes can be constructed from the bottom up because they have smooth fitness gradients, while human-made macro machines do not.

IDists never mention this difference to their audiences, and probably don't understand it themselves. It's the key reason why the "tornado making a 747" analogy is horrendously wrong.

As to the question, "Why do biological systems exhibit molecular machines at the smallest level permissible by the properties of matter?", I don't understand what the issue is. They exhibit machines at the smallest level of organization precisely because evolution is a bottom-up process. Organisms are complex interwoven sets of thermodynimically imporbable chemical reactions, and the only way that they can arise, ontogenetically and phylogenetically, is through the smallest units of chemical conversion "machinery" permissible by the laws of physics/chemistry.

And yes, another commenter was unclear on what he meant by "fitness gradient", just as I was. His followup indicated that he basically is referring to the robustness of the reaction. At the molecular or even the cellular level, the likelihood of chemicals to still engage and complete reactions even under suboptimal conditions is far greater than what can happen for a complex entity on a larger or "macro" scale:

It means that slightly changing some variable only changes the activity of the system/enzyme slightly, it doesn't completely knock it out. For example, if you look at a graph of the activity of an enzyme over, say, temperature, you'll typically see a parabolic curve, it looks like a hill (or less often a hyperbolic curve). At some temperature, the enzyme has maximum activity. In humans, this is usually 37C, which is why it's so important to maintain thermal homeostasis. If you change the temperature to 38 or 36C, the enzyme doesn't just stop working. It merely slows down.

If you make a single amino acid substitution in an enzyme, it (usually) doesn't just stop working as well. You change the conformation of the enzyme slightly, you alter the size or shape of the binding pocket, and therefore the affinity of the substrate for the enzyme. It works a little better or a little worse. The fitness function for this enzyme is smooth. It doesn't just stop working.

With macro machines, if you cut the right wire in a car, it does stop working. That's a discontinuous fitness function. Only specific states work at all.

[...]

The reason, I think, that enzymes and other nanosystems have smooth fitness gradients is because physics becomes a lot more probabilistic, a lot fuzzier, at smaller and smaller scales. All chemical reactions are thermodynically probabilistic, although most macro objects aren't.

Evolution works by accruing complexity through small changes over smooth fitness gradients, because that's the only way that it could happen from the bottom up. And since the smallest systems are likely to have the smoothest fitness gradients, it shouldn't be a surprise to Dembski why biological systems have tiny "machines." At least not if he knows some biochemistry.

This is the clearest refutation of that old complexity canard I've come across.

The implications of these ideas are far-reaching. Not only do they help us understand how the myriad of enzymatic reactions that happen in organisms eventually came to be, but they even give us a hint as to how abiogenesis - an idea beyond the purview of evolution proper, but not science - could well occur. Indeed, Dembski has it completely backwards - when it comes to understanding the origin of these processes, Evolution provides the only convincing answer.

tags: evolution, intelligent design, abiogenesis

Move Thanksgiving

2005-11-28T16:15:00.000-07:00

Well, another Thanksgiving in the can. You know, I like the idea of this holiday just fine, but it seems to me that the timing of it is ridiculous. Why have a nice family oriented holiday just one month before another one? Any why have a holiday that supposedly represents an autumn harvest festival long after any real harvest actually occurs? It's late November, for pete's sake, right on the verge of winter.

I am going to start a movement, a real Movement, to Move Thanksgiving to some other date.

I'll blog more on this later, but I just wanted to get the idea out there. It's gonna happen. Oh yes it will.

A touch of overkill

2005-11-26T18:31:00.000-07:00

Our family does a random drawing every year, around Thanksgiving time, to determine who gives a present to whom for Christmas. (In the interest of not engaging in total consumerist gluttony, we try to reduce the total amount and cost of gifts exchanged in the holiday season.) We've always cut up little pieces of paper, and drawn them from a basket to assign the names. Pretty 19th-century, don't you think?

So, with plenty of free time at hand, I whipped up a couple Perl scripts to make these random assignments for us. This one takes a list of names of assigns gift recipients to each one randomly:


#!/usr/bin/perl -w

@givers    = ('Dan','Lori','Connie','Dave','Chet','Cindy','Eric','Mom','Kent');
@receivers = @givers ;

foreach $giver (@givers) {
    $num_receiver = int(rand(@receivers)) ;
    $receiver = $receivers[ $num_receiver ];
    redo if $giver eq $receiver;
    print "======++++++ $giver will give a present to $receiver\n" ;
    splice (@receivers,$num_receiver,1);
}

My mother also suggested today that we come up with a similar scheme for having the adults give a gift to one child. The constraint was that a parent could not give a gift to their own child, but other than that, every assignment was random. I also cranked out a script for that:


#!/usr/bin/perl

my $adult;
my $kid;
my $num;

my %parents = (
   'Gabby'  => ['Dan','Lori'],
   'Grant'  => ['Dan','Lori'],
   'Alissa'  => ['Dan','Lori'],
   'Bianca'  => ['Dan','Lori'],
   'Caitlin'  => ['Dan','Lori'],
   'Zack' => ['Connie','Dave'],
   'Nick' => ['Connie','Dave'],
);

my @adults = ('Dan','Lori','Connie','Dave','Chet','Cindy','Eric');
my @kids =  ("Gabby","Grant","Alissa","Bianca","Caitlin","Zack","Nick");

BLOCK: foreach $child (@kids) {
    $num = int(rand(@adults));
    $adult = $adults[ $num ];
    foreach $parent ( @{$parents{ $child }} )  {
        redo BLOCK if $parent eq $adult ;
    }
    print "======++++++ $child will get a present from $adult\n" ;
    splice (@adults,$num,1);
}

As it turns out, we probably won't even use this second script, since there are some issues about the purpose of even doing this random assignment thingy in the first place. But I felt compelled to prove to myself that I can still create something from scratch on a moments notice, even after a full year away from programming at Yahoo. Thanks to Apple and Mac OS X, where I can easily graft together Perl in a UNIX environment.

Norah and Foo

2005-11-07T09:53:00.000-07:00

I just discovered that Norah Jones sings and plays along on "Virginia Moon", on the Foo Fighters' latest album "In Your Honor".

I love it when my favorite artists collaborate, especially when I would never have imagined that they might. In the biz we call that "thinking outSIDE the box."

Pikes Peaked

2005-08-29T10:09:00.000-06:00

Good lord. What an epic.

You may remember that I had been in training for the Pikes Peak ascent for several months. Well, it's done. Barely.

The race was on August 20, with about 2500 total participants. About a thousand of them were in the "First Wave", starting at 7am, with the rest of us starting a half hour later. The weather was nice that morning, with a few altocumulus clouds and temperatures a bit warmer than expected, around 55 °F. It was clear to me that convection would likely develop over the summit today, but I hoped that with this early start and projecting a finish in under 5 hours, I could make the top before the worst of it hit. Heh. How's that for foreshadowing?

The "Second Wave" started on Main Street in Manitou Springs, with all 1500 of us lumbering up the road to the trailhead, 13.3 miles and 7,860 feet of elevation gain ahead of us. With the road narrowing to merely a trail, things got cozy in the earlygoing, and jogging gave way to "powerwalking". It was just as well, since you don't really want to burn out in the first couple miles anyway. Still, I kept a good pace, always thinking about getting to treeline and within eyeshot of the finish.

The miles ticked by, and the pack thinned gradually. By about 5 miles in there were actually stretches along the ever-rising trail where I could actually resume jogging. It felt great to run, if only to stretch out my quads. That didn't last long though, and I had to be mindful of my pace, and keeping it sustainable. I passed Barr Camp at 7.5 miles (10,000 ft) in just 2 hrs and 20 min, and still felt quite good. Unfortunately, things went "downhill" from there.

Initially I wasn't sure what the problem was - I was well hydrated, and had munched on pretzels on the way up. But I was simply feeling gassed. I stopped to eat part of an energy bar, hoping that I could get a second wind soon. And I even believed that I did for a few minutes after resuming. But as I kept trucking up the trail, getting closer to treeline, I realized that my exhaustion would not be so easily remedied. The slog had begun.

And it only worsened. As I approached the next waterstop at 10 miles in, I got clearer views of the sky above. My, that sure looks dark and threatening up there. How can this be, it's only a little after 10am! Fighting off the fatigue and my diminishing morale, I kept pushing to the rest stop, slowing only a little as I refilled my water and grabbed a few more pretzels. A number of the people I had been grouped with or passed on my way up were now passing me. It was discouraging, but I remembered that my goal wasn't to beat them, it was just to finish. Onward I went.

