Mt. Lassen

The morning sun woke us from our sleep of recovery, at about 5:30 am. We had nothing around for breakfast except dried fruit and nuts, so we ate a few handfuls of that and washed it down with a cup of tea. By 6:30 we were on the road, headed for the south entrance to Mt. Lassen National Park...

Nobody was at the guard post when we got there (at just after 7 am), so we self registered using my fathers "Golden Age Passport", which gives our vehicle free admission. As we drove the first few miles into the park, we saw a few flowers, but not very many. Some hellebore plants were just poking up through the mud, which means that the snow melted only a few days before. There were a few shooting stars in wet spots, some western bleeding hearts generally nearby, some very nice crimson Indian paintbrush, and a couple of yellow flowering plants that we don't know. But in general the flowers were sparse, and except for a couple of places I'll mention later, it continued this way all day. The weather could hardly have been better -- clear skies, temperatures in the 60s and 70s...

Not far into the park is a place where an old sulphur works used to mine the sulphur brought to the surface by the boiling springs, steam vents, and boiling mudpots that surround it. Right alongside the road is a very entertaining boiling mudpot, roughly five feet in diameter. The boiling mud surface is out of sight, but not out of hearing -- loud noises emanated from it constantly, sound much like some giant beast was struggling mightly to escape. Every thirty seconds or so, some blobs of boiling hot mud would come flying out of the mudpot into sight, landing on the surrounding soil and building up a rim around the mudpot as it dries. Every few minutes a particularly large blob came flying out -- including, one time, a blob containing roughly a cubic foot of gloppy hot mud. And sometimes these blobs would be thrown extra far -- on the sidewalk that is closest to this mudpot, you can see the dried residue from many such past splats. The smell from the mudpots and the more common steamvents is an evil, sulphurous conconction; so intense that it almost seems to have a physical texture.

After leaving the sulphur works, we took a very leisurely drive up to the summit, enjoying the spectacular scenery, the snow, the frozen lakes with blue ice, and the crazy people who were just starting the climb to Lassen Peak (almost 2,000 feet above the trailhead). The Bumpass Hell trail was closed; many feet of snow remain on it. Then we continued on to the King's Creek trailhead, where many years ago Debbie and I enjoyed a beautiful hike. We actually couldn't make the entire drive to the trailhead; snow blocked the road. But we did get down to the bridge over the creek, and that area was quite pretty. There were pussywillows in seed right near the bridge, dwarf mountain laurel in bloom in the meadow, and quite a few shooting stars. I found two blue hyacinths right at the water's edge, just past prime. We walked a loop around a section of creek, perhaps a half mile in all, with the whole way through an area full of springtime life and vigor. There was a large Ponderosa pine, about five feet in diameter, that had fallen across the creek to make a good bridge -- I didn't want to walk through that ice cold water! The water itself was as clear as lead crystal; not full of milt at all as snowmelt runoff often is.

Then we continued our drive, traveling counter-clockwise around Mt. Lassen until we got to the western entrance. The entire north side of the mountain is quite different than the south side -- much drier, and subjected to eruption effects within the past 100 years. About the only interesting thing we ran into on this portion of our trip was the red flower stalk of a fungus -- very weird looking, and quite common. We turned around just outside the western entrance and zoomed it back to the eastern-most part of the summit road, and stopped at the trailhead for the Chain of Lakes trail. We walked this about a half mile to the first lake (Summit Lake), and just goofed around on the shore there, relaxing. This was a quite a beautiful spot; a small lake (perhaps a quarter mile in diameter), wind blowing straight toward us making gentle wavelets that crashed in front of us, flowers and greenery all around the lake, and very peaceful. We watched a chipmunk gathering dried grasses just ten feet or so from us; he was very obviously not intimidated by us. One interesting thing we saw along this trail was a number of dead and decomposing Ponderosa pines. Some (but not all of them) decompose in a peculiarly regular fashion, leaving cubic chunks of dry wood as the detritus. These cubes were roughly a quarter inch to a half inch on a side, and far more regular in shape and size than you'd expect from the results of decomposition. We don't even have any speculations about how this might happen. By the end of this walk, my father was stumbly tired, so we called a halt to walks for the day...

