Travel Blog

Badge Hacking from DEFCON 17

2010-04-07T10:45:00.001-07:00

Our badge hacking report from DEFCON 17, held in Las Vegas, NV.

Pie crust cookies "I Love Christmas Trees"

2009-12-10T21:00:00.001-08:00

Pie crust cookies "I Love Christmas Trees", originally uploaded by Abraxas3d.

Pie crust mix prepared then rolled thin, then cut into hearts and tree shapes. Excess rolled into small balls. All of it cooked at 450 F for 12 minutes. Store-bought icing applied to hearts, then trees (sprinkled with allspice) placed on top of icing. Small balls placed on icing as well. Yum!

Smithville

2009-11-26T19:15:00.001-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

A pleasant restful day with relatives and great food. We worked on cub scout belt loops, watched the Space Shuttle/ISS pass, and I received some feedback on the Neon-test tutorial. I corrected the typos and republished the document.

Smithville – Amory

2009-11-25T07:59:00.000-08:00

Day 4

The first order of business was to work out at the gym. The gym is across the parking lot from the hospital in Amory, which is about 7 miles away. I listened to POTUS, a satellite radio channel, in the rental car on the way. POTUS was launched to cover the 2008 presidential election, but remained on in lesser form as a political news channel. The degradation in quality, from my point of view, is the current domination of daytime programming by a dreadful talk-format program called Stand Up with Pete Dominic. It’s hours and hours of a tepidly presented and superficially informed blowhard-style call-in, with the host always “running out of time” on his way to talking about nothing in particular.

This racing to nowhere style talk radio (and TV) is the bane of my existence. I can’t stand it. I don’t like it. Have I mentioned that I find it irritating?

“Blah blah blah and in the 9 seconds remaining, can you recommend a solution for mid-east peace?”

“Well, host person, it’s a very complicated issue with great historical and cultural –“

“I’m sorry! We’ve run out of time! Up next, we’ll ask our next guest about Afghanistan!”

“Welcome back to our show!

“Blah blah blah, and in the 9 seconds remaining, should we sent more troops to Afghanistan?”

“Well, host person, it’s a very complicated issue with enormous political and economic consequ-“

“I’m sorry! We’ve run out of time!”

Rinse, repeat, all day long.

If it’s not patchwork crazy quilt pseudo conversations, it’s yell kings baiting guests to snap and bite at each other like clever children. This is why I watch about 3.7 hours of this stuff per year. Just to check and see if it’s still as bad as I remembered.

I know I sound like a total grouch. I’m not, really. I just prefer a real conversation, where you put your opponent and your comrade in the one and the same most positive light; where you direct your remarks to the most intelligent person in the audience, and not the most base or partisan.

Anyway, the gym was great. I covered three miles and had some good coffee there in the small café overlooking the pool. I’m updating the Livescribe smartpen (I highly recommend this tool) and have some work to do today in terms of packing up things in the storage room in downtown Smithville and in continuing the interview process for the writing project I’m here to start.

Smithville - Aberdeen - Smithville

2009-11-24T19:10:00.000-08:00

Day 3

I got up after it turned light outside. The bed is really comfortable here, so it took a while. It was still pretty early. My son was still soundly asleep and wasn’t going to get up. I didn’t blame him – he played pretty hard yesterday, and probably still needed some beauty sleep. Upstairs seemed deserted. My relatives are true morning people. While I may be at my best in the morning, they have already had a good head start on being productive and such by the time I get around to thinking about getting dressed.

Eventually, they noticed I was up and Atom, and I got some coffee made for me (yum!), talked about global warming deniers and the latest news about Palin, had a small very tasty cheesy-egg breakfast, went to the gym, jogged 3 miles with a few huff-and-puff walking breaks on a treadmill while listening to the beginning of Ayn Rand’s “The Art of Nonfiction”, came back home, took a shower, had lunch, got a tip about a document I need to read, checked in on the NEON/FFTW Google wave, headed out to visit more relatives, went to storage site where I’m supposed to pack up a bunch of stuff for the movers to take back to San Diego, packed up a bunch of old hardback science fiction from decades ago that my grandfather had collected as a science fiction book club member, had cheese and merlot for dinner, then talked about all sorts of things before settling into the first big book interview.

The task ahead is to gather, gather, gather information and then try and define, define, define the story for this project. There isn’t any way to really summarize the complexity of the engineering project that I’m trying to talk about. The most important thing, to me, is to try and make it possible for people to feel what it was like to work on a particular, large, complicated engineering project during the cold war, and to provide some understanding of how the context and justification for the project shifted over time.

Olive Branch - Memphis - Smithville

2009-11-23T20:57:00.000-08:00

Day 2 of travel

We got up and strolled over to help-yourself-to-hot breakfast. A seated and nearly-done-with-breakfast party of four was the only other non-staff people I’d seen in the hotel since we checked in. The television in the lounge was blaring what appeared to be a soap opera. It made the room feel like a bad meeting at work.

When the female lead on the show threatened another with a gun, I asked the party of four if they were watching it. None of the middle-aged and British-accented people admitted to being interested in the program. They had been trying to talk over the Shatneresque dialogue for a good minute or two, which is the classic sign of not really being into a show.

I walked over to the set, which was a nice new flatscreen mounted high on the wall, and failed to find a power switch. Waving my hand along the side, searching for any buttons, caused a staff person to magically appear.

“Do you want to change the channel?”

“Not exactly,” I said politely. “I want to turn it off.”

“Well!” she said, her eyebrows raised as high as they could go. “I don’t know if we should do that. I mean, these people might be watching it!” She seemed surprised at the very idea of shutting off the television.

“They said they were not. I would not do that without asking,” I said quietly. The foursome interrupted me to enthusiastically agree about shutting off the set. She retrieved a remote control from an Undisclosed Safe Location back in the kitchen and shut the TV off.

We resumed breakfast and it was a lot more pleasant. The atmosphere seemed to clear, volume-induced stress melted away, and violent acts weren’t looming in my peripheral vision. I talked with my son about all sorts of funny things, since I can finish my breakfast way faster than he can play with his. The other folks finished their post-breakfast conversation and cleared their table, ambling off down the hall. I made a cup of coffee, and was expounding on some fact or another to him when another staff person whizzed through the room, checked the coffee, the egg tray, the oil-soaked bacon, and the untouched grits and gravy, and asked if I wanted the television on.

“No thanks,” I answered, turning from my son to the staff person.

“But what about the news? Or cartoons for your boy?”

And interrupt a great conversation? Are you kidding? I said, “No thanks, we’re enjoying the quiet.”

You should have seen the look I got.

After breakfast we packed up and headed out for the Pink Palace Museum. I’d been lured there by talk of a fashion/sewing exhibition. The museum, overall, was great. The sewing exhibition was somewhat of a disappointment.

http://www.memphismuseums.org/mu-event_program-13252/

The clothing hinted at on the website was indeed there… with a big “Coming Soon” sign in front of all the clothing (on manikins), which were crowded onto a small dais in the center of a room dedicated to other stuff. There was limited placard verbiage. There was no interpretive elements, diagrams, explanations, definitions, or even the fabric content of the clothing. There literally was more content on the website teaser than there was actually in the exhibit.

Another minor annoyance was that one of the exhibits required an additional ticket. I must have missed the part at the ticket counter. They have an IMAX theater, and I didn’t get that ticket either (on purpose). However, when you sell an “exhibits” ticket, then I guess I sort of expect to be able to see all the exhibits.

Regardless, it was worth seeing – if only for the Indycar themed Christmas tree in the decorated Christmas tree exhibit hall. It was garlanded with slot car tracks! Photo set to follow.

There was a space science exhibit, minerals, natural history, and New Madrid Earthquake area. There were lots of fossils, plenty of really good regional history exhibits, and an animated hand-carved enormous circus model. It was larger than HO scale, but smaller than G, and was pretty incredible. One guy spent pretty much his whole hobby life working on it. His particular style reminded me of a ceramic monkey statue that Ken won for last place at a charity golf tournament at work. It had that pre-Mattel toy vibe, with a palette of colors from the 1930s, and wonderful hand-lettered signage. The track was unique - the horse-drawn carriages and traincars are actually drawn by the teams of hand-carved horses. Along one side of the room (the entire center was the circus animated model) was a case detailing the process the artist used. Quite the exhibit all on its own! And, there was more.

The Pink Palace is a mansion that was being built by the guy that came up with the idea of self-service grocery stores. Before, it was like oldschool libraries, where you were not allowed back in the stacks. You had to bring your list to a clerk. Grocery stores were like that too. The guy that founded Piggly Wiggly (the most awesomely named store ever) was named Clarence Saunders, I believe, and a full-sized model of the first self-service grocery store in was just down the hall from the giant animated circus.

After my son couldn’t stand it anymore – literally, his feet were aching – we got back in the car and headed for the Wal Mart supercenter. We got a gigantic lego set and clothes. This would be the first time that I’ve ever attempted to live off the land, as Ken puts it, as existential frontiersmen. Frontierspeople. Frontierspersons? Whatever.

Anyway, this was a travel experiment. Money saved by not checking baggage: $40. Money spent at Wal Mart (minus the legos) buying the same stuff I would have packed if I had checked the baggage: $200.

Ok, existential-frontier-travel-light-live-off-the-land-plan version 1.0… #fail.

And, this was shopping selectively – mainly from the sale and clearance racks. I got pants for $3. Running shoes for $20. Shirt for $8. Wal Mart is in-your-face cheap. It pulls no punches. There are no questions about where the decimal point is in these prices, and it’s almost always further to the right than you expect.

But, 5 days worth of clothes for two people, a workout set for me, and a jacket for the son adds up. Oh, I also bought bacon, two things of cheese, breakfast sausages, and cheddar wurst sausages. I probably wouldn't have packed that. But still, those things didn't cost the $160 difference between "would have spent" and "spent".

The checkout clerk complimented me on my savings, so I didn’t feel too bad. Let my experience be your guide. Go ahead. Pack heavy for the plane. Pay the fee. It’s really hard to buy a suitcase full of luggage for the fee they charge, unless you buy half-off fabric and have a sewing machine, time, and skill at your destination. Oh, and did I mention time? It took a good 1:45 to achieve shopping nirvana. The good news is I actually got some new clothes that I didn't sew myself. It was kind of fun. I might do it again someday. Not anytime soon, though, because I love sewing.

We arrived in Smithville after a leisurely drive, and visited all evening. We went out to Mel’s Diner and had a pleasant late dinner. My relatives know everyone there, and we wrapped up the evening in the lab, talking about the decline of newspapers everywhere, comparing and contrasting newscasts (San Diego Channel 10 and the local news received in Smithville), standardized testing in Mississippi and California and all the fallout thereof, political scandals, all the recent photography projects, and a bit of the philosophy concerning doing photography for free, which is pretty much what I do with a large fraction of my time.

Looking forward to the gym and packing up stuff to ship to San Diego, and research for a book project, all things I hope to do tomorrow.

San Diego - Dallas - Memphis - Olive Branch

2009-11-22T19:44:00.000-08:00

Today my son and I traveled from San Diego, California, through Dallas, Texas, to Memphis, Tennessee, to Olive Branch, Missisippi.

We were dropped off at the airport early in the morning. I was able to teach my little one about airports, security, carry on luggage, tickets, boarding passes, jetways, terminals, and concourses. We had a wonderful time watching all the parts of the wing move. I explained pitch, roll, and yaw, and we went over every square millimeter of the Boeing 757 emergency exit guide in the seatback pocket. We had our escape routes totally memorized.

The plane change in Dallas afforded two opportunities to take the tramway, since there was a gate change in between then time they announced it on the plane and the time we showed up at the gate. This gave me another opportunity to emphasize the importance of checking the monitors because "things change".

Michael bought his own Subway sandwich, and got a drink on the house for being a gentleman in line. He successfully negotiated a window seat with the gate agent for the flight from Dallas to Memphis.

We took the bus to Alamo rental cars and picked up a nice car. I used the new phone (Droid) to navigate, and experienced a few setbacks. The database didn't know about one-way entrances, and roads that were marked as "no left turn". This resulted in a detour through some really sad looking neighborhoods. Several boarded up houses and an entire apartment block boarded up and busted up, with "KEEP OUT" spray-painted ineffectually on the plywood. It looked pretty scary, and it was still daytime.

We got back on track on Union Avenue, and parked on Beale Street. Our destination was Hard Rock Cafe, Memphis, and we had stageside seats for our big dinner.

We bought t-shirts, we spent a lot of time looking at all the items displayed on the walls, we talked at length about Elvis, Beale Street, rock and roll, and playing the drums, since my son started playing the drums in the school band this year. In the gift shop, we were able to buy "Memphis" flame-decorated drumsticks!

While walking to the car, after a stroll around the somewhat-down-at-heel Beale Street Drag, I told him that his drum teacher would be quite impressed with his fancy new sticks. To this, he declared that he wanted to keep the drumsticks as a souvenir instead of using them! Alas, he takes after me. I might have to buy a second pair - one for keeping and one for using.

We're now in the hotel room. He's watching a football game and cheering for Chicago, and I'm working on various documents that have to do with understanding the NEON processor better, so that I can help add NEON support to a software package called FFTW. We're looking forward to more travel and adventure tomorrow.

Something Really Ought To Be Said

2009-10-30T14:03:00.000-07:00

Something Really Ought To Be Said
30 October 2009

On the 28th of November, I took my 8-year-old Bear Cub to his Pack Meeting. It's held in a multi-purpose room at a nearby school. We arrived about the same time we always arrive - a few minutes late due to soccer practice getting out a scant 15 minutes before the start of the Pack meeting. Since I make him change into his scout uniform before going in to the meeting, we arrive just at the close of the opening activities and the beginning of the meeting itself.

This particular Pack meeting had a special guest. The email announcement said:

"This month's theme is Jungle Safari! We have exciting guests this night.

* Master So and So, 6th Degree Black Belt
* Boy Scout Troop ###
* Mrs. So and So to help prepare for Holiday Caroling"

Hey! Neat! A 6th degree black belt! This was going to be interesting. Maybe he would talk about martial arts, culture, and history. Maybe he would demonstrate a form, or break boards with his bare hands, and talk about the power of the individual to rise above limitations with hard work and diligent practice.

Mr. So and So and his able student assistant did indeed demonstrate martial arts techniques. And, he did speak about discipline. However, something unexpected happened. He linked discipline and martial arts training to material success and made fun of people living in Aguanga and El Cajon, which are two nearby towns here in California. The focus of the entire presentation was fighting back against "predators". This was, in essence, a paranoia-drenched safety seminar about what to do if you, the cub scout, are kidnapped by a pedophile.

But, first, let's analyze the message about materialism. The reasoning went something like this. People that live in Carmel Valley, San Diego (where the Pack is located) are successful. Not everyone can live in Carmel Valley. Discipline allows your parents, and therefore you, to be successful enough to live in Carmel Valley. Not like those people in Aguanga, or El Cajon. They aren't successful enough to live in Carmel Valley.

Aguanga was described by the martial arts speaker as having a population of 25. That's off by two orders of magnitude. As of 1990, it had a population of 2,309. It's an unincorporated small town in Riverside County.

Drawing the obvious conclusion, people in Aguanga and El Cajon don't have discipline. People in "those other places" are not successful. It's ok to make fun of people that are less-advantaged than you.

As of the 2000 census, there were 94,869 people, 34,199 households, and 23,152 families residing in the city of El Cajon. According to estimates by the San Diego Association of Governments, the median household income of El Cajon in 2005 was $47,885.

According to the San Diego County Assessor's Office's 2006 estimates, there were 42,047 people residing in Carmel Valley, which is an increase of 49.2% from 2000. The median household income was $120,886. 17.8% of the households made $200,000 or more and 12.3% made $30,000 or less.

While the median household incomes are different, with Carmel Valley being higher, this really should not be held up as proof that people living in Carmel Valley are "more disciplined" or even "more successful" than people living in El Cajon. At least, not without an awful lot of careful definitions of terms and a recognition that different people value different things.

Importantly, El Cajon isn't impoverished. The median household income for El Cajon is right about at the median household income for the entire state of California. Therefore, El Cajon is a very good representative of material success in the state of California. Poking fun of El Cajon, as if they were a bunch of backwards, lazy, hayseed, no-accounts, doesn't make much sense, since it's equivalent to making fun of the entire state of California.

Carmel Valley, by comparison, isn't even a city. El Cajon was incorporated in 1912. Carmel Valley, being a master-planned neighborhood, mooches off San Diego for services and other expensive things that El Cajon has the discipline and focus to provide the citizens that live there.

I wonder who Rancho Santa Fe cub scouts make fun of at their Pack meetings? Could they possibly be making fun of phony, high-maintenance, new-money Carmel Valley set?

Where does a scouting organization get off promoting the idea that the most important things in life are material success? Is this a core value of scouting? I wonder if the organizations that help fund scouting, say, United Way or other agencies, would be happy about scouts talking down to disadvantaged persons at their meetings?

Is this the only time this year that this sort of thing has happened? No, it is not.

Several months ago, when each scout at the Pack meeting had to stand up and answer the question "What do you want to be when you grow up," nearly every older cub scout, the two groups of Webelos, answered "I want to make a lot of money" or "I want to be rich". My own Bear Cub later admitted he felt kind of silly saying he wanted to be a Lego Designer, but first work at Souplantation (his favorite restaurant). This made me feel sad. Here we were, confronting the corrosion of a natural desire to grow up and do productive things that made him feel good about himself and others, and it happened at a Pack meeting - the sort of place where I'd hoped we could find the opposite environment. In the face of a series of smarmy "I wanna be RICH", the simple statement of serving food to others at his favorite restaurant became something to be emabarrassed of.

There is nothing inherently wrong with having money, earning money, or spending money. Much of the time, things worth doing are paid well enough to make a good living. If you are lucky, prepared, willing to sacrifice and work hard, then you might be paid more than the average. However, there are plenty of cases where wealth came from being in the right place at the right time, or from being the children of wealth, or from giving up happiness, or from stealing wealth from others, or from taking advantage of a loophole in the law or a fad or a shortage.

There is no guarantee that discipline and grace will make you wealthy. Ask any priest.

The lessons on how to handle a predator and the message of paranoia are controversial, and I have no good answer. An 8-year-old is no match for a full-grown adult. Putting the idea in their minds that they can resist or win a physical confrontation may or may not be a good idea.

The demonstrations consisted of the martial artist pretending to be a stranger kidnapping a boy from Toys R Us. The message that strangers are the real danger is categorically wrong. "There are a number of commonly held misconceptions regarding child sexual abuse in the United States. [such as] ...the perpetrator of the sexual abuse is always a stranger" ("Sexual Abuse of Children" Renee Z. Dominguez, Ph.D., Connie F. Nelke, Ph.D., Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.)

Children are far more likely to be abused by a family member or someone already known to them. By emphasizing the danger of strangers, we both erode civil society and we also set up a false expectation of where the danger really lies.

Why do I care so much about the message of materialism?

About 20 years ago in Arkansas, I earned a black belt in Tae Kwon Do from the exact same organization that the speaker represented. In no way, shape, or form, was the message presented back then that discipline would make me financially successful. It doesn't hurt, but it wasn't presented that way. Those that were less-advantaged were actively respected, especially if they made what was quite often a larger sacrifice to come to class and work hard on developing their skill, self-confidence, and poise. It was dishertening to see the difference that 20 years and living in a different part of the country can make in the presentation of the meaning of martial arts to youth.

Quilt Project Part 1

2007-09-06T10:01:00.001-07:00

Quilt Project Part 1

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Conclusions of MIssissippi Travel

2007-08-29T05:17:00.000-07:00

The adventure to Mississippi that me and the three kids took concluded yesterday with a drive from Monroe County to Memphis in a rented minivan, a short shuttle bus ride to the airport, a four-hour plane ride to LAX, and a long ride home in our own minivan with a diversionary visit to grandparents and Giovanni's pizza in Fullerton.

Here is baby in her carseat on the airplane, about to land back home in San Diego.

The visit to Smithville was quite enjoyable, although the heat made for cabin fever. An editorial in the paper compared the situation, where one cannot go outdoors for more than a few minutes after the sun is up, and the evening cools down only slightly, to being snowed in. The comparison is quite apt. Keeping three small children entertained indoors without their own toys and away from all the Big People Stuff was very tiring. It was like some sort of parental boot camp.

I think I learned multiple new Mommy Skills on this trip, but so far I have not been able to form them from the murk of wrong-time-zone sleepiness. Maybe after a few days back here in the paradigm-schedule-shift of the new school year, the bones of the lessons will be revealed.

With this school year, the two oldest will be going to the same school, which is very nice, while the baby is still here at the house with me. I am very much looking forward to some increase in uninterrupted time. My resolution is to take full advantage of it while continuing to provide as much "homeschool style" interaction as possible with the children.

I'm happy the summer is over, and that feeling somewhat surprises me, since I did enjoy it. Being quite comfortable with ambiguity, I've been giving this sort of dichotomy a somewhat mistrustful look out of the corner of my mental eye.

Up with the Vertical, Out with the Dancing, Down with the Solar

2007-07-22T08:35:00.000-07:00

I have a grid-tie solar system here at Silver Home, and the household had noticed an increase in our very small electrical bills and a decrease of the power being created by the solar panels on one of the two inverters. The inverter was suspected as source of the problem, but with a bit of assistance from someone that works with solar power all the time and a voltmeter, the problem was narrowed down to one of the four strings of daisy-chained solar panels.

There are 40 panels up on the roof. They're divided into 4 strings of 10. The bad string was removed at the inverter, so 30 are now in use. Unfortunately, none of my records easily show which 10 are connected to that particular pair of wires! The only way to find out is to go up on the roof.

Speaking of the roof, a ladder was climbed by a very helpful someone who assisted me in getting the 2m vertical installed on the solar panel side of the house. The antenna is as-yet-to-be tested, however, so I can't declare victory quite yet. In order to test it, I need to connect a radio up to it and give it a spin. That will happen today.

Finally, I went out dancing at Club Montage last night. I'm none the worse for wear, but I did experience an interesting effect which was due either to eating a whole bag of carrots the afternoon prior or my innards getting reverberated with the exact wrong frequency of bass from the speakers-taller-than-I. Regardless of the cause, a fun time was had by the both of us that went out dancing. San Diego Pride is going on this weekend, so the place was festive and gay and the energy quite enjoyable.

A highlight of the evening was an exotic dancer (male) who performed on a pair of long red diaphanous curtains suspended from the ceiling. It was quite acrobatic and dramatic.

Magic Rocks by Geneva

2007-07-21T16:12:00.001-07:00

Check out this video: Magic Rocks by Geneva

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Geneva Crystal Experiment 1 - Citrine

2007-07-19T17:15:00.000-07:00

Check out this video: Crystal Experiment 1 Citrine

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Quote of the Day

2007-06-20T17:13:00.000-07:00

"damn, I should have bought that hundredweight of unclaimed canary yellow cardstock."

19 June 2007 Fire in Mira Mesa, CA

2007-06-19T19:20:00.001-07:00

19 June 2007 Fire in Mira Mesa, CA

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Summer School Day One

2007-06-18T13:06:00.000-07:00

Mommy Science School kicks off the 2007 season.

Summer School 1

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Ivory Soap Experiment

2007-06-13T09:18:00.001-07:00

Ivory Soap Experiment

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Midget Electric Vehicle Converstion Blog 1

2007-06-12T13:50:00.000-07:00

MG Midget Blog 1

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Fun at the Park

2007-05-05T20:43:00.000-07:00

Bicycle weirdness:

Mexican Primrose Watercolor

2007-05-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

Getting back into painting. Paul & Paul inspired me. Here is today's study.

Hale Telescope Art Competition

2007-03-18T22:09:00.000-07:00

QSL Card Design Competition

For the Hale Telescope Special Event Station June 2-3, 2007

The Palomar Amateur Radio Club invites you to participate in an Art Competition, organized on behalf of the amateur radio special event station celebrating the 59th anniversary of the dedication of the 200 inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Mountain.

Entries will be judged for their artistic appeal as well as which one is best suited for use as a QSL card.

A QSL card is confirmation of a communication between two amateur radio stations. A QSL card is the same size and made from the same material as a postcard (3.5 x 5.5 inches).

Artists may submit up to 5 works of art in the following mediums: Paintings and drawings (oil, watercolor, acrylic, pencil, charcoal, etc.), fine art prints (lithographs, etching, intaglio, wood cuts, etc.), giclees (Iris prints), photography, graphics, digitally generated art, sculpture, ceramics, glass, mosaics, textiles, crafts, functional art and other mixed media.

Winning three-dimensional entries will be photographed for the QSL card. Winning two-dimensional entries that are not of the correct proportions will be reproduced and then cropped for the QSL card.

The 200-inch (5.1 m) Hale Telescope (f/3.3) was one of the world's largest telescopes for 45 years (1948 - 1993). It is still an important scientific instrument and is used almost every night of the year in a wide variety of astronomical studies.

The entries that best capture the artist's feeling toward, or relationship with, the Hale Telescope, or best portray the history of or an aspect of the history of the Hale Telescope, will be enthusiastically accepted for judging as well as displayed on the weekend of the special event station operation.

Submitted artwork may be featured on the Palomar Amateur Radio Club website and newsletter and exhibited on Palomar Mountain at various venues open to the public.

The Board of Directors of the Palomar Amateur Radio Club will judge the entries. Prizes will be awarded to the winner and two runners-up.

Submission address:

W6P QSL ART 2007
5379 Carmel Knolls Drive
San Diego, CA 92130

For complete and updated rules on the design competition, please visit www.palomararc.org

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Originally uploaded by Abraxas3d.

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2007-01-17T18:11:00.000-08:00

Picture014.jpg
Originally uploaded by Abraxas3d.

Techno Haiku

2006-12-17T17:18:00.000-08:00

Lightning vibrates air
Dance until you cannot breathe
Live a thunder life

Voter Turnout? Cartograms

2006-11-16T10:49:00.000-08:00

From an interesting article about the 2006 elections, I found a link to the last presidential election, normalized for population.

Here's a cartogram of the 2004 national presidential vote:

Voter Turnout? Tuned Out?

2006-11-15T15:23:00.000-08:00

Is voter turnout too low? Too high?

Can you have a too low or too high voter turnout?

Should people that vote be considered part of the constituency of elected politicians?

Is it accurate to say that the active members (voting members) of a community are the ones that set the agenda?

Are people that choose not to vote in essence voting for the status quo, and should be considered happy with the way things are going?

politics

Review of "God Hates Gay Evangelicals"

2006-11-09T08:55:00.000-08:00

Here's my review of "God Hates Gay Evangelicals" by Mark Morford.

Like most commentaries, the article is non-neutral in language. Setting that aside, there is a dangerous oversimplification in the initial assumption, and an easily disproven generalization later on in the article.

The assumption that Haggard is homosexual (as opposed to bisexual or a member of the entirely different category of being a straight man who has sex with men) might be an overstatement.

Haggard is not "obviously gay", unless being gay reduces down to genital sex. Someone that objectifies other men for sex for pay may or may not be gay. This is similar to the case of a gay man who has heterosexual sex on the side with hookers. Would we then call him straight? Or, is he just a gay man who has sex with purchased women while his partner is at work or on travel? It's safer and widely considered to be more anonmymous than having a fling with someone that might know your primary partner.

What about lesbians who have sex with men? They are considered lesbians, yet have sex with men for any number of reasons, some of them entirely pragmatic.

The reason why the distinction is important is because the gay community has fought for decades to stake the claim that same-sex attraction is NOT just about the sex. Gay sex used to be deprecated because it was simply about sexual attraction, and companionate love was NOT considered to be attainable by same-sex couples.

The writer states: "There really is nothing at all wrong with feeling deep, sexual love for another man."

No, there isn't anything wrong with it, but I don't get the impression that Haggard "loved" his boy toy in any way, deeply or otherwise.

Sex is not all there is to being homosexual. The article trivializes an entire sexual orientation down to covert genital activity by someone that has some serious self-hatred issues.

