Birds, Books, Brahms, Babies, Bosons and the Pursuit of True Wilderness

Montebello 2011 | Mini Herp Transect

2011-05-14T17:34:00.000-07:00

This year I decided to take my 4th annual Montebello solo 24-hour shindig in the late spring just for some variety. It's a better season for wildlife but much more challenging for the Montebello Light Project. Everything is way too green this time of year, especially after getting a tremendous winter rainfall this year.

I spent more time than previous years but almost none of it photographing--I was waiting for some inspiration but got none. Instead, I embarked on a mini informal herp transect along Steven's Creek and tributaries. Here's my route [UPCOMING]:

And here's my haul:

407 California newts
4 unidentified larval salamanders [1 apparently arboreal, 3 unknown--very dark but too small to be giants]
3 unidentified large fish
1 San Francisco garter snake
0 Red-legged frogs
0 Robot ninja zombie badgers

I estimate that I undercounted the newts by between 10-50%, giving a total newt population along the transect of ~450-600. I estimate that the 3 fish decreased the newt population by about 50 based on the dramatic decrease in newts in the fishy sections. I probably missed several dozen of the larval salamanders because they are much more prone to hiding and I tried to disturb the habitat as little as possible [no rock-flipping, etc]. Montebello probably holds several thousand newts altogether.

At night [alone, as usual], a couple great-horned owls frolicked above me in the trees until I disturbed them with raucuos nose-blowing. A wild turkey greeted me in the morning and I watched a wrentit gather nesting materials.

Now for the pictures:

Lupine at sunset.

My unfortunate attempt at a 2011 entry into my ongoing Montebello Light Project. It's a lupine as pacman, eating the sun.

You can bet when this white-tailed kite decided to start kiting near the setting sun that I really missed my 500mm f4 [this was taken with a 180mm]:

I found a small deer skull and thought it would be fun to combine it with some cool water effects. I aimed the skull so that water entering the breathing tubes at the back of the skull emptied out the nose. In the full-size version, the little squigglies made by reflections of the sunlight on the surface of the water make for a very cool abstract pattern.

California newt. If you see the full-size version, there's a funny little parabola of water spray coming from the salamander. I've spent many hours over the last couple years trying to get good newt pictures and these two are the first I've felt good about.

As always, thanks to my wiff for letting me go!

Montebello 2010

2010-09-19T22:33:00.000-07:00

Friday was my third annual backpacking trip to Montebello. It's a perfect little spot for a quick, short photography expedition and night under the stars: the wildlife and habitat is diverse and the sunsets from Black Mountain are excellent. Here are some of my pictures from this trip; not quite the haul I got the last two years but worth it anyway.

Steven's Creek had a lot of newts, including both local species. Especially exciting was a very large red-legged frog, my first ever and a goal for this year.

I took a self-portrait reflected from the frog's eye. Well, the camera and tripod are at least plainly visible.

When I got up to Black Mountain the sun was low and fog was moving in, which made for some nice generic atmospherics. There's something about the soft backlight, the harsh dark karst, glowing golden grass and fog that combine to make a nice mood. It was lovely up there.

I found a jay feather and played around with shooting it with the sun behind it. Of several hundred pictures this is probably my favorite. It took pretty much everything I know about my camera and its optics to make this work.

The Pacific Ocean is somwhere beneath that sea of clouds out there.

The fog crept in up valleys and ravines.

I don't like the combination of colors in this picture but I just love the perspective of sitting above the clouds and capturing their advance up and over ridges.

I took this last picture long after sunset, trying to get the light low enough that I could take a long exposure to soften the clouds and get some nice color. The fog was pouring between the trees at the top of the ridge as the it rolled in from the ocean.

Once again lots of thanks to Manda, who was stupendously generous to let me take this time away.

Infinite Jest

2010-06-29T16:24:00.000-07:00

I just "finished" Infinite Jest on the plane back from San Diego last night. Then I started from the beginning again because it seems like that's the only way to make sense of it. Infinite indeed.

Some thoughts, appropriately disjointed, for myself and others who have already read it:

1. I haven't seen any IJ analysis that touches on the mathematics in the book, but I see some major clues to what happened in the year between the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment and the Year of Glad. I started cataloging science- and math-related errors in the book in order to determine if DFW was making the errors or the characters. I ended up finding about 25 significant errors; most of them were of a nature that they had to be intentional. If I knew pharmacology and chemistry like I know physics, optics and math maybe the list would be much longer.

Quite a lot of the errors are math "mistakes" that Pemulis communicates to Hal. In one or two cases, The Peemster nails the math when he isn't communicating with Hal, but he's always wildly off when he's tutoring Hal. And ALL of Hal's math--which he presumably got from Pemulis at some point--is terrible. Hal tells Mario that his most-feared monster is somebody who can lie without him (Hal) realizing it--and he mentions that Pemulis had just lied successfully in a way he'd never seen and he didn't know that the Peem could lie like that--and on pg. 852 Hal says that Pemulis has been "almost suspiciously generous" about tutoring Hal. The "point" of all this seems to be that Pemulis is in reality not Hal's best friend, but an incredibly subtle arch-enemy. I think the math points to the hypothesis that Pemulis deliberately sabatoges Hal through introduction of the DMZ. In a tale about Hal's alienation, it is a major key that his only real friend is actually one of literature's most cunning antagonists.

Some of the mistakes seem to be DFW error and some others are non-plot-related pseudo-narrator error akin to the pseudo-narrator grammar errors. Some appear to be deliberate physical surrealism. If I have a few hours I may list the errors here because nobody else seems to have done it, though my list will surely be incomplete.

2. The book is certainly meant to be read cyclically--there is no way to make sense of the book without starting at the beginning directly after reading the last page. This mirrors a general theme throughout the book.

3. The narration is individual-based but not first-person except for the very end and very beginning of the book, which are contiguous chronologically [also a brief chapter by Himself that is completely out of the chronology]. Hal's personal narration indicated to me upon first read that the events of the book all eventually cross with Hal--and that idea was borne out in the first chapter when it is revealed that Hal, John NR Wayne [representing the wheelchair assassins/Quebecois connection] and Don Gately [representing the Ennet Housers] dig up Himself's head together. The story is about Hal--even the parts that aren't explicitly so.

4. IJ is clearly a work of mad genius. Don Gately may be the most beautifully rendered sack in all of literature.

I think I'd need 2-3 rereadings before I can really put things together. But let me leave you with part of pg. 482, which sums up how I feel while reading IJ:

"He has that rare spinal appreciation for beauty in the ordinary that nature seems to bestow on those who have no native words for what they see."

Home

2010-04-07T18:58:00.000-07:00

The taproot of my psyche is embedded to the mantle at fifty-ten-west-Sweetwater-Drive-Tucson-Arizona-eight-five-seven-four-five. My sense is dominated by place--not community, belonging, security, but by the geography of my formation.

My senses are overwhelmed by this sense.

Sounds: a 7am Gila woodpecker banging on the ducts, "The Barn," "Kingstaff," "The Museum," violent monsoons, amorous Harris' hawks, The Wash after a microburst, the strange acoustic properties of brutal heat, "Arroyo Lane," The Katiebonniepeter Saguaros exploding and plastering our outside walls with green spiky goo, coyote packs yapping in the yard, C-130, A-10, F-16, cicadas, "one-four-oh-oh-oh-off," the ringing of the old cowbell heralding dinnertime, "good morning to you, good morning to you, it's time to get up now, it's time to go poo," an impossible cacophony of mysterious noises throughout the night, Past Masters II through headphones over the roar of the Electrolux Pig every Saturday morning in The L, Tyrone interfacing with the ancient Soviet-personnel-carrier-ish microwave, KUAT 90.5 FM in the morning in The Addition, "I'm just going to show Bonnie that she didn't throw this rag away," and--most of all--the seasonal serenades of white-winged and mourning doves and Gambel's quail: kuh kuh kuh kuuuuu-uh u-uh kuuuu-uh u-uh kuuuu-uh uh... kuh kuh-kuh kuuuuuuuuuh; oooooaaah poo poo poo; huh hwaaa ha huh hwaaa ha huh hwaaa ha, respectively.

Tastes: bitter pulp of unripe pomegranates, grotesquely sweet ocotillo blossoms after summer rains, chlorinated overripe apricots, the local oral anesthesia of raw jojoba, prickly-pear jelly, Fry's bagels--by the crate--with copious butter and cream cheese and dipped in orange juice, feral New Zealand spinach, a half vanilla/half flour swirl cake, homemade bagels with dry milk for flour, Dongy's fried eggs with La Victoria chile verde salsa on Roman Meal, eggplant and swiss chard.

Smells: monsooned creosote, burnt dust signaling the end of the heater's annual 11-month siesta, a necklace of dessicating chiles, "flower"ing palos verdes, heat so oppressive it reeks, goat manure, the complex and powerful smell of paraffin and stale placemats pouring from the buffet, freshly-broken ground, the well-ripened trailer interior after 10 months of disuse, The Barn with goats, The Barn with chickens, The Barn with packrats, Pixie, anything cooking on the cast iron, a daddy javelina, the desert's anxious chemical anticipation of an approaching storm cell, Cabby's wet-mixed-with-dry dogfood in the aluminum bread pan.

Sights: literally hair-raising lightning, a bobcat under my window on a lazy Saturday morning, acres of frosty cacti glowing backlit in sunrise-light, the omnipresent raptor, gopher snake with the blip-blip-blip of digesting packrats, javelinas in the carport; Gila monster under the car, Granddaddy's shells lined up under Smithsonian cutouts of leopards and orcas, the bushy overwatered elephant acacia near The Tramp, surreptitious TGIF with Katie every datenight, rattlesnake on floor at the foot of the bed during construction, diaper art, Bonnie curled up in a midden with a decovered and well-bathed Gone With the Wind, Van building a wall from desert rocks, a single vulture feather helicoptering down, Dongy stepping on--and breaking--the greatest dragon of all, a dozen tan cottonballs leaking horizontally behind quail parents, ubiquitous funnels of black widow spider nests, "Monsoons to Wash in Toxic Toad," Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp framed by saguaros, Dongy jigsawing a brontosaurus in the porch outside the master bedroom, two admired brothers jumping in the living room until their heads brushed the ceiling popcorn, ubermanly Brother Hously cutting his pinkie with a circle saw while building The Addition, a new land discovered in Civilization, iridescent cicadas, burnt circles on the underside of bookcase shelves, old sliding church belt buckle found by the rabbit cages, maggoted dove carcasses on The Porch, the daily drowned kangaroo mouse in the pool, old bullet hole in a prickly-pear paddle every day on the trail back from the bus stop, the potato plug--from a potato gun war with Bonnie--stuck to a thin branch over the pool wall for years and years.

Touch"es": a scorpion's zing, daily cholla spines in feet, smushy wash sand, binary solar radiation, bristly tarantulas, barefoot basketball on scorching gravel, thousands of prickly-pear microspines embedded in flesh, a tarantula hawk-shaped forehead welt, floating at night in a dark warm pool while bats swoop in for sips, the soft wood-on-wood friction of Dongy's goat-head-holder, the tactile dwink of the racquetball dwinked off an aluminum softball bat from the diving board out deep into the desert, getting blocked over and over and over again by Chris at The Hoop, the glossy rubberiness of the fiberglass-reinforced tape wrapped around the fracture in the Louisville Slugger, the impenetrability of caliche when attacked with a digging bar, the sandy and satisfying yield of poking holes in a sweet potato before baking it, Tyrone on my chest on Saturday morning to remind me of seminary, heavily-counterbalanced fancy silverware, insubstantial squirmy Colorado river toad tadpoles, pounding nail after nail into the unfinished doorjamb between the master bedroom and the porch, helpless but efficient swimming down the flashflooded Wash, scraping candle wax off the diningroom table with a butter knife, the heft of the squat square-tipped goat manure shovel, unique textures in a shovelful of packrat nest, peeing in the breeze, the crunchy lace of Mongy's nori and the satisfying monaxial rollability of the sushi roller, tapping each support beam in The L--only after working up from the metal bracket on the side of the fridge and the two inter-hall arches, wedging above the floor in doorways with hands and toes, the velvet-on-wood report from closing a drawer on The Buffet.

A cataract of memories pours from every remembered sensation. My roots grow to absorb every memory. I will never be uprooted from fifty-ten-west-Sweetwater-Drive-Tucson-Arizona-eight-five-seven-four-five but I can never go back. Even if I could go back, it would just be 5010 W. Sweetwater Dr., Tucson, AZ 85745, without the infinite magic.

Montebello 2009

2009-10-10T20:04:00.000-07:00

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...

Shorter version

2009-03-16T23:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-16T23:01:00.000-07:00

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

2008-12-22T22:55:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-11-04T22:30:00.000-08:00

Wooo hoooo!

Killing in the name of

2008-10-06T20:55:00.000-07:00

[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.

Deceit and ... Silliness

2008-09-26T09:10:00.000-07:00

For anybody who may have doubted that Palin really buys the McCain campaign's garbage about the proximity of Russia to Alaska giving her foreign policy experience, there's this:

COURIC: You've cited Alaska's proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?

PALIN: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land-- boundary that we have with-- Canada. It-- it's funny that a comment like that was-- kind of made to-- cari-- I don't know, you know? Reporters--

COURIC: Mock?

PALIN: Yeah, mocked, I guess that's the word, yeah.

COURIC: Explain to me why that enhances your foreign policy credentials.

PALIN: Well, it certainly does because our-- our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia--

COURIC: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth. We-- we do-- it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where-- where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is-- from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to-- to our state.

By those qualifications, the governer of Missouri has foreign policy experience because the B2's used to bomb Iraq in 2003 flew out of an air base there. Again, she's claiming experience from what the military is doing in Alaska; it has nothing to do with her.

Read that carefully a couple times. It's disturbing.

Deceit and Outrage

2008-09-18T01:01:00.000-07:00

Guy walks into a job interview. Interviewer asks if he feels he's sufficiently educated for the job.

GUY: "Well, I grew up in Oakland. Berkeley and Oakland are neighbors."

INTERVIEWER: "What knowledge did you obtain due to your proximity to Berkeley?"

GUY: "Oakland and Berkeley are neighbors, and there's even a hill in Oakland you can climb and actually see the Berkeley tower."

INTERVIEWER: "What knowledge does that give you?"

GUY: "Well, it means it's a small world."

Does he get the job? Of course not. Even if the job required no special schooling, the sheer audacity of the bald deceit involved in Guy's claim to education would disqualify him from any job in the eyes of a self-respecting interviewer. It's downright offensive. If Guy expected the interviewer to buy that, what does he think of the interviewer's intelligence? And can the interviewer expect him to be an honest employee?

Here's another story, even more ludicrous, you may have heard this one:

SARAH PALIN: "...And, Charlie, you're in Alaska. We have that very narrow maritime border between the United States, and the 49th state, Alaska, and Russia. They are our next door neighbors.We need to have a good relationship with them. They're very, very important to us and they are our next door neighbor."

CHARLES GIBSON, ABC NEWS: "What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?"

PALIN: "They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska."

GIBSON: "What insight does that give you into what they're doing in Georgia?"

PALIN: "Well, I'm giving you that perspective of how small our world is and how important it is that we work with our allies to keep good relation with all of these countries, especially Russia..."

Before you rush in and claim that these two stories are not perfectly analogous, let me say that you're right. Palin is much much worse than Guy. There is a decent probability that Guy, growing up in Oakland, benefited from some small cultural trickle-down from the [relatively] nearby university. It is even likely that Guy has been to Berkeley. But Palin has never seen Russia, she's never been there, she's never interacted with diplomats from there, she's never dealt with Russian-American common interests in the region, there is no Russian foreign policy trickle-down floating across the Bering Strait, and she surely hasn't picked up any clues to Russian motivations for the invasion of a small democracy 5,000 miles away. Guy was just trying to deceive the interviewer to get a job. Palin? The entire country.

Before I analyze her comments further, let me make one thing clear: I'm not currently interested in the question of whether Sarah Palin is qualified to be VP. What interests me is the culture of deceit in the McCain-Palin campaign that this story symbolizes. The campaign and even John McCain himself have repeated this exact same argument on national TV. This is not a poor choice of words by a candidate under duress; it is apparently a coordinated talking point within the campaign designed to convince voters that Palin is experienced enough in foreign affairs to be VP and, by extension, P. Yet it would be safe to claim that both Palin and McCain understand the deceit inherent in this claim; Palin certainly understands that she never interacted with Russia in any way as Governor of Alaska. But she apparently has no qualms feeding this story to the public. America hasn't seen somebody this comfortable deceiving us since... well, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.

Let me be again be clear: I'm not accusing Palin of lying. I'm [re-]documenting her deceit. Let's analyze her claims in detail:

Start in Sarah Palin's hometown of Wasilla. Drive to Anchorage and board a plane. Fly 500 miles over completely uninhabited wilderness to the town of Nome on the remote western coast of Alaska. Hire [at great cost] a helicopter to fly 120 miles to Little Diomede, a small island in the middle of the Bering Strait. This is the only way to get to Little Diomede; it has no port and no airport, the population of about 170 Inupiat Eskimos isolated from the rest of the world but for a weekly mail helicopter and a single cargo barge each year. If you're lucky and the weather is good, you can now look west and see another island on the horizon. This is Big Diomede which, for historical technicalities, is actually part of Russia. Big Diomede has a permanent population of exactly zero. Beyond Big Diomede, over the Bering Sea, lies the Chukotka Autonomous region of Russia, with a population density of 0.18 per square mile; less than 1/6th that of Alaska, which is by far the least densely populated state in the country [Wyoming, the next lowest, has 5.4 citizens per square mile]. Chukotka is so remote that its large oil reserves and other resources are largely untapped. See this map: Alaska on the right, Little Diomede and Big Diomede in the middle, with Chukotka on the left.

Furthermore, Russia is so big that Wasilla is barely further from the business end of the country--Moscow--than Boston is, via a Great Circle route. You don't hear Mitt Romney touting his foreign policy experience because he was the governor of a state only 4,500 miles away from Moscow. In fact, to fly to Moscow from Anchorage requires flying down to the lower 48 and flying east over Europe. So Wasilla--in practical terms--is as far from the heart of Russia as any place you can find in the Northern Hemisphere.

The point is this: While it is technically true that it's possible to see part of Russia from an island in Alaska, this fact is irrelevant to Palin's foreign policy experience in the following ways:

1. Sarah Palin has neither seen Russia nor traveled to Russia

2. The region of Russia adjacent to Alaska has negligible strategic importance

3. Palin has never met with official Russian delegations

4. Alaska is functionally further from the Kremlin than almost anywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere.

