Another way the World Can End

I just found this paper from 12 years ago by Dar and De Rujula. It's about another way life on earth can be (mostly) snuffed out and might also explain why there are no old advanced civilizations. It's another variant on the world ending in fire. And unlike extinction by giant asteroid, we don't have the technology to do anything about it.

Dar is at the Technion and De Rujula at CERN. Their paper looks at what happens when a gamma ray burst (GRB) goes off in our galaxy. A GRB, visible somewhere in the cosmos about 3 times every day, is thought to be either the dying blast of a high mass supernova, in which the core collapses to either a neutron star or a black hole or the merger of two neutron stars. In either case, the combination of high angular momentum, trapped magnetic field and extreme kinetic energies - comparable to the entire rest mass of the star or stars - results in a few-second long blast of energy beamed along the opposite poles of the rotating system. We see a fraction of this energy as gamma ray photons. These two beams are tightly collimated by a combination of magnetic fields and relativistic effects, with opening angles thought to be no more than a few milliradians. That's how we can see them all the way across the universe -- an appreciable fraction of the supernova's total energy goes into these tightly focused beams. When one of them happens to point in our direction, it's bright enough to outshine everything else in the sky at gamma ray energies, even from billions of light years away.

If one of these things goes off in our own galaxy, though, we could be in trouble. Anything sufficiently close - and the center of the galaxy, 25,000 light years away, is apparently, close enough -- gets blasted with radiation. For us, it's not the direct gamma rays that are the problem. Our atmosphere blocks those pretty effectively. GRBs weren't even noticed until the 1960s, when, during the cold war, the US launched satellites designed to detect nuclear bomb blasts. (Above ground tests were banned by treaty in the early '60s.) Being above the atmosphere, they could see the GRB gamma rays.

However, once the gammas (and any other cosmic ray stuff -- protons and heavier nuclei swept up in the blast) hit the upper atmosphere, their interactions with atmospheric atoms produce a copious shower of high energy particles. The result of this air shower is a flood of high energy muons. Muons are heavy enough to zip by atomic electrons without being significantly scattered or deflected, not affected by the strong interaction, making them highly penetrating, and sufficiently long-lived for most of those created in the upper atmosphere to reach the surface. In fact, several (created by ordinary cosmic rays) go through you every second as you read this. They pass easily through the lower atmosphere and hundreds of meters of water or rock, and deposit all of their energy along the way. This puts them in a really nasty "sweet spot" of particle properties to cause trouble. Protons, which are heavier, interact strongly with atomic nuclei and lose energy before reaching the ground. Electrons are so light that they get scattered before going very far. Neutrinos just zip right through everything without losing any energy. Other particles like pions (aside from being strongly interacting) are too short-lived to reach the surface.

The net effect from the muons is a ~10 second zap of high energy radiation deposited in anything on the earth's surface or in the shallower parts of the ocean. According to the paper, a GRB at the distance of the center of the galaxy would, if pointed right at us, have enough energy to sterilize the planet's surface. Thanks to associated cosmic rays, which would follow the initial gamma pulse for a few days, no part of the planet would be safe. Dar and De Rujula calculate that a person at sea level would receive hundreds of times the fatal dose of radiation. Only the hardiest, smallest or deepest ocean life forms would have a chance of survival. Also, just for extra fun, there'd be a global firestorm from the thermal pulse in the upper atmosphere, like in the asteroid strike scenario.

Because the gamma burst comes from a supernova, it should also be accompanied by a neutrino pulse, and these might precede the gammas by seconds or minutes, because they are produced early in the collapse and escape almost immediately. The neutrinos would be imperceptible except to a few large experiments like IceCube. It seems unlikely that, even if correctly interpreted, the warning would help anyone very much. The only place to ride out the initial radiation blast would be deep underground. And the surface that anyone who happened to be down in one of these mines (such as physics grad students minding an experiment) would return to would be sterilized by the blast and the firestorm. Life would survive in the deep oceans and also among smaller, hardier critters (like these) that are able to withstand and repair cellular damage.

