Day trip to Mount Rainier

I’ve just got home from my day trip to Mount Rainier. Steller's Jay at Mt. RainierThe weather cooperated, and it was a really great experience. I’m in the process of uploading 149 photographs (191.4MB) to my gallery. I used the Kodak P850 (5.1Mpx, 12x zoom) instead of my usual Casio EX-S600, and I was delighted with the results. However there were a couple of scenes that I couldn’t do justice to with a static photograph, so I’ve uploaded three QuickTime clips as well:

Depending on your browser and QuickTime settings, you may have to wait for a few moments for these video clips to be downloaded.

Theodicy is not just a debating point

Pharyngula reports that a Seattle girl is dying of cancer, and her entire community is praying for a miracle. No, they are not hoping for a medical breakthrough: they are pinning their hopes on direct divine intervention. A surgeon finds this outrageous:

I must also say this: there’s something perverse to the point of revulsion in the idea of a god that will heal the girl if enough people pray for her. […] To believe that, you must believe he deliberately made her ill, is putting her through enormous pain and suffering, with the express plan to make it all better only if enough people tell him how great he is; and to keep it up unto her death if they don’t. […] If people survive an illness because of prayer, does that mean that god has rejected those that didn’t pray? If you pray for cure and don’t get it, and if you believe that praying can lead to cure, then mustn’t you accept that God heard your prayers and said no? […] But if you say either outcome is God’s will, then what’s the value of the prayer in the first place? In this case, it seems, it’s only to make the girl feel guilty and unworthy.

Once

Around lunchtime, I developed a yen for a movie. It’s a warm, slightly humid day; A/C would be nice; what shall I see? Maybe a bit of mindless fun with “Transformers”? I checked the reviews at RottenTomatoes: not promising. OK, if “Transformers” was at 56%, what was the top-rated film currently in the cinemas? I scanned the full listing, and although the animated film Ratatouille had an outstanding score of 96%, the outright winner was Once, with 97%. OnceI watched the trailer – and I was hooked. I finished lunch, hopped a bus up to Capitol Hill, and went to the Harvard Exit.
It was a superb film.
One reason that I think I liked it so much was that it was set in Dublin, and I was there so recently that it was particularly vivid. Just as Tokyo is “the third character” in “Lost in Translation”, so Dublin – especially the area around Temple Bar, Grafton Street, and St. Stephen’s Green – is a character in this film. And as in “Lost in Translation”, the film revolves around the way in which an unexpected and ephemeral relationship can offer the possibility of change. The romantic in me wonders if the relationship is going to be the outcome, rather than simply a catalyst. The film-lover relaxes and appreciates the economy of the art that brings these things to life, and makes us care so much.
Oh yes – I bought the soundtrack CD on the way out of the cinema. Because even though some of the dialogue (with heavy Irish and Czech accents) is hard to follow, the music is the true language of this film. And there are no surrogates here: the actors wrote and sang their own compositions.

A non-random 10: music to play loud

Instead of my regular occasional “Random 10” list, here’s one of my favourite iTunes playlists. I call it “Blow Your Speakers Out”, and it’s a collection of tracks by various artists over the last 40 years that sound best when played unusually loud.

  • “Jesus Built My Hotrod (Redline/Whiteline Version)” by Ministry (from the Jesus Built My Hotrod single) If you only buy one thing, etc. Simply wonderful.
  • “Cowgirl (Album version)” by Underworld (from Dirty Epic/Cowgirl) “Everything, everything” – Underworld at their best. The break at 5:56 into the track cranks up the nervous energy beautifully for the head-snapping moment at 6:25…
  • “Dime-a-Dance Romance” by the Steve Miller Band (from Sailor) The intensity builds over the last three tracks on this album: “You’re So Fine/Overdrive/Dime-a-Dance Romance”. I wish I’d heard them in concert: the only live track in my collection that comes close to capturing the heavier side of Steve Miller is “My Dark Hour” on disc 1 of the King Biscuit Flower Hour collection.
  • “I Keep Singing That Same Old Song” by Heavy Jelly (from Psychedelic Years: Back In The British Isles) If there’s one track here that NOBODY will remember, this is it. Of course Heavy Jelly was really Skip Bifferty. As one reviewer put it: “Very L-O-N-G cut. First an unsure and plaintive vocal and a repetitive acoustic piano. Some aimless guitar. Then it gradually builds up (everybody having a rave up as the good ole Yardbirds would say!) to a bit of a mess: Tons of guitars, Creamish riff fragments, relentless staccato drums. Too much of everything. At the end it sounds as if it’s all going to explode.”
  • “Shallow” by Porcupine Tree (from Deadwing)
  • “Last Train To Trancentral (LP Mix)” by the KLF (from The White Room) This is about as far from the KLF of Chill Out as it’s possible to get.
  • “America (Second Amendment)” by the Nice (from Here Come The Nice) “America is pregnant with promises and anticipation, but is murdered by the hand of the inevitable.”
  • “Leg” by Arzachel (from Arzachel) Arzachel were actually Uriel, a short-lived project by Steve Hillage and Dave Stewart. Their eponymous LP is reckoned to be one of the best psychedelic albums of all time.
  • “Sister Ray” by the Velvet Underground (from The Best of the Velvet Underground)
  • “Kandy Korn” by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band (from Strictly Personal) Yes, I know the Captain hated this album. And yes, there are several live recordings that are more ferocious – but none of them capture the sonic layering that defines this track.