Another thing about this particular article is the sweeping statement that:

"You will not see a single comment from a Christian or would-be Christian that says: Hey, you know what? Maybe this gay love thing we've all been railing about and making laws against and rending our flesh over for so long, well, maybe it isn't such a bad thing after all."

Some research here - five minutes tops - would have relegated this to the "cut" column of "cut and paste", since (for example) all you have to do is go to the Dignity home page to get the pro-gay Catholic point of view. Dignity is regularly included in bishops' meetings. One is going on this coming weekend, and some of my fellow Dignity members are attending. They will be presenting their position on having a holistic sexuality that fully includes all orientations become part of church teachings. This is an ongoing dialogue that has already made a big difference. Progress is slow, but progress is made, and there are many pro-gay catholics. I think I qualify as one, and have made many public comments on the issues.

As far as other faiths, there are many books written by prominent (mostly christian) leaders that take positions on both sides. There are a lot of lectures from various leaders available in text or video form that are pro-gay and advocate exactly what the writer here says doesn't happen at all.

In fact, the writer doesn't limit himself to leaders that are already christian. The writer goes so far as to include all christians as well as all "would-be" christians, as if the writer knows what all "would-be" christians think.

Maybe the writer isn't familiar with the Unitarians?

I am not sure what to make of such a sweeping statement that is so egregiously wrong, other than to think the writer just doesn't know many christians.

What does the writer get right?

The description of self-hatred is right on the money. The self-hatred is a sign of internalized homophobia. It's not 100% sure bet, but I'd put good money on Haggard suffering from self-hatred that is orientation-related. It might not have homosexuality as its source (he could be bisexual, or he could be acting out some other repressed ugliness) but it probably does.

Otherwise, why take the risk of having sex with men for money? Maybe he felt trapped as a leader in the same way that my pastor friend in Arkansas talks about. Always being the one that leads, takes care of, listens to others, officiating at baptisms, weddings, funerals, visits to the sick...

It can be very stressful providing comfort to others, and you have to take care of yourself. In catholicism, priests are required to have a spiritual advisor - someone that they can go to where they are not "on the clock". It's imperfect, but it provides a way to take a break, get a clue, vent. My pastor friend doesn't have this, since he's alone as a leader in his (small) religion. All he has is me, and I'm 1643 miles away, and I have limited time. I suspect that Haggard was isolated, and ended up self-destructing as a result.

Summary:

1) sexuality is more than sex acts
2) the sweeping generalization about "christians and would-be christians" fails
3) the article correctly and effectively describes self-hatred (probably internalized homophobia)

The article could actually be read as anti-gay if you are a strict gay-rights advocate. It misrepresents genital activity as healthy orientation, and presents a nonconsentual (wife didn't ok it), for-pay affair as a legitimate gay relationship. I'm not reading it that way, but I see people who are in the blogosphere. Since consentuality is very important to me, I think it's worth highlighting.

Ted Haggard
homosexuality
christian
religion

For my friend

2006-10-30T17:09:00.000-08:00

The charge of child abuse is one that requires answer, regardless of the source, and regardless of the veracity of the charge. If someone defends themself vigorously against a charge, their defense should not be used against them as if that proves their guilt.

Richard Dawkins makes the charge that religious education of minors is tantamount to child abuse. There are people who seem to sort of agree with this charge. However, the equation of religious education of minors with child abuse is supported neither by tradition or by science.

Since Richard Dawkins is supposed to promote science (his day job, so to speak), it's important to highlight when he's on the wrong side of scientific research. Since religious practice - any practice - requires an introduction, an education, and exposure to some sort of community, a child raised in a religious tradition can more easily adopt whatever tradition he or she desires when he or she is an adult. This includes things like Ashtanga yoga, humanism, traditional mainline protestantism, catholicism, zen buddhism, paganism, and so on.

Since the value of religion in an individual's life can be categorically shown through scientific study, the failure to teach some sort of religion to a child is more abusive than teaching it.

Something that Richard Dawkins' reviewers point out, more competently than I could, are the places where he diverges from the evidence, and makes claims that simply can't be supported, or are contradicted by historical record.

When pushed for some evidence of the evil of religion, one often hears "crusades, 9/11, inquisition, galileo".

No one is claiming the crusades, or 9/11, or the spanish inquisition were entirely positive events. However, these events have powerful and complex historical contexts that cannot be simplified down to "thoroughly evil things that religion caused".

For a historical perspective on the crusades that states it better than I can:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_crusades

In regards to 9/11, suicide bombings have a necessary condition which is secular, not religious. Religion is not a necessary factor in the incidence of suicide bombings. The stated goal of Al Quaeda is to evict western occupation and undue influence in the middle east. The targets of 9/11 were political (pentagon, white house) and economic (trade towers). If the point of the attacks was religious, then the national cathedral, the main jewish temple in DC, or Vatican City itself would have been the better set of targets.

These targets are easier to hit than the Pentagon or the White House, which have FAA zones that trigger a military response. (In the case of 9/11, this was botched, as NORAD was still set up for invading Soviet jet fighters.)

The choice of targets by Al Quaeda in Spain was deliberately picked to effect political change. The blasts right before the election swung the state to the socialists, and the withdrawal of Spanish Troops happened just as Al Quaeda desired. Al Quaeda planned this in advance, and documents to that effect have been recovered and are available on the web. Religion is not the fulcrum of contention with Spain. Separating the US from her allies in the military occupation of the Middle East most definitely is. After Spain is peeled away, then other targets would be hit (the London bombings, which did not immediately result in the UK pulling out). After the US is separated from enough allies, then targets in the US mainland would be hit again, until the US left the Middle East.

The portrayal of the 9/11 hijackers as "crazed" or "fanatical" people acting out of religious extremism is convenient for the Bush Administration, and many people buy into this for any number of reasons. However, the hijackers were not crazed lunatics. They acted smartly and strategically out of (primarily) political motives, with religion being used to recruit and retain them in the organization. Depictions of suicide bombers in the US often emphasize a religious motive, however the large majority of suicide bombings are carried out for secular reasons, most often by secular groups. The necessary condition for a suicide bomb is not religious, but is rather the occupation of a land by an outside entity with a superior military force. If this sounds familiar, then good - it should. This fits to a T our presence in the Middle East. We should not have been surprised by 9/11, nor should it be blamed on religion.

Our policies in the Middle East - and the fact that Israel is considered to be an occupier with the US as it's main and often only ally - set us up for attacks such as 9/11.

Here is some scholarship in this area from a place you visit:

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_to_Win:_The_Strategic_Logic_of_Suicide_Terrorism
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_attack

Here's the view from some revolutionary socialist scholars.

See http://leninology.blogspot.com/2005/07/suicide-bombing-dossier.html

From the third link, the summary:

"Suicide bombing as a tactic is used by various groups in diverse circumstances, but usually as a highly efficient means of combatting a perceived transgressor in nationalist terms. Religion and other ideological apparati do help facilitate self-murder and the murder of others, but as a motivational cause they seem to be inadequate on their own. Similarly, organisations provide cash and opportunity for carrying out such attacks, but not the desire. The variety of motivating factors seem to be overdetermined in the case of the London bombings by a rejection not of what the West is, but what it does. If the West's actions were just, this would simply be a stark Manichean case of good versus evil. Instead, what we appear to have is injustice generating recruits for unjust actions."

Would the absence of religion fix this?

From the 9/11 commission report:

"Many Americans have wondered,“Why do ‘they’ hate us?” Some also ask, "What can we do to stop these attacks?” Bin Ladin and al Qaeda have given answers to both these questions.To the first, they say that America had attacked Islam; America is responsible for all conflicts involving Muslims. Thus Americans are blamed when Israelis fight with Palestinians, when Russians fight with Chechens, when Indians fight with Kashmiri Muslims, and when the Philippine government fights ethnic Muslims in its southern islands. America is also held responsible for the governments of Muslim countries, derided by al Qaeda as “your agents.”

Bin Ladin has stated flatly,“Our fight against these governments is not separate from our fight against you.” These charges found a ready audience among millions of Arabs and Muslims angry at the United States because of issues ranging from Iraq to Palestine to America’s support for their countries’ repressive rulers. Bin Ladin’s grievance with the United States may have started in reaction to specific U.S. policies but it quickly became far deeper. To the second question, what America could do, al Qaeda’s answer was that America should abandon the Middle East, convert to Islam, and end the immorality and godlessness of its society and culture: “It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind.” If the United States did not comply, it would be at war with the Islamic nation, a nation that al Qaeda’s leaders said “desires death more than you desire life.”

1) Get out of the Middle East
2) Convert
3) Clean up your act

I think we can see what the foundational issue is here, and it's not the demand to convert. My feeling is that's thrown in to anger Americans, who don't like being told what to do, and therefore help Al Quaeda become the "arsonist rescuer" after America invades Iraq. By "arsonist rescuer" I mean the type of person that sets a fire to help quench it, and is therefore elected "town hero". This strategy is working pretty well so far, with US forces in Iraq regularly described as infidels, invaders, occupiers, and the source of Iraqi misery.

The historical context is of course of great value here. From the 9/11 commission report:

"After gaining independence from Western powers following World War II, the Arab Middle East followed an arc from initial pride and optimism to today’s mix of indifference, cynicism, and despair. In several countries, a dynastic state already existed or was quickly established under a paramount tribal family.

Monarchies in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Jordan still survive today. Those in Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and Yemen were eventually overthrown by secular nationalist revolutionaries. The secular regimes promised a glowing future, often tied to sweeping ideologies (such as those promoted by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab Socialism or the Ba’ath Party of Syria and Iraq) that called for a single, secular Arab state. However, what emerged were almost invariably autocratic regimes that were usually unwilling to tolerate any opposition—even in countries, such as Egypt, that had a parliamentary tradition. Over time, their policies—repression, rewards, emigration, and the displacement of popular anger onto scapegoats (generally foreign)—were shaped by the desire to cling to power.

The bankruptcy of secular, autocratic nationalism was evident across the Muslim world by the late 1970s. At the same time, these regimes had closed off nearly all paths for peaceful opposition, forcing their critics to choose silence, exile, or violent opposition. Iran’s 1979 revolution swept a Shia theocracy into power. Its success encouraged Sunni fundamentalists elsewhere. In the 1980s, awash in sudden oil wealth, Saudi Arabia competed with Shia Iran to promote its Sunni fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism. The Saudi government,always conscious of its duties as the custodian of Islam’s holiest places, joined with wealthy Arabs from the Kingdom and other states bordering the Persian Gulf in donating money to build mosques and religious schools that could preach and teach their interpretation of Islamic doctrine. In this competition for legitimacy, secular regimes had no alternative to offer. Instead, in a number of cases their rulers sought to buy off local Islamist movements by ceding control of many social and educational issues. Emboldened rather than satisfied, the Islamists continued to push for power—a trend especially clear in Egypt. Confronted with a violent Islamist movement that killed President Anwar Sadat in 1981, the Egyptian government combined harsh repression of Islamic militants with harassment of moderate Islamic scholars and authors, driving many into exile. In Pakistan, a military regime sought to justify its seizure of power by a pious public stance and an embrace of unprecedented Islamist influence on education and society. These experiments in political Islam faltered during the 1990s: the Iranian revolution lost momentum, prestige, and public support, and Pakistan’s rulers found that most of its population had little enthusiasm for fundamentalist Islam. Islamist revival movements gained followers across the Muslim world, but failed to secure political power except in Iran and Sudan. In Algeria, where in 1991 Islamists seemed almost certain to win power through the ballot box, the military preempted their victory, triggering a brutal civil war that continues today. Opponents of today’s rulers have few, if any, ways to participate in the existing political system.They are thus a ready audience for calls to Muslims to purify their society, reject unwelcome modernization, and adhere strictly to the Sharia."

Since secular government corruption is named as the source of the Islamist angst in this as well as other studies, wouldn't it be at least as logical to assign the same amount of blame to secularism as to religion, when assigning blame for 9/11?

Galileo is a very interesting case. The simplistic story of "the church repressed science!" is inaccurate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei

To me, it boils down to two friends in a pissing contest, where one had more power and could threaten the other. Both men (Galileo and his former strong supporter, the pope) had huge egos, and both blew their chances to work things out and advance science.

The use of the inquisition here is of course deplorable.

In fact, it's as deplorable to the daily use in California (as well as all the other states) of threats of anal rape in jail when interrogating male suspects under arrest, in order to "gain cooperation". How is showing someone a rack, and implying that it will used, any different than the completely tolerated tactic of threatening men (and women) with the horrible things that "might happen to them" in jail? The brutality of a secular jail situation is no different from the brutality of the inquisition.

One of the interesting facts about the inquisition is that the most famous, the Spanish Inquisition, was operated under secular authority.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition#Spanish_Inquisition

The most important question in context of the assertion that everyone would be better off without religion is simple. In the absense of religion, are nation-states at peace? The answer, as far as it can be seen since you can't run an experiment where you delete religion from society and repeat human evolution, is either no or uknowable.

The absence of religion - the banishment, or repression, or replacement of it, does not prevent atrocity, warfare, or the failure of states. In fact, the absence of religion seems to create fertile ground for a lot of all three.

In the absense of religion, are individual people happier? The answer is no. With repeatable scientific evidence pointing to a strong positive correlation between individual health, happiness as measured on standard psych eval tests, increased lifespan, and increased marriage longevity, the benefits cloud the issue of the claim of religion as a net negative.

Since religions produce people that volunteer more, donate more money, and support secular causes to a degree significantly higher than secular people do, the absence of religion would probably result in fewer service organizations, and less good done in the world.

Religion thrives under and deserves critique, but as a product of human evolution, it's not inherentely evil, nor are we better off without it.

Assigning value to a product of evolution smacks of teleological thinking - sort of like assigning a value to white vs. black in the case of the Peppered Moth. If I did that, I'd be laughed right out of the lab, so to speak.

By the way, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

I don't like it when stick figures of religion are hatefully portrayed by people that don't address historical context, or verifiable facts.

I expect that anyone would defend any of their beliefs, at any time they feel they are either mischaracterized, attacked, or subverted. This is true of politics, religion, and sex especially.

Which leads me back to the original point. Accusations of child abuse are serious, not funny, and have to be defended. If you told a Wiccan that you honestly believed her practice of Wicca, and her intent to teach her children about it, was tantamount to child abuse, I can imagine that she would not be amused in the slightest.

The tactic of:

Ann: "You're a poo-poo head!"
Bob: "No I'm not."
Ann: "Only a poo-poo head would disagree, so you are obviously a poo-poo head."

actually has a name in debate theory, although, I can't remember what it is. If it doesn't seem familiar, here's another more pertinant version:

Richard: "Religion is off limit for debate. Religion is so terrible, that we'd be better off without it. Idiots, child-abusers, etc."
Charlie: "I'm not a child abuser, and religion has positive social value. Here, let me show you."
Richard: "See? Your reaction means I'm right. Religion is evil!"

The only acceptable outcome to Richard is for religious people to roll over, repent, and become positivists. Repent or die, anyone? The acceptable outcome for Charlie is to be portrayed fairly, which includes warts and failures, but doesn't totalize religion as evil. The second one is more reasonable, and more healthy, no? The first one is quite judgemental, and flies in the face of human evolution, scientific evidence, and the historical record.

Finally, the evidence quandary. "Show me evidence for God!"

I'm not an adherent of fluffy white cloud theology, so I can't really defend it. I've said before, I can't speak to issues of faith the way other people might. I can give my take on it, which only seems to invite ridicule, so I generally don't offer it.

My god is the god of Epicurus, Occam, Descartes, and Einstein. She is not the white-haired guy on the roof of the sistine chapel. I posit a perfect being, and model my life accordingly. Why do I need to provide evidence for belief in an ideal being? This is a 2500 year old question that was solved by the Greeks. Epicurus, my hero, both posed and solved the "problem of evil" and provided a solid framework for me. With additions from Sartre, and some enlargements from physics, biology, and chemistry, I'm at ease being "a believer", despite being a "loose canon". Get it? Canon? Cannon?

I can't add any more to their writings (Epicurus, Occam, Descarte, Sarte, Einstein). Any further explanation that I could offer would only dilute theirs. I might be a decent writer, but they are masterful.

I develop values through a religiously-based intellectual activity, and have come up with six. I decide how to spend my time, and what actions to take, based on this chain of reasoning that is initiated and nurtured by consistent meditation upon my idea of god in the form of prayer and good works. Since I take Matthew chapter six seriously, http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt%206:1-4

I don't discuss the "good works" that I do. Nor do I reveal the good works of others that I personally witness. I keep my mouth shut not because I think it will help with some sort of afterlife, since I don't believe in one, but because bragging about it ruins it for me. Since I see others following this philosophy, and since I can do math, it would take a colossal amount of evil - far more than exists in the historical record - to counterbalance the good done in the name of religion.

Until E.O. Wilson's vision of a replacement for religion happens, then I am a religious person (happily catholic, with six or seven other traditions seriously investigated), and I refuse to be unfairly characterized by Richard Dawkins.

If you think I throw a fit over religion, try accusing me of not "really" being bisexual, or bisexuality being "a myth". I save my best screeds for sex.

christian
religion
islam
terrorism
richard+dawkins

Ham Radio CQWW Contest

2006-10-30T13:19:00.000-08:00

This past weekend was the CQ DX Contest.

The objective of an amateur radio contest is for amateurs around the
world to contact other amateurs in as many zones and countries as possible. A zone is like a really big version of a zip code. It can be part of a country, or an area of several countries. It's part of the on-air exchange, and simply makes the contest a bit easier to work.

In the nomenclature of ham radio, you "work a contest", even though it's just for fun. The advantages of working contests are improvement of your communication skills as well as testing the quality of your equipment. If your station works well in a contest, it will probably work well in an emergency.

It's also a great chance to see exactly what your antenna coverage is like - whether or not you have a good antenna pattern, which directly affects how well you are received worldwide.

All bands, 1.8 through 28 MHz, are used for this particular contest.

I worked the contest only briefly throughout the weekend, but I logged stations in Hawaii, Canada, Japan, and South America during the times I was on the air. The experience of participating in a contest is completely worth the time and effort. You don't have to have your own station to participate, but you do need to be a licensed amateur radio operator. This is a very easy license to get.

I operated on the 20 meter band (14MHz). Tuning up and down the band I heard a ton of stations calling for contacts. The cadence and rhythm of the voices makes your heart quicken. It's like standing on the floor of the stock exchange, listening for someone to make or take a bid. When a rare station comes on the air and calls for contacts (calls "CQ") then many people answer. This is called a pile-up, because the voices pile up on top of each other. Again, this is similar to a hot stock being offered at a great price by a floor agent at an exchange. Everyone starts yellling.

The ability to pick out calls from the din, to process them quickly, and then move on to the next person, is something developed over time. It takes listening skills, cognitive skills, and stamina. The contest is long. It starts at 0000 hours GMT Saturday and ends 2400 hours GMT Sunday. So, all day Saturday and all day Sunday. This is 48 hours of operating, I reckon. I don't really know if there is a required break, like in some contests. I have to admit to not reading the rules beforehand.

When you contact another station in a contest, the point is to get an "exchange." This is a bit of information that may be your state, or your section, or zone, or grid square locator, or something like that. Some contests have silly/fun exchanges, and some have more serious, detailed exchanges. It varies quite a bit from contest to contest, but all contests require the correct exchange of some sort of information.

For the CQWW contest, you have to get the call sign of the person you're talking to correct, and you have to get their CQ zone. This is submitted to the contest sponsor in the form of a log. Each contact is worth some amount of points. There are ways to increase your score, called "multipliers", that vary from contest to contest. For example, if you contact every zone, or every state, or every province of a country, then you get a boost. This can make a big difference if you are competitive in the contests. There are strategies and tactics to contesting. It's considered a sport, and to be really good at it requires dedication and practice. However, it doesn't take much to turn a neophyte entry-level ham radio operator into a full-fledged participant.

One of the best ways to get involved is to participate in a multi-operator station. This is where several people man a station in shifts, or together, and make contacts. The more experienced people teach you the ropes and give advice, and you don't have to buy a bunch of equipment or put up a big antenna.

I didn't "call CQ" during the contest - which means finding and defending a frequency, where you transmit something like "CQ Contest CQ Contest Whiskey Five November Yankee Victor" over and over again, until people respond, whereupon you do your exchange. I used the "search and pounce" tactic, which means dialing around and answering people doing the hard work. Sleep in, still win.

In order to win, you really have to do both. And, you have to know when the various bands are open - not all frequencies are usable at all times - and you have to know when to take a break so you aren't drooling on your microphone at 3:12 am.

Here's a typical exchange for me:

They: "CQ contest CQ contest 4M5R"
Me: "W5NYV"
They: "W5NYV 59 33"
Me: "Roger, 59 03"
They: "QSL, QRZ?"

CQ means calling all stations.
QSL means "confirm contact"
QRZ means "who (else) is calling me?"

Sometimes you have to go back and forth to confirm an exchange, because there may be a lot of static or you may be a weak station. Then it goes something like this:

They: "CQ contest CQ contest 4M5R"
Me: "W5NYV"
They: "Whiskey Five, again?"
Me: "Whiskey Five November Yankee Victor"
They: "Whiskey Five November Yankee Delta?"
Me: "Whiskey Five November Yankee Victor"
They: "W5NYV 59 33"
Me: "Roger, 59 03"
They: "13?"
Me: "03, 03, 03"
They: "QSL, QRZ?"

The exchange is quick. When there is a pileup, or when band conditions are good, you make contacts as quick as you can talk or as quick as you can log. Making a contact is one thing, but successfully logging it is another.

There are a ton of software tools that help with contests. Actually talking into a microphone for hours and hours will kill your voice. It's acceptable to record the parts that you are going to say over and over again, and transmit those with a keypress of the software interfaced to your radio.

Logging programs help by allowing you to type things in. If you are a multi-operator station, a second person can be assigned the logging duties.

For the contest, I used pencil and paper to log, and a push-to-talk microphone. Since I didn't work very long at any one time, it worked out fine.

One of the things that I thought about over the weekend, while working the contest, was how much Amy would have liked watching this whole process. She wasn't really interested in ham radio, but she was interested in ham radio operators, and I know she would have been really impressed with the whole effort, and how much focus and concentration it took.

I remember when I let her hold my violin. She never really played any musical instruments, but she played a bard on EQ. One of the characters that she fictionalized played the violin, and I thought it might be fun for her to see how incredibly lightweight a violin is, and what it looks like in your hands. She was really taken with how fragile it seemed - something that could make such a sound should be heavy, like an electric guitar. Violins almost feel like they're made from balsa wood. I had her draw the bow to see what it felt like, and she laughed when it made the most horrible sound ever in the history of strings.

I think she would have been equally engaged at the antics of the contest. She would have loved eavesdropping on the "big gun" stations as they chewed through their pile-ups like communications juggernauts - spitting out the syllables in staccato.

Contests, like any competition, can be addictive. For some people, it's their main interest in ham radio. I'm just a dilletante. I will probably never rank very high in the standings, but the sheer fun of working people from around the world in a competitive atmosphere is totally worth the time. Hearing your callsign from a faraway station is such a thrill. I'm looking forward to the next contest, in November.

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2006-10-28T19:04:00.000-07:00

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2006-09-25T12:28:00.000-07:00

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2006-08-22T14:36:00.000-07:00

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2006-08-15T05:13:00.000-07:00

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2006-08-14T16:57:00.000-07:00

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2006-08-12T14:32:00.000-07:00

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2006-08-12T14:31:00.000-07:00

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2006-08-11T21:16:00.000-07:00

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California Girl

2006-07-27T15:02:00.000-07:00

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2006-07-22T10:11:00.000-07:00

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Speed Racer meets Lithium Ion

2006-07-21T20:57:00.000-07:00

... and a star is born!

Tesla Motors

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2006-07-12T10:40:00.000-07:00

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2006-06-30T17:22:00.000-07:00

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2006-06-30T17:18:00.000-07:00

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2006-06-30T17:15:00.000-07:00

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2006-06-21T18:57:00.000-07:00

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2006-06-10T13:22:00.000-07:00

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2006-05-21T13:56:00.000-07:00

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Originally uploaded by Abraxas3d.

The Heavy Axe (poem)

2006-05-14T12:28:00.000-07:00

Doesn't that axe get heavy?
The one you keep grinding every day?
The one that hangs upon you,
Draining your strength away?

To support it you must purchase
Stones aplenty, oh so many stones.
And don't forget the extra axeheads,
To replace the shattered ones.

You grasp it as a corpse would
A deathgrip upon the shaft
While all around you unencumbered
People blithely pass.

They see you fall behind them,
Lugging that burdensome thing.
Your hot hatefulness consumes
To ashes any chance of reasoning.

The Mariner killed the Albatross.
You took up the axe.
Coleridge teaches hope here.
But you have to choose to act.

Rigid inflexible thinking,
Hidebound by your generation,
Never letting opportunity escape
To clumsily hack and rend.

What at first engendered alarm,
Anxiety, and strife,
Quickly faded to pity,
For the paucity within your life.

The paths gleam before your blindness.
Those resplendant glittering roads
With innumerable people upon them,
A living river of the soul.

Loose your grip, the scales will fall;
The heart relents her vanity.
Loose your grip, the axe will drop;
Welcome back to your humanity.

poetry
poem

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2006-05-08T08:43:00.000-07:00

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Originally uploaded by Abraxas3d.

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2006-05-07T15:51:00.000-07:00

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2006-05-07T09:57:00.000-07:00

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2006-05-07T09:56:00.000-07:00

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2006-05-07T09:55:00.000-07:00

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2006-05-07T09:54:00.000-07:00

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2006-05-06T07:27:00.000-07:00

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2006-05-06T07:26:00.000-07:00

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2006-05-06T07:25:00.000-07:00

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2006-05-04T20:00:00.000-07:00

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Michael as Flower at Zoo

2006-05-03T15:24:00.000-07:00

Michael on a field trip to the San Diego Zoo. I took this photo at the Children's section of the zoo.
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Originally uploaded by Abraxas3d.

Good Idea from George W. Bush

2006-04-28T09:24:00.000-07:00

President Bush says he wants to raise fuel-efficiency standards on automobiles, as members of both parties jockeyed for political position on the issue of rising gas prices. "I encourage them to give me that authority," Bush told reporters during a visit to a service station in Biloxi, Mississippi. "It's an authority I used for light trucks, and I intend to use it wisely if Congress will give me that authority."

Increasing the fuel economy of light duty vehicles is the single most effective energy-saving policy the federal government could adopt.

environmentalism

bush

Energy - Solar

2006-04-27T07:54:00.000-07:00

BLOG Energy - Solar

Solar power is one of the "alternative" energy sources that someone living in a sunny place like San Diego can make the most headway with. (I put it in quotes because to me, it's just an energy source. There's nothing scurrilously or dangerously or seductively alternative about it at all.)

Here are some construction photos, and a shot from the street.

The solar panels on my house cover most of the southern-facing roofline. You can't really see them from the street unless you stand at a particular angle on your tiptoes. You can see a brief flash of them as you drive by. The neighbors don't really have much of a view of the panels, either, just due to the layout of the nearby houses. The first photo was taken during the worst of the smoke of the October 2003 San Diego County fires. That's why it's orange.

The angle of the roofline almost exactly approximates the ideal angle for catching the most perpendicular of the sun's rays. This was a conscious part of the house-buying process and not a happy accident. Relatively few homes in this particular neighborhood have as good a roofline for solar, but I drive by hundreds and hundreds of homes and businesses every time I'm out that have "wasted" space perfectly aligned to the sun. What a great sight it would be if there were solar panels on rooftops as a matter of course, and not as a rare exception.

The system here is of a "grid-tie" type. That means it's tied to the power grid, as opposed to being "stand alone". Grid-tie means that when we're using less than we generate, the electricity is fed back into the power grid for others to use. It also means that when the electrical grid goes down, so do we. There is a large safety switch that disconnects the solar panels from the system in order to prevent backfeeding.

