On Understanding Complexity (or, Looking Inwards)*

As a scientist**, I often find myself turning to works of philosophy to consider questions that science cannot answer.  Contrary to popular belief in some corners, we freely admit that those questions exist -- because, by necessity, there must be first principles and science only deals with matters that follow from them.

For example, what does it mean to live a correct life?  This is partially a question of morality, but what is morally correct?  Why, for example, is the Golden Rule any better, from a moral standpoint, than Might Makes Right?  There is no easy answer.  One's choice is simply a preference than cannot be "proven" to be superior.  The christian bible is essentially an historical collection of first principles (the Old Testament) with errata and appendices (the New Testament) that provides a convenient starting point, but one which is not really usable by anyone who does not accept that morality is what God says it is, particularly when He had such a penchant for contradiction and His Children have such a tendency for picking and choosing.

Lately I've been reading a lot of Dennett, particularly his musings about determinism and free will.   The nice thing about Dennett, beyond his readability, is his thoroughness.  It's not enough, for example, to say that we have free will because we can make personal choices -- Dennett probes the source of those choices.  He uses the clever example of the spex ichneumoneus wasp, which lays eggs next to a paralyzed cricket.  When the time comes for egg laying, he quotes a biologist, the wasp Spex builds a burrow for the purpose and seeks out a cricket ... She (then) drags the cricket into the burrow ... and the wasp grubs feed off (it).  To the human mind, (this) seemingly purposeful routine conveys a convincing flavor of logic.  He then goes on to describe how the nefarious biologists vex the poor wasp by moving her paralyzed cricket around, to which the wasp can only respond by going through apparently preprogrammed biological actions that -- had she actually been using logic and reasoning -- she would not have done, for apparently the wasp inspects the burrow first, before dragging the cricket inside.   If the cricket is moved a few inches away while the wasp is inside making her preliminary inspection, the wasp ... will bring the cricket back to the threshold, but not inside, and will repeat the prepratory procedure. ... On one occasion, (the biologists moved the cricket) forty times, always with the same result.  "The poor wasp is unmasked," writes Dennett: "she is not a free agent, but rather at the mercy of brute physical causation, driven inexorably into her states and activities by features of the environment outside of her control."

There was a time, long ago during the Age of Reason and the young ascendency of empiricism, when it was thought that the time would come when the future could be predicted through mathematics.  Physics, went the reasoning, was guided by fixed laws, and hence the path of a particle through space (and thereby its future) was predetermined by the position and velocity of of every other particle in the universe.  All that was needed was the precise identification of the latter two quantities.

Today, we know that prediction of the behavior of something as simple as a quadratic mapping -- practically the 2nd most simple type of nontrivial equation known to mathematics -- is fundamentally unknowable, given the basic limits on precision in the real universe and our inability to capture anything except the finite in an empirical sense.   Long ago, I once wrote something along these lines regarding the number of problems in the universe: how not only that the number of provably solvable problems is finite, but that the number of humanly indescribable (much less solvable) problems is uncountably infinite***.

We are meek and small animals, we are.  Well, small, anyhow.

*This line of thought actually has a point and is going somewhere, I think, someday, although the ride may take innumerable side trips.  Who knows.  It makes some kind of weird sense to me.

**I use that term loosely these days, given that I have long since sold out, as it were.

***That particular statement is provable, too.

Six Days then Two Trains

I'm home alone for a few days, then off for the New Year down south.   Just in time, Seattle's Sound Transit has opened a light rail link from the International District station directly to SeaTac airport that costs a total of $2.50 one way.  A far sight better than the $35 cab fare from King Station or $200 for five days of long-term parking at the airport!  I am looking forward to peering down on the I-5/405/Int'l Blvd snarl from the comfort of the Central Link rail this time, instead of from behind a wheel.

So I would like to take this moment to offer thanks for living in a place where I can park for free and then board a coast-hugging train in the morning, switch to a frequent light rail, and then be at the airport without parking, driving hassles, or worry (and having read a few chapters of an engrossing book, to boot!), all for about a tenth of the cost of gas and parking that I used to pay.  

Saturday Skiing

Mt. Shuksan, from the Heather Meadows Lodge

12/19/2009

Yeah.  Yeah.  Hard to argue with that.

Apparently I Can't Help Myself

                                 Don Ryan / AP

So here are some thoughts on Mountain Rescue in light of the recent loss of life on Mt. Hood, after all.  No ranting I hope.