We headed back down to the south entrance, and down until we got to about 6,000 feet of altitude. At that point there was a nice dirt road heading westward and down, and we decided to try it, to see of we could find any more concentrated wildflowers. We failed on that objective, but we did run into something Debbie and I saw once, years ago, in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho: a muddy section of the dirt road that was attracting large numbers of butterflies and moths. I speculate that they are there for some mineral in the water, but that is purely speculation.

Finally we were done for the day, and we headed downhill and southeast to the town of Chester, on Lake Almanor. Here we stocked up at a real grocery store, where I was helped by some very friendly locals -- reminded me of the folks at home in Jamul and Lawson Valley. After I got my supplies, I asked a couple of employees where they'd go in town to get a nice meal. One of them said "Susanville" (30 miles or so to the east) and the other said "Red Bluff" (50 miles to the west). This was not encouraging. So we ended up cruising the main drag in Chester, scoping out all the eateries. There were only about three that were open, and one of them had four cars in front of it (the others had either one or none) -- so we chose it. The Kopper Kettle Kafe turned out to be a good choice -- we had a decent ham-and-bean soup and a great BLT with avocado; the only sour note was the potato salad, which was the standard odd-tasting stuff you'd find in a typical grocery store deli section. But the biggest and best surprise was dessert: an honest-to-goodness old-fashioned strawberry-rhubarb pie, tart, fruity, and none of that friggin' cornstarch-thickened sugar sauce. The crust was delicious, too. You could have knocked me over with a feather. The owner is a woman from somewhere in southeast Asia (judging just from her appearance), assisted by her high-school aged daughter Sonya. Both of them were a delight; attentive, good-humored, lots of genuine smiles and joshing. We enjoyed their company as much as we enjoyed the food...

And now we've journeyed back to our cabin in Mill Creek. My dad is taking a shower as I write this, and I believe he'll go straight to bed, as he's quite tired. I'm going to stay up for a little while to review and process the photos I took today, and hopefully I'll be able to post some of them with this screed...

On The Road!

When we arrived in Mineral, just a few miles from our cabin in Mills Creek, we discovered something quite unexpected: a little store that sells broadband Internet access by the hour. So...it looks like I may be able to do some trip-blogging after all...

Today was "travel day" -- we left Jamul at about 5 am, and just zoomed straight up I-5 until we got to Red Bluff (between Sacremento and Redding). We had good luck with the traffic -- no clogs in all the usual places like Los Angeles or Sacremento. The only obstacles we ran into were a couple of slow drivers and our own endurance. Our ice chest was loaded with goodies we'd bought at Trader Joe's the previous day, so aside from one stop at a Starbucks to stoke up on caffeine, the only stops we made were at rest areas and gas stations. I used a total of about $150 in gasoline to end up here with a full tank -- expensive, but still less expensive than flying to somewhere nearby and renting a car (especially a 4 wheel drive car!).

In total, the trip was 697 miles, and we were at our cabin in Mill Creek at about 4:15 pm. That means we averaged over 63 miles per hour for the trip -- darned good time! We did have one misadventure on the way up, though. At one point just north of the Grapevine my father turned around in his seat to fetch his jacket, where he keeps his hearing aid container; he wanted to take his hearing aids off and put them away. While he was doing this, a police car followed closely behind us, and finally pulled us over. The police officer had spotted the fact that my dad wasn't wearing his seat belt, and she wrote him a ticket! We were only pulled over for a few minutes, and she was quite polite (though insistent) about it, but my dad was quite flustered by the whole experience. Personally, I object to the entire nanny-state notion of government enforcement of my behavior (when it doesn't harm anyone else), and I think this incident in particular was absurd. But...the affair wasn't of the police officer's making; she was just doing her job. And in general, I don't think that sassing police officers is a particuarly smart idea, nor is it likely to result in positive outcomes...