With the addition of a bank of batteries or a generator to "fake" the grid, then we could convert to stand-alone. However, the reason I didn't choose this option when specifying the system is three-fold.

First, battery banks take up a lot of space and are a cost-adder. Since the power in this neighborhood is extremely reliable, there is little need to incur the space and monetary cost for producing our own night-time power every night. In the case of an emergency (72 hours of no power) then we'd be no better off than anyone else. However, if the power is off for more than three days, the odds of us staying here in Carmel Valley, as opposed to evacuating someplace else, are actually pretty low.

The second reason is that a portable generator is more useful to me than a bank of batteries. The generator can enable stand-alone operation, with the addition of a transfer safety switch behind the generator. The generator power would then be applied at the point where the grid would be if it wasn't down (I haven't tested the whole idea quite yet, so don't go off and do anything drastic without convincing yourself you won't do something epicly dumb first) and can also be taken places (like Field Day) and pressed into service.

The third reason was some concern over maintaining a large bank of batteries for the lifetime of the system. The solar panels have an expected useful lifetime of about 30 years. Some people explain that this is conservative - that many panels in current production may end up with even longer lifetimes. Some of the first solar systems installed in residential places are already over 35 years in use and are still humming along. In stand-alone systems, Batteries are the components with the shortest life expectancy. Most of the companies I talked with said 15 years would be the maximum, but the residential systems I've surveyed required battery bank replacement in 10 years or less.

We did have a failure with one of the two inverters, but it was a quick warrenty replacement. The inverters are under warrenty for 5 years, and are from Sunny Boy. They're old-school big-iron boring old inverters. Batteries (optional), wiring, solar panels, inverters, safety switches comprise the components of a solar system (or photovoltaic system "PV" system for short). There are no moving parts. Electrically, it's quite simple.

The system here at the house was designed for something less than 100 percent of our electric bill. This is commonly done because you're not going to get easily compensated for trying to become a power generation station by the power company, and because of diminishing returns in tiered-power situations. This means that a small system can have more ROI due to the fact that you're knocking your bill down from perhaps a high-cost high-tier power consumption range to a lower-tier lower-cost power consumption range. Getting the power consumption range down to the bottom of the lowest basic tier (e.g. SDG&E basic allotment of the first 300 or so killowatt-hours is only $20 bucks or so) means you're spending a lot on hardware that doesn't really buy you much in terms of financial savings.

Some people design their systems this way, and have relatively small "assist" systems that are very finanically effective, especially if they have high energy consumption due to air conditioning, etc.

I went for a larger system in order to "do environmental good" as well as reduce the electrical bill. The target was 85% of the average consumption over the previous 16 months, as of summer 2003.

The system will pay for itself at a later date due to the higher initial cost, but it sure is nice to get an energy bill of "zero" for 6 months out of the year.

Energy production is lowest in January. Considering that the winter solstice is in late December, it's interesting to see that January, then February, then December are the months where the panels are least effective, at least in terms of energy consumed from the point of view of the power company. This oddity makes sense in light of the fact that grid-tie systems are usually billed by net power.

In other words, in the months where I produce more than I consume, the net "owed" to me is shoved forward to the next month. I get a headstart. This has shifted the entire graph of yearly energy consumption forward a bit. For example, September was a zero consumption month, but March was not. If March and September are both equinox months, then they should have similar energy patterns by the end of the month. But, due to net metering, and the fact that the billing month doesn't exactly line up with the equinox crossover, I guess they don't.

If I was less lazy, I'd take it as an action item to verify this. However, I didn't spring for the expensive frivolous wireless poor-industrial-design data logger (yeah ok I'm a codger), and I don't manually write down how much exactly I generate every month (something the equipment dutififully reports).

I guess I've talked myself into starting to monitor it. Or, I could build my own data logger! Yes, yes, I need another project to do.

That's my experience with solar grid-tie systems.

The state of California, at the time of installation and at the present time, gives tax incentives and subsidies on each kilowatt-hour that your system is rated at. These incentives are not widely publicized. Grid tie systems are offered as an option by at least one developer, but the promotion is somewhat muted, and "energy star appliances" are given higher billing than the solar systems and solar water heating systems that also come with the package.

MY feeling is that once again consumerism has lead to form (appearance) being valued way more than function (clean energy). Solar panels and the equipment necessary to have either a grid-tie or stand-alone system do NOT have to be ugly or obtrusive. There is a false dichotomy at work here that people have totally bought into. Somehow, solar panels are dorky, or ugly. How many times do you actually ponder the south-facing roofline of your house? Do you live on the south-facing roof of your house? Since most installations can in many cases be installed unobtrusively with a bit of intelligent exterior design, and since there are solar panels that look like roof tiles or roof material on the market now, any snobbishness about looks resolves into irrationality.

Yes, the systems add cost to a house. Yes, they can and do pay for themselves directly. They pay for themselves indirectly too, by reducing the need for energy generation at polluting stations, therefore reducing the costs to society of energy production. We don't have a whole lot of natural gas left, either. So the more people that employ solar systems now, the longer the supply will last.

Even the cleanest natural gas burning power generation station still produces pollution that will not be produced by the solar panels. Yes, there is pollution produced in manufacturing solar panels, but that is greatly outweighed by the clean solar power produced by the panels over the course of their lifetime. For each panel, it takes (at the current time) from 2 to 5 years for the electricity produced by the panel to equal the energy that was necessary to produce it. Some people count this energy in their evaluations, and some do not.

There are justifications either way, depending on whether you do a straight household ROI (since everything used in a household is manufactured, and the energy costs of manufacturing are assumed to be in the price to the consumer, adding additional costs is double-billing the item) or you actually want to know whether or not you are making a positive environmental effect (which, in the case of grid tie solar systems, you undoubtedly are, especially after the first few years where the energy required to make the items is paid back by the items themselves. Can you say this about most any other manufactured good?)

Solar systems aren't useful only in the southwest, even though they're most useful here. A photovoltaic system can go in almost anywhere that the sun shines. You may get better performance in a sunny place, and that's where the most activity seems to be, but I've seen systems profiled in places like Connecticut and New York and the UK on television programs, and they seem to work just fine.

The efficiency goes down with clouding, dust on the panels, and lower angle of the sun, but even with these challenges, solar co-generation stations on commercial and residential buildings are a great energy solution. Unlike hydrogen fuel cells, these systems are simple, available now, and easily understood by almost anyone. If you can operate an oven in your kitchen, you are overqualified for operating a solar system on your roof.

Speaking of kitchen ovens, mine is broken yet again.

environmentalism
solar
energy

Socialism, Capitalism - economic truth, ecologic truth

2006-04-25T20:37:00.000-07:00

From an article from Wired.com

There's a quote by Oystein Dahle close to a decade ago now, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was for many years Exxon's vice president for Norway and the North Sea. He said, "Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth." That's a lot of wisdom distilled into those two sentences.

Equating the blind spots of socialism and capitalism is something I found to be quite interesting.

In the presence of a shared ethical framework which values the environment we depend on, then capitalism can potentially work well in the long term. There is of course the other unsolved issue of what "enough" wealth is in terms of creating it. This is a conundrum that has existed from the beginning of capitalism ( as defined in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations).

This shared ethical framework with respect to the environment does not currently exist in the United States capitalist community for any number of reasons. American capitalism has been allowed to simply pillage the environment instead of preserving it, with some regulations having some effect from time to time.

This unrestricted wealth creation at high cost to both workers and the environment has been going on for a long time. It's gone on so long that being a good consumer is now the equivalent of being a good citizen, with predictable results to culture, the environment, and - oddly enough - the economy itself.

A professor at UALR told me that the Roman Empire collapsed for several interrelated reasons. One of which was the habit of farmers to grow cash crops instead of sustainable mixes. The cash crops were exported for, of course, cash. Cash allowed the Romans to buy whatever they wanted. The economic system was advanced and worked pretty well.

When unrest due to some sustained external raiding made it impossible for the cash crops to be exported, then the internal economy of the Roman Empire started to experience hyperinflation and moved from healthy to crumbling in a relatively short time.

The economy can indeed be killed by that which makes it strong, if enough positive feedback is applied. But enough of ancient history. We're seeing history in the making at the present time.

The destabilization of the world oil economy (or, as I would rather see it put, the recognition that it is inherently unstable to begin with) may have some parallels with the Roman experience. Inflation is kept low here due to the fact that we've shifted labor costs to places where labor is shockingly cheap, while at the same time selling debt.

By giving up the ability to manufacture consumer goods, while continuing to borrow money from the same economies that sell us those manufactured goods, we either have a mutually-assured-destruction Economic Death Embrace (and the US and, say, China continue on as we have been continuing on), or we'll have a situation where the dollar will devalue greatly, and we will suffer widespread economic damage as the dollar slowly (or quickly) becomes incapable of buying what we, or our parents, used to buy.

Since mutually-assured-destruction didn't prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union. I'm not inclined to think of it as a stable or preferable economic partnership. Destabilization of the trade routes made the Roman experience of the third century quite challenging. Continued destabilization of our trade routes could make our own third century, of existence as a country, quite challenging.

So, if someone like me can maintain an understanding of the basics, you'd figure that our government, with all sorts of smart people as resources, would come up with solid solutions for the precarious position that we find ourselves uncomfortably sliding towards. After all, with a republican president and a republican congress, I'd expect to see some smart economic action - some wicked-mean sharp-shooting monetary policy acumen. After all, these are the guys that are supposed to be the experts of the financial side of the house.

It's unfortunately revealing, then, that it took only a modest rise in gasoline prices for President Bush to do nothing more than simply waive environmental rules for gasoline.

This is supposedly to help lower prices. I'm not exactly sure how this will help lower prices. Why are we trying to manipulate prices (thinking as a Republican), instead of solving the underlying problems anyway?

A free market means a free market. Prices are high for specific reasons, none of which can be solved by rolling back environmental laws. A real republican answer would be to allow the market to shape society, not use the machinery of government to shape the market, while allowing society to do whatever it is that it's doing. This primarily means driving a lot more than necessary and buying record amounts of fuel.

It sounds, from the brief article, that refineries are generally already done with their summer blending plans anyway. The connection between not complying with regulations and a reduction in price to the consumer is therefore negligible at best. I of course fully expect to see someone at some point claim that the Bush Administration "saved summer vacations for patriotic Americans" by rolling back environmental laws.

Any cost decreases will be largely taken as profits by the refineries. A cynic would see this (profits for oil companies) as the real reason for waiving of a regulatory law that has far less impact on the value (as opposed to price) of gasoline than drivers actually driving intelligently or maintaining correct air pressure in their car tires. If you want to tinker with regulations, then require higher gas mileages for new cars. It's not like the technology isn't there, and would actually increase fuel value to the consumer.

There is a long list of other things that could actually help consumer costs. Some of which have been repeatedly and publicly suggested by people a lot smarter than me. I can't recall anyone outside of maybe a few refinery industry lobbyists that has ever called for the removal of clean air related environmental regulations. There has never been any sort of suggestion that it would actually lower prices at the pump.

The reason for this is simple. Dirty air and climate change cost society much much more than any small break at the pump from refining regulations going away.

environmentalism
politics
bush
economics

Freedom Quote, Rise of Soft Paternalism, Libertarian Response?

2006-04-19T10:34:00.000-07:00

Unless men are free to be vicious they cannot be virtuous.
by Frank Meyer, "In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Manifesto"

Much has been made of freedom and liberty in this country. It's a neverending source of inspiration to both real and imaginary politics.

The struggle over privacy, freedom, choice, and liberty is the most important political question we face. It's more important than the War on Whatever, more important than the level of taxation, more important than the state of the electoral college or immigration reform. The only thing it's not more important than is the survival of the environment. I.e., the health of the planet itself, without which everyone slowly dies, which is, perhaps, the ultimate in privacy, since the government can no longer badger, guide, legislate to, or tax you.

In reading the cover story from the April 6th Economist magazine, you can see this questions of privacy, freedom, choice, and liberty in action.

The Rise of Soft Paternalism

April 6th, Economist

Liberals sometimes dream of a night-watchman state, securing property and person, but no more. They fret that societies have instead submitted to the nanny state, a protective but intrusive matriarch, coddling citizens for their own good. Economists, with their strong faith in rationality and liberty, have tended to agree. As many decisions as possible should be left in the individual's lap, because no one knows your interests better than you do. Most of us have gained from this freedom.

But a new breed of policy wonk is having second thoughts. On some of the biggest decisions in their lives, people succumb to inertia, ignorance or irresolution. Their private failings—obesity, smoking, boozing, profligacy—are now big political questions. And the wonks think they have an ingenious new answer—a guiding but not illiberal state.What they propose is “soft paternalism”.

Thanks to years of patient observation of people's behaviour, they have come to understand your weaknesses and blindspots better than you might know them yourself. Now they hope to turn them to your advantage. They are paternalists, because they want to help you make the choices you would make for yourself—if only you had the strength of will and the sharpness of mind. But unlike “hard” paternalists, who ban some things and mandate others, the softer kind aim only to skew your decisions, without infringing greatly on your freedom of choice. Technocrats, itching to perfect society, find it irresistible. What should the supposed beneficiaries think?

Most people would accept that a healthy diet is hard to achieve, financial matters are confusing and cigarettes kill too many. The state is tempted to step in, not only because of the harm that smokers, lushes, spendthrifts and gluttons may do to others, but because of the harm they are doing to themselves. In Scotland last month the government banned smoking in offices, restaurants and pubs. In Massachusetts, the state legislature has passed a bill requiring everyone who can afford to buy health insurance to do so, on pain of higher taxes.

This is hard paternalism. The softer sort is about nudging people to do things that are in their best interests. The purest form involves setting up systems for sinners to reform themselves: in Missouri for instance, some 10,000 compulsive gamblers have banned themselves from riverboat casinos; if they succumb to their habit (and are caught) they face tough punishments. In most cases, though, soft paternalism means the government giving people a choice, but skewing the choice towards the one their better selves would like to make.

For instance, in many countries plenty of workers fail to enrol in pension schemes and suffer as a result. The reason is not that they have decided against joining, but that they haven't decided at all—and enrolling is cumbersome. So why not make enrolling in the scheme the default option, still leaving them the choice to opt out? Studies have shown this can nearly double the enrolment rate. Lord Turner, head of Britain's Pensions Commission, is the latest soft paternalist to recommend such a scheme

Soft paternalists also want to give people more room to rethink “hot and hasty” decisions. They favour cooling-off periods before big decisions, such as marriage, divorce or even buying cigarettes. Some of them toy with elaborate “sin licences”, which would entitle the holder to buy cigarettes, alcohol or even perhaps fatty foods, but only at times and in amounts the licenceholder himself signed up to in advance.

If people want this kind of customised paternalism, why can't the market, in the shape of rehab clinics and personal trainers, provide it? Soft paternalists argue that, without the power of the state behind such schemes, they will often break down: the sovereign consumer can always veto his own decisions. He can fire his personal trainer or check out of the clinic. Long before the government took it upon itself to ban opium from general sale, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Romantic poet and drug addict, used to hire porters to bar his entry to apothecaries. But he would later threaten to have them arrested if they did not let him pass.

Soft paternalism has much in its favour. First, it is certainly better than hard paternalism. Second, a government has to provide information to citizens in order for them to make rational decisions on everything from smoking to breastfeeding to organ donation. Even a government reluctant to second-guess its citizens ends up advising them in one way or another. What people decide they want is often a product of the way a choice is framed for them—they take the first thing on the menu, or a bit of everything. Even a truly liberal government would find itself shaping the wishes and choices to which it earnestly wants to defer. It's surely better to lure people into pension schemes than out of them.

Yet from the point of view of liberty, there is a serious danger of overreach, and therefore grounds for caution. Politicians, after all, are hardly strangers to the art of framing the public's choices and rigging its decisions for partisan ends. And what is to stop lobbyists, axe-grinders and busybodies of all kinds hijacking the whole effort? There is, admittedly, a safety valve. People remain free to reject the choices soft paternalism tries to guide them into—that is what is distinctive about it. But though people will still have this freedom, most won't bother to use it—that is what makes soft paternalism work. For all its potential, and its advantage over paternalism of the hard sort, this is a tool that transfers power from the individual to the state, which only sometimes knows best.

Its champions will say that soft paternalism should only be used for ends that are unarguably good: on the side of sobriety, prudence and restraint. But private virtues such as these are as likely to wither as to flourish when public bodies take charge of them. And life would be duller if every reckless spirit could outsource self-discipline to the state. Had the government deprived Coleridge of opium, he might have been happier. Then again, there might have been no “Kubla Khan”.

So, the challenge to Americans, many of which believe that the government has "no business telling us how to live", is what to do about the rise of soft paternalism.

If defaults are changed to where you have to opt out, instead of opting in, then many things would indeed go much better. Retirement savings, for example, which is something Americans seem to have some problems with, would probably be the first thing that many people would choose to make opt out instead of opt in.

Waiting periods can affect sales and decisions. If things like divorce, gun-purchases, medical procedures, cigarette purchases, and whatever other vice the government and/or society wants to see reduced had waiting periods, then this too would most likely be widely tolerated. We already tolerate the legislation of waiting periods for many things in the US. Why not more?

At first, this seems to fly in the face of libertarianism, which stresses that allowing people to make their own choices, even if they are bad ones, is better than someone else making the choice for you, even if that someone else is making a very good choice for you.

However, Libertarianism works well only when everyone chooses within a framework of responsible freedom. Libertarianism works exceedingly well for responsible people who tend to be altruistic, well-educated, and believe - either consciously or unconsciously - in a moral or ethical framework behind and beneath law and choice.

This is why I both vote libertarian, am proud to be libertarian, and yet also concede how improbable it is for more than perhaps a small fraction of the population to ever be truly able to embrace what is, at heart, a very disciplined and responsible form of government. Like any ideal, the reflection in reality is somewhat fractured, faceted, or corrupted. The (alleged) fiscal conservatism of the Republicans, the dedication to doing the right thing by the environment of the Greens, the compassion for equality of the Democrats - all these things are facets of Libertarianism, scattered amongst parties that have other fatal flaws that render them incapable of winning a libertarian vote. Bringing all these ideas together under the banner of one party happened in 1972, but no one seemed to notice.

Libertarianism is abused and society is disserved by people who make selfish short-sighted choices, who then are left to die in a ditch due to accident or addiction or other repercussions of their choices.

The Democrat would try to save the person in the ditch. A Republican would punish them. A Green might secretly rejoice in the darwinian reduction of population that irresponsible behaviour produces from time to time. It takes courage to confront the underlying reasons for irresponsibility before individual choices lead to social loss.

In a morally relativistic society, how often do you actually hear someone making a value judgement about the choices of another person? It's quite rare.

It also takes courage to let the person continue to make those choices and allow them to suffer the consequences. This is never fun when the consequences are negative.

So, the question is:

Is soft paternalism a preservation of the ideals of Libertarianism, or is it a perversion of those ideals?

soft paternalism
libertarian
politics

Energy - Hydrogen

2006-04-18T16:28:00.000-07:00

Hydrogen cars cannot replace the current transportation demands that gasoline-powered cars provide. The energy density just isn't there. Even if the storage, transportation, energy return on energy invested, and tank size problems can be solved, then ranges and required energies to create the hydrogen result in a greatly reduced energy capacity.

To create hydrogen from methane, use the following recipe.

CH4 (g) + H2O + e > 3H2(g) + CO(g)

Greenhouse gases are still created. The energy used to make the steam (the H2O) is usually produced by burning fossil fuels. Essentially, the pollution has been moved around a bit. Using nuclear power to heat the steam might work, but more plants would need to be built or else diverted from electricity production.

To create hydrogen from water, use the following recipe.

2H2O + e = 2H2(g) + O2(g)

This requires 286kJ per mole. This energy is required by the chemistry of reaction and can never be reduced.

It can be somewhat difficult to get a real picture of hydrogen due to the politicization of this particular technology and the constant rah-rah positive pep talks from the government. The "roadmap" from the DOE reads like a real estate newsletter, with occasional dips into reality.

Hydrogen as a replacement for electricity production will probably be a component of future energy technologies, but declaring it a replacement for gasoline in cars, at this point, is really not believable.

environmentalism

Bisexuality is Superior?

2006-04-17T10:47:00.000-07:00

Bisexuals are Superior?

I used to believe in the superiority of bisexuality with a special sort of zeal. The arc of my thinking was grounded in a foundation of being fundamentally different from those monosexuals out there - those gay and straight people that were incapable of truly loving people because they couldn't form significantly deep or romantic feelings about people of a particular gender.

I considered myself truly free, advanced, progressive, and somehow unencumbered by whatever psychological or biological failings that monosexuals had. This feeling of superiority was usually passively expressed. I didn't go around snickering at others or making snide comments or wearing T-Shirts declaring my superiority. However, I certainly believed it.

I felt sorry for everyone else. The very few bisexual people that I knew very well seemed to only confirm my prejudice. They were really quite similar to me in behaviour and worldview. We were the Chosen Few.

Of course, anecdote doesn't equal proof. The other bisexual people in my life were people that I got along with really well. The shared values and interests were probably the reason we got along, and not because of a particular orientation.

Identity politics, the idea that a part of your identity then determines your politics, and that some sort of political change needs to happen based on group identity, has been around for a long time, and greatly affected my attitude.

The gay rights movement can be described in terms of identity politics. Politically active gay people were agitated, motivated, organized, and had "whips", to keep the message coherent and focused. Members of the group that fell outside the majority identity had to form their own smaller groups, or go it alone. The US "gay rights movement" is largely one that identifies with the left. As a politically active gay person, you were (are?) assumed to be an unchurched Democrat. Queer people that were politically right-wing formed the Log Cabin Republicans.

In popular culture, Gay Republicans are viewed as a bit weird. The Republicans largely ignore them and many left-leaning politically active gay people seem to be embarrassed about them. The belief that a part of your identity should determine a leftist vote is directly challenged by groups like the Log Cabin Republicans.

Two other groups that have suffered a similar sort of identity politics (called Values Politics) are pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans. This litmus test issue in the US has made it impossible for these candidates to get anywhere within either party. Conform or leave.

All of these realities work at cross-purposes to political progress. Being political definitely requires compromise, but when compromise isn't possible, your effectivity as a political agent is very much reduced. In many cases, it's nullified.

In contrast, leveraging certain issues can greatly enhance an otherwise incompetent candidate or voting bloc.

So, for a while, I bought into the identity politics belief structure. My identity meant that I should be political as well as politically active in certain specific ways.

I did not see the gay rights movement demanding "special" privileges or asking for anything that anyone else didn't already have. However, for me, the identity extended well beyond the basic political rights questions (e.g. equal access under the law means equal access under the law, so civial unions or civil marriage licenses should be available to any two people above the age of majority that want to enter into a marriage contract).

Then, I extended the identity politics to identity religion, identity socialization, and identity entertainment. Once I did this, I began to feel the full power of conformity, all within a community that placed high value on diversity. However, the message became clear. You can be diverse, as long as you are diverse the same way we are. In other words, you could be catholic, as long as you were an ex-catholic, or hopelessly guilty about it. You could be middle or high income, as long as you apologized for it or didn't talk about it or show it in any way, since to be financially successful meant that you weren't suffering any discrimination, unlike the other "authentic" queers, who were unfairly kept down and ghettoized by "the mainstream community".

You could live outside the accepted neighborhoods, but you had to drive to the acceptable neighborhoods for any event or to meet friends. You could go to the movies, or out dancing, or out to eat, but if you went to mainstream locations, the lack of enthusiasm for others to go with you was palpable.

Therefore I went to a lot of small shabby theaters, small dingy nightclubs, overpriced no-parking mediocre restaurants, and went to lots of meetings in university meeting rooms, where lots of talk occurred about equality and rights and petitions and parades. During parades in California, I twice got a close-up view of Phelps, who was protesting the parade. One of the parades I was in was tear-gassed right before it was supposed to start. Although we were too far back to tell what was going on, the word about the source of the delay spread down the line quickly enough. This only reinforced my belief that straights (and gays) were inferior in thought, word, and deed.

During this time I wasn't just a member, acting in a way I was expected to act. I did actually help organize a GLBT university group from scratch. I did experience what was undoubtedly two different hate or bias related violent crimes during the organization of this group.

The group that we formed was for social support, and not for political action, but the identity politics at the time created the environment where the assumption existed that we were just a campus version of ACT UP or Queer Nation, and not really there to provide GLBT people a club to join where they could then talk about identity issues, goof off, and eat out as a group. This was in the US South, so the predictable collision between what I tend to think of as fundamentalist christians and our hodgepodge of mostly ex-believers happened on a regular basis. We viewed ourselves as the modern version of lepers, exiled by the "pure" folk and regularly despised by the hysterical religious right.

Although there were several gay-friendly leftist church groups that welcomed people like us, no one I knew admitted to being a member. The prevalence of organized religion in the south is high (smothering, glittering, constant, ubiquitous). It's both resplendant and burdensome.

I think most of us were either too busy studying, or occupied with being hip and cool to really delve into any religious life with any amount of energy. Besides, the message was mostly negative, so why bother when you could insulate yourself from any moral or ethical or bigottedconfrontation by sticking with your own kind in a close-knit community.

We pitied the people in the rural areas just as the larger cities pitied people like us in the smaller ones. The pity flowed like a river, with imagined headwaters in San Francisco, picking up speed in New York and LA. The river churned through the south and finally curled inward to drench the rural midwest in a muddy blanket of pity from all the rest of the land.

"At least I don't live in the midwest", we'd say to each other. "Our city might not be the most progressive, but we have it better here than they do out in the backwards sticks."

The pity turned to horror when Matthew Sheppard was beaten to death in 1998, something universally assumed to be a hate crime within my community.

That more than anything proved in my mind that straight people were one cut above animals.

Of course I made exceptions. When I met a straight person that accepted either the equality of or the obvious superiority of bisexuality, or if they never gave me a reason to doubt them on these assumptions, then we got along famously. People expressing other beliefs were strictly limited to aquaintanceship at best.

In general, I believed that being bisexual in orientation meant the following.

I was more open-minded, accepting, and tolerant of others.
I was intellectually superior because I could handle ambiguity and was unafraid of conflicting ideologies. I could see paths out of most any intractable conflict.
I was a living symbol the shortcomings of monosexuality since I was capable of fully loving all people, not just those of a certain body type.
I was better at negotiation and communication.
I was more forgiving.

At some point, I realized that the cause and effect could not truly be proven. I could easily have become bisexual at some point in my life BECAUSE of a very strong training in communication, tolerance, and empathy, and not necessarily a better person DUE to being bisexual.

I got this message of communication, tolerance, and empathy from several sources and tried to run with it as best I could. But if I couldn't really prove a causality, then my snobbish attitude wasn't really valid.

This created the opportunity to be willing to move beyond identity politics. After meeting many more people that also felt a bit cramped by being defined by (and therefore marketed to, or politicized by) their orientation, it started to feel like a necessary political phase, and not an end condition. After meeting people who simply rejected labels on their orientation, which at the time seemed inexplicable (reject a label that important? when there is so much at stake? are you kidding? Don't you have any idea how bad the situation is! you're abandoning the cause!), I started to really think about the disadvantages as well as the advantages of allowing an identity to be defined by orientation.

What were we all working towards, if not to make sexual orientation largely meaningless as a predictor of value? I could no more argue that being bisexual makes someone better as a person, than the rest of mainstream america could argue that being bisexual makes someone worse as a person, although that attitude is still widely held (referencing the study "Heterosexuals' attitudes toward bisexual men and women in the United States" by Gregory M. Herek)

It would be nice if being bisexual made you a more advanced human. Then the recipe would be clear for a big step forward in human progress. To be honest, I still somewhat ascribe to that belief, but it's now more along the lines of self-affirmation or fuzzy daydream (sort of like my continuing happy dream of operating a small hardware store) instead of a prejudice.

