Black Rock City

Found this satellite photo of Black Rock City, the temporary city where Burning Man takes place and had to repost it.

Folsom 2010

I'm getting ready to leave for San Francisco and Folsom Street Fair in just a couple of days. The BF as well as other friends all decided not to go this year for various reasons so I'll be going solo for the first time. Fortunately I do know a couple of people from the DC area that are going.

Healthcare Reform

So I've given up all hope of the country actually coming together in support of anything even remotely rational and have accepted the fact that something actually got done as consolation. Here's a video created by Kaiser that tries to explain the affects of healthcare reform on average citizens. It's animated but surprisingly complete and helpful.

Nudists, Burning Man and Locusts

A while back I read of scientific experiments that claimed to have figured out why locusts swarm. Locusts are normally solitary creatures that on rare occasions will completely change their normal behavioral patterns and team up with millions of other locusts. The cause of the locust swarm has been so baffling since biblical times that swarms were considered to be acts of God. In fact, solitary locusts and swarming locusts even look so different that up until 1921 scientists believed that they were completely separate species.

As it turns out, experiments have shown that changes in serotonin levels within locusts cause them to change their behavior and appearance leading to swarms. Serotonin also naturally occurs within the brains of many animals including humans. Elevated levels of serotonin are known to lead to intense feelings of well-being.

So what causes locusts to experience elevated levels of serotonin? The answer appears to be the scent of other nearby locusts as well as having their hind legs fondled. So certain environmental factors can cause normally solitary locusts to be forced onto smaller and smaller patches of vegetation resulting in the raising of their respective serotonin levels leading to swarms.

I can personally say that something very similar occurs when you get a group of people that are willing to be close enough and open themselves up to each other. I've seen it happen at most nude events as well as on gay cruise ships and of course at Burning Man. In each of these cases the feelings of closeness and connectedness with those around me rose as the hours or days passed. I could tell that it wasn't just happening to me because I could simultaneously witness the same changes taking place in those around me. These events have been some of the most intimate and memorable times of my life and are a great reason why I (and likely others) feel such a draw to such events. It is at these times that everything in the universe just seems most perfect.

Burning Man Video

I love the way that this video captures the spirit of Burning Man.

More O'Donnell

I swear that I am not obsessed with the primary victory of Republican Christine O’Donnell. Nonetheless she seems so emblematic of what is wrong with the tea party faction of the Republican Party. And one of the major problems with the other factions is that they feed the tea party faction.

Here are two quotes from O’Donnell:

I think that drug use is out of control here and there is something called tough love and what has happened with the liberal welfare program implemented in the last decade is they have cultivated an attitude of dependency. The reality is, especially in my own city here in D.C., is that a lot of those people who do deal drugs are using federal money that they get from welfare programs. We need to implement a tough love program.

We know that people will abuse the system. They will find a recovery program that can enable them to continue in their drug use as long as they get federal funding. We see the same kind of abuse with food stamps... people are abusing our compassion.

So my problem with these statements is their lack of intellectual rigor. What is the basis for her statement that “a lot of those who deal drugs are using federal money?” She states this as fact, but provides no supporting info. Perhaps it is supposed to be implicit because both of these groups tend to live in the same neighborhoods. This too is a misnomer too, but I can only cover so much in one posting. Would her “tough love” program allow the children of America to become like the children of third-world countries? That is, would America’s poorest children be starving on the street and condemned to caste system where education and upward mobility become even further out of reach?

She also implies that the fact that some people abuse a system means that the system should be abolished. So I could say the same thing about voting, so should we abolish this too?

She goes on to say:

We sit there and scratch our heads and wonder why sexual harassment is out of control in this country. It is because we are setting a precedent through our pop culture, through the songs that penetrate the airwaves and the sitcoms that are on television that are just saturated with sexual themes, that respect no boundaries. We need to just do a U-Haul of our pop culture. I think legislators, Hollywood film producers all need to reevaluate why they are doing what they are doing... We end up feeding a demon, feeding a monster and we are feeding this appetite so much that our generation is going to self-destruct quite honestly.