When we arrive at the Mill Creek Resort, where we are spending the next week, we were very pleasantly surprised by how well-equipped the cabin was. We've never been to this place before, but hard past experience tells us that you just never know what you're going to run into -- the description on the web site (or the one you're given over the telephone) often doesn't match the reality you discover when you check in. Here all the surprises have been on the good side, at least so far. The cabin is quite large, with two bedrooms, a full bathroom, a kitchen, and a small "living room" with a big fireplace. It is neat and clean, though a few minor things are in disrepair. There are at least two cords of wood piled in front of the cabin. The kitchen has a full-sized refrigerator, a normal stove, a microwave, and even a toaster oven -- along with a table and chairs. It's not a cozy, romantic getaway -- but it is a very comfortable "home base" away from home. We're pleased!

After we unpacked the truck, we drove a few miles off and stopped at a few places to look around in the forest we're in. It's a diverse conifer forest, with very abundant cedar, Ponderosa pine, several other pine species, and at least two firs. The understory is full of unfamiliar plants that even my dad couldn't identify, but there are some old familiar plants as well -- maples and oaks are very common, as is dogwood. We spotted a few flowers: Indian paintbrush, some nearly-gone lupine, forget-me-nots, and a small pale violet flower that neither of us knew. In general, though, at this altitude (about 4,500 feet), we're too late for the flowers. We found out later that they've been snow-free at this altitude since mid-March -- so the flowers we're looking for will be at a higher altitude. That will be tomorrow's quest...

The Mill Creek Resort has a small restaurant, with a limited menu and hours. We ate dinner there tonight, and in general the food was quite good, simple, home-style fare. We had a nice dinner salad and fried chicken. My dad was hungry, and (in addition!) had a bowl of beef stew and a chocolate ice cream soda! Not a gourmet dinner, but perfectly good, solid food; both of us are sated. But we are also quite tired, and after a shower, we're hitting the sack!

Blog Hiatus

Blogging here will be very limited -- possibly even non-existent -- between now and Monday, June 11. Your blogger and his father will be on vacation in and near Mt. Lassen National Park, in search of wildflowers. We got good news a couple of days ago: the road through the park has been plowed, so all areas are accessible.

The reason for the uncertainty? The area where we're traveling to just barely has telephones, and those few can't be used for computer access. There's a rumor of WiFi access in a town we'll most likely visit a few times, but it's just a rumor. So we just don't know!

Credit Where Credit Is Due

A few days ago, I whined about the "rate-limiting" that prevented me from importing my old blog posts into the new Blogger-powered blog. The basic problem was that I needed to import well over 1,000 old posts, and Blogger was limiting me to just 50 posts a day. I wrote to Google, hoping for some kind of solution.

Well, today the folks at Blogger came through -- they changed the limit for my blog from 50 posts/day to 500 posts/day. At this rate, I'll have them all imported within just a few days. It's a perfectly good solution, and one that I'm quite happy with. If you look in the "Archives" section at right, you'll see that I've now got about half my old posts imported -- just a couple more batches and I'll have them all!

Considering that Blogger is a free service, this is outstanding customer service -- not instantaneous, but plenty fast enough; polite and cheerful; and best of all -- effective!

I am impressed, Googloids. And thank you!

Pecans in the Cemetary

Tip o'the hat to Marsha Y.:

On the outskirts of a small town, there was a big, old Pecan tree just inside the cemetery fence. One day, two boys filled up a bucketful of nuts and sat down by the tree, out of sight, and began dividing the nuts. "One for you, one for me. One for you, one for me," said one boy. Several dropped and rolled down toward the fence.

Another boy came riding along the road on his bicycle. As he passed, he thought he heard voices from inside the cemetery. He slowed down to investigate. Sure enough, heard, "One for you, one for me. One for you, one for me."

He just knew what it was. He jumped back on his bike and rode off. Just around the bend, he met an old man with a cane, hobbling along. "Come here quick," said the boy, "you won't believe what I heard! Satan and the Lord are down at the cemetery dividing up the souls." The man said, "Beat it kid, can't you see it's hard for me to walk?" When the boy insisted though, the man hobbled slowly to the cemetery.