Unless foreign policy experience is acquired through some kind of bizarre geographically selective osmosis, Palin can claim exactly none due to her home state's proximity to Russia.

Some cite the fact that Palin was commander of the Alaska National Guard. Well, this is true, but any time National Guard troops are used for international issues they are federalized under command of national military leaders. The frequently-cited Alaskan National Guard troops in Iraq are not commanded by Sarah Palin. Executive experience [whatever that means, and why it's suddenly the only kind of applicable experience, is another question entirely] maybe, but foreign policy experience? Hardly.

Let me get back to the point. This little deceit is a microcosm of the McCain-Palin campaign. They have shown an epic degree of comfort with deceiving the American public for political gain. Sarah Palin and John McCain both know that there is exactly zero substance behind the some-Alaskans-can-see-a-remote-part-of-uninhabited-Russia-sometimes-and-therefore-the-Alaskan-Governer-is-experienced-in-foreign-affairs claim. When they use this argument, they are consciously trying to deceive the country. That is terrifying to me, as an American citizen. And, truth is, this isn't even close to the most egregious example of McCain-Palin deceit. Check any one of the non-partisan fact-checking sites like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com. It's shocking: full-up straight-faced pants-on-fire lies.

Having foreign policy experience with Russia may or may not be a legitimate mandatory qualification for VP candidates; I haven't argued either way. But the willful, persistent, coordinated deceit that the McCain-Palin campaign is willing to feed the American people signals a moral corruption and deep cynicism that profanes the offices they are running for. This isn't politics as usual, this is the politics of change: change from fibs, exaggerations and disinformation to dirty, filthy, brazen lies.

Ping

2008-09-08T11:41:00.001-07:00

Ping!

Montebello

2008-06-19T11:04:00.000-07:00

I backpacked solo in Montebello friday and saturday. The lighting was unreal due to a nearby fire. Here are a few of the several hundred pictures I took on friday. I hope you like California grass. Enjoy.

At about 5pm a large cloud of smoke covered the sun.

Count my aperture blades.

As the smoke patch cleared the normal gorgeous colors came out briefly.

One of the sweat-sucking little buggers.

I think this is a white butterfly mariposa lily.

Bees were mobbing the soap plants.

My other hobby

2008-05-21T20:49:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I go to parties and start beatboxing. Everybody just starts going wild, I'm that good. Here's a live recording from the last party I went to. Pretty sweet, right? I know, it's pretty impressive.

Some pictures [too large for palewis]

2008-04-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

Racist

2008-04-07T16:54:00.000-07:00

I just took tests at two sites to determine if I have subconscious racist biases. Here they are:

U Chicago
Harvard [the race IAT]

I first read about these in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and then today in Nicholas Kristof's NY Times column. Apparently whites and blacks alike tend to associate blacks with negative things and whites with positive things. The tests are designed to access the subconscious through mind-numbingly repetitive tasks that measure implicit associations.

So go give them a try.

The U Chicago test has you shooting or choosing to not shoot a series of white and black men holding guns or cell phones. I shot whites with guns faster than blacks and I holstered my gun faster with blacks than with whites [no error bars were quoted, so I don't know if the results were statistically significant, but the difference appeared "large"]. This means that I am subconsciously biased anti-white. The second test is an association test and I scored dead even with no bias. I have many questions/complaints about the methodology but the general conclusion is that I test marvelously bias-free!

Everybody let me know how you do... and whether you measure up to my lofty precedent of high-minded anti-European American bigotry.

Evolution of Toxicity

2008-02-27T12:16:00.000-08:00

How does defensive toxicity evolve? Being as I am completely ignorant of scientific orthodoxy on the topic, I am free to wildly speculate regarding this mystery.

Consider the monarch butterfly for a well-known example. As caterpillars, monarchs acquire a store of cardenolide aglycones from eating milkweed. These cardenolides are steroids that, in high enough doses, can stop the heart and thus are toxic to most animals. The monarchs then are permanently toxic to most predators from cardenolides ingested as a caterpillar and are thus protected from predation.

Storing cardenolides is a trait that must have evolved. Any investigation into the evolutionary history of a trait must begin with the Occam's Razor of evolutionary theory: the trait arose through random genetic mutation; it was beneficial to the reproductive viability of an individual monarch; this increase in viability eventually led to universal trait ownership in the global monarch population.

But how can this explanation be correct? Let us try to explicitly paint this story of the cardenolides-storing "gene" [standard euphemism for "gene or set of genes"]. We will start with a single monarch since identical genetic mutation in two distinct individuals is probabilistically impossible:

A single monarch is endowed through genetic mutation with the cardenolides-storing gene. Until the first interaction with a predator, this gene has no effect on the reproductive viability of the single butterfly.
A bird eats the butterfly and dies or is injured from the toxin.
The gene disappears.

The gene conferred no survivability advantage to its host since its first effect occurred only after the monarch was killed. If the monarch had offspring before it was killed, those offspring would have no survivability advantage over their cousins without the special gene. Genes that confer no reproductive viability advantage do not become universal.

Consider further the role of the predator, in this example a bird. If not killed, the bird might learn not to eat monarchs again. Through cultural transmission the bird could possibly teach other birds not to eat monarchs. Even if such cultural transmission is likely, this benefits both the monarchs endowed with this gene and not, giving no evolutionary advantage to the gene itself [using a Dawkinsian gene-level evolutionary argument which is clearly valid trait-level as well]. If the bird was killed, on the other hand, then birds with a gene instructing them to not eat monarchs might replace the old ones after many generations. This scenario is less likely than the first; it requires a long period of large-scale predator/prey interactions with a monarch population significantly endowed with the gene, while simultaneously never giving any viability advantage to the cardenolides-storing monarchs. Neither explanation can account for selective pressures favoring the toxic gene.

Is there still some way to invoke basic adaptive natural selection for monarch toxicity? There is a candidate solution: taste. Cardenolides taste horrible. Is it possible that the bird tasted our monarch and rejected it? The butterfly then has received the ultimate survivability boost from the gene: it lives where its cousins would certainly have died. This is certainly possible, but I have strong doubts about this hypothesis. For one thing, I wonder about the state of a butterfly after being tasted by a bird. Is it likely that a tasted butterfly can survive and have offspring? It is true that this tasting could possibly leave the butterfly alive; this is why beak-marks on the wings of butterfly specimens are common. But what are a monarch's chances of reproducing after this injury? Additionally, any lesson the bird learned from the tasting the monarch--that all monarchs or even all butterflies taste terrible and are possibly toxic--will confer no specific advantage to the monarchs with the mutation. Remember that our one monarch, in order to pass on beneficial genes, will need to live in a situation where a monarch without the genes would die. Unless birds habitually sample butterflies in a non-fatal way before deciding to eat them, I find it extremely unlikely that it is taste that conferred the viability advantage for the monarchs with the toxic gene.

It is clear to me that the standard adaptive natural selection argument can't explain the toxicity trait of monarch butterflies. But exaptation--my old friend of herons and voles--could explain it well. Here's my explanation:

Cardenolides are not only toxic to birds, but insects as well. In fact, the toxins are used by plants specifically as a defense against being eaten by insects. Let us paint a different evolutionary story:

A single monarch is endowed through genetic mutation with some kind of immunity to cardenolides
This monarch has access to food plants [as a caterpillar] that other monarchs do not. The immunity gene confers a strong advantage to this monarch at its most vulnerable stage of life.
Because of increased survival rates as caterpillars, monarchs with the mutant genes proliferate and replace those without it

This sounds very probable. But where does the toxicity fit in? I have only explained how monarchs might have evolved tolerance to cardenolide. Here is the "wild speculation" I promised:

Suppose the gene for "immunity" is actually a gene for removing the cardenolides from the plant matter before digestion. This is one of several plausible methods for tolerating a toxin. The toxin thus must be excreted or stored. If the toxin is stored--or even if it persists a significant amount of time before being excreted--the monarchs will be toxic to birds. This toxicity is a by-product of the natural selection of the cardenolide-tolerant gene.

The benefit of this approach is that it allows the monarchs to acquire the toxic gene as a species. The downfall of the adaptive natural selection argument in the first place was that the gene had to be beneficial to the first butterfly in order to propagate. If the mutation had an initial evolutionary benefit--allowing access to new abundant food sources--then it will prevail throughout the species. Only then will the pressures of predation influence the evolution of these monarchs. Remember that all of our explanations for how the presence of the gene in the first individual gave it an evolutionary edge failed because all of those explanations gave the same advantage to the monarchs not possessing the mutation as to the monarchs with it. This failing is erased when the evolutionary impetus for the gene's survival is not dependent on being eaten or "tasted" to be expressed.

Now, as a species, the monarchs evolve better and better storage mechanisms for the toxins to be more effective at deterring predators. The predators evolve in parallel to learn not to eat monarchs.

This is exaptation.

This is also a "just-so story." But I would be surprised if toxicity in most prey animals is not a result of exaptation [there is a tantalizing genetic correlation between toxicity and coloration that broadcasts toxicity--like the red/black monarch wings--which seems to support my argument].

Update: I just found a paper [Ecological factors influencing the evolution of insects' chemical defenses, J. Skelhorn et al., Behavioral Ecology, doi:10.1093/beheco/arm115 ] discussing the evolution of defensive toxicity in insects. It says that the subject is relatively unexplored but gives this insight:

One potential explanation [for the evolution of defensive toxicity] is that chemically defended individualssuffer less from predation than those that do not invest incostly chemical defenses. However, chemicaldefense often cannot be detected prior to attack, meaning thatin order for chemically defended individuals to suffer lessfrom predation than visually similar undefended individuals,they must be more likely to survive predatory attacks. Althoughthere is now some evidence that aposematic insects often survivepredatory attacks relatively unharmed andthat predators selectively reject prey based on their chemicalcontent, it is currently unclear under what ecologicalcircumstances such differences in survival would allow costlychemical defenses to evolve...
...[A]lthough sequestered chemicals may be stored systemicallyin body tissues, many species storea large proportion of the chemicals in the integument and wings. This may increase the speed with which predators perceivean individual to be defended and as a result reduce damage tothe insect.

This vindicates the premise for my theory but sheds some doubt on the need for it [the paper nowhere discusses the transmission of the gene from the first individual to further generations, but points to evidence that birds taste and release butterflies. And I was right about storing the toxic chemicals, it seems]. I still think exaptation is a cleaner explaination, but pure adaptative natural selection is more plausible in light of this. The paper is really good, it's worth a read.

Update 2: I just realized that toxicity can be manufactured by the prey species, not just acquired through feed. This strongly suggests that the adaptive route is possible.

Encyclopedia of Life

2008-02-26T07:47:00.000-08:00

Last night I had the urge to look up the ecology of tank bromeliads. Not having a university biology library in my apartment, I turned to the internet. And found nothing. The "information superhighway" is supposed to be a glut of information; a curious Googler is supposed to be able to find anything. I have found this to be increasingly not the case. Very, very few resources provide deep, detailed, well-written material for the purpose of free information. Most of my searches return a superfluity of corporate garbage, functionally empty blogs, and woefully incomplete or inaccurate official pages. There are a few well-respected sites which provide high-quality information consistently--like the OED and Encyclopedia Britannica--but all have significant flaws; too narrow a scope, too little free content, or too-shallow coverage. Wikipedia has immensely broad but shallow and frighteningly inconsistent coverage. General Google searches are a major headache for anybody trying to find quality information. At every turn a researcher is bombarded with hundreds of irrelevant ads, search results, and links. I have found the internet to fall well short of its promise of being a powerful and accessible repository of the sum of human knowledge.

For these reasons I have been nearly beside myself with excitement for the last year in anticipation of the unveiling of the Encyclopdia of Life. The EOL will be the culmination of the internet, and by far its most important resource. In the words of E. O. Wilson, one of the coolest guys on the planet and the inspiration for the EOL:

Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth available everywhere by single access on command.

And it's even better than that. Each page will eventually contain all known information about each species. It will accept user content, but only after screening by an expert, so the EOL will have the breadth of Wikipedia [within biology] with the information quality of a scientific journal. But the depth of information will be unlike any resource ever created by man. Seriously.

This morning I received this message in my inbox:

The new Encyclopedia of Life portal has gone live with more than one million
species pages! In celebration of this big event, our first EOL newsletter is
available at:
Click here to read the newsletter.
You can see the new pages at http://www.eol.org/. We also invite you to take the
survey at the site so you can help us improve.We thank you for your interest and
support over the past year. Enjoy.

Woohoo! It is here--in abbreviated form, but it is here. I strongly urge you to go take it for a spin; the information format in revolutionary and brilliant.

Now when Little wakes up in the morning and asks to look at a picture of a kinkajou I don't have to rely on the crummy random pictures that Google image search returns...

Update: nytimes.com has a nice article on the unveiling of the EOL.

Sub-bullet b: Antarctica

2008-01-28T14:01:00.000-08:00

Sub-bullet b: "A clear warming trend is evidenced by the Antartctic ice sheets"
Hierarchy: Part II:1:A:iv:b

Back to Intro - Back to Outline - Up to Bullet iv - Back to Sub-bullet a - Forward to Sub-bullet c

Introduction:
Antarctica, like Greenland, has a complex climate and thus the logical structure of Sub-bullet a will be followed. Simply, this means that we will use current understanding of how warming could effect the ice in Antarctica and data showing the trends of the distribution of that ice to conclude whether warming is occurring. The issue of causality will be left at this point unless evidence can be found which attributes the observed behavior to effects other than warming.

The bulk of the ice on Antarctica consists of two main sheets: the East Antarctic Ice Sheet [EAIS] and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet [WAIS]. The EAIS is much higher in elevation and therefore colder and less susceptible to warming than the lower WAIS. Below is a map compiled by NASA's ICESat showing the altitude of the upper surface of the Antarctic ice sheet.
This uneven distribution of ice mass and altitude will be critical for understanding the behavior of the Antarctic ice sheet.

In most respects Antarctica is as different from Greenland as two polar ice sheets can possibly be. In contrast with Greenland, Antarctica is naturally very cold; a large majority of the surface area of the continent averages below freezing year-round. Since Anatarctica is less marginal for ice than Greenland, a small rise in temperature isn't likely to be the difference between ice and liquid water except at the extreme edges. This means that melting is relatively less important in Antarctica as a factor for mass loss. The interior is large and very cold and in this region scientists expect that a warming climate would increase the ice mass since precipitation would increase--perhaps even enough to make the total mass balance increase due to warming. The Antarctic peninsula sticks much farther north and thus is more susceptible to warming trends than the coasts. Antarctica also does not rely on an exterior ocean current to cool it, and contains over 10 times the ice that Greenland does. All of these factors make Antarctica theoretically much less sensitive to small climate effects as Greenland is.

Despite all of these differences, we are looking for the same warming signature for Antarctica as we were for Greenland: positive mass balance in the interior, potentially negative and accelerating mass balance at the edges [since thinning is not just related to melting but to ice dynamics like glacier flow], and glacial dynamics features like accelerating flow. A refinement of the mass balance model predicts that the WAIS will see mass loss and the EAIS will see mass gain; this is the signature we are looking for.
[Refer to bullet iv for further introductory material]

Study 1 : GRACE weighs in on mass balance
Measurements of Time-Variable Gravity Show Mass loss in Antarctica
Isabella Velicogna and John Wahr, Science 311, 1754 (2006)

Antarctic mass rates from GRACE
J. L. Chen et al., GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 33, L11502

Interannual variations of the mass balance of the Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets from GRACE
G. Ramillien et al., Global and Planetary Change 53:3, 198-208 (2006)

Simple: The researchers who conducted two of the three of our GRACE studies for the Greenland mass balance trend also conducted similar studies for Antarctica, and another group worked on the data as well. Their conclusions are the same: interior mass is increasing, peripheral mass is decreasing, with a net decrease in mass that is quickly accelerating. See Sub-bullet a: Greenland for more GRACE discussion.

Details: All three studies found large negative mass balances in the WAIS and mass gain or balance in the EAIS. A figure from Velicogna and Wahr illustrates this [the green line is the EAIS trend and the red line is the WAIS trend]:

Mass balance findings for these three studies are summarized in the table below.

All three studies also corrected the data for post-glacial rebound--the upward swelling of the crust resulting from the loss of glacial period ice--which yields more accurate but less precise data, since the post-glacial rebound is poorly known. Chen et al. describes the limit of knowledge [units, parenthetical statement and emphasis mine]:

"The calculations here show that the estimates of Antarctic snow/ice mass rates from GRACE data are completely dependent on the adopted PGR [post-glacial rebound] model, with uncertainties that might be on the order of 100% Our estimate of -99 or -77 cubic kilometers per year mass loss in West Antarctica is consistent with that of Velicogna and Wahr of -148 cubic kilometers per year, given the large PGR uncertainty and that here we only compute the mass loss of the Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica."

The take-home message is that we shouldn't have much faith in the exact numerical values of the mass balance, but that the trend of mass loss in the WAIS and mass gain in the EAIS is clear.

Discussion: The two studies with the most comprehensive geographical scope [Velicogna and Wahr and Remillien et al. ] agree within quoted error limits. The total mass balance isn't the first clue to a warming climate that Antarctica offers anyway [although it's the driving global factor in sea-level change, which has the potential for enormous effects]. What is important is also what is clear from the data: Antarctica is undeniably showing the signs of warming--decreasing ice mass in the WAIS and increasing or stable ice mass in the EAIS.

Conclusion: The GRACE data constitute strong evidence of a south polar warming trend.

Study 2: Sattelite radar altimetry measures mass balance
Mass changes of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and shelves and contributions to sea-level rise: 1992–2002
H. Jay Zwally et al., Journal of Glaciology, Vol. 51, No. 175, 2005

Not-yet-published sattelite radar altimetry Antarctic mass balance study
Eric Rignot

Simple: The European remote sensing sattelites ERS-1 and -2 used radar altimetry to measure the altitude of ice in the Antarctic ice sheets. The first study is comprised of data from 1992-2002 which shows a mass loss in the WAIS and a mass gain in the EAIS which contributed to an overall negative mass balance. Additionally, the as-yet-unpublished second study--another by Eric Rignot--apparently fuses newer ERS-1 and -2 data with similar data from Japanese and Canadian sattelites and finds that ice loss in the WAIS increased extremely sharply during the decade 1996-2006.