I made it to treeline, and finally had a view of the summit. Well, not really. The summit was obscured by a huge dark cloud. There was no blue sky remaining in any direction, and only a terrible sense of foreboding. Still 3+ miles left, and I could see the train of runners winding up into invisibility beyond the mist. I looked around me, and everyone was unconcerned about what lay ahead. Not a word from anyone, even at the last rest stop, of turning back or closing down the operation. Then a flash, and a couple seconds later, thunder everywhere. Was I going heed the lessons learned on Mt. Bierstadt just a month earlier? Apparently not.

My conscience didn't accede so easily though. Each subsequent thundercrash had me shouting back at the sky and at myself, asking why I was doing this. The other runners still went on, even encouraging me to stick to it (despite the fact that I probably seemed like a total nutcase for yelling), you can do it, you're almost there, just a little over 2 miles to go. I understood the encouragement, and in any other circumstance I would have taken heart in it. But when it means immersing yourself into the kind of danger that any outdoor organization admonishes you against doing, that even I had admonished myself against doing just a month ago, insanity sets in. I actually did turn back at one point, and walked toward the previous rest stop for about a minute as the my rational, sensible side took over in a short-lived coup d'état. I begrudgingly turned back up the hill though, not from summit lust like what drove me the last bit up Bierstadt, but the realization that as hazardous as it looked ahead, toiling back 10 miles on this trail feeling as exhausted as I did was no more inviting. The best I could hope for was to just get this damn stupid thing over with.

Easier said than done. Another lightning bolt, this time a "flash-BOOM!" episode of absolutely deafening thunder. It must have struck only a couple hundred feet away in the rocks up the hill. I was too tired to react anymore - all I could do was trudge ahead, hope that I wouldn't meet my doom today. Lightning continued intermittently over the next 20 minutes, after which the ice pellets began to come down.

I hadn't brought along my windbreaker. It was so warm at the start, and I was so confident that I could summit before any inclement weather that I opted to leave it behind to keep my weight down. Another bad idea, I guess. My arms began to redden from the pelting. At least I had some light gloves for my hands. They stayed warm for a while, at least until they got soaked.

I passed the El Paso County Search and Rescue stop at 11 miles in. Still no word of turning anyone back. I wondered what the hell had to happen for them to cancel this thing - I had the impression from all the literature that they weren't going to endanger the runners or help-crews in the event of bad weather, and yet here I was, 12000 feet up Pikes Peak in a hailstorm with lightning all around. Maybe they were waiting for a couple more signs of the Apocalypse before calling it? Some grasshoppers? A blood red moon? I continued, practically flailing myself forward, muttering constantly about how I'd never do this again, I had to keep moving, I couldn't stop, I hope Cindy and Mom and Kent are OK, I wonder if they got turned back, am I going to collapse, I sure feel like it, god I hate this, this is so stupid, so insane, so absurd, gotta keep going, can't stop, how much farther, am I getting closer, my arms really hurt now, I'm freezing, I can feel the ice pellets going down my shirt, I better not slip on the pellets, I can't believe hundreds of us are here doing this, and why am I the only one complaining?

With less than a mile to go, another stop, and this time someone actually fitted me for a makeshift poncho. It didn't help much, but I was in no state to complain. I drifted into this dreamstate of exhaustion, compelled by a will that I previously wasn't sure I had, to keep hiking to the finish. About 20 minutes later I finally saw the finish line through the mist and continuing hail. I finally felt a second wind, and my pace quickened like it hadn't in almost 3 hours. I stepped strongly, greatly encouraged for once, knowing I had only a few minutes left until real assistance, and real rest. But the second wind subsided after about a minute, and I fell back into my near-sleepwalk. A third wind came about another minute later, as I hoped to at least have a triumphant-looking finish, but that too receded quickly. If I was to cross the line, it would be pathetically. And so it was.

At a little over 5 hours after starting, I finished. I heard the congratulatory remarks as I approached and crossed the line, and once I knew I was done, I stopped, completely. I fell to the ground, conscious, but having no more energy to even stand. I was helped back up and carried to the aid station on the summit, fully awake and aware of what was happening, but utterly powerless to effect any speech or gestures. I'd never felt so spent.

In the aid station, they laid me down, took off my wet shoes and gloves, gave me a blanket, and hooked me up to oxygen. (I knew it wasn't the altitude that got me, but they didn't know that. Besides, I'd always wanted some pure O2.) As someone began rubbing my extremities to warm them, the intense emotion of the previous 2-3 hours overcame me, and I started to weep, especially as I thought of my mother and Cindy, most likely still out there. It would be a half hour before I was strong enough to get up and start looking for them.

I later found Cindy and Kent amid the masses on the top of the mountain. None of us knew where my mother was, nor did we have any way of finding out while up there. It was time to head down, except that the road to the summit had been closed for about an hour or more because of the storm - it had to be plowed first. Unbe-freakin-lievable - August 20, and there's half a foot of frozen precip on the mountaintop, on race day. Several hundred to a thousand people lined up outside (there's no place inside any building there to line up that many people) to wait for the shuttle vans to arrive to take us off the peak. After another hour or so, the road opened, and we could start back to Manitou Springs, and try to find out what happened to my mother.

Another 45 minutes later, we were back at the race start. It had obviously dumped rain there. After talking to several race organizers, we had word that my mother had been turned back around mile 11, and picked up by the Search and Rescue people. She had been crouching under a rock, obviously very cold, and was told by the rangers that conditions higher up were even worse (which they were). They bundled her up and put her on a horse (her first horse ride of her entire life!) that took her back to the inclined rail junction around mile 7, at which point she rode the train back to Manitou. Not long after hearing the story, we were all reunited, and after heading back to our hotels to tidy up, recounted our travails over dinner.

An experience I'll never forget. And if I have any choice in the matter, never repeat.

Terror

2005-07-19T20:41:00.000-06:00

As a preparation for our Pikes Peak Ascent in August, Cindy and I went down to Mt. Bierstadt just south of I-70 for a day-hike. Bierstadt is a 14er, and clocks in at 14,060 feet. The route is pretty straightforward, and quite short - it's a 6-mile or so round trip, starting from a trailhead off Guanella Pass at about 11,000 feet. Cindy had the misfortune of straining her knee two days before the hike, and was very disappointed that she was not going to try the summit with me. Still, she wanted to come and planned to spend the morning doing some writing and relaxing in the area near the trailhead.

Feeling energized, I started fast on the trail. I could see a few puffy cumulus around the summit area, and realized right off that I was getting off to a late-ish start (~ 10am). I figured that it might start looking pretty scary by the time I summited, and that I wouldn't have too long to hang around up there before heading back.

Sure enough, the clouds continued to build, and I hiked ever faster. I got near the summit area in about an hour and a half, which is pretty quick. Unfortunately, that still wasn't fast enough. It began to precipitate lightly, mostly small frozen pellets of graupel.

(That's a graupel shaft in the upper right of the pic, by the way.) Not a good sign, because charge separation occurs when frozen material moves in a convective updraft like that. And charge separation of course means -- lightning. There were about 8-10 other hikers in the area, and we began to hunker down. With about 5 minutes of clambering remaining to the top the first bolt of lightning hit, about a quarter mile away. Holy crap. I struggled to think of a time when I was as terrified as I was at that moment. Being near a mountain summit is about the worst place you can be in an electrical storm. I knew this rationally, and yet there I was, having put myself in this pickle. Still, in spite of this, I didn't want to head back down yet, because I was so damn close to the summit. I had to get to it - otherwise the whole trip down here was for naught.

Now, I know that this was a faulty rationalization which fails to consider the waste of time of the trip if I happen to get struck by lightning in the process; but at just under 14,000 feet, I apparently was incapable of sound reasoning. I wanted the summit. I needed it. So I took what I thought were reasonable precautions considering the insanity of what I was about to do, staying as low as possible and just trying to get to the summit area for a moment, time my arrival so that I get up there shortly after any nearby lightning strike, and get the hell off there a moment afterwards. (Remember kids, do NOT try this at home.)

As a side note, I got to personally experience another aspect of terror which I had heard about before, but never really understood. Each time the lightning flashed nearby and the thunder broke around me, I shouted back, and even occasionally laughed. It was so odd, laughing in the face of danger, but also utterly natural. I'm not sure that I laughed as a way to reduce the fear, but it's an undeniable reality that such a reaction happens. The situation was just so ridiculous, and so perilous, that I guess I thought it was sorta funny.

Anyway, in about 3-4 minutes time, climbing upward in the frozen pellets and the lightning which was still about a quarter mile off, I finally made it to the top.