The paper's authors calculate an expected rate for getting caught by one of these blasts at roughly once per 100 million years. The nearest star likely to undergo this kind of supernova is Eta Carinae, but apparently its spin axis isn't pointing at us, though it's expected to blow sometime in the next million years or so. There's been some speculation that one or more of the handful of mass extinctions seen in the fossil record was due to one of these events, with arguments recently made for one about 450 million years ago as a candidate. (Oddly, while there are several later papers on the same general subject, no one seems to reference this paper. I'm not sure if that means it's wrong or if this is some petty turf thing.)

Anyway, this is another interesting way for the world to end, up there with the solar system wandering into a black hole or metastable vacuum decay. Always fun to think about!

UPDATE: A new paper suggesting that GRBs make most galaxies inhospitable to complex life. http://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/124. Doesn't mention the muon shower effect though. In fact I haven't found a later paper that references the one at the top. Maybe there's something wrong with the calculations, but de Rujula is a big name, so I doubt it's egregiously wrong.

A pseudo-debate on GE salmon

Interesting "debate" between Paul Greenberg, an opponent of GE technology and Elliot Entis, the former CEO AquaBounty Technologies. They've used GE to create a faster-growing salmon, which is to be raised in large (inland) fish tanks on primarily plant-based feed (in contrast to conventional farmed salmon which requires primarily fish-based feed). I put "debate" in quotes because the nature of the discussion doesn't resemble a real discussion so much as a bout of eel-wrestling. Entis repeatedly shows Greenberg's claims to be either mistaken or internally inconsistent (e.g,. arguing for "sustainability" at the same time as opposing GE salmon that requires less fish-meal input per unit of output), at which point Greenberg just raises some other point, without ever providing a rebuttal. I don't see how anyone can read this and come away thinking that Greenberg has made a case.

For anyone going to the link and deciding tl;dr; here's a key exchange. The earlier back-and-forth concerns also questions of "ownership" of the breed, environmental impact, labeling and profit.

Greenberg: But what about the fact that traditional growers who may not want to farm with modified stock will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. That they may in fact be obliged to buy salmon juveniles exclusively from AquaBounty. Is that ethical? Is that good for the world?

Entis: I am confused by your raising the question of ethics. Are you really suggesting that improving a product so that people will prefer it is unethical because people with an inferior product will be disadvantaged? Is that what you would have written when the first Model T rolled off the line and the horse and buggy industry cried foul? Your "ethical" objection can be raised against any new invention or product. Do I hope salmon farmers will buy the AquAdvantage eggs? Of course, and then the farmers, consumers, and the environment will benefit. I think that is pretty ethical. 

Greenberg: I suppose it depends on what your definition of an “inferior product” would be. I know you have absolute faith in the safety of your salmon, but others would rather take a longer range view and wait and see if it is truly safe. DDT and PCBs were once considered “safe” in the general marketplace. We only saw their profound impact on the environment decades later.

Entis: Paul how long is the long range? Ten years? A hundred? This argument is the refuge of those who would prefer that this fish and any product of biotechnology never see the commercial light of day.

Very little in our world is perfectly knowable, but over the years I believe that the systems for judging knowable risk have improved in quality and comprehensiveness. I also know that analysis of DDT, PCBs, and other chemical agents used in the past did not undergo 15 or more years of safety research, as has the AquaBounty salmon. I can also point out with no fear of contradiction that no fish has undergone as much testing and analysis as the AquAdvantage Atlantic salmon.

After this exchange, where pretty much every claim Greenberg makes has been countered, Entis asks whether his mind has been changed at all. Greenberg says, in effect, that nothing he learns about this could change his view. So much for open-mindedness.

Does warning your daughter that sexual assault is a risk of binge drinking make you a "rape apologist"?

[Updated: Quote from an article by Slate's legal correspondent Emily Bazelon at the end.]