Details: Covering a time period prior to most of the studies we've seen so far, the first ERS data is crucial in establishing a longer-term trend. This analysis is the most sophisticated to come out of the ERS program; the authors attempt to correct for some small but important factors which most other studies ignore, having to do with the dynamics of ice compaction. The dH/dt [rate of change of ice sheet altitude] map below represents the corrected data from Zwally et al.:

Rignot's technique is different than Zwally's; Rignot measures the amount of ice leaving the continent indirectly, by monitoring the flow of ice off the continent in glaciers. The benefit of this method is that it allows the researchers to ignore the problems that Zwally had to design sophisticated corrections for, such as the sensitivity of compactibility of new ice to temperature. Additionally, Rignot combined many different large datasets and has data up to 2006, greatly enhancing the completeness and relevancy of the data.

Quote from article on Rignot's upcoming paper: "The team found that the net loss of ice mass from Antarctica increased from 112 (plus or minus 91) gigatonnes a year in 1996 to 196 (plus or minus 92) gigatonnes a year in 2006."

Zwally et al. Quote: "The ice sheet inWest Antarctica (WA) is losing mass (–47 +/- 4Gt per year) and the ice sheet in East Antarctica (EA) shows a small mass gain (+16 +/- 11 Gt per year) for a combined net change of –31+/- 12 Gt per year (+0.08mma–1 SLE). "

Discussion: The data from this study solidly confirms the existence of the bimodial east/west mass gain/loss signature in Antarctica; the signature of warming. Furthermore, Rignot's study--which used data from the same sources and identical analysis--found solid evidence that the ice mass loss in Antarctica is accelerating at a phenomenal pace; a solid sign of warming. Two more sattelite radar altimetry studies, Wingham et al. and Davis and Li found a slight mass increase. However, both of these studies found it difficult to analyze the peripheral regions and thus left them out of the analysis altogether. Since a majority of the loss we see occurs at the periphery, these studies do nothing but confirm the other studies' findings of a mass increase in the interior.
[Zwally et al. study also analyzed the Greenland ice sheet and found a small positive mass balance, which is not inconsistent with the studies reported in the Greenland section for this time period]

Conclusion: The ERS data constitutes evidence of a south polar warming trend.

Study 3: Laser altimetry analyzes glacial dynamics
Accelerated sea-level rise from West Antarctica
Thomas, Rignot, et al., Science 8 October 2004:Vol. 306. no. 5694, pp. 255 - 258

Simple: Using laser altimetry data from sattelites and aircraft, Thomas et al. have measured the discharge from the glaciers in a section of the WAIS. They discovered a steeply accelerating flow from the 1990's until 2003; a glacier dynamics marker indicative of warming.

Details: Thomas et al. found that 60% more ice was flowing out of the catchment basin feeding the Amundsen sea in west Antarctica than was accumulating due to precipitation. They collected precise ice thickness data from aircraft flown from Chile and compared it with various sattelite data sets to create a map of ice thinning rates for the catchment area. A quote: "The catchment regions of Amundsen Sea glaciers contain enough ice to raise sea level by 1.3 m. Our measurements show them collectively to be 60% out of balance, sufficient to raise sea level by 0.24 mm/year. Although these glaciers are the fastest in Antarctica, they are likely to flow considerably faster once the ice shelves are removed and glacier retreat proceeds into the deeper part of glacier basins."

Discussion: Not only does this large imbalance of outflow/inflow point to conditions now being different than they were previously, but the study reports an acceleration of the imbalance, which signifies compounding factors in recent years. Even more impressive is the potential for yet higher rates of mass loss when/if the ice shelves melt, effectively pulling the rug out from under the glaciers.

Conclusion: This glacial dynamics study constitutes strong evidence of south polar warming.

Other studies
Recent sea-level contributions of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets
Andrew Shepherd and Duncan Wingham, Science 315, 1529 (2007)

Simple: This is a review of mass-balance data. It does a much better job than I can, and it reviews most of the same data I have.

Mass balance of polar ice sheets
Eric Rignot and Robert H. Thomas

Simple: Another review but older. Same conclusions.

[Further studies requested]

Discussion
The evidence is accumulating and the doubt is thinning; the Antarctic ice sheets are shrinking at fantastic rates, and the rate of increase is itself increasing at a fantastic rate. Two years ago there might have been argument, but at this point it is obvious that something big is cooking at the south pole. The issue of causality is less complicated than Greenland, but still the strongest statement we can make is that warming is the only candidate known for the cause of the changes observed. Given the scale of the changes--and the recently discovered fact that ice outflow increases dramatically after ice shelves melt--I feel comfortable agreeing with the large majority of these researchers in this point: the loss of ice in Antarctica will likely reach astonishing proportions in the near future if current conditions persist. Two ice shelves collapsed in the last few years, triggering massive acceleration of glacial flow, and similar events should be expected in the near future.

A summary of the mass balance studies cited in this post:

Conclusion
This data constitutes strong evidence of north polar warming.

Sub-bullet value: TRUE

Sub-bullet a: Greenland

2008-01-22T11:25:00.000-08:00

Sub-bullet a: "A clear warming trend is evidenced by the Greenland ice sheet"
Hierarchy: Part II:1:A:iv:a

Back to Intro - Back to Outline - Up to Bullet iv - Forward to Sub-bullet b

Introduction:
Greenland holds nearly 10% of all the ice in the world. Given its relatively southerly location, Greenland's ice is balanced precariously between its current state and cataclysmic melting, kept stable only by virtue of a microclimate controlled by the ice itself and by friendly and cold arctic ocean currents. The ice is so thick that the crust of Greenland is depressed in the interior from the weight of it. Warming should be relatively easy to spot here; many scientists think that Greenland is close to a sharp equilibrium point and that warming will cause a chain of " positive feedbacks"--some warming will trigger factors which compound the warming and trigger other factors, etc. Thus the changes in the Greenland ice sheet might happen quicker than expected given the large thermal inertia that such a huge block of ice has.

Greenland's climate is an anomaly when placed in the context of other land masses at its latitude. When my family traveled to Prudhoe Bay, AK this last summer, we found it warm and ice-free. Prudhoe Bay is at the northern edge of Alaska, at a latitude of 70 N [for comparison, Anchorage is at 61 N]. Greenland's permanent ice extends down to about 60 N, so far south that almost all of Alaska and the northern territories of Canada would be under ice if Greenland's ice sheet was typical. Why is Greenland covered in ice when most of the latitudes it occupies are free of ice elsewhere?

The glib answer is: because Greenland is colder than other areas at the same latitude. A little background is needed before we can answer why.

Greenland's ice sheet was formed during one of the many colder periods in the earth's history. These glacial periods have caused the latitude marking the ice sheet boundary to move southward, at times reaching down into the continental United States. About 10,000 years ago the last major ice age ended and temperatures returned to roughly what they are now. The equilibrium latitude shifted much farther north in a short period of time. The bulk of the ice sheets were now below the equilibrium latitude, and thus started slowly retreating northward. The retreat was so slow that it is probable that the remaining continental glaciers are still retreating to this day. For some reason, though, Greenland never got the message; some particular climate conditions caused the local equilibrium latitude around Greenland to be stuck farther south than it is for the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. It turns out that this effect is due to two main things: the East Greenland Current, an ocean current that cools Greenland's climate through shipping cold water right along the east coast Greenland from the Arctic; and the high altitude of the ice sheet in Greenland, which keeps the sheet colder than its latitude would dictate.

Warming would effect Greenland in very complex ways, and since the climate is dictated by an ocean current, understanding the subtleties of the current's response to warming would normally be critical to understanding the effect on Greenland's ice sheets. It would be impossible to delve into those subtleties here--albedo, salinity, feedback--but we can still draw some conclusions if the effects are clear enough. This requires an explicit logic that needs explaining: given the "well, duh" aspect of the statement "ice will melt more if temperatures increase" and also given that regional models predict a certain pattern of melting occurring as the result of the warming, IF expected melting patterns are conclusively observed, THEN the region is almost certainly warming. The burden of proof to the contrary will rest on those who wish to prove that the melting proceeds by some other mechanism.

I am not trying to cover up a logical flaw. Rather, I'm using the strongest logic that is possible in any kind of analysis of complex systems. A researcher can never be 100% confident in a causality solution in a system this complex, but it is not wrong to draw conclusions based on the best available data, assuming that as much rigor as is possible is dedicated to trying to understand the underlying causes and effects. Such a case this is. What this means practically is that we will look at the data, conclude confidently based on this data that it is TRUE or FALSE that the behavior of Greenland proves regional warming. The bullet value will only stay TRUE if sufficient evidence is not found for mechanisms other than warming causing the observed effects.
[Refer to bullet iv for further introductory material]

Study 1
Greenland mass balance from GRACE
Isabella Velicogna and John Wahr, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 32, L18505

Satellite gravity measurements confirm accelerated melting of Greenland ice sheet
J. L. Chen, et al., Science 313, 1958 (2006)

Recent Greenland ice mass loss by drainage system from sattelite gravity observations
S. B. Luthcke, et al., Science 314, 1286 (2006)

Basic: These papers utilize data from the GRACE experiment, with newer data in the second and third papers. This is the type of experiment every researcher would love to be part of. GRACE is a fantastic idea: two orbiting satellites working in tandem to measure the gravitational field above the earth. This is an exquisitely delicate experiment, but it was pulled off and is very successful. The idea is that ice will "pull" on the spacecraft through gravitational acceleration. This pull is measured each time the satellite passes over and compared across time. If the pull changes, that means that ice is accumulating or being lost on the ice sheet. The beauty of this approach is that it is independent of ice transport mechanism and is the first experiment that is directly measuring the quantity of ice present as opposed to indirect studies of depth or flow which use generous extrapolations and interpolations. The first study includes data from 2002-2004 and the second and third studies adds 2005 to that. The studies concluded that the mass balance of Greenland in the time period was large, negative, and accelerating, consistent with regional warming.

Details: Velicogna and Wahr: "We recover a decrease in total ice mass of 82 ± 28 km3 of ice per year." I am unable to access the rest of the paper, so I would appreciate anybody with an AGU membership to help me on this one. Again, although static or increasing mass balance is inconclusive, negative mass balance, especially one this large, is very strong evidence of warming. The image below, taken from the NASA site supporting this research, shows a very strong net mass loss around the periphery of Greenland and a small mass gain in the interior.

This figure, from Velicogna and Wehr, shows the total Greenland ice sheet mass observed by GRACE during the study:

The second study confirms this data and adds a crucial fact: melting accelerated even within the limited time scale of the study. This acceleration is evident in the following plots from Chen:
The second study revises the yearly net mass loss upwards and confirms the acceleration of mass lost at least on this small time scale.

The third study confirms the main results of the other studies but lowers the mass loss estimate from the second study.

GRACE tells us that the Greenland ice sheet is melting and by how much. But even more significant is that this melting is accelerating on a seasonal timescale. This is a crucial piece of the puzzle; receding glaciers can be attributed to "ice age rebound"--the still on-going process of ice retreat from the last ice age, when the ice sheets were much more expansive. But acceleration of melting can only be due to warming: rebound predicts a gradual deceleration of ice loss as the equilibrium point is approached.

Conclusion: GRACE data provides very strong evidence of north polar warming.

Study 2
Greenland ice sheet: high-altitude balance and peripheral thinning
W. Krabill, et. al., Science 21 July 2000:Vol. 289. no. 5478, pp. 428 - 430

Basic: Greenland ice sheet: high-altitude balance and peripheral thinning. What more to say?

Details: This study was conducted using laser altimetry from aircraft; this is how it was done before GRACE. Laser altimitry can only tell you the altitude of the surface of the ice so this approach is most useful for mass balance studies. The study specifically addressed the mass balance of Greenland. Above 2000m of altitude, there was a mass balance: net accumulation in the northern latitudes counteracted net loss in the southern latitudes. However, at all latitudes around the periphery there was widespread net loss. An included figure best describes the findings [flight tracks shown; also note that this is an elevation chart, not a mass chart like for GRACE]:

Although less comprehensive than the GRACE survey, it is clear that a large negative mass balance at the periphery of Greenland overwhelms the accumulation in the interior.

In sum: "Interpolation of our results between flight lines indicates a net loss of about 51 cubic kilometers of ice per year from the entire ice sheet, sufficient to raise global sea level by 0.13 millimeter per year--approximately 7% of the observed rise."

Discussion: This study found strong evidence for behavior which points to warming: ice thickening or balance in the interior and aggressive thinning at the periphery. However, the authors admit that the peripheral thinning cannot be explained by the temperature record alone, and that the mechanism for the mass loss is still a mystery. Study 3 below is a partial response to this study and attempts to solve this problem with glacial dynamics studies.

Conclusion: This study gives some evidence for north polar warming.

Study 3
Changes in the velocity structure of the Greenland ice sheet
Eric Rignot and Pannir Kanagaratnam , Science 17 February 2006 311: 986-990

Basic: Using data from satellite radar interferometry [bouncing electromagnetic waves off the surface of ice from space], Rignot and Kanagaratnam have measured the velocity of the glaciers of Greenland over the last decade. Note how this differs from the previous study: the altimetry data presented in Study 2 likewise bounced electromagnetic waves [in that case, lasers] off the surface of the ice sheet, but there it was for the purpose of measuring the altitude of the ice surface and in this study the purpose is to measure the speed at which the ice flows down glaciers. These glaciers are the conveyor belts for ice transportation from the interior of Greenland to the sea, so glacial acceleration is a sign that more ice is leaving Greenland and entering the oceans. The study not only found widespread glacial acceleration, but found that the portion of Greenland experiencing the acceleration is increasing dramatically. The effect is also found to dominate any increase in due to warming, and is presented as an explanation for the mechanisms behind the results found in Study 2.

Detailed: The causes of glacial acceleration are not very well known, although all plausible explanations are products of warming [such as surface meltwater percolating down under the ice and lubricating the interface between ice and rock]. The degree of acceleration is also not a terribly good measure of the warming; all it can say is that warming is occurring. The study found that total mass loss from Greenland doubled in the period 1996-2005. The important point is that acceleration is observed, and this is not a feature of ice age rebound. The authors state: "We detected widespread glacier acceleration below 66 [degrees] north between 1996 and 2000, which rapidly expanded to 70 [degrees] north in 2005. Accelerated ice discharge in the west and particularly in the east doubled the ice sheet mass deficit in the last decade from 90 to 220 cubic kilometers per year."

The figure below shows the velocity plots of some of the glaciers from the study. The black lines correspond to the oldest data, blue the next, and red the most recent. Since these are velocity plots, the earmark of acceleration will be the red plots lying "above" the blue ones and the blue ones above the black ones.

Conclusion: This study constitutes strong evidence of north polar warming.

Other studies
Progressive increase in ice mass loss from Greenland
R. Thomas, et al., GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 33, L10503

Basic: Similar results from the ICEsat experiment.

Quote: "Laser altimeter measurements over Greenland show increasing thickening rates bove 2000 m, reflecting increasing snowfall in a warming climate. But near-coastal thinning rates have increased substantially since the mid 1990s, and net mass loss more than doubled from an average of 4–50 Gt per year between 1993/4 and 1998/9 to 57–105 Gt per year between 1998/9 and 2004. This increasing trend is very similar to findings from independent massbudget studies, but differs widely from ERS radar altimeter results."

Runoff and mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet: 1958–2003
Edward Hanna et. al., JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 110, D13108

Quote: "Runoff losses from the ice sheet were 264 (±26) km3 yr−1 in 1961–1990 and 372 (±37) km3 yr−1 in 1998–2003. Significantly rising runoff since the 1990s has been partly offset by increased precipitation. Our best estimate of overall mass balance declined from 22 (±51) km3 yr−1 in 1961–1990 to −36 (±59) km3 yr−1 in 1998–2003, which is not statistically significant."

The Greenland ice sheet and global sea-level rise
Julian A. Dowdeswell

Abstract: "The flow of several large glaciers draining the Greenland Ice Sheet is accelerating. This change,combined with increased melting, suggests that existing estimates of future sea-level rise are too low."

Seasonality and increasing frequency of Greenland glacial earthquakes
Göran Ekström, et al., Science 311, 1756 (2006)

Abstract: "Some glaciers and ice streams periodically lurch forward with sufficient force to generate emissions of elastic waves that are recorded on seismometers worldwide. Such glacial earthquakes on Greenland show a strong seasonality as well as a doubling of their rate of occurrence over the past 5 years. These temporal patterns suggest a link to the hydrological cycle and are indicative of a dynamic glacial response to changing climate conditions."

[Further studies requested]

Discussion
There is no doubt that Greenland is losing ice. And fast. A valid argument against concluding that warming is the cause of the loss is still present, however: since Greenland's climate is so controlled by the East Greenland Current [EGC], it is possible that the current is changing in ways that is encouraging the loss of ice on Greenland. The GRACE mass deficit maps are particularly encouraging to this line of thinking since a large majority of the mass loss occurs along the eastern coast, where Greenland and the current interface. I have dug deep to find evidence that the EGC has changed in any way since before the mass balance turned negative. I found no such evidence. Additionally, any change in the EGC could very well be tied to warming since the Arctic has seen the most dramatic effects attributed to warming of any region on Earth. Until strong evidence emerges that some other factor is forcing these dramatic mass losses, the sub-bullet value is TRUE. However, the evidence strength is demoted from "conclusive" to "strong" due to these concerns.

Brief summary of the issues: A complete description of the behavior of the Greenland ice sheet has to include two behaviors: ice mass loss--the change in the distribution and quantity of ice--and glacial dynamics--the change in the behavior of the ice. The dynamics data [such as Rignot and Kanagaratnam and Ekström] are strongly complementary to the mass balance data since glacial dynamics explains at least some of the mass loss and simultaneously acts as strong evidence of warming. Strong positive signatures of warming were found from both glacial dynamics studies and mass balance studies.

Summary of mass balance data:

Conclusion
This data constitutes strong evidence of north polar warming.

Sub-bullet value: TRUE

Bullet iv: Ice and Sea Levels

2008-01-22T09:03:00.000-08:00

Bullet iv: "A clear warming trend is evidenced by ice sheet and sea level changes"
Hierarchy: Part II:1:A:iv

Back to Intro - Back to Outline - Back to Bullet iii - Forward to Bullet v

Introduction
It would be logical to assume that a warming world should be losing ice cover. But the relationship between warming and polar ice sheets is not simple. Warming does not simply melt ice; it also changes weather patterns that affect the accumulation of ice. Warmer polar air can carry more moisture and thus increase the amount of precipitation over ice fields, effectively increasing the amount of ice. If precipitation outweighs melting and evaporation [positive "mass balance"], then warming could actually increase the ice in polar fields. Also, the equilibrium-line altitude [ELA]--the altitude above which there is net ice accumulation--increases with increased temperature but decreases with increased snowfall, so it is not necessarily clear from ELA trends whether warming has occurred.

