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A view from space (courtesy NASA)
For the image (and others) in hi-def see here
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The other day while riding downhill on my bicycle, averaging speeds above 35mph, I happened to notice that a squirrel had been struck, perhaps a few moments before I passed it, by another cyclist or a car. The squirrel was not dead, it was struggling and writhing, its head almost entirely severed and it lay there dying. It probably died long before I reached the bottom of the mountain. Note that I captured all this in a fleeting moment - there was a brief instinct to brake and help put it out of its misery but I continued downhill, my thoughts moving quickly - from the shame of not helping the miserable creature by putting an end to its suffering, to the ethics behind my inaction.
I asked myself the question what my “kartavya” (duty) was to that squirrel. What was my role in the death of that squirrel? Am I as responsible for its death as the person who directly laid the hit. What if instead of a squirrel it were a person? Is letting a person die as dastardly an act as laying a hit on that person that caused them to die? I know the utilitarian answer to that question but that is not at all comforting.
I know that if it were a person, I would have done everything in my power to help that person, but that got me to the question - what if the only reasonable help that I could offer that person was, like the squirrel, a quick death. Would I act illegally? Obviously what was supposed to be an exhilarating downhill ride was quickly filled with angst. At least the physical pain of the uphill ride was masked easily with memories of funny expressions. There was zero thrill to be had in this downhill return. I confess that I was at a complete loss, I even blew past a STOP sign, with a middle-aged man yelling sarcastically from his car “Nice Stop”.
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For those lazy blogging days (weeks), I am going to start a series called Photo of the Day (POTD) to showcase a photograph from my now extensive digital collection. While I don’t expect rantlust to become a photoblog, this will enable me to at least see my own photographs once in a while. These photos will be randomly chosen from my collection and will be those taken after 2001 when I first acquired a digital camera (Minolta Dimage 7).
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Turns out you can use spinach to derive the energy to run your house as well
See here
All they need to do is grow olives and press some olive oyl from it.
In the past couple of weeks, two stories of being lost in the wilderness have captured headlines in the bay area. The first story was of a couple who went out for a late afternoon stroll at Castle Rock State Park in the Santa Cruz mountains, and ended up missing for 5 days, before being rescued. The official version of the story is that they went exploring down a waterfall, and lost their way. They ended up living in the hollow of a tree for the next few days till they were found by searchers. Castle Rock State Park used to be one of my favorite short hikes, for its views and fantastically shaped rock formations, and I know the area well. I find the official story scarcely credible, since the park itself is so small that if you keep walking in almost any direction, you will come out onto some road in a few hours, or at most a day. But then, this was the same park where a couple of years ago, they found a man who’d been living in the wild, holed out in a tent with a shotgun, farming marijuana, so I guess the park does have its secrets. The other little detail is that right next door is the Los Altos Gun Club, from where you can frequently hear the sound of gunshots being fired, a real annoyance when you’re out hiking. If you’re lost in the area, all you have to do is follow the sound. Maybe the club was closed during their adventure.
The other story was the tragic death of James Kim in the Oregon backwoods, after he and his family lost their way and were stranded near Grant’s Pass. Given that most of us hike and climb frequently, this is a situation which hits close to home. I’ve been lost in the mountains many times, and in bad weather, it’s quite easy to make a wrong turn. The choice that James Kim faced was a horrible one - follow conventional wisdom, stay with his family near the car, and possibly watch them die, or take the risk of hiking it out of there against even longer odds?
The slopes of Munnar are blessed with an endemic species of a purplish flower called Neelakurinji that blooms once every 12 years. That’s right, twelve! Plants that bloom at long intervals like these are called plietesials.
Last weekend, we got the chance to go see these in person. Munnar is a beautiful town located at 5500 ft above sea level in the Western Ghats. It’s long been known as a place of tea estates and beautiful mountains. For Keralites, it’s often a place to go to escape the heat. This month is special as people are coming from all parts of India to see this elusive flower.
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Mt. Kilimanjaro… the very name is redolent of romance. Rising in splendid solitude from the vast dusty plains of East Africa, Kilimanjaro has since ancient times been a magnet for explorers and adventurers, and an inspiration for writers, artists and marketing departments. So naturally, when I recently heard of an old schoolmate of mine who’d settled in Tanzania, my thoughts turned immediately to Kilimanjaro. I hadn’t seen him in a long 18 years, but my school crowd has always been rather tight-knit, and it was no surprise to me when, in response to my letter, I received a warm welcome to visit him in Zanzibar and seek my summit attempt on Kili. Accordingly, I started my preparations - reacquainting myself with the works of Hemingway, climbing mountains, and so on.
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A couple of days ago, in my daily commute to work, in the usual company of fellow San Francisco commuters, with the usual boredom, one of the favorite topics came to the plate: dumb people (which of course is everybody that drives except whomever is in the car at that moment - no pun intended to my fellow bloggers and (some) acquaintances).
Bear with me in this line of thought and (un)reasoning. While talking about bad drivers, we sort of link it to the Darwinian mechanisms of survival of the fittest. So bad driving is really a natural mechanism for getting rid of certain number of people, which is, we suppose, one of nature’s problems: how to keep these annoying humans for growing larger and more powerful than nature. So we tied that to the fact that nature was very clever and was savy enough to embed human kind with some “stupidity” property, which comes small or large depending on the subject, and the geographical location (don’t ask me why but I suspect it is very true). Then nature decided that is not good enough because stupidity by itself won’t get rid of many people. So nature kept trying and decided to embed the “power” property in these human subjects (or objects for the OOP geeks). And then nature came with the master plan and based on probabilities, IT thought that eventually you could have one subject with enough desire for power that would take advantage of the stupid people. Chi chin! big win for nature, mathematically speaking, and we all know nature is about zeros and ones, this would guarantee the possibility of yielding enough stupidity together to raise to power somebody stupid enough, managed by people that desire power, that would cause the destruction of a lot of people.
Of course I am not referring to anybody in particular, or any sbject in particular.
Ahh! the wonders of commuting.
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