Averting Human Extinction

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

"The facts are sobering. More than 99.9 percent of species that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct."

"Humanity could be extinguished as early as this century by succumbing to natural hazards, such as an extinction-level asteroid or comet impact, supervolcanic eruption, global methane-hydrate release, or nearby supernova or gamma-ray burst. (Perhaps the most probable of these hazards, supervolcanism, was discovered only in the last 25 years, suggesting that other natural hazards may remain unrecognized.)"

And citing NASA Administrator Michael Griffin:

"The history of life on Earth is the history of extinction events, and human expansion into the Solar System is, in the end, fundamentally about the survival of the species."

I've long considered the Universe a mostly sterile place, and our place in it explicable only by the odds of our being here being only slightly less infinitesimally small than the Universe is huge. We've relied on dumb luck to survive so far, coddled in an evolutionary breathing space between mass-extinction events, our time will run out on Earth and the only fundamental way we can survive is to harness our natural instinct toward curiosity and innovation, we're in a race against the universe.

Palin the Sportscaster

The VP debate was a pretty drab, empty affair for me, all I got from it was the body-language, and I'm not the only one; Roger Ebert:

"Listening to her voice, you could also sense when she felt she'd survived the deep waters of improvisation and was climbing onto the shore of talking points. When she was on familiar ground, she perked up, winked at the audience two or three times, and settled with relief into the folksiness that reminds me strangely of the characters in "Fargo.""

And Jonathan Raban:

"Palin never thinks. Instead, she relies on a limited stock of facts, bright generalities and pokerwork maxims, all as familiar and well-worn as old pennies. Given any question, she reaches into her bag for the readymade sentence that sounds most nearly proximate to an answer, and, rather than speaking it, recites it, in the upsy-downsy voice of a middle-schooler pronouncing the letters of a word in a spelling bee. She then fixes her lips in a terminal smile. In the televised game shows that pass for political debates in the US, it’s a winning technique: told that she has 15 seconds in which to answer, Palin invariably beats the clock, and her concision and fluency more than compensate for her unrelenting triteness."

I couldnt get the image of Palin the Sportscaster out of my mind. Trained in that infuriating American TV habit of addressing the camera rather than the human-being they are ostensibly talking to. A dead-eyed, condescending and phoney habit I've loathed since I watched British presenters struggle with it during our coverage there of American football.

Palin treated the debate as she would a sportscast, her at-hand clutch of empty sporting cliches replaced with a clutch of empty, trite soundbites about the 'media' or 'hockey-moms' or 'mavericks'.

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.