But it is still true that polar ice presents a potentially powerful testament to climate trends. The expected contribution to the mass balance from increased precipitation is small compared to increased melting. And also the distribution of ice changes in predictable ways according to temperature. Below the ELA, the rate of melting should undeniably increase with increasing temperatures. A signature of warming would then be ice thickening in the interior and thinning or retreating around the periphery. The flow of ice into the ocean is also expected to accelerate with rising temperatures; scientists have recently shown that the melting of sea ice abutting the mouths of glaciers triggers a massive acceleration of the glacier. And further evidence has been found that surface meltwater can percolate to the bottoms of glaciers and lubricate the ice-rock boundary, catalyzing faster ice flow. If sea levels are rising then the net amount of water tied up in ice worldwide must be decreasing, which would be an undeniable sign that temperatures are increasing despite increases in snowfall.

Glaciers and polar ice fields are very different beasts. Glaciers represent a much higher diversity of the planet's climates and thus tell us more about global temperature trends. Glaciers also are more a part of their surrounding climate than ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, which are so large that they create their own regional climates. So glaciers can respond faster to climatic variations. An analysis of ice cover then wouldn't be complete without a discussion of the trends in the distribution of continental glaciers.

Changes in the distribution of polar ice, glacial ice and sea levels are all important in an analysis of what ice can tell us about temperature trends. Each topic contains enough data to evaluate independently, so we will follow the structure below. Click on the links to see an analysis of the research for each topic.

Bullet Structure:

A clear warming trend is evidenced by ice sheet and sea level changes

a. The Greenland ice sheets show warming

b. The Antarctic ice sheets show warming

c. Global continental glaciers show warming

d. Sea levels show warming

e. Permafrost and river and lake ice show warming

Conclusion
No conclusion at this time.

Bullet Value: INCOMPLETE

Chuckwalla and Bunnies

2008-01-19T12:19:00.001-08:00

Chuckwalla and I were looking up animal pictures on images.google.com, and she asked me to find pictures of a bunny. So I typed "bunny" and clicked on the first picture I saw.

Click on the link.

The photographer is... Steven Pinker! Pinker--the greatest modern cognitive psychologist, one of the most influential living linguists, and the modern anti-Empiricist rock star--took a picture of a "bunny." Not a desert cottontail rabbit, not a cottontail rabbit, not even a rabbit, but a "bunny." And not only that, but it is one of the top ten hits on images.google.com for "bunny."

Bizarre!

His gallery is actually pretty good. He uses polarizing filters to good effect, and he takes some nice macros. His bird pictures are all properly identified. But still... didn't see that one coming!

Bullet v: Warming and Life

2008-01-18T15:35:00.000-08:00

Bullet v: "A clear warming trend is witnessed by changes in wild plants and animals"
Hierarchy: Part II:1:A:v.

Back to Intro - Back to Outline - Back to Bullet vi

Introduction
Most plants and animals rely on climate to provide the necessary conditions to provide essential sustenance. Additionally, living organisms rely on climate to provide weather cues essential to a complete life-cycle. Therefore, widespread warming should have a measurable effect on the life-cycles of many plants and animals. With increased temperatures, birds migrate and lay eggs sooner, populations tend poleward, and the physical and genetic traits of many species tend toward configurations ideal for warmer climates. Almost certainly a majority of these effects are not known, but those that are known are easy to measure and stand as a completely independent and reliable complement to temperature data. Accumulating data from these sources avoids many of the issues endemic to outright temperature measurements, such as instrumentation unreliability, faulty or problematic calibration, and lack of continuity or comprehensiveness of records. However species' traits are poor measurers of the degree of the warming, meaning that their use is restricted to orthogonal verification of more standard climatic data.

Study 1:

Fingerprints of global warming on wild animals and plants
Terry L. Root et. al., Nature 421, 37-42 (2 January 2003)

Basic: A large meta-analysis of 143 independent papers which shows that the large majority [>80%] of nearly 1,500 plant and animal species studied had significant changes in behavior, habits, and physical traits consistent with rising temperatures but not consistent with level or decreasing temperatures. The trait shifts were statistically significant in the direction consistent with warming.

Details: The species' traits studied included population density change and poleward migration; phenology: the timing of egg-laying, flowering, migration, etc.; morphology: body size, behavior, etc.; and genetic frequency shifts. The meta-study identified potential temperature-dependent shifts for each species and counted the number of observed shifts of these types. Over 80% of the species showed shifts consistent with warming, with a 90% confidence interval of roughly 70%-89%. The shifts in phenology [timing of life-cycle events] across species shows statistically significant trends towards earlier dates.

In sum: "...the balance of evidence suggests that a significant impact of recent climatic warming is discernible in the form of long-term, large-scale alterations of animal and plant polulations. For example, the average shift in spring phenology (timing) of events, such as breeding or blooming, for temperate-zone species is 5.1 +/- 0.1 days earlier in a decade."

Discussion: It is important to note that this study does two important things: [1] confirm a wide-spread and broad-based response consistent with a global warming trend, and [2] act as an independent, statistically verified, though imprecise, verification of the IPCC warming data. Though the IPCC data were cited in the study, it is crucial to understand that the trait shift data exist independent of any warming data and no statistical results were contingent on IPCC data.

Conclusion: This meta-analysis is very strong evidence of a widespread warming trend.

Study 2:
Biological fingerprint of climate change impacts
Camille Parmesan & Gary Yohe, Nature 421, 57-60 (2 January 2003)

Basic: A large meta-analysis of over 1,700 species focusing on range and phenology shifts as well as relative abundance shifts. The shifts are compared to predictions based on IPCC climate warming data and agree with a confidence of >95%. This means that there is a less than 5% chance that the living systems' shifts that have been observed are correlated with the IPCC warming data purely by chance.

Details: Northern range limits for species moved an average of 6.1 km per decade northward with 95% confidence interval of 1.3-10.9. Mean spring timing advanced an average of 2.3 days per decade, with 95% confidence interval of 1.7-3.2. The entire set of analyses points to a >95% [the IPCC's definition of "very high"] confidence that climate change is driving species poleward and pulling spring dates earlier.

In sum: "The meta-analyses of 334 species and the global analyses of 1,570 species... show highly significant, nonrandom patterns of change in accord with observed climate warming in the twentieth century, indicating a very high confidence (>95%) in a global climate change fingerprint."

Discussion: This is perhaps the most statistically rigorous paper on the topic. Conforming to very high levels of objectivity and statistics, the evidence overwhelmingly proves that global plant and animal life is changing in ways consistent only with global warming. We endeavor in this section only to show that plants and animals are changing in ways that signal global warming, but it is interesting to note that this paper also ties the degree of living organism response to the amount of warming and thus acts as a kind of verification of the actual IPCC warming data.

Conclusion: This meta-analysis is very strong evidence of a global warming trend.

Study 3:
[Various phenology studies]
Mark D. Schwartz
[as suggested by reader "Smoker"]

Basic: Schwartz has made a career out of creating an integrated study of phenology. He utilizes ground stations, citizen scientists, networks of researchers and satellites to track the onset of spring and to measure trends in the timing of leafing and blooming. There is no simple way to synthesize all of his findings here, but there is a very useful collection of figures on his website relating to a single study he conducted which is indicative of the type of data he is collecting. The figures for growing season length, last spring freeze date, first bloom date, and first leaf date trends are particularly instructive. Data from stations across the Northern Hemisphere were used for the study.

One pertinent quote: "Results are consistent with prior smaller area studies, confirming a nearly universal quicker onset of early spring warmth (spring indices (SI) first leaf date, -1.2 days per decade), late spring warmth (SI first bloom date, -1.0 days per decade; last spring day below 5 1C, -1.4 days per decade), and last spring freeze date (-1.5 days per decade) across most temperate NH land regions over the 1955–2002 period."
[Quoted from: Onset of spring starting earlier across the Northern Hemisphere, Mark D Schwartz et. al., Global Change Biology (2006) 12, 343]

Conclusion: This body of data is very strong evidence of a widespread warming trend.

Further studies on the topic:

Patterns of phenological changes in migratory birds
Thorup K et. al., Oecologia. 2007 Apr;151(4)

Rapid advance of spring arrival dates in long-distance migratory birds [with response]
Jonzen N, et. al., Science. 2006 Jun 30;312(5782)

Climate correlates of 20 years of trophic changes in a high-elevation riparian system
Martin TE, Ecology. 2007 Feb;88(2):367-80

Conclusion
These studies together constitute conclusive evidence of a global warming trend. Little information about the rate and scale of the warming is discernible from this data, however. No papers I have found to date can attribute these trait shifts to any other cause than increasing temperatures, so this bullet is uncharacteristically clean and simple.

Bullet value: TRUE

Back to the Outline

Please Spend This Here $10,000,000,000

2008-01-17T15:20:00.001-08:00

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has just offered you one-quarter of its endowment--10 billion dollars--to spend on charitable endeavors of your choice. They also stipulate that you must spend it or lose it; no investments possible. What would your plan be? Be specific and thoughtful, I'm very interested in your answers. My guess is that the answers will vary drastically. I'll include all of the responses in a main post when enough people have responded, unless you request otherwise.

Have fun!

Again, what should I write about?

2008-01-13T22:12:00.001-08:00

This time, pick 3 and rank them. I'll do every one that gets a vote before I ask this again! And this time, there is no reason for the order.

Book reviews:
1. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman [5 stars]
2. Resistance by Barry Lopez [4.5 stars]
3. 1491 by Charles C. Mann [2.5 stars]
4. Nature via Nurture by Matt Ridley [4.5 stars]
[4.5. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis [4 stars] -- it's difficult for me to review novels but I'll try really hard if you REALLY want it]

Philosophizationings:
5. The demise of the clovis megafaunal extinction theory
6. Thoughts on asceticism
7. The Project for the New American Century
8. The chimp video game study fraud
9. The first Global Warming data
10. Why I might never have a real job [aka "The 2008 DOE Science Budget"]
11. Why the election system is broken
12. Cranks, kooks, crackpots, and their relationship to science... and birding

[There are 12 delegates up for grabs. Delegates will be assigned in a proportionate distribution based on voters' number 1 picks, except when a particular candidate topic receives less than 15% of the possible vote, in which case its delegates will be transferred to the second choices of the voters casting the unpopular first pick. If your second choice also receives less than 15% of the vote, all of your votes will contribute delegates to your third choice. If the third choice is under 15% then your votes will be discounted. Additionally, I posses 6 superdelegates which I will assign based on whimsy after the vote which will guarantee that I will first write whatever topic I really want first. But don't let that dissuade you, vote away!]

Why I used to think I was a socialist but was wrong

2007-12-19T20:19:00.001-08:00

[by "popular" demand]

I used to think I was a socialist. I didn't know much about socialist economic, social or political theory. I hadn't read Marx. I couldn't articulate the differences between socialism and communism. I had never heard of the Second International or Frederick Engels. So... why?

To be completely honest, a lot had to do with my aesthetics. For me--and this is still true--there was literally nothing in the world more offensive to the senses than a large crowd. Times Square, Pier 39, sporting events, zoos, concerts, Yellowstone, and the Rose Festival all left me with acute sensory rage. The merciless ugliness of these places arose from individuality taken too far, I thought. Each person was so focused on making themselves stand out in a crowd that the effect of the crowd was complete and intense visual confusion. Add to that intense blasts of noxious deodorants, bodily insecticides, hair spray, perfume, and other industrial synthesized personal care products, and I experienced my own personal hell.

So I decided that I was not a huge fan of freewheeling individuality and that a certain amount of uniformity across society is a good thing. While jealously defending my need to be different from everybody else, I wanted the rest of humanity to stop being so frazzin' different from each other. Somehow I thought that socialism would deliver this. The key here is that a large portion of my motivation was aesthetic. Not moral, not philosophical, not logical, but aesthetic.

I thought of other ways to defend what I considered socialism, which I thought of as simply the mandated practice of equality and unity. Scripture, the fantastic gulf between the well-offs and the have-nots, an ideallistic streak and a taste for being different [ironically enough] all seemed to solidify my position on socialism.

Then, I learned what socialism is all about. Nothing doing!

At this point in my life I see the aesthetic purgatory that is Disneyland as an unavoidable consequence of the inalienable rights of human expression. I still feel strongly that every tax-paying citizen has the right to health care, that unfettered consumerism is immoral and destructive, that capitalism is in essence sinful, and that masses of people are profoundly nauseating.

But I am not a socialist!

What to write about?

2007-12-17T21:24:00.001-08:00

I have a backlog of blogs I've been wanting to write. My 2 or 3 readers can vote on which one comes next [in order of how likely I am to do it before we leave for Montana on the 24th]:

1. The chimp video game study fraud
2. Review of The World Without Us by Alan Weisman [5 stars]
3. The demise of the clovis megafaunal extinction theory and discussion of the carolina bays
4. Review of 1491 by Charles C. Mann [2.5 stars]
5. Review of Resistance by Barry Lopez [4.5 stars]
6. The first Global Warming data
7. Explaination of why I used to think I was a socialist but was wrong
8. A review of the Pinker/Bloom language evolution paper

Anybody out there have an itching to hear any one of these? I've been dying to jump into any one of these, so just let me know...

Herons, Spandrels, Voles, and Exaptation

2007-11-30T16:00:00.000-08:00

Walking back from the library today, BChester asked me to find the great blue heron which we saw on the way out and which lives in our neighborhood. We spotted it hunting voles along the path back to our apartment.

We stayed and watched long enough for the heron to get accustomed to our presence. BChester kept on saying "heron pretty!" and "heron cute!" as we watched it wander around looking for rodent holes to peer into. The heron apparently noticed a vole about 10 feet in front of us and decided to stalk it, ignoring us completely. He [it was a male] very slowly walked toward the vole in a heron's equivalent of a soldier crawl, with his neck folded up and so close to the ground that his neck plume was dragging in the dirt. When he was about a foot away from the vole he stopped and began adjusting his footing and angle to get the perfect strike. He further retracted his neck until it was wound up like a spring. BChester found this completely entrancing.

The heron soon struck. His neck sprung, propelling his head forward like a viper, and he used his hefty and razor-sharp bill as a spear. We could distinctly hear the sound of rodent bones being crushed [if you haven't heard this sound before, it actually is quite distinctive]. He immediately calipered the vole by the neck and lifted it off the ground.

But at this point, the heron was out of tricks. He had to wait for the vole to bleed to death since he had no built-in way to off rodents like most specialized rodent-killers do [watch a prairie falcon casually rip the spine out of a ground squirrel some day, it's easy for them]. After several minutes, the vole turned its head around and started to gnaw on the heron's beak. I imagine a bone saw would make a similar sound. Eventually the heron got tired of that and threw the vole back on the ground, wound his neck up, and piked it right through the skull. The vole didn't move much after that.

We then watched [BChester: "heron lunch"] the heron orient the vole nose-down and swallow it whole. At one point the vole got stuck in the bottom of the u-curve section of the heron's throat and we watched him contract his whole neck over and over again to try to get it down ["heron play"]. But then it was over. BChester didn't want to leave but once the vole was down it was obvious that the heron didn't want any more company.

Besides a thrilling up-close look at some serious natural carnage, this experience got me thinking about some pretty profound evolutionary messages hidden in this behavior.

The great blue heron is a fantastically well-adapted bird--for stalking fish in shallow water. The entire genetic code of herons is calculated for two things: fishing and sex [what a life, eh?]. The long legs keep the body elevated above water, the long neck helps them reach into the water without submerging the body, the long beak helps them catch fish, etc. Herons can catch a fish, toss it into the air, catch it when its head is oriented the right way, and swallow it in under a second and without rippling the water. They have extensive in-built hunting techniques which assist them in stalking fish, utilizing light and shadow and fish behavior. The cumulative effect of all of these features is that of a very refined and polished masterpiece of evolution.

Except...

Our bird was hunting on dry ground for voles. The stalking method, the attacking method, the killing method and the eating method that I witnessed are all completely different than the way they stalk, catch and eat fish. The special adaptations that herons have for hunting fish put them at a disadvantage when hunting voles. Their long legs and large body make them conspicuous and hard to hide, they have no way to kill prey quickly, and there are few voles swimming around in the shallow waters at the edge of bays, which is where herons should be programmed to try and find food.

The first observation is a simple one: animals are not stupid. The popular consciousness [such as it is] has held for a long time that genes control everything about an individual animal's behavior and capabilities. Besides being anthropocentric, blatantly contrary to common experience and logically ludicrous, this idea is also the foundation of a litany of corrupt philosophies about human nature. And most conscious biologists would find the idea appalling. If genes controlled all the behavior of every member of a species herons could never hunt voles. Somewhere at some time, this bird or one of its ancestors discovered a source of calories and through trial and error devised a hunting technique that would work for voles. This requires thought. Perhaps rudimentary thought, but thought nonetheless.

Now that that's out of the way, there are some more interesting things to talk about.

We're taught [if at all] that all traits are the result of millenia of selection events. The truth, as pointed out by Stephen Jay Gould, is that some features are "spandrels;" excess baggage created by genes which control other features which have been selected for. These features then have not been selected for even though they exist. Some features arrive through "exaptation;" adaptations co-opted for new beneficial uses. Think about our ability to wipe our butts, which was not the evolutionary impetus for hands but is a great use for them.

It appears that this heron has used some amount of general intelligence to co-opt their specific fish-catching adaptations [I'm thinking the lance-like beak] to catch voles, a perfect example of exaptation. This required, in the least:

1. Recognizing voles as a source of calories
2. Devising a strategy for stalking voles
3. Devising a strategy for catching voles
4. Learning not to swallow the voles until they die

Since I actually have seen two distinct herons in this area do this, I can add another one:

5. Teaching others steps 1-4

I'm not claiming herons are terribly bright. And I'm not claiming this is particularly new, it's actually rather old news as far as evolutionary biology is concerned. But what did impress me is that it took evolutionary biology until 1982 to recognize what was supremely evident in this heron; that adaptation and natural selection are only a portion of the whole evolutionary picture.

Suppose there is enough habitat in the bay area to support a couple hundred full-time vole-eating great blue herons for dozens of generations. Then we could see a subset of the population break off and eventually parapatrically speciate. That means that they could form a mostly isolated gene pool which will slowly acquire traits beneficial to vole hunting and thus diverge from main-stream herons and become its own species. The new niche is actually not new, it's just nearly infinite; there are not enough snakes, raptors, and coyotes in the area to make a dent in the vole population.

