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Although we moved to the Bay Area a year ago, we haven’t spent any time exploring San Francisco itself. I’ve been up for a couple of business meetings, but that hardly counts. So yesterday we jumped on an early Caltrain, rode up to the city, and took a cab to Coit Tower.
The forecast was for cool and foggy weather, which meant we wouldn’t see too much from the top of the tower, but that didn’t matter. We were most interested in seeing the amazing murals. We planned to join in the guided tour at 11am, which provides access to some of the murals that are normally closed to the public.
We arrived before 10am, and explored the murals in the public rotunda. We noticed that the number of visitors was steadily increasing, so we decided to take the elevator ride to the top of the tower immediately, rather than waiting until after the tour. Even so, we had to stand in line.
As forecast, the view was distinctly misty. However there was one odd sight which piqued my curiosity: what appeared to be a small aircraft carrier, under tow, with a strange structure on the flight deck:
At the time, I thought that it looked like an amphibious assault ship, such as the USS Tripoli, but I was confused: hadn’t the Tripoli been decommissioned years ago? (Yes.) Perhaps it was part of the “ghost fleet” from Suisun Bay; I knew that they were scheduled for scrapping. But in that case the ship’s course made no sense. Kate found a link to a real-time map of San Francisco Bay shipping, but I couldn’t find it on there.
My best guess is that it was in fact the Tripoli, being towed out to sea (perhaps to Pearl Harbor), for use as a launch platform for SCUD and other missiles as part of the THAAD or Aegis BMD anti-missile programs.
By the time we returned to the base of the tower, the crowds had grown dramatically. There was a long line for the elevator, and outside the traffic was backed up all the way down the hill, as people waited for one of the few parking spaces at the top. We decided to skip the tour of the murals, took the #39 bus down the hill (admiring the way in which the driver negotiated the traffic), and had a wonderful lunch at the Mona Lisa in North Beach.
You can see more of the pictures I took here.
I just had occasion to search for a bunch of former colleagues on Facebook and LinkedIn. It was strange to see how many of them still show “Sun Microsystems” as their employer. It’s not that they are inactive on either site; they have been adding to their networks, and posting news and comments.
Odd…..
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Back in April I reviewed Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, “Hitch 22”. In my remarks, I focussed on the literary style and the content of the work, without offering any opinions about the positions which Hitchens has endorsed. Regular readers of my blog will know that I generally agree with him on the topic of religion, and strongly disagree with him when it comes to the United States’ disastrous policies of regime change, nation building, and other military adventures. One thing that I did not do, however, was to discuss how Hitchens thinks. In a recent review in the New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma does exactly that. The result is a powerful indictment of the way in which Hitchens abandoned skepticism and irony in favor of simplistic emotion.
Another typical word in Hitchens’s lexicon is “intoxication.†This can literally mean drunk. But that is not what Hitchens means. Writing about his early political awakening, when he shared with his fellow International Socialists a “consciousness of rectitude,†he claims:
If you have never yourself had the experience of feeling that you are yoked to the great steam engine of history, then allow me to inform you that the conviction is a very intoxicating one.
This must be true. When Hitchens became a journalist for the New Statesman, after graduating from Oxford, he adopted a pleasing kind of double life, part reporter, part revolutionary activist, imagining how he might help an IRA terrorist hide from the law. He found this double life “more than just figuratively intoxicating.†One can only assume that intoxication again played a part when he took the view that yoking himself to George W. Bush’s war was to hitch a ride on the great steam engine of history.
The trouble with intoxication, figurative or not, is that it stands in the way of reason. It simplifies things too much, as does seeing the world in terms of heroes and villains. Or, indeed, the dogmatic notion that all religion is bad, and secularism always on the right side of history.
(My emphasis.)
The biggest challenge for a soi-disant skeptic is to hold his or her own thinking – and that of one’s comrades – to the standard applied to others. And in this Hitchens has generally failed:
Again, the narcissism, the narrow scale of characters, and the parochial perspective are startling: “We were the only ones to see 1968 coming.†It is as if the central focus of the Iraq war was about scores to be settled between Hitchens and Noam Chomsky or Edward Said. It is odd that in all his lengthy accounts of the war, the name of Dick Cheney is mentioned only once (because he happened to share the same dentist with Hitchens). What is utterly missing is a sense of perspective, and of the two qualities Hitchens claims to prize above all: skepticism and irony. A skeptic would not answer the question whether he blamed his former leftist friends for criticizing the war with: “Yes, absolutely. I was right, and they were wrong, that’s pretty much it in a nutshell.†Asked about his literary influences, Hitchens mentioned Arthur Koestler. He was right on the mark. Koestler, too, lurched from cause to cause, always with the same unshakable conviction.
I love Hitchens’ writing, and his bravura performances of rhetoric. I do not believe that they would be diminished by a modicum of reflection and humility. I would love to read his thoughtful response to this insightful review by Buruma.
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When I first got my iPhone 4, I tried tethering via BlueTooth, but was unable to get the BT pairing to go through, so I forgot all about it. My 3G modem gives me all the coverage I want, and with my MacBook Air I can share the connection with my (WiFi-only) iPad. Today, however, I was nudged to try the iPhone 4 tethering, and this time everything worked flawlessly. Right now I’m composing this on my tethered MacBook Air.
Of course, all of this “tethering” stuff feels antiquated compared with the mobile hotspot features on the latest Android phones, but it’s good enough for now.
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Quote for the day: PZ discussing Bronowski’s wonderful TV series “The Ascent of Man”:
A dead civilization is one that has stopped progressing, that ends that dynamism in the stasis of preservation and numbing reverence for the past — when a 2000 year old myth becomes the greatest knowledge worth knowing, we have abandoned the process and begun the contraction into the shells we built while still vital.
This is one of my deepest objections to the religious stance. When one encounters a source of wisdom – an idea, a book, a teacher – the responsible attitude is not to worship it, but to ask, “How can we learn from this and do even better, so that others may learn from us?” This is the human experience, going back over tens of thousands of years. It is also our future: it’s what human beings do. The religious impulse to ascribe supernatural perfection to people and ideas of the past is defeatist. It is, ultimately, inhuman.