The View from my Window(s)

Our front window looks out on to the Henry Thornton Village and Whistler's Mountain about 10km in the distance.














The window in our bedroom looks out towards the forested foothills of Signal Mountain. It looks out toward the east and so we get to see the sun-rise in the morning, at night-time it is pitch dark so we get the best stars I've seen anywhere, and it currently seems to be where one of the bull Elk chills out during the day.

Living in Jasper: Fall

Its the Autumn, so the Elk are running wild all over the bloody place.

I believe there are two big bulls running around the Lodge with a harem each, this guy was strutting around the car-park the other day.

I've gotten very used to Elk and it took me a minute or two to realise that to see a huge deer wandering absent-mindedly around your apartment complex isnt actually the norm, so I took a picture. I took it from the porch outside our apartment.

The Elk make the brief walk from our car to our apartment a bit more exciting and they make loud rutting noises all day and all night (imagine a strangled horse's neigh mixed with the braying of a donkey), but they also hold up traffic when a dozen American tourists stop to peer at them.

Also, the red and grey rocks of the mountains are being squeezed between a rapidly reddening foliage and an expanding white cap at their peak. Every day it gets a wee bit bigger.

Where Dawkins is Wrong

Oliver Kamm writes about secularism in The Times and concludes with an observation on Dawkins' call for a kind of Atheist political movement:

"I do not wish to see, and will not sign up to, an organised interest group of atheists, because atheism is a private belief, of no civic significance. So is religious belief."

While I have always enjoyed Richard Dawkins' work, they are undoubtedly the work of a, incredibly well-read, scientist. Not a politician.

So I always squirmed a little bit when I would read his comparisons of the nascent atheist populations of America to the struggle of it's homosexual population, and the need for an Atheists Rights movements along the lines of the Gay Rights movement.

For what would an Atheist in America or Europe struggle toward? The right not to have to look at a Hijab? The right not to have to listen to a red-faced, podium-thumping preacher? Or would Dawkins' movement be a proscriptive one? Denying the religious the right to 'brainwash' their kids?

I'm not a big fan of proscriptive movements, and my hostility to religion has nothing to do with politics.

Future Projects

An Aquaponic Aquarium/Herb Garden;
A home-made Arcade cabinet;
Aaaand a home-made 3D TV (two LCD screens and a two-way mirror)

Reading on the Web

Reminded me of University;

"A 2003 Nielsen warning asserted that a PDF file strikes users as a "content blob," and they won't read it unless they print it out. A "booklike" page on screen, it seems, turns them off and sends them away"

And the reams and reams of paper I wasted because I couldnt, absolutely couldnt, read a PDF file or a scanned book from the screen. I had to print all twenty odd pages of each of dozens of files, move a few yards away from the computer, and read them there.

Also, I skipped the vast majority of that article.

People who arent Christians in irrationality shocker!

Anyone who has spent more than a few days perusing the internet or run across one of those airy, earnest, tattooed/pierced young women in highly perfumed gift shops cant be hugely surprised at the smirking 'revelation' of Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, that so-called Atheists are more prone to the temptations of quackery and pseudo-science.

Unfortunately for Hemingway, the statistics dont really bear out her argument that Christians are more skeptical toward superstition, primarily because to be Christian in the first place requires a belief and devotion to a superstition, and that their particular belief, say in consuming the blood of a two thousand year old messiah or in excising the foreskin of a baby lest it be condemned to an eternal Hell, tends to preclude belief in other, 'crazier' superstitions.

Whatever the statistics say about Christianity, its what they say about atheists that is most troubling and I think is the natural response to a critical flaw in the current obsession among rationalist crusaders to focus their attention on the quiet mass of Americans who go to Church every week.

Its not so much the besuited Christian we need worry about, but the 'I'm not religious but I am spiritual' crowd, who are ready to rush into Dawkin's and Hitchen's post-Christian vacuum and refuse their kids crucial vaccines and doom us all to vaguely condescending lectures about the healing qualities of a huge chunk of carbon.

Oh, and the Muslims.

Apparently there is an election going on?

The Canadian federal election is set for October the 14th. Living in Alberta means that its going to largely pass us by. Alberta has a stake, as the nations largest repository of oil, as to who wins the election, its more sensitive than others to the Green economics of Dion's Liberals and has the lowest overall tax rate of all the provinces.

But while it arguably has the most to lose, Alberta wont really play a part in this election. Its such a solidly Conservative province that Stephen Harper feels confident ignoring it (Dion showed up to the university in Edmonton, I believe).

Right now I feel like I'm living in leafy Kent...only with 3.5 million people and the size of bloody Europe.

Jogging the JPL again

Infuriating Andrew Sullivan

"we seem to be on the verge of a financial crisis of potentially severe proportions, we have a nuclear-armed rogue state with a leadership in flux in North Korea, we have a direct war between the United States and the Taliban in Pakistani territory - and John McCain wants to talk about "lipstick on a pig" and a woman who didn't know the difference between a Shiite and Sunni two weeks ago. (I'm sure they've programmed her now)"

"This is the most shambolic campaign I have ever witnessed in a general election."

Unfortunately, this isnt a shambolic campaign in the slightest, its actually depressingly brilliant.

Much has been said of the dwindling of the Karl Rove mode of campaigning. How in a change election the Republicans cant rely on the cultural wedge to pry a 51% victory. But you dont need a wedge issue to get that 51% when you can ingeniously fuse a rallying symbol for the Christianist base with the kind of rolled-sleeves, baby-balancing, power-woman that can snatch that vital 1-2% away from Obama.

And all the while she dominates the media, leaving it to Obama to perputuate some ridiculous story about Lipstick while her myriad scandals slide into shrugging obscurity.

New Blog Header!

If only I could find a way to have Blogger alternate between the two whenever people load up the site... That kinda code is way beyond me.

Palin Redux

Well, I think I was mostly correct in my assessment of Governor Palin's potential use as a campaign tool (although not as an actual Vice-President).

When I wrote that post, I assumed that John McCain had done the requisite vetting and that she had a clean history or she absolutely wouldnt have been chosen. My mistake I suppose.

Now the Republican convention has been overshadowed by developing stories on abuses of power (getting an ex brother-in-law fired during a custody hearing), lies and membership of seccessionist political parties and by the inevitable and concomitant questions surrounding McCain's competence as a leader.

McCain has crippled his campaign: he can stick with Palin and trudge through a campaign in which her issues completely overshadow his message, or he can get rid of her in what can only really be a humiliating admission of basic incompetence in assembling an administration.

Manchester City

Oh dear, about sums it up for me really.

Not wanting to be outdone by the likes of Chelsea or Real Madrid when it comes to vulgarity, Manchester City, it's bum still sore after bending over for a corrupt and murderous Taiwanese autocrat, has now spread it's legs for an indolent and juvenile Arab sheikh.

Like a teenage boy who has just figured out how to edit a club's finances on Football Manager, Dr Al-Fahim plans to buy "a minimum 18" new players, including Robinho for 32m and Ronaldo for 135m.

Chelsea have found it harder than they expected to create a 'brand' with the worldwide appeal of Manchester United, Abramovich has discovered, after a few years in the game, that self-respect, consistency and competence matter as much as an infinite bank account.

Manchester City evidently have no self-respect, and I wonder how their fans will react to becoming not just the most hated team in the UK, but also the most derided and scorned and ridiculed.

It really is a shame.