I tried to angle a self-portrait shot with what I could see of the view from there (at least the part that wasn't obscured by the thundercloud), all the while trying to be mindful of how idiotic it would be if I were to get struck on the summit while trying to take my own picture. (As if merely being up there already weren't dumb enough...) Just as I was about to snap the shot, there was another huge thundercrash, which caused my arm to flinch and make the picture crooked. I didn't sweat it at that point, and decided that, OK, maybe now was a good time to start descending. Although it wasn't easy clambering down slick rocks in the cold, I made it back without further incident.

I had some trepidation about telling Cindy about this exploit, and sure enough, she wasn't thrilled about my choice. But as it turns out, she actually hiked up the trail a good ways herself, having felt much better after I had started hiking, and wanting to get some exercise anyway. She made it up about 2 miles along the trail before turning back because of the impending weather, and she also tells me about how looking back she even saw a figure in green, some stupid guy, near the summit when the lightning was ramping up. Hmmm, coincidentally I had my green rainjacket on at the time too.

Whatever you do, I don't recommend that you do what I did. I plead temporary insanity due to summit lust. If you must hike Colorado 14ers in the summer, get a nice early start appropriate to how long the trail is; in the case of Bierstadt, I'll want to start hiking no later than 8.

Nature is glorious, full of mystery and wonder, often serene, and every now and then frighteningly powerful. It's moments like those described above which lead people to say that you should always treat the mountain with respect. I certainly didn't need to experience all this to believe it, but I guess a little reminder was in order.

Bird class

2005-06-26T21:06:00.000-06:00

I joined the Rocky Mountain Nature Association some weeks back, so that I could take a number of seminars they offer up in Rocky Mountain National Park this summer. The first one of several was a 4-day class called Rocky Mountain Birds, run by retired ornithologist Richard Beidleman, his wife Linda, and his daughter Carol.

If you have never met him or had a chance to take a class or seminar from him, here's my suggestion - DO IT. He is a remarkable fellow, getting a little on in years, but in no way diminished by it. For an 83-year-old gent, he is extremely spry and apparently just as enthusiastic about birds as he probably was 50 years ago. Perhaps the best part of it is that he is a total ham - he was cracking jokes quite often, in between occasions of sharing his long-acquired wisdom on birds. But he pokes fun at himself as often as at anyone else, and is just a real charmer. And I do find it inspiring to see a man his age undeterred at getting up at 5 am at the prospect of going out to see birds, not to mention doing that 4 days in a row!

I won't hesitate to sign up for his class again next year. If not for the birds, just for the sheer entertainment value he provides.

Peru - what a country

2005-06-21T18:48:00.000-06:00

Cindy and I returned from Peru back on June 1, and we're just now getting used to the idea of actually being back in the states. Part of the reason for the delay was that we also took a trip to California just a week after our return.

A 3-week trip to a foreign country, especially a new one, can be a disorienting experience. I've had the good fortune of traveling quite a bit in my life, but I would have to say that this trip to Peru was perhaps the most life-changing one I've ever done. Not even my 5-week trip to the then-Soviet Union back in 1989 affected me like this. (Admittedly, it's hard to get myself back in the same mindframe as I was 16 years ago, so take this for what it's worth.)

Peru is an amazing place. A country about the size of California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona put together, it's also about as diverse as that assemblage, if not moreso. We got to see both the driest and the wettest parts of the country, as well as the lowest and the highest. I'd say we also saw some of the saddest and the most glorious parts as well. Lima. Cuzco. Sacsayhuaman. Atalaya. Fitzcarrald. Manu. Macchu Pichu. Huaraz. Llanganuco. Santa Cruz. On our last day of the trip, both Cindy and I remarked how mind-boggled we were, at all we'd done and seen. Even with as much as we did, we only scratched the surface of what there was to do in Peru. We could easily schedule another 3-week trip there, going to completely different destinations, and be just as entranced by it all as this one. And we could probably do one more after that too.

We played the role of simple gringo tourists for the most part, but oddly enough, I didn't resist. I usually chafe at the idea of looking so..."typical", but I think this time, I recognized how silly it would be to pretend to be something that I so obviously wasn't, which was a savvy traveler who could talk it up with the locals wherever he went. I do aspire to that, but I sure ain't there yet, and acknowledging that turned out to be a huge relief. I carried my digital camera visibly everywhere I went (and took close to 1000 pictures for the trip), and even my binocs, in case I saw a neat bird. To my benefit, the Peruvians we met were completely unassuming, which made it easy for me to take on this role.

But what did we see though? We spent a total of about 6 days in Cuzco (enchanting), a day at Macchu Pichu (as spectacular as all the photos you ever see), 4 days on a trek in the high Andes (now those are mountains), and 5 days in and around the Amazon (I lack the words to describe the majesty of it). Many animals and birds, many Incan and pre-Incan artifacts and ruins, many interesting people and musicians and tour guides and townsfolk, many sketchy roads, and many roads that were far better than I would have expected. Take a peek at my Peruvian photo galleries to sample some of the sights and scenes we encountered.

The thing that was so altering for me (and for Cindy as well) was seeing such a different manner of existence that, although hectic in its own way, seemed more grounded and earthy than much of modern life in the US. Even though we were just tourists for the most part, it was easy, especially in Huaraz, for us to get a feel for the pace and style of life for many Peruvians. They do work hard, as hard as anyone I've seen, but there's something different about the nature of it that is so different from life here in the US. The culture is changing, especially in the face of technological advancement, but perhaps as an outsider it was easier for me to see how things have not changed, because I can see how the same technology (and economy) result in very different effects between there and here.

We flew American Airlines, who offered direct flights between Lima and Dallas. As such, the flight is full of Americans, and both Cindy and I looked at those fellow Americans quite differently on the return as compared to our departure. Suddenly, Americans seemed unusually verbose and chatty, and well, distracted. America is so full of distraction, of sensory overload, of advertising and video games and reality shows and DVDs and pop music and pimped-up cars and huge airports and interstate highways and intensive cattle ranching. In the course of one day we returned to this state of existence from having lived in something far less....intense in the previous few weeks. Again, I don't mean to suggest that life in Peru is sedate and low-key, because it really isn't. But even in the urban areas we spent time in, Peru was just easier to accept, to grok. California, by way of comparison, is practically inscrutable.

In short, we loved it. We want to go back. We recommend that you go there if you ever get the chance, especially to Macchu Pichu. (It sounds trite, but it really is everything you might imagine it to be.) Learn some Spanish before you go - not because you absolutely have to, but because you will appreciate your time there all the more. And there is much to appreciate.

Peru

2005-05-09T23:01:00.000-06:00

Cindy and I are off to Peru tomorrow. A full report on our travels will be forthcoming upon our return. Ta ta!

Mr. B and TV

2005-05-05T18:38:00.000-06:00

The warmest place in the house, most evenings...

Cindy and I got Netflix last January (which is awesome, by the way), and watched a lot of movies and TV shows on DVD. I've kept track of the movies I've seen this year (most of them on DVD) on my Yahoo Movies list, and some of the TV shows include Alias, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Arrested Development.

Anyway, a habit became ingrained during these many evenings of TV vegging, whereby the cat would jump into my lap almost as soon as I sat down, and watch the entertainment with us. Even though it's warmer this time of year, he'll still "assume the position" if the lap presents itself. Endearing, and a welcome sign of affection from a cat that many years ago kept rather aloof.

That's French, BITCH

2005-05-04T16:32:00.000-06:00

Some of the best news I've heard in quite a while - Stephen Colbert is going to get his own "spinoff" from the Daily Show. I think this is fantastic, because Cindy and I are both huge fans of the Daily Show, and especially Colbert.

To get an idea of the tenor of his silliness, take a peek at the promo that has been running on the show for many months now.

Bird Lists

2005-04-30T21:50:00.000-06:00

I recently assisted the Fort Collins Audubon Society with a monthly bird census out at the Fossil Creek Reservoir Natural Area. As we saw and heard a few surprise species like Red-breasted Merganser, Long-tailed Duck, and Virginia Rail, the fellow who was leading the census told me he was keeping a year list. For some reason, the idea of keeping my own year list had never dawned on me, even after having read The Big Year by Mark Obmascik, which is all about hardcore birders keeping track of all their bird sightings in a calendar year. So, I decided to start my own year list for 2005, which of course is much smaller than those in Obmascik's book. The '600 Club'? Hell, for me, I'd be happy to be in the '300 Club'. So far in 2005, I have 176 species.

I also started a Colorado List when we first moved here in November. That list has 113 species. You can always check to see the current status of that list here.

In general I've been cautious about keeping track of so many lists. Of course I also have the most general of lists, a Life List, which includes all birds seen anywhere in the world. But I've hesitated on keeping a separate list for the localities where I've lived, until recently. I'm not sure how I suddenly overcame this reluctance, but listing has a new appeal to me. I think it's basically another manifestation of that 'pack-rat' mentality, where I want to keep track of everything and lose nothing. So be it. Bird lists are a way of ensuring my continuity of experiences, by connecting the past with the present. Until my photography really gets past rank ~~amateur~~ poseur status, lists will have to do.

