Clearly you can find idiots anywhere, but these people are top notch. Bravo, Ohio.

I was going to share this story on Reader (from Newsweek re: Palin being in way over her head), but the comment area is only so large.

The public wants a hard drinking, uneducated, lowbrow commander-in-chief. Important qualifications in the past 8 years alone have been being likeable and not enjoying anything too foreign sounding, like arugula. It just doesn’t make sense. Consider Bob. He’s lazy, isn’t too bright, and only repeats what his friends tell him to. But he is a fan of your favorite sports team, which scores a few points. Would you want to work with Bob? Would you hire Bob? Hopefully not, but if you get enough people together, they would put Bob in charge of the country.

But it isn’t just a problem with the electorate. The goal of a politician is to be elected, which is achieved by satisfying the desires of the largest proportion of your constituents in the very short-term. Successful politicians continue on, perhaps moving up the ladder to bigger and better positions, mentoring others along the way. It seems reasonable that success would depend upon things like staff loyalty and earmarks. Natural selection of memes takes care of the rest, with the result being incompetence, mismanagement, and corruption.

Rather than figuring out the most efficient use of our resources in the long term, just cut taxes and borrow money to get elected right now, because you’ll be onto something bigger and better by the time it comes around. In a business like health insurance where the whole point is to bring together a group to share risk, keep it small with lots of overhead and people in suits rather than increasing the pool to include the whole country because that would be socialism. It’s easy to find some justification for a decision and then brush over the counter arguments. I think that these problems (which only scratch the surface) are inherent to full-time politicians of any affiliation, but are most obvious with right-wing, fear- and war-mongering representatives who appeal to the worst in people.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that there are tons of bright, productive people here. However, the people that we elect have their own interests to look after and the people doing the voting care about very strange things. It’s a chicken and egg problem, but short of moving to an island, a start is giving lasting support to thoughtful, intelligent politicians who have a deep knowledge of the issues.

One last thing about the financial crisis. You can only spend more than you produce for so long, and in the best case it will turn out like Sweden, and more likely it’s going to get ugly for a decade or more like Japan. But an investment at (hopefully) the bottom of the market makes a lot more sense than a hand out.

Anyways, I just wanted to get that off my chest to feel less of a need to share Reader items that highlight these things.

I haven’t posted in a while, but have been active on Twitter and Reader (there are links over on the left).

Mainly, I wanted to concur with Noah (from his new tumblog) that Shad is absolutely filthy and you should check him out immediately. There are a ton of videos and music from him on YouTube.

Lyell, Evan, my Dad and I went backpacking in Mineral King last week. Mineral King is on the western edge of Sequoia National Park, and varies in elevation from about 8,500 feet to 11,500 feet. Back in the 1950s and 60s, Disney tried to build a ski resort there, but environmental groups held them off and Mineral King was annexed into Sequoia National Park in 1978.

We drove down there on Sunday, 7/27 and came back on Saturday, 8/2. We camped at the trailhead the first and last nights. Our route took us over Timber Gap to Pinto Lake (Day 1), over Black Rock Pass to Little Five Lakes (Day 2), a layover (Day 3), past Big Five Lakes through Lost Canyon to Columbine Lake (Day 4), and over Sawtooth Pass past Monarch Lake back down to the car (Day 5).

Here’s what our trip looked like on a USGS topographical map (here’s a good free source of USGS maps).

I brought my handy GPS along for the trip in order to geotag the photos I took. A nice side effect is that I recorded the distance (30.5 miles), total climbing (13,645 feet), total descent (14,061 feet), and maximum elevation (11,679 feet). Nice.

I’ve included some photos from the trip (there are many more on Flickr) and you can view the photos on a map. Also, in writing about the trip, it was interesting to see all of the other people who have taken a similar trip.

We met up on Sunday with Tom and Doug, two co-workers of my dad, and Doug’s son Chet, who works as a hunting guide in Alaska. We took off Monday morning on the trail.

There was late snow this year, so we ran into quite a few creeks and fields of wildflowers.

We stopped on Monday night when we came across a bear box and some nice looking campsites. We couldn’t find Pinto Lake and were a little bit unclear on where exactly we were.