Still to this day, however, I have the most trouble getting along with, understanding, and being friends with straight women. I can count the number of straight women friends that I have had in my life on one hand and not use all five fingers. Is this odd, considering that I'm a raving extrovert, and meet new people all the time? It can't be explained entirely by my hobbies and career, which are mostly male-oriented but not exclusively so. How male-oriented is knitting, sewing, quilting, and rose gardening? How come I can't seem to click with the large numbers of women I meet as a parent? I'm at home with little kids, and go days and days without meeting any men, especially if I just go to the play groups and school functions.

After all these meetings and groups and activities, the only person that I have clicked with in recent memory was someone's husband, mainly because he asked about the GPS receiver on the dash of my truck, and we talked enthusiastically about geocaching and hiking with our kids, and camping, and cars, and bear attacks, and random juvenile humor. His wife joined the conversation only haltingly, and didn't bother to maintain eye contact past the first few seconds.

The answer to the question of why conversations with men and queer women go so much better than with straight women is probably found more in my behaviour than theirs, but even deliberate attempts to include straight women in conversations either one-on-one or with men/boyfriends/husbands/queer women seems to fail regularly. Even if I devote all my attention to the particular assumed-to-be-straight woman, they tend to sidle off or appear uncomfortable or noncommittal.

Maybe the problem is that most straight women seem very boring to me. My assumptions about them have been that they care about their looks and status more than ideas and issues, that they tend to make decisions emotionally first and logically a distant second, that they expect both paternalism and feminism to coexist in their lives with no conflict, they tend to be mean-spirited and competitive about silly things, and that they don't have much of a sense of humor about life in general.

These are really negative assumptions, once you write them down and look at them. It takes effort to bash them back down beneath the noise of life. Negative assumptions create anxiety, which is easily apprehended as hostility, even when the anxious person doesn't really intend to project anything negative at all.

In the continuing process of trying to be an individual, which means you are composed of a lot of different facets of developing and sometimes conflicting identity, confronting assumptions like unsubstantiated feelings of superiority or the belief in negative group qualities about others almost seems like a requirement.

So that's a bit of my personal story on some of my experiences with identity politics and the belief that bisexuality is superior to monosexuality. I wonder what will happen going forward with the political and social scene in the US, when it comes to social science, philosophical and political developments, and identity politics, and whether or not it will continue to affect and shape how and what I think. I look forward to finding out.

identity politics
bisexuality
bisexual
prejudice
glbt
politics

Bisexuality Missing in Action as Academic Study Area? Not Exactly, But Then News Wasn't Good

2006-04-15T17:31:00.000-07:00

It's been about 10 years since I really dug into gender studies. I'm definitely not an expert in the field. I never took any advanced coursework in it at the college level. I developed a working knowledge of the field through asking professors who teach gender studies courses if I could have a copy of their syllabus and book lists. Then I went and bought these books and talked about the things I learned with whoever would bother to talk back with me. So, given those disclaimers, here's what I recently noticed.

In the mid-1990s, a variety of books were published about bisexuality. The pace seemed, to me, to have slowed in the current decade. So, I thought either something good has happened over the past 10-15 years (bisexuality isn't that big of a deal anymore) or something bad has happened (bisexuality isn't that big of a deal anymore).

"Anything That Moves", a magazine about bisexuality, started publication in 1996 and ended publication in 2004. If magazines start somewhat coterminous with a rise in interest, and hang on for a bit after the decline of a supporting base, then the window seems to follow the rise and either decline or leveling off of books published about the subject.

So, I did an informal survey of books published from 1989 to the present to see if the reality fit my impression. Here's the books I know about, have, or have read and when they were published.

Needless to say, the amount of porn that one gets when trying to find blogs, web pages, or anything on the internet about bisexuality is immense. However, I did my scholarly duty of examining each bit to make sure it wasn't a book.

When Husbands Come Out of the Closet (Haworth Series on Women: No. 1) (Paperback)
by Jean S. Gochros 1989

Bi Any Other Name Edited by Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu 1991
Anthology of coming-out stories.

Closer to Home: Bisexuality & Feminism (Women's Studies/Gay Studies) by Elizabeth Reba Weise 1992
Feminism linked with bisexuality.

Women and Bisexuality by Sue George (Paperback - Aug 1993)

The Other Side of the Closet by Amity Buxton 1994
This is the only book I ever reviewed on amazon.com. It portrays coming out as a portent of an inevitable end to a marriage. There are no positive depictions in this book for gay, lesbian, and bi people. The only way to happiness is divorce.

Dual Attraction : Understanding Bisexuality by by Martin S. Weinberg, Colin J. Williams, Douglas W. Pryor 1995

Vice Versa by Marjorie Garber 1995

Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics by Paula Rust 1995
Biphobia and identify politics. Why bisexuality appears to function as such a divisive issue for the lesbian community

Representing Bisexualities: Subjects and Cultures of Fluid Desire by Donald E. Hall 1996
Thoroughly postmodern, scholarly to the point of, well, it's hard to tell.

Identity without Selfhood : Simone de Beauvoir and Bisexuality by Mariam Fraser 1999

Bisexuality: A Critical Reader Edited by Merl Storr 1999

Bisexuality in the United States by Paula C. Rodriguez Rust 1999
Review of academic work through 1999. Leads off with a quote by Thomas Kuhn, which always warms the cockles of my heart. Quite good.

Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life by Marjorie Garber (Paperback - Feb 2000)
A republication of Vice Versa.

Bisexuality in the Lives of Men: Facts and Fictions by Brett Beemyn and Erich W. Steinman (Paperback - Jan 2001)

A History of Bisexuality (The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society) (Paperback)
by Steven Angelides 2001
Bisexuals are invisible. Duh.

Bisexuality (Pocket Essentials) by Angie Bowie (Paperback - May 2002)
Light fun and frothy.

Bisexual and Gay Husbands: Their Stories, Their Words (Paperback)
by Fritz Klein (Editor), Thomas Schwartz (Editor) 2002

Current Research on Bisexuality (Paperback) 2004
by Ronald C. Fox (Editor) This study examined how bisexually-identified individuals experience cultural attitudes toward bisexuality, how they establish a sense of community for themselves, and how their experience has affected their self-concept."

The Sex And Love Handbook: Polyamory! Bisexuality! Swingers! Spirituality! & Even Monogamy! A Practical Optimistic Relationship Guide by Kris A. Heinlein and Rozz M. Heinlein (Paperback - Jul 31, 2004)
Yes, it really does have all those exclamation marks in the title. This is mainly a book about non-monogamy and lifestyle choices, heavily supported with anecdotes. It's therefore primarily a "self-help" book for enhancing communication between people that have already chosen to be non-monogamous. It seems to include bisexual people as an afterthought. Non-academic.

Is He Straight : A Checklist for Women Who Wonder (Paperback) 2000 and 2004
A book purporting to provide a checklist to make sure you don't marry a gay guy. Not especially positive portrayals of gay or bi men.

Bi America: Myths, Truths, And Struggles Of An Invisible Community by William E. Burleson 2005

Essentially the same definitions established by earlier work, and the same assertion of invisibility. A history of the "movement" is included with the somewhat more useful examination of 13 myths about bisexuality from a focus group.

Bisexuals are easy, indiscriminate about who they have sex with
all bisexuals are swingers
Bisexuals have the best of both worlds, twice as likely to get a date
Bisexuals are unable to commit to either gender
Bisexuals are wives just trying to please their husbands, husbands justifying cheating
Bisexuality is just a phase on the way to being lesbian or gay
Bisexuals are unable to be happy, have low self-esteem, or are mentally ill
Bisexuals are disease carriers
Bisexuals are a very small part of the population
Bisexuals are just trying to maintain het privilege
Bisexuals can't be feminists
Bisexuals just want to be trendy
Bisexuality is a choice

Although the rate of publication seems approximately the same (no real decline like I thought), you can see a trend away from the political towards the academic and the practical. Anthologies are mostly about coming-out stories and are positive, but there are some very negative portrayals in anthologies such as The Other Side of the Closet and some silly checklist "make sure you have a real man" self-help books. However, real progress in the gender/orientation studies arena seemed to be happening.

Then I came across this study.

There was a Journal of Sex Research article in 2002 that concluded "heterosexuals dislike bisexuals more than gays, lesbians and most religous or enthnic groups."

Here is part of the article.

Heterosexuals' attitudes toward bisexual men and women in the United States.

by Gregory M. Herek

Although patterns of bisexual behavior have been documented throughout history and across cultures (e.g., Carrier, 1985; Ford & Beach, 1951; Fox, 1996; Herdt, 1990), bisexual men and women in the United States have gained recognition as a distinct sexual minority only recently. Bisexuals began to form social and political groups in the 1970s (Donaldson, 1995; Weinberg, Williams, & Pryor, 1994), but it was not until the late 1980s that an organized bisexual movement began to achieve widespread visibility in the United States (Herdt, 2001; Paul, 1983; Rust, 1995; Udis-Kessler, 1995). Around the same time, the heterosexual public became more aware of bisexual men as a group at heightened risk for HIV infection (Gelman, 1987). By the early 1990s, bisexuals were becoming an established presence in the organized gay movement, as reflected in discussions of bisexuality in the gay and lesbian press and the addition of "bisexual" to the names of many gay and lesbian organizations and events (Rust, 1995). Throughout the 1990s, the mass media frequently featured images of bisexuals (Hutchins, 1996; Leland, 1995).

Given the culture's relatively recent recognition of "the bisexual" as a category of sexual identity, it is not surprising that empirical research on heterosexuals' attitudes toward bisexuality and bisexual persons is scant. Like lesbians and gay men, bisexual women and men experience hostility, discrimination, and violence because of their sexual orientation (Ochs, 1996; Paul & Nichols, 1988; Weinberg et al., 1994). Unfortunately, the prevalence of such experiences is difficult to gauge because empirical studies of sexual minorities generally have not included bisexuals in their samples or they have combined data from bisexual and homosexual respondents in their published reports.

That's the introduction - skipping down to the definitions of measurement:

Measures

Attitudes Toward Bisexual Men and Women

Attitudes toward bisexual men and women were measured with 101-point feeling thermometers, which have been widely used in survey research (e.g., Herek & Capitanio, 1999b; Sapiro, Rosenstone, Miller, & the National Election Studies, 1998). Higher ratings (maximum = 100) indicate warmer, more favorable feelings toward the target whereas lower ratings (minimum = 0) indicate colder, more negative feelings. The instructions for the feeling thermometers were: "These next questions are about some of the different groups in the United States. I'll read the name of a group and ask you to rate the group on a thermometer that runs from zero (0) to one hundred (100). The higher the number, the warmer or more favorable you feel toward that group. The lower the number, the colder or less favorable you feel. If you feel neither warm nor cold toward them, rate that group a fifty (50)."

Attitudes Toward Other Groups

The thermometers for bisexuals were embedded in a longer series of feeling thermometers that were grouped by topic in the following order: (a) religious groups ("Protestants," "Catholics," "Jews"); (b) gay people ("men who are homosexual," "women who are lesbian or homosexual"); (c) "people who inject illegal drugs"; (d) "people with AIDS"; (e) racial, ethnic, and national groups ("Blacks," "Mexican Americans," "Puerto Ricans," "Whites," "Haitians"); (f) bisexuals ("bisexual men," "bisexual women"); and (g) groups defined by their stance on abortion rights ("people who call themselves pro-life and are opposed to abortion," "people who call themselves pro-choice and support abortion rights").

For the racial-ethnic thermometers, respondents rated their own group after they rated the other racial and ethnic groups. Within the gay, bisexual, and abortion thermometer groups, item order was randomized (e.g., one half of respondents rated "bisexual women" first and the remainder rated "bisexual men" first). Randomization was independent across groups (e.g., the order of thermometers in the gay series was unrelated to the order of the bisexual series). Responses to the bisexual thermometers did not vary by order of administration.

And then finally part of the results section of this study

"Mean thermometer scores for bisexual men and women were 43.4 and 45.8, respectively, and were strongly correlated, r (1273) = .90, p < .001. As shown in Table 1, feelings toward bisexuals were colder (less favorable) than toward any other group except injecting drug users." The sample's generally negative attitudes toward bisexuals were also evident in the number of respondents giving the lowest and highest possible ratings. Compared to most other groups, bisexual men and women received a rating of zero more often and a rating of 100 less often. Approximately 11% of respondents (n = 140) gave the lowest possible thermometer score for bisexual men, and 9% (n = 116) gave a zero rating for bisexual women. All but one of the respondents who gave a zero rating for bisexual women also gave a zero rating for bisexual men.

Whew.

So... whatever "trendiness" is associated with being bisexual, as mentioned in several national news magazines over the previous decade, must not have translated into a positive perception on the part of the surveyed heterosexuals. Despite almost two decades of anthologies of coming out stories, surveys of bisexuality, bisexuality in popular culture, and academic works that are pretty good, the negative waves are still rolling into shore.

I think that the identity politics that lead to the marginalization of bisexuality from the gay community seem to have lessened as a point of discussion. I can understand the reasons, up to a point, for "queer political purity". Dilution of the lobby means less political capital. Bisexuals were "encouraged" to be counted with gays and lesbians. There was a conscious effort to include us in the names of organizations, if not necessarily in the community.

I can see where heterosexual angst about bisexuals may have spread. Being blamed for being the conduit of HIV infection from the "dirty" homosexual population to the "clean" straight population early on in the pandemic wasn't an unusual thing. With the stereotype of being sex-crazed, bisexuals made good boogeymen.

Maybe the overall concept of identity politics with respect to sexual orientation is fading. This might be due to the influence of postmodernism, or might be due to some sort of natural plateau that successful activists have achieved.

The more accepted and normal an identity (gay, straight, bi) is, then the less need for a separate community. The separation, agitation, and activist process eventually makes enough progress to where the people that take action feel that they've "changed" society enough to "rejoin" it. Or, at least, it's "good enough" for them. That doesn't mean that people coming after them, upon evaluating the same society, won't separate, agitate, and activate for further change.

Prejudice to tolerance to respect to full membership in the community is a very long process for certain groups. "Separate but equal" and "Don't ask, don't tell" and "you can keep your kids as long as you don't act in certain ways in front of them" are all stages in that process.

When the subject comes up, I am still told by some that I don't exist, that it's just a phase, or am immediately invited to swinger parties. With the exception of the assumption that I'm a swinger, the other two types of communication have certainly lessened through time.

This last issue - the "hot bi babe" phenomenon (regardless of the total lack of hotness that would be me) is the one thing that seems to be the most persistent. With the increasing awareness of polyamory, non-monogamy, acceptability of the discussion of adultery, swinging, and so on, this seems to be the natural course of many discussions about being bisexual.

The assumption that bisexuals are inherently non-monogamous seems to be a widely held one.

The assumption that bisexuals "have" to have partners of both genders to be "real" bisexuals is as silly as defining all virgins as having no sexual orientation at all until they have sex with someone.

The invisibility issue is quite intractable. Unless an effort it deliberately made, over the course of each friendship, relationship, acquaintanceship, or contact, to express your "identity", then people will simply assume according to whatever context they meet you in. Some people simply don't see their sexual orientation as a part of their identity in any way that requires them to "confess" it or make a point of it. It takes more effort to explain that you're bisexual if you appear to be heterosexual or homosexual by the relationship you're in. Many bisexual people prefer it this way. Not making waves lets you fit in. Fitting in has inherent social value. Why quibble over a silly label?

In the end, all of these issues and the seemingly successful progress, when reflected against the 2003 survey quoted above, seem to indicate that there is still a lot more work ahead for those that want to eliminate the negative stereotypes surrounding bisexuality.

bisexual
sex research
psychology

A Letter Home

2006-04-14T12:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Mentor,

A while back (10 years ago now) you asked me to think about why scientists should study humanities and the arts.

I took this seriously, and have done a lot of reading and writing in the meantime. Im sorry about my progress being really slow, but the more you find out, the more you find out you really have no clue about what you just thought you had figured out, and that the entire thing is a whole lot more interesting than it first appeared.

Anyway, so far this is what I have.

If a scientist or engineer (or any technologist) makes a good faith effort to study the humanities, then they will not end up like, for example, Richard Dawkins. Thats pretty much it. Its really that simple. But, since you've already read this far, and hopefully dont feel like the idea is a waste of your time to read a page or two about, Ill go on.

Reading certain authors, whether they be Richard Dawkins, or Carl Sagan, or any one of a number of those permanently blinded by what-they-think-the-Enlightenment-is types, is like embracing a supermodel.

First, you run your hand down her very reasonable shoulder, past her sculpted upper arm, through the lovely enlightened inner elbow, letting your fingers massage the velvety soft skin of her perfect forearm. You long to hold her hand and run off into the sunset with her, feeling like you can understand your world with her, and that you will live happily ever after, secure in the knowledge that youre better than everyone else because youre a smarty-pants. Your life is truly better because youve been introduced to the supermodel. This is beyond question. Youre head and shoulders above where you were before.

Then, you come abruptly to the bloody stump of an amputation.

All the while the supermodel smiles at you, beckoning you to continue following her past the scientific method to empiricism or rationalism or secular humanism or atheism or pretty-much-any-ism. She reassures you that all is well, that all that mysticism and philosophical liberal arts mumbo-jumbo doesnt mean anything anyway, and is just a bunch of ignorant claptrap.

But she's bleeding to death, there on the couch.

The challenge to scientists is manifold. Scientific people have had a heck of a time this century. To go from the heady days of the 1920s, where science seemed to be on the verge of conquering all problems and would usher in a new modernity, free of toil and disease, to the Depression, where technological unemployment was (rightly or wrongly) blamed for much of the misery, to World War II, where scientists became associated with bombs, and weapons, and entered into an enduring symbiosis with the government, never to truly emerge as an independent class again, through decades of being portrayed as people who only memorize formulas, lack creativity, and have no fun, and finally to the present where they are all of the above and less - to go through all of this perhaps narrows the mind, creates a defensiveness, an over-reliance on empiricism, a replacement of a healthy worldview with nothing more than Occam's Razor as your weapon. Speaking as a technologist, its quite a tempting worldview.

At the very least, an effort made to study the humanities arms the scientist with a tourniquet to go with the razor.

As I remember, for the razor to cut, there must be some real solutions, and there must be some truly extraneous explanations. However, too often, I see surgery where none is required on the part of the scientist. This leads directly to bad science, not to mention the tendency to then liberally apply Occam's Razor to people, their identities, interests, orientations, beliefs, arts, and practices.

This can result in a world that not even the most hardcore scientist would truly want to live in.

Specifically, in the case of bad science - to pathologize something such as culture, homosexuality, religion, certain observable scientific realities, and then hack them off with your razor, to the delight of you or your audience, often results in a delay of discovery.

Who would have predicted that there would be thousands of studies showing the health benefits of religiosity, if everyone had believed Freud or if everyone went along with Dawkins? Surprise, being religious may be hard-wired into our DNA. Religiosity may actually have enhanced our evolutionary progress as humans, instead of hampering it.

The values of certain things wax and wane. There are as many fads in scientific thinking as there are in philosophy, or music, or fashion. If this is appreciated, a scientist becomes that much more powerful.

Scientific progress does not equate with or ensure social progress. It would be so nice if it did, but we can clearly see otherwise. The tendency of many scientists to take credit for the good while denying any culpability for the bad is something that can often be addressed through a study of humanities.

For all the attention paid to a separation between church and state - arguably a separation that has benefited US churches far more than the US government - precious little attention is ever given to a separation between science and state.

Government funds a lot of science. Government uses a lot of science. Money always comes with strings. Governmental motives are, I would argue, largely incompatible with pure research. It's worth asking whether or not tremendous distortions in the achievements of science have occurred with a lack of separation between science and government. Without an appreciation for political and social history, without an introduction to some of the basic philosophical concepts that lead to classical liberalism and the roots of our own Constitution, is it probable that the average scientist would see anything wrong with the current situation that they are ensconced within?

The great power of a scientist or engineer is often the sharpened curiosity and the years (or decades) spent becoming a better problem solver. Due to the realities of the division of labor, sometimes something has to be given up in order to allow the engineer or scientist to be an engineer or scientist. At some point, however, an integration and optimization has to occur at the grand systems level.

This is a fancy way of saying that at some point scientists (I'm speaking both of scientists in general and as a scientific person myself) really need to get a clue about what it means to be human. Otherwise, incurvatus est is their (our) destiny, and they (we) end up doubting every truth but their (our) own.

Hence, you have people like Richard Dawkins, who traversed the sky of his adult life from the rosy dawn of productive and positive pro-science writing to the smoggy sunset of anti-religious polemic, thus wasting years of his life expressing hatred at and for something that he claims is meaningless. Incurvatus est.

This is a great failing of intellect, not a triumph of it. Fundamentalism follows, and then fossilization sets in, only to be ruptured later by some sort of tectonic intellectual groundswell. A study of the humanities won't change the reality of the structure of scientific revolution, but my feeling is that it directly improves both the quality of the scientific work done as well as empowering the scientist to take a more active and more productive role in society.

Yours always,

-Mitch

philosophy
religion

Don't make me YAQ - Yet Another Quiz (religious humor)

2006-04-12T19:59:00.000-07:00

Section 2: Short Answer

1. Define reality. Give two (2) examples.
2. Using only basic first order logic, develop a rational foundation from which to prove the truth of radical relativism.
3. Analyze the fundamental nature of being. Introduce new distinctions and obfuscatory neologisms.
4. Escape the hermeneutic circle with only fishing line and a Swiss Army knife.
5. Demonstrate the validity of the fallacy of composition.
6. Evaluate the following argument: "If conventionalism is true, it must be true by convention. We do not believe in conventionalism. Therefore, we should change our beliefs because conventionalism is self-evident."
7. Translate Heidegger's Being and Time into Latin and Aramaic. Provide an analysis of the nature of translation which explains why neither translation makes sense.
8. Assume solipsism to be correct. Explain why more people aren't solipsists.
9. Explain the Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa without going into any intentional states, e.g. thinking of Descartes.
10. List three beliefs held by eliminative materialists.

See the rest of the quiz here.

religious humor

Six Saints of Separation

2006-04-12T18:53:00.000-07:00

Most days, the conversations with my dad go something like this (my apologies to anyone offended by any perceived irreverence, please direct your complaint here ).

Roger Thompson says:
Hi!
Michelle says:
hi there! how's it going?
Roger Thompson says:
Tired, long day in meetings, 3 hours, 27 minutes drive home.
Michelle says:
you're home? excellent!
Michelle says:
welcome back
Roger Thompson says:
Thank you, we escaped Jackson.
Roger Thompson says:
What is going on there?
Michelle says:
lots of reading, plenty of nothing else
Roger Thompson says:
Not much to read here! Guess I'll have to do some lawn work tomorrow after work and Rotary.
Michelle says:
yay for rotary! you probably are going to take it easy tonight I bet
Roger Thompson says:
We get lots of church this week.
Michelle says:
we do too
Michelle says:
funny that
Michelle says:
we had palm sunday, holy monday-wednesday, tomorrow is chrism mass, holy thursday, vigil mass, then Good Friday 12-step-program through the stations of the cross, then Good Friday mass at night...
Michelle says:
I forget what saturday is... oh yes! Easter Vigil. The big one. Then Easter Sunday, the relaxed one.
Roger Thompson says:
I meant to say earlier, "Some people get lots of church this week."
Roger Thompson says:
We have it easy.
Michelle says:
you guys are busy too!
Michelle says:
you got some of this stuff
Michelle says:
"catholicism: every day is a feast day!"
Roger Thompson says:
Yes?
Roger Thompson says:
Catholics eat a lot?
Michelle says:
oh yeah
Michelle says:
I think "feast" is a great term...
Roger Thompson says:
We have some sort of dinner tomorrow night....
Michelle says:
some days are triple booked for feasts for various long-dead important people
Michelle says:
yum! food!
Michelle says:
i love feasts
Roger Thompson says:
Just think. Given no removal process for saints, etc., then you will have every day oversubscribed.
Michelle says:
totally. then jp2 added a whole bunch more.
Michelle says:
I heard a rumor that St. Christopher was getting removed because of some sort of problem proving he really lived.
Roger Thompson says:
Obviously a case for class definitions and modular techniques.
Michelle says:
hey! you are right!
Michelle says:
we have saints for both
Roger Thompson says:
Probably a saint for MSM.
Michelle says:
plus, don't forget the PASCAL sacrifice.
Michelle says:
I bet you thought that was something about lambs
Roger Thompson says:
Or doors or something.
Michelle says:
<checks for church survelliance>
Roger Thompson says:
What's that light in the western sky....
Roger Thompson says:
login:
Michelle says:
St. Isidore of Seville is the patron saint of the internet
Roger Thompson says:
ybkm!
Michelle says:
really!
Roger Thompson says:
What about Al Gore?
Michelle says:
he's the Patron Faint of the internet
Roger Thompson says:
snicker
Roger Thompson says:
I had no idea....
Roger Thompson says:
So, who is the patron saint of yagi antennas? Need info before next contest.
Michelle says:
I've always liked how Catherine of Bologna is the patron saint of the liberal arts.
Roger Thompson says:
Better yet, what about lotteries?
Michelle says:
"It's all balony"
Michelle says:
St. Notkar Balbulus is the patron saint of Stammering Children
Michelle says:
I'm not making this up, either
Roger Thompson says:
You must be.
Roger Thompson says:
Is there a saint reference book?
Michelle says:
there are four DIFFERENT patron saints of "disappointing children"
Michelle says:
* Clotilde
* Louise de Marillac
* Matilda
* Monica

Michelle says:
yes, there sure is. catholics create references for everything.
Michelle says:
http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/indexsnt.htm
Michelle says:
see, that's why children are so difficult. They have FOUR different saints on their side
Michelle says:
FOUR!
Roger Thompson says:
I'm overcome.
Michelle says:
wait, how many do "parents" have.
Roger Thompson says:
I was checking migraine sufferers, should be the same.
Michelle says:
Great. Gerard Majella. A man is the patron saint of motherhood.
Michelle says:
I guess this is payback for Mary being the mother of the church.
Roger Thompson says:
Peoria has a saint, but not Mississippi. This could be serious.
Michelle says:
wait! Gerard is just for expectant mothers!
Michelle says:
moms are totally unguarded by patron saints
Michelle says:
unless they're expectant. This is obviously a conspiracy.
Michelle says:
Mississippi is saintless?
Michelle says:
this could definitely be serious
Roger Thompson says:
mothers
Anne
Gerard Majella
Monica

Michelle says:
whew!
Michelle says:
ok 3 against 4, that's more like it
Michelle says:
Is there a patron saint of triangles? maybe that could cover the Mississippi delta.
Roger Thompson says:
accountants
Matthew the Apostle
Roger Thompson says:
Cannot be . Check lawyers.
Michelle says:
ok, that makes sense. make the guy that gave away all earthly possessions to follow some carpenter the patron saint of accountants.
Roger Thompson says:
The record is incomplete as to the receiver of the possessions.....
Michelle says:
PATRON SAINT INDEX TOPIC

attorneys, lawyers, barristers

* Catherine of Alexandria
* Genesius
* Ivo of Kermartin
* Mark the Evangelist
* Raymond of Penyafort
* Thomas More
Michelle says:
SIX!
Roger Thompson says:
Needed.
Michelle says:
and they need all the help they can get
Roger Thompson says:
diocese of San Diego, California
St. Diego

Michelle says:
San Diego... St. Diego - how original.
Michelle says:
Saint Nicholas of Myra - Patron Saint of Pawnbrokers
Michelle says:
Saint Blandina - Patron Saint of those Falsely Accused of Cannibalism
Michelle says:
Saint Drogo and Saint Germaine - Patron Saints of the Really Ugly
Michelle says:
There are 16 Patron Saints for Bachelors. 16.
Roger Thompson says:
No patron for beer.
Michelle says:
Four Patron Saints for those Rejected by Monks and Nuns

Believe it or not, there was once a time in which there was a surplus of people wanting to be monks and nuns. People actually gave up everything they owned, left their families, trudged off to convents or monasteries, and were turned down. Not only that, this apparently happened often enough that there are four patron saints, just for these
Michelle says:
well, there is one for alcoholics
Michelle says:
Saint Monica - Patron Saint of Alcoholics
Michelle says:
Saint Clare of Assisi - Patron Saint of Television
Michelle says:
television sort of goes along with beer
Roger Thompson says:
Well, I hope the tests on this are easy.
Michelle says:
there's only about 5000 saints.
Michelle says:
it was fairly easy to memorize <twitch>
Roger Thompson says:
Yes........I guess.
Roger Thompson says:
I can see there was too much time on someone's hands.
Roger Thompson says:
So who got the nod on the elections?
Michelle says:
ah HA
Michelle says:
PATRON SAINT INDEX TOPIC

brewers

* Amand
* Arnulf of Soissons
* Augustine of Hippo
* Barbara
* Boniface
* Dorothy of Caesarea
* Florian
* Lawrence
* Luke the Apostle
* Medard
* Nicholas of Myra
* Wenceslas

Michelle says:
12!
Michelle says:
two six-packs of patron saints for BREWING!
Michelle says:
no one won a plurality in the election.
Roger Thompson says:
Luke?
Michelle says:
so, we have a run-off election on June 6th between the top demopub and the top republicrat.
Michelle says:
Now, this election will elect someone for the remaining 7 months of Duke's term.
Michelle says:
it will also be the same election for the next term.
Roger Thompson says:
So the winner could get two boats?
Michelle says:
so we're electing the replacement, and the replacement for the replacement, in the same election, on the same day.
Michelle says:
yes! the winner could get TWO boats!
Michelle says:
plus a 7-month headstart on the antiques
Roger Thompson says:
Only in California.
Michelle says:
only here!
Michelle says:
Gabriel the Archangel is the patron saint of radio
Roger Thompson says:
Well, Duke had airplanes, too.
Michelle says:
maybe save that for the third term
Roger Thompson says:
I shall name my next radio computer Gabriel.
Michelle says:
St. Roch is the patron saint of dogs
Michelle says:
St. Patrick is the patron saint of engineers. Patrick Gabriel has a nice ring to it
Roger Thompson says:
Yes.
Michelle says:
St. Zita is the patron saint of lost keys
Michelle says:
Ken is quite familiar with her.
Roger Thompson says:
Hattie, at the doggie day camp tonight, wishes for a patron.
Roger Thompson says:
So what about the pasta?
Michelle says:
St. Amand is for vintners. Apparently, they need a little extra help over and above the 12 brewer saints.
Roger Thompson says:
Isn't zita a pasta?
Michelle says:
I think it is!!
Michelle says:
the keys are obviously related to the pasta
Roger Thompson says:
Keys lost in attempt to recover lost pasta...
Michelle says:
ok here's a good combo
Roger Thompson says:
Well, perhaps we should return to discussions of immigration or national defense.
Michelle says:
St. Elmo is the patron saint of ammunition, explosive workers, ordnance, sailors, women in labor
Michelle says:
somehow, all of these things go together...
Roger Thompson says:
Hmmm.
Roger Thompson says:
Is this a joke book?
Michelle says:
nope!
Michelle says:
all real
Michelle says:
St. Genevieve is the patron saint of both paris AND disasters.
Roger Thompson says:
Same.
Roger Thompson says:
Makes perfect sense.
Michelle says:
it does make a strange sort of sense!
Michelle says:
St. Vitus is the patron saint of comedians, dancers, and epilepsy
Michelle says:
St. Willirbrord is the patron saint of epilepsy, Netherlands
Michelle says:
thus linking dancing with the Netherlands
Michelle says:
and comedy
Michelle says:
this is like the six saints of separation

And so we bid each other good night.

religious humor

Iraq War Costs Too Much and is Fundamentally Wrong

2006-04-11T15:56:00.000-07:00

The Iraq war will have cost $315 billion by September 30, 2006, the end of fiscal year 2006.