The interwebs have been lit up over the last couple of weeks about how to talk (or write) about "rape culture" and the hazards faced by women who get blitzed at parties. I gather from some of what I read that this has been an ongoing point of anger within a segment of the feminist community, but I was stunned at the outpouring of vitriol in response to a column by Slate writer Emily Yoffe, "College Women: Stop Getting Drunk" (title probably provided by her editor) with subtitle "It’s closely associated with sexual assault. And yet we’re reluctant to tell women to stop doing it." The article made many points that struck me - and from comments evidently a lot of other readers - as perfectly sensible, motherly advice. To wit: there are predatory men out there, and women who get drunk - especially to the point where they lose control - are putting themselves at risk of becoming rape victims. This seems no more controversial than telling kids to look both ways before they cross the street, but evidently there's a long history of some sort of feminist view that any advice to women about how to stay safe amounts to "apologizing" for or "denying" the "rape culture", victim blaming and slut shaming. Apparently the only correct way to talk about rape is to talk about the men who are raping. Parents should "tell their sons not to rape". But they should never ever warn their daughters about the risks of being incapacitated by drugs or alcohol. Because that's just blaming the victims.

I've read a bunch of these feminist manifestos, and I still don't get it. [I use the word "feminist" here as a shorthand for the people espousing these views. I consider myself a feminist in the sense that I don't think gender should be grounds for discrimination, and I want my daughter to find the world entirely open to her in every respect, unlike, say, the way it is for Saudi women. But that doesn't mean I haven't warned her about the risks of alcohol.] This hoo-hah came in the wake of the news of two teenage girls from a small Missouri town who went to a party at the house of some HS football players, got passed-out drunk, were raped by some of the boys, then dropped off at their homes (one semiconscious and unable to get in her front door on a freezing night). After a subsequent investigation by the police and local prosecutor, charges against the boys were dropped; the reasons are disputed, but I don't think anyone openly argues that what the boys did wasn't rape or was OK. The "rape culture" meme is, I think, about the macho jock culture that tells guys that anything they do to score is OK, including sticking it in a drunk passed out 13 year old. I'm pretty sure that's a real thing, not just a feminist fantasy. But it seems hard to argue that the bulk of society is OK with this kind of thing - people all over the world were shocked at the Maryville story. It's no more acceptable than was the Matthew Shepard murder in the late '90s or the bullying that pushed a S. Hadley, Mass. girl to suicide a few years ago. It's bad shit and pretty much everyone agrees that it's bad shit and we should keep working to keep it from happening again. Humankind being what we are, it seems unlikely that these efforts will ever be completely successful.

What doesn't always happen in these rape cases is for the justice system to punish the perpetrators. The feminist claim is that when it doesn't happen it's because police, prosecutors and judges don't take it seriously. That might also sometimes be true, though it seems uncontroversial that the lack-of-consent part of a rape conviction is going to be tricky to prove in situations where the woman can't recall exactly what happened, particularly since there's such a thing as consensual sex, sometimes after drinking. Obviously that doesn't apply to cases like Maryville, but that's not what's being debated. What many of these folks are saying is that drunk consent is not consent, period, end of story. I don't know what these people's experience of the real world is - how many times they've gotten it on with someone after a few drinks. I'm guessing it doesn't heavily inform their polemics. The criminal justice system is a very blunt instrument for "solving" the complexity of interpersonal relationships.

[A case that got Yoffe a lot of flack from the same merry band is one where a married woman wrote to her (as "Dear Prudence") about how she & her husband drank, then got into bed & started going at it but she doesn't remember everything and is now really upset. ("I liked it and went along, only to wake up in the morning and remember only half of it.") Yoffe's response was not sympathetic, except to the woman's husband. Apparently, though she should just have told the woman that yes, her husband is a rapist and she should divorce him. This woman is a rape survivor who is being slut-shamed by Yoffe. (There's a much more nuanced response by Lindsay Beyerstein here. Though I don't agree with everything she says, she shows much more sensitivity to the unusual aspect of the story than the rest of the dial-at-11 rants of outrage.)]

There's a lot more along these lines at the websites Jezebel, Feministing, Salon and even on Slate, where Amanda Hess wrote a piece subtitled "We can prevent the most rapes on campus by putting our efforts toward finding and punishing perpetrators, not by warning their huge number of potential victims to skip out on parties." The theme is that its so tired to be warning women about the risks of alcohol - they all have heard it a thousand times - and so the only thing that needs to be written about is how we're going to lock up all the rapists.

