Nice weekend

Have just spent a very pleasant weekend on SaltSpring Island with one of my cousins. We dined well, watched the Ice Hockey on TV, saw an AGW ranter get told off by one of the commentators. Life was good.

We have an open invitation to go back to Saltspring any time we like, which is nice. Free accommodation, terrific views, amazing food, although the restaurants sometimes look a bit basic. In particular there is a little place at Vesuvius bay ferry terminal. Sunday's special was a seafood salad sandwich and cup of beef and barley stew. Filling, terrifically tasty, I highly recommend a visit.

I can foresee a lot of weekends spent coming and going during the summer. I have neglected this branch of my extended family over the years, and have much time to make up.

Earth hour

Have been reading about 'Earth Hour' a lot recently in the online press. The idea is to save energy by switching off all electrical appliances for an hour at 8p.m. on the 29th of March, and thus cut Canada's (and the world's) CO2 emissions.

I think saving power and reducing pollution are a great idea. Pity it won't work.

My reasoning is thus; Canada, and BC in particular, gets the lions share of it's electricity in Hydro Electric power. Electricity generated by power from a head of water fed by gravity through turbines, which spins generators and thus generates electricity. Hence the name of the main Energy supplier in British Columbia, BC Hydro. The only real effect of all of BC and Canada turning off electricity for an hour will be a surplus of electricity to sell to the USA, and some overflowing spillways. Won't change a thing, so you'll forgive me if I refrain from joining in.

One other observation; people are being exhorted to have 'candlelit dinners' at the time of Earth Hour, romantic though this might be, the candles required to light up a room are more likely to contribute to global CO2 emissions than BC Hydro's customer base shutting off their power for an hour.

Besides, the weather forecast is for snow showers in our part of BC.

Global what?

It's snowing again. Did someone say it was going to get hotter? No? Really?

If tax is the answer.....it's a damn fool question

Just been reading about the rural communities in northern BC who are up in arms about the proposed carbon tax designed to 'combat global warming'. The metropolitans, shielded as they are from the harsh rigours of BC's climate, think that putting the cost of things up with extra tax will prevent people from making unnecessary journeys and so prevent the temperature altering from year to year.

The demand for the tax came from 70 'Economists'. When I read that I stopped in my tracks and cast my mind back. In the UK, similar 'Economists' were forever getting things badly wrong. Especially academics. It seems the population of BC has a similar problem. The guilty parties are named below;

UBC Economics

Siwan Anderson, Paul Beaudry, Mathilde Bombardini, Gorkem Celik, Clive Chapple, Brian Copeland, Michael Devereux, Erwin Diewert, Catherine Douglas, Mauricio Drehlichman, Mukesh Eswaran, Patrick Francois, Giovanni Gallipoli, Robert Gateman, David Green, Yoram Halevy, Joseph Henrich, Viktoria Hnatkovska, Atsushi Inoue, Tsvetanka Karagyozova, Ashok Kotwal, Amartya Lahiri, Thomas Lemieux, Kevin Milligan, Hugh Neary, Donald Paterson, Michael Peters, Angela Redish, W. Craig Riddell, Shinichi Sakata, Henry Siu, Rashid Sumaila, William Troost, Okan Yilankaya

Sauder School of Business

Richard Barichello, Anthony Boardman, Keith Head, Thomas Hellman, Sanghoon Lee, Peter Nemetz, Thomas Ross, Ratna Shrestha, Veikko Theile, Ilan Vertinsky, Ralph Winter,

Faculty of Land and Food Systems

Richard Barichello, Katherine Baylis, Sumeet Gulati, James Vercammen,

SFU Economics

Steeve Mongrain, Gordon Myers, Krishna Pendakur, Arthur Robson, Nicolas Schmitt, Simon Woodcock,

Public Policy

Dominique Gross, Jonathan Kesselman, John Richards,

School of Resource and Environmental Management

Mark Jaccard

University of Victoria Economics

Merwan Engineer, Martin Farnham, Elisabeth Gugl, Malcolm Rutherford, Herbert Schuetz, Paul Schure, David Scoones, G. Cornelius van Kooten,

University of Northern British Columbia

Paul Bowles, Ajit Dayanandan, Fiona MacPhail

Imposing a tax to 'prevent global warming'? Analogies fail me this is such a bad idea. Do these guys never open a window or take a walk in the winter? It's cold out there. Then again, they are not the ones who will have to pay or freeze. Nor are they the ones who will benefit from any extra tax. What will all the money raised be used for? Planting trees, or paying bureaucrats and box tickers? The UK has this problem in spades.

As for environmental impact. Cut pollution - yes. Take fishing conservation seriously. Emphatically yes. Those are things we can and should do something about. The weather? Well, that will happen no matter what we do.

More snow

Down at the shoreline it's still pretty chilly, with temperatures around the five degree mark. Took a short trip into town and noted fresh light snow cover on Mt Benson where it had previously melted. Winter is still here, despite it being past the vernal equinox.

