Montebello 2009

My superlative wife let me go on my second annual Monte Bello 24-hour solo backpacking trip this weekend. October is just about the worst month for wildlife here, but that was only part of my reason for going. Here are a few pictures culled from the 300 or so I took yesterday.

One of my main goals was to find snakes. Most of my hiking plans revolved around poking around the karst outcroppings up near Black Mountain to find snakes. I found none there. I did however see a Pacific gopher snake directly on the trail right at the parking lot before I had even taken a single step:

In the undergrowth around Stevens creek I found a western skink [no newts because of the season]:

1000 feet higher, at Black Mountain, I spent a lot of time taking pictures of flowers and searching for snakes. I didn't find a snake but I did find a completely intact 5-foot gopher snake skin. The scales seemed like little lenses to me, so I shot the setting sun through the skin:

This is my favorite of the bunch. The shadows from the wide ventral [belly] scales are visible as well as the in-focus dorsal scales:

For 45 minutes or so I sat alone on Black Mountain and watched the sun set, while a doe stood still on a hill several hundred feet away and... watched the sunset too, is all I can figger.

I spent a foolish portion of last night rigging up creative ways to catch opossums in my lens, to no avail. They were everywhere and impossible to nail down.

It was great! I hope next year I can go in a better season...

Yippee

Hey, you wanna know what's cool? Family. You know why? Because we're stuck with each other. I just scanned through my posts on this blog and WHEW!! Gives me a headache. All my friends check it once then think "holy pimple pox, get me out of here." Yet family members seem to keep on coming back. For what, I cannot say. I know I wouldn't read it if I didn't write it.

Unless I was related to me, that is.

Shorter version

Each person is a dot in a box. People that are really, fundamentally similar are close together and people that are different are far away. Similarities are measured in dozens of different ways. What pattern do the dots make?


[this is a 3-dimensional projection of the n-cube, if you care]

The Ultimate Social Science Experiment

I couldn't sleep last night. All I was thinking about was:

The ultimate social science experiment [short of raising people from birth in 100% controlled environments]. Here's how it would go:

1. Find a set of N social variables that are, to the best degree possible, completely orthogonal, and span the set of all social properties [!].

2. Design a test--like a very carefully conducted interview--to measure position along the variable axes for a very large number of randomly selected people. Each person would need to answer, say, 10 weighted questions to resolve their position along a single axis.

3. Instruct a computer to create an N-dimensional cube [hypercube, n-cube, whatever] containing all the data. Each person would be represented by a single point within the volume of the cube.

4. Calculate the effective entropy of the configuration, and other interesting things

Question: what would it "look" like?

To simplify things, imagine a 3-dimensional cube [the normal kind]. Along one edge might be the variable "pacifism," measured between -1 [hawk] and +1 [dove]. Another edge would measure, say, "deference to authority" and another possibly "analyticity." If you scored (1,1,-1) then your position would be at one of the bottom corners of the cube, and indication that you are extreme in views. If lots of people end up there--if there is a clustering somewhere--then we can conclude that the variables either have [a] correlation in substance or [b] correlation in occurance. Since the axes are chose to avoid--as much as is possible--correlations in substance, grouping means correlation in occurance. Meaning, there's a "type" of person begging to be labelled there, typified by location near a particular corner of the box. Occurance correlations could be very profound, though there's no way of identifying cause [ie. nature or nurture] without plotting gene occurances along yet more axes [and that's still partially ambiguous]!

Expanded to N-dimensions, we can do all kids of neat statistical tricks to tease out interesting information. How about a polarization test on all axes combined? As in, are people generally one way or the other, or do they generally fall along a flat continuum? Correlation tests, looking for structure: filaments in N-space would indicate that some variables have give-and-take relationships with others. Projection on axis pairs will unobfuscate correlations that might be hidden by completely uncorrelated variables. Entropy is a good measure of how "organized" the resulting distribution is: do people really fall into categories?

The great thing about cubes is that every axis connects to each vertex. A 3-dimensional cube has 12 edges and 8 vertices, but each vertex touches one edge in the x direction, one in the y direction, and one in the z direction. So all the correlation information in the whole system is contained in an n-cube.

The overall key to this exercise is asking the right questions. Take the "pacifism" axis, for example. Questions like "suppose a terrorist struck a major US city, would you support retailiation" tap into conscious political biases. Stripping away contextual biases in the questions, to get at how people really ARE would be incredibly difficult but essential.

So I ask again: what do you see? Do you see a cloud of dots in the middle, with outliers near the edges? A hole in the middle? A gas [uniform density]? Structure? What about dynamics: do dots clump over time, disperse, oscillate, rotate, collapse, expand?

Creativity

Chapter 18 in my ongoing quest to meanderingly pedanticize the world.

I've been brooding over the nature of creativity since I noticed a disconnect between two different broad usages of the word. If I say Bob is creative, I can mean that he:

1. creates things.

or

2. is imaginative.

The first, I imagine, is closer to the roots of the word, but the second is much more common. If I tell you that I know a guy named Bob and that he's very creative, you would probably imagine somebody with unique style, an artist's flair for the new and different, and a certain unrealistic and colorful view on life. At least that's the image I get.