What all this seems to miss is the completely straightforward observation that it's a risky world out there right now. All the good intentions in the world about "changing the rape culture" don't change it tomorrow. As Yoffe says in her reply: "In the meantime, this weekend, some young, intoxicated women will wake up next to guys they never wanted to sleep with. I believe it’s worth talking about how keeping within a safe drinking limit can potentially help young women avoid such situations." A common thread I notice in many of the replies is how young the writers are. I'm guessing they don't have daughters yet, and aren't thinking about this issue from the very immediate perspective of their daughter's safety today and tomorrow. (Though one of the more ridiculous pieces is by Soraya Chemaly, who has young boys.) Their responses are purely political: to give safety advice to girls is a distraction from the only correct path, telling boys not to be rapists. Chemaly says "These are profoundly systemic problems, and this approach - taking up valuable time and space -  is counter-productive." Umm… there’s a lot of space on the internet. And “counterproductive”? It's not like we can't walk and chew gum at the same time.

This is a subject that seems to invite analogies in the blog comments, such as about not wandering into a bad part of town with $100 bills poking out of your pocket. (Which does seem to verge on telling women not to dress “seductively”, though that's not how it's meant.) But to continue the one that I started with: when we tell our children to look both ways before crossing the street – even though they have the right to be in the crosswalk and cars are required to stop for them, and this is the tenth time we've said it – are we being apologists and enablers of the car-centric aggressive driving culture? (Also, taking up valuable time!) Or are we just giving them utterly commonsense instruction in how not to get hurt?

[Update]
A month after the Yoffe article, Emily Bazelon, Slate's legal correspondent wrote another, using a study on underreporting of drinking-related rape as a basis to defend Yoffe from the PC gang. Closing paragraph:

In the vast majority of sexual assaults, Krebs says, the victim knows the offender. And sometimes she may not remember exactly what happened—because her memory is blurred by intoxication. That’s why Emily Yoffe called for rape prevention education that reaches women as well as men. Not instead of men—of course we need to make clear that men who force sex are fully responsible for their violence, no matter what the circumstances. But we also should treat women as fully capable of agency by giving them the information they need to understand that binge drinking is a risk factor for sexual assault. I’m the mother of sons, not daughters. It is absolutely my responsibility to teach my boys that there is no excuse—none—for having sex unless they can be absolutely sure the other person wants to. But if I had girls, I would want to open their eyes to the reality that drinking to the point of passing out will make them more vulnerable. That doesn’t mean blaming them. It means arming them.

Hiking the Sequoia NP Five Lakes Loop

I spent 4 days last week hiking a loop in Sequoia National Park, with Chris King. We covered about 31 miles, averaging 8-9 miles / day for the first 3, then 5 miles out on the last.
We started from the trailhead just beyond the Mineral King ranger station. From here, every direction is up. The peaks and ridges are close in and high up on every side but the one we came up, a canyon with a 23 mile long one lane road from the little resort town of Three Rivers. We set out last Thursday morning (the 12th).

View from the Timber Gap trail, heading up from the Mineral King trailhead

After climbing out of the valley, we descended a wooded ridge. As we descended, we saw a helicopter below us, looking for a landing spot and descending below our sight in the canyon. Shortly afterwards we came on a small forest fire. About 15 x 30 feet next to the trail was smoldering, and flames were shooting up in a couple of spots. Hikers ahead of us had already started putting it out, and almost immediately a park service fire fighter from the helicopter showed up & took over, single-handedly putting it out with a shovel and a water-carrying backpack which he had to descend a mile or so to fill, before climbing back up to douse the embers. Much later we saw large gouts of smoke rising from the ridge. At first we thought the fire had grown, but soon realized that we were just seeing the steam as the fire was put down.

After descending the ridge, we turned east along a creek. Our first camp was 3 miles up the valley, by the creek, near Pinto Lake. In the next campsite over was a park law enforcement guy named Brad. He had hiked in from the same trailhead and was heading for the next valley to the north to help another ranger pack up her summer home in the wilderness.