1. Carrying a locator beacon is indeed a good thing.  Climbers have traditionally rejected this idea, for a variety of reasons ranging from the weight (the early models were clunkers), their lack of reliability (they were awful), the changing standards (a beacon bought one year was useless the next), and their "techiness" (mountaineers generally disdain things that use batteries, other than headlamps, because batteries get cold and die within a matter of hours).  But let's face it, the newer Spot2 models are pretty good: they're lightweight, inexpensive (relative to other mountaineering gear), and they include both an automatic tracker that makes it possible for someone with web access to see a trail of breadcrumbs indicating the climber's path of travel, as well as an "I'm OK" button that climbers can proactively press to leave a marker indicating that (at least at that moment) they were/are fine and a panic button to call in the troops if necessary.  And finally, a beacon helps locate bodies faster.  This is the reason why I ski with an avalanche transceiver when I ski alone -- not so that I can be saved, but so that my family could have some closure, were I swept away.  (FWIW, I don't buy the idea that mountaineers take greater risks if they carry a beacon.   A rescue is a last-ditch call for help; we all know that.  We also know that rescues take hours or days, in the best case.  I don't know anyone who would take an unwarranted risk just because they have that beacon -- who wants to lie in the snow with a compound fracture, for days?)

2.  That being said, charging for rescues is a bad idea. I can think of scores of reasons why it's bad, but a few stand out:

• People who think that they will have to pay money to call for help will probably not do it until their situation is dire.  I can think of a dozen missions off the top of my head in which our patients (what MRA folks call the people they're rescuing) called in early and the resulting search and rescue went well, but in which if they had delayed by even an hour, they would have been dead and the rescue missions would have been extended by days -- if not weeks -- with all the resulting increased danger and expense.
• Mountain Rescue teams are almost exclusively volunteer.  We are funded via donations (read: United Way), so we couldn't charge a victim even if we wanted to do so.  Naval and military support helicopters, too, have mandatory training schedules and are obligated to log a certain number of flight hours -- which they would much rather do in support of a real rescue mission instead of winching a locator buoy out of the water somewhere, so their time is "free" in the sense that they would have logged the airtime, anyway.  (In fact, they even monitor our frequencies here, and have even been known to show up unannounced overhead, "just to see if the search teams could use some aerial reconnaissance support.")
• Charging money implies a mandate and/or a requirement to provide service.  As it stands, signs at trailheads loudly proclaim that no rescue is ever guaranteed.  However, if we charge hikers and climbers a fee, then it's not inconceivable in our litigious culture that the family of a victim might take a rescue team to court, to recover rescue fees (and more!) in the event that the victim was never saved or even located.  When that happens, liability insurance will probably become mandatory for these teams, to be followed shortly thereafter by team members quitting, as we will have "professionalized" the mountain rescue business.  And here's the thing: we are in this as volunteers because we care about our community and want to give back to it.  Helping to save lives in distress makes me feel like I've done something worthwhile.  I won't do it for money, were salaried professional rescue teams proposed, and I won't do it all, if that's the direction we're going.
• Asking desperate families to pay for rescues is just as bad as asking the victims.  I'll support this with an anecdote.  We were once on a big, glaciated peak, searching for a lost backcountry skier, and we had a naval blackhawk in the air to support us.  We'd been out there for a week already, and the family was freaked at the pace, so they paid two separate, private, commercial helicopter pilots to fly in and join the search.  Problem: the two new choppers were not on our MRA frequencies, since they weren't licensed to use them, so now we had two birds flying around randomly with no way to talk to them (since we also weren't licensed to use their commercial flight frequencies).  Only the navy boys could talk, and they became instant middlemen.  The naval helicopter -- the only one with a winch that could be used to retrieve the skier, or his body -- returned to base, given the danger of that aerial and ground situation.  Conclusion: when families are allowed or forced to make payment, they generally agree to do it -- but on their own terms.  In the above situation, we were able to force the commercial pilots to leave the area since we had mission responsibility for it, but if the families had paid for the whole thing we would have been helpless.
• The "expense" of a rescue is already covered by taxes that all mountaineers pay.  Specifically, it comes from the law enforcement folks who liason with the MRA teams, act as the PR interface with the media and families, and generally oversee operations (although they are not the incident commanders and not running the rescue, just running interference for the entire thing).  That's usually where you hear about the cost of a rescue, since the deputies are salaried and they often call in police helicopters for low-altitude searches.  But if we're going to require one group of people (mountaineers, who have an extremely low accident rate compared to unprepared summer hikers) to pay an additional fee beyond taxes for the local constables in the event that they need them, then we should really look into charging everyone else, too, because those dreamy-eyed cotton-and-flipflop-wearing day hikers are the ones who really consume the department resources on a week-to-week basis, at least when it comes to searches and body recoveries.  Alternatively, we could ask only those helped by the police to pay for police services.  Why should I have pay the salary of an officer who saves a child from being beaten?  I mean, it's not me, right?  (Yeah, that's a callous way to look at the world, alright.)