From
http://www.whitehouse.gov/homeland/book/sect5.pdf

"The United States spends roughly $100 billion per year on homeland security. This includes the services of federal, state, and local law enforcement and emergency services but excludes most spending for the armed forces. The cost is great, and we will strive to minimize the sacrifices asked of Americans, but as a Nation we will spend whatever is necessary to secure the homeland.

In recent years, the federal government has allocated considerable resources to homeland security. Including supplemental funding, the federal budget allocated $17 billion to homeland security in Fiscal Year 2001. This amount increased to $29 billion in Fiscal Year 2002. In Fiscal Year 2003, the President budgeted $38 billion for homeland security activities. These budget allocations must be viewed as down payments to cover the most immediate security vulnerabilities."

2006 budget proposal for DHS is $41 billion.

Spending "whatever is necesary to secure the homeland" is exactly the sort of thinking a traditional Republican opposes. "Whatever is necessary" is hardly ever "what is truly needed".

Spending "Whatever is necessary to educate our children" or spending "whatever is necessary to defeat poverty" or spending "whatever is necessary to win the war on drugs" or spending "whatever is necessary to defeat the North Vietnamese" should all sound really familiar by now. All have resulted in massive cost overruns, high and continuing tax burdens, extensive collateral damage, earmarking and interest-group hijacking, and have delivered minimal positive effects. Good intentions are really difficult to implement correctly when it's all someone else's money.

In reality, there is no way to spend ourselves into security. It's a charade of security addiction. In fact, real security improvements can be purchased with a whole lot less money that what we're spending to continue to occupy Iraq.

From
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/09/08_402.html

Bush administration officials used to say that the war on terrorism had to be fought "in Baghdad, not Boston." You don't hear that line much anymore, yet it's clearly reflected in the administration's spending priorities. The war in Iraq so far has cost $150 billion; for the Department of Homeland Security, the administration has allocated $27 billion this year, with the bulk of that going to the routine operations of agencies like the Customs Service. When it comes to new programs to make planes, trains, ports, and urban centers safer, there's precious little left over—which is why a range of critics, from local firefighters to Republican members of Congress, have lambasted Bush for shortchanging the nation's true homeland security needs. Below, a sample of those needs, along with Bush's budget allocations, compared with the time it takes to burn through the same amount in Iraq.

Amount needed for basic security upgrades for subway and commuter trains in large cities: $6 BILLION
(Iraq spending equivalent: 20 days)

Bush budget allocation for train security: $100 MILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 8 hours)

Amount needed to equip all U.S. airports with machines that screen baggage for explosives: $3 BILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 10 days)

Bush budget allocation for baggage-screening machines: $400 MILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 32 hours)

Amount needed for security upgrades at 361 U.S. ports: $1.1 BILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 4 days)

Bush budget allocation for port security: $210 MILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 17 hours)

Amount needed to buy radiation portals for U.S. ports to detect dirty bombs in cargo: $290 MILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 23 hours)

Bush budget allocation for radiation portals: $43 MILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 3 hours)

Amount needed to help local firefighters preparefor terrorist attacks: $36.8 BILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 122 days)

Bush budget allocation for firefighter grants: $500 MILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 40 hours)

Amount needed to get local emergency medical crews ready for terrorist atttacks: $1.4 BILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 5 days)

Bush budget allocation for emergency medical training grants prior to eliminating program altogether: $50 MILLION
(Iraq equivalent: 4 hours)

Sources:

All Bush allocation figures taken from administration estimates of FY 2005 budget

Subway and rail security upgrades
Amount needed: Statement by William W. Millar, president of the American Public Transportation Association, 5/20/04

Baggage screening
Amount needed: Government Accountability Office, "Aviation Security: Challenges Exist in Stabilizing and Enhancing Passenger and Baggage Screening Operations" [PDF], 2/12/04, p. 28

Port security upgrades
American Association of Port Authorities, "AAPA Concerned FY '05 Lacks Funds For Port Facility Security", 2/2/04

Radiation portals
Amount needed: Calculation based on figures from House Committee on Appropriations (Total cost of radiation portals: $495.5 million. Amount already spent: $205.5 million. Remaining amount: $290 million)

Firefighter preparedness
Amount needed: Council on Foreign Relations, "Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Underprepared", p. 34

Emergency medical preparedness
Amount needed: Council on Foreign Relations, "Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Underprepared", p. 37

Being categorically opposed to pre-emptive laws - let alone pre-emptive war - it should be no surprise to anyone that I completely oppose the occupation of Iraq, which was presented by the Bush Administration as a pre-emptive war. This unmitigated disaster of a decision will have long-term consequences for the nation, none of which can be easily rectified.

Yes, some good has been done in the process. However, from where I sit, the good does not and can not balance out the bad. It's not simply that the ends doesn't justify the means, it's the fact that the means naturally causes more evil than the good that happens to come from the means. Pre-emptive wars never liberate, they only enslave. They enslave the warring nation to a degree that is equal to or greater than the resulting enslavement of a population to a foreign occupier. People simply don't like being occupied, regardless of the reason. Occupation never results in a society flourishing. To expect otherwise is be in the grip of a special kind of egoistic denial.

Perhaps, relatively improbably, democracy will take root in Iraq and then spread around to other nation-states in the region. Recently, The Economist magazine declared this to be about the only thing that Bush got right in Iraq - the need for democracy in the Middle East as a way of solving global tension and conflict.

This would require a heretofore unknown process of externally forced culture-to-government creation.

Democracy at gunpoint has worked in what other situation? None that I can find. In fact, there are plenty of examples of failure of trying to force democracy along with violence.

The war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, interventions in Panama, Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia, and the invasion of Grenada are all sobering examples of what happens when you try to either institute democracy by force, or pre-empt another nation's politics. In the case of each of these examples, the "democracy excuse" was in hindsight either remarkably and unjustifiably idealistic, or a relatively weak public relations excuse for military action. If there is a situation where a pre-emptive war created a democratic system of government where it didn't exist before, I'd like to know about it.

From
http://www.cato.org/dailys/11-30-03.html

"British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who declared in his famous 1946 Iron Curtain speech that "we must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man," but that "it is not our duty ... to interfere forcibly in the internal affairs of countries."

Churchill urged the Free World to lead by principled example, not to impose such principles by force; adopting the latter course risks subverting these principles from within, and thus eroding the foundations of our own democracy as we propose to build new democratic foundations abroad. The reality is that the ingredients for successful democracy are found in domestic political kitchens. Democracy is a dish that Iraqis and others throughout the Middle East must prepare for themselves."

This war costs too much and is fundamentally wrong.

iraq war

politics

economics

Is Economic Growth Bad?

2006-04-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

Is Economic Growth Bad?

No. But if economic growth depends on the conversion of natural resources through a manufacturing process into products that are then used by people or businesses, and if those natural resources are finite, then the faster we grow, the sooner we run out.

Since there is no end-state, no winning condition, of capitalism, and since there are conditions where productivity gains can ratchet upwards without much in the way of control, it would make sense to actually start thinking about what "winning" or "success" in capitalism means.

A long list of people have tried to answer this question. Everyone's version of a sucessful life is different. Behaviour of people in aggregate, however, shows little to no possibility of ending the consumerism without some sort of external or internal intervention. So, what to do?

If defined only in relative terms (standard of living compared to a baseline, or how much more money you make than average) then the ratcheting continues unabated. If everyone strives to make more money than average, and then succeeds, then inflation follows. Everyone would like more for less.Capitalism very often delivers exactly that - more for less.

The barbed hooks hidden in the velvet pillow are the depletion of finite resources, exploitation of the less powerful leading to amazing amounts of wealth disparity, and epic greed crimes.

What about a separation of business and state? A real one, modeled after the separation of church and state, which has served both spheres quite well in the US. Would it work?

economics

Evolution Debate as Red Herring?

2006-04-09T16:37:00.000-07:00

My take on the creation science debate being a red herring is actually not entirely original. I’ve long considered the creation vs. evolution debate it to be a solved legal problem that requires maintenance, sort of like weeding a garden after you’ve done all the work planning, and planting, and pruning. What do you do when you have weeds? You pull them, of course.

However, once you start pulling up these particular weeds in the garden you realize that the weed is actually not the problem.

Being from a state with quite the history of dealing with the controversy (Arkansas) is both an advantage and a disadvantage here.

It’s a disadvantage because it can polarize to the point of paralysis and the extremists get most of the press. The debate monopolizes your attention to the point that you think the debate is the issue. Constantly being made fun of by people from other states or regions gets old fast. You can start to fall for the inferiority complex. You begin to self-flagellate. You go on crusades. You get taken advantage of, which is what this essay ends up being about.

It’s an advantage because of the opportunity, if you made the effort, of being able to observe something truly devious, elegant, and deceptively complex in practice. And you also get to practice debating. A lot.

I’m going to start with a political assertion from Thomas Frank (“What’s the Matter with Kansas”). This expands the creation science debate by quite a bit. Instead of it being simply a conflict of ideology (“defend science against those in-denial bible-thumpers!” or “defend our faith from the heresy of the dogma of atheism!”), the debate can be explained as a conflict that exploits the emotions of both sides for tremendous political capital, which is then spent in an entirely different direction. Frank identifies three issues that are most likely to be used in this manner. Abortion, Homosexuality, and Evolution. I’d add Flag Burning and English as the Official Language as supporting case members.

The recipe for Applied Republicanism that follows is from the point of view that capitalism is the most important activity that government can support, and that capitalism solves all problems. Capitalism and free markets are more efficient for solving social problems than government. Government is the problem, not the solution, unless you are rich, and then it is the solution.

People that aren’t participating in capitalism are not generally good consumers. People that aren’t good consumers are not patriotic because they are not supporting capitalism. People that are not patriotic are dangerous. Dangerous people must be neutralized.

This is the dominant view of the Republican Party in America. There are exceptions and modifications to this general attitude, e.g. moderate Republicans that understand regulation of industry is of huge social value. However, a tenet of the Republican faith is the primacy of capitalism. Capitalism made the country great. Opposing capitalism, in whole or in part, means you oppose Republicans. Or worse, you’re defined as opposing Freedom.

“In the book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman presents his view of the proper role of competitive capitalism - the organization of the bulk of economic activity through private enterprise operating in a free market - as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom.” -from the Book jacket.

The equation of free markets to democracy and national security is clear, even from the most deliberately inoffensive, blandest of the bland document in politics. The Party Platform.

2004 Republican Party Platform excerpts:

“Republicans applaud President Bush for launching groundbreaking efforts to address the needs and hopes of the world’s poor, cutting across traditional boundaries to focus on what works. We agree with President Bush that the United States must use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe – by actively working to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.”

“Republicans know that a strong world economy enhances our national security by advancing prosperity and freedom in the rest of the world. Economic growth supported by free trade and free markets creates new jobs and higher incomes. It allows people to lift their lives out of poverty, spurs economic and legal reform, enhances the fight against corruption, and reinforces the habits of liberty.”

“Republicans support efforts by the President, Vice President, and Republican Congress to ensure that America takes the side of reformers who are committed to democratic change. We support doubling the budget for the National Endowment for Democracy and focusing its new work on bringing free elections, free markets, free speech, and free labor unions to the Middle East. We support the President’s expansion of America’s public diplomacy efforts, including the use of radio and television to broadcast uncensored information and a message of tolerance in Arabic and Persian to tens of millions of people.”

See also “The Anti-Capitalism Virus” for a particularly strong screed.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA536AntiCapitalism.html

Is freedom necessarily dependent on free markets? Perhaps, in certain cases, it can be a powerful tool for enabling freedoms. However, the application is far from universal. In other words, not every culture, not every country, and not even our own country derives universal freedom from free markets.

Free markets (especially unregulated ones but even regulated ones in a world with non-homogenous ethical behaviour) can indeed reduce freedoms and reduce standards of living for some while ensuring freedom and a higher standard of living for others. Free markets require certain things in order for them to not be destructive. The original concept of Capitalism is based on progress, defined as the production of wealth through economic growth. Economic growth has no end state. Government should support capitalism because the creation of wealth is assumed to benefit all citizens, and this benefit is assumed to continue linearly with wealth creation.

The person to elucidate this the best was the person most often credited with the codification of capitalist ideas, Adam Smith (who wrote Wealth of Nations).

Is the US Republican version of free-market Capitalism entirely authentic? To me, Republicans seem to currently champion a flavor of capitalism that benefits the most powerful entities in the country at the expense of both the worker and the environment. Instead of benefiting all, we clearly have a problem with government benefiting particular groups at the expense of others. In the case of the environment, this type of wealth creation harms everyone, even the very wealthiest. While the very wealthy can delay drinking the same water, breathing the same air, and suffering health effects from pollution and climate change that the “rest of us” suffer from, there isn’t enough money in the world to put off the inevitable economic damage from degenerated capitalism, which I’ll call consumerism.

Republicans Don't Understand Capitalism
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/11/con04501.html

“It's clear that Bush's idea of "capitalism" consists of socialism for the rich, and brutal, dog-eat-dog capitalism for the rest of us. As a result, in Bush's America, U.S. corporations pocket over $300 billion a year in corporate welfare. And over 60 percent of corporations pay zero income taxes.
Meanwhile, small mom-and-pop businesses across the land are struggling to compete with the likes of corporate-welfare-collecting giants like Wal-Mart. As a result, Wal-Mart's success in crushing its smaller rivals has nothing to do with "the free market" or "capitalism."

Republicans know nothing about capitalism. And the fact that they control all the levers of power in this country at the moment is worrying for anyone who's concerned about America's economic health.”

The wealthy are a minority. Most people do not benefit from the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer or the middle class declining in relative wealth and number. Claiming that the poorest of the poor are better off now than hundreds of years ago is not real progress. It might even be true, but is not a justification for the disparity in economic progress across society, or the damage incurred so that a few can have most.

Obviously, Capitalist Republicans controlling all levers in the country requires a large number of people voting against their economic self-interest.

These large numbers of ordinary people that voted in their economic self-interest (gee, no thanks, I don’t want my standard of living lowered or environment trashed to make a few people even wealthier, but thanks anyway) kept the Capitalist Republicans at bay, by the way, for decades.

Democrats firmly controlled Congress and routinely, if not entirely effectively, identified with and represented the much more numerous workers rather than the much more prosperous owners.

So, how do you get people to vote against their economic self-interest? After all, with all that time on their hands, and Democrats becoming used to the status quo, you have a lot of time to come up with political strategies. The winner? Classic bait and switch.

1. Deliberately choose an emotional, already-lost culture war issue. Don’t pick a real issue. If you do, then the electorate will expect progress to be made on it once you are in office. The issue selected has to be a loser, previously settled, but emotionally powerful, and complex enough to generate “new” developments that will soak up the energies of people that would otherwise be standing in the way of capitalism.

2. Fuel it with funding, prop it up with legal teams, and encourage activity by leveraging particular (usually protestant literalist) religious beliefs at the expense of others (catholic, Unitarian, Judaic, eastern, other).

3. Wait for Defenders of the Ideological Faith to show up and protest. They will find it irresistible to swoop in and fight a can’t-lose battle like going to bat for evolution against intelligent design. This is so clearly a separation of church and state issue that it seems like a waste of time. But, the feeling of being obligated to defend what is clearly the right path is just too strong to resist.

4. Denigrate the Defenders of the Ideological Faith as “liberal elite”. They are the perfect foil.

5. Capitalize on the latent anti-intellectual bias that links “liberal” with “intellectual”.
Since the “liberal elite” and “intellectuals” are poorly defined but ubiquitous and possessing of a negative connotation in political language, and it’s been this way for quite a while, otherwise moderate voters begin to trend towards the right. And they keep going to the right.

6. Win elections due to the fact that you’ve successfully captured moderates.

7. Get back to work promoting capitalism, especially the military-industrial complex, because national defense is a priority.

8. Dismantle regulatory laws that impede capitalism.

What should be an obvious question is where American anti-intellectualism comes from. Especially since anti-intellectualism allows the recipe to work so well against the scientists defending evolution.

The golden age of the social status of science and scientists in the United States was the 1920s. Tennessee vs. John Scopes (aka The Scopes Monkey Trial) occurred in 1925. To call the trial anything but a circus in atmosphere would be the understatement of the century. Public attention was riveted, famous people traveled from far away to participate. It was cast as a battle royale between the forces of the archaic and the ignorantly hidebound, and the forces of progress and the scientifically knowledgeable.

From
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/evolut.htm

“The Scopes Trial had its origins in a conspiracy at Fred Robinson's drugstore in Dayton. George Rappalyea, a 31-year-old transplanted New Yorker and local coal company manager, arrived at the drugstore with a copy of a paper containing an American Civil Liberties Union announcement that it was willing to offer its services to anyone challenging the new Tennessee anti-evolution statute. Rappalyea, a modernist Methodist with contempt for the new law, argued to other town leaders that a trial would be a way of putting Dayton on the map. Listening to Rappalyea, the others--including School Superintendent Walter White--became convinced that publicity generated by a controversial trial might help their town, whose population had fallen from 3,000 in the 1890's to 1,800 in 1925.

The conspirators summoned John Scopes, a twenty-four-year old general science teacher and part-time football coach, to the drugstore. As Scopes later described the meeting, Rappalyea said, "John, we've been arguing and I said nobody could teach biology without teaching evolution." Scopes agreed. "That's right," he said, pulling a copy of Hunter's Civic Biology--the state-approved textbook--from one of the shelves of the drugstore (the store also sold school textbooks). "You've been teaching 'em this book?" Rappalyea asked. Scopes replied that while filling in for the regular biology teacher during an illness, he had assigned readings on evolution from the book for review purposes. "Then you've been violating the law," Rappalyea concluded. "Would you be willing to stand for a test case?" he asked. Scopes agreed. He later explained his decision: "the best time to scotch the snake is when it starts to wiggle." Herbert and Sue Hicks, two local attorneys and friends of Scopes, agreed to prosecute.”

The trial opened with drama. The transcript is on the web, of course. After opening statements, the defense moved to cancel the indictment on both state and federal constitutional grounds. The goal was not to win, but rather to get the issue before a higher court, like the U.S. Supreme Court that would once and for all clearly state that laws censoring the teaching of evolution were flatly unconstitutional.

At the end of the trial, Darrow, representing John Scopes, asked the jury to return a verdict of guilty in order that the case might be appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court.

Under Tennessee law, Bryan was thereby denied the opportunity to deliver a closing speech he had labored over for weeks. The jury complied with Darrow's request, and Judge Raulston fined him $100.

A year later, the Tennessee Supreme Court did indeed reverse the decision. However, it was over a technicality regarding who set the fine!

The case was not sent back for further action. Instead, the Tennessee Supreme Court dismissed the case and stated "Nothing is to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case." Bummer.

Forty years after the trial, John Scopes wrote an essay about his impressions of it all. Here is the end of his essay. The writing of the essay occurred at about the same time of Epperson v. Arkansas - Supreme Court of the United States (1968), which did indeed settle the constitutionality questions that the Scopes trial was aiming for.

“The defense had hoped to call a number of scientists as witnesses. They were to testify in regard to the erroneous belief that there was an irreconcilable conflict between the theory of evolution and the Genesis account.

One scientist made it to the stand, but Judge Raulston shortly ruled that scientific testimony was not admissible. I think that was a defeat for us, but only in the terms of our legal goals. The material sent out from Dayton through the news media included the interviews and the affidavits of the scientific witnesses; these made a tremendous impact on the science education of the country and the world.

A second accomplishment was the limiting of the passing of anti-evolution bills in other states. This was achieved through the activities of six groups of people; the defense team and their aids who organized and presented our case; scientists; theologians; educators who worked then and are continuing to work for a better concept of education and the freedom of inquiry; the large numbers of ordinary citizens who thought or were capable of learning to think by the simple process of reasoning from cause to effect; and last, buy by no means least, the news media. The efforts of these groups, I think were responsible for limiting the passing of anti-evolution bills to only two additional states, Mississippi and Arkansas.

The trial created a better climate for understanding divergent points of view. The intermingling of a great number of people from all over our country (where did they find accommodations?) and the news gathered and sent out by reporters from the North, East, South, and West lowered to some extent the barriers of misunderstanding that separated the different sections of our country. By no means were these barriers demolished but the top rails were removed or splintered.

The trial marked a beginning of the development of a national consciousness of the roles played by religion, science, and education. I think the importance of communicating the thinking of the professionals in these fields to the general public was first generally appreciated during and immediately after the trial.

I believe that the Dayton trial marked the beginning of the decline of fundamentalism. Each year—as the result of someone’s efforts to better interpret what the defense was trying to do—more and more people are reached. This, in conjunction with the labor of scientists, educators, ministers and with the dissemination of the results of their efforts through books and news media, has retarded the spread of fundamentalism.

But most importantly, I feel that restrictive legislation on academic freedom is forever a thing of the past, that religion and science may now address one another in an atmosphere of mutual respect and of a common quest for truth. I like to think that the Dayton trial had some part in bringing to birth this new era.

I have had a continuing interest in the issues of the trial but never as a participant. Many times I have been asked why I have had no further role to play relative to the issues—even why I did not at least capitalize on my publicity and reap the monetary harvest that was close at hand. Perhaps my best answer is to paraphrase Calvin Coolidge’s “I do not choose to run”, for me it would be, “I did not choose to do so.”

Thus, 1926 was most likely the year of greatest positive momentum for science.

However, the first few signs of a developing economic disaster were being reported. The phrase “technological unemployment” and evaluations of the rate of it happening. Technological unemployment at this time meant that machines were replacing men. This by itself is not bad. Machines free us from dangerous, repetitive, dirty work and allow great increases in productivity.

However, the rate of technological unemployment had never been this high, for this long, and in this many industries.

As many as 200,000 workers a year are replaced by automatic or semi-automatic machinery during the decade, and it wasn’t just one field, it was almost all fields, except those that couldn’t be easily automated. Like, scientists and engineers.

In the pre-computer era, anyone that did “computer” work, or was a knowledge worker, was largely immune. The good times rolled for the capitalists at the top of the food chain, who directly and hugely benefited from the productivity gains, and the people coming up with the ideas for the machines. Protests from the proletariat were ignored, even as creative and highly-skilled people were summarily thrown out of work on an ever-widening basis.

Not even farming, the ultimate generalist activity, was immune from mechanization.

From
"Recent Social Trends," by O. E. Baker of the United States Department of Agriculture:

“The five years from 1922 to 1926 [he writes] are in several ways the most remarkable in the history of American agriculture. Agricultural production increased about 27 per cent, while crop acreage remained practically stationary and labor engaged in agriculture declined.”

The causes of the Depression are of course several and complicated. However, the primary reason most often given is due to grossly inequal distribution of wealth throughout the 1920's followed by stock market speculation.

From The Technological Unemployment and Structural Unemployment Debates by Gregory R. Woirol

From 1923 to 1929, corporate profits increased 62%, this wealth went mostly to upper brackets. Tax policies of government favored wealthy; workers real income increased by 11%, and most of this increase in purchasing power was caused by the lowered price of food--paid for by poverty of farmers. The top 5% of wealthy took one third of all increased wealth.

A major reason for this large and growing gap between the rich and the working-class person was the afore-mentioned increase in productivity that allowed manufacturing to dramatically increase output.

Scientists both took credit and allowed credit to be given to them, as this increased output was directly enabled by huge technological advancements. A cursory reading of any archived newspaper or magazine of the decade reveals article after article reflecting this positive glow.

The promise of science and technology was ubiquitous in advertisements, articles, editorials, dinner-table conversations, and in real life. Real changes were taking place and they were not just modernizations. The promise of science, as the swirl around the Scopes Trial shows, was of a new golden era enabled by science.

The absolute enormity of the unemployment during the 1930s soon turned the aura of science from gold to lead, in a weird sort of anti-alchemical process. Rapidly, even scientists were out of work. Shocked, they had to form or join relief societies of their own, or take whatever work they could find. A 33% unemployment rate for engineers and scientists was not unusual.