View from the Black Rock Pass trail, towards Spring Lake

The next morning we continued east up the valley, before turning north to climb the ridge in a series of switchbacks that, after 3000 vertical feet, took us through the Black Rock pass. Brad passed us along the way, stopping briefly to take in iphone photo of a flower I wanted to identify. He promised that the ranger at Little Five Lakes would know what it was, or find it in her book. As we climbed, the glacial valley we had left came into full view and eventually we could look down on three hanging lakes feeding the creek, Spring, Cyclamen, and the uppermost one, Columbine, which we would eventually reach the next day. We could have just hiked there directly around the upper end of the valley, going off-trail to make a route shorter by a day.

From the top of the pass, around 11,600', we looked down to the north into the Little Five Lakes basin, a moonscape of mud-puddle lakes and scree. The ranger's summer yurt is visible just above the lake in the woods at high magnification in the image below. On the far side, a bit to the east is a high, imposing ridge of 12-13,000' peaks, the Kaweahs.

Little Five Lakes basin

Descending, we passed the middle lake above, before reaching the more scenic wooded one on the left. The ranger's yurt was partway around the lake, and we decided to check it out. We found there not just Brad, but also an older, grizzled ranger who had also hiked two days in from his wilderness yurt in the Kern valley to help the local ranger Christina take hers down and winterize the site. On meeting her, we understood why these guys had both hiked for two days to provide assistance. Aside from showing us a blinding smile, she identified the mystery flower from her book, then wished us an enjoyable remainder of our hike.

Returning to the trail, we slowly ascended east through some rocky woods, before turning south and then descending a 30-switchback slope which took us to Big Five Lakes, where we spent our second night. Camping near us at the lake was a 20-something couple who turned out to be chemistry grad students at Cal. They became "The Chemists" in later conversation. As in, "See you on the trail, Chemists!"

As on the previous night, the weather was great and we got a few minutes of beautiful alpenglow at sunset. The nighttime temperature probably got down into the high 30s - perfect sleeping weather, if I was any good at sleeping on a 1 1/2" mat on hard ground.

Big Five Lakes at sunset

The next morning (day 3) we climbed up and around the ridge to the east of Big Five lakes, then dropped into Lost Canyon, heading more or less west towards our starting point. This was perhaps the most scenic part of the hike. A gentle creek winds along the middle, with high ridges on both sides and Sawtooth peak dead ahead in the distance.

Lost Canyon creek and Sawtooth peak

This fellow was fattening himself up for the winter, and stood up to get a good look as we passed by.

Marmot

Eventually we got most of the way to the far end of the valley, where we began a long climb up the south side, reaching Columbine lake about 900' later. Here we took our only "group" shot.

Columbine Lake, below Sawtooth peak

Continuing around the lake, we took a wrong turn in a wide ridge of boulders, gullies and peaks, before backtracking and discovering to our chagrin that we had another 500' or so of climbing to do, before we would reach the top of Sawtooth pass at 11,700', just to the right of the peak in the photo.
On the far side of Sawtooth pass is a steep descent across a long slope of scree consisting of sand mixed with boulders of varying sizes. We forgot the instructions of the ranger who'd written our permit, to first go north along the ridge before descending the switchbacks. So many people before us had taken random routes down the slope that we also took what seemed like the "easiest", most direct way down, through the scree. This was a mistake, because the sand-covered boulders along the way were slippery and treacherous. Eventually we crossed the slope and reconnected with the "official" switchbacks.

At the bottom of this slope, we hooked left and found Little Monarch lake. Being relatively close to the trailhead, this site was crowded with other campers by the time we arrived. We found a bare patch too near the lake, and pitched our tent. As the sun set the fish started jumping like mad. We had another perfect evening, with the moon rising above the cirque.

Monarch Lake sunset and moonrise

The next morning (day 4) we headed down through woods, eventually crossing a creek and reconnecting with the trail we had started on. A half mile later we were at the parking lot. Luckily, no marmots had eaten the engine hoses -- which apparently they do early in the summer, looking for salt. We headed back down the winding road and got on the highway.

Judging from the amount of water we saw, and reports from early-to-mid season hikers, we lucked out on the total absence of bugs. I never had to break out the 100% DEET I had brought. And the daytime temperature was perfect for hiking. I'm pretty sold on September trips.

