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Travels and Images
WEEK 33 2005
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Saturday 20 August
2005
Saturday
- hiked. More on that when I can move...
Friday 19 August
2005
Friday - finished the Cook biography. Interesting. I knew how Cook died, but I didn't know that the Hawaiian's cooked and ate him. Sheesh.
Tomorrow my brother M and I hope to go hiking in the San Gabriels - specifically hike #1 in Trails of the Angeles,
from highway N2 to Liebrie Mountain, 3.5 miles with 1700 elevation
change, but supposedly well shaded. That's not far, but the general
rule of thumb is that 1000' change of elevation is equal to a mile
added to a hike, so that means 5.2 miles. About as far, one way, as my
morning walk. It should be interesting!
Phoebe.
Thursday 18 August 2005
Thursday
- reading Farther Than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook.
Obviously it's a biography of Captain Cook - not a scholarly tome,
there being no footnotes or even a bibliography, and the author
"imagines" what it is like to be Cook in various situations.
Interesting, nonetheless.
And it also sheds some light on Joseph Banks - light that was not
present in O'Brian's biography, and not a not very flattering light at
that.
Cook was also an INTJ. Heh.
Wednesday 17 August 2005
Wednesday - working away on things.
With regards to the Meyers-Brigg personality quiz, it seems that Severus Snape
is also an INTJ. And, actually, I do find him the most interesting
character in the Harry Potter universe. Is he a double agent as
Dumbledore believes, or a triple agent as Harry fears?
The Harry Potter Universe - the Potterverse?
In lieu of anything creative, some of the books I've read this year and mentioned on the blog:
I probably read about twice this number of books, but most weren't worth reporting on.
Tuesday 16 August
2005
Tuesday - I think I've written before on
Bull Halsey and the "Halsey: Savior or Sucker" controversy, and came down on the his
side, but suspected that the US Navy itself was not quite as impressed.
But here is an interesting turn of events: a new Arleigh Burke class
destroyer, the USS Halsey DDG-51
commissioned a few weekends ago (I'd have gone if I knew about it!). So,
perhaps his reputation is being rehabilitated a bit? Halsey was, I
think, originally a tin can sailor.
Looks like there was also a Tall Ships visit coming to San Diego. Cool.
From my brothers' email about the Milwaukee:
Got back up to Humboldt for a few days and
managed to find the wreck site and take some pictures, right near the old pulp
mill where it has always been. It was foggy and gloomy this day--much like the
night when she first ran aground and it took me awhile, and walking, to
find it. These were taken a few hours after low tide so some of the wreckage may
have been submerged. At any rate there's not much left above water, and I read
that some of the wreckage was retrieved during the eighties and is now in the
Humboldt Maritime museum.
and from me, to him:
Awesome. I spent quite a while at google earth trying to make her out
on the pic, to no luck. Wasn't quite sure where she'd be, and it could
have been high tide i guess...
to which he replied:
...if it hadn't been so foggy I would have gotten a firm landmark--there
are lots in the area. Unfortunately, visibility was so poor I could only
barely see out to the Navy Base road and all the good landmarks are on the other side. The best I could tell you is its somewhere between the smaller pulp mill by Bay St and a large white 'water tank' up off the main road.
Monday 15 August 2005
Monday - there were a lot of storms
blowing through the AV last night. Thunder, lightning, rain. It had
started by late evening, 10:00 PM or so, and was still going on at 3
AM. The UPS have performed magnificently - apart from one long power
outage of over half an hour on Saturday they have kept the
computers up and running their jobs.
Destroying a technical library at NASA. Just about criminal, in my view. Not the first time this kind of thing has happened though.
"I am paid partly in money, partly in flounder, so that Beaufort is again for me something like heaven."
What a line. What a life. Coasting down the Atlantic Seaboard on an old Cape Dory 25.
The USS Milwaukee aground at Samoa Beach, in 1917, but with steam still up.
(The original, at the web site below, is bigger and sharper!)
Sunday 14 August
2005
Sunday - I didn't do a lot, actually.
Thought about going for a hike in the mountains, but it was too late by
the time I got organized. Maybe next weekend.
Somewhere, on a blog that I couldn't register to comment on for some
unknown reason, there was a question on the efficacy of savings, over
very long periods of time, should life extension protocols actually be
found that work. Someone even used a quote from the The Notebooks of Lazarus Long:
$100
placed at 7 percent interest compounded quarterly for 200 years will
increase to more that $100,000,000 - by which time it will be worth
nothing.
Actually, someone has already tried this: Benjamin Franklin.
In 1790 he left in his will 1,000 pounds or about $4000 (I understand
that dollars didn't replace pounds sterling everywhere until roughly
1792) - a goodly sum in that day - and gave directions on it's
investment, for the next 100 years. Despite various setbacks and
changes in investment over that time the money grew to be more than $5,000,000 by 1990 - substantial increases on the principal, even when inflation is factored in. It actually works out to about 4% compound interest.
So, why would Heinlein have Lazarus, an immortal, say such a thing?
Well, it's clear from the books that Woodrow Wilson Smith, aka Lazarus
Long, was a bit of a rogue. One can imagine him on some distant
frontier planet, trying to coerce some earnest young and upright rube
into
joining a card game. It's payday, the boy's flush but he's on his way
to the bank to save that money, mindful of what his mother told him.
He's stopped for a sarsaparilla, and Lazarus has a chair open at his
table in the back of the saloon...