The heron I saw was so successful [killed in one attempt; 90% of the raptor attacks I see are failures and they all use lots of energy] that I can imagine it turning out that only one or two genes need to be changed to make the herons the most efficient vole-eaters on the planet; none of this wasteful hovering like kites and none of the slow dangerous slithering of snakes. Classic Darwinism pictures species arriving at an optimal form always from the bottom-up, arriving through branches of selective adaptations after millenia. The concepts of spandrels and exaptation allow hopping from limb to limb on the evolutionary tree in a way that creates species laterally. We're not talking about herons moving to enjoying crustaceans here-I'm talking about a change in almost every non-morphological phenotypical aspect of a species in one shift occuring over only a few generations. And these behavioral and environmental changes will surely lead to accelerated genotypical shifts due to the extreme "distance" between the niche evolved in and the niche moved into. This strikes me as a much more efficient way of generating diversity than classical adaptation, even if the conditions for exaptation have to be just right. The catalyst for using exaptation this way is general intelligence. In that way I'd expect the diversity of life on this planet to be much smaller if animals were thoughtless robots as popularly assumed.

This, in a nutshell, was half of what I was thinking when I saw the heron, beak sheathed in dripping blood, saunter away from the killing site. The other half was this:

Holy son of beelzebub!

A Logical Approach to Global Warming, part II : The Outline

2007-11-16T11:26:00.000-08:00

Here is the logical structure and links to data for our GW guide. The structure is organized into topics [arabic numerals; 1, etc.], sub-topics [capital letters; A, etc.], bullets [small roman numerals; i, etc.], and sub-bullets [lower-case letters; a, etc]. In order to prove each topic, each sub-topic and each bullet under it must be shown first. After a bullet is completed, its result will be compressed into FALSE, UNCERTAIN, or TRUE markers, sometimes dependent on sub-bullets. Only when/if each sub-topic is full of bullets with TRUE markers will the sub-topic be marked TRUE and the next sub-topic addressed. The analogous process will be used for proving the topics. Feel free to contribute.

[NOTE: as the structure is being refined, some of the category names might not match the outline. This will be remedied whenever the structure becomes stable.]

1. The earth is warming

A. There is a clear trend of warming

i. direct temperature measurements

a. atmosphere [satellite, balloons]

b. surface [stations]

c. ocean [buoys, satellites]

ii. proxy temperature records

d. ice cores [antarctica, greenland]

e. tree rings

f. other [tree rings, sediment, ice cores]

iii. ice sheet behavior INCOMPLETE

g. Greenland TRUE

h. Antarctica TRUE

i. continental glaciers

j. sea level

k. permafrost and lake and river ice

iv. life TRUE

v. other [coastal wind speed, sea ice]

B. The warming is "special"

vi. rate [historically; accelerating]

vii. scale [historically]

viii. solar system [recent trends]

2. The warming is significantly anthropogenic

C. Natural explainations for the warming are not sufficient

ix. solar [spots, flux, cosmic rays]

x. ice age departure

D. Anthropogenic sources can explain non-natural contribution to the warming

xi. greenhouse gases

a. Are atmospheric GH gases increasing in concentration?

b. Are people responsible for the increase?

c. Can GH gases cause the GH effect?

xii. is the proportion of warming due to anthropogenic causes dominant?

3. Something should be done about it

E. it is possible to solve

F. it is worthwhile to solve

Logically, we can say: AWG if and only if A and B and D. AWG mitigation action is required if and only if 3 [contingent on E and F] and D. Additionally, the hierarchy of the logic is top-down, meaning that questions v through xi are irrelevent until questions i through iv have been established, and so on. I hope that you can all help me flesh out these categories to include more crucial steps in the logic, particularly in part 3.

A complete proof of AWG would flow like this [using ^ for the logical operator AND and => for "IF...THEN" and <=> for "IF AND ONLY IF" and semicolons to seperate clauses]:

(i ^ ii ^ iii ^ iv) => A; (v ^ vi ^ viii) => B; (A ^ B) => 1; (viii ^ ix) => C; (((a ^ b ^ c) => x) ^ xi) => D; C ^ D=> 2; (1 ^ 2 ^ E ^ F) <=> 3.

3, of course, is the only thing that matters.

This will be the logical structure we will follow once it is set in stone. Of course, it is possible to remove a bullet later on by arguments such as "the scale of the warming is irrelevent because..." but we will treat those instances as proven bullets to simplify the process. Help me out with this now so we won't have issues with it later!

The Atoms of Language

2007-11-16T00:06:00.000-08:00

The Atoms of Language
Mark C. Baker

I must admit to a lifelong predilection to the aesthetic of reductionism [maybe that's why I ended up in particle physics; the ultimate end-of-the-road for reductionism]. Right or wrong, I find a certain beauty in the reduction of a messy, complicated and fundamentally unexplainable system down into an elegant set of constituent parts and rules.

I guess I'm not alone. Mendeleev, Mendel, Gell-Mann, Linnaeus, Schoenberg, and Chomsky all made their considerable fame through discovery of reductionist principles in their fields. I can't profess much aesthetic interest in the product of Schoenberg's reductions of music, but I spend almost all of my free time these days studying those of Gell-Mann, Mendel, Linnaeus, and Chomsky. There is no doubt that the principles of understanding given to us by these men are powerful.

This fascination of mine is probably why I ended up getting hooked on The Atoms of Language after casually flipping through it a couple weeks ago. It was intended as a supplemental book for an advanced linguistics course my wife took as a student in college. It's very dry, quite dense, and particularly narrowly focused. But it is a thorough reduction of human language in the Chomskyan style and as such really appealed to me.

Gell-Mann's discovery that all visible [and much of the invisible] material in the universe is composed of a very small handful of fundamental particles is the reductionist heritage of Mendeleev's periodic table. This reduction is clean, precise, and demonstrably true. The reduction of all life into species, genera, families, etc. as initiated by Linnaeus is, on the other hand, completely messy, controversial, and even arbitrary. Species are not a fundamental building block of ecosystems in the way quarks and leptons make up the entirety of any atom, molecule, or star. There are compelling practical uses for species and genera, but they exist more on paper than in reality because of the inherent messiness of ecosystems.

Chomsky's reduction of language falls somewhere between the intractable reduction of ecosystems and the neat and tidy reduction of matter. Although messy and strewn with exceptions, language is surprisingly reducible, lending itself shockingly well to a hierarchy of constituents and rules. This concept strikes me as terrifically profound. Whereas the species concept is mostly a construct created for practical purposes, the "atoms of language" are quite real and tell us a great deal about human nature and, importantly for me, what's going on in the head of my babies when they hear me talk.

In this way, Mark Baker's incessant use of an analogy between the periodic table and the reduction of language is apt. When he speaks of the "atoms" of language, he is not referring to the words we speak, which are in a sense the fundamental constituents of the language that we can hear when others speak [or morphemes, which are even more fundamental]. This language--what Chomsky calls "E-language" or external language--is mostly culturally transmitted. The atoms of the language that are really interesting are the parameters that set the rules for syntax within our "I-language" or internal language. What appeared, until Chomsky, to be a potentially infinite set of possible languages with a continuum of possible properties turned out to be the result of a nearly ludicrously small set of "parameters" which come pre-loaded in our brain and are set by experience with our native language as babies.

This is a powerful concept, and the book fulfils its role as an explicator of the known parameters extremely well. The details get tiresome for somebody reading it from my angle, just wanting to learn about human nature, but the big picture is presented well too. Here's a recap of my greatest insights from this book [since you probably won't read it]:

1. Based on surveys of known world languages, it is clear that not every syntactic structure possible is used. In fact, there are only a few syntactic systems humans use out of potentially thousands or millions. This is a clear indication, in the very least, that humans share an innate knowledge pertaining to syntax.

2. Chomsky likes to talk about the "poverty of the stimulus," which points out that children do not have enough language presented to them to learn every rule for every possible sentence in their native tongue. In fact, there are exactly infinite possible sentences. We would then never learn to speak if parameters didn't exist. This is not new to me, but through reading this book I realized that the evolutionary purpose [so to speak] of parameters is language acquisition. Acquisition is a two-fold task: (a) acquiring a lexicon and (b) setting a few parameters. This is an infinitely simpler proposition than memorizing every legal sentence configuration in the native tongue.

3. One of the most interesting new revelations I had from this book is that parameters are hierarchical. Some parameters take presendence over others, and some manifest themselves in obvious ways better than others. Baker constructs the rudiments of a parameter tree that will presumably at some point have every language on earth on its branches.

4. The lack of geographic inhomogeneity in syntax speaks volumes for the hypothesis of parameters. The fact that Indonesian, for example, has syntax essentially identical to English, yet German is quite different is completely incompatible with a fluid, infinite, culturally-transmitted grammar. Suppose language A diverged from language B a couple hundred years ago, and now has a completely distinct grammar. Also suppose that there exists a language C which is thousands of miles away and historically completely socially isolated from language A, but which has identical syntax to language A. The only explaination for this occurrence--which, by the way, is very common--is that language A swapped a parameter from its original form and since there is a finite number of parameter configurations now matches another isolated language by lucky accident.

5. It actually turns out that not every syntactic property is parametrically controlled. For example, the fact that English has reflexive pronouns [like himself and themselves] allows us to use the construction Bob said that Joe should buy himself a car. It is clear that it is Joe that should be buying the car because the pronoun himself attaches itself to the secondary subject Joe. If English didn't have reflexive pronouns, the sentence Bob said that Joe should buy him a car would be ambiguous at best and thus not possible. The lexicon of a language can influence the possible syntax without the involvement of parameters, but it requires special situations.

We have to be cautious with this, though. The evolutionist Daniel Dennett aptly described a very useful concept called "greedy reductionism." It refers to the compulsion to take reductionism well past its practical limitations. Describing the behavior of a bird in terms of the quantum mechanical interactions of its constituent electrons and nucleons, for example, is greedy reductionism. However, Baker doesn't fall into this trap. He aspires to, I think, but the field is so new and fresh that every reductive step is sound and useful up to this point. That's not to say that there is no controversy on the issue of the existence of parameters though.

Philip Lieberman is the modern anti-Chomsky whose ideas shaped a large portion of Christine Kenneally's The First Word, which I reviewed a few weeks back. In his 1984 book Toward an Evolutionary Biology of Language, Lieberman argues that one simple result of evolutionary biology sinks every language innateness theory. The argument is this: single random genetic mutations are common from one generation to the next. If all human grammar was pre-programmed in our genes, then some people with random mutations should be expected to display an inability to form certain syntactical structures or learn language at all. Such people do not exist, and thus, Lieberman says, the sum of human syntax is not encoded in our genes.

I have what I consider to be a simple refutation of this idea, but it requires a small retreat from a strictly Chomskyan theory. Chomsky views language as being a single entity which is whole, complete, and perfect. In his view parameters come as a bundled package; each is as necessary to language acquisition as every line of code is to a computer program [often removing one line at random will render the entire program useless]. Not only does this idea make it impossible to manufacture language through selective evolution, but it creates the exact problem that Lieberman takes advantage of in his attacks against the entire theory.

I however see parameters strictly as a learning tool; their biological purpose is to assist babies in learning language. If human language is limited to a certain subset of possible grammars, and if each child comes already knowing the settings that contribute to each possible grammar, then learning language becomes tractable. This allows an evolutionary theory of language since each built-in parameter increases a child's ability to learn language and presumably increases their reproductive viability. Additionally, Lieberman's complaint becomes moot: genetic mutation is likely to only effect a single parameter. Remove one parameter and all it does is make learning language harder for that one individual. One of the "startling" revelations in the post-Chomsky days is that human brains are very powerful. Not only are we pre-programmed with some things, but we can also figure things out other things for ourselves very well [like where the breaks between words occur, which is terrifically difficult and requires tremendous computation power]. General cognition can cover the holes in parameter space left by random genetic mutation.

Of course, parameters are studied from the perspective of systematics. That means that the parameter hierarchy describes [most of; see point 5] the differences between the syntaxes of languages, not how parameters can help children learn the bulk of the syntax of their native language. A meaningful parametric theory should have as its final goal a map of the innate choices in grammar each child is born with which teaches them their native syntax based on setting parameters through experience. This map is complete only when it contains every parameter a child must have in order to learn any possible human language. Baker's ultimate goal is a systematic description of the systematic relationship between the grammars of all languages. His parameter hierarchy is complete when it describes all of the observed differences between languages. This is actually a huge distinction and a potentially schema-breaking one for me. Baker's hierarchy shows only two parameters necessary to explain every observed difference between Mohawk and any other language. But I guarantee that a child learning Mohawk will have to flip more than two mental switches before being able to create every valid sentence in that language.

I don't see any evolutionary force in Baker's method; the diversity of languages is just a byproduct of the existence of parameters, and thus any description is akin to the reduction of life into species and genera; it is a useful description tool but doesn't hint at much that is more more profound [in that species per se are not the goal of evolution but survivability is]. I see Baker's method as analogous to the species method of description, and this acquisition-oriented method as analogous to a genetic description. I think his approach will break down at some point, or get mired in greedy reductionism. Shifting focus to discovering which parameters a child much identify and set to properly learn his native grammar is surely the path to follow.

I don't suggest reading this book for everyone. It does requires a small amount of introductory linguistics knowledge [for me, one introductory class and a few books, including most Pinker]. But beyond that, it's really intended as the definitive source on the workings of each parameter. There is little indulgent philosophizing about the implications of parameters; for that, go to Pinker. But if you, like I, enjoy the beauty of reductionism then you will enjoy Baker's relentless systematic destruction of the apparent infinite variability of language in this book. His brutally clean logical structure and impeccable analysis leaves analyticians like me very satisfied, even if in the end he strays off in a tangential direction.

A Logical Approach to Global Warming, part I: The Wind-Up

2007-11-15T23:32:00.000-08:00

I've been planning on doing this for a while, but it will take a lot of work so I put it off as long as I could.

What I have in mind is a simple, 4-part guide to the science behind the Global Warming debate. Here's the outline:

1. The Wind-Up. A description of the ground rules and structure of the guide.

2. The Outline. A structured outline of all issues pertinent to the subject of GW, to be addressed in part 3.

3. The Data. References and discussion of peer-reviewed data addressing each bullet from the Outline, linked to and thus indistinguishable after completion from the Outline.

4. The Synthesis. Drawing logical conclusions from the data.

Given that there is an infinite supply of any possible opinion on the matter online, you might wonder why I bother with this. The reason is simply because I have never run across a resource that goes about it the way I think it should be done: pure science mounted on a bullet-proof logical framework. I have a great faith in this logical framework [coming in Part II] because my observation is that a vast majority of the debate is essentially meaningless; it doesn't touch on any of the main pillars that support the theory. Without an explicit logical structure, I believe that any of the conclusions drawn from these debates are inherently flawed, in that any simple statement of "since X then GW is T/F" ignores the logical structure surrounding X which is required in its entirety to prove/disprove the theory.

As far as working rules for this guide, I only have two. You must believe these before you participate:

Data is the only thing that matters. A vast majority of the current debate seems to revolve around issues like Al Gore's hypocrisy or Jim Inhofe's conflicts of interest. These issues are completely irrelevant and I won't ever mention them again.

Nothing is simple. Anybody who claims to know for absolute surety one way or the other is claiming a mystical knowledge that science can't begin to reproduce. The issue is complex and each item has multiple potential causes.

I will run this in a semi-wiki fashion. I will post an initial draft and leave it on the site for a couple weeks. Any additions should be left in the comments and I will add those which are appropriate.

A note on my motivations for doing this: After spending an embarrassing portion of my life watching both sides [shouldn't there be more than two? As in: the neutral, objective view so dear to science?] of the debate, I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with the nature of the debate. Every resource which touches the general public is so steeped in rhetoric, slander, and fustian grandiloquence that the underlying science has no chance to escape. Even the few sources that try to present the science do so in a haphazard and illogical way, discarding contradicting evidence and making logical mistakes that shouldn't make it past the simplest jury. The audience is just as bad: we watch/read/hear and agree or disagree based on what we believe. Personal belief has nothing to do with GW, it just gets in the way. I fear that the public is getting manipulated by our lack of critical thinking and the absence of motivation to challenge previously held notions. Political predelictions are motivating people's acceptance or not of the thoery without reference to the science involved. This is a disasterously bad state of affairs. Even though the audience of this blog is about a dozen at best, I hope even a couple of you will find use for this guide.

[As a disclaimer, I believe in anthropogenic global warming. But I am extremely skeptical of the vast majority of the claims made in the popular media pertaining to it. I hope through this exercise to disprove the theory because I feel that its presence critically distracts from other extremely pressing environmental issues, like species conservation and habitat protection. So maybe I'm not entirely neutral, but you can be sure that I won't suppress any data or distort any findings to meet some agenda of mine, because any agendas I have are at war with eachother.]

Enjoy! And please contribute! Participation is the point of this exercize.

Self Revelation

2007-11-11T21:38:00.001-08:00

Here, according to Chuckwalla, is a picture of me:

No, seriously. This is from Dr. Seuss' One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. Every time MChes reads it to her she says "Dad!" and points to it. When I read it to her she says "Dad!" and looks back and forth between me and the picture over and over again.

MChes, in all seriousness, says that she can "see the resemblance." What else are wives for?

The First Word

2007-11-01T22:00:00.000-07:00

The First Word
Christine Kenneally

Christine Kenneally brings a unique perspective to popular science writing; she's a freelance journalist but also has a PhD in linguistics from Oxford. The First Word is therefore primarily a piece of journalism, secondarily a scientific look at the evolution of language. It is the anti-Pinker; very straightforward, unchatty, and more distanced from concrete conclusions. But it's probably the only way available to get a good glimpse of the complexity and contention surrounding the very new field of the evolution of language.

Kenneally's main thesis is that the strictly old-style Chomskyan model of a pre-programmed syntax is not consistent with modern experimentation and therefore is false [in fact, a simple statistical argument would have sufficed for me: the probability that the number of genetic mutations required to construct all of Chomsky's Universal Grammar could arise in one generation, as the theory demands, is much smaller than your average zero]. Her conclusion is that language does require some innate and specialized genetic code [descended larynx, fine motor control of mouth and tongue, some built-in language-specific cognitive structure, etc.]. However, this coding arose over thousands of generations for other purposes than language itself; language is a pastiche of adaptations which were beneficial in more ways than just verbal communication. Language is not a thing as much as it is a set of communication and cognition capabilities developed and boot-strapped together into a coherent ability. This is evident by the fact that many of the traits which are recognized as essential to human language production are homologues we share with our genetic cousins, and even those less related to us.