So here she conflates a legislative agenda with a cultural one. She suggests that politicians should do a ‘U-Haul’ (seriously… U-Haul?) of our pop-culture. I have no idea what the hell she means by this and doubt that she’s thought about it enough to know herself. I can’t think of any steps that politicians could take short of legislating pop culture that would help in this area. The only countries that I can think of that currently attempt this are totalitarian regimes such as Iran where they now have a list of acceptable haircut styles.

Half of me is giddy with delight at her nomination given that she has a snowball’s chance in hell at election in a state such as Delaware. However, a more insidious part of me asks… “what if…” and this part terrifies me. I just cannot help imagining an army of people like O’Donnell, who believe that (a) masturbation is evil, (b) morality can and should be legislated being in control of this country.

Tea-Partiers as Cylons

As an avid Battlestar Galactica fan and a political junkie, I just couldn't resist re-posting this:

The Tea Partiers were created by Republicans.


They devolved.

They rebelled.

They look and feel like Republicans.

There are many copies.

And they have a plan. (Maybe)

Burning Man

As some of you may know, I spent the last 8 months figuring out how to go to the Burning Man festival this year. I have to say that I had a wonderful and surreal experience and am still trying to figure out how to describe it all. Until then, I'll just post a few pictures...

I love this next pic. While on the Critical Dicks march, I ran across a heart-shaped mirror somewhere near Esplanade and 4:30p. The guy in the background was someone I was speaking to and said that he intentionally positioned himself into the picture to add some additional flair.

Burning Man is like an alternate universe. Therefore many people there go by what they call their 'playa name'. On Thursday at our superhero party someone asked me what my name was. I told them, but only after explaining that I don't yet have a playa name. He conferred with two others before naming me. Now I'll forever be called 'Blondie'.

Anyone who's followed my journey to Burning Man will likely know that I've researched and read just about everything available on the topic. Even so, there were still some things that just blew me away. One of which was the scope of the artwork. There a massive amount of incredibly creative pieces of large-scale art that looked like it took years to make. But likewise, there were seemingly thousands of smaller works of art that were no less inspiring.

On the top of Malmart:

Christine O'Donnell versus Jerry Falwell

Ready Andrew Sullivan's blog I came across these two episodes of Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect. The point of his posting these were to shed insight on Christine O'Donnell, who won the Republican nomination over Michael Castle in Delaware last night. O'Donnell is a tea-partier (I could use 'tea-bagger', but why be pejorative) and enjoyed the support of the likes of Sarah Palin. The Delaware Republican Party actively and ardently campaigned against her to no avail.

Anyway, the first episode can be seen here and here in which she discusses the topic of telling the truth. As a complete aside, as someone that tries not to lie, the episode did make me consider my own thoughts on the topic. Perhaps I'll write about that later. The second episode featured O'Donnell and Jerry Falwell discussing the their views of the inerrancy of the Bible.

Here's what I got from these episodes:

• Wow is she annoying to listen to! I try not to judge people along such superficial lines, but honestly it is hard to deny that some people are easy to listen to and others not.
• Although I disagree with almost everything that Falwell said, I have to give him credit. Except for his faith (which by definition is not subject to logic), he comes across as reasoned, logical, human and I have to admit... quite intelligent. O'Donnell on the other end seems to spout an endless stream of illogic and nonsense by contrast.

Even if I did buy the tea-partiers anti-tax rhetoric, God help us if her like wields any sort of significant power in the upcoming political landscape.

[Update] Oh wow. Somehow I missed O'Donnell's anti-masturbatory segment she did for MTV in the 90s.

Good Data, Bad Conclusions

As someone with a background in science and mathematics, I often read reports and studies and question the conclusions that are reached. In all fairness, true studies tend to be pretty careful, but we typically hear about these reports via a synopsis over public media, which inevitably leaves out the details and often draw obvious but bad conclusions from the study results.