It's almost May, right?

2005-04-30T10:45:00.000-06:00

Here's the scene from outside our front door just moments ago, today, on frickin' April 30th:

I don't think we're in Santa Cruz any more, Toto.

U2 in Denver

2005-04-23T21:50:00.000-06:00

I have a long history with U2.

My interest with them began in 1983, with the release of their album War. I had heard New Year's Day on the radio, and even taped the whole album off the radio at one point. (Some of you may be old enough to remember that radio stations used to do that kind of thing back in those days.) I kept that tape for over 20 years, before it finally became impossible to listen to.

My concert history with U2 goes back a ways as well. I went to my first U2 show back in 1987, over 18 years ago. Since then I've seen them 3 other times - one other time on the Joshua Tree tour, once for Zoo TV, and once for Popmart. I missed their Elevation tour, mostly because of laziness, but partly because of disillusion after being somewhat underwhelmed by their Popmart appearance. But I had heard afterwards so much positive about their Elevation tour, much of it from my brother, that I resolved not to miss them the next time they came around.

This show in Denver last Wednesday had a lot to live up to. The two shows I saw on the Joshua Tree tour were excellent, and the Zoo TV show was unparalleled, and is perhaps my all-time favorite show from any band I've ever seen. Fortunately, I'm happy to say that this pricey Vertigo show (~$125 per ticket) was worth every penny, and I left wondering how I might be able to finagle a chance to see them again on this tour.

The stage set was simple yet elegant, featuring an elliptical runway surrounding a barebones stage and embracing a standing-only general admission area. Strings of computer-controlled lights forming a screen were dropped down on occasion, providing the right amount of ambience needed for the various songs. Above all this was a wide screen featuring views from fixed cameras on the band members - this turned out to be one of my favorite features, actually. In this day and age of fast edits and sensory overload, it was refreshing to see live shots that weren't all flashy and obnoxious, but simply let you see what each band member looked like at any time, even from the upper level.

Energy flowed virtually all the songs, which was something I was paying close attention to, knowing how the band is getting on in years and in tours. I was especially impressed and pleased with Where The Streets Have No Name, which bristled with life and hope. For me, the emotional peak of the show was Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own, which Bono sang with a clarity and a soaring vocal that I can't recall ever hearing him do before. It's such a beautiful song, I admit that I welled up inside before the song's climax.

It was also a thrill to hear so much old material, like all the stuff from Boy. It was played very energetically, especially Electric Co., and it also melded very easily (and surprisingly) with the newer songs. The songs played were generally grouped by album, but not slavishly so. The band did a great job making segues between songs which highlighted similarities in theme which I hadn't previously noticed.

If I had any quibbles, I guess I would have liked to hear Bono chat just a little more with the crowd, because he is quite charming when he extemporizes. Zoo Station, the first song in the encore, felt a bit perfunctory, about a minute into it - odd, because I didn't get that feeling from any other song. I also wished we could have heard a few other songs which I think would have fit well with the overall feeling of the show, like Walk On, or Crumbs From Your Table. But I understand that the show can't go on forever, and if they had played those, I'd probably complain about their not having played a couple other songs as well!

Still, in spite of these small complaints, on its own merits, this was an excellent show. Cindy and I loved it a lot, and were quite abuzz afterwards during the drive home. The lights, the songs, the band members, the excited crowd, the passion for peace, the creativity that went into the show design, all these things which were conveyed confidently, maturely, and passionately - all that made for one of my favorite shows ever.

Running to get high

2005-04-04T23:56:00.000-06:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm beginning training for the Pikes Peak Ascent coming in mid-August. The Ascent is a race from Manitou Springs to the summit of Pikes Peak mostly along Barr Trail, going a half-marathon's distance of 13 miles. The total elevation gain is over 7,800 feet, and it is almost entirely uphill (I would hope so!). So what is my plan for getting myself ready?

Well, at this point, I'm simply trying to shed a little more weight. When I started working desk jobs back in 1998, I gained nearly 20 pounds in the first few months. Being sedentary and indulging in yummy but fatty lunches contributed equally to my bulging. After a few months I did finally start exercising seriously, and I also switched to healthier lunch fare at the office; but in all the time that I worked in the private sector, I never got my weight below about 150 and change. And in the late months of 2004, I found my weight going up again, topping out in January at nearly 165. Ugh.

Then came Gym of the Rockies to the rescue. 2 1/2 months of spinning, stairmaster, weights, and outdoor running (5 times a week of at least some type of exercise) have helped significantly, and today I weighed in at 153. I'm hoping to get trimmed down to the mid 140s or so, at which point I'll focus a little more on strength training. But in the meantime, all this is doing wonders for my endurance.

Certainly the best thing I'm doing so far is the trail running. Most of these outings consist of roundtrips between 4-7 miles, with elevation gains of 300-600 feet. Doing this kind of running at 5100+ ft. elevation here in the Front Range is fantastic, and I am finally beginning to feel like it's coming more easily now. (I was huffing quite a bit back in February.) I'll be doing a few more such runs around here, but shortly I plan on actually driving up to Estes Park at 7500 ft. and doing some extended training runs up there on nice long inclines.

Cindy and I are also doing weekend hikes to some of the local summits. We've done Horsetooth Rock twice now, including once this past Sunday. That tops out at 7255, with about a 1500 ft elevation gain. Our next couple hikes that I've scoped out are about 2000+ ft gains, rising to 8400 and 9000 ft respectively. But mid-summer, I think we'll do a few nice hikes in Rocky Mtn Natl Park, and time-permitting, maybe even a 14er or two.

And of course, to help with acclimatization, we'll be trekking in the Peruvian Andes in mid-May. Our trek starts at around 12,000 ft, and over the course of 4 days, we spend nearly all of it at or above that, topping out on day 3 as we cross Punta Union pass at 15,700 ft. Fortunately, before we get anywhere near that high we'll have spent over a week in Cuzco, which itself sits at over 11,000 ft. Cindy and I are definitely learning to live with less oxygen.

The big challenge for me though in the short term is shedding the next 5-8 pounds. The last few pounds are always the hardest. But I can see the fat on me in the mirror, and I know that I didn't always have it.

How much Rush is too much?

2005-04-01T00:04:00.000-07:00

My buddy Keith is trying to find out, by listening continuously to www.rushradio.org at work. Everybody got to elevate from the norm.

Oh, and in case you're concerned, we're talking about the geeky Canadian progressive power rock trio, not the loudmouth pill-popping radio talk show host. Then again, for our wives, that probably doesn't provide much consolation.

My interest in Rush goes back all the way to 1981. The Signals tour was my first rock concert. Even after all these years, we still think the band rocks.

I do worry about Keith though. He's the only good friend I know anymore who is anywhere near the fan of the band that I am. If he gets too saturated with them, I'll be alone.


Wave after wave
Will flow with the tide
And bury the world as it does
Tide after tide
Will flow and recede
Leaving life to go on
As it was...

The Full Plate

2005-03-31T23:01:00.000-07:00

As of today I've been in Fort Collins for 4 months. It's been a terrific time overall, getting adjusted to a very new way of living. Having a house is excellent - and having a ton of free time in which to enjoy it is all the better.

So here I am, having moved to Colorado, away from a good-paying high-tech job, with no current job, and no actual employment or even a plan on the horizon. And yet, I feel as busy as I ever have. So what the hell am I doing these days?

Well, first off, it's not completely accurate to say that I have no plan. I actually do have a plan. It's a subtle plan. Perhaps it's even a meta-plan. But it is something, a gradualistic evolutionary approach toward a new way of living.

One of the things I most anticipated when I left Yahoo was having the time to pursue one or several of my interests, so that I could determine whether any particular one of them could lead to a new vocation and a career. One of my personal peccadilloes of all time is indecision when it comes to career management. I had this problem as an undergraduate, and again in grad school, and again during my tenure in private industry. I just enjoy too many damn things for my own good, and my desire to keep all these disparate doors open and not letting any of them close outright has driven me nuts my whole life. Not to mention that it probably confused the hell out of people close to me.

It's gotten to the point where I'm thinking that as a 37-year old, it's probably naive to think I can change this aspect of my personality. Perhaps. But this hiatus is a grand once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me to find that out for certain once and for all. So why not delve into all these hobbies of mine? That is, throw the whole slew against the wall, and see what sticks. Surely gravity will draw me toward whatever it is that I truly care about the most. At worst I'll still be like a drowning man unable to choose between a dozen life preservers thrown toward him - but even then, I'll at least take comfort knowing that this is an unchangeable trait of mine. More likely, I think I will in fact discover what I can do that which will motivate me and make me the productive individual I know I can be. Pursuing all of them with equal vigor is certainly impossible, so something had better emerge from all this. It's time for me to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Sheesh.