The next morning we started up Black Rock Pass, and could clearly see Pinto Lake now that we were above it. I came across a few marmots on the trail and made it up to the top of Black Rock Pass around noon.

From Black Rock we descended into Little Five Lakes and setup camp beneath some trees. Interestingly, a married ranger couple was living out there this summer off of a few thousand pounds of supplies brought in by helicopter. They had a yurt surrounded by an electrical fence powered by solar panels to fend off the bears. Once we setup camp, we had some tasty dinner and passed out for the night.

The next day (Wednesday) we didn’t move camp and mainly sat around reading. Doug and my dad did some fishing and Lyell managed to get caught on the wrong end of a fly fishing line. We also caught some nice photos of the sunset over the mountains. The mosquitoes were out in force, and there were typically 10-20 of them on you at any given time.

On Thursday we parted ways with Tom, Doug and Chet, who decided to stay another day at Big Five Lakes. We headed down into Lost Canyon and back up, following a creek to a nice climb to reach Columbine Lake.

We played in the snow a bit, looked at Black Rock Pass from a completely different perspective, and enjoyed the relative dearth of mosquitoes. That night the stars all over the place and the Milk Way was a stripe of milk foam across the sky.

We headed back to base camp the next day (Friday). On the way down we came across a few more marmots and covey. We camped back in the realm of toilets and running water that night and had a blueberry cake to celebrate Lyell’s 18th birthday.

I’ve been fiddling around with EveryTrip, so here’s a slideshow that shows the photos overlayed with the map. It’s what Flickr should have but doesn’t yet.

Mineral King

Here are two interesting things I found out recently.

1. Yellow cheddar cheese is artificially colored with Annatto. The original reason for coloring it have been long forgotten, but how weird would cheese whiz look if it was white? Most importantly, there is no difference in flavor between yellow and white cheddar, although I could have sworn…
    
2. You know the brightly colored ponds at the south end of the San Francisco Bay that you can see from the air? They are salt evaporation ponds which were purchased by the public from the Cargill Corporation in 2003 in order to convert them to wetlands. They’re still being used to produce salt for industrial purposes but someday will no longer be bright red (the color is due to all of the brine shrimp and other little beasties living in the ponds).

photo credit: kevin_kemmerer

Don’t you love how there have been tons of recent papers and commentaries on opening up scientific publishing to make it freely accessible, but they all end up in Nature or Science (two of the mainstream expensive journals, see image) rather than going to PLoS to, you know, practice what they preach? Impact factor is the usual excuse, but there’s plenty of criticism for it and it’s a nice positive feedback loop. Given the fact that publishing companies aren’t necessary to find peer reviewers anymore (as they were, say 15 years ago), and electronic distribution is cheaper and faster than paper, their only value is based upon their current, unstable position in the publishing process. I’d wager that things will change dramatically in the next five years.

photo credit: stu_spivack

I listened to a lot of A Tribe Called Quest back in the day and when my eyelids began to get heavy on the drive back from South Dakota it wasn’t coffee that saved me but some nice hearty drumbeats from Low End Theory. Anyways, ten years later and avoiding meat as much as possible, I have new appreciation for their song Ham ‘n’ Eggs (on my muxtape). And for the record, Phife > Q-Tip, no question.

My brother, Evan, and his fiance Erin’s wedding was last week in Milbank, South Dakota. The nearest airport to Milbank is Minneapolis, which is a four hour drive. Given all of the airport security (+1 for trains), we figured that the trip would be 12 hours each way while the drive was a little over 20 hours (or so we thought). So we decided to make a trip of it, driving out there with our dog Lola and camping along the way.

First stop was Lake Mead, down south in Nevada near Las Vegas. It was formed when Hoover Dam was built between 1931 and 1935. We got in just before sunset, after passing through the Mojave desert (113 deg. F!) and just south of Death Valley.

That night we didn’t do too much, focusing most of our efforts on sweating profusely and being unable to sleep. The lake is about a mile away from the campgrounds, so we didn’t head down there until the morning.

After the lake, we headed to the Hoover Dam. It was like a time warp back to the 1930s, with very rounded architecture and gold details. I was expecting rushing water and huge turbines, but we mostly saw enormous quantities of cement and power lines.