The interesting thing is that being creative in this way doesn't say anything about one's actual creation of anything. Engineers--not everyone's creative archetype--create things all the time, but colorful creative personalities might actually create nothing. I'm not arguing that this is in any way wrong--language can make whatever it wants out of the words we use--but the distinction is interesting because it shows how much we culturally evaluate creativity as an attitude or personality and not as a process of creation.

I came upon this disconnect while trying to label myself [a fantastic waste of time]. I have always felt a profound motivation to make things--music, photographs, drawings, snowflakes, model rockets, electronics, dams, forts, holes, gardens, websites, food, books, songs, code, solutions, essays, babies. But calling that "creativity" implies a lot of things which--regardless of whether they are true or not--have nothing to do with this creative impulse. So, I want a way to think of these two ideas--creation and imagination--independently.

I imagine there is a continuum of possible "amounts" of each of these two types of creativity which each person has. And I doubt they're correlated. And no doubt a large portion of the world's more successful artists, scientists, architects, musicians, chefs, engineers, lawyers, contractors, entrepreneurs, and criminals have decent amounts of both. I can't think of many situations where creativity wouldn't help performance, and it is basically a uniformly recognized [but soft] virtue.

Synthesizing these two ideas, we get creativity as a process of imagination motivating creation. This is probably what I would like the word creativity to express. Take, for example, the three processes of creation that I've noticed in my own life and by observation, with Bob as proxy. These represent the three general paths whereby a new thing can come into existence.

1. Inspiration lands in Bob's head. He follows it.

2. Bob has some good ideas. He uses talent, work, and time to stitch them together into something.

3. Bob sits down with no ideas but with a goal to make something. He forces it into existence with no particular inspiration, using only his skills and concerted effort.

It would be fair to say that, in a sense, the first path is the "higher" path. But there's nothing in essence wrong with the third approach--it just seems less likely to produce remarkable results. In fact, I imagine that the bulk of the creation that is done is of the third type; crank the stuff out because somebody will buy it, instead of sell it because it's worth buying. This Dell PC that I'm typing on right now is a result of that approach, so I shouldn't complain too loudly. That being said, the third path is less creative [by my definition].

Anybody who has made an effort to create has probably experienced each of these three states. You can't control inspiration [whatever that is] so if you're regularly driven to create something you'll use the third method at least some of the time. Brahms did--he threw away huge amounts of music that he didn't feel met his standards, a fact which many musicians bemoan but I am grateful for. So it's nothing to be ashamed of--unless your entire career is the mass production of forced-into-existence soulless pieces of corporate detritus. Then you should be ashamed [but you wouldn't have lasted this far into this post if that was you].

And what about the crucial element of creativity, uniqueness? It's essential to any of these three steps. If it's not original, it's not creation you're doing, it's mimicry. And don't get me wrong, mimicry has its place too--every band has its own sound [Beatles respectfully excepted]. But even to accomplish creation of the third kind requires something new. I like to remind myself often though that uniqueness is not a measure of creativity any more than sheer bulk of output is. Anybody can do something that has never been done before--I just picked my ear with a bottle of contact solution, balanced my salsa bowl on my cup and then blogged about it--but that doesn't mean it's an expression of creativity. I feel that this is the major trap that people fall into when they run out of inspiration: they replace it with idea-free experimentation [see: Wild Honey Pie].

There is no conclusion. But I feel like I understand creativity better--perhaps not in the cognitive sense but in the psychological sense. The best summation I can make is this:

Creativity is imagination which motivates creation. The more inspiration is involved the better the result. Creativity motivates experimentation and creates unique results, but does not come from them.

At last!

Wooo hoooo!

Killing in the name of

[by mandamommy and trogonpete]

From our perspective, there are two distinct questions pertaining to the Iraq war that are often lumped together.  The first is whether we were right to invade in the first place.  The second question is what we do now that we’re in.  We believe that the first question needs to be answered first, because it necessarily motivates the answer to the second question.

Invasion:

The original justification for invading Iraq is often cited this way:  Iraq seemed to be producing weapons of mass destruction.  The theory was that part of our war on terrorism included pre-emptive strikes against terrorists likely to attack the US. 

But the actual original justification predated 9/11 and had nothing to do with terrorism.  The neoconservative group Project for a New American Century [PNAC] sent a letter in 1998 to President Clinton urging a strategy aimed at “the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”  The group believed in the establishing of an “American empire” and proposed that American dominance in the 21^st century should be maintained by "fight[ing] and decisively win[ning] multiple, simultaneous major theater wars."  The main goal of the group was to convince the government to invade Iraq. 

So who is the PNAC?  Well, you might have heard of Dick Cheney.  And Donald Rumsfeld.  And 15 other well-known names later part of the Bush administration.  Nearly everybody advising Bush after 9/11 were members of the PNAC, a group that had a clear and public agenda of bringing war to Iraq for the purpose of maintaining American “hegemony.”  These are the very same people who attempted to discredit the entire CIA after the intelligence agency proved that there was no WMD threat from Iraq. 

