On local public radio this morning (I was listening on headphones at the gym), literature professor Hugh Witemeyer talking about why D.H. Lawrence, a Brit, kept returning to northern New Mexico during his itiinerant life. Lawrence, Witemeyer said, was drawn to the “wild and improvised life of the American West”. Even when you scrape away years of encrustations of Western mythos, there’s something to that.
Witemeyer also said Lawrence loved to make his own furniture.
Imagine for a moment having a factory in your neighborhood that spews untreated effluent out its boilers’ smokestacks, that some evenings you couldn’t go outside for ten minutes without an asthma attack and clothes that stink.
Took the dog for a run Tuesday evening and didn’t last but 10 minutes. My sweatshirt smelled of fireplace smoke, and I needed a slug on my asthma inhaler.
Another interesting commentary on risk perception, and the way our attitudes color that which we accept and that which we do not.
A friend sends along this, a poll by the American Family Association (Promoting Traditional Family Values!) on the institution of marriage. My friend suggested I might want to share my views. I herewith pass that suggestion along.
Added David Appell’s Quark Soup to my blogroll. He’s another science writer, and his blog has become a regular stop, with great regular commentary on climate change news and other science topics that are in the headlines. Sharp guy. He’s had some useful stuff last few days about BSE.
Lissa and I just finished putting new lights in the kitchen.
We replaced the old (very old) incandescent fixtures with flourescents. More light. Less electricity. Woot.
Did a year-end climate story to play with some science story-telling techniques patterned after those used by PBS business correspondent Paul Solman. Solman uses a folksy, conversational movement between the general and the particular, using examples of the mundane, along with cheerful characters who play along, to illustrate the complex.
What’s the line from Life of Brian? “Consider the lily.” I used the rose.
There are moments that matter intrinsically, and there are moments to which we attach the mattering, because it exists and needs to be stuck on a moment so we can get to it.
I was looking back through an old exercise log book this evening and found this, one of those moments that matter intrinsically. It was Feb. 13, 1999:
Tramway loop – 13.1 avs, 2:27:06, 11+ most of hill – died near top – high 160s to 173 on hill
I will never forget that climb. It was a crystalline moment, a moment of compelling physical discomfort, when I lived for the false flat near the top and then ached when the hill kicked up again one final time. Today, we bang up the Tramway hill like it’s nothing, on the way to something steeper. But that one perfect day, Feb. 13, 1999, was a special moment I still can’t quite explain.
Two summers ago, Jaime and I were regularly doing another climb that hurt, up Rio Bravo out of the valley and onto the west mesa. The hill was not so long, with a steep section and then a long gentle finish. Jaime would invariably drop me on the steep section, and it’d be all me and my handlebars and my heart monitor, flirting with the pain threshhold. It hurt, hurt like that first climb up Tramway.
“What is it,” I said, gasping at the top of the hill as we stopped to collect ourselves, “that makes me want to come back and do that, over and over again?”
Today was one of those artificial moments.
By my reckoning, the picture above was taken at the point at which I rode my 4,000th mile of 2003. It was a bit of a cheat. I laid out the ride intentionally, so the milestone would happen at a favorite spot, where the trail sweeps east with a view of mountains in three directions. Click on the picture above and you’ll get a panorama, though the itty-bitty web image does it faint justice.
The real cheat is the fact that there is no way my odometer is precise enough to tell when I rode the 4,000th mile. But it’s such an artificial milestone anyway that this’ll do, and I’ll cheaply use it.
Up to the northeast, I could see the Tramway hill. To the southwest, I could see Rio Bravo stretching up the mesa front. To the east, I could see the break in the mountains where Tijeras Canyon cuts through, another tough, great ride.
I ride a lot with other people. There is Jaime, who is really the only person with whom I can share the great good that can come of the pain of banging up a long steady climb. Sometimes we’ll be riding side by side and he’ll start picking up the pace, and I’ll match him as long as I can, then slip in behind him, which is his cue to go even faster, and I’ll be locked on his back wheel and we’re flying in this mad reckless two-car train. I love those rides.
Lissa is a favorite riding partner too. When I need her to help me sort out something hard, we often save it for the bike, a leisurely trek along the river. I love those rides.
But most, I ride by myself. On the easy rides, I ride to write, working out ideas. On the hard rides – and my favorites are the hard rides – it is the exquisite meditation of kicking the pedals over at 90 rpm, feeling the chatter of the road and the pounding of my heart, the music that is labored breathing. I love those rides.
Observing and thinking about the somewhat chilly reception Ali Akcaagac’s concerns have received on the GNOME foundation list got me thinking about the Darwinism inherent in a big free software project.
It has been said, I believe with some accuracy, that free software is a meritocracy based one’s ability to write code (or do other work – Lord knows the actual code I’ve written has no merit). But looking at the patterns of the evolution of GNOME as a group of individuals, and thinking about Ali’s problems, leaves me wondering if there is also some sort of selection pressure that favors people who are nice.
There’s a whole scientific literature on the evolution of cooperation, and how cooperative behaviors can be seen to endure in populations when there is such a strong selective pressure for the individual who defects and eats all the group’s food. Cooperation obviously did evolve as a human behavior, but it’s poised on a narrow ridgeline with the abyss of defection always nearby. (Oh, gawd, did I write “abyss of defection”? Somebody confiscate that guy’s thesaurus!)
But in a project like GNOME there is very little defection benefit, so the selection pressure would naturally favor people who are cheerful, cooperative and good at working together. Is it therefore inevitable that people who are gruff and abrasive would get nowhere in the heirarchy, and a community of nice people would emerge?
Spurred on by my own noir musings the other day, I swung by the library Tuesday and picked up The Long Goodbye. Slumming angel and all.