Kenneally goes a bit too far. The structure of her book is very balanced and journalistic; she gives several rounds of the debate to various sides, often giving way to broadside blows and rhetoric that would make Nancy Pelosi proud. However, the last word is given to those who oppose UG, despite the fact that a majority of them are not actually linguists, but ape researchers. This sells the very successful and still useful old model quite short. It should be customary for the old theory to get the final chance to defend itself, especially one as deeply entrenched and successful as UG.

Very little of the book deals with linguistics itself, but rather ape language study and evolutionary biology. Despite a truly epic amount of research, I feel that Kenneally didn't completely understand the evolutionary biology she was reporting on. Here's an example:

Evolution is the process by which genetic mutation influences the reproductive viability of individuals and propagates genetically across the species according to the reproductive advantage the mutation gives the individual over the other members of its species. Evolution proceeds by two paths: natural selection, in which the mutation influences survivability; and sexual selection, in which the mutation influences the likelihood that an individual will actually reproduce. Natural selection gets all the attention because it is the real driver of the creation of species. Sexual selection is traditionally associated with creating sexual dimorphism--males and females having different appearances--and mostly superficial traits. So sexual selection changes mostly details within a species [this is a vast overgeneralization, but it's mostly accurate].

This is very important for the study of the evolution of language. The human species has basically stopped evolving by natural selection; people in modern society live or die according to geographic and socioeconomic conditions and not, generally, as a result of personal genetics. However, sexual selection has taken its place as a vastly powerful means of shaping the species. The caution with which most humans choose who to create children with ensures that there is at least the potential for major genetic trends to be introduced to the species by sexual selection alone [more on this in a subsequent post].

So, what am I driving at? Christine Kenneally has completely ignored the effect of sexual selection in language evolution, and I think it is potentially the most important driver of recent hominid evolution. In fact, she only devotes one paragraph to sexual selection and dismisses it promptly with an analogy from Tecumseh Fitch, one of the scientists she interviewed for the book. The analogy goes something like this:

Peacocks have strong sexual dimorphism from sexual selection. The selection pressure forced the sexes apart, instead of brought them forward together to new traits. Since human language is balanced between the sexes, it cannot be the result of sexual selection.

Besides being a faulty analogy, this is one fabulously impoverished piece of logic. First off, a peahen doesn't need a gaudy tail in order to be attracted to a male's gaudy tail. But a female human must have somewhat comparable language to the male who is courting her in order for her to even observe the trait. It is fairly easy to imagine that the only male in a band of early hominids who can communicate with a particular female at her capacity is more likely to be the father of her children. Secondly, the whole notion of sexual selection becomes infinitely messy and unpredictable with very social species, which we and our recent ancestors are. So comparing us to peacocks is completely disingenuous. It is clear that sexual selection is a potentially powerful force in human evolution, so why ignore it? I think the problem lies in the fact that traditional evolutionary biology focuses on the creation of species, for which sexual selection is impotent compared to natural selection. The language evolution people have inherited this inappropriate bias. [note that I don't claim to possess a model for how sexual selection influenced the genesis of language; how the female and the male came to the same mutation is difficult to understand without invoking widespread incest. But it should at least be obvious that the potential power of sexual selection demands that it be part of the discussion].

Not to get too tied up in this point, here's the rub: The First Word is a great and important book. The question of the origin of language is at least as vexing as the properties of dark matter, and the prospects of conquering the problem significantly less so. Christine Kenneally does a fabulous job of crystallizing and enlightening the debate, and presenting the most recent research. The fact that I disagree with her to a degree is not surprising; out of many dozens of researchers she interviewed for this book, no two agree on the subject either. The issue of language evolution is crucial for understanding our species and ourselves, and this book does a nearly perfect job of drawing the borders over which the wars of human nature will be fought for the next decades.

[Washoe, the first non-human trained for human communication, died two days ago. She was a significant character in the book.]

The Pumpkin Dude

2007-10-30T20:15:00.002-07:00

Earthquake

2007-10-30T20:15:00.001-07:00

We just had a small earthquake. Hope it wasn't a foreshock!

Update: it's not a foreshock. It's not on the San Andreas, and the fault is only capable of ~5.6 quakes, which this was [except we didn't feel more than a rumble because we are ~20 miles away]

Chucricket

2007-10-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

Chuckwalla woke up extra early this morning. I went in to check on her, and she pointed to the wall and told me there was a cricket there. She wasn't scared, just excited that there was a cricket in her bedroom!

There wasn't a cricket there.

So I tried to put her back to sleep but she kept on telling me there was a cricket on the wall.

So I checked again, and I noticed that there was a shadow coming from a street light passing through the top of a crib. It cast a long horizontal shadow with a very abstract insect-looking silouette--complete with 3 blocky legs--onto the wall. A cricket.

So I turned on the light and showed her that there was no cricket, it's just a shadow. She was a little disappointed but satisfied.

I wonder what being 20-months-old is like. The world must seem very different! I'm glad she knew the word for cricket and the concept of shadows, because otherwise I never would have been able to get back to sleep [I nearly didn't anyway].

Desert Solitaire

2007-10-28T22:01:00.001-07:00

Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey

I wish I had known what was going on when Edward Abbey's drunken and highly illegal wake was held per his request in Saguaro National Monument west of Tucson. I wouldn't have gone [I was 6. I wouldn't go now either.] but it was likely little more than a short hike from our house at the time, and it would be a nice memory to have.

I won't say much about this book. Ed Abbey is brash, manly, serene, enlightened, hilarious, gentle, ignorant, brave, humble, loud, brilliant, passionate, misguided, visionary, articulate, well-read, witty, opinionated, zany, compassionate, and most of all downright daft.

Solitaire is a superb book. It makes you feel, laugh out loud, get angry, become enlightened, scratch your head, and hopefully go outside. It is also a very important book.

If you haven't, read it.

Life of 4/1 - 4/3 + 4/5 - 4/7 + 4/9 - 4/11 + 4/13 - ...

2007-10-28T21:27:00.000-07:00

Life of Pi
Yann Martel

I had to read this book because I needed some fiction to balance my literary diet. And I heard it was great. A story about a shipwrecked Indian boy spending 227 days afloat in a life boat on the Pacific ocean with an adult male Bengal tiger for company has to be good. Even if it is semi-allegorical and/or fableized.

But I was pretty disappointed.

It's not that the book didn't deliver the promised fun shipwrecked-with-a-man-eater excitement. It's just that the rest of the book was terrible. The book comes in three parts: A long-winded and dry prelude which lasts nearly a third of the book; the shipwreck and survival section, which takes up the bulk of the rest of the book; and the cadenza, wrapping up loose ends and applying a good Hollywood ending.

I'm surprised that many people got through the first third. I'm pretty thick skinned about plotless writing; I devour Jared Diamond and Edward Abbey. But this still tested my mettle. The problem is that Yann Martel tries his hand at pursuasive writing, completely forgetting that he's writing a novel and that he is a novelist. I itallicized that last sentence because that is all he appears to be. His arguments are so ludicrous; filled with naive generalizations, ignorant statements, and some of the worse logic I've ever seen in copyrighted publication. He just has no idea what he's talking about, but he still talks about it, Krishna only knows why.

The first and third segments have a bit of dialog. I had to put the book down occasionally during these parts and check the front cover just to make sure I hadn't accidentally started reading a George Lucas book [a classy literary reference if I've seen one]. The dialog was impressively contrived and laborious. I often pondered whether the author was trying to create a nightmarish world of stilted communication in order to do something the English professorial types would have fun with. But I decided against that. I think Yann Martel just lacks any subtlety at all, and doesn't really care whether his characters seem real.

On the issue of subtlety, I think that the lack of it destroyed an otherwise cute and gratifying surprise ending. Throughout the book the author felt need it to pound into our heads every time he did something he thought was clever, and the ending was no exception. He leaves nothing of the nearly-perplexing and interesting ending to the imagination. After being bludgeoned repeatedly throughout the book with banal psuedoreligious pandering, the reader deserves a gentle, subtle, thoughtful ending.

I grant fiction writers almost infinite freedom to stretch credulity with the setup of the plot. What's the fun of fiction if they can't? So I have no bones to pick about the fantastic nature of the story itself, it is the book's main draw. But I did find Yann Martel's extensions and details so outrageous that it detracted from the story. I think he intended the book to have a "choose for yourself" type ending, like K-PAX, but unlike K-PAX one of the possibilities is so impossible and fantastical that it isn't an option. So you're forced to choose the other option [and if you missed the choice, he has a clunky dialogue that forces you to interpret it this way]. It's just not fun, it leaves the reader with no space for imagination or intrigue.

So, I don't know what all the fuss is about. The book is fun-you should read it-but the claim on the back of my edition that Yann Martel is the "greatest living writer of the generation born in the sixties" is absurd. I'm not sure that he's the greatest author born in 1963 in Salamanca with the surname of Martel, but I'll need to do some more research before I can say that for sure.

Transcendent music

2007-10-26T23:06:00.000-07:00

People have often asked me why my wife and I often limit ourselves to a narrow range of classical music. I've had a lot of trouble explaining this, so I want to try here.

First of all, these are some of the reasons that have been speculated for our choice of music, all of which are wrong:

1. We think it makes us smart
2. We think it makes us look smart
3. We have an elitist disdain for other music
4. We have a moral issue with other music
5. We haven't been exposed enough to other music

We both actually listen to and appreciate a wide variety of music. But we still keep on discovering that nothing reaches us like our music, particularly late romantic chamber. One of the reasons for this is a feeling that we have both arrived at independently, and describe in the same language. I'll try my best to explain from the bottom up:

There are many categories of "bad" music [of course judged by how it affects and reaches us]. I won't discuss this here, it should be fairly obvious what makes up the bulk of the inhabitants of these categories. And there are "good" music categories. Here are some examples of pieces and composers which might fit under various good categories, based on our tastes:

Merely good: most of Mozart. Schumann, most of Mendelssohn, Lizst, Chopin, etc. Almost anything you hear on a classical station is here or below.
Really good: most of Dvorak, most Beethoven, Stravisnsky, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, etc. I don't think we bother listening to anything below this category.
Spectacularly good: Mendelssohn quartet Op. 13; Ravel and Debussey quartets; Bach Cello suites; some Beethoven; Smetana quartet and Moldau, Dvorak serenade for strings, etc. This is a huge category considering how distinguished it is.
That much gooder [a.k.a. perfect]: Schubert late chamber and nearly all Brahms chamber. Grieg g quartet.

Most of the non-chamber music we listen to falls within the "merely good" to "that much gooder" categories and this includes non-classical music, what we listen to for dancing, and whatever else we have on our iPod.

This is pedantic.

The point is that there is great music everywhere, even music that rivals our holy "that much gooder" music.

But there is one more category that we have both arrived at without triangulation. It is transcendent music. This is music that breaks some invisible barrier and really deeply penetrates us. This is music which feels like it was written by God, and probably was. There are only certain passages in certain pieces which are transcendent in this way for us, and they hold a very special place in our lives. We both claim the most profound spiritual, emotional, and penetrating experiences with these passages. It's different than very, very good music; it is very, very good music with a divine touch. Here's what is transcendent for us:

Scattered passages of the Dvorak cello concerto, mostly in 1st and 2nd movement.
Brahms piano quintet in f, especially the B and D sections of the 4th movement [this trumps all for me, put me on a desert island with this and I'll die a perfected saint].
Schubert quintet in C, B section of the second movement

I want to stress that we dearly love and are passionate about other music. The second movement of the Ravel quartet, Schubert's Death and the Maiden 1st and 2nd movements, the opening sequence in Grieg's quartet in g, the first movement of Smetana's "From my Life" quartet, Brahms' piano quartet in g final cadenza and piano quartet in c 2nd movement climax and a huge amount more, Schubert's G quartet 1st movement, Bach cello suite #5 prelude. These are all the absolute pinnacle of human musical achievement. But the transcendent passages [of which there are few more] go beyond the pinnacle and enter into another realm for us. And the key is that these transcendent passages cluster mostly around late romantic chamber music. That's why we listen to chamber as much as we do. It doesn't hurt that the non-transcendent stuff is flappin' awesome also.

So we don't think music can make us smart. And we're not musical snobs or prudes. We just found a little patch of the transperfect and we can't get enough of it.

The Best Widget

2007-10-26T21:19:00.000-07:00

It's absurd that so much of critique in popular circles revolves around the best of something or other. How can anybody claim to judge the best book, actor, food, music, athlete, temperature, dog, linguine crunchiness, song, expletive, or friend? It's a compulsion born of lack of vision, objectivity, humility, and experience. I find it beyond reproach that anybody dares to proclaim that X is the best Y, no matter how passionately they feel it.

The Dvorak cello concerto is the best and greatest concerto ever written. And Jacqueline DuPre's recording of it is the best in existence. No argument possible. I'm not joking.

The Magic Cello

2007-10-26T20:56:00.000-07:00

On an orchestra tour in Aspen, CO, I started warming up before an open-air performance, surrounded by the beautiful dissonant noises of a full contingency of strings playing whatever they wanted simultaneously and in small quarters. As a 17-year-old, I had been playing the cello for 11 years and loved it. I was reasonably good at it. That summer I had been busy spending quality time [and otherwise] with my future wife and hadn't so much as touched the cello in many weeks before the tour.

So I sat there in the middle of Kitschville and just started playing, barely able to hear myself. And...

... music came out!

Sorry if this doesn't sound profound, but it really was. Like I mentioned, I was a good cello player but I was not really a cellist. I didn't think that I ever would be; I considered cello playing just a vehicle for experiencing the chamber music I loved. So something in my mind, my fingers, my inner musikmensch, my muscles, just clicked and I knew how to really play. I didn't instantly become any better technically, that would be magic. But this was the next best thing to magic: somehow I figured out how to project, to vibrato, to sing, and to create music with my cello. I wasn't playing anything that had ever been played before [this was typical for me; I shouldn't have wondered why practicing didn't help my solo pieces much].

So I became a cellist. A great cellist? Nope, just a cellist. Sometimes I pull my cello out and just glory in the beautiful sound that comes out of it, feeling blessed that my brain mysteriously figured out how to play that day in Colorado. I've never forgotten.

So what happened? I have no idea. Maybe some final, last neural connection between different regions of my brain that allowed me to express music through the cello? Who knows? A blessing no matter how it came.

Has anybody else had an experience like this? Your brain just figured something else out without you knowing?

San Pedro

2007-10-22T23:02:00.000-07:00

This is a complete travesty.

My wife and I spent a significant portion of our considerable courtship hiking along the San Pedro in the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, perhaps the busiest corridor for illegal immigrants in Arizona [though the Border Patrol coverage there seems spotty; they never seem to leave their flatulent air-conditioned SUV's]. The river provides cover and lower temperatures during the summer, runs straight north to I-10, and has an old abandoned railroad track running right along it, all of which factor to make this an ideal illegal immigration corridor. Hiking along the more remote stretches of the tracks is like trekking through a 40-mile-long 10-foot-wide landfill. Every step is littered with discarded water bottles, batteries, shoes, socks, shirts, pants, backpacks, empty food cans, plastic bags, blankets, utensils, and other detritus of desperate human exodus. Walking these tracks is an extremely sobering and humanizing experience. Almost 50 illegal immigrants a day are apprehended in the conservation area but nobody knows how many make it through. Only God knows how many people have died along this route trying to win a better life for their family, but it is easy for me to imagine as I walk there that I am surrounded by informal graves, each marking the end of a brave soul and their family's dreams. Maybe I over-estimate the deaths, but the marks of human tragedy are obvious.

The track route is subject to brutal day-time heat [up to the high 110º's] but the neighboring river-bed is protected by a canopy of massive cottonwoods and thermally regulated by the flowing water. It is an oasis. Hiking in mid-July is rarely feasible in southern Arizona, but here it is delightful. To escape the heat during the days the immigrants pick their way up the river bed, which is exceptionally rough going. We have run across elaborate networks of food caches, scouts, runners, and guides using the bed to smuggle immigrants during the day. Besides a pair of entomologists speculating that our southbound route constituted illegal immigration in an unusual sense, and a single nudist right at the confluence with the access wash, we have never run into a legal American citizen along the river. The Border Patrol flies by the dirt access roads in their SUV's without pausing [except for occasional stops to examine our vehicle and attempt to exact intelligence from us--they shouldn't dare].

That's the immigrant picture in San Pedro. Here's the biological picture:

San Pedro is a complete biological treasure. Due to the proximity to Mexico, north-south orientation, flowing water, monsoons, and high temperatures, the San Pedro contains the breeding grounds for many of the rarest birds in North America [using the convenient birder's definition excluding Mexico]. These birds represent the furthest north extension of many of the neotropical species. Several dozen of these exotic tropical bird species which are found nowhere else in North America breed in the giant cottonwoods along the river. Go to this gray hawk page and look at the range map; the long straight range extension up the western flank of the Sierra Madre Occidental in Mexico is typical of many tropical species found in extreme southern Arizona but nowhere else in North America. Gray hawks were actually our main targets in the area; 75% of all gray hawks north of Mexico breed along the San Pedro.

Western riparian habitats account for more than half of all species found in the region. The San Pedro is often cited as the richest riparian area in the state, and it is the longest undammed river in the southwest. Approaching the San Pedro is a shock of senses: arrogantly laid down in the middle of drab, low-level desert-scrub is a gaudy green ribbon of thriving giant cottonwoods and biological extravagance. It is truly one of the precious treasures of the country.

Much could be said about the damage that has already been done to the San Pedro: devastating, though not on the same scale as the full-fledged rape and murder of the similar Santa Cruz river, parallel and 40 miles to the west. I won't devote any more of this post to those issues, but this piece is well-written, lightweight, digestible, and touches on the conservation issues of the San Pedro watershed.

Now that the background is painted, here's the issue: The Fence. Right through the corridor.

Backed by the ignorant flood of vitriol that is steadily disseminated by the conservative punditry, and empowered by the heavy-handed and arrogantly mongering Current Administration, Michael Chertoff wants to build a fence right through the conservation area. He has used his God-given, er, Current Administration-given powers to “waive in their entirety” every single piece of modern legislation that stands between the Republican extractive economy and complete ecological ruin for the western States. The Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, all are impotent against Michael Chertoff's whim. These acts are often the only weapons on conservationists' belts, now rendered obsolete by a flick of somebody's president's pen.