The accusation that technological unemployment, foisted on the country by scientists, was made by many people, at many levels. Scientists defended themselves publicly, often denying any negative effects from scientific advancements, and generally sticking to a very unapologetic stance. Many of the speeches at the time made from conventions and meetings are excerpted in “Beyond the Laboratory” by Peter Kuznick, as well as in The New Republic’s archives, and archives of other newspapers. There was an active science media service at the time that promoted scientific news.

Debates definitely raged. Whether true or not, there was definitely a shift in public opinion concerning science and technology. On the heels of (or perhaps solving) the Great Depression, came World War II.

Scientists were gainfully employed to make better weapons. The government hired wholesale the services of thousands of scientists and engineers who, virtually to a man, went along with the idea of making and dropping an atomic bomb on Japan, or whatever else they were tasked with doing.

The resulting atomic age was not an optimistic one, nor did the social status or trust in science return to anything like the pre-war, pre-depression era. There was a stigma associated with science. My grandmother, for example, doesn’t trust scientists because she doesn’t believe that they care about the results of their work. Hers is not an unusual sentiment. She also is not a fan of space travel or astronomy due to the space race with Russia that had definite threatening military overtones. People don’t like feeling threatened.

Reading through many memoirs of the many famous wartime scientists, you get a feel for the nostalgia of a simpler time, when they were more respected, less “used”, and had a clearer conscience.

Scientists, through Roosevelt’s adroit playing of the Blue Ribbon Panel tactic and wartime activities, were now cemented to the government. In the 1920s, industry and academia employed them. Industry rapidly figured out that pure science was a relative waste of time and started paying only for targeted research, but in a post-war US, things would only get worse.

One of the only standouts of pure research was Bell Labs, for a time. The existence of this group was most likely due to the luxury that a monopoly has, instead of any altruistic industrial reasoning.

Therefore, it’s my feeling that the anti-intellectualism is really anti-scientism leftover from the Depression and WWII, and it’s due to the perception that scientific optimism is naïve, and that scientists are arrogant about their work being primarily good. The application of knowledge can never be assumed to be good by its discoverers. In fact, the scientist doesn’t have much control over what other people do at all with their findings.

The scientist may not be able to imagine how their particular chemistry oddity ends up – they may assume it has application as a new medication that dramatically improves the very ill, but instead it ends up being used in a weapon that renders soldiers permanently blind. Who gets the blame? Should scientists deny all culpability or not?

The pendulum definitely swung against science for a while. It didn’t help much for the major representatives of science to publicly ask for special government assistance at the start of the Depression because they were somehow more special than others. Nor did it help for them to publicly deny any responsibility for technological unemployment right after claiming so much credit for technological advancements. As is the case in most of reality, it is probably somewhere in between. You cannot eat your cake and have it too. Either share the blame, or share the credit.

Hence, American anti-scientism or anti-intellectualism, ripe for the picking, as it’s filtered through several decades of political and social progress, and the hopes that John Scopes expressed are again a bit delayed by opportunism.

The moral of the story according to Michelle? Resist the temptation to be played like a drum. You may not simply be pulling weeds. You may be playing a part scripted for you by people much more manipulative than you’d expect. Play your part in civil discourse and support efforts to get the issue resolved in court. Other than that, how about fixing American capitalism?

evolution
creation science
religion
politics
science

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2006-04-08T10:35:00.000-07:00

Picture006.jpg
Originally uploaded by Abraxas3d.

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2006-04-08T10:32:00.000-07:00

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Originally uploaded by Abraxas3d.

Energy - Overview

2006-04-07T09:42:00.000-07:00

I'm going to make an attempt at looking at all the sources of US energy, give a brief evaluation of whether or not they're renewable, when they'll run out, and what will be the result. The resulting shift in world-view and lifestyle may actually be better for humans in the long run, if much less convenient, and much different than what many of us are used to.

environmentalism

Energy - Hydropower

2006-04-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

As of 2003, the sources of US energy included the following

* Oil 39%
* Natural gas 24%
* Coal 23%
* Nuclear 8%
* Hydropower 3%
* Other 3%

The only "renewable" resources on this list are Hydropower and the mysterious "Other". Hydropower is used to create electricity, and therefore contributes very little to the energy required to move cars, trucks, and machinery around.

Sadly, Hydropower isn't exactly renewable, unless you are capturing energy without a dam at natural waterfalls. When is the last time you saw a working water wheel producing electricity?

The reason dams are often considered non-renewable is that all resevoirs behind dams fill with sediment over time. This happens in every resevoir, although the rate that this happens varies by quite a bit, depending primarily on the size of the resevoir compared to the amount of sediment flowing into it. A small resevoir on a muddy river, for example, compared to a large resevoir fed by a clear river will have very different rates of sedimentation. However, the clear river resevoir will still lose capacity over time.

The build-out phase of dam projects in the US is drawing to a close. We've captured pretty much all the energy we can capture from rivers.
Hydropower dam projects will continue to provide a fraction of power for the US, but since almost all available sites are already constructed, and some major sites will not have the lifespan originally predicted, this proportion cannot truly grow and may actually contract.

It sounds, therefore, somewhat hypocritical to come out against hydropower projects in other countries since we've managed to "tame" almost every river at home.

The largest and most high-profile dam project would probably be the Three Gorges Dam in China.

"The Three Gorges Dam is designed to operate under conditions practically untested in the world and never before tested in such a large structure. Projections of controlling sedimentation within the reservoir are subject to significant uncertainties. China has about 83,000 reservoirs built for various purposes, of which 330 are major in size. Sediment deposition in 230 of them has become a significant problem, resulting in a combined loss of 14 percent of the total storage capacity. In some, more than 50 percent of the storage capacity has been lost." Hu Chunhong, 1995, Controlling Reservoir Sedimentation in China, Hydropower and Dams, March issue, pp. 50-52.

Flood control is a tremendous advantage of large dam projects. The number of people affected and killed by flooding in China below the site of the dam is tremendously high.

Both India and China also are planning very large river diversion projects that are intended to solve water shortage/surplus issues based on geography. In some analyses, though, the cost of moving the people to the water is less than moving the water to the people.

Despite the flood control advantages, a dam site has a limited lifespan for energy production. The local geography changes quite a bit with sedimentation of the resevoir. There is no guarentee that the site can be used forever, again, or even as long as the dam structure lasts.

Can a dam be reconstructed? In theory, yes. Dam reconstruction means either raising the body of the dam or dredging out the resevoir behind the dam. Successful dam reconstruction projects usually include replacement or rehabilitation of smaller collapsed structures. Reconstruction of a large dam, like the Hoover Dam, is in a different category. I can't find an example of it ever having been successfully done.

environmentalism

The Greenhouse We Don't Want is Here

2006-04-05T20:18:00.000-07:00

From one of my favorite books comes the "call to environmentalism" theme of this collection of essays. The book is The Cannibal Queen, which is a memoir about restoring an old plane and then flying her to each state of the United States, and the observations along the way.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671038494/sr=8-2/qid=1144287756/ref=pd_bbs_2/102-1831096-2236938?%5Fencoding=UTF8

From pages 251-253

Years later, Thomas Frank gives another description of the expression of our times in “What’s the Matter with Kansas”. This book isn’t about the environment, at least not directly. However, like “The Cannibal Queen”, an introspective writer examining other things manages to capture something critical to our future as a species.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805073396/qid=1144288586/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-1831096-2236938?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

If you haunt cnn.com or any other major news source, you would have probably seen an article last week about coral dying off in the Caribbean. I’m very much reminded of the insidious invasion of Caulerpa taxifolia in the Mediterranean, which is an ecological disaster that few people seem to be very much worried about. Possibly, like the Caribbean coral holocaust, because it occurs beneath the waters of the oceans, and is therefore completely invisible to all but a few observing eyes and instruments.

"Meinesz's fight against C. taxifolia—and against the arrogant ill-informed oficials who allowed it to prosper—may be a lost battle, but his combat journal is enormously valuable. We will never have any such well-documented record of how the gypsy moth, the whelk tingle, or the house sparrow established their beachheads and rolled on to conquest."— from the foreword of Killer Algae by David Quammen

Link to check out the book “Killer Algae”

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226519236/qid=1144289307/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-1831096-2236938?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Unprecedented die-off of Caribbean coral reefs

The barriers, which limit damage from weather, are key to the region's tourism and fishing.

By Seth Borenstein
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - A one-two punch of bleaching from record hot water followed by disease has killed ancient and delicate coral in the biggest loss of reefs scientists have ever seen in Caribbean waters.

Researchers from around the globe are scrambling to figure out the extent of the loss. Early, conservative estimates from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands find that about one-third of the coral in official monitoring sites has recently died.

"It's an unprecedented die-off," said Jeff Miller, a National Park Service fisheries biologist, who last week checked 40 stations in the Virgin Islands. "The mortality that we're seeing now is of the extremely slow-growing reef-building corals. These are corals that are the foundation of the reef... . We're talking colonies that were here when Columbus came by have died in the past three to four months."

Some of the devastated coral can never be replaced because it grows only the width of one dime a year, Miller said.

Coral reefs are the basis for a multibillion-dollar tourism and commercial-fishing economy in the Caribbean. Key fish species use coral as habitat and feeding grounds. Reefs limit the damage from hurricanes and tsunamis. More recently they have been touted as possible sources for new medicines.

If coral reefs die, "you lose the goose with golden eggs" that are key parts of small island economies, said Edwin Hernandez-Delgado, a University of Puerto Rico biology researcher.

On Sunday, he found a colony of 800-year-old star coral - more than 13 feet high - that had just died off Puerto Rico.

On Wednesday, Tyler Smith, coordinator of the U.S. Virgin Islands Coral Reef Monitoring program, dived at a popular spot for tourists in St. Thomas and saw an old chunk of brain coral, about three feet in diameter, that was at least 90 percent dead from the disease called "white plague."

The Caribbean is actually better off than areas of the Indian and Pacific Oceans where mortality rates - mostly from warming waters - have been in the 90 percent range in past years, said Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance.

And with global warming, scientists are pessimistic about the future of coral reefs.

"The prognosis is not good," said biochemistry professor M. James Crabbe of the University of Luton near London. In early April, he will investigate coral-reef mortality in Jamaica. "If you want to see a coral reef, go now, because they just won't survive in their current state."

New sea-surface temperature figures show the sustained heating in the Caribbean last summer and fall was by far the worst in 21 years of satellite monitoring, said Mark Eakin, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch.

The heat causes the symbiotic algae that provides food for the coral to die and turn white. That puts the coral in critical condition. If coral remains bleached for more than a week, the chance of death soars, according to NOAA scientists.

Our culprit is global warming, which was almost immediately discarded as a myth, mainly by people with a vested interest in the consumption continuing. Pressure was applied to government, the issue politicized, those who wanted reductions in greenhouse gases were patronized as washed up hippie environmentalist fruit cakes, and those that quietly insisted that the caring for all creation was a religious duty shared by all humanity and that the place of man was as a servant to the earth and not the center of it were dismissed as socialists or irrelevant.

Worse, the issue was portrayed here in the U.S. as one of defending American sovereignty, patriotism, and authenticity. Images of rugged individualism were ordered in by the generals of capitalism against the latte-sipping limousine liberals that were out of touch with ordinary Americans. The only trouble is, anyone with any amount of analytical skill, could read and slowly appreciate that the trend was not good. In the 1990s, a wait-and-see approach was commonly adopted by even ardent environmentalists. No one wants to be the one that cries wolf. And, you only have so much reputation capital as an activist. But now, I think we have a consensus.

Powerless in the face of corporatism, most people in America seem to not have many choices when it comes to causing the emission of so-called greenhouse gases. Sure, everyone could cut their energy consumption in, say, half. But we love using electricity, and we love oil. We are also not unique. Everyone on the planet loves using electricity and loves consuming oil. We in the U.S. just seem to have perfected the conspicuous consumption of it.

There is little incentive to walk instead of drive when no one else in the neighborhood walks the 40 minutes to the grocery store. There is little incentive when it’s actually physically unsafe to walk the 40 minutes to the grocery store. And that is if you happen to have a grocery store relatively close to you.

The “town square” mentality of new construction doesn’t help either. It’s mostly a charade. An unintentional charade that was probably executed with the best of intentions, of course, but it is still a charade. Those Town Squares, where walking paths occupy otherwise unbuildable space, and a nod is made towards public transit, still require almost every resident to own and operate a car. They’re ornamental and not functional. The bedroom community reigns supreme, and is remarkably intractable when it comes to modification.

The older neighborhoods aren’t a sure bet either. Move to them, and see your local shopping evaporate because a Wal-Mart was built 24 miles to the south-east. The scythe-wielding harbinger of completely empty Main Street business districts has been silently and darkly standing sentry over all of us for at least two decades.

Is Wal-Mart and the centralization of shopping necessarily a bad thing? No. Maybe in the case of greenhouse gas emissions we cause less damage with centralized shopping than we would with decentralized shopping, where every place requires shipping to and from, and every little store duplicates the overhead of waste. I don’t know which is environmentally better, but I wouldn’t be surprised either way. All I know is that I’m chained to a car of some sort, and unless technology gets a move on, we’ll run out of oil before having anything close to an equivalent ubiquitous replacement for transportation.

Why every single home in Southern California does not already have solar panels on the roof yet, I don’t know. Is it simply cost? Is it because it’s not “cool” enough? Too much trouble? Why in the world every single large commercial building isn’t required to have co-generation on their vastly spreading flat roofs, to reduce the need to burn coal or natural gas for electricity, defeats my minor-league brain. It would seem to make perfect sense.

This brings up the question, however, of whether or not it’s really worth it to be able to drive when the biodiversity of the planet is failing all around us. Here’s a series of essays that document some of the damage.

COMMENTARY
Feeling the Heat: The World Wakes Up
By Jim Motavalli

http://www.emagazine.com/view/?3136&src=QHAEN

Two thousand and six is emerging as the year Americans finally wake up to the reality of global warming. Of course, E has been hammering away at the issue for six years or more, but now it has momentum, with the release of several new books and a Time magazine cover story ("Be Worried, Be Very Worried") April 3.

An ABC/Time/Stanford University poll accompanying the article confirmed that Americans are finally focusing on the problem. Today, 85 percent of Americans believe that global warming is occurring, versus 13 percent who don't. Sixty percent of respondents admit to worry about it either "a great deal" or "a good amount." Sixty-eight percent think the federal government should do more to combat it. (It's doing virtually nothing now.)

But Americans remain pretty confused. A stunning 64 percent in the poll think there's "a lot of disagreement" among climate scientists on the reality of global warming, when there's actually a near total consensus. And 54 percent think climate change is "a problem for the future," versus only 44 percent who think it's already a serious problem.

Given that misconception, we thought it might be helpful to provide some examples of climate change that are happening right now. Let's make this clear: We are already causing major disruption to the Earth's weather patterns, and we're seeing huge effects, from melting polar ice to shifting species, from rising seas to dying coral. For humans, this poses grave dangers, but for some species it means extinction. "There will be no polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out."

Imperiled polar bears.
© Gary Braasch
These excerpts are from E's book Feeling the Heat: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Climate Change (Routledge). Our report on ongoing climate change came out in 2004, before Americans were as focused on global warming as they are now. But much of the evidence cited in the Time article and in other, more recent books first appeared between covers in Feeling the Heat. The book would probably have sold better if we simply sat on it for two years! Here's some of what we saw around the world in 2004, from the pages of Feeling the Heat (which is illustrated, as is this article, with dramatic photographs by Gary Braasch):

The California Coast: Migrating Species

In 1949, a combination of state and federal organizations began monitoring physical, chemical, biological and meteorological facets of the California Current under the auspices of the California Cooperative Oceanic and Fisheries Investigations program, known as CalCOFI. It was designed in part to track many factors affecting commercially important fish species such as mackerel and sardines. The data gathered under CalCOFI include air temperatures, wind speeds, nutrient levels, salinity, water temperature on the surface and deep below the surface, and the abundance of larval fish and zooplankton--the smallest marine animals.

What happens if you watch those data change over the years? Your findings might echo those of John McGowan, an oceanography professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego: As water temperatures have risen, the base of the marine food chain off the coast of California has crashed. And one by one, the fish and birds farther up that food chain are crashing, too.

Life in the ocean begins with tiny plants known as phytoplankton. Like all plants, phytoplankton need light to drive photosynthesis and nutrients to feed the process. Although it's somewhat counter-intuitive, the richest and most nutritive ocean waters are the coldest and heaviest. Strong winds do the work of stirring the system and pulling the nutrient-rich waters up toward the light.

The first problems showed up because of El Niños, short-term changes in ocean temperatures that tend to increase the warm water along the western U.S. coastline, reducing the food that boosts the phytoplankton. But researchers like McGowan noticed a difference between the early El Niños and the later ones. Numbers of zooplankton--the tiniest animals in the food chain, which depend on the phytoplankton--dropped during the El Niño of 1957-1959 and then quickly rebounded. But after subsequent El Niños during the 1983 to 1984 and 1997 to 1998 seasons, the zooplankton didn't come back.

California's tidepools are changing.
© Gary Braasch
In 1995, going back through the accumulated years of data, McGowan reported a staggering finding in Science: Zooplankton numbers in the California Current had dropped by 70 percent. "It's the largest change ever measured in plankton productivity in the ocean," McGowan says. "This enormous change in the zooplankton in the California Current could not be detected from year to year. It took several decades before we discovered this big drop, by at least 70 percent or even up to 80 percent."

With that huge loss at the base of the food chain, reverberations throughout the system that depended on it were inevitable. Since McGowan's study came out, declines of species throughout the area have been attributed to the loss of zooplankton and the warming water.

The crash showed up in fish, although it's often tough to tell if such declines come from too many nets or too little fish food. But even when researchers look at species for which human markets have no appetite, they find precipitous declines. The larvae of Leuroglossus stilbius--a fish of so little market value that it doesn't even have a name in English--historically are the third most abundant in the California Current. Larvae counts for it dropped 50 percent after 1977. Another similarly ignored species with no common name, Stenobranchus leucopsarus, saw its larvae drop 42 percent after the sharp temperature rise. Its larvae are typically the sixth most abundant in those waters.

In 1967, aerial surveys found 70 square miles of kelp forests along the long California coastline. In 1989, that number dropped 42 percent. By 1999, the most recent year for which data are available, the total plummeted to just 17.8 square miles--down 75 percent from the 1967 survey.

George Divoky with a Black Guillemot, whose population crash has been related to global warming.
© Gary Braasch
But the most dramatic decline came to the sooty shearwater, a predatory seabird at the top of the marine food chain. "In the 1960s and 1970s they were present in the tens of millions," McGowan says, "the largest population of pelagic [marine] seabirds in the entire California Current. They dominated it. Millions and millions of them." The birds feed on juvenile fish and larger zooplankton. Researchers began looking at the birds regularly in 1987. By the 1990s, the population of sooty shearwaters had crashed, with numbers down 90 percent. —Orna Izakson

New York: The Virus Specter

Heat stress is probably the most obvious thing people think of when global warming comes up. Other effects are more subtle, but no less deadly. Higher rates of ground-level ozone are a major respiratory irritant, and vector-borne diseases thrive in warmer temperatures. And that's the problem that's keeping the city's public health officials up nights.

New York City had never had a case of West Nile encephalitis before 1999, but that hot summer--the hottest and driest in a century--62 cases were reported in the region. In all, 8,000 New Yorkers were infected, and seven people died.

Between August 12 and 23, six people were admitted to Flushing Hospital in the borough of Queens with high fevers and headaches. Routine culture screens for bacterial or fungal microbes were negative, leading to a growing consensus the patients were suffering from an encephalitis-like disease of viral origin. Within three weeks, three elderly patients died.

Tests at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and Fort Collins, Colorado revealed that the illness was close to the St. Louis encephalitis, which had never previously touched New York City. By September 6, there were five confirmed victims of the new virus, and 34 suspected cases. By September 9, exotic birds began dying in the Bronx Zoo. A general health warning was issued, and city residents began to get used to helicopters overhead spraying clouds of malathion and pyrethriod pesticides. By September 21, scientists had isolated and identified the specific virus, not St. Louis encephalitis but West Nile.

West Nile is spread by a mosquito, Culex pipens, which breeds in stagnant pools of water. According to several prominent scientists, drought is the key factor in spreading West Nile virus. Outbreaks require an unfortunate series of events, they say. According to Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, Culex mosquitoes often live in close proximity to people because of the stagnant water they carelessly let stand. While the mosquitoes' favorite prey is birds, periods of high heat and drought send such common urban-dwelling species as crows, blue jays and robins out of the city in search of fresh water. City bird populations are further reduced as unlucky individuals are bitten and killed by West Nile infection.

"By reproductive imperative the mosquitoes are forced to feed on humans, and that's what triggered the 1999 epidemic," Despommier says. "Higher temperatures also trigger increased mosquito biting frequency. The first big rains after the drought created new breeding sites." It took Hurricane Floyd, which passed through New York on September 16, to break the weather cycle that led to the outbreak.

Despommier says this same pattern is also discernible in recent West Nile outbreaks in Israel, South Africa and Romania. In Bucharest, Despommier's investigation turned up abandoned buildings whose basements were full of water, a perfect Culex breeding ground.

Another prominent proponent of the West Nile global warming connection is Dr. Paul Epstein of Harvard University. "Droughts are more common and prolonged as the planet warms," he says. "Warm winters intensify drought because there's a reduced spring runoff. The cycle seems to rev up in the spring, as catch basin water dries up and what's left becomes organically rich and a perfect mosquito breeding place. The drought also reduces populations of mosquito predators."

In 2002, West Nile spread across the country, appearing in 44 states and the District of Columbia. Five provinces of Canada were also affected. In a growing scientific consensus, public health officials believe the next drought will give this serious virus even a wider reach. Spraying certainly hasn't stopped these infectious bugs. Researchers at France's University of Montpellier said in mid-2003 that a mutation in the West Nile mosquitoes' genetic code resulted in their singular resistance to pesticides. —Jim Motavalli

Florida: Dying Coral

Florida's vulnerable coastline.
© Gary Braasch
I first heard about coral bleaching from Billy Causey, the manager of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. We were sitting in his office deep in a 67-acre hardwood hammock on Marathon Key. It's a place where ospreys, egrets, cormorants, fat black snakes, hermit crabs, parrot fish, even an old tropical fish collector like Billy can still find refuge from the Kmart mall sprawl out on Route One. Thick set with iron-gray hair and sea-gray eyes, Causey, who moved to the Keys in 1973, sounds like some Old Testament Jeremiah as he recalls the gradual decline of the reef during the years he's been here.

Unfortunately, while among the most diverse of marine habitats, the world's massive coral colonies are also fragile structures, living within a narrow range of clarity, salinity, low-nutrient chemistry and temperature.

"Throughout the '70s we saw various problems but constantly clear waters with typical hundred-foot visibility," Billy recalls.

"In 1979, we had a warm water spell and big vase sponges started dying," he continues. "In June of 1980 we had a pattern of slick calm weather and thousands of fish were killed. This was the first signal to me that things were tilting the wrong way. Then in 1983, with an explosion of onshore development, there was an urchin die-off. In 1984, there was another doldrums and the reefs bleached down to Key West. Maybe five percent of the coral died. In May of 1986, when we had hardly seen black band disease [characterized by dark bands of dead coral on otherwise healthy specimens], I went out to take a picture of it. I saw four-dozen massive outbreaks within an area about 400 feet in length."

Causey pauses to listen to a passing bird cawing over the still, aquamarine waters of the Gulf a few yards away. Further north I've noticed the fringing waters of Key Largo have taken on a greenish lime Jell-O hue.

"In June of 1987 we got a slick calm," he continues. "On July 13 we went out and saw all the corals turning mustard yellow. Then they went stark white. Then we began getting reports of similar bleaching in the Caribbean and on the Indo/Pacific reefs and we realized something global was going on. We began looking at this as the canary in the coal mine. Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was reporting 1987 as the hottest year on record and the 1980s as the hottest decade." These records would all fall in the 1990s.

The bad news multiplied, Causey says. "In 1990, we had the first big losses linked to bleaching where the coral didn't come back. We lost most of our fire coral that year. There was another benchmark year in 1997, with coral bleaching all around the Caribbean. Lots of living coral just went away in 1998, a catastrophic bleaching event. But remote reefs in the Pacific were also being lost, so it gave me a sense that this wasn't an isolated event--the result of our failure to act. There were back-to-back severe bleaching in 1997 and 1998, then Hurricane George hit."

Causey shakes his head, as if unwilling to believe his own unremittingly bleak narrative. "You look at old photos and film of the reef and you realize what was lost," he says. "If you were lucky enough to be here 20 or 30 years ago, you know."

I do. As a teen I got to snorkel through Keys' waters so clear and vibrant with exotic life and color they were almost scary.

After talking with Billy I'll do some diving in the Keys, including a couple of dives down to Aquarius, the world's last underwater research habitat, seven miles off Key Largo. The habitat is a 48-foot cylindrical structure resting on four steel legs planted on the bottom in 60 feet of water. Its yellow body is rusting in spots and encrusted with weedy growths being grazed by roving schools of fish. A couple of large tarpon in the 100- to 150-pound class circle it curiously, shadowing me as I swim under the metal skirt of the habitat, popping up in the wet room where a school of yellowtail snapper huddle discreetly at the edge of the entry pool. Beyond the wet room there is a lab, shower and toilet, kitchen and berthing area with two sets of triple bunks. Scientists, living here for up to eight days at a time, have a unique opportunity to study the world's third-largest reef system.

Unfortunately the reef they're studying is also dying. Where once branching corals grew I find only skeletal sticks in faded rubble fields. Many of the abundant rock corals are being eaten away by diseases that have spread in an epidemic wave throughout the Keys. The names of the diseases tell the story: black band, white band, white plague, and aspergillus, a fungus normally found in agricultural soils that can shred fan corals like moths shred Irish lace. The corals are also being smothered under sediment and algal growth linked to polluted runoff and are periodically bleaching white as a result of warming ocean temperatures. —David Helvarg

Pacific Northwest: The Incredible Shrinking Glaciers

Edith's checkerspot butterfly is a global warming victim.
© Gary Braasch
It feels as if a giant meat locker has swung open, sending a cold, yet thin, wind blowing down South Cascade Glacier just outside North Cascades National Park in northern Washington. The sun glares. Everything is white. The expanse of snow acts like a big reflecting basin. Bob Krimmel, a scientist in a broad-brimmed hat and gloves, is initially winded by the altitude change, but spends much of the day trudging through brush to get to this spot--the longest-studied glacier in the northern Cascade mountains, the nation's most heavily glaciated area outside of Alaska. So much snow. And yet, the glacier is shrinking.

"It's very easy to see the glacier is much, much smaller," Krimmel says later, back at his office at U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Seated at a computer, he looks at the side-by-side images--a photo taken in 1928 and another 60 years later. "In the last century, it's retreated about 1.2 miles," says Krimmel, a hydrologist and the glacier's leading researcher. "Right now, it's about 1.5 miles long. It's lost about half of its length and half its volume."

South Cascade Glacier has become the poster child for global climate change in the Pacific Northwest, contends Jon Riedel, glacier researcher for North Cascades National Park. It is thinning so much, Riedel points out, that between 1953 and 2000 it lost the equivalent of 72 feet of water in thickness off its surface. That's about as tall as seven basketball hoops stacked on top of each other.

Call it the case of the incredible shrinking glacier. In this icy high country, 46 of the 47 Cascade glaciers observed by Nichols College researcher Mauri Pelto were found to be retreating. Riedel, meanwhile, personally backpacks several miles to monitor four glaciers; he notices the lower-elevation, smaller glaciers on the west side of the Cascades are shrinking, a pattern also found farther south.

This melting promises to change the very image of the Pacific Northwest. Montana's Glacier National Park in 30 years may need to be renamed "the park formerly known as Glacier," as Seattle-based writer John C. Ryan puts it. A hundred of its 150 glaciers have vanished, and the pace is hastening. Or take Washington's white-capped Mount Rainier, that looming symbol of the Northwest depicted on Washington license plates and the label of a venerable local beer. The vast majority of Rainier's glaciers are receding, says Andrew Fountain, researcher and Portland State University geology professor.