3. People climbing a mountain in winter do not "lack common sense." This meme sure does come up a lot.  People who don't climb often seem to think that although climbing is dangerous, it's at least acceptable in summertime with banner blue skies, and that we should sit in front of our fireplaces recounting stories during the winter.  Were that to be the case -- that we, as humankind, should only venture out into the world when conditions were pristine and outcomes known -- then I certainly wouldn't be typing this in North America, if at all.  In reality, the ability to push our limits is a fundamental human quality, and the slow advance of knowledge has today made winter mountaineering an everyday and practically mundane occurrence that is almost always undertaken safely, and with quantifiable benefits.  A crashed airliner in the Indian Peaks range of Colorado, for example, would have been written off as lost, were this 1950 and in the winter time, but today the Rocky Mountain Rescue team would be responding, at the site, and saving lives within hours of the first report, purely because of advances in winter mountaineering knowledge that have only come about as a direct result of people doing it.

I'm sure that next year, another group will be lost in the mountains, if not Mt. Hood itself, and this debate will repeat itself.  And I'll probably get sucked into it again.

Oh, No You Don't

Exhibit A: Infinite Depth of Kitteh

So, I had a huge rant ready to post about the latest Mt. Hood climber disaster and the usual laymen response to it (blah blah "they're insane" blah blah "ought to force climbers to pay for rescue insurance" blah blah "ZOMG MAH TAX DOLLARS!" blah blah "danger to themselves and the valiant rescuers!" blah blah Blah BLAH), but after about ten pages of fuming I got it out of my system and decided: be it resolved that (a) daring people aren't going to stop pushing their boundaries, and (b) whiners aren't going to stop whining, and (c) there are enough infuriated people around already: then, why, I suppose I'll just shut up. Perhaps have another glass of wine and ponder how spaghetti is harvested:

UPDATE 12/18/2009: Here ya go, Wombat--

Tick List I

• Mt. Baker (My back yard)
• Chopicalqui (Peruvian Andes)
• Mt. Rainier, Kautz Glacier route (My extended back yard)
• Artisanraju* (Peruvian Andes, the mountain in the Paramount logo)
  

That's enough for now, we're probably looking at 2-4 years of vacation and retraining there.  Artisanraju in particular is going to be a bitch, but more fun than you can shake a stick at!  Kautz should be easy; I almost made it up that one once already, were it not for an ill teammate.  Chopi is probably pretty straightforward, depending on the conditions (of course).  The one that intrigues me the most, believe it or not, is Baker: I've been on her slopes many times, in the form of rescue missions and skiing, but never tried to go for the summit.  I would be arrogant to consider the climb easy, considering how many bodies we've pulled off that mountain.

* "Raju" is apparently a native term for "mountain," in Quechua, the modern derivative of ancient Incan.  "Artisan" is clearly latin-based.  So perhaps it means "artist mountain?"

Thursday Night Music

Once while driving through Texas, I found an AM radio station that played this song on an infinite loop. I listened to it for four hours*, through the night, before it faded into static. Find the album version**, it's better than the live videos (with its spanish guitar interlude; I'm such a sucker for spanish guitar).

"Now when I talked to God I knew he'd understand, he said 'stick by me, I'll be your guiding hand, but don't ask me what I think of you, I might not give the answer that you want me to...'"

*Texas is BIG.
**"Then Play On" - ping me if you can't find it.

Geekiness

(T-shirts can be found here)

Laura comes home tomorrow after a few days out of state, so of course I'm not cleaning up the house or getting anything ready for her because I'm totally geeking out with my brand new weather station! Just FYI, it's currently 22ºF and 80% humidity in my garden.  The dew point is 16ºF, and the barometer is reading 30.31 inches of mercury.  Ooh, update: now it's 21º and 81%!