[So I have just demonstrated what I hate about blogs: diatribing, name-calling, generalizing, ranting, sourceless opining. Here's my attempt at an objective discussion, minimized by the late hour:]

For the fence to be built, it must be established that:

1. The Fence will work
A. Illegal immigrants will no longer be able to cross
B. Drugs will not be able to cross
C. Foreign terrorists will not be able to cross

2. Benefits outweigh costs
A. Environmental damage
B. Capital costs

3. The Fence constitutes a solution to current border issues

Let me set one thing straight before we continue: the god-like powers given to Michael Chertoff to suspend environmental regulations were given as an add-on to his Department of Homeland Security duties in the Real ID Act, which deals almost exclusively with terrorism-related regulations. So nominally the Fence is about terrorism. It is not about illegal immigration.

To address the issues above, I'll say this, briefly:

1. The Fence will not work
A. Illegal immigrants will find other ways to cross the border. They will until economic opportunities exist at home. Desperate people willing to risk death to cross will always find a way to do it.
B. Our own capitalistic model insures that drugs will always be available. Walling off Ogden, UT is probably a more effective method of controlling methamphetamine distribution in the US than the Fence will be for any drug.
C. Foreign terrorists? Are you kidding me? 36 of the 48 al-Qaeda operatives who have been implicated in crimes in the US between 1993 and 2001 entered and stayed in the country legally. They can fly over on a student visa, a business trip, to visit family, for the holidays. A Fence won't stop legal immigrants and visa-holders from blowing up Americans. So who cares even if it can stop illegal entrants from doing it? There are millions of volunteers to do it now that we've set up camp over there and created hundreds of thousands of widows.

2. Benefits do not outweigh costs
A. Environmental damage is the only lasting legacy of a Fence. Habitat fragmentation is the most potent cause of biodiversity loss. The Fence cuts an ugly impenetrable swath right across the San Pedro, among other important areas. I'm convinced, after all my time in the area, that bulldozing even a 10-foot chunk out of the middle of the riparian zone and placing fence there will drastically alter the life cycles of much of the local flora and fauna. Rivers in the southwest are superhighways of animal movement. Walls bisecting highways are not a good idea.
B. Capital costs. Really, at 2 billion a week the War pretty much makes any other expenditure moot. But the 1 billion or so it will take to build the fence could absolutely and irreversible revolutionize the worldwide species conservation effort.

3. The Fence constitutes a band-aid at best for current border issues

The last issue is illegal immigration. Although the Fence is nominally about terrorism, the political expediency comes from rampant fear and misanthropy caused by poor statistics and hysterical public figures. Have you ever known an illegal immigrant? I have. Have you ever met one? Talked to one? Eaten dinner with one? I have. Fantastic, humble, family-oriented people. We could use more. I would have an illegal family as neighbors without pause. The proportion of rotten ones is no higher than that of the general American populace. But their illegal status and the accompanying social barriers put their children at extreme risk for criminal behavior. That is the fault of the way we treat the immigrants, not the fault of the immigrants.

I meet so many people who are ridiculously ignorant on this issue. "They broke the law, I have no sympathy for them." Really? I would jump the fence for my family. Wouldn't you? I'm not a bad person [Ann Coulter is not my judge]. "I say just send them all back where they came from." Really? Will you be the one to work in the fields when all the immigrants are gone? I've worked side-by-side with illegal immigrants harvesting onions, pumpkins, and hay. What they do in a day would reduce you to a quivering pile of whimpering. And it is necessary labor, needed to sustain the economy we all benefit from. "They're not American, America has no obligation to help them." What moral right do you have to a microwave, 3 TV's, frozen pizza, an SUV, multiple pairs of shoes, and all-you-can-eat buffets? You were born an American, yes. Did you die for this country? The entire founding philosophy of this country centers around the inalienability of fundamental human needs. Will you be the one to tell them that your rights are inalienable but theirs are alienated in this country because of where their parents lived when they were born? Your ancestors--if you are like most Americans'--immigrated to this country and found equity. Will you deny equity to those who would come now? What proportion of your hoarded wealth do you feel you will lose from having to share with our new arrivals? "They steal my tax money." Sure. The solution to this is to make them tax-paying citizens.

Something that really, truly should appeal to the very people I wish would listen to this but will never read my words: would Jesus Christ turn the illegal immigrants away? Would he deny them health care? Would he let them die in the wilderness? Would he condemn them for trying to save their families? Would Jesus Christ build a Fence? Would you?

I once met a Peruvian sheep-herder living alone in a small trailer on top of a mountain in Idaho. He spent 9 months a year with virtually no human contact doing a job that no American would take at well under minimum wage in order to feed his wife and children at home. He had to hop the border twice a year. Why should this man have to break the law to get home to his family?

And we're back. This is where it ends:

In the far distant future, a ceremony will be held atop an old set of tracks next to the San Pedro during mid-July at mid-day. The participants will dedicate a memorial to the souls who died trying to find a way to provide for their families. Somebody will say "Mr. President, tear this *&!^@ fence down" and it will be done.

Long live the San Pedro!

Ma propre expérience française

2007-10-22T12:37:00.000-07:00

Mon frère Beerstraw a écrit dans le français l'autre jour sur son blog. Je n'ai pas pensé qui était équitable parce que j'ai dû compter sur une page de traduction en ligne problématique qui a rendu son écriture illisible. Donc j'espère qu'il lira cette traduction contraire et sentira la même frustration j'ai senti l'essai de lire ce qui a eu l'air d'une collection sans fin d'expressions banales courtes et vaguement spirituelles. Je ne sais pas comment ce traducteur voudra traduire "et là j'avais la révélation" mais j'espère que cela tourne dehors plus comme "et là j'avais quelque chose de bon." Mais le lecteur ne sera pas capable de répéter parce que les deux expressions sembleront identiques si ainsi.

En tout cas, j'ai pensé à l'insérant des articles supplémentaires juste pour l'amusement mais j'ai décidé que ce sera assez impénétrable sans eux que je peux garder la traduction torride pure, après une manière du fait de parler.

Durablement, votre frère de votre mère.

Searching in vain

2007-10-21T21:54:00.000-07:00

We've spent the last week researching a new lens we need to acquire to fill a gaping hole in our coverage and to give MChes something to shoot with while we're out our requirements:

1. ED glass with max focal length no less than 300mm
2. Hand-holdable
3. Fast [f2.8 hopefully]
4. Fast AF [AF-S preferable]
5. VR would be very, very nice considering that we'll be using it handheld under rainforest canopies

And, of course, we have to be able to afford it. We were thinking about the 80-400mm VR, which is really versatile. But I've looked at hundreds of images online from people using it, some of which are explicitly designated as proof of the lens' superior optical performance, and they're all garbage. Nothing doing, I won't touch a lens that will ruin an otherwise awesome picture with bad glass. Plus the lens is slow and the AF is super slow.

So we were looking at a variety of 300mm primes. The 300mm f2.8 would be sweet, but the AF-I and AF-S versions are too heavy to hand-hold and the VR versions are so fantastically expensive that it would be more economically feasible to switch to barnacle photography than to buy it. Same for the fabulous 200-400mm f4 VR.

So maybe we'll get an old, cheap used 300mm f4. Not as fast as we'd like, too-large depth of field wide-open, and no VR.

So we just can't get what we want. It's frustrating.

Chuckwalla

2007-10-21T21:52:00.000-07:00

Second draft

2007-10-18T15:33:00.000-07:00

Thanks for all the comments [I especially liked the "you're a stud" ones]. Here's the next draft:

http://raptorphoto.sundala.com/NewSiteSandbox/

Note that the title is just a stand-in, we haven't decided what to call ourselves yet, and I'll still add Beerstraw's copyright at some point.

Lemme know, etc...

New Website Front Page

2007-10-16T23:36:00.000-07:00

Here's the first draft of the new front page to our site:

http://raptorphoto.sundala.com/NewSiteSandbox/

Some questions about it:

1. Is it too big? I'm curious how it looks on smaller resolution screens
2. Is it clear? If you clicked on a link to take you here would it be too confusing what you need to do?
3. Is it attractive?

Any help is help. We want this to be gooooood.

The incredible explodable egg

2007-10-15T17:51:00.000-07:00

I just got home from work and felt like a little protein before heading off to tutor tonight. So, on a whim, I put an egg in the microwave.

It exploded all over the microwave. So I tried again.

The second one split open but didn't explode. I salvaged a core of yolk and white which was piping hot but looked edible and intact. When I bit into it, the burnt yolk exploded in my face.

It smelled like a large quantity of rotting ant dung. And it was all over my face, the table, the floor, and the chair. And it was, I should emphasize, piping hot.

So don't try that at home [I'm not sure why I did].

Into the Wild

2007-10-15T16:54:00.000-07:00

Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer.

I'm not prone to saying things like this, so enjoy it while it lasts:

I learned something about myself by reading this book.

First you need to know what the book is about. If you haven't heard the story already, it's about a guy my age [24] named Chris McCandless who dies of starvation alone in the wilderness in Alaska two years after converting to asceticism and disowning materialistic life. But it's not really that simple. The guy was not nutty, and he was not stupid. He was irrepressibly idealistic and passionately morality-minded. Being a real person, it's foolish to try to attribute his actions to any single factor.

Read this if you want to know more of the story and about Chris [this is the article that the book was derived from]. It's very good reading.

Chris reminded me in many many ways of myself. I hesitate to explain how, but it was uncanny. Reading the book was like reading a story of me in a parallel universe but with these differences:

∙ I'm married to the same woman I dated when I was 16 [this is actually crucial]
∙ Religion

That's it. As far as I can tell all the other differences are superficial. Sure we had different parents and were raised in different homes, but we both showed such a convergent evolution of philosophy and traits that I can't imagine that differences in environment can explain much.

Being married has been a tremendous moderating force in my life. I've flirted here and there with radicalism but the practicalities of marriage and parenthood as well as the personal influence of my wife has smoothed over my most extreme views and tendencies. I discovered how much of a blessing this is through reading Krakauer's book.

Chris's views were not fundamentally wrong or bad. And his ideals didn't kill him. What killed him was his immoderation and, frankly, some pretty bad luck. He was somewhat reckless, but not suicidal.

So reading the book was a great education for me. It taught me that people like me exist elsewhere in the world, it taught me the dangers of taking my idealism too far, and most of all it showed me how lucky I am to be married to a stabilizing woman.

It also forced me to imagine what my life would look like posthumously through the lens of a nature/adventure writer in mainstream culture. I imagine a lot of armchair psychologists saying "obviously suffering from X" or "clearly his behavior was caused by Y" which seems so foreign seeming when it's referring to me. I'm me, I decide what I do, I decide how I am, and I'm neither insane nor stupid. So I don't believe that Chris McCandless was stupid, repressed, off-kilter, insane, arrogant, heroic, brave, naive or even labelable at all. He was just a guy with no moderation who felt strongly and acted on his feelings. A weird duck, no doubt, but a duck nonetheless.

[I feel like I'm rambling. I listened to some of my old music today and it had this same structure: clumps of connected material haphazardly strung together with no driving purpose, no direction, and no correlation. Whoops.]

THE Forgotten War

2007-10-14T13:15:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking of an American war.

The war was fought on foreign soil in a country which had inferior technology and tactics. The Americans defeated the regular army soundly and quickly. Within a few months the Americans declared the war over and won.

But violence still continued. Thousands of American soldiers died in protracted conflict with guerrillas determined to liberate their country from occupation. In response to guerrilla tactics the Americans started resorting more and more to brutal methods. Prisoners were regularly tortured and civilians targeted. The Americans trained and used native troops against their own countrymen.

News of atrocities incited the American people to denounce the war. Many influencial personalities demanded publicly that the war be ended on grounds that it constituted an act of imperialism which the United States was fundamentally opposed to on principle [the Monroe Doctrine is a manifestation of this].

∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙

OK. So if you're a non-savvy reader you might think that I'm talking about Iraq. If you're a little smarter than that, you'd recognize that I must be talking about another war which I've simplified in just the right way to highlight resemblance to the Iraq war.

But the one you're thinking about isn't it at all. This isn't Vietnam. It's not Korea [obviously]. And since it's quite certainly not either of the world wars, the civil war or the revolutionary war, I think the average American can safely be assumed to be 100% absolutely ignorant of its very existence.

I'm talking about the Philippine-American war, fought from 1899 to 1913.

Never heard of it? I don't think most people have. It's an embarrassing war: 4,324 Americans and maybe 1,000,000 Philippinos died in this little adventure. In case you missed that, 500 more Americans died in this war than have died in the Iraq war to date. The war was essentially an act of imperialism, not nearly as complex in cause as the current war. The Americans had just soundly defeated Spain [how many people even know we fought Spain? and as a result of a purported act of terrorism?], and Spain was the colonial ruler of the Philippines. The U.S. sought to replace Spain in its role as colonial governor. So this war was, in essence, a war of independence with the Americans as the "bad guys."

Virtually anything else that can be said about the Philippine-American war proves that it was quite different than Iraq; no WMD's, no IED's, no Saddam, no Islam, no Dick Cheney, and no oil interests. Many of the soldiers died of disease and not combat.

But there were Guantanamos, there were Hadithas, there were John Murthas, and there was a messy, unpopular, ugly, expensive and unwinnable war in a country so far away that the majority of modern Americans cannot find it on a map. So there are lessons to be learned.

A few weeks ago cnn.com showed a graphic of war casualties from all "major" American wars. I can't find it now, but I think the data came from here. The P-A War wasn't on the list. This is completely consistent with the lack of profile that this war has. Wars with a fraction of the casualties of the P-A War--like the Gulf War and the Spanish-American War, the Mexican War, and the War of 1812--were shown while the P-A War was not [note that the page referenced specifically lists "battle deaths." Even by this measure the P-A War, with 1,000-1,500 conflict casualties is worse than the Gulf War and the Spanish-American War and thus certainly deserves place on the list]. A quick google search for "american war casualties" yields among the top hits this, this, and this, with no disclaimer of incompleteness and with the second link even going so far as to mention Grenada [but not Panama??], but none mention the P-A War. The last link is a very thorough documentation of every death in US military history, found on fas.org, the website of the Federation of American Scientists, an extremely well-respected non-profit group dedicated to collecting and publicly distributing information pertaining to the US military. It lists Haiti, Somalia, Grenada, Panama, and even the Iranian Rescue Mission which combine for 82 casualties. Combat and non-combat deaths are totaled one-by-one by race and cause but the Philippines-American War doesn't show up.

How could over 4,000 Americans die and nobody seems to know about it? How has our information-oriented culture completely forgotten a major American war? I don't know, but I do have a theory.

I think that nobody is comfortable with such a blatant act of imperialism by the US. We rarely hear of the American intervention in the Bolshevik revolution. Nobody even mentions US occupations of Haiti, Cuba, Panama in the 1900's, Nicaragua in the 1920's and 30's, Hawaii, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, etc. All of these occupations were adventures in imperialism carried out by the United States before most of us were born. In many cases the US supported or installed evil, cruel, tyrannical dictators who made Saddam's only unique attribute his mustache. In the vast majority of these cases even the most optimistic and patriotic American would have trouble demonstrating some great good either then or now that these occupations have accomplished. This is embarrassing.

Forgetting this war has rewritten US history just like remembering Valley Forge has written it. It surely is not the most important war in American history. But remembering it may have prevented us from embarking on the most frivolous one.

So how does the story of the Philippine-American war end? The violence lasted for years until the United States backed out and ceded control of the country to its own citizens. The US lost the country and several thousand soldiers. Nothing was won with this sacrifice. It wasn't sacrifice for freedom. America lost the war.

Raptorrific

2007-10-13T21:56:00.000-07:00

Today we drove to Half Moon Bay to photograph a huge concentration of raptors dining on a population explosion of voles. We saw perhaps a dozen white-tailed kites, 4-5 northern harriers [one male], and several red-tails [top picture is one of them] dining on the voles. Additionally there were two great blue herons hunting voles at sunset [bottom picture is one of them, a 1st year].

The herons were interesting. They slowly walked through the grass while waddling their entire bodies snake-like with head poised to strike. They looked like cobras on stilts. I didn't see them catch anything.

The kites hunt by hovering over a vole then periodically lowering themselves down until they are within range. Then they fold in their wings and drop like a rock. I didn't see them catch anything.

The harriers fly acrobatically very low over the ground and periodically ambush voles. They have many other tricks in their arsenal but this is all we saw today. I didn't see them catch anything.

The red-tails just sit on a stump and wait until they see a vole. Then they fly over and eat it. They ate lots of voles.

So I think the red-tails have something good going here. No wonder they're the ubiquitous hawk of North America. Now if somebody would inform the other raptors that they don't need to work that hard maybe we'd see more of them too!

Costa Rica

2007-10-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

From Jan 9 to Jan 23 [plus or minus a day or two on either side] 2009, MChes, Chuckwalla, Pummelo, Beerstraw's older brother and I will be in Costa Rica. We've hired a private bird guide to show us around for a week and then we're going to spend the rest of the time camping in Corcovado National Park ["the most biologically intense place on earth" according to National Geographic].

We will hopefully be sleeping outside for most nights, a good primer for Peru and New Guinea. It's going to be awesome! I can't wait.

Literally.

I'm pretty much just sitting around waiting for it to happen.

But there's a lot to do until then. We have 820 species worth of field marks to memorize, half a dozen books on neotropical ecology to read, tropical camping gear to acquire, vaccinations to receive, a camera and the Nikon 80-400mm VR lens to buy, and many other nouns to verbize.

The original incarnation of this trip was a two-week guided backpacking expedition in August 2008 in the western Amazon basin in Peru. After a huge investment of time planning that trip it pretty much imploded based on cost and safety concerns. Costa Rica will be half the price and much, much safer. And quite possibly birdier too.

So, imagine us with a nealy-3 Chuckwalla, a 16-month Pummelo, a 500mm f4 lens mounted on our antiquated but trusty D100, our tripod, a D200 with the 80-400mm VR mounted on it, a tent, sleeping bags, bug netting, food, field guides, baby backpacks, rain gear, binoculars, and possibly an infrared trigger for the cameras. Not exactly Chris McCandless, but worth it to us.

Peach Prizes

2007-10-13T12:26:00.001-07:00

Re: Beerstraw's post.

The reason why Al Gore's crusade against Global Warming qualifies for a Peace Prize is in my mind pretty simple. Even if we limit "peace" to the lack of armed conflict between people [an unnecesarily narrow definition] then there is ample evidence that climate change in the way predicted by the most modern climate models will lead to more global conflict and thus less peace. This is very thoroughly laid out for environmental degradation in general in Jared Diamond's Collapse and for GW in particular here and here, among other places. Especially interesting is this report by a group of retired US generals and admirals [not your typical extreme environmentalists]. They claim national and global security are seriously threatened by GW. Here's how they say it:

"Climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most
volatile regions of the world."