"They don't recede because they're getting colder, you know what I'm saying?" Fountain says. Whatever the ultimate cause, he says: "That's global climate change--right there."

In scene after scene played out around the Pacific Northwest, researchers are uncovering surprises that appear linked to the past century's average one-degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature and, based on what has happened so far, they predict serious problems to come in the next century. The surprises are as varied as the region itself, from the dangerously delayed spawning of salmon in British Columbia to the practically regionwide shrunken snowpack and perhaps happier news--such as the discovery of a butterfly that has colonized Oregon and Washington from the south as temperatures warmed.

"We're seeing things that never happened before to our knowledge," says Elliott Norse, of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Redmond, Washington. "These things are consistent with what we would expect in a world that is warming. It would be, in many cases, surprising if this weren't human-caused." —Sally Deneen

Antigua: Stronger Storms

I am standing on the shoreline at Runaway Bay. It is mid-January, the height of the tourist season in the Caribbean tropical islands. The sea, as its groundswell rushes in, retains those same wondrous shades--the navy-blue, the turquoise, the cobalt. Something is missing: there is no sand. No sand, no tourists. The effect is not so much unreal, as surreal.

Lionel Hurst, since 1988 Ambassador to first the United Nations and then the United States for Antigua and neighboring island Barbuda, points to the waves crashing against a metal wall just below the concrete patio of the Sunset Cove hotel. "The owner put in that barrier to try to save his property after Hurricane Luis came ashore in September 1995," Hurst says. "The waves used to break 23 feet further out to sea. But that entire stretch of beach just disappeared, overnight, and it's never returned. So nobody wants to stay here now. The hotel's clients used to walk up a little further and swim. But you can see the same thing has happened in that half-moon area there. Basically, about 1,000 feet of sand has eroded along what used to be one of our most idyllic areas."

Hurricane Luis was the most devastating storm the island had ever seen. With gusts approaching 200 miles an hour and sustained winds of more than 140, Luis damaged 90 percent of Antigua's homes, 65 percent of its business sector, and left 7,000 people unemployed. In a small country now dependent on tourism for 70 percent of its income, virtually all such facilities along the coast needed extensive repairs.

Clearly, something new was in the wind. "A signal," as Ambassador Hurst puts it, "that something is terribly wrong." Simply stated, warmer ocean temperatures put greater moisture into the atmosphere, two variables that work to power hurricanes. Caribbean-wide, as Hurst would summarize in March 2003 at the World Water Forum in Japan, storms and hurricanes have risen from an average of 3.5 events per year between 1920 and 1940, to 5.5 events per year between 1944 and 1980, to 13 events per year ever since 1990.

More hurricanes and volcanic eruptions are just the most extreme manifestations of what is happening to the leeward islands of the West Indies. Make no mistake: Antigua is still achingly beautiful. Including day-trippers from the cruise ships, more than half-a-million visitors still arrive annually to vacation at places like the Jolly Beach Resort, enjoying wintertime temperatures in the 80s and cool rum punches before an evening feast of fresh grouper against a backdrop of Caribbean steel drums. But there is trouble in this Westerner's paradise, and local Antiguans sense it all around them in myriad ways. —Dick Russell

I’m a big fan of Edward O. Wilson. He is one of my favorite scientists. He is an ultimate interdisciplanarian. Reading his CV is a tour-de-force of legitimate modernity. He is the champion of many people like me, who do not see religion and science being intractably opposed, who see biodiversity as the greatest wealth of the planet, and who see culture being primarily responsible for our success in evolving as a species.

He is the reason that I developed a renewed interest in biological science, after being simply and flatly disgusted by both sides of the Creation Science debate. You can only take so much of rigid fundamentalism, whether it be scientific, or protestant. When they seem to be two sides of the same coin, it can be depressing. However, having been introduced to another coin, I now am able to give my two cents worth.

Biodiversity is key. The loss of it only happens when really bad things occur. Like, the big impact that killed off most of the dinosaurs. Or the other 11 or so mass extinctions that have been identified in the distant past, which occur (very roughly) every 26 million years or so.

Here’s the seminal paper on the issue of periodicity of mass extinction events.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/81/3/801.pdf

Wilson writes that we’re in the middle of a mass extinction event now. We very well may see what a mass extinction looks like, from the infinitesimally small blink of time that a human life-span allows.

This begs the question. If species are dying off around us, and it’s due to global warming, then are we dying off as well?

If you are like me, you grew up with scary stories of exploding population growth and how it would only go up and we would soon be doomed by overcrowding. There have been some interesting developments. When I was born in 1972, the global fertility rate had just climbed to 5 births per woman. It didn’t look like it was going to come down. The articles below discuss what has happened since then, and what the thinking is now going forward. Understanding what affects population size, which naturally affects energy consumption, is vital to identifying what we need to do next.

World Population in 2300
http://www.enviroliteracy.org/subcategory.php/248.html
The United Nations Population Division (UNDP) released its first projection of population trends to the year 2300. According to its medium scenario, the UNDP predicts global population will increase from approximately six billion persons in 2000 to nine billion over the next 75 years. Global population will then decline to about eight billion by 2175 and then increase again to nine billion by the year 2300.
Because population grows at exponential rates, small increases of decreases in the growth rate would result in significant differences in long term population trends. For example, in its low growth scenario, UNDP projects that global population could decline to 2 billion in 2300; under its high growth scenario, as many as 36 billion people could populate the globe. All of these projects have a considerable degree of uncertainty; they are based on current population trends, but the world could be a very different kind of place three centuries from now. After all, three centuries ago, the Industrial Revolution was many decades away, and it was another century and a half before Louis Pasteur published the germ theory, which led to a revolution in health and the increase in longevity that has led to the current increase in global population.
The UNDP's projections are based on its revised predictions for global population trends over the next five decades. During the past fifty years, there was an unprecedented increase in global population as mortality rates declined almost worldwide. This rapid increase in population raised concerns that population growth in many developing countries would outstrip the countries' ability to feed their population. That concern, however, has been reduced because of another unprecedented trend: Developing countries are experiencing a transition from high to low fertility rates much faster than occurred in Western nations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Total fertility rates are declining almost worldwide. The concern in many developed nations is that total fertility rates have dropped so low that populations will begin to decline significantly.

There are several clear population trends. First, the global population is getting older. Because longevity is increasing almost worldwide, and birth rates are declining, the age distribution of the population is changing. UNDP projects that 40 percent of the world's population will be over 60 years of age in 2300. The global distribution of population will also change, if present trends continue. Almost every countries' total fertility rates will decline over the next century; more than half of the positive population growth will be in three countries: Yemen, Uganda, and Niger. India will bypass China to become the most populace country. Together, India and China will account for 48 percent of positive population growth.

The key factor is whether current population trends continue or not. The UNDP significantly revised their last population growth predictions in 2002 because demographers did not foresee the rapid transition to lower fertility rates in many developing nations. There is also a considerable lag in obtaining population statistics for some countries; countries that are politically unstable, war-torn, and host to large refugee populations may lack the capacity to collect adequate birth and death rate data for their populations. Moreover, the HIV/AIDS epidemic is taking a larger toll on populations in sub-Saharan Africa, India, and China than was previously predicted. How current trends will change in response to numerous unforeseen factors is a matter of considerable uncertainty. For more on population, see the following:

http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/Long_range_report.pdf

Population Dynamics
From
http://www.enviroliteracy.org/subcategory.php/30.html

It is estimated that the world population reached 6 billion at the end of the 20th century, a remarkable expansion. While historical records are inexact, it is believed that at the beginning of the 20th century, the world population was approximately 1.6 billion, which means that global population nearly quadrupled in just 100 years. Most of this expansion in population occurred in the fifty years following World War II.

This unprecedented increase in global population is due to the dramatic decline in mortality worldwide. The agricultural revolution, the availability of antiobiotics, vaccines, and pesticides has all contributed to the increase in life expectancy. Life expectancy is estimated to have more than doubled over the course of the 20th century, from approximately 30 years to nearly 65 years.

It is expected that the population will continue to grow over the next two decades, because a large percentage of the population in the most populated countries are of, or will reach childbearing age during this period, a phenomenon known as population momentum. According to most recent estimates, the population will continue to increase by 1.3 percent per year, adding about 78 million people each year.

However, another remarkable demographic transformation is underway. Worldwide, the total fertility rate is declining and a demographic transition is taking place. Total fertility rate is the average number of children that a woman has over her lifetime. Demographic transition is the term demographers use to describe the change a nation undergoes from experiencing high mortality rates and high death rates to low death rates and low birth rates. Most western industrialized nations began to undergo a demographic transition after the Industrial Revolution. Now evidence indicates that most developing nations are undergoing a similar transition. Almost every region, except Africa, has experienced a sharp decline in fertility rates; it appears that a decline in fertility is occurring in Africa as well. The worldwide total fertility rate was estimated to be 5 births per woman when total fertility rates peaked during the period from 1965 to 1970; it is now estimated at 2.7 births. A replacement fertility rate would be 2.1 births per woman, or one child to replace each parent (taking into account premature deaths). Almost half of the world's population lives in countries in which the fertility rate is below replacement rates. These below replacement rate countries include not only Western developed nations, but developing countries such as China,Thailand, and Sri Lanka.

Additional demographic trends are emerging: the aging of the population. People are living longer and having fewer children. As a result, the average age of the population is increasing, with a larger percentage of the population aged 65 years or older. The aging of population will strain the ability of nations to finance social security programs for the elderly in coming decades, because the number of people working and paying taxes to support these programs is shrinking in relation to the number of people these programs must support. It is not clear how nations will deal with these demographic trends.

Although the global population growth rate has slowed, the population is estimated to continue to grow over the next two decades. Most of the increase will occur in nations that have the lowest income levels, depend heavily on natural resources and in areas of rich biological diversity where deforestation for fuel wood and cropland is a serious concern.

The decline in fertility rates seems directly related to the level of education women get, and the availability of contraception. There have been a lot of studies, but this seems to be the key. When women are educated and have control over their biology, birth rates go down. And they decline fast. If this is true, then the reality and requirement of global assistance for the education and health support to women everywhere especially becomes an absolute imperative.

Does this mean requiring women in poor countries to use contraception? Pushing it on them as some sort of string tied to aid money? No, not at all. Simply the process of improving education and allowing families access to the tools that enable their right to choose their own size, from NFP to Norplant, is all you need to reduce fertility rates. This works, where lectures and smug superiority from the Northern Hemisphere do not. Some would argue that this is already happening on its own.

What will the world look like in 300 years? Will there be less of us? One way or another, there might be. Plague (waves of bird flu), major events (supervolcano, asteroid impact), the end of oil (that 40 year reserve is looking kind of thin), shock waves from the loss of biodiversity (our current mass extinction event), and the natural decline of fertility rates (education and contraception effects) could all play a role in creating an earth where people depopulate. Will we live like Isaac Asimov (everyone in cities while massive machines farm the empty lands for us?) or will we live like Jean Auel (decentralized tribes wandering the renewing earth?).

I wish I could be here to see it.

What next in the short term?

Reduce your energy consumption.
Talk about the issue.
Take as radical steps as you can in your own life.
Recycle.
Vote with the survival of the earth first, not last, on your priority list. This does not necessarily mean Democrat. Nor does it mean a Republican can’t qualify.
Write letters to companies and congress-critters alike.
Compliment progress when you find it.

Support legislation like this:

California aims to limit emissions of gases
Mon Apr 3, 2006 11:33 PM BST164

SACRAMENTO, Calif (Reuters) - California on Monday stepped up efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

State assembly members introduced a bill that would make California the first state to set a limit on emissions of heat-trapping gases.

The bill, which aims to cut emissions by 25 percent, or 145 million tons to 1990 levels by 2020, was drafted by Democrat Speaker Fabian Nunez and Democrat Assemblywoman Fran Pavley.

Pavley also wrote a state law ordering the reduction of emissions from cars and light-duty trucks.

A "Climate Action Team" of environmental advisors also recommended a series of new clean-air programs to Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"We cannot continue to ignore the threat of global warming to our environment because it isn't just about the future, it's about the impact that it's already having on our public health. It's about the impact that it's already having on our planet, our natural resources," Nunez said at a news conference.

The climate report to Schwarzenegger said the emissions reduction target for 2020 "should be the basis for an emissions cap in the development of the program." The report urged a program beyond California's borders to include other states in the West "to minimize emissions leakage."

It also called for mandatory reporting of emissions levels by the largest polluting industries -- oil and gas exploration and production, oil refining, electric power, cement manufacturing and solid waste landfills.

"Mandatory reporting will ensure an accurate inventory of emissions, which is critical to ensure that decision-making is based on emissions and emission reductions," the report to the governor said.

The climate advisors also said California should develop a "market-based program which considers trading, emissions credits, auction and offsets" and recommend the program to the governor by January 1, 2008.

A cap-and-trade market system would establish financial incentives to reduce emissions. Such programs are used extensively by electricity producers in the European Union.

Another key recommendation would require new electricity in California to come from sources with emissions equivalent to or less than new combined-cycle natural gas-fired plants. All utilities, whether publicly or privately owned, would have to meet state energy efficiency goals.

A spokesman for PG&E Corp.'s Pacific Gas & Electric unit, the state's biggest utility, said the company had not reviewed the Assembly bill and could not comment specifically on an emissions limit.

PG&E spokesman John Nelson said "we are not talking just about greenhouse gases emitted by utilities. This is something that all significant emitters of greenhouse gases need to address and on a regional basis."

The company has been reporting its emissions levels to a state climate registry.

The End.

environmentalism

Alzheimer's Study - effect of religiousity on disease progression?

2006-03-31T14:40:00.000-08:00

I found this report below from last summer while reading a bit more after the Templeton study announcement on the heart patient study. The reason I'm doing all this reading is twofold. I thought the heart patient study had kind of a dorky design, and I'm thinking about writing a longer piece of work on why scientific fundamentalism (Scientism) is just as bad for society as religious fundamentalism run amok.

Science and Religion are not mutually exclusive spheres. It's time for an integration of the lessons from both and an optimization for the future.

As far as the Alzheimer's study, I would suspect that anyone that has a community that supports them and reinforces a systemic belief system and keeps your mind active might get the same benefits from their community that religious people get from theirs. In other words, if you stimulate the mind in a particular way, then you could get rewards. I don't envision a world where a doctor writes a prescription for Judaism, or tells you to lay off the atheism for a while due to plaque buildup.

Never understimate the real value of having a social support network. Having moved across the country in 1996, and therefore being forced to rebuild mine, I came to wonder if the lack of a social support network can erode you in a physical way.

-=-=-=-=-=-

Religious practice may slow the insidious progress of Alzheimer’s disease.

By Mike Martin
(June 9, 2005)

Going to church may not only be good for the soul, but good for the mind as well, say Canadian and Israeli researchers who found that religious practice may slow the insidious progress of Alzheimer’s disease.

“We learned that Alzheimer’s patients with higher levels of spirituality or higher levels of religiosity may have a significantly slower progression of cognitive decline,” said study author Dr. Yakir Kaufman, director of neurology at Sarah Herzog Memorial Hospital in Jerusalem.

Recent peer-reviewed research indicates that religious involvement lowers mortality and increases quality of life, particularly in patients with neurological disorders, Kaufman and co-author Dr. Morris Freedman explain in a paper.

Kaufman presented “The Effects of Spirituality and Religiosity on the Rate of Cognitive Decline and Quality of Life in Alzheimer’s Disease” at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Miami Beach, Fla.

Their study is the first to look at the relationship between religiosity, spirituality and the rate of disease progression in Alzheimer’s disease, said Freedman, who heads the division of neurology at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto.

“This is amazing research,” said geriatric psychiatrist Dr. Michael Rayel, chief of psychiatry at Dr. G. B. Cross Memorial Hospital in Clarenville, Newfoundland. “This work is consistent with recent studies showing that prayer, spirituality or religiosity is correlated with better mental and physical health.”

Worldwide, Alzheimer’s disease affects approximately 5 percent to 10 percent of adults over age 65 and nearly 50 percent of adults over 85 years of age.

In Freedman’s home country of Canada, 1.3 percent of the population — 420,000 people — has the disease, which manifests as a gradual wasting of brain tissue accompanied by the accumulation of so-called “amyloid plaques” — protein fragments the body normally breaks down and eliminates that block transmission of information across neurons.

In the United States, 4.5 million adults, or about 1.5 percent of the population, have Alzheimer’s, at a cost of some $61 billion annually, according to the Alzheimer’s Association of America.

The new research, which found that “spirituality and private religious practices were significantly associated with progression of cognitive impairment,” may open the door to new psychotherapies designed to stop or reverse this so-far incurable disease.

The researchers devised a study that assessed 68 subjects between ages 49 and 94. Each person met criteria for probable Alzheimer’s disease as determined by the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke/Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders Association.

Published in 1984, the criteria are globally accepted as diagnostic for the disorder.

Two assessment tools — the Duke University Religion Index, or DUREL, and the Fetzer Institute’s Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality — measured each subject’s religious practices, such as church attendance or private prayer.

“The DUREL is a five-item scale designed to assess organizational and private religious and spiritual practices including attendance, private religious activities, and intrinsic religiosity,” said Kaufman.

Kaufman and Freedman used the Folstein Mini Mental State Examination to measure cognitive response and impairment in their subjects.

The brainchild of Tufts University psychiatry professor and cognitive disorders specialist Dr. Marshal Folstein, the Mini Mental State Examination is a short survey that grades a person’s orientation, attention, memory, language and ability to follow simple commands.

Data analysis revealed “higher levels of religiosity and private religious practices were significantly correlated with slower rates of cognitive decline,” Freedman explained.

But whether or not spiritual activity slows Alzheimer’s more effectively than other types of mental activity may be the “$64,000 question,” said University of Pennsylvania radiology professor Dr. Andrew Newberg.

“Is prayer simply a heightened cognitive process or does it have unique benefits all its own?” said Newberg, whose pioneering studies imaged the brain during meditation and prayer. “One of the big questions ultimately becomes whether or not the researchers can differentiate the positive effects of spirituality from other activities.”

Separating the two elements of religious practice — belief and practice — may help explain these benefits.

“In addition to the ‘supernatural’ explanation for better health, the rituals and traditions associated with spirituality, such as socialization, volunteering, scheduled church activities and prayers, contribute to mental and cognitive processes,” said Rayel, who is also a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Scanning a patient’s brain with positron-emission tomography may
represent a next step in the research, Newberg told Science & Theology News. Positron-emission tomography is an accepted diagnostic tool used to improve predictions about future cognitive function in Alzheimer’s patients.

If spirituality indeed slows the disease, additional studies could lead to religion-based therapies.

“These findings may warrant an interventional study looking at the possible effect of enhancement of spiritual well-being as a means of slowing cognitive decline,” Rayel said.

Mike Martin is a freelance science-and-technology writer.

Science Confirms Witchcraft Doesn't Work!

2006-03-31T10:58:00.000-08:00

Amy and I discussed this study a while back when the study was publicized on CNN, while it was still being conducted. Which, I thought was kind of odd, since I was under the impression that you usually don't want to bring the media in during the middle of a study involving psychological or medical effects and then interview anyone involved in the experiment. But heck, what do I know?

So, I've been waiting for the study to come out in order to see if it was as simplistic as it sounded.

As a comparison, a classmate of mine did much the same study (on a smaller scale, and with a mix of very sick patients) as a catholic high school science project back in 1988. Interestingly, she predicted and received the same results as this study.

Here's the article from March 30th, 2006.

Study: Prayer doesn't affect heart patients

NEW YORK (AP) -- In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

Researchers emphasized their work does not address whether God exists or answers prayers made on another's behalf. The study can only look for an effect from prayers offered as part of the research, they said.

They also said they had no explanation for the higher complication rate in patients who knew they were being prayed for, in comparison to patients who only knew it was possible prayers were being said for them.

The work, which followed about 1,800 patients at six medical centers, was financed by the Templeton Foundation, which supports research into science and religion. It will appear in the American Heart Journal.

Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School and other scientists tested the effect of having three Christian groups pray for particular patients, starting the night before surgery and continuing for two weeks. The volunteers prayed for "a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications" for specific patients, for whom they were given the first name and first initial of the last name.

The patients, meanwhile, were split into three groups of about 600 apiece: those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but only knew it was a possibility, and those who weren't prayed for but were told it was a possibility.

The researchers did not ask patients or their families and friends to alter any plans they had for prayer, saying such a step would have been unethical and impractical.

The study looked for any complications within 30 days of the surgery. Results showed no effect of prayer on complication-free recovery. But 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility.

Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, who did not take part in the study, said the results did not surprise him.

"There are no scientific grounds to expect a result and there are no real theological grounds to expect a result either," he said.

Science, he said, "is not designed to study the supernatural."

First of all, expecting a result from prayer falls into the witchcraft category of spells, incantations, oracles, and fantasy. This is something that most major religious groups battled centuries ago. Second, even if prayer pulled mysterious levers in the universe for heart patients, this study is not described as either single or double blind. What's the point, if the entire group knows that they might be prayed for or are prayed for?

The quote at the end by Dr. Harold G. Koenig is a very restrained version of "No duh."

The role of prayer is very well documented in every major catechetical work of every religion I've ever bothered to be curious about. Prayer, meditation, consciousness-raising, determining your core values, trance, chi management, whirling like a dervish, auditing your thetan, prioritization, whatever you want to call it, is a necessary human activity that allows us to develop our own moral compass, develop a compassion for others, allows individual and communal sharing of hope, and hasn't been a "tit for tat" ritual since the days of the Old Testament and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Yes, there are intercessionary prayers. Yes, there are prayers for petition. However, the definition of these prayers is universal in admonition that they are not shopping lists for your chosen deity or idol.

Sacrificing goats will not grant you special superhero powers. If that were true, we'd have a goat-based economy and would have expanded our human hegemony to every single planet in the universe by now. I'm not seeing a whole lot of that going on outside some weird sci-fi books based on the video game DOOM.

In a time where we have fantastic amounts of quality literature, philosophy, and science, it's weird to see a study that seeks to answer a question that has been consistently answered, with evidence, by both science and religion, for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Glad to see science catching up, but maybe the Templeton Foundation can skip forward a bit next time? How about quantifying the effects of social capital of religion, better defining the agency of religion with respect to cultural evolution, and continuing to qualify and quantify the social and psychological benefits of prayer?

Appetite for Learning

2006-03-31T10:08:00.000-08:00

Geneva, my two-year-old daughter, has a great appetite for learning.Sometimes a bit too literal of an appetite...

FEMA online training course completed!

2006-03-24T19:11:00.000-08:00

It's great to get certified by The Shadow Government (a reference from x-files the movie).

I recommend CERT training for anyone that wants to help themselves and their neighborhoods to be better prepared for pretty much anything.

Here in San Diego, be sure to check out San Diego CERT.

catholicism, secular humanism, faith, works, salvation

2006-03-21T14:33:00.000-08:00

1782 Man has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions. "He must not be forced to act contrary to his conscience. Nor must he be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters."[53]

The line above from Article 6 Section I Catechism of the Catholic Church is probably my favorite part of the entire catechism. I’m starting here because the concept of conscience and free will is extremely important to the question at hand of exactly how belief, salvation, and faith are related.

This particular sentence is probably the reason that I tend to not feel very comfortable proselytizing. The assumption in my mind at least is that if someone is already practicing a religion or philosophy, that they successfully reached that state through the application of introspection and the guidance of their own conscience. In other words, even though they’re not catholic, they get the benefit of the doubt from me that they are doing what they do because they chose it, not because they’re “lost” or “in a state of sin” or whatever.

I soundly reject the “if you’re not a member of the South Park First Baptist Church, then you are going to hell!” sort of sentiment for two reasons. One, it’s casting the first stone. Two, it denies the person their right to free will.

Line 1782 above has two very important components towards the end.

First, thou shalt not force someone to act contrary to his or her conscience.

Second, thou shalt not prevent someone from acting according to his conscience. Out of all matter of conscience, the catechism emphasizes religious matters.

If you disagree over a religious matter, and to me this includes someone’s decision to leave a religion, take a sabbatical to think about it, or whatever, then you as a Catholic are called by the catechism to leave them alone, as long as they’re acting according to their conscience and not simply due to laziness (But mom, I want to watch TV on Sunday!) or some sort of human resources problem (I can’t get along with that stupid old Deacon. What a dork. I’ll quit going until he leaves or dies or something.) or some sort of very trivial material-world problem (this church has the worst interior decorating ever. I can’t stand it. I’m staying home and watching football.).

Since the church is the people, and you’re not there for the building (even though a nice building goes a long way towards making the experience more pleasant), excuses based on what the place looks like or the human failings of the members aren’t really matters of conscience. They’re matters of preference and taste that’s bound up in the mundane and not the sublime aspects of our individual identities.

So, if you’re there for the sharing of sacraments, and it’s just not clicking, and you’ve tried, but you’re heart isn’t in it and you’re nagged by questions that aren’t being answered, then you are obligated first and foremost to be truly introspective about it.

1779 It is important for every person to be sufficiently present to himself in order to hear and follow the voice of his conscience. This requirement of interiority is all the more necessary as life often distracts us from any reflection, self-examination or introspection:
Return to your conscience, question it.... Turn inward, brethren, and in everything you do, see God as your witness.[51]

Once you have your answer, and if it is “I’m just not catholic (now, or possibly forever)” or “I just don’t buy this God stuff (now, or possibly forever)” then you have to decide what to do for yourself. Furthermore, even though other people have the right to appeal to you, to offer help, to challenge you, etc. they do not have the right to prevent you from acting in accordance to your conscience.

They might think or say you’ve not tried everything, or have given up too early, or whatever, but that’s beside the point. The only person that can decide what to do is you, and your free will is paramount in the catechism.

In fact, this is echoed in many other catholic writings. Here’s an example from my library. This is my favorite part of “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” by JPII.

I recommend the whole book, by the way, both because it’s quite good on its own and because, for those that have never read anything by JPII or seen him speak in person; it captures one of the reasons for his runaway popularity, especially among the young. It’s also a short read – 230 or so pages.

The book is the result of a journalist sending him some questions that were supposed to be in preparation for a televised interview. The journalist, who also wrote the Ratzinger Report, didn’t expect to hear back from John Paul II after the project fell through due to scheduling problems and other things that came up for the Pope in September 1993. However, a couple months later, a hand-written manuscript arrived. The book is the product of that manuscript.

When I first read it, I was really surprised, since at that point in my experience I did not expect to see the “God has a lot of explaining to do” sorts of sentiments expressed by, say, a pope. The rest of the book would be about as good, with excellent but short and accessible discussions of a wide variety of subjects.

So, God created man as rational and free and therefore placed Himself under man’s judgment. God’s wisdom and omnipotence are placed, by free choice, at the service of creation. Man has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions. You are, essentially, called to be accountable to yourself. You are not to abdicate this responsibility to anyone else.

Catholicism, along with many other faiths, is not a passive reception of Truths dictated by old men in vestments once a week in dusty buildings. While it can deteriorate into this, and while this is more than enough to satisfy some (most?) people, it is not what you find in the catechism, nor when you scratch the surface of the church and start asking (undeterred) questions. Sure, some church members (or teachers or officials) might be uncomfortable. Sure, you might run into some static from people that should know better. However, it is your responsibility to apprehend what’s easily available to you, regardless of whether you are a skeptic, an atheist, someone disillusioned, or an interested believer.

On to the question of salvation and belief. This necessitates defining “what it is that saves you”. There are three basic tenets of the Protestant/Catholic Faith/Works schism that played out over the various Reformations and Counter-Reformations. It’s really interesting history to read, by the way, if you aren’t familiar with the era.

1. Sola Scriptura (“Bible Alone”)

There is an old quote: “The Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible, is the religion of Protestants.”