So today I came across Allstate's annual Best Drivers Report. The full list of the city-by-city breakdown can be found here. I initially read about it here where the article's author stated "Once again, DC boasts the country's worst drivers." Even Allstate themselves state that the purpose of the report is to "identify which cities have the safest drivers." They further state that a goal of the report is to "facilitate an on-going dialog on safe driving."

So what's the problem? So I can find a number of problems with the methods used in this report such as it assumes that Allstate claims data is representative of all accident, which may or may not be true. It is also possible that, because of rate differences present in each state, safer drivers flock to Allstate in some states but have less of an incentive to do so in others. This would certainly skew the result. That said, I realize that they wanted to put numbers together based on the data they had so I'll ignore this problem.

The real problem is that what this report actually tells us is "in which city is it safest to drive" and not which city has the safest drivers. Here's why:

• The report definitely states that some cities have higher incidents of accidents than others, but it emphatically DOES NOT tell us why. The report assumes that the only (or primary) cause is the quality of the driver, but other possibilities include traffic patterns, road conditions, density of cars on the road, etc, which the report completely and conveniently ignores.
• By this report one would believe that bad drivers love big cities since no city with population >1M is less than the 50th percentile. I find this hard to believe. More likely cities with lower density by definition have less opportunity for collisions and greater margins of error than cities with higher vehicular densities.
• The report suggests that cities on the lower half of the list should "fix" something. Although this may be true, it doesn't necessarily follow. As long as humans continue to drive, there will be accidents. We could take draconian measures to lower accidents to virtually zero by erecting barriers between lanes, instituting a nation-wide 5mph speed limit and stop lights at every corner of every street that only allow one car to proceed at a time. Although this would certainly reduce accidents the cost of doing this would be counter-productive as the nation would come to a stand still. So just because cities in this report could improve, doesn't mean that they necessarily should improve.
• It also seems to me that it is more likely that roads conditions such as lane size, traffic lights, stop signs, visibility at intersections and other factors are more likely to yield improvements to safety than just telling drivers they need to drive better. It seems this report is better targeted at city transportation departments than individual drivers.

That said, I like the report in that it does tell us the relative safeness of driving in various cities. It also gives us some clue as to which cities might want to evaluate if changes are in order. But it definitely does not tell us which cities have bad versus good drivers.

Pics from GNI Gathering

Everyday at 5pm, there's a themed cocktail party. Many people dress up according to the theme and group cabins will all make an entrance all dressed either the same or in complimentary ways. My cabin and our sister cabin (20 guys in all) dressed up everyday. This last picture was from theme called "What not to wear." We all used lavender-dyed mops as wigs. It was a big hit.

Burning Books

We've reverted back to burning books... Really?
Despite years of over a decade as a fundamentalist, I am not agnostic and decidedly non-religious. Nonetheless, I certainly allow others to worship their religion and have their beliefs. That said, I find religion one of the most dangerous forces on this planet because it leaves no room for compromise, rational discussion or reason. It defines "us" and "them" and then imbues us with righteousness because we act with the authority of God. Of course this does not represent all believers, but history has shown religion to be amongst the primary motivations of some of the worst atrocities committed by humans in history.

Somehow we have to realize that there really are only two, diametrically opposed paths; either we will live together or we will wage world-wide war to annihilate one another. Unfortunately world-wide war isn't very scary to some radical believers as they believe that it heralds the coming of paradise to earth.

It scares me to see how far we've regressed from the country that believes in freedom of religion and the right to pursue of happiness for all humans.

Of course it is the same communications medium that allows me to share my thoughts here that also permit xenophobes, islamophobes, terrorists, racists and other inherently socially destructive organizations to disproportionately recruit and influence the world-wide debate. But how do we stop the beast when nut like Pastor Terry Jones with a mere 40 followers can have such influence on us all. Sure, we could overcome it by saying that we must all act reasonably, but even this optimist knows that humans are generally predisposed to group think rather than reason. So where do we go from here?