Standing by the fence they heard, "One for you, one for me, one for you, one for me..." The old man whispered, "Boy, you've been tellin' me the truth. Let's see if we can see the Lord." Shaking with fear, they peered through the fence, yet were still unable to see anything. The old man and the boy gripped the wrought iron bars of the fence tighter and tighter as they tried to get a glimpse of the Lord. At last they heard, "One for you, one for me. That's all. Now let's go get those nuts by the fence and we'll be done."

They say the old man with a cane made it back to town a full 5 minutes ahead of the kid on the bike...

Raw Temperatures

In my poking about trying to get a grip on the debate about global warming, I've tried several times to get raw temperature data. Until this morning, I've always failed -- all I've been able to find is the "adjusted" data, and the adjustment methods are opaque. I'm suspicious when I see something this; it makes me think there's something there the authors don't want me to see.

So I was delighted this morning to uncover this graph of raw temperature data -- and of California, no less! You can click on it to get a full-sized, readable view. I found it at this web site, along with this description of how the data was gathered:

Today I visited my friend Jim Goodridge, former California State Climatologist and the man with a garage full of data going back to before the Gold Rush.

He’s been quietly toiling away in his retirement on his computer for the last 15 years or so making all sort of data comparisons. He gave me two CD ROMS full of data that I’m just now wading through. One plot which he shared with me today is a 104 year plot map of California showing station trends after painstakingly hand entering data into an Excel spreadsheet and plotting slopes of the data to produce trend dots.

He used every good continuous piece of data he could get his hands on, no adjusted data like the climate miodelers use, only raw from Cooperative Observing Stations, CDF stations, Weather Service Offices’s and Municipal stations.

Nothing but the data, ma'am. Just good, clean, raw data. And it is fascinating to examine.

If you're unfamiliar with this particular method of plotting data, here's the key point: the biggest red dots represent the largest temperature increases, and the biggest blue dots represent the largest temperature decreases (both over the 104 years of data). As the author points out, there's a definite pattern there -- the red dots are clustered around major population centers (Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, etc.) and the blue dots are, well, nearly everywhere else.

One of the frequently heard claims of the global warming skeptics is that the data used by the global warming proponents is biased by the "urban island" effect -- a well-known phenomena wherein cities are warmer than their surroundings. The reasons for this are many, but they boil down to the predominance of man-made materials in a city (concrete, asphalt, etc.) over the plants (trees, grass, crops) found around them -- and where the city is, before the city was built.

It sure looks like this raw data supports that that claim. If you were to subtract the populated areas from this chart, the trend would be toward a mild cooling! This single compilation of data, however compelling, is a long way from scientifically credible proof -- but it certainly doesn't decrease my skepticism about the global warming "phenomenon"...

Scary, Scary Lady

In the text of a speech Hilary Clinton gave on Tuesday, I discovered that she said:

It's time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few and for the few, time to reject the idea of an "on your own" society and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity. I prefer a "we're all in it together" society.

Usually her socialist proclivities are hidden behind screwphemisms and other clever language. This statement lays it out in the open, though. Shared prosperity simply means forced wealth redistribution -- or, more personally (since I'm in the top 25% of wage earners), it means take money away from me, forcibly, and give it to someone else.

Socialism.

A "fact sheet" on Hilary's site is chock-a-block full of the non-facts, lies, distortions, and clever common to the liberal dialog these days. It's best viewed as propaganda (spin, if you prefer the more, er, polite term), and not as a serious piece. But it is useful for understanding how the leading Democratic candidate is posturing. And it's downright scary to someone (like me) who believes in the America our founding father's created. Hilary and her ilk would like to turn our country into something more closely resembling a European country.

If I was attracted by that, I'd move to Europe. Sure wish Hilary would!

Cognitive Bias

I'm currently reading a fascinating book (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb). One of the topics discussed in the book (though not its main focus) is the way we humans habitually misinterpret (and therefore misunderstand) the world around us. I did some poking around the web to learn more about these cognitive biases, and ran across this Wikipedia page that lists 20 or so common kinds of cognitive bias, and points to pages explaining them. I was actually looking for information on "confirmation bias", and found this example on another Wikipedia page:

Among the first to investigate this phenomenon was Peter Cathcart Wason (1960), whose subjects were presented with three numbers (a triple):

2 4 6

and told that triple conforms to a particular rule. They were then asked to discover the rule by generating their own triples and use the feedback they received from the experimenter. Every time the subject generated a triple, the experimenter would indicate whether the triple conformed to the rule (right) or not (wrong). The subjects were told that once they were sure of the correctness of their hypothesized rule, they should announce the rule.