This is different in Catholicism, where the bible, church traditions, writings, letters, encyclicals, and other stuff forms a big ol’ blob of “official writings”. A Protestant would (justifiably so, to him or her) hold up the bible and say “No way man, this is the only infallible document.” I happen to fall into the Catholic camp. I think that the Bible is a place to start. However, due to translation issues, figurative speech, and general incompleteness and corruption due to it being written by humans, and due to the fact that I’m a nerd, I give tremendous and equal value to thoughtful philosophical church writings such as encyclicals and other works. I simply prefer and trust a body of work done by a diverse set of people over time, rather than one particular document, no matter how good that one particular document is.

Read “The Wisdom of Crowds” for a contemporary explanation that precisely sums up why I feel this way.

I don’t have any particular argument with or animosity for those that follow Sola Scripture. I don’t think that Sola Scripture the way to pursue a faith life, but if it works for you, then it works for you. You don’t have to agree with but you should definitely respect the honestly-chosen postulates that a person selects for their personal philosophy.

2. Sola Fide ("Faith Alone")
A central principle of the Reformation is salvation by faith alone. The sinner is righteous before God solely on the ground of the merits of Christ as believed in through a faith, in opposition to the theory of the (catholic) Council of Trent, which makes faith and good works equal sources of salvation, with works getting slightly more emphasis than faith. Being Protestant doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t do good works, but it flatly denies their value as sources or conditions of salvation. In other words, you can be a Secular Humanist, and do good works, and a Protestant will still say you are going to go to hell because you don’t “have faith”. Protestants often criticize Catholicism for allowing people to “work their way” to heaven through good works, or for being “too soft” on those dastardly Secular Humanists who have come to do good works through an introspective process of their own.

3. Priesthood of All Believers
Protestants commonly believe that there exists a priesthood of all believers. This stems from a (understandable) rejection of corrupted church hierarchy in the 1400s. However, since no two people think exactly alike on any subject, this makes for a fractured church situation, which is easily seen in reality. From a purely pragmatic viewpoint, membership in the priesthood can’t easily be universal without suffering tremendous communications overload and balkanization. Worst case? Everyone goes their own way, or one step better you have literally thousands of 100-member churches each churning away in relative isolation. This is, largely, the condition in my native South.

So, can you be saved by works alone?

From the Council of Trent:

“For faith, unless hope and charity be added thereto, neither unites man perfectly with Christ, nor makes him a living member of His body. For which reason it is most truly said, that Faith without works is dead and profitless;"

In other words, we don’t care how pious you think you are, if you don’t actually get out there and do some good, your Faith is pointless. Ouch.

Ok, what if you just do good works and don’t want to mess around much with that Faith issue?

Again, Council of Trent:

“And whereas the Apostle saith, that man is justified by faith and freely, those words are to be understood in that sense which the perpetual consent of the Catholic Church hath held and expressed; to wit, that we are therefore said to be justified by faith, because faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation, and the root of all Justification; without which it is impossible to please God, and to come unto the fellowship of His sons: but we are therefore said to be justified freely, because that none of those things which precede justification-whether faith or works-merit the grace itself of justification.”

The short answer is no, good works alone won’t save you. It’s handled in the first canon of the Council of Trent.

CANON I.-If any one saith, that man may be justified before God by his own works, whether done through the teaching of human nature, or that of the law, without the grace of God through Jesus Christ; let him be anathema.

You are going against the theme of Catholicism here, in other words. This is understandable, since having faith (no matter how simple or how complex, how strong, or how weak) is kind of central to Christianity. However, as I mentioned before, faith alone won’t do the trick either.

CANON IX.-If any one saith, that by faith alone the impious is justified; in such wise as to mean, that nothing else is required to co-operate in order to the obtaining the grace of Justification, and that it is not in any way necessary, that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will; let him be anathema.

Catholicism and Secular Humanism overlap here (good works: check! Faith: possibly a problem…), where Protestantism and Secular Humanism are completely disjoint (you’re going to hell!). Many Secular Humanists are publicly atheist or agnostic while having a private faith life. If you differ with the assumption that Secular Humanism requires personal atheism, then the path to Council-of-Trent-style Justification is cleared.

Catholicism doesn’t let you either force or prevent someone from acting either contrary to or in violation of his or her conscience, especially concerning religion. So, in the case of someone that is totally convinced they’re a Secular Humanist, and that person is obviously doing good works, then feel free to challenge them to develop a faith, but in matters of conscience, you are not to force them or prevent them from practicing their own faith tradition.

It might seem odd for me to refer to Secular Humanism as a faith tradition, but to me it qualifies. Secular Humanism can be and is defined as a religious worldview based on naturalism, atheism, the primacy of the scientific theory of evolution, and moral relativism. Secular Humanism produces good work and good people, who are all on various paths of discovery about the good, the true, the beautiful, and all other aspects of life that interest humans.

To me, Secular Humanism simply duplicates much of the same sort of results of many religious faiths. It simply starts at a different point further down the pipeline. I don’t have any particular complaint with Secular Humanism except for the problems that are often encountered with moral relativism and the tendency towards materialism. These problems are significant and widely discussed in both religious and secular humanist circles, but are an area of active ethical and philosophical Secular Humanist research. In other words, they’re working on it, so people should stop portraying Secular Humanism as unethical selfish heathens because that simply isn’t true.

A vigilant Secular Humanist will be no more susceptible to failures in morality due to relativism than someone that ascribes to a different worldview. A thoughtful Secular Humanist will be no more susceptible to decadence and materialism than the typical Californian, and possibly quite less.

If you develop a system of belief that guides your behavior, then you are acting in good conscience. Your salvation as a Secular Humanist, according to Catholic doctrine, may not be complete, but you have one foot in the door already.

This begs the question, though – if a Secular Humanist acts in accordance to a moral code that is identical, to say, a Catholic moral code, even though the morals appeared to come from different sources, is the Secular Humanist really a Secular Humanist? Or are they a parallel-universe Catholic? Could God simply be Reason? Could Reason simply be God? Sure, if you have a universalist attitude.

If God can be or do anything, then a facet of God can easily be “Reason”. The invitation to use Reason for Good is issued by God. The rest is up to you.

I prefer to view Secular Humanists as brethren. Perhaps God reaches them in a different way to accomplish the same result – good works done just because good works are the calling of humanity. Maybe some people need fear or a threat of hell (ick). Maybe some people need to feel the solidity of a floor of reason beneath their feet and distrust the non-experiential. Perhaps some people need Zeus, or Peyote, or the Spirits of the Ancestors, or Mother Earth. I really don’t care, as long as the motivation is to do good.

Finally, having faith doesn’t mean you don’t have doubt. “A faith” in something is accepting something without proof. “Having faith” is the process of developing a faith life. They are not the same. “A Faith” is a static and one-dimensional time-invariant statement. “Faith” as in faith in God is a continual process which requires the constant evaluation and growth of the self and does not mean that you have all the answers at any one time, if ever. It isn’t something that’s inherent. It’s learned.

“Having faith” is different for each person. For me, it’s the productive contemplation of the mysteries encountered in life, philosophy, and nature. For other people, it’s a personal relationship with God developed through prayer. For others, it may be the examination of theology and the development of religious thought. For some people, it’s all of this and more.

We’re all guilty of this (deferring to the experts) in at least some aspects of life. In a very specialized society, you will not be able to master everything you need in order to make decisions throughout your life. You save your energy for the big ticket items, like your health care, or your chosen career, or your personal moral code. Some people are totally ok and experience a resonance with a moral code (or religious values) being taught to them in toto as dogma. It works for them, and they go with it. They’re low maintenance. I’m not. Most people I know are not, either, preferring to do the hard work of figuring stuff out on their own, often in the face of people that don’t understand what we’re all about. To them, we’re spending a lot of time re-tracing old ground. However, in my case, I needed to do the work myself, and didn’t like simply accepting what I was being taught.

Fortunately, and like most but not all of my compatriots, I was encouraged to explore and experience by church members. I wasn’t condemned or yelled at or threatened in any way shape or form. Sure, I was challenged, but I took it on as a challenge, and it was definitely worth all the reading and thinking and distancing myself from religion that I did.

About Criticizing Religion - a Postscript

Statements about religion such as “it’s the opiate of the masses” or “obviously nothing more than a method of social and political control” or “nothing more than a dictatorship with good music” assume that religious people are mindless zombies that can’t think for themselves. This is nothing more than snobbish bigoted tripe.

It’s as bad as saying gay people are inherently and inescapably promiscuous or Secular Humanists can’t be trusted because “they don’t buh-LIEVE in the al-MIGH-ty GAWD”.

Catholics, etc. are obligated through free will to develop a faith life in good conscience. Some are better at it than others, but there are literally millions of non-religious people that seem to not want to think for themselves either, easily fall prey to social and political control mechanisms, and don’t even have good music.

Churches are communities of people. People are subject to critique. Productive critique is welcomed. The goal of a critique is to communicate possible errors, shortcomings, or failures. Using pejorative language or making sweeping and negative generalizations right off the bat generally isn’t the hallmark of constructive criticism. It has the additional unfortunate effect of ensuring that the subject or audience of an otherwise valuable critique will immediately discard whatever follows as bigoted.

This makes religious people no different than other types of people. The rules of civil discourse shouldn’t change just because people identify as a member of a religious faith, philosophy, orientation, or creed. Save the snide comments for sitcoms and satires, where we can all then enjoy them… as God intended.

(hehe, sorry I couldn’t resist)

-Michelle Thompson 21 March 2006

Summer Dreams

2006-03-18T18:17:00.000-08:00

Winter Storm on Palomar Mountain, Ham Radio Class, and Repeater Site Hike-in

2006-03-14T11:19:00.000-08:00

Tuesday 7 March 2006 Spent wonderful day at zoo, then model railroad museum, then plant pavilion. Took lots of photos, using the telephoto lens at the zoo and the macro lens at the railroad museum and plant pavilion. Geneva had a close encounter with a Peacock and we took the SkyFari ride, which is a small gondola, from the back of the park to the front. I can't walk very far, so this was a "shortcut". The kids had never been on it. Michael immediately named it SkyFerrari, and realized that everything in view was the zoo, and that it really was a very big place.

We took a lot of photos. Here's the set.

Thursday 9 March 2006 We spent entire day at Disneyland with extended family. Geneva, who loves princesses, was in pretty pink princess heaven. There was a princess castle, princesses walking around, and a fairy godmother at breakfast!

We got a family photo taken!

Note the cute Tinkerbell.

I took it easy, I checked into the Disneyland Repeater, I monitored APRS in the area, and generally geeked out while everyone rode rides and saw shows.

The day went really well until I got a very strange phone call from the Palomar Mountain Observatory. This needs a bit of explanation. I organized a ham radio class for the mountain, mainly to serve the volunteer fire department, but also including anyone else that wanted to become a ham. I had reserved the rec center at the observatory since it had a place that most resembled a classroom. This was back on the 24th of February. The class was scheduled for the 11th and the 18th of March.

On the 24th February, a meeting to finalize the reservation was set up for 2pm on Sunday, February 26th. Later that day, the secretary wrote me back and postponed the meeting due to "unforeseen circumstances". I didn't inquire what the circumstances were. I thought maybe illness or accident or else the staff was busy. I hoped that the "unforeseen circumstances" didn't involve anything too seriously bad.

I was told by the secretary I'd been working with (a very professional and courteous person) to wait for a call in order to set up a meeting for the week of March 6th. No one called the next week, so I wrote the secretary back on the 8th of March asking if the meeting was still necessary, and whether or not a phone call would do.

So, since I was expecting a call anyway from the observatory about the reservation of the room, I didn't think much of it. I took the call, and greeted the fellow with "It's great to hear from you!" The reply was "Well, we'll see about that."

How odd, I thought. The next ten minutes were comical, to say the least. I was berated, belittled, interrupted every single time I tried to speak, and even more strange - the guy turned out to not be the guy I was expecting a call from. Instead, this was his supervisor.

He tried his best to bully me and then twice threatened to cancel the reservation. I was accused of taking the observatory for granted and other various vague failures on my part, none of which sounded familiar, since I'd followed all instructions and had a great experience with the observatory staff up until this phone call. I began to wonder if it was an early April Fool's joke. Only thing was that it wasn't really funny.

Since I'd already agreed to meet with anyone at almost any time, and since I'd been told to wait for a call to schedule this meeting, I was kind of confused about this whole conversation.

Being away from my desk (at Disneyland with four small children) this was kind of a surreal moment. It's hard to plan when you don't have your planner, but he refused to let me call him back when I got back to San Diego. I agreed to meet before the class, at 7:30am, just to go over whatever they wanted to go over in using the classroom at the observatory. This, to me, was a somewhat strange request. I'd been completely available for a meeting at any time since the 24th of February, with the exception of late Monday evenings. Why the rush-rush chaos now?

The instructor for the class was set to arrive at 7:45am, and had been willing to meet to finalize the classroom reservation as well. The class was to start at 8:00am. I mentioned that the instructor might be a better person to meet with since he was already going to be there a bit early, and that unleashed another angry outburst from the guy on the phone. I was lectured about how I was the one responsible if for some reason a bunch of volunteer fire department people burned the place down (what a hysterical image), or made a huge mess. Obviously, that suggestion wasn't going anywhere. No matter, I was going to be up there anyway, and meeting at 7:30 vs 7:45 wasn't much of a difference to an early riser like me. I asked him if there was some other issue that was the real problem, but his answer was unclear. Finally he hung up with a BANG. Whew! Weird.

I decided to call the secretary back and ask her if she could give me a better explanation. She had a very interesting story! She said that the person I was organizing the class for (who will be referred to as Happy) had come into the office and put the class on hold, and that he was "going to talk to me about rescheduling it." I told her that was news to me, and that I'd have to ask him about it. I left a voice mail for him to call me back and touch base and enjoyed the rest of the day.

Friday was a great day. I had a doctor checkup, went to the hardware store and got a bunch of raw materials for making wooden toys, had the oil changed in the truck, cleaned the truck for Operation Date Night, called people to do last minute planning for the ham class, and then picked up the kids at preschool at 12:30, had Rubios for lunch, and kept tabs on the weather. A lot of snow was predicted for the mountains. There was debate over how much Palomar, a relatively small mountain in SoCal, was supposed to get. Some predictions said 6 inches. Others, for the San Bernardinos, mentioned a foot or more. Having four-wheel-drive and some experience with driving in the snow gave me the confidence that I would at least be able to get around in any weather. I made sure the instructor wasn't scared away by the weather. His reponse? "They'll have to close the roads to keep me from coming to teach." Right on!

I dorked around with a great software program in the afternoon called Radio Mobile. This was for another mountain project - to get a Traveler's Information Station up and running at the State Park on Palomar. They have the sweetest antenna site, too, so doing the propagation map was just totally fun.

Ken didn't want to go out on Date Night (kids have date night at the gym) so I did some more computer stuff and packed to drive up to Palomar at 9:00pm.

Snow was already falling, and falling down to about 3000 feet. It would eventually fall in San Diego itself, which is a rare event. The only cars I passed were an SDG&E truck (more about that later - this truck was an early harbinger) and a snow plow. The xTerra did great in 4WD-high. No sliding even when the snow got thicker. We couldn't get the gate open at the cabin due to the bottom being already in a foot of snow, but the truck was in the driveway. This was probably not the best place to park it, as I found out the next morning, but it made getting kids and dogs and computers and cameras and clothes inside a lot easier.

UH OH

The cistern at the cabin was empty. This was immediately obvious since the pump was spinning away downstairs, dry. For how long, no one could tell. Ken took the action item to figure it out, since I don't do plumbing. Or windows.

He solved our no water problem by running a hose from the well to the cistern and filling it up that way. It was unclear where the freeze was, but no bursting was apparent. Since it was just under freezing, I didn't expect anything catastrophic. The pipes are below ground, and it had been warm recently.

Now, the interesting thing about Ken is that he really doesn't like microbes. Or toxins. Or no-see-ums of any type. He insisted on using melted and then boiled snow for eating since the hose to get the water to the cistern was now suspect (except apparently for toilets, washing clothes, and washing dishes).

Having drunk from garden hoses all my life, I tried to reason with him, but to no avail. "See how I turned out? I'm FINE!" didn't really make much of a dent in the Impenetrable Fortress of Logic that Ken maintains.

The rest of the day was totally great. It snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed. It was getting deep out there, considering this is San Diego County. The snowflakes were those strange little balls, or bigger crystals, then back to the little balls.

We played, we walked around, I took a few photos, but since it was storming, we mostly stayed in, stayed warm, and read books, putzed around with projects, and did some cooking.

I got up early and looked at the snow. I spent about a half hour trying to get the car dug out, then called the Observatory to see what the status was. I got the guy that I was supposed to meet with originally on the phone. This was pure luck, since I'd called the secretary's desk. It being Saturday, and after a major snow, I wasn't really ambitious about getting through to anyone important. He started in on how I should postpone since the roads were closed to non-residents and the instructor would never get on the mountain in the first place. He was quasi-unpleasant, but I thought that was understandable because there was a ton of snow he had to deal with, and he was going to be busy. I told him I wasn't going to try to get over there at 7:30 if the class was going to be cancelled for the day, and he said he was heading out with a bunch of people to go take care of whatever needed taking care of.

Ken took over Operation Truck Freedom and succeeded. In the process, the North County Times took his photo, thus sealing his fame as "guy stuck in snowdrift tries to free car" forever. I'll try to find the photo. He also attracted the attention of "Happy", who was joyriding in his truck while waiting for Ken to get out of the way so he could plow Birch Hill Road. Ken has all the fun!

So, while all this was going on, I called my friend who was also involved in planning for the ham class, and he suggested redirecting people to the fire station. It's easy to get to, and the students are most likely already there in anticipation of a very busy day. He also said he'd call a contact at the observatory to redirect anyone that showed up at the classroom. I thought that was a great idea, since the guy I talked to probably wasn't going to be available to handle anything extra and getting out of their hair was a good plan.

So, I hiked up to my friend's house at 8:00am. I had the coolest doggie escort ever - he just simply appeared out of the snow. He was a really big dog - sort of wolf-like, very friendly, and stuck with me the entire hike. Here is a photo of him. He belongs to a neighbor.

It's hard to tell from this photo how truly big this dog is, but look carefully at the photo and how wide the truck tire tracks look in relation to his feet. He easily came up to my hip. He could have knocked me over without much effort. His head was massive, wide paws easily allowing him to cut through the snow. He seemed completely in his element, and hovered around me, nudging my hand and looking at me with big smart doggie eyes.

Once I arrived at my friend's house, my doggie escort dropped me off and took off to walk with someone else further up the road. It turns out, the SDG&E truck I'd passed the previous night had been there to restore my friend's power from a downed limb yanking out their line from their house. SDG&E had showed up within an hour or two and gotten their power back on that night. I looked at all the trees, everywhere, that covered the mountain, and (yet again) had the appreciation that power outages were probably going to be an issue.

I helped dig out my friend's cars, rescued some compost, watched them put chains and cables on their cars, evaluated the trees, met their wonderful bird, helped put a kayak aka "fastest sled on the mountain" on top of a car (a kodak moment for sure) and ate chips. We got down to the main road and arrived at the fire station at 10:00am.

Guess who was there? The instructor, with his old 4WD truck, with chains, and daughter in tow! He was stoked. She was cold. Very cold! It was kind of cold, actually, in the mid-20s. She said she could have gone to the beach today, but thought snow sounded more fun. This is the magic of San Diego County. The beach was sunny and warm, and the ocean is visible - gleaming golden in the distance - from just a few tens of feet away from the fire station. While you're in knee-deep snow. And cold.

When "Happy" saw me, he pulled me aside and told me that there was more to the story than simple crankiness on the part of observatory staff concerning the room reservation. What I heard was amazing. Apparently, someone else who works at the observatory - someone who is also in the ham radio club with me, and has been a bit cranky with me in the past had learned about the ham class room reservation. He is also supervised by the guy that called me while I was at Disneyland, so the connections became clear.

Apparently, this same fellow wanted to put a ham radio class together 5 years ago and it didn't work out. I guess he viewed ham radio classes on the mountain as his turf. Ironically, I'd tried to contact him about helping with the class, and not gotten a response. Since he lives up here, I figured he'd want to help. His view, as told to "Happy", was that he should get to organize the class, and I should handle "overflow". Overflow? Like, in a sewer? Overflow from what? The great pent-up demand to become Amateur Radio Operators? Like being a volunteer firefighter doesn't already mark you as some sort of freak of nature?

Ok, maybe I'm in dreamland, but if there is that much demand that there is overflow, then there will be more ham radio classes in the future and everyone that wants to teach one can. In fact, the instructor of that day's class has been begging for more instructors to teach all over the county.

I offered to "Happy" to let the guy take over the class, even if I had to continue to do the work, if it would make it easier for everyone to get along. It's no skin off my back. "Happy" said it wouldn't be necessary, and to keep doing what I was doing. I agreed with him. I'm thinking that the best thing to do is to just let it go. There's no sense in raising a fuss about someone upset for things I have no control over. Not everyone likes me, and I can't help that. I can only continue to do what I can, where I can, and continue to be civil and cooperative with everyone I work with. That includes everyone at the observatory.

We actually and seriously had a class that day at the fire station and then later at the restaurant. Calls came in all day for the crews, so the instructor focused on teaching the ones that were there so they could train the others. It was under very chaotic conditions with radios blaring and melted snow and boots thumping over the floors, and people talking over each other's heads, and large herds of uniformed folks heading in and out, but it was completely fun and the basics actually got covered - the essential definition of the test, how to approach it, and material for study distributed. We ended the class at about 2:00pm to both give the instructor time to get back down the mountain safely, since the snow was falling heavily yet again, and let the crews go to increasingly numerous calls.

I got a lift back to the house, and spent the rest of the day playing with the kids in the snow. Michael loved it. Geneva got her fill pretty quickly. Her little pink face told me the whole story. "Um, where is my coach? My footman? My warm milk? You mean I actually have to walk through this stuff? I'm going back in to conclave with my PONIES! Thank you very much."

So, she liked looking through the window at Michael playing, much more than actually joining him.

Later on - at 7:33pm to be exact - I was writing an email to a church friend to see if I could get someone else to record mass for me the next day. Chains were required and roads were closed. We were snowed in. At that moment, the power went out. The computer and my cell phone modem were the only things on.

The power did not come back on. I realized that our generator was not taking over. This was bad. The battery in the generator had not been replaced yet, and well - it's kind of necessary. We immediately shut all doors and started a fire in the fire place. It actually kept things really warm. We called it in to San Diego Gas & Electric after noticing the entire side of the mountain was dark. They estimated 12:00am repair time. We could see flashing lights soon at the end of the road and thought that must be a repair truck.

We turned in early, but had to keep the fire going, so it wasn't a solid night's sleep. The power didn't come back on at midnight.

At 7:00am I hiked out to check on things and brought the camera along. I took a lot of photos. The mission was two-fold. I wanted to see if the repeater was on emergency power (CW "P" is added to the ID if it was on emergency power) and if it was, or if it was off-line, then I was going to hike down to the site to do a visual inspection. The repeater came up on emergency power, so off I went.

The walk was really pretty easy, even down the dirt road that hadn't been plowed.

Here is the set of photos from the site. If you saw the video from the other day, then these will be familiar.

Set of all winter storm photos.

The place was totally magically beautiful. There were a lot of limbs down everywhere. I kind of figured that it might take a little longer to get power back on than they thought, especially if whole trees were down back in where the power lines ran.

I hiked back home after taking the scenic route and meeting the same doggie escort from Saturday, still romping around in the snow like there was nothing there. I sent in a report to the radio club board, and answered some other email. We decided to head out in the afternoon since Ken had work on Monday and the power situation would probably not improve. Ken scouted out S6 (South Grade Road) and I packed up and cleaned.

Ken came back with an amazing story. There was a solid line of cars on South Grade Road. It was Deep Impact - the movie grade traffic. Everyone was playing in the snow. Whole families had grills, picnics, wine and cheese parties, shovels and pickup trucks full of snow to drive back down to the city for snowball fights. It wasn't moving. No one was going anywhere.

Since I of course wanted to see this chaos for myself, I said we should of course take South Grade. Ken was up for it, and off we went! The roads were plowed, but still covered in snow, but 4WD-low got us to the main road, and 4WD-high got us down to the traffic jam. We passed one other car. The driver asked me if we'd been down the mountain yet today. The trees were completely encased in gleaming white. The clouds moved back in, and the entire forested mountain-top became an ethereal wood with us moving through the heart of winter.

We made it to the main intersection, then turned onto S6.

Seven miles and 2.5 hours later, we were through what we estimated was over 2000 cars. There were 2WD hondas. There were snowplows, stuck in the traffic. There was a highway patrol car in the middle of it all. There were trucks, racing imports, an armada of minivans packed with kids, and a large bus.

There were people sledding on driveways, in the road, on the road, down what can be only described as cliffs, and across the road. Constant snowballs criss-crossed the sky. There were dogs, people in snowsuits, people in t-shirts, people in jeans. There were kids laughing, crying, and/or staring in shock at this strange white stuff. There was music, laughter, yellling, people trying to direct traffic, people trying to turn around, people spinning out.

It was one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen. And, it was so weird that I didn't take any photos at all. You'll just have to imagine the Rio Carnival - on Ice - mixed with a Street Fair then crossed with a car show.

We made it home with a large amount of snow still on the top of the car. Ken decided to go get some food before it melted, which of course caused people to run into inanimate objects while staring at him in the parking lot.

Listening to the repeater traffic the whole weekend taught me some things. The club and the site are generally pretty prepared, but people tend to pass along stale and incorrect information. People speculate and opine about things that are going on, and it gets assumed to be the real story by people listening, who then pass it on, and it quickly becomes The Truth.

The batteries were rumored to be dead. The power was rumored to be out for over three days when it had been off for less than 30 hours. Emails started zipping around with pointed questions.

I'd already taken site photos, made a couple of reports when necessary, and headed out. I knew this upcoming phase well - and always try to avoid it. There is a time for evaluation and analysis, and now was not it. This was the period in time where the news of an emergency has spread, and everyone has an idea or question on what to do. However, things were already coming back online. However, things were still bad on the mountain for everyone else.

The power had come back on at 1:00am on the 14th of March. 54 hours of outage and the repeater site had done really well, with minimal problems. Sure, the club will take care of the things that failed, but I'm not even going to bother wading in until all the facts are known and people that aren't going to actually do any site work in the future get bored and wander off.

The phones also failed on the mountain, which points to another issue with the communications infrastructure. Our communications group on the mountain will probably get a lot out of this experience, along with the fire department and the community in general. I'll write more as this develops. My cell phone worked for the most part, but coverage is kind of problematic, and in the traffic jam on S6, the cell was obviously overloaded and quit accepting new calls.

SDG&E deserves some remarks here. It's really hard to figure out where the power failed on a mountain, in two feet of snow, with little trails that suffice as roads, where things aren't marked and the snow and the limbs continue to fall. They did a great job repairing things.

So, that was my weekend, guys!

Picture012.jpg

2006-03-09T19:00:00.000-08:00

Picture012.jpg
Originally uploaded by Abraxas3d.

SuitSat-1

2006-03-08T16:52:00.000-08:00

My SuitSat-1 Video.

I hope you enjoy!

-Michelle

Project Tolkien Part One

2006-03-07T18:51:00.000-08:00

Project Tolkien Part One

This is a photo of my San Diego Model Railroad Museum floor tile. Installed 2006. Each tile is actually part of a railroad motif that goes down the center of each hallway. There are a couple hundred tiles so far. The museum sells them as a fundraiser. Usually people put their name or a memorial name, or a sponsoring company buys a tile. I'm sure you've seen something similar at universities or other places where donations are important.

The black background is the railroad tie. There's two metal decorative strips for the rails themselves on either side. I forgot to get a hallway-scaled photo, but will get one next time I go, so you can better tell what I'm talking about. Since it's a railroad museum, the tiles form a railroad motif.