JayB

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.

We're counting on Europe and Canada. They have a fraction of our millitary spending, and look at all of the world-changing innovation and high quality research that they crank out every year. The fundamental problem with the set of assumptions that you bring to this hypothetical is that you are assuming that crisis-spending would occur in the absence of the said crisis. I don't see any evidence that this assumption is correct.

Gosh. I don't blame you for not reading through my long-winded post in its entirety, but the overall point was that not everyone who attacks millitary targets should automatically be classified as "Freedom Fighters," for a number of reasons, some of which I'll restate in a somewhat less long-winded post. For one, you are assuming that there's a clearcut distinction between the guys blowing up the supermarkets and the guys attacking our forces, and I'd wager that theres no clean divide between the two. Secondly, you have to look at the ends that they are hoping to achieve with their violence, some of which include some vaguely nationalist sentiment, but none of them seems to be shooting for anything like personal or political freedoms. If anything, they're trying to dismantle them in favor of a return to a totalitarian state or the adoption of sharia law or some combination of both. Then there's also the fact that there is/was a political process that they could have availed themselves of if they wished to persuade their countrymen to adopt their agenda, which they made a conspicuous point of not doing, probably because they reasoned correctly that they'd have it rejected out of hand, and so they are trying to bridge the gap between their vision and what the public will willingly accept by violent means. On this and many other counts, these guys are anything but freedom fighters, and the fact that so many folks in the west think otherwise is something that I have a hard time understanding.

But one man's freedom fighter can become the same man's terrorist...the Afghan freedom fighters, for example, that later morphed into Al Qaeda using the skills that we taught them. We should be very careful what we teach rough characters to do in this world. They don't always stay on your side. Ya well one could probably argue the same thing about veterans of the Revolutionary War turning the skills that they picked up while fighting the British against the new government that supplanted it, and that Washington, Adams, et. al should have forseen this and forgone the whole affair. Ditto for arming the Russians while they were fighting the Germans, etc. Back when the US was funding the Afghans, anyone who suggested that less than 10 years hence the Soviet Union would implode and the ragtag band of fanatics sporting the beards and turbans would surpass the Soviets as a strategic threat in another 10 years hence would have found everyone within earshot doubled over with teary-eyed laughter. This notion that somehow leaders who are confronted with a grave, immediate, and obvious threat should somehow forsee one of the millions of unintended consequences that could potentially result from their actions and at some random point in the future and let these considerations fundamentally alter the manner in which they address the threat in front of them doesn't seem like a terribly wise or viable way of confronting threats. If I'm a doctor and there's a massive ebola-esque plague errupting somewhere within our borders and I've got a pill that will neutralize it, I imagine that concerns that it might potentially lead to an increased probability of cancer in some people some years down the road. Of course, if everyone dies from the plague, that'd be one way of keeping those cancer stats in check.

Signed up for the Institute for Creation Reasearch's newsletter yet? http://www.iraqbodycount.org/press/pr14.php "Iraq Body Count Press Release 16 October 2006 Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates."

Well if those are the facts, and you had actually read what I wrote then you'd know that I'd have no problem labeling the guy as a terrorist and having his ass deported to wherever.

Hahah. Brayshaw, putting the WACK in Chilliwack.

Hey - it's the "I'm losing both the argument in one thread so I'll restate it somewhere else" tactic. Neat. The absolutist statements that you were spewing out before you ran away to another thread have way more in common with the "It's in the bible therefore I believe it" perspective that you are referring to than anything that I've articulated. Only people that live in some kind of a cloistered dreamworld or refuse to acknowledge the kind of moral complexity that one normally encounters in the real world, beyond the age of twelve, could possibly hang onto the kind of perspective that you bring to pretty much any political realities that get discussed here from time to time. Don't you have Cuban "not terrorists" to coddle? I don't actually know what you are talking about, but it must have something to do with someone in the Cuban emigre community using violence against the Cuban regime in some fashion or another. I've always thought that the glib "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." statement is a transparent crock of shit, and one could just as easily and logically say that "One man's romantic is another man's rapist," "One man's cannibal is another man's gourmand" or any number of other statements that conflate two things that share certain components but are moral opposites of one another. When determining whether a not a person qualifies as a terrorist or a freedom fighter you have to asses several characteristics. Is their intention to deliberately kill as many civilians as possible as a means of futhering their objectives? Does the society that they wish to create by means of violence one that bears any resemblance to anything that resembles a free society, or is what they are fighing to impose its antithesis? Is the reason that they are resorting to violence to fill the gap between their ambitions and what the public will accept without violent compulsion? Do they recognize that the public will reject their vision and the arguments they used to support it if they were forced to use dialogue to persuade them instead of violence? Are there political means available to them that do not require violence in order to bring about political change? Does the society that they are attacking permit vastly more political freedoms than the society that the "freedom fighters" aspire to create? In just about every case, the answer to most, if not all of these questions is not one that comports with the "Freedom Fighter" label that gets applied to most terrorists movements or insurrections. Since Cuba is a politically repressive state where the people neither enjoy political freedoms nor have any means to bring about change through their political system and most of the people who want to see the regime overthrown have ambitions of creating a society with vastly more political and personal freedoms than the population currently enjoys, I'd give anyone who attacked the regime on behalf of these causes more leeway than someone who attacked, say, the Dutch government on pursuit of the same grounds. However, since the "terrorist or freedom fighter" question also involves asking whether or not there's any way to bring about the changes they desire without violence, attacking the Cuban government would fail on that front, and anyone who deliberately attacks civilians to achieve their political ends categorically falls into the former category. So - if the people you were talking about were out to down a planeload of Cuban citizens, then they'd fall into the "terrorist" category. If they were involved in a plot to assasinate Fidel or Raul in some fashion or another that didn't involve targeting civilians, I'd put them into the "Freedom Fighter" category, as the unelected heads of totalitarian/police states are fair game IMO.

Just for the record, I don't like you either, but on the off chance that you were singling me out for censure on account of the fact that I should hold myself to higher standards in the forums where I'm a moderator, and not because of previous beefs or a general disdain for me for some other reason, I'll admit that you have a point. Given the nature of the topic, I should have ignored this statement: " You mean by moral relativism, that when Chinese soldiers kill an unamed Tibetan refugee, it's wrong because the Chinese are "bad guys" but when US soldiers kill an unarmed Iraqi, it's OK because the US soldiers are "good guys"? That kind of moral relativism?" And moved on. I didn't watch the footage. If I had, perhaps I would have conducted myself differently, and I'll admit that I should have. Regards,