While the actual rule was simply “any ascending sequence”, the subjects seemed to have a great deal of difficulty in inducing it, often announcing rules that were far more complex than the correct rule. More interestingly, the subjects seemed to only test “positive” examples, triples that subjects believed would conform to their rule and thus confirm their hypothesis. What the subjects did not do was attempt to falsify their hypotheses by testing triples that they believed would not conform to their rule. Wason referred to this phenomenon as the confirmation bias, whereby subjects systematically seek evidence to confirm rather than to deny their hypotheses.

It's fascinating to read about all these cognitive biases, and understanding them can (I hope!) lead to a better ability to avoid them in one's own thinking. Taleb's book provides abundant reasons for investors to avoid these biases, but it's easy to see how avoiding them would improve just about any decision making. Taleb makes an interesting point regarding these biases: that most likely they evolved because they helped humans when we were in more primitive situations -- but today, in our modern, more civilized context, they often get in the way rather than help us...

Spam King: Nailed!

This is very welcome news: Robert Soloway (aka "The Spam King") has been captured and arrested in Seattle. He's been indicted on charges of identity theft, money laundering, and mail, wire, and e-mail fraud. From the story on Yahoo! News:

Between November of 2003 and May of 2007 Soloway "spammed" tens of millions of e-mail messages to promote websites at which his company, Newport Internet Marketing, sold products and services, according to prosecutors.

Soloway routinely moved his website to different Internet addresses to dodge detection and began registering them through Chinese Internet service providers in 2006 in an apparent ploy to mask his involvement.

Spam messages sent by Soloway used misleading "header" information to dupe people into opening them, according to Sullivan.

Soloway is accused of using "botnets," networks of computers, to disguise where e-mail originated and of forging return addresses of real people or businesses that wound up blamed for unwanted mailings.

If convicted as charged, Soloway will face a maximum sentence of more than 65 years in prison and a fine of 250,000 dollars.

Prosecutors want to seize approximately 773,000 dollars they say Soloway made from his spamming-related activities.

More than 65 years. Well, if it's enough more, it might just make up for all the garbage this evil man has spewed. I can only hope that his cell mates despise spam even more than I do...

30 Years

On June 30, 2005 there was a horrific crash that killed five people and injured five more. Two of the dead were children; one was a pregnant woman. The car was full of illegal aliens being smuggled into the U.S., but nobody was chasing the car -- the driver, probably nervous and frightened, passed on a blind corner and crashed head-on into a large pickup.

The driver of that car was Fidel Wilfredo Gonzales, who is 20 years old now -- and has just been sentenced to 30 years in prison on multiple counts of gross vehicular manslaughter and assault with a deadly weapon.

Gonzales is directly responsible for the horrors of that day. His actions, taken of his own free will, caused those deaths, injuries, and much consequent misery. He deserves that sentence, and arguably more.

But while he bears responsibility for his own actions, I believe our immigration policies bear responsibility, too -- not for his actions, but for creating the incentives for those actions. Gonzales was essentially in this game for the money, and the money was only there because these aliens could only immigrate here illegally. I don't know whether the aliens Gonzales was carrying wanted to come here to become Americans, or simply to take advantage of jobs or handouts available here for them. In either case, I believe our current policies are loony.

People who want to come here to become good Americans -- we should welcome them, plain and simple.

People who want to come here to take advantage of our generosity -- we should remove their incentive for doing so. Not by the utterly hopeless notion of "closing the border", but instead by being tough on employers who illegally hire them, and by stopping the government handouts and policies (such as free hospital care) that attract them.

Instead, we have our hopelessly ill-designed system of unachievable goals, conflicting incentives, and guaranteed human misery. The miserable story of Gonzales and his passengers is but one tiny piece, destined to be repeated over and over until and unless we chuck our current system out the window. Let's chuck it!