Next we headed to North Rim through Nevada and Utah. The scenery changed from the dry, yellow hills and trees of California into desert and then lots of rocks. Utah was yellow and brown before Arizona turned to red. North Rim was far more green than we expected. Cassie and I took turns walking to Bright Angel Point to check out the canyon; national parks aren’t very dog friendly.

We had originally been planning on camping at North Rim, but they had no campsites available (we didn’t reserve sites and tried to go to places that didn’t allow reservations), so we decided to drive until a little before dark and save a few hours of driving the next day. Arizona is a beautiful state to drive through, but it’s ridiculously hot in June and there’s a stretch between North Rim and Colorado with no camping. Pitching the tent along the road was tempting, but Lola was panting all night in Lake Mead and we were hoping to hit temperatures in the 70s before stopping. Unfortunately we failed and had to stay in a motel, but showering was nice and Lola enjoyed laying on the bed for awhile.

The next day we drove right by Four Corners, which is the cheesiest of all cheese, but we had to stop.

The next day we headed to Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. We hadn’t heard of it before, but it was dog friendly and kind’ve on our way. And it was awe-some. Until we were five minutes away, we thought that we had gotten the address wrong because it was all grasslands and mountains. Then you see what appears to be dust storm on the horizon, and finally you see it.

We hiked to the second tallest dune in North America (I know, kind’ve weak, but still 750 feet). Lola had a blast digging in the sand.

Next we headed to the Black Hills in South Dakota, which is a really wide state (8 hours to drive across it). On the way we passed through Wyoming, which is like Arizona but green. We saw lightning bugs (luciferase in the wild!) and had to rush into the tent when lightning and rain came out of nowhere. We saw a bison (apparently the same thing as an American Buffalo but kind’ve a misnomer) and stopped at Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse. I’ll be impressed if they finish it in my lifetime, but the face and arm are getting there.

The next day we rolled into Milbank. The drive across South Dakota was a little mind numbing, but the addition of trees (none in Wyoming) completed the scenery progression from Arizona -> Wyoming -> South Dakota.

I’ll save photos from Milbank for another day. You can see all of the roadtrip photos here.

On our last weekend in Switzerland we visited Jungfraujoch and the Bernese Oberland, of course taking boatloads of photos along the way. On the way back down from Jungfraujoch we stopped in Grindelwald and hiked to a glacier, which took a few hours. Along the way we used GPS to keep track of our route (which was handy when we ended up at a few dead ends) and mark the locations of all of the photos.

Here’s a view from Google Earth of our hike (it also includes part of the train ride, from Grindelwald back to Interlaken before we lost signal). Also, here is the .kml file which you can play around with in Google Earth, etc.

The photos from Grindelwald and Jungfraujoch are online and here are a few of the ones that I like.

Also, the weekend before the Jungfraujoch/Grindelwald trip we visited Lucerne to see the transportation museum there. Here’s the link for the Lucerne photos. You should read about the Lion Monument that we saw there.

 

 

Something has changed in the past year for me; I no longer use bookmarks or visit my favorite websites. And it’s not because I’ve stopped using a computer and live in a van down by the river. I use Google Reader so that instead of visiting a website to see if it has been updated, the website lets me know whenever there’s new stuff to check out, and then I can go read every website in a single place.

How does it work? Most websites publish something called a Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feed, which is like a newsfeed on Facebook. Then your RSS Reader (like Google Reader) repeatedly checks all of the RSS feeds that you’ve subscribed to, looking for new content. Here’s a video that talks about it…

It’s insane how much time you can save by using RSS. Before Google Reader I didn’t see what the point of RSS was, because you still had to visit every RSS feed manually in your browser to look for updates, but RSS readers change everything.

Here are the things I like about Google Reader in particular

• Share websites with your friends at the click of a button
• Subscribe to websites without even looking for the RSS feed URL, e.g. just type in ‘guyslikedolls’ and it will find us (search engine built-in)
• You can use it from any computer or even your iPhone for the next time the Caltrain is late

Here are some of the things I’m subscribed to:

• Research journals (e.g. JMEMS)
• Friends (e.g. Noah, Oscar, new photos from friends on Flickr)
• Saving time (comments, Twitter)
• And other random stuff (e.g. PhD)