In short, based on our best modern science combating GW will lead to fewer conflict fatalities in the future. Thus fighting GW is an act of peace.

It's not clear if the Nobel committee had this in mind when they awarded Al and the IPCC the award, but it makes a lot of sense to me.

Croozle

2007-10-12T18:28:00.000-07:00

Google "finland time zone". Click on the first link [Wikipedia article].

Recognize the language? Thought not. It's Somali. Isn't that bizarre? Somalia doesn't even have an operational national domain and it has a Wiki article for Finland.

And why the blue buffalo Google chose to display the Somali page as the most relevant search is one of those ineffable ineffabilities of life.

But there is at least a possible explaination. The Somali page is the only page I could find that didn't have the info bar in the language of the page. So the Basque page says "Ordu Eremua" instead of "Time Zone."

Still...

Chuck

2007-10-12T18:10:00.000-07:00

I sneezed. Chuckwalla said, "bless you!"

It was cute.

Travels

2007-10-11T19:15:00.000-07:00

I posted 10 minutes ago. Babysitting can be so productive!

So MChes and I are nuts about traveling. Here's our plans for the next couple years:

Nov 2007: Thanksgiving in Utah, of course!
Dec 2007: Montana with the Monsters
Aug 2008: Olympic peninsula alpine camping and temperate rain forest hiking
Feb 2009: Costa Rica
Sept 2010: Peru

Up to Costa Rica is pretty firm, and I've spent too many hundreds of hours planning for and dreaming of Peru for that not to happen. It was going to be Sept 2008 except we had scheduling and money issues.

So, after that where we go depends on where we are living. If I get a CERN fellowship we'll be living in Switzerland so our travels will be mostly European, though we'd love to swing by Madagascar or Tanzania if we can. So here's our list [mostly mine, MChes's list and mine are, shall we say, complementary]

1. Papua New Guinea. Some day I'll write a whole post about why I'm so attracted to there. Or seven.
2. Madagascar. This will get a post too.
3. Peru. Most biologically diverse place on the planet.
4. Costa Rica. 100 more species of birds than North America in a country the size of West Virginia. And the plants and mammals and scenery... fantastic. And you probably have no idea what kind of crazy animals exist in the world until you've gone through a guide to the fauna of tropical America. Or been there.
5. New Zealand. This one isn't about diversity. It's about wild places, scenery, crazy birds and the cold. What's not to like about a place where birds evolved into every niche normally filled by mammals?
6. Tanzania/Kenya. Usambara mountains, seregeti. Need I say more?
7. Kamchatka. 7th looks far down the list, but let me tell you I've been dreaming of this trip since the 2nd grade. That's a true story. It might seem odd that somebody as obsessed with the tropics is also in love with tundra, but it's true. I could spend my whole life on tundra and be very very happy. Plus I prefer cold weather.
8. Bhutan/Nepal. This one isn't about biodiversity either. It's about a lot of other things though.
9. Botswana. Okavango is just about the wildest place on earth.
10. Hawaii. 40 species of honeycreeper. It would be my 49th state.
11. South Sandwich Islands/Antarctica. The real deal, some day. Not exactly for biodiversity... but the biomass is rediculous.
12. Norway, Iceland, Australia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Mongolia, Brazil, Ecuador and the Galapagos, Indonesia. Each of those has been on a top-three list at some point in time and each one would still be sweet beyond belief.

What makes me want to travel? Wilderness, wildlife, photography, ecology, adventure, experience, boredom, curiosity. And the goal is to finance the travel with our photography, which is on the verge of commercial viability after our Alaska trip this summer.

Now you know me better. You know what I think about when I can't sleep at night, when I'm supposed to be working, and when I'm in class.

Squirrel

2007-10-11T18:52:00.000-07:00

I normally bike to where a campus bus picks me up for work. I purposely don't check the schedule because I like sitting outside and the stop is rather peaceful [don't tell MChes]. I get some good reading in there since the bus comes every 20 minutes which means my average wait is 10 minutes.

For the last week I've been watching a squirrel from the bench I sit on. He has been systematically stripping one small oak of all of its acorns. He pulls each acorn off the branch and, while dangling upside-down or downside-up [whichever one fits his mind-set] pulls the cap off off of the acorn and takes a nibble of the nut to see if it is acceptable. If it isn't, he drops it [there is a large circle of detritus around the bottom of the oak]. If the acorn is acceptable, he climbs down the tree and crosses the road, which is often jam-packed with students on bikes. When he gets across he searches for a suitable spot to bury the acorn in a small thicket of imported shrubs. He is just as picky in selecting a spot to bury his prize as he is in selecting a proper nut in the first place. After the burial he returns to the tree again.

This seems like rather tedious work, but I've seen him at it every day for nearly a week.

So, even though you are conditioned by speeches, talks, commentaries and articles to expect the great motivational tie-in at this point, I don't have one. The squirrel is a squirrel, one of billions, and he is doing what he thinks he needs to to survive the fantastically [literally] brutal Bay-Area winter. No observations on human nature, life, or futility.

I just have found it interesting to watch the squirrel. I don't often get to see wild things being wild in my sterile cubicle deep in the gizzard of the marvelously sterile monstrosity of a scientific edifice that is the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center [SLAC]. So it has been fun.

I mention this because... I can. It's honestly one of the most exciting moments in my day. Here's the list, if you're keeping track:

1. Waking Chuckwalla up in the morning [if she doesn't wake me up first]
2. Waking Chuckwalla up from her nap after coming home from work
3. Reading at the bus stop and on the bus
4. Watching the squirrel

You should see my weekends!

Dreaming

2007-10-11T10:31:00.000-07:00

I saw a purple-crowned fairy in my dreams last night. Honestly.

When I woke up I read Beerstraw's post. I endorse it. Good stuff. But since I'm a young dude living in California, I blame it all on the System. Here's why.

Take a young idealistic up-and-coming politician [assuming that some start this way], call him Bob. Bob feels strongly about a few issues, and if he's smart and independent-minded, probobalistically speaking these issues will liekely not follow a particular party line. So he decides to run for election. He has two choices:

1. Sell out to a particular party [my bias in no way reflected in my choice of verbiage]
2. Lose the election

Bob takes option 1. He does this because option number two is stupid. So Bob decides to run as a Democrublican. Now Bob has two more options:

A. Sell out to the party line
B. Lose the primaries

So Bob chooses option A, of course. It's his only option. So he trims his list of genuine ideals in order to win the primaries. What's the point of running if you can't win? By now he's becoming a party hack, but he still feels like an independent spirit so it doesn't bother him too much. He hires handlers to tell him how to look and what to say in order to get votes from the Democrublican party. In order to finance his campaign, Bob aligns himself with several corporate interests. By the time he wins the primary, Bob has become a complete phony. He adheres to the party line so religiously that he believes that's what he started out believing just a few months earlier. Next comes the general election. His options:

I. Revert to more moderate positions
II. Lose the election

So Bob softens his stances. He no longer follows the party lines. His handlers talk to him in terms of gaining and winning votes. They plan on keeping all his old supporters and gaining a few new ones by essentially lying: retracting his harder positions from the primary race and becoming more moderate. Bob listens to his handlers and shakes hands the right way, he smiles at the cameras the right way, adds perhaps a homey twang or sophisticated curve to his speech, and he treats his opponents with the correct blend of disdain and respect that he has been coached into believing will win the sympathis of the general public.

Bob wins.

Now Bob has two options:

i. Sell whatever remains of his soul to the System and have a long political career.
ii. Revert to his original well-thought-out ideals, be labelled a liar and hypocrite, and lose all political clout. Lose the next election

So Bob finally is making policy decisions. He is a slave to his former campaign donors, his party, and his supporters. Someday he might remember that it was idealism that started him off on this track [remember, Bob didn't get into it for narcissism]. But by that time he is in way, way too deep to ever get out.

Bob's rise to public service required so much lying, bribery of the public, and selling out to corporate interests and his party that there is nothing of merit in what Bob has to offer in public service any more. He does whatever he is expected to do by those who he owes his election to.

Isn't that sad? Isn't it true? Is there another path to a high-profile public position?

Lest I lose track of the point of this post, here's it is: the political machine today is intolerant of objectivity and free-thinking. We have a choice: let others dictate to us what we are to believe or live impotent political lives on the outside of the circles of populist power.

Wow. Sounds cynical. It's not, I promise.

And by the way, lest you think that Bob represents a particular politician, that's not true. And even if he did, it's not the one you're thinking it is.

[for those of you unaware, a purple-crowned fairy is a species of hummingbird]

The results

2007-10-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

Here are the number of incorrect guesses in my vanity game:

MChes: 0
G of All Creation: 2
Little Mama: 1
Real: 3, but she guessed too many
Anonymous [Beerstraw? Monster?]: 2

So Little Mama, the cool mama in the wilderness, is the big time winner [except for MChes who doesn't count]. So here's the real answers for each one and the reason for it:

See every bird in North America: NO. I enjoy birds and wilderness but I'm not big into listing, which is the obsession with seeing as many species of birds as possible. There are some bird species I wouldn't mind seeing a hundred more times [trogons, gray hawks, etc.] and there are species which I will never look for.

Become a professor of physics: NO. It turns out that experimentalists don't get summers off like theorists do. Anyway, although I've decided to continue my studies in physics, I have no idea if I want to do physics professionally. There are a lot of other things that I would love doing but probably won't for purely practical reasons.

Finally dunk a basketball: YES. It was pretty embarrassing to put this under one of my "passionate dreams" but it's true. Last week I dropped the ball in the hoop and the nicked the rim with my hand on my way down, so I'm reasonably close. There's something about being 5'7" that makes this seem really exciting to me.

Have 9 kids: NO. I have no idea how many kids we'll have. But we are both reasonably sure that we won't have 9.

Travel to New Guinea: YES. This has been a nearly all-consuming passion for the last year or so. We're going to Costa Rica and Peru first for "training" but someday we will be there.

Have one of my pieces performed by a professional quartet: YES. When I die maybe somebody can scrap this together in memory of me. I don't have any prayer of it happening until then.

Hike Kilimanjaro: NO. It would be fun, sure. But I hike to be in wilderness, not just to conquer some famous peak, so I'd prefer to spend a lot of time elsewhere in Tanzania or midway up the side of Kilimanjaro.

Publish in National Geographic: YES. Maybe this isn't strictly true, but it is true that one of my life goals is to become a published wildlife photographer who can pay for his travels and gear with his photos. Putting NG on there seemed a good way to crystallize that unwieldy sentence. And, as MChes points out, NG would be awesome.

Win a Nobel Prize: NO. I don't love physics nearly enough to put the work into it that would produce a Nobel.

Write the definitive particle physics popularization book: NO. If I ever write a nonfiction book it will be about something specifically not physics-related.

Now you know me.

Little Mama now gets her amazing prize. "Little Mama, you are super cool!" That's it.

Brachistochrone

2007-10-10T11:39:00.000-07:00

So I've decided to keep blogging. This morning I was going to delete it, then I read Beerstraw's blog and decided that the world needs us both.

World, thank Beerstraw.

John Muir: Travels in Alaska

2007-10-09T21:42:00.000-07:00

John Muir is a Man. I want to be him.

To know why, read The Writings of John Muir. You'll want to be him too. He's the Brahms of glaciers, if you know what I mean.

For the sake of drama I though about ending right there. But since that was largely impenetrable for anybody with a brain outside of my skull, I should elaborate.

John Muir [how the pus do you say "Muir"? Moo-EER? Myur? MOO-er? Mweer?] is a late-19th century explorer, often described as the country's first conservationist and the founder of the Sierra Club. Writings is a collection of his--what else?--writings detailing his explorations in various places, mostly California and Alaska. In other words there is no plot. But plot is the last thing this book needs. Plots pull you forward through a book. This book is best appreciated slowly and repeatedly, with relish, like Gorgonzola. And like Brahms, I might add. Each page contains fantastically vivid descriptions of his cherished wilderness without the cloud of literary cynicism and post-modern understatement that has obsoleted this kind of book [yes, obsoleted is a word. Everything is a word in the OED.].

I just opened the book to a random paragraph to give you an idea. He is hiking up a glacier for kicks:

"I greatly enjoyed my walk up this majetic ice-river, charmed by the pale-blue,
ineffably fine light in the crevasses, molins, and wells, and the innumerable
azure pools in basins of azure ice, and the network of surface streams, large
and small, gliding, swirling with wonderful grace of motion in their
frictionless channels, calling forth devout admiration at almost every step and
filling the mind with a sense of Nature's endless beauty and power."

If that made you nauseaus, don't even think about thinking about reading this book, or the rest of this post either. But if that made you long for a solitary walk up an ancient isolated Alaskan glacier, and for times when profuse romantic language used only for the sake of glorifying beauty was not scoffed, then read this book. Slowly and repeatedly [just like you'll have to read that last sentence in order to extract any meaning from it].

Mendelssohn might be considered a better analog for John Muir; they both incessantly gloried in pretty things and created works that were neat and pleasant but rather light philisophically. But John Muir is Brahms. Here's the reason: John Muir is Man, just like Brahms is Man. Both epitomise what the Romantic era was all about [beauty!] while maintaining a totally modern manliness that was unparalleled in their generation. Listen to the last movement of Brahms' Piano Quintet in f Minor then read Muir's chapter on traversing the Taylor Bay Glacier. Then do it the opposite order. Despite Muir's blissful I'm-at-peace-with-Creation front, he's the bravest and craziest and most insanely passionate man Testosterone has ever created. Except maybe Brahms. In that movement Brahms loses grip and goes absolutely nutty. But it is profound, glorious nutty and it's some of the best music ever written. When John Muir goes completely nutty he does it without volume, but with just as much machismo. Read it and find out what I mean.

But I'd still love Brahms without the Quintet. And most of what makes John Muir great is his innocent, uncynical, enlightened romance with pure wilderness. This is pure Scripture for anybody who has felt the urge to seek true wilderness. And you find it better in this book than you can within a half-day's drive of your house.

Brevitously [ok, not in the OED]: read it. You need it.

Why I did it

2007-10-09T21:03:00.000-07:00

I'm the only male in the family with a blog. MChester has one and it talks all about Chuckwalla and Pummelo, which makes my blog thus far redundant.

So why is it here?

Actually I've been debating having a blog since MChes created hers over a year ago. My main motivations:

1. To keep journal which can be stored for my kids in place of the solid journal I don't have
2. To write about the things I care about, since I like to write but never have an outlet

The reason why I always decided not to blog is that the "things I care about" are potentially controversial. I don't worry much about controversy generally, but in the context of the family it could be trouble. If I write "I like to beat up puppies" or "I like to cuddle with chipmunks" [neither of which is strictly true], then the puppy lovers and chipmunk haters in the family would never look at me the same again. It isn't a matter of offense; I think we're all more mature than that [and I'm not going to accuse anyone of smelling like gorgonzola]. It's a matter of preserving the peace by avoiding debate and judgement.

So what changed? Why did I decide to blog after all?

Part of the reason why I caved is the litany of amazing things that Chuckwalla does. It no longer seems fair to let her antics be forgotten and unremarked just because I'm scared of offending people I love.

Another part of the reason is... I have no idea, it was completely impulsive. I'm thinking about removing the blog altogether. I can help MChes update hers with Chuckwalla and Pummelo stories and photos and perhaps run an anonymous opinionator somewhere else.

Any thoughts? Until I figure this out, I'll stick to reviewing books I've been reading. That's benign enough, right?

Perigrinationings

2007-10-06T12:12:00.001-07:00

I expect that very few people besides those who share my mitochondrial DNA [and maybe one who is married to one of those people] will ever read this blog. It doesn't matter much though because we don't get much chance to sit down and get to know each other, do we?

So, in all vanity, I'm going to make a me-oriented game [blogs are traditionally all about narcissism anyway, right?]. It will be very good for my already healthy ego, and hopefully you will all learn something about me.

Here it goes:

I have embedded in the following list 4 passionate personal dreams of mine. Leave a comment on this posting listing your four picks.

See every bird in North America
Become a professor of physics
Finally dunk a basketball
Have 9 kids
Travel to New Guinea
Have one of my pieces performed by a professional quartet
Hike Kilimanjaro
Publish in National Geographic
Win a Nobel Prize
Write the definitive particle physics popularization book

6 of these are wrong for specific reasons, and the 4 that are right do not constitute a comprehensive list of my dreams.

Let the competition begin. Winner gets an extra special surprise. MChester can't play [sorry, I know you were extremely excited].

Pummelo

2007-10-05T21:38:00.000-07:00

Pummelo is one month old today. She's little and cute. She poops alot. She's also way cute.

I'm actually very impressed at the biochemical factory that is Pummelo. All she gets in is milk and she puts out several substances derived from it: seedy yellow nuclear gruel, clearish sterile salt solute, boogers, farts, etc. It's pretty impressive!

Chuckwalla

2007-10-05T21:22:00.000-07:00

Chuckwalla is 19 months old. She is undoubtedly and quantifiably the best toddler on the planet. Sweet, cute, funny, smart, pithy, savvy, gelatinous and adorable. Her favorites:

∙ Reading. She will do this indefinitely if allowed.
∙ Talking. She's very lexically oriented but not terribly syntactically oriented. We counted her solid words at 18 months and she had 300, and it has been increasing by leaps and bounds since then. Her forays into sentence construction have gotten more bold recently. Altogether we love having a baby who we can have basic conversations with.
∙ Exploring outside. This too she can do forever if allowed.
∙ Animals. She loves badgers, toucans, owls, foxes and pandas the most.
∙ Kissing.
∙ The baby. She calls her "Azuacha" which we decided is too cumbersome for a nickname.

She's too entirely sweet for words. She is sweet going down for a nap, sweet when she's eating, sweet when she gets babysat, sweet when she plays with her friends, and sweet when she plays with her sister.

So, in other words, I don't care how nice you might think your toddler is, because Chuckwalla is demonstrably the greatest toddler on earth, and the second greatest in human history.

I Hate Blogs

2007-10-05T17:23:00.000-07:00

I hate blogs. Unsourced, unresearched, uncontemplated opinions will sink western civilization. This blog will be full of such opinions.

But also this will be a space to brag about my children Chuckwalla and Pummelo, report on recent readings, and generally semi-anonymously broadcast my eccentricities around the world.