Today's favorite sentences:

In 2012 alone, keas were responsible for $425 million in damages and 5 deaths. And while it’s true those statistics aren’t based on real data and that I just made them up, they are nonetheless startling.

http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2013/08/16/snark-week-the-mighty-kea

A great essay by Steven Pinker.

Science Is Not Your Enemy

[T]he worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of an educated person today is the worldview given to us by science. Though the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities. By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality. The scientific refutation of the theory of vengeful gods and occult forces undermines practices such as human sacrifice, witch hunts, faith healing, trial by ordeal, and the persecution of heretics. The facts of science, by exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, force us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species, and our planet. For the same reason, they undercut any moral or political system based on mystical forces, quests, destinies, dialectics, struggles, or messianic ages. And in combination with a few unexceptionable convictions— that all of us value our own welfare and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct—the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely adhering to principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings. This humanism, which is inextricable from a scientific understanding of the world, is becoming the de facto morality of modern democracies, international organizations, and liberalizing religions, and its unfulfilled promises define the moral imperatives we face today.

www.newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-humanities

My Cat Violates Arrow's Axiom of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives

Arrow's Axiom of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives says that if you prefer apple pie to peach pie, the appearance on the table of a slice of cherry pie inside an unbreakable glass box won't change your preference for an available slice of apple over an available slice of peach. This seemingly intuitive axiom is one of the assumptions for Arrow's famous impossibility theorem, that there is no democratic choice system (i.e., voting method) that satisfies this and several other equally "obviously true" principles.

Our cat Fluffy (aka Fluffy the Finicky) routinely violates this axiom. She prefers dry food to no food. She prefers no food to wet food - she will almost never eat it unless she's very hungry. However, often when presented with dry food she turns up her nose, even if she's hungry. The trick to get her to eat (so that the other cats don't eat her food first) is to put down another bowl containing a tiny amount of wet food. As soon as sniffs the wet food bowl, she heads back over to the dry food bowl and starts eating.

So her preferences at these times start out as No Food > Dry Food. Presented with some wet food, an irrelevant alternative since she almost never prefers it to either, her preferences switch to Dry Food > No Food.

This is probably why cats have never developed advanced democratic societies.

Climbing Mt. Shasta

Last weekend, along with 9 friends and acquaintances, I climbed Mt. Shasta. It was Jim Offel's birthday gift to himself (originally conceived for his 50th birthday, but deferred by 4 years) and I was happy to be included.

Four of us, including me, climbed 3700 feet in 8 1/2 hours, but failed to go the last 300 feet to the actual summit, bailing out at the top of the aptly named "Misery Hill". The other 6 made it all the way to the top. On the descent, I skied back to our base camp, thighs burning like mad with every turn in the slushy snow. The return took about 5 minutes.

We took three days for the climb, though many people do it in two and some even in one. The trailhead is at about 7000 feet, while the summit is over 14,000. We took extra time in order to reduce the chance of getting altitude sickness. It seemed to work: no one really succumbed, though one of the 4 of us who missed the summit had some nausea. For everyone else, the worst symptom was being out of breath.

With my friends Tom and Eric, I arrived a day early to take a class on basic mountaineering skills, which was mainly about using an ice axe to climb, arrest a slide and control the descent, and a little bit about climbing technique on the steep slopes. Our teacher was a young guy who once did the entire climb in under 2 hours.We didn't really understand how impressive that was until our own climb was over.

Our route started at Bunny Flat on Saturday morning. From there we walked up a marked trail to Sierra Club cabin, also known as Horse Camp, around 7,900 feet. We camped that night on the snow, and from there up we were on snow the entire time. On day two, while the rest of the group hiked up "Climber's Gully" to Helen Lake at 10,000 feet, I put my skis and skins on and went up a different route. Unfortunately, my rental skins were crap, and on the steeper slopes they came unglued from the skis, making them worse than useless. Eventually I had to take them off, put the skis back on my pack and hike the rest of the way. I had walkie-talkie communication with the rest of the group, so they knew roughly where I was which was reassuring. But it was a damned hard climb with a 50 pound load (my full pack plus the skis).