Sharing my favourites from Google Reader

I mentioned recently that I’ve started using Google Reader to cope with the dozens of blogs and other feeds that I read each day. As Art pointed out, Reader has a feature whereby you can tag individual items as “Shared”, and they will then show up on a publicly-accessible page. I’m taking this one step further, and adding a sidebar item to my blog that shows the last 10 few items that I’ve shared. Enjoy!

One second: $56

This morning was unexpectedly expensive. The ticketAt 7:15, I was walking to a downtown restaurant for a breakfast meeting, as I do every Thursday, and I came to the intersection of Seneca Street and 3rd Avenue. The light was against us, and so I waited with half a dozen other pedestrians for it to change. I was watching the traffic light for Seneca Street, which was devoid of cars. The light changed from green to yellow, and I put my right foot on the crosswalk. One second later, four things happened:

  1. the traffic light change to red,
  2. the pedestrian signal changed to “WALK”,
  3. I pushed off from the kerb with my left foot, and
  4. I heard the sound of a Harley Davidson revving; this was closely followed by a police siren.

I had been nicked for jaywalking.
I was quiet and scrupulously polite, remembering the case of Professor Fernandez-Armesto in Atlanta. I showed my ID, answered the officer’s questions, and received a citation ((Confusingly for non-Americans, “citation” has several contradictory meanings. It can, inter alia, mean “a mention of a praiseworthy act or achievement” or “a legal summons”. It ranks with one of my other favourite auto-antonyms, the verb “to table”.)) for $56. I have no idea how he arrived at that fine ((Merry thinks that the cop simply used my age.)) – the Seattle City code simply states that the fine shall be “not more than $250” (whew!). I also think that it’s odd that the fine should be nearly twice that for parking in a handicapped-only space, but then I come from a country, England, in which there is no such thing as jaywalking, and from a city (Boston) where the jaywalking laws have apparently not been enforced since 1976.
I guess I’m a real Seattlite now.

Some (non-luggage) thoughts on last weekend

It was a good weekend. On Saturday, I visited Lorna in hospital, then headed off to spend a few hours shopping in Oxford. As I was leaving the hospital, I checked my cell-phone, and saw that I’d missed a call from a UK number. I called back, and found that it was from Jeff Lower. Jeff and I had both attended Essex University in the early 1970s, and had subsequently worked together at a small software startup. We drifted apart after I moved to the States in 1981, and we hadn’t seen each other since about 1985. We recently re-established contact through LinkedIn.
Jeff lives near Newbury, about half an hour south of Oxford, and I drove down to visit for a few hours. It was delightful: Jeff has an idyllic house in the country, and we talked had lunch, listened to music, talked some more… After 22 years I really didn’t think that either of us had changed very much.
About four o’clock I returned to the hospital, and soon afterwards Alec and Adriana arrived. After visiting with Lorna for a while, the three of us took a bus into Oxford and went to Brown’s for dinner. It was, of course, a geek affair: Alec whipped out his Nokia 800 tablet in order to demonstrate the folding BlueTooth keyboard that he uses. I had ordered a Nokia 770 from W00t while I was in Dublin (just $130!), and Alec knew that it was waiting for me in Seattle. Over dinner (and later, waiting for the bus), we had a fine debate about the relevance of classical economic theories to information economies, governed as they are by network effects and the natural monopolies that flow from software platforms and wired infrastructure. It was good to see how complete Alec’s recovery has been – it was exactly a year since his accident in France – and it was great to finally meet Adriana. I’m looking forward to our next dinner.
On Sunday I flew back on a British Airways 747 that has been refitted with the very latest in-flight entertainment system, complete with video-on-demand for all. Once the cabin service director had rebooted the system(!), it was quite impressive. I watched two films: Jim Carrey in The Number 23, and the very funny Hot Fuzz.
One other thought: I spent a little while standing by the aft door as we were crossing Greenland, and I was startled to see so much bare rock, and so many meltwater lakes. The last time I’d crossed this area in summer (about ten years ago), it was pretty much solid ice from coast to coast. Not now.

Still waiting…

From BBC NEWS

Heathrow Airport is still trying to clear a backlog of thousands of bags following last week’s terror alerts.
Despite extra staff being brought in, the system is “under considerable strain”, with about 23,000 bags handled a day, British Airways (BA) said…
BA said could be days before the owners were reunited with their baggage.

Indeed. 36 hours after I landed at Seattle, minus my bag, the WorldTracer system reports that it is still being traced:
Output from SITA WorldTracer
Most of the contents of the bag would be easy to replace – clothing (including a bunch of geek t-shirts), toiletries, a couple of books. There’s a first edition of my mother’s book about the Windscale accident, and the charging cradle for my digital camera. (That explains why I haven’t published some of the photos I took.) And I bought my first ever Oasis album; I was browsing round Tesco’s in Abingdon, looking (unsuccessfully) for noise-cancelling headphones for Lorna, and I came across the double CD “best of” Oasis for £5. Easy come, easy go. At least I still have the bottle of single cask 16 year Laphroiag which I bought at Heathrow…