JayB

Hahaha. My, my, my. This thread is full of surprises, isn't it. Next we'll see the evil homonym chiming in with his own riposte. Moderately more clever, but very un-Zen of you, nonetheless, comrade. I think that both the hourly pay and the hours during the average residency are such that most prostitutes might well decline the opportunity to trade places, so perhaps she would be less insulted by the comparison than you think.

Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. I think you could have made whatever point you set out to make with touch more class. If you can't make the point without insulting someone's wife, even if the insult is rather tangential to some other point that you are trying to drive home, then you lack both class and imagination IMO. I don't necessarily think that you lack either, which is why I don't quite understand why you chose that tack.

C'mon dude. Talking shit about each other and calling each other names is all well and good, but even in the midst of this free-for-all, most folks draw the line somewhere, and that's line is usually drawn a ways short of baiting someone by insulting wives, kids, etc - who have neither entered the fray nor deserve to be interjected into it. I know what you are doing, and I suspect that Fairweather won't take the bait, but this was uncalled for and I plan to lobby behind the scenes to enforce the "no spouse and family" rule in here. Doesn't seem like too much to ask of everyone.

That's a good question. I'd think that at the very minimum the UW climbing club and the Mountaineers and the Washington Climber's Coalition - and perhaps even the Access Fund - could submit statements on behalf of the rock. I think that a well-constructed letter from an organization would go a long way towards enhancing the legitimacy of the arguments put forward by individual citizens. This is something that could be done fairly quickly as a first stage, and then perhaps we - in the royal sense - could get an advisory comittee together to stay on top of the project and provide input. I realize that I am pretty much volunteering other people for this, but there's not much I can do in person seeing as I am only halfway through the three-year sentence that I'm serving on the East Coast. Even if the organizations don't get involved in this one, it seems as though there's enough concerned folks chiming in on this thread to get some kind of a group together to tackle this. I'll send some money and write some letters. If anyone has a copy of Erik Wolfe's guide to UW rock, there's some good historical information in the intro that could be integrated into a statement that explains the rock's significance and why it should be formally addressed in the off-ramp planning and construction. T

Hell - if we really get organized maybe we could lobby them to make the sound wall a climbable structure on the side that faces the UW wall. If they're going with the conventional tilt-up construction all that they'd have to differently is lay down a bunch of small stones before they poured the slabs. Just imagine the mega-traverse you could develop on that sucker.

I have zero technical insight into how this stuff works, but I have seen a bunch of blogs where the link to an external video actually plays in the same window where the link is displayed, and the "link" that you click on is an image which shows the first frame of the video file that's stored at GoogleVideo or Youtube. Is this kind of what you guys were thinking of or did you have something else in mind? I think that they do something like this with the video content that they post at www.oregonkayaking.net and it's pretty dope.

I think that you and Jon are both right. I think they'll pay more attention to what we have to say if it's clear that we actually know what we are talking about, and if it's does look like the ramps would hose the rock, the best course of action would be to persuade them to move the structure, rather than trying to get them to radically alter a project of this size, scale, and importance that they've already sunk quite a bit of time and money into planning. I'm in the middle of what's going to be a long and busy day. Maybe someone with a day-off or otherwise endowed with some free time could try to get a definitive answer to the first question and we can take it from there.

I'm less attached to the location than I am to the rock itself, so a compromise solution that would provide for moving the rock to a new location nearby would be fine with me. On a project of this size and scale, the cost associated with dismantling the structure and moving it somewhere else would be pretty trivial. Even if they could only save the poured slabs, and subsequently re-arranged them in something close to the original layout that would be infinitely better than losing the structure entirely.

Wow. I didn't realize that things were so far along. Hey Ziggy: I'm thinking that a posting a notice about this on the message board at REI, FF, and the local climbing gyms would be a great way to get the word out. I'd do it but I'm 3,000 miles away at the moment. Even though the UW rock might theoretically be "competition" for the gyms, I can't imagine that they'd really object, and if they do you can mention the fact that quite a few folks that start out by clambering around on the rock in tennis shoes turn into dues-paying gym members. Gary - has the UW climbing club taken a position one way or another on this one? If I recall the history of the rock correctly, a major part of the impetus for building the rock came when UW students/faculty died in a climbing accident, and people made the argument that building a convenient training ground would help save lives. The argument may be a stretch, but it should be pretty easy to make a case for the historic significance of the rock to UW and at the very least get climbers who work or study at UW involved in some fashion.

Not sure if it's technically feasible but...what about adding some tags that make it easy to hotlink video from Google Video or Youtube so that the video plays inside the BB? Might be a cool way for people to incorporate video/audio/slideshow type stuff into their TRs or posts, without cc.com having to host the files. Could be a good way to inject some more homegrown stoke into the freshiezone.