On the summit day we got up at 1:30 am, had a quick cup of coffee, and were climbing at 3:00. The final day's climb has four stages. The first is up the Avalanche Gulch bowl, visible in the first photo below, up past the triangular rock feature (the Heart) and through the line of sandstone at the top called Red Bank. This was by far the hardest and longest part of the climb. The ascent through Red Bank was especially hard, with the icy slope reaching 50 degrees and going through a narrow chute eroded through the stone. After the Red Banks came Short Hill, then Misery Hill, after which we could finally see the summit. After a rest, I tried to continue, but it was hard to tell how big the last stage really was. It looked intimidating and I was completely spent, so turned back to wait with 3 others who were similarly done in. As it happened, looks were deceiving and the other 6 took only 1/2 hour or so to get to the summit. Oh well.

Slightly refreshed by a noontime snooze lying on the rocks at 13,800 feet, I picked up my skis at the bottom of Misery Hill, hiked a short way upslope to get around the end of the Red Banks, dropped across the cornice, then skied down the bowl, past the other side of the Heart and into camp. After about an hour and a half, the rest of the group began to mosey back, after sliding down on their butts (glissading). We packed up, retraced our steps (or in my case, skied) to Horse Camp and finally trudged back down the trail to the cars. That last 2 miles to the car was particularly hard - we were all pretty much done in and ready to be off the mountain. Vertical tally for the summit day: 4000 feet (+/-) up, 7000 feet down.

While I think I was in good enough physical shape for the climb, I wasn't really prepared mentally. In spite of reading a book on the route and hearing about it from others, I had thought it was going to be more or less a hike on snow. It wasn't. Climbing is much more gruelling. You trudge along, each step needing a conscious effort, thinking about each breath. You look up every 15 minutes or so, and seem to have made almost no progress, hour after hour. You get to the top of a difficult stretch, but there's no relief: just a view of the next, equally difficult one. It's really a test of mental endurance, especially for an aging geezer.

It's a really beautiful mountain. Our group was great. If I do it again, at least next time I'll know what I'm getting in to.

Some of the photos below are by Tom Hoynes.

Mt. Shasta seen from the town at dusk. Avalanche Gulch is the broad bowl to the right of the ridge near the center of the photo. The Heart is the triangular feature near the top, and the Red Banks is the rocky ridge above the Heart. Helen Lake is just above the lowest horizontal moraine visible below the Heart.

Right to left: Jordan, Jim S. ("little" Jimbo), Laurie, David, Jim O. ("big" Jimbo), Eric, Tom, Jennie, Elio, me.

Horse Camp, with Avalanche Gulch looming behind.

Avalanche Gulch; the Heart and the Red Banks are near the top.

Resting at Helen Lake after a long slog.

Our encampment at Helen Lake, the afternoon before summit day.

From Helen Lake, our view of the first stage of the summit ascent. The top of the Red Banks is about 2500 feet above the camp.

Getting ready at 2:30 am. Jennie and Tom in the foreground.

Climbing up past the Heart at sunrise, with the shadow of the mountain visible to the west.

Near the top of the Red Banks, still carrying those damned skis.

Resting at the top of the Red Banks.

Looking down towards Shastina (the active cone) and glaciers, from the top of Misery hill.

Attending BrunoFest

I was seized once again by an impulse to do something foolish - in this case, to attend a conference organized to honor the life work of Bruno Zumino, a 90-year-old retired Berkeley physics prof. and co-inventor of the so-far purely theoretical idea of supersymmetry. Attending was foolish because I was out of place among all these academics, most of whom knew each other more or less well, and because I couldn't even begin to understand half of the talks. However, I did get to hear some really good presentations by two lead experimentalists from CERN on the Higgs discovery and (so far unsuccessful) supersymmetry searches. One was by Fabiola Gianotti, formerly the spokesperson for ATLAS, the other by Gigi Rolandi from CMS.

The photo above is of the bad combover of the audience's obligatory local crackpot, a fellow who sported, along with his nametag, a pin bearing the handwritten text "HOPE 96-D" and something below in smaller writing that might have been "ask me about my theory". He piped up several times to ask truly obscure questions, which all of the presenters swatted away quite deftly - basically replying something like "I'm not familiar with that idea," and he didn't push the matter, so it wasn't too bad.

