Back, and still breathing

So, April and I hiked our way out of the back country on Monday night, none the worse for wear. We were a little wetter, a little stronger, and a lot closer. I guess that's what happens when you go hiking/camping with someone. You either wind up hating each other, or getting closer.

Actually, it was sorta sad, 'cause April and I both realized that this is likely to be one of our last jaunts out into the middle of nowhere for some time. I'm gonna miss these trips. However, next summer, we have a number of trips planned; culminating in a hike along the West Coast trail. That'll be really amazing. 75 km along the Island. I'm getting super-keen on this one.

Of course, I'll need to actually buy a backpack first. I've been using my big brother's, and I think he's starting to get annoyed with it, so I'm gonna use some of the money I put aside to buy one. Mountain Equipment CO-OP, here I come...

Back unto the wilderness.

So, April and I are again heading into the wild of beyond. We're going out to Yoho national park for a few days of hiking. That'll be much fun. We're going to hike past two rather spectacular waterfalls, not to mention a major glacier. We also may have substantial swim time; as Emerald lake is only a short jaunt from our campsite on the last day.

At any rate, I'm predicting that this will be much, much fun. April's looking forward to it, too.

I'm going steadily through my little checklist as I'm packing.

Map: check
tent: check
food: check
stove: check
cookware: check
clothes: check
GPS tracker: check
camera: check
First aid supplies: check
Bug spray: check
bowl to eat out of: check
cutlery: check
Hiking boots: check
swim trunks: check
Water bottle: check
Water filter: check
Sodium hypochlorite solution (yeah, I know, I'm getting a little paranoid about keeping the water I drink safe): check
spare batteries for GPS tracker: check

Fun stuff.

Entering the digital age

So I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a digital camera.

I've been resisting the switch to digital for as long as I felt I could. There's just something about dropping the paper into the solutions and watching an image magically float up from nothing. You lose that with digital.

But, sadly, I fear the days of polycarbonate film and enlargers are nearing an end, and are being replaced with high-resolution CCDs and high-quality printers. I guess that this is what they call "progress."

Sigh.

At the end of the day, it was my mom, who has been resisting the change to digital even longer than I have, who convinced me that I would be stupid not to go digital. It's simpler, its cheaper, you can get high-quality prints with far less effort than with old-fashioned film. A lot less painting with light, and a lot more fiddling with pixels.

And if this whole PhD. thing doesn't pan out, my little bother says I'm all ready to start a career in amateur porn.

Boiling a frog

We've all heard the metaphor of the boiled frog. You throw a frog into boiling water and it jumps right out, but if you put a frog into cool water, then slowly heat it up, the frog will stay there until it boils to death.

Okay, so I bring this up because it's coming to my attention that the US is in serious danger of turning into a theocracy. Granted, this won't affect me that much, because I don't actually live in the US. But I am an American. I'm proud to be American. I'm proud of my country and what it stands for, and I am, frankly, afraid of where this could go.

One of America's founding principles is the separation of church and state. The country exists on the principle that no person should be forced into a specific set of religious beliefs, and that the government should act free of any religious bias.

The fact is that this is less the case than it was five years ago.

There's been an increasing movement in the states to rewrite national policy based upon Religious docterine. It is one thing to have strong religious beliefs. I have nothing against people with religious beliefs. It's quite another to use those beliefs to dictate law and policy. This, I do take issue with.

Take our not-too-bright president, for example. When one is unseating a dictator in a primarily Islamic country (and for the moment, I don't really want to get into whether or not it was right or wrong to invade Iraq), and fighting a war on terrorism against a group of Islamic Fundamentalists who follow an extreme interpretation of the Koran, about the dumbest thing you can do is to claim that your actions are taken in the name of God. Thousands of Christians are killed every year by Islamic extremists, simply for being Christian. 9/11, the Holocaust, the Crusades... All justified, to some extent or another, as being in the name of a given deity. None of them turned out terribly well. To claim that your actions are "in the name of God" makes you no better than the people who perpetuated those atrocities.

Now, one of the issues that I personally feel very strongly about is gay marriage (which confuses some people who have very strong fundamentalist beliefs, since I'm not gay); I'm completely in favor of it.... at least until someone can give me a non-religiously grounded reason why I should be against it. Nobody has yet; and I can think of no reason, either philosophically, scientifically, or legally why the right to marry should be denied to homosexual couples. Even the Religious arguments against it are based upon very questionable translations and interpretations of the Bible. Yet, in a country where the Church and State are supposed to be completely separate entities, a motion was successfully proposed (and, thank God, struck down) to define marriage according to biblical statutes. However, I don't think it's going to end that easily. I think that we're likely to hear a lot more about the Federal Marriage Amendment. It should be noted that the last person attempting to protect the sanctity of marriage by constitutional amendment was Seaborn Roddenberry in 1912. I'm not going to give any links here, I'm just going to leave it to you to look him up. Suffice it to say that anti-gay-marriage activists seem convinced that this time, it's somehow different.

There have also been quite a few cases in the courts in the past years (some of which have made it as far as the US Supreme Court) to force science classes in public schools to teach what has been (rather unscrupulously) called "creation science," and to present the arguments against evolution (none of these motions suggest presenting the arguments against creation "science;" apparently that would be too even-handed). All of these motions have been struck down, so far, on the grounds that "creation science" has no scientific basis whatsoever. The proponents of creation "science" have made a big deal about the fact that the scientists themselves say that Evolution is just a theory. While true, this ignores two other facts: 1) Gravity is also a theory, but nobody's gluing their feet to the floor and 2) creation "science" doesn't even have a scientific theory; for that matter, it doesn't even have a falsifiable hypothesis; all it has is the assumption that the Bible is literally true. I'm reminded of a scientist by the name of Gallileo who came up with the outlandish suggestion that the Earth was not the center of the universe...

Ladies and gentlemen, the water's boiling. I just hope that we, the frogs, have the wisdom to move it off the stove.