Anyway, so what all is on my plate?

yardwork - finally raked all the leaves that have been getting moldy in my yard since last October, before we even moved here
basic house maintenance - keeping carpet clean, doing dishes, building shelves, etc.
volunteering - I've begun volunteer work at the Rocky Mountain Raptor Program, going 2-3 times a week
gym workouts - I go with Cindy a couple times a week to the Gym of the Rockies, lifting weights, doing stairmaster, spin classes, etc.
birding and bird photography - haven't done so much of this the past few weeks, but back in February and early March I was going out 2-3 times a week. I'll try to put up a couple of my photos here soon.
being a travel agent - spent a good chunk of February and March organizing and booking a 3-week-long trip to Peru in May for Cindy and me
running - I've begun training for the Pikes Peak Ascent in August. Doing some regular road running as well as resuming trail running
Spanish - related to the Peru trip, I'm trying to bone up on the espanol that I'm in danger of forgetting
weekend hiking and snowshoeing - obviously weather dependent, but we've been getting out at least a few times a month so far
ok, there's also some time spent doing real genuine goofing off, like watching TV, or websurfing

So that's a start. I should be adding 'writing' to this soon (including blogwriting), but I think I need to prove that I can keep that up for more than a week or two at a time before saying I actually do it.

I hope to add climbing, guitar playing, and weather study to this list soon too. All in good time...and all part of a good time.

Shoveling Fort Collins

2004-12-04T07:34:00.000-07:00

We got into town last Tuesday night. It was three days drive over some of the most empty and desolate terrain the continental US has to offer, but we arranged it so that we missed the big late November storm that passed through and avoided snowy days in exchange for intense cold but dazzlingly clear skies.

Fort Collins was covered in about 10 inches of snow when we arrived, and as soon as we pulled up toward the house, we realized we had forgotten something of paramount importance when preparing for our trip - a snow shovel. Now, we had known well beforehand that it was going to snow quite a bit in Colorado, even before we left Santa Cruz. And we also had plenty of time to shop for a shovel before we left, and we had space in the truck for it too. But I guess we just couldn't put 2 and 2 together and deduce the necessity until we saw the buried driveway (and curbside for that matter) for ourselves.

Comical highjinks ensued, with me scurrying around town even before I had unloaded the truck, in search of a shovel. It was rush hour, and I didn't know where any hardware stores were (and as a typical guy, I was not about to ask for directions). I did soon find a KMart that hadn't yet gone bankrupt, but they were sold out of shovels except for the cheap plastic kid variety. It had to do, and it luckily did.

I hadn't shoveled a driveway in 18 years. It's amazing how quickly some things come back to you after such an absence though.

Replies to a tentative Bush supporter

2004-10-09T14:10:00.000-06:00

Here is a comment I left in reply to a tentative Bush supporter while posting on another blog (his comments are italicized):

-------------------------------------------------------------------

isn't it possible that overall it was a mistake that actually produced very favorable consequences?

Well, first, it is far from certain (and actually unlikely) that the consequences of invading and occupying Iraq will be all that favorable in the long-term. And in fact, the means to the ends you describe here are extremely important in determining whether those favorable consequences were worth the enormous human, financial, and credibility cost that our government paid to try to make this happen.

we and the rest of the world are better off with an agressive approach that does not wait for certainty

Americans are probably better protected with such an approach, and our intentions for places like Afghanistan and Iraq are admirable, so I tend to think the aggressive Bush approach is probably better even with inevitable mistakes along the way.

I think we should elect that guy who will make America safer. Overall, it seems like that person is Bush

These three comments come across more as articles of faith than actual arguments or reasons to 'stay the course'. They are based more on very superficial perceptions than actual analysis and reasoning. This is what concerns me most about continuing on this path that Bush has led us on. It doesn't seem to be based on recognition of reality, but a notion of how they wish things were.

Although I think it's misguided to be a 'one-issue' guy, I imagine there are many more potential voters like you, Brian. Even accepting that, I just don't understand why people think that 'talking tough' and basing an entire foreign policy on a very limited notion (and expending that aforementioned capital pursuing it) of what it means to fight terrorism is utter lunacy, and ultimately counterproductive.

It is often said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again, but expecting different results. It seems to be that by that measure, this administration is totally insane.

Draw???

2004-10-09T00:06:00.000-06:00

About tonight's presidential debate in St. Louis. A draw? "Draw" my ASS. Are you kidding me?

Was there anything Bush said tonight that wasn't either petulant, fraudulent, arrogant, insouciant, or incompetent? Kerry totally wiped the floor with this guy. How any even half-intelligent person could consider this a draw totally mystifies me.

And to think that Kerry did so without being his most compelling. Kerry missed a few opportunities to put this blameshifting jackass of a president in his place. But he did score a lot of points on decorum and looking Presidential, so I guess I'll have to be happy with that.

Damn. 4 more weeks of this. Can you guess who I'm voting for November 2?

Media Reaction

2004-09-30T12:00:00.000-06:00

From DailyKos, here's a brilliant diary entry that captures the essence of where the mainstream media are these days....

Bush Suffers Breakdown On TV, Wins Debate by jazzmaniac
Thu Sep 30th, 2004 at 04:59:07 GMT

AP-In a stunning display of raw emotion never before seen on national television, President George W. Bush appeared to suffer a psychological breakdown during last night's square-off with Democratic nominee John Kerry.
Political commentators were quick to agree that Bush won the debate.

Diaries :: jazzmaniac's diary ::

Observers first suspected a change in Bush's emotional state when, following a blistering attack from Kerry, a large, apparently wet stain began to appear on the front of the President's pants.

Laying his head upon the podium, Bush began to speak in a soft, high-pitched voice. His microphone was able to pick up questions apparently aimed at his father, former President George H.W. Bush, rather than his opponent. "Daddy. Daddy. Daddy, why don't you love me? " Bush whimpered.

Cokie Roberts, in a post debate roundtable on ABC, stated that such actions "clearly presented a softer, sensitive side" of Bush, "that every man in America will identify with."

Moments later Bush appeared to regain his energy, bolting upright and loudly asking "What's a nigga got to do to get a drink around here?" He then began pounding on the podium while chanting "Jack and Coke, Jack and Coke, Jack and Coke" repeatedly.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews was quick to point out how the alcohol reference would resonate with "Joe Six-pack," while CNN's Wolf Blitzer heralded Bush's use of "the `N' word," as "an appeal to the hippity-hop generation."

As Bush crumpled to the floor, his rival, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, implored the audience to "give the President some air." Kerry also called out to the audience, asking "Is there a doctor in the house?" a clear violation of the debate rules.

FoxNews anchor Brit Hume lambasted Kerry for his "patronizing attitude," while ABC's Peter Jennings stated that he felt that "No American watching is going to want to vote for a candidate who doesn't know if a doctor actually is in the house, I'm sure aboot that."

On CBS, Dan Rather told his network's viewers that the debate was being carried via a pool arrangement of cameras, and that he could not verify that Bush actually was curled up in a fetal position.

Bush's debate performance was seen by most as dealing a harsh blow to Kerry's presidential aspirations.

"If a soiled heap of laundry on the floor isn't what we need in our war against those who would do us harm, I don't know who is," stated debate moderator Jim Lehrer.

Seriously, how badly would Bush have to be for the media to consider it a poor performance?

Lookie, a new hobby

2004-09-29T02:57:00.000-06:00

Cooper's Hawk perched on neighbor's tree, September 12, 2004. Santa Cruz, CA.

About a month ago, I ordered an adapter for my spotting scope for affixing my digital camera to it. I also bought a remote shutter release for my digital camera, so that I could snap photos without having to press a button on the camera itself. Lo and behold, I now have the ability to take fairly nice digital photos of birds (as well as do some time-lapse photography, but that's a topic for another post). Here's one of the early experiments that came out pretty well.

Thanks especially to blogger.com and their partnership with hello.com, which allows me this new capability for posting photos to my blog. This is certainly a very welcome development, and I eagerly await showcasing more of my photography in the next few months. I'll soon have a lot more free time, after all.

What a difference a few months make

2004-07-13T22:23:00.000-06:00

So here it is in July, and we have a honest-to-goodness presidential candidate in John Kerry, and a VP selection in John Edwards to boot! I'm actually quite happy about the Edwards choice - he makes a very good complement to the ticket, and provides an outstanding and very appealing contrast to the corporate fat-cat image proffered by that other VP, whose name we shall not utter here.