The presenter above is Peter van Nieuwenheizen who lost me before the second line of his first slide. But he lost all of the experimentalists and many of the theorists as well, so I don't actually feel quite as bad as I made it sound.

Mainly what I felt about the meeting is that it's not easy to wander into an academic circle as an outsider and feel comfortable. I knew a number of the Berkeley people in attendance and it was fun to catch up a bit with them, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Regrettably, Bruno couldn't be there for most of the event because he is recovering from some fairly serious illnesses. His companion and my thesis advisor, Mary K. Gaillard was there, looking weary. It was fun to see her, though as always our attempts at small talk didn't last very long.

The New York Times uses R for some of its fancy graphics

 http://chartsnthings.tumblr.com/post/36978271916/r-tutorial-simple-charts

Using R at work myself, I think it's pretty cool that the Paper of Record (tm) uses it too.

Colonial Exploitation

We just got back from a week in St. Croix, USVI. We spent the week diving, eating and relaxing.The picture to the left is from a beach cafe in the town of Fredriksted at the west end where we ended up after an afternoon drive & hike in the "rain forest" on the wetter side of the island. We stayed on the north shore, towards the east end near the other main  town, Christiansted. The names reflect the Danish colonial heritage of the island, which came after the British colonial period, which followed the French and Spanish colonial periods and preceded the US colonial period. Thanks to the Brits, cars drive on the left.

For some reason, although Denmark sold the USVI to the US about 100 years ago, it's still a destination for Danes on holiday. There are charter flights non-stop from Copenhagen to St. Croix. On one of our dive trips we met a young woman from there who came, among other things, to visit her ancestral estate. According to a waitress in one of the restaurants, Danish tourism keeps the local economy afloat (barely). Some of the restaurants have Danish menus.

We were surprised at how low key and quiet the tourist areas were, even though it was the peak spring vacation time. Restaurants were at most half full and often less. We actually appreciated the quiet and absence of spring break rowdiness, but it also gave the tourist areas a depressed vibe. Some of this might have to do with the legacy of hurricane Hugo which apparently damaged or destroyed something like 80% of the island's structures in 1989. The hotel on the cay in the main harbor has still not been fully restored, and there were abandoned buildings scattered all over.

Slavery was abolished on the island by the British in the 1830s, but the slaves' descendants still live here along with hispanics from neighboring islands, wealthy American retirees and a handful of younger wanderers. Front line service jobs like wait-staff were mostly filled by white US expats, with the occasional Cruzan local.

The diving was so-so. Visibility was never more than about 50', and sometimes as little as 20-30. I think both Grand Cayman and Bonaire are better. A lot of the reef structures are overgrown with algae. We did see reef sharks, a few turtles, a couple of rays and a moray out of his crevice. Also lots of fish carrying what I think were parasitic isopods under their gills, which was kind of creepy. We also did a night dive in the shallows under the Frederiksted pier, where we saw sleeping turtles, an octopus and a sea horse, among other things.

We also visited the Cruzan Rum factory, which was kind of fun. Their process is somewhat old fashioned, especially compared to the nearby Captain Morgan's factory which looked like an oil refinery. We saw (and smelled) the open fermentation tanks and the aging casks, which were first used for scotch or bourbon. If I understand it right, then, the barrels are first used for sherry, then for whisky, and finally for rum. Cruzan makes a "single barrel" rum that's a blend of 5 to 12 year old casks and has a slight trace of a scotch taste. I thought it was great, but they were all out of it at the gift shop. I'm happy to give the standard stuff a miss.

Here's Catherine in front of the windmill remnant at the center of the property. (These cones are all over the island, mostly unused, but one in the harbor is now a functional part of a restaurant.)

Consolations of Philosophy

for Valentines Day singletons:


http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Sinhababu-Possible-Girls.pdf

"Given that every possible world is real, I shouldn’t feel lonely. There are many possible girls out there in worlds where modal realism is widely accepted. Some of the girls are single, and are pining for a boy in a world that isn’t their own. Some of them are pining for a boy who fits exactly my description, down to the smallest detail. Some worlds hold legions of girls who desire a boy from a world other than theirs, and who fits exactly my description."