This kind of stuff makes me smile.  I dunno why, I just love playing with gadgets.  Whenever I get in this way, L says something along the lines of "OMG you are SUCH a superdork!" which might sound bad, but when it's followed by her exclamation that "dorks are so sexy *wink*" it's enough to make a man smile even wider.

There was a time when "nerd" was a pejorative term, and I somehow missed when that changed.  When did it happen?  There seem to be hordes of women who like dorks -- my friend Jamie has a crush on the entire cast of "The Big Bang Theory," for example, and she's just one of many.  And don't even get me started on geeky women, who almost universally seem to wear those sexy librarian eyeglasses.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you.  It's awfully nice to be admired & desired for just being who you are.

UPDATE: 19º, 86%, 15º dewpoint @ 8:41pm.  Yes yes, I know, you're on the edge of your seat just like me!

On Being Thankful

My sister and her boyfriend are visiting us this weekend, from faraway North Carolina. That seems odd to write: "faraway North Carolina." But it's accurate. Sometimes the people on the other side of this nation are like aliens, in their manners, their habits, and especially their speech. From my travels around the world I got the distinct impression that people think that the "USA" is one country, but it doesn't take much wandering around these states to realize that though they might be united in some sense, they are still very different states. I can no more understand a native from the hills of carolina than I can someone from the hills of Wales.

Finn decided to go AWOL upon their arrival. As soon as sis+BF walked through the door, he was nowhere to be found. It turned out that he'd burrowed underneath the duvet on the bed in the master bedroom and -- in lumplike form -- was hiding there. Slowly, over the course of hours, we finally coaxed him out. Perhaps he was filled with scared memories of the recent move, and of riding in a moving car for two days, or perhaps he just got frightened because his newly secure world in my home was suddenly disrupted again -- whatever the cause, he was terrified. But he came out, finally, and made friends. Perhaps because we were in the living room sipping wine for hours, and laughing and chatting together like family do.

For whatever reason, it's gotten me thinking about language. Perhaps it's the Carolina factor, or the introduction of the new and the strange to a little fellow who did not expect them. Regardless, I'm chuckling at it now, before I go burrow under that same duvet myself. Chuckling at how my 5-year-old nephew sternly corrected me for calling a "torch" a flashlight, or how he broke out in peals of laughter when I declared that I "can't find my pants" one morning at his mother's (my sister's) home. How "brilliant!" is such a multifaceted expression in England and Australia, meaning everything from surprise and joy to irony and disgust.

But mostly just happy that there's black cat flying around the house, a sleepy girl under that duvet, my sister in town, the downtime to think about ridiculous things, and a few days of sunlight in the forecast. What a big change from a couple of years ago!

Late Friday Night

Plans

Getting ready for a mountain rescue team meeting tonight, after a fruitless day of beating on an experiment that just would NOT cooperate.  Fiddle fiddle, start it up, watch it run for 30 minutes, and then die.  Fiddle fiddle fiddle, restart it, watch it run for 45 minutes and then die.  Gack.  Eventually this thing has to run for eight hours!  I really just want to drink beer and watch movies, not go to a team meeting and training.

But on that note, I have been far too removed from the mountains (as I've already noted) and from community service in the form of mountain rescue for far too long.  This will be the first training that I have been to in months, and I haven't been on a rescue in far longer.  Teams like this are like platoons of soldiers -- if you're not there, taking part all the time, you're an outsider.   So, time to get back into the thick of it before the summer season comes back around before everyone forgets who I am.

After that, I'll come home, plant a smooch on Laura, crack open a bomber, light a fire, and chill out with something ridiculous on TV, and try to forget that tomorrow I will be banging my head into a bloody pulp from frustration with this stupid pile of electronics and cables again.  Which doesn't actually matter, anyway.

Besides, soon I'll be skiing.  Damn, I love me some snow and steeps!  It's always easy to get sucked into meaningless drivel and routine, so it is important to do something every week to break the routine and reestablish that connection with life that we all know that we have.  Today, this week: get back into the rescue group, and learn about those last three heinous missions.  Next week: load up the skis and hit the slopes that I haven't been on for over two years.  The week after that?  Who knows.  Maybe sex on a fauxfur rug in front of the fireplace.