A number of the AGW crowd are leaping up and down with glee, pointing at a chunk of ice shelf that has broken off. Shame it means nothing really. It's one little bit of an ice shelf, comparatively speaking. Mechanical stress and increased cold are more likely to cause catastrophic collapse than any warming.

Away from the weather, I'm busy getting on with my new job despite a relative lack of information from head office. I shall just run it like any business; making sure that a service is provided and that there is a cashflow for the facilities needed to do the work. I don't mind, I'm more or less my own boss and I like that.

Global Warming test

I scored six out of ten.

We have Ospreys

Just put the kettle on to boil for some afternoon tea. Wife has gone to sit out in garden chair. Directly in front of us are three big six foot plus wingspan eagles, wingtipping and wheeling less than fifty metres away. At first I thought two were juvenile Bald Eagles bullying another adult for food. Picked up my bird identification book and realised my mistake. We have a pair of Ospreys nesting nearby.

I am amused by this, don't ask me why, but I'm greatly pleased.

Perspective

The longer I live out here, away from the insanity that seems to pervade modern day life, the more I wonder at my fellow humans. The rarity of joined up thinking is staggering.

Brought up in an Engineering background, I tend to look at events as processes. Causality rules, so to speak. Nothing happens in isolation with few absolute values. Everything is relative. To pretend otherwise is pure folly.

Conversely, to overstate an effect is an even greater mistake, yet I see otherwise intelligent and rational people do it all the time. They take a philosophical position on the shifting sands of 'morality' for example, and promptly get everything disasterously wrong. Almost like they're wearing blinkers.

So it is with religion; as for me, I find religion gets in the way of God, or at least my perception of God, and what that concept means to me. By way of explanation I don't believe God micro manages our lives. From the limited evidence I have available this does seem to be the case. Ergo, some priest in girly robes telling me for example, that eating beef on a Tuesday is not the will or the Lord will get laughed at for the simple reason that I don't think God cares overmuch. In our day to day lives, experience will bear this out.

What I tend to look at as proof God does not meddle in our day to day lives (He's probably got better things to do) is when 'true believers' start handing around veilled threats that something bad will happen to you if you do not do things like their priests tell them you should. If what they say truly were 'God's will', then surely God would make it physically near impossible for me to do. The same argument can be seen to hold true for 'bad' things like Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Sunspot Minimums, Murders, Ethnic Cleansing etc.

Then again, who is to say what is 'bad'? The Earthquake is mainly a side effect of plate tectonics. Volcanoes are just the Earth venting a little excess pressure here and there. Murders and killing are a side effect of a whole rake of factors which have precious little to do with religion, and more to do with the 'baser' side of human nature. Ethnic cleansing is an extreme extension of natural competition between tribal groups. Ergo, 'bad' is a morally relative position just as much as 'good' is.

By this reasoning, religion can neither be viewed wholly as good or bad. If examined under the light of historical perspective, religion is tribal, or to borrow a term from Desmond Morris, 'super-tribal'. We have had eras in human history when a number of Gods were the religion of preference. At the moment a single God is the religious preference. The rest is all a matter of perception and politics.

All seasons in a day

This morning brilliant sunshine. This afternoon sunshine and showers. Right now, snow.

Posted 18:45 local time, broad daylight.

Snow stopped after about seven minutes. Now bright blue sky. Cold and damp outside around 1-2 Degrees celsius.

Posted 19:00 local time, red dusk painting the cliffs of Mudge and Link Islands pink.

et in acadia ego

This morning I took a pause whilst walking Dog along the foreshore, sat down on a large, sea washed log and the phrase drifted into my head. "And I also am in paradise" being one of the translations. The bright warmth of a Sunday morning sun on my face, Dog sitting attentively at my feet, water lapping at the pebbly shore, Gulls arguing. When I closed my eyes it felt like a perfect moment.

Wife is sitting up in bed, reading and patiently waiting for me to cook Sunday morning scrambled eggs and bacon. Thin cirrus cloud is drifting east and south. To the west and south, there are snow capped mountains sharply resolved in the clear early spring air. Down in the narrows, the Herring Run has cleared and the water is crystal clear. The day lacks urgency or anxiety. A day for sitting in the sun, sipping tea and perhaps a chilled glass of wine as a companion to a good book. A little slice of heaven.

When my turn to face death comes, I hope I can greet the old fraud with equanimity, knowing that for a fleeting moment, I too have dwelt in paradise.

Good Friday heresy

As far as some of my old time heroes go, it hasn't been that good a week. Arthur C Clarke, the Daddy of all hard science fiction writers, is no more. Paul Schofield, one of the great classical actors likewise. We will not see their like again.

As for today, I've always wondered why we call it 'Good' Friday. Although for most who do not work in the retail sector it comes as a day off, it has otherwise quite dark connotations.