Thanks for the rec. Sounds like it has some cool features, but how has it been in terms of reliability? Online-review forums might self-select against people who are neutral, but even allowing for that, there seem to be a lot of folks who have had some trouble with the program chiming in here: http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/001454.html

Hey: Thanks for the input. I tried using the Windows Movie Maker software but for whatever reason just about ended up pulling my hair out trying to use the thing just to crop/splice video segments together, but maybe the defect is with me and not with the software. While I was looking into this, I discovered a hack that will give you pretty much unlimited control over playback speed using Quicktime Pro. 1. Open the source video that you want to work with. 2. Use the cropping tool to define the length of video that you want to speed up or slow down and note how long the segment that you've defined takes to playback. 3. Use a sound editing program like "Audacity" (free on the web) to create an empty/silent sound file and save it in a format that will work with Quicktime. If you want to playback the video clip that you've selected at one half speed, create a sound file that's twice as long as the video segment. If you want to create a fast-forward effect and play the video back twice as fast, create a sound file that's one half the length of your video clip. 4. Open the sound file in Quicktime Pro. 5. Copy the segment of video that you want to speed up or slow down and paste it into the empty sound file using the "Paste and Scale to feature" command in the edit menu. Adds a lot of function to a $30 editing program.

There must be some other folks out there who shoot their own video and edit it on their computers - so this is probably as good a place as any on the site to ask if anyone has found a decent video editing package out there for a reasonable price. I'm using QuicktimePro at the moment, and it's easy enough to cut and paste clips, and add sound, but I'd like to find something that's just as intuitive, but has a few more features. Another problem is that in order to use the program I have to convert the files from the format that the camera records them (.asf) in to the .mov format, whichy takes about 10 seconds per second of video on our computer (1.66GHz or thereabouts), then I do the editing in QuicktimePro, then if I want to share the video I have to run the thing through the file converter again and change the output file to something that'll reduce the size and be compatible with most media players. Surely there's a program out there that will let you do all of these things to the video files, and let you do some other stuff like adjust the color balance, slow-mow, rewind, add/remove sound tracks, add titles, etc. Chime in if you've got something that you like that'll do some of this stuff and is relatively easy to use and (big if) doesn't cost a fortune.

Depends on the fabric. Stuff made out of WB-400 seems like the perfect compromise between shedding snow/water/wind and breathability. I ordered some pants made out of the stuff from Beyond Fleece, and love them. I wouldn't get the WB-400 for cardio-intensive stuff that's mostly below treeline, but a jacket made of the stuff (with a hood) would be just about perfect for full winter conditions, and if you threw in a superlight shell for the times when you were stopped you'd be set to handle a pretty wide range of conditions. Worth every penny IMO. Works great - and lasts forever. Most of my softshell stuff is going on season 8, and it's almost as good as new. If I was in a financial position where I could only afford Salvation Army stuff, I have no idea how I'd have been able to buy the ropes, cams, tools, etc - much less pay the routine costs associated with driving to the mountains. The (increased comfort*number of outings/years of use) equation is such that you either have to be destitute or very, very intent on making a point to go the Salvation Army route. I buy at least half of all of my clothes at thrift stores because I could care less how a pair of jeans or everyday shoes performs, but I've never regretted making an investment in good gear.

I like Colorado too. I especially loved the Platte and the Sangre's. He also has a special message for kayakers: "I just am not a boater, I guess, I like being lean and athletic and somewhat pleasing to the opposite sex, and the water sport enthusiasts I have met seem to be aimless fatboys who use gravity rather than fight it. I have a hard time hanging out with them." Blasphemy. Blasphemy I say!!!! From what I've seen there's actually a fair number of boaters who climb and vice versa. Take our very own Jarred Jackman, for example: The lip The Drop http://riverlog.blogspot.com/

"The Commanding Heights" Global Econo Stuff "The Smartest Guys in the Room," Enron Story "Triumph of the Geeks" (or something like that) Story Behind PC Revolution. Lots of shorter stuff at Nova.com or Frontline.com

Maybe even a decrease if the predictions about Japan and Euroland are correct.

I think I argued against the energy-security claim elsewhere so you'll have to use the search bar for a response to that one. I think that your engineering background is getting the best of you with respect to the relationship between financial inputs and tangible outputs at the leading edge of science. The relationship between scientific discoveries and financial incentives is tenuous at best, and I can't think of very significant discoveries that were inspired by the desire for financial gain at all, actually. The usual model is someone makes a discovery, and sometime later someone actually finds a use for it and there's a financial reward involved. There are problems out there that you could literally throw all of the money in the world at and get nowhere because the critical discoveries just haven't been made. I'm not sure where things stand with regards to most renewables, but something tells me its not just a lack of funds holding them back at this point.

If one's objective is to contrive utopias then I don't see why one should limit the expenditures to the amount spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, nor limit the objectives to alternative fuels. There's also an assumption at work here that the productivity of research is infinitely scalable, which is also a dubious assumption. Some problems are amenable to brute force approaches and the results are directly proportional to the funds invested in the efforts, but this is more common in cases where the science is essentially complete and the problem is one of engineering rather than discovery. I'm not sure that a shortage of investment in engineering is all that stands between the world and economical, renewable replacements for fossil fuels at the moment.