It's something. A year ago, it was hard to imagine that the incumbent would be anywhere near defeatible. But now, it's hard to imagine how the good guys can lose this one, barring any truly disastrous events or foulups. We have brains and populist appeal all in one package, and the hope that there won't be any of those embarrassing Clintonian bimbo eruptions to get them off-message.

President Kerry. Yeah, I could deal with that.

Impressions of Zack Greinke, and the Royals

2004-05-23T22:48:00.000-06:00

I'm including here, in no particular order of relevance or chronology, some of my thoughts and impressions about seeing Greinke and the Royals yesterday at the Coliseum. As a west coast Royals fan, I don't get to see them much firsthand (although after yesterday, maybe that's a good thing.) Of course I'm no expert scout or anything, just an interested fan. Also bear in mind that I sat 6 rows into the upper deck, albeit right behind home plate. A nice view, although not so easy to judge exactly how high or low some pitches were.

• I like Zack Greinke. A lot. If he continues to develop from where he is now, I really do believe he could be a premiere pitcher in this league. Granted, he came into this game with an advantage common to many new pitchers, which is his unfamiliarity to opposing teams. And it's probably fair to say he benefited a decent amount from that. Still, there were certain indications to me of his remarkable potential, and why so many hopes are being placed on him.

For example, he can really change speeds. His fastball most of the time cruises in around 84-89, but he did kick back and throw a few in at 92-93. His off-speed stuff cruises in in the mid-70s, and I saw more than a few mis-timed swings by the A's as a result. Also, Greinke was unafraid of jamming hitters. He did seem to lack the overall control that I'd often heard about, since several times some of his outside pitches went way outside. But I atttribute some of that to just plain nerves - the Coliseum is a tough place for a new guy on an opposing team to make a debut appearance.

I was also impressed by how he handled his only true jam situation - based loaded, 2 outs in the 5th, facing Eric Chavez. He threw two WAY-offspeed pitches which I would have guessed were knuckleballs based on the fact the came in at 63 mph. I mean really, mix that in with the occasional 90 mph fastball, and you've got yourself a pretty tough pitcher to time. Chavez was totally fooled by it. Now, it's not completely devastating yet - over time, Greinke will have to learn how to mask his delivery of that pitch, since his arm motion is noticeably different for it, and hitters will eventually pick up on that. But his careful use of it, the fact that he saved it for just that situation, showed me he's got a great mind for the game, and surprising maturity for a 20-year old.

Overall, he wasn't dominating, but he seemed to me very confident in himself, and by and large in control of the situation. He certainly didn't look like a guy who was only throwing A ball just last summer, that's for sure - I can now see how the whisperings of "the next Maddux", although perhaps premature, are not totally unwarranted. He certainly deserved to win that game. But I'll talk more about that in a bit. Grrrr.....

• Jeremy Affeldt in the pen. I was kinda disappointed to hear about his going down there, given how bereft our rotation is of reasonably competent arms, but seeing how he is in relief, I can see why. The mere fact he can add a few extra mph to his fastball, I think, makes him that much tougher of a reliever than he could be as a starter. Even though he made that one mistake to Chavez in the 9th, he still looked like a terrific late-innings reliever. I just hope no one gets too down on him for that home run pitch, because as painful as that was to watch, he should never have been in that situation to begin with (yeah, I'm looking at you, Angel). Which brings me to my next topic, defense, or lack thereof...

• Good god. You know, it says something not too flattering when the best defensive play by any Royals player Saturday was by Matt Stairs on that sliding catch he made in the 10th (I believe). It wasn't a spectacular catch, but it was surprisingly good. Back to Berroa though - what is it with him and making crucial errors against the A's in late innings? That grounder took a nice big juicy comfortable hop for him - he didn't even have to range for it, it was right at him. There was no excuse for him not making that play, it just doesn't get any easier than that. Affeldt should have been out of there 3 up 3 down, given the way he was throwing, but crap like that makes his job incrementally tougher, and when playing this A's team and their penchant for dramatic comebacks, leads to bad things. Sheeesh guys, at least make them earn their way on base, OK?

Oh, and that dropped popup in the 2nd or 3rd that luckily didn't lead to any runs - it was ruled a single, but to all our eyes that should have been an error. Totally embarrassing - Desi and Mendy were each just standing right there, and it seemed like there was just no communication as to who should catch it. That kind of ball is Mendy's all the way, but for whatever reason, neither of them seemed to know that.

• It's amazing how many times Santiago, who I call The Double-Play Hitting Machine, gets opportunities to do just that. 3 or 4 times, he came up with 1 out and a runner on first. I actually clapped when he struck out or popped up, just for avoiding the GIDP. Of course, he did meet his 1-DP minimum quota eventually.

• Later in the game I saw this rather portly man walk onto the field toward home plate, from the Royals dugout to talk to Mike Sweeney after a pitch. Who is this guy? Oh wait - is that Nick Swartz? My god, no wonder the Royals are beset with injuries.

• Mendy Lopez. It's like having the pitcher bat when he's in the lineup. I mean, congrats on hitting that opening day game-tying homer in the 9th, that was awesome. But the guy just can't get anything else going, and his body language shows it. I know, he's just in there as a fill-in, but relying on him for D and O makes it that much harder for the Royals to win games. At one point Zito gave an intentional walk to Desi Frickin' Relaford in order to pitch to him - now what does that tell you?

• Brandon Berger. I don't follow the Royals minor leagues all that closely, but it seems like I'm always hearing about how this guy is raking in AAA, gets called up, and instantly becomes a .220 hitter for the Royals. (And of course gets sent back down at the earliest opportunity.) He did have a great timely hit against Zito that would have won the game for us, but his other AB's actually looked pretty bad. And he also horribly misplayed an off-the-wall double, which fortunately didn't lead to anything worse at the time. Again though, he looked pretty bad on that play, as if he couldn't figure out which way to break for it or how to play the carom.

• Overall, this loss was heartbreaking for me. It just seems like the Royals are cursed when playing the A's. 2 outs in the ninth, and a 2 run lead, and they still can't close the deal. The Royals are now something like 10-31 against them in the past 4 years, and more than a few of those losses came when the Royals had a late-inning lead and lost it due to heroics or homers by A's players. My god, why hast thou forsaken us?

My dislike of the A's has now turned into outright hatred. Maybe it'll be 5, 10, or even 20 years from now, but the day will come when the Royals are a better team than the A's. And when that day comes, I will make a return pilgrimage to Oakland or wherever and will delight to see the Royals mop the floor with them. But sadly, I have to report that the Royals are a long way off from that right now.

But then again, you probably knew that already.

I must be in a bad mood...

2004-04-23T00:11:00.000-06:00

I've had it. I just can't take it anymore. I've read and read and read about this Bush administration, and I know that I hate them and all that they're doing with all my heart, and yet half the frickin' country still thinks they're doing a bang-up job, and a third of the other half is still undecided. That's just ridiculous, and if the events of the past 3 months aren't enough actual physical evidence for their evil and/or incompetence, I don't know what is. I keep hoping one or another of these scandals will finally shatter the public's illusion about the current state of affairs, and yet this administration's veneer of adequacy, although weakened considerably, is still standing.

That just shouldn't be, in a just world.

And when I read about polls that suggest that a majority of American's still think Iraq had anything to do with 9/11, and that this government does absolutely nothing to disabuse them of that notion simply because it serves their political ends, then I begin to think that it's all a grand waste of my time.

Maybe I'm just in a really bad mood about this, and I'll come back to my senses later. I hope so - I've tried so hard not to despair, but sometimes it's just really really difficult to keep thinking that the forces of right and truth will win out here.

Now THAT's Irony

2004-04-08T12:25:00.000-06:00

From Yahoo News today:

BANGALORE, India - Infosys Technologies Ltd., which has become India's second-largest software maker thanks largely to outsourced work from the West, is investing $20 million to create nearly 500 consulting jobs in the United States.

The company has set up a subsidiary in Fremont, Calif., to provide business consulting to American corporations. The new company, Infosys Consulting, has begun "aggressive hiring in America," Infosys chief executive officer Nandan Nilekani told reporters Thursday.

"As we are looking to expand our global footprint, we are creating local employment in the countries we operate," he said.

In the first year, the new firm will hire 75 experienced consultants, with plans for a total of 500 hires within the next three years

Sounds great, doesn't it? But continue reading....

The company's American employees would advise U.S. corporations on improving their efficiency by embracing outsourcing and moving work to India.

Only one sentence in this story was devoted to describing what this company actually does...which is assist in the continued exporting of US jobs overseas. Everything else makes it seem like this is a net boon to the American economy, namely, the American worker.

Is it any wonder I'm cynical about the mainstream media?