10 days after George Bush took office he instructed his staff to begin drawing up plans for an invasion of Iraq.

Additionally, it is now well documented that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld lied about the WMD’s and misled the American people about Iraq being part of the war on terror.  There were no WMD’s, and the administration knew it.  Again, this much is well documented [along with almost 1000 other lies told between 2001 and 2003 by the Bush administration about the threat Iraq posed to the US, according to the Center for Public Integrity].

As far as the war on terror was concerned, bin Laden and Saddam were enemies; Saddam represented the secular Islamic ideal so repugnant to fundamentalists like bin Laden, and Saddam considered bin Laden a—well, terrorist.  Additionally, there never was any possibility that Saddam was in the terrorism business—he was a cruel dictator, but he wasn’t interested in flying planes into American buildings.

But the administration said Saddam had WMD’s and that these WMD’s could be used as weapons of terror on American soil.  Donald Rumsfeld, as the Secretary of Defense, made it clear that what was at stake in Iraq was the potential for Saddam to repeat 9/11 but on a much larger scale.  Again, this is a deliberate lie; Saddam never had any connection to al Qaeda and had no interest in terror operations in the US. 

So we invaded Iraq.

The interesting footnote here is that many supporters of the war now cite how bad Saddam was and what a service we have done to the world in getting rid of him.  But what about Robert Mugabe?  What about Kim Jong-il? Than Shwe?  Hu Jintau?  Sayyid Ali Khamenei?  And there’s no way Saddam was worse than Omar al-Bashir.  Should we invade Zimbabwe, North Korea, Myanmar, China, Iran and Sudan in order to depose tyrants?  Is that our role?  If so, why aren’t we doing it?

We believe—as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—that we should “renounce war and proclaim peace.” [D&C 98:16]  War is justifiable only in cases when it is necessary to defend our families [Alma 43:47] and plausibly our rights and freedoms [akin to Alma 48:10].  War is also a purely defensive means of preservation [Alma 48:14] and even pre-emptive war is expressly forbidden, even in cases where a pre-emptive strike would prevent a terrorist  attack [3 Nephi 3:20-21].  Modern scriptures clearly forbid the invasion of Iraq and the prophesies concerning the failure of offensive endeavors are applicable. 

[Each of these scriptures pertains to a situation analogous to the position we were in; the saints in Missouri wanted to take the fight to their persecutors and the Lord forbad it, the Nephites wanted to pre-emptively attack the terrorist Gadianton robbers but were forbidden.  We believe that the inclusion of these councils in the scriptures is very strong council for us and pertains to our government as well.]

This is an unjust war, founded on a thousand lies and violating basic morality.

The immorality of the invasion is key to the discussion about what we do now:

A much more complicated question is what we should do now that we’re in Iraq.  It is very important at this time to step back and admit that nobody—nobody anywhere—has any idea what the future holds.  The military experts told us the war would be quick, painless and easy.  They were wrong.  The civilian experts said the surge would only exacerbate the violence.  They were wrong.  So any time a politician says something like “setting a timetable will plunge Iraq into a civil war” or “the fighting will never continue as long as we’re there,” we shouldn’t believe it for a second.  The truth is that nobody knows and even the best analysis is a guess.

Politicians also like to talk about “winning” and “losing” the war.  This is pure propaganda.  It is meaningless.  In a sense, we have already lost: we lost over 4,000 American soldiers—significantly more than the number of civilians lost in 9/11—we lost our moral standing in the world, we lost trillions of dollars, we lost the opportunity to capture or kill the terrorists responsible for 9/11, we lost trust in our government, and our government lost the trust of the world.  We lost our national integrity.  We created a country full of destitute anti-American terrorists where once there was a country of poor repressed farmers.  A million Iraqis lost their lives.  Every day we stay we lose more.  The only metric of victory in a war like this one is preventing further losses.

This is where the immorality of the invasion comes to play.  Having losses does not imply a war is lost.  World War II was a victory in the sense that Hitler’s ambition at global domination was ended, and Americans had to pay dearly.  But when the cause that these troops are fighting for is an ignorant, arrogant global domination scheme dreamed up by a few radical ideologues in the government, when “dying in vain” becomes propaganda for dying for oil and power, when planning to save American lives is branded “unpatriotic” and “defeat,” then we have lost.  But neither Saddam Hussein nor Osama bin Laden beat us.  We just lost.

Still, it would be clearly irresponsible of America to just pack up and leave.  The infrastructure needs to be rebuilt.  We need to make sure the Iraqi army is competent enough to prevent a plunge into anarchy.  That’s why we need to stay.  But we must stop the bleeding as soon as possible.  This means setting a firm goal with the government of Iraq after which they will be on their own, then get out.  Every day we spend there the more we lose.  An open-ended policy seems foolish; with our tax dollars flowing into the country, what great motivation does the government of Iraq have to pick up the slack themselves?  With no carrot and no stick, the donkey ain’t moving. 

Of course we’re not experts.  We know very little and understand less.  But we do know that the invasion was wrong.  And that fact alone compels us to want out—the best way to repent, we believe, is to stop sinning.  That’s a good first step.