One argument is that money being spent on Iraq wouldn't necessarily be spent by the government at all, and if it was, the overwhelming majority of it would probably go towards non-discretionary spending. The second argument is that if there's any correlation to be found between millitary expenditures and innovation, it's probably not especially tight, and it's certainly not always negative. Both of which are arguments against the notion that if the US hadn't spent a dime prosecuting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that it would somehow herald an era of unprecedented investment in research and promote an outburst of innovation. The absence of spending on Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, and on millitary spending in general in the rest of the world has yet to produce such a result, in the present or at any particular time in the past. Germany is a case in point. Nowhere in my statements is there anything that suggests that Germany is an insignificant player, but the fact is that its significance as a driver of innovation has waxed and waned quite a bit over the course of the last century and a half, and there hasn't been a tidy linkage between millitary expenditures and the relative significance of its scientific and technological contributions. The Cambridge biotech scene is another story that it would be tough to explain with a single variable.

Yeah - they were spending a lot and building a lot, but a considerable number of their top scientists were also fleeing the country for some reason or another. They were spending the scientific capital that they'd accumulated over the previous 70 years or so, and I'd be willing to wager that had their country prevailed in WWII, their relative decline as a scientific power would have accelerated for a number of reasons. I think that you'd also have to credit at least part of the German edge in arms to the fact that they had dedicated themselves to these efforts quite a bit more intensely than their opponents prior to the onset of the war. Still not sure how any of this supports the thesis that you are offering oblique, piecemeal support of.

No, I'd expect Japan to be the clear leader - constitutionally obligated to pacifism - minimal overseas military presence. And guess what? They are. If there was a clear inverse correlation between these two variables, then the US would rank next to last, which isn't the case. The case of Europe and Japan is interesting. Japan was essentially a scientific backwater before WWII, while Europe was the clear epicenter. Both were devastated in WWII, but Japan's relative significance as a driver of innovation and scientific research has increased significantly relative to the rest of the world since WWII, and Europe has undergone a significant relative decline, despite the two having roughly comparable levels of defense spending which are much lower than the USA's. If there's a clear negative link between defense spending and innovation, there's none evident in any of your arguments thus far. Consider the case of Germany. Between about 1860 and 1910, Germany became the world's leading scientific power, at the same time that it was ramping up its spending on armaments. Clear link? Not really if you consider what happened to German scientific output during the next interval of heavy investment in arms during the 20th century. Clearly there's a bit more to the story than defense spending as a percentage of GDP.

Yes, I find JayB's continued insistence that Europe is a monolith devoid of invention, innovation and science compared to the rest of the world because of their draconian taxation and social practices terribly amusing, not to mention counter to fact. As for "trajectory" one need only compare Europe relative to S. America and Africa to see who the real losers have been in the last 6 decades. If the claim that there was an explicit tradeoff between millitary expenditures and research and innovation was valid, you'd expect Europe to be the clear global leader in this regard, with it's lead over the US increasing every year in direct proportion to the gap between the percent of GDP that the US dedicates to millitary spending, and the percentage of GDP that Europe dedicates to millitary spending. This just hasn't happened, so I think the fact that if anything, the relative contributions of Europeans to scientific discoveries and commercial innovation has declined since they became de-facto protectorates of the US suggests that the connection between millitary spending and innovation is not a direct or simple one, and depends on quite a few other variables that are at play in any given society. I do think that Europe has deep structural problems that have contributed to it's decline as a driver of innovation relative to the rest of the world, and that those will become even more accute in the next 20-30 years, but that's a topic for another thread.

WWII or Iraq - in either case, I'm not sure that the assumption that moneys spent on either would necessarily be raised by the government had the millitary action not occured, and it's even less likely that had an equivalent amount of money been spent, that it would be spent on programs that are essentially discretionary. Is there any evidence of a correlation between millitary spending and innovation, or a lack thereof? I'm certainly not aware of any. I won't have time to dig it up today, but the data I've seen does support a fairly clear link between more mundane "retail" level issues that government has a role in, like the amount of time it takes to get a permit to open a business, the clarity and enforceability of patent law, etc. There's also a pretty clear link between the quality and quantity of a nation's research institutions and innovation, which does tie into government spending and funding priorities, but the US has managed to do reasonably well in this area as well, despite the magnitude of our millitary spending. Another important factor in fostering innovation is an ability to attract and retain the best minds, and now that talented people in China and India can pursue careers in their own countries, our capabilities in this area might take a serious hit. In short, I don't think it's as simple as "No Millitary Spending = Outburst of Innovation," and all you need to verify that is to look at the trajectory of European science relative to the rest of the world since WWII.