Do-over

2004-03-22T22:28:00.000-07:00

OK, remember a month or two ago I said that I was going to resume some real "full-time" blogging, or at least something to that effect? I really mean it this time.

Since I last wrote, I got my laptop back from the assholes at Hewlett-Packard. Turns out that all the effort I went to, to get them to preserve the old hard drive, was for naught - in the process of "fixing" the laptop, they simply tossed the old drive and put a new one on. Of course, this was in sharp contradistinction to what I had been explicitly told (and in fact promised) on several occasions by what I now recognize as inept lazy idiot bastard customer care reps, but HP is hiding behind the legalese in their warranty as a way of defending their utter incompetence at actually providing useful customer service.

The bottom line is that everything I had on my laptop which was not backed up explicitly was lost. What was irretrievably lost consists mostly of several hundred pages of scanned notes and personal writings, and last winter's holiday photos (as well as whatever edits and modifications I made to my existing photo galleries). Losing the writings really hurts, but at this point I can't get too upset about it - they are gone, really really gone. And I've already vented my spleen over the phone and in a verbose but pointed email addressed to the executives at HP. There's just not much more I can say at this point.

So, I've been focusing my energy the past month on squaring away that whole sordid episode, as well as trying to get my "new" laptop back up to speed. I purchased a 160 Gb external hard drive, and am now performing backups (yes, my lesson is now well-learned). I've also been reloading a lot of software back onto my machine, and hopefully starting now I can feel like I'm sorta back to where I was, say, around Feb 10. There really is plenty more to talk about, so let us move on to more engaging fare.

Anti-trust

2004-02-21T10:49:00.000-07:00

Have I mentioned how much Microsoft sucks? I mean, really really really sucks?

My first blog entry in nearly 3 weeks....so what gives? Oh, I'll tell you. About 10 days ago my 2-month old laptop suffered a serious OS malfunction, brought on by a supposed bug-fix that I downloaded directly from Microsoft. This bug fix was intended to address a serious OS-related security hole, but in the end I discovered to my horror that once installed it ceased to allow me to even log on to my machine. I suppose in some perverse sense that does increase the security of the OS...when no one can actually connect to it. But I digress.

I have since jumped through several hoops with technical support, with the current status being that my laptop is sitting in some repair facility god-knows-where. The annoying thing about all this (and I feel my blood boiling again just writing about this) is that it's almost been two weeks now since I dropped the machine off for warranty repair, and I have no evidence yet that anyone has even taken a look at my machine. Nor do I have any evidence that they will follow my explicit instructions to not delete or reformat my existing hard drive. I say that because the laptop is now in the second or perhaps third location it has been to since I dropped it off on the 11th.

So yeah, I'm a lot pissed at Microsoft. And frankly, HP isn't earning too many points with me either. In fact, I have now resolved that in the next year, I will work hard to move all my computer use off any machine that depends on Microsoft software, or HP hardware. I am just so sick of all this MS stupidity and incompetence.

OK, enough bitching. I've worked myself into a lather again, which was not my intent. Grrrrrrr.........

Quiz answer

2004-02-03T18:59:00.000-07:00

The answer to my earlier pop quiz is E), none of the above. The quote is from our first Republican president Abraham Lincoln. You can read the full context of the quote here.

President Psychopath?

2004-02-03T18:47:00.000-07:00

In the tradition of columnist Charles Krauthammer, who frequently publicizes his own psychiatry practice and likes to psychoanalyze Democrats, here's a fascinating (and well, disturbing) analysis of our President from last March.

I know that I've posted similar links and analyses in the past, which help to explain what is so seriously wrong with the President. This is just another of those....but damn, this one is just so relevant it's hard to ignore!

You can learn more about similar psychoses here at Serial Bully Online. Now really, read through the list there and try to tell me that the vast majority of the characteristics of such people don't apply to Bush. You can't do it.

Pop quiz

2004-02-02T12:51:00.000-07:00

From the inestimable Billmon:

"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion ... and you allow him to make war at pleasure ... If today he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the Canadians from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the Canadians invading us'; but he will say to you, 'Be silent: I see it, if you don’t.' "

Which of the following made this statement?

A.) Howard Dean
B.) Noam Chomsky
C.) Gore Vidal
D.) Michael Moore
E.) None of the above

Answer coming soon....

Invade Iraq? What was I thinking?

2004-02-02T12:14:00.000-07:00

Unbelievable.

"What we don't know yet is what we thought, and what the Iraq Survey Group has found, and we want to look at that," Bush said as he met his Cabinet.

Hey dummy, you're the president - it's your JOB to know what you thought when you decided to invade another country. Or were you sleeping during those meetings?

It's in the cards

2004-01-31T01:12:00.000-07:00

Over the Christmas holiday my in-laws introduced me to a very, very wicked vice, from which I have an extremely difficult time extricating myself once I get started. They showed me their Hoyle Casino PC game, which I found utterly enthralling, much to my wife's chagrin. I got so into this game that I asked to get a copy of it to put on my then-brand-new laptop.

One nifty aspect of the game is that you create your own character, meaning that you use this utility called FaceMaker to craft the physical appearance of that character (face and clothing mostly) as it will appear at the various card or craps tables, etc. Then, when it comes time to play head-to-head against other players, even computer players, it gives the game a much more "human" feel to it than it otherwise might. So much of gambling and the whole casino scene rides on being able to look at the faces of your opponents in order to sense their habits and weaknesses, and it's a nice touch to have other human visages to look at while you play. Granted, these faces (and voices) don't have nearly the variation or subtlety to be too convincing, but it's definitely a step up from my older, cheaper casino game. (I'll leave it for another time to discuss my interest in games of chance.) In addition, the character you create starts with a bank, and you can try to increase your winnings over time as you return to this casino again and again....and again, in my case.

Hoyle's Casino features a good number of games including roulette, slots, and even horse racing; but what I find myself playing more than anything is the Texas Hold 'Em game. I love this game. I also hate it, mostly because it is terribly addictive. In fact I finished a session just now where I went from steely-eyed pro to whimpering loser to gloating winner all in the course of about 90 minutes. The only reason I quit is because I'm almost emotionally exhausted from the roller coaster feeling of having lost half my money, and then finally winning it all back and then some. (Judging from my near-hysteria over winning and losing all this fake money, I've concluded that I'm not ready for the real thing - something in which Cindy can take a measure of reassurance.)

It's the O C, stupid

2004-01-29T18:00:00.000-07:00

I came across a very abstract and polysyllabic discussion about why there aren't more entrepreneurs in our ostensibly capitalistic society at 2Blowhards. But it struck me while reading this that there is one very simple explanation that goes a long way toward understanding this phenomenon, and only requires a basic level of familiarity with economics: opportunity cost . I've often noticed that economists and/or folks who like to talk about economics in the abstract often seem to have trouble comprehending that a good many people value other things in life besides money, or its acquisition.

Why is this so easy for me to understand, but so hard for Friedrich?

It's the same thing, except different

2004-01-29T14:06:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm going to demonstrate some ignorance here, but I don't get what the difference is between an LCD monitor (like the one I recently bought) for use with a desktop PC, and an LCD TV that seems to show a much sharper picture and better resolution. Maybe I just haven't looked super-closely at the LCD TV's, but I can say that when I'm standing there in the showroom of Circuit City, I'm pretty damn impressed with the image quality on, say, the Sony 23" LCD. But when I'm sitting at home with my machine plugged into my 17" LCD monitor, the image is, well, underwhelming.

I mean, I do like the fact that there's no flicker, which is good for my eyes to be sure. But the screen resolution is noticeably less than my old 17" CRT, and when I'm viewing my digital photos on it, I definitely can see a "stair-step" effect in the photos when I've taken pictures that have very straight lines in them.

And what about my laptop? My laptop screen looks really nice. Why is that? That's LCD too, right? Does it have to do with "native" resolution? I don't know. All I want is to see a really pretty picture, and not get a headache looking at it.

WMDs of the gaps

2004-01-29T08:51:00.000-07:00

In a similar manner to how some assert proof for the existence of God by claiming that what we don't know in science by definition suggests His existence, we're now seeing similar illogic propounded for claiming that WMDs in Iraq could well have existed in spite of the fact that nobody actually found any. I recently came across this blog entry at Wonkette which talks about David Kay's recent testimony:

David Kay testified that there may always be "unresolvable ambiguity" about WMDs in Iraq "because of the severe looting that occurred in Iraq immediately after the U.S.-led invasion and the U.S. military's failure to control it." He suspects that "Iraqis probably took advantage of that period of chaos to get rid of any evidence of weapons programs."

