Lost (Almost), in a Blizzard

On Thursday my 18 and 13 year old son and daughter wanted to go snowboarding. We have had several feet of new snow recently. It was a pretty stormy and cold day, but with a 4WD truck and snow tires, we really did not have any trouble getting up the mountain. The fun started once we arrived.

They headed off to the ski area and I continued up the road. I love the outdoors, camping, hiking, backpacking, and, that day, cross country skiing. The weather did not concern me as I had been into that backcountry area many times before. I had numerous GPS waypoints on my receiver and knew the roads and trails very well. Still it was an exciting few hours in the wild!

First of all, because of the snow storm, I was alone. It was about 10 or 15 degrees with steady wind of 20 or 25 mph and gusts much higher. As you can see from the above picture, taken with the flash, I was dressed for the weather.

Here are a couple of pictures of the area I was in from a nice day.

And a couple of pictures of the same place on Thursday.

I was not able to ski as far as I wanted to, but made a loop of about 2 miles out, then a mile up into the woods to get out of the wind. Heading back to the truck, after about another mile, I felt something just was not right. So, I stopped to get my bearings. I fired up the GPS receiver to see where I was in relation to points I had marked on previous outings and could not believe the electronics was reading correctly. I had been heading in the wrong direction by about 90 degrees. Very unusual for me, but without any reference in the sky and hardly able to see 100 feet in the blowing snow, I guess it can happen.

Of course, I just changed direction and made it back fine, but it was a reminder of why I usually don’t go out alone in that kind of weather. I do have good survival skills and had the GPS and my portable HAM radio, but it was very cold indeed and I was glad I did not end up having any trouble getting out.

I am going back to the same area tomorrow, but it will be a nice day.

Update 1-1-2008: Here are a few pictures from yesterday’s outing.

There was someone else out hopping about on this fine morning!

It is so pristine and quiet out here after a new snow.

Happy New Year!

December 30th, 2007 Posted By: Will | 12 Comments |

Categories: The Great Outdoors
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Fast Walkers Live Longer

I read recently that on the evening of Thanksgiving and the evening of Christmas day, more people in the United States are out walking than at any other time of the year. Hm-mm, I thought the tryptophan from the turkey dinner glued everyone to their sofas?

In the same vein, a new study shows that people who have a naturally fast walk live significantly longer than the slowest walkers. People who live in New York City apparently benefit the most from their fast walking habits. Supposedly this study was adjusted for age, illness, sex, weight, etc. That makes me trust the results more since my first thought was….. Of course they do, the slowest walkers are already unhealthy, overweight or depressed.

I am a fast walker. I have often been told to slow down as it is not healthy to rush everywhere. Now I have a quick, scientifically supported, answer for all the slow pokes!

Enjoy your brisk after dinner walks this holiday season. Maybe even try to pick up the pace a notch in the coming year!

Merry Christmas!

December 24th, 2007 Posted By: Will | 22 Comments |

Categories: health
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Will Earth Survive? One Humble Opinion

Thanks to a post on Blog Catalog, I was led to an interesting site that uses a weekly prompt to encourage people who love to write. The most recent prompt on Writer’s Island asks, in part, “Tell us your feelings about this island earth, as it hurtles through space and time….. Is it in imminent danger right now? If yes, are we too late to save it? Is all the concern just unjustified paranoia?”

As readers of this site will know, I am certainly a fan of treating Mother Earth with all the respect we can. My reasons for this are a bit different than you might think. I have absolutely no fear that Homo sapiens, now the dominant species on the planet, will do any serious, long term harm to the Earth itself. The only reason many people think this is because of our biological tendency to see our species as the center of everything. The truth is we are too insignificant to the universe and even to the earth to be more than the proverbial fly on the camel’s back, always in danger of being swished off by the coarse tail of Mother Nature.

The reason I have been a supporter my whole life of the philosophy now trumpeted as “being green” has nothing to do with the ultimate preservation of the planet and everything to do with our responsibility to the other inhabitants of earth, human and otherwise, now and in the future. This responsibility means that we should not be contributing any more than is necessary for our survival to changes that affect the community of the earth. It is this community we have the awesome power to disrupt, not the planet itself.

Earth has undergone many cataclysmic changes in the past and will survive many more in the future. At some point in the future one of the changes will eliminate humans from the earth’s community. It is likely that before our final day, the species will face challenges of survival unthinkable to most people alive today. Whenever the ultimate end of the planet occurs, we humans will be insignificant contributors.

Fortunately, the human instincts of optimism and survival are not perceived on the incredibly huge scope of time involved with earth changes, but on the scale of the present and the coming few hundred years. Because of this, I believe we, as a species, will ultimately survive anything we can do to harm ourselves. (There is the optimism.) And, we will survive because even if something happens that crushes the human population, any survivors will make the best of what is left to go on.

In our ultimate end, we will disappear because of some change well beyond our control. Current global warming trends are concerning and we need to address them so that we delay effects as long as possible. This will give us time and technology to help cope with the climate changes that will eventually come, human contributions or not. Eventually most of the current coastal cities of the world will be under water. At another point in the future, many of these same flooded areas will be under a mile thick sheet of ice. These futures seem long on the scale of human time, but they are short and repetitive on the scale of earthly time. These things will happen regardless of anything humans do.

We are temporary occupants of earth. Our significance, and our responsibility, is to our fellow humans, both present and to come, and to all other species currently sharing the planet with us. The earth will survive into the unfathomable depths of time without us. By religious, political, and environmental responsibility, we can positively shape our part of the coming trip.

December 22nd, 2007 Posted By: Will | 45 Comments |

Categories: Environment
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Google Backsteps!

Google has taken heed of everyone who wrote articles like mine criticizing their recent decision to eliminate non-Google urls from Blogger Blogs. Now you can once again link your name to your site on Blogspot Blogs. I don’t know if anything needs to be done from the side of the Blogger author, but I did successfully comment on Bob’s site this morning using the reinstated feature.

Thanks you Google for listening to us!

Now I would just like to make a plea for all Blogger authors to implement comments on their site the way Anna and Bob do.Â The pop up window that some Blogger blogs use is a bit annoying and makes commenting a somewhat more cumbersome.

December 22nd, 2007 Posted By: Will | 3 Comments |

Categories: Blogging
Trackback: http://willtaft.com/blogging/google-backsteps/trackback/

Bacteria May Replace Disk Storage

JD at the blog TechFun had a link to an article about physicists discovering a way to store light as sound, thereby increasing the storage capacity of memory devices used in telecommunications networks. That reminded me of an article I read somewhere several months ago.

In Japan, scientists have discovered a method of inserting data into the DNA of bacteria. Using present methods, which are expected to get better, they can insert 200,000 characters into the DNA of one bacterium. They have even developed a method to to read the results of the insertion to verify its accuracy. Imagine being able to store the entire contents of the Library of Congress in a few drops of bacteria containing liquid.

I remember them being quoted saying 5 grams of DNA can store the same amount of information as a computer hard drive 150 hectares in area. If my calculations are correct, that is a hard drive almost 6/10ths of a square mile in area. This encoded data is passed from generation to generation of bacteria, so the storage capacity is long term. I don’t think there is any practical application for this yet, but you can be sure they are working on it. And to think we only used to have to worry about genetically altered food.

When this technology does begin to be used, I do wonder how we will back up our data? Automated, nightly, bacterial transfers sounds too weird to even imagine.