'Good' Friday we are told, is the day we comemorate the death of a man, who to quote Douglas Adams "Got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to everybody all the time". I blame religion, although it isn't really the fault of the religious bodies really, it's the zealous amongst the 'believers'. These are the people who often demand that their religion reflect their own petty tribal prejudices and pointless blinkered hatreds. When their religion fails to do this, they go off and decide that the old way is no longer true, and that their new way is holy writ.

Maybe if God managed to speak to us all and said something along the lines of; "Come on guys - I didn't mean you should take it that seriously." It might do some good.

I prefer my heresy, which at least has the promise of a chuckle.
Around 2000 years ago, a man has been nailed to a cross and literally 'hung out to dry' for speaking out against the established religion. The establishment manage to fit the guy up, because he is young, full of ideals, and not all that bright outside of his own belief system. Now he sags, nails driven through his wrists and ankles by unsympathetic Roman Soldiers. "Stop wriggling and it won't hurt so much." Staring down in the baking sun at a small group of ragged losers of disciples who got him into this mess in the first place. "What are you looking at?" Says he.
Shame faced, one disciple steps forward and speaks for the group. "Er, sorry Lord. I mean we're truly sorry we let the Pharisees stitch you up like this. Is there anything we can do?"
"Yeah." Says the man nailed to the cross. "Something to get these sodding nails out, and a decent beer would be helpful."
"No need to be like that." Says the Disciple, and leaves with all his friends.
"Oh come on. I was only kidding." Shouts the man nailed to the cross. "Guys, come back. Hey! I was only kidding! Get me down from this thing. GUYS! Oh bugger."

A flock of Seagulls

There must be another mini herring run on; because there is a large flock of Gulls, by the look of them mostly Herring Gulls, with their distinctive grey backed wings and dark pin feathers.From what I can make out, this single large flock is at least four or five hundred strong, and mostly consisting of juveniles and young adults, all feeding on a mini glut of Herring Roe.
It's certainly not a day to be outdoors unless you are wrapped up warm. The wind has a definitively Northern chill to it, and the rain has been persistent through most of the day. Especially in town and down the Narrows towards Yellowpoint and Ladysmith. The forecast looks more hopeful at the weekend. We have a lunch date booked with some old friends, but in the meantime I think hunkering down and enjoying the benefits of Canadian heating are going to be the order of the day.

Death on the beach

Wandering along the tideline with Dog sniffing and pleasing himself. For todays perambulation we turned right at the beach access as opposed to our usual left. We meandered past a barricade of logs washed up by the rough weather a couple of weeks back when Dog jumped up onto the logs and barked at me. Doubling back, I came across this macabre tableau right up against the cliff face.The corpse of a Deer, legs crushed under a massive metre and a half thick log. Trapped in the shelter it had sought from the surf, head still twisted back in pain as the last bleat of complaint rattled out of it's exhausted lungs.
Now nothing more than a two week old skeleton wrapped in the last vestiges of rotting flesh. Yet even now you can still read the pain in the still wide open mouth and twisted neck, seeking surcease from the agony. Normally all we find of the seas vicissitudes are sea washed bones like these;
A caution against carelessness in this place where the dwellings of man are so close to the wild.

Another nice day

Nice day; not that much doing. Am taking a day out from working and just chilling outside. Read the morning papers and waded through the 58 pages of the Mills-McCartney divorce Judgement. The irony is that if she'd shut her mouth in public, the Judge might have been a bit more generous. Even so, £24 million for four years marriage! Holy smoke! As someone said when the Pope spontaneously combusted. What do you do with that much money?

Really must stop reading the UK newspapers, they are so annoying. I think the only reason I do is to keep an eye on the slow motion train wreck that is the UK economy. We have money still sitting in a high interest account and are wondering at which point we should shift it to a less high risk environment.

Computerwise I'm toying with the idea of replacing my old 1998 Compaq laptop with a Mac. Much nicer. The only reason I stay with a PC is that I've got so much licensed software. Don't like Vista at all, not that keen on XP either. In fact the more I see of the alternatives, the keener I am to ditch Microsoft products. If I had the choice I'd have WordPerfect as a word processor. Microsoft Office is okay(ish), but there are features in WordPerfect that I miss, like the Alt-F3 reveal codes option which gave you the opportunity to really clean up your document code. The revision functions were better, so I could keep track of MSS document changes more readily. I've looked at Open Source / Linux and other stuff, but that would end up distracting me from the business of writing. I'm not a code cruncher, and programming quite frankly, bores me to tears. Always did. It's not that I can't do it, it's just that I really can't be bothered. I find programming sends me to sleep. Did do a bit of it professionally once. Completed a job once, but I tended to find myself nodding off at my desk by the middle of a working week. It was more fun in support, even though the pay wasn't as high.

Dog has arrived, and is looking at me hopefully, so it's time to pootle off down to the beach. Heavy sigh, life is so hard.