Where to begin? To me there are two points to be made. First, there's the ironical notion that in spite of the fact that the full weight of the US military was bearing down on their whole command and control structure, that same Iraqi political and military apparatus was still organized enough to destroy all the evidence not only of all the WMD stockpiles themselves, but the voluminous paper trail that would certainly have accompanied it. Such a hypothesis requires critics to prove a negative, which of course is impossible - where is Occam's Razor when you really need it? Granted, Kay doesn't actually appear to subscribe to this point of view, but you can bet that the Bush dead-enders who support the administration unapologetically and in spite of the contrary evidence will pick up on this idea and promote it as a plausible explanation. I guess I just fear that the mainstream media, after three years of being browbeaten into thoughtless submission, is now gullible enough to buy it.

The second point has to do with the urgency (or the lack thereof) that the US military seemed to take in securing the country from the kind of looting that Kay describes. Don't you think that if this administration and the Pentagon leaders actually believed there was a genuine threat from large WMD stockpiles, and that the Baathists were desperately trying to hide as much evidence of it as they could, that there would have been a bigger and more coherent effort to secure those suspected facilities as soon as possible after the invasion? It was apparent to me even early on that this administration wasn't really acting like they believed there was any urgency to that quest.....in which case the administration was either lying or grossly incompetent in its Iraq invasion planning.

OK, so that's not an altogether new thesis....but the Kay quote does make that increasingly evident, at least to me. Now if only the media did their jobs....

UPDATE: Actually, a third point comes to mind, which is something of a corrollary to my second point. Kay makes reference to widespread looting and the "U.S. military's failure to control it". That's something you didn't hear much about from the Bush administration or its propaganda arm, Fox News, while it was happening. Oh no, that wasn't widespread looting, it was just the sporadic actions of a few "dead-enders" and a few unruly types, but nothing that was unexpected or requiring immediate attention. To say otherwise would have been an admission on the part of the administration that they hadn't adequately made post-war plans for Iraq, or that their plans were insufficient for the task at hand. And we all know how this administration doesn't take blame or admit fault for anything - gotta save face, you know.

Thus, Kay's statement effectively puts Bush apologists in a logical vice: if the looting was so bad that it led to the destruction of all the meaningful WMD evidence, then the administration is guilty of downplaying the severity of the looting as it was happening. That's the unpleasant alternative to proposing the aforementioned idea of those wily Baathists who couldn't organize an effective resistance to the US invasion, but still could organize the tiimely and methodical destruction of all the damning evidence of their noncompliance with UN resolutions.

Again, this really just amplifies my second point, but it especially highlights how this administration seems to consider truth and honesty secondary to whatever serves their immediate political interests.

Scanning redux

2004-01-26T23:32:00.000-07:00

I spent a good part of the previous weekend scanning more old class notes (see my previous note for context). I spent a little time trying to make the process more efficient - not an easy task with a $100 PSC (printer/scanner/copier). The device works pretty well actually, but it is unrealistic to expect it to be all that fast or too easy to operate out of the box. (The old adage 'Good Fast Cheap - pick any two' comes to mind...) Still, after many iterations as well as some painful mistakes, I think I've figured out a way to reliably save different types of notes and reports. Among other things, I've learned how to save handwritten notes in color PDF files that don't take up too much disk space. Such notes comprise a majority of all that I am trying to save.

While doing all this it is impossible to avoid the question that begs to be asked: simply put, "Why bother?" I've got thousands of pages of notes, many of which date back 10-15 years, and yet I'm scanning them as though my life depended on maintaining an accurate record of all that time spent in classrooms. Then of course, it dawned on me that perhaps that was exactly why I was doing this.

Does my life really depend on these notes? Well....that's probably an overstatement. But it is clear that I place a very high premium on knowledge and memory, and that my notes signify both these things to me. I've pondered recently what constitutes personal identity, and have come to understand the enormous role that memory plays in this. A movie I saw last year which concretized that notion for me was "Memento", with Guy Pearce in the starring role as a man on a mission to find his wife's killer, in spite of his recent brain injury that prevents him from remembering anything that happened more than 20 minutes ago. It's a remarkable film, and there are a couple particular moments in it where Pearce's character explores the meaning of his own memory loss and how it has come to define his whole existence.

LEONARD: I know I can't have her back, but I want to be able to let her go. I don't want to wake up every morning thinking she's still here then realizing that she's not. I want time to pass, but it won't. How can I heal if I can't feel time?

So what am I trying to preserve by scanning these notes, which makes it more likely they will last in perpetuity? Perhaps I see all this as a compendium, not just of the subject matter (which in itself means a lot to me) but also of the occurrences that have led me to where I am today. When I re-read what I've written, I can rediscover not just who I turned into when I learned things from these classes, but I get a glimpse of what I was like before I learned any of it. Put another way, my insistence on keeping all this stems largely from a deep-seated fear that by simply chucking these notes, I disconnect myself from an intensely formative time in my life, from which I extract so much personal meaning. When you feel that strongly about something, justified or no, it's hard to simply let it go.

Put yet another way, I'm trying really hard to keep feeling "time".

Scanning for scanning's sake?

2004-01-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

Cindy and I bought a new printer/scanner/copier last weekend. We've been doing a huge computer room-makeover since late November, and this device is the latest (and hopefully last, for a while) acquisition. I was very excited initially about the prospect of being able to make scans of all my photos and my class notes, which I've been lugging around from move to move over the past decade or more. Then I'd be able to get rid of the bulky binders and albums that contain them. You may recall my earlier comment about the desirability of having an easy bed to move, which we recently decided to forego. Well, perhaps in compensation, I'm now looking to make my ever-increasing information inventory a bit more mobile.

So I've actually started scanning. And it's pretty cool - I've so far made PDF files out of my class notes for two classes, as well as files for a couple short reports I wrote. But it has taken me a cumulative 5 hours or so to do this, and now I find myself staring down what must be another couple thousand pages or more of class notes and homework assignments. (Not to mention that I've not even started scanning the photos, which I recently tallied at more than 3,400.) Bear in mind that I've not really said anything about why I want to keep these class notes in the first place. But my mindset seems to be that because I've kept them this long, and that now we have a scanner, well then, by golly, I should scan them all. When the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem you see begins to look like a nail.

I have a feeling I'll be revising my strategy very soon. Scanning is cool, but it'd be great if during 2004 I got to spend a little time outside, or with the wife, or heck, maybe even doing a little work, instead of hunched over that sleek but noisy little box.

Justice shrugged

2004-01-23T00:40:00.000-07:00

I saw a news tidbit tonight about that Representative Janklow in South Dakota, who was convicted on second degree manslaughter. He's been sentenced to 100 days in jail. No, correction - 30 days in jail, with 70 days followup reporting to the county lockup. And after 3 years, his record is clean.

So let me get this straight. I can show a pattern of irresponsible driving behavior, including speeding and driving under the influence, and do that for decades...and then even if I eventually kill someone through my negligence, I can still get off with a month in jail, a couple years probation, and then eventually a clean record?

Oh wait, what am I thinking? That kind of sentence only gets handed down to high-profile Republican politicians; you know, the real "tough-on-crime" variety prosecutor-types who would seek nothing less than the maximum 10 years in prison for some no-name who committed the exact same crime under the exact same circumstances.

And don't even try telling me this guy didn't deserve anything harsher - not with this record - and that's just from 1990 on. You can imagine the lecture that someone lower-profile would get from a judge if they'd run a stop sign and killed someone. I just hope the civil suit filed by the victim's family can bring some greater sense of justice to this whole sad affair.

Cheney, in his words, and in mine

2004-01-19T11:17:00.000-07:00

From Yahoo today:

Cheney said he's effective working behind the scenes and doesn't believe voters will choose the next president based on running mates. "Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?" he said. "It's a nice way to operate, actually."

This quote just reeks of that smarmy attitude that says, "Guilty as charged! Ha ha." What a prick.

Double entendre headline

2004-01-16T12:42:00.000-07:00

From Yahoo:

[Gen.] Sanchez orders Iraq prisoner abuse probe

I wonder exactly where one orders such things? Then again, I don't think I really want to know.

Good point

2004-01-15T22:39:00.000-07:00

Cindy got a free issue of National Geographic in the mail a couple days ago. On the cover is a headline "Death On The Nile", with a depiction of some Egyptian wall art behind it. Then, in a moment of amusing pique, she blurted out "What is it with all the mummies and National Geographic?"

At that moment I couldn't think of a more astute observation.

So that's why mannequins have always creeped me out

2004-01-13T23:56:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article by Roger Ebert about the likelihood of Andy Serkis getting an Academy Award nomination for his performance as Gollum in Lord of the Rings, when the topic of "the uncanny valley" came up. I'd never heard of this before, but it's a fascinating explanation and study of how we as humans react to entities which have some amount of "human" characteristics. Definitely worth a read.