Bill Stone: Journey to the center of the Earth ... and beyond!

This guy Bill Stone is a total bad-ass. He invents underwater exploration devices in 2019 his most recent system will be sent to map the oceans of Europa while looking for life. In the second section of this Ted Talk he proposes a manned mining operation on the moon. He proposes that they send the mission without enough fuel to return, requiring them to successfully mine the fuel for the return trip from the moon. He makes this proposal to the TED conference, which is full of extremely wealthy and influential people. In front of all of them he proclaims that he will lead this expedition. He is deadly serious. This guy is like some crazy sci-fi hero super-scientist. It's truly inspiring. I'm not sure all his ideas are perfect but I think he's likely to influence the creation of a moon-based rocket fuel mining operation. I'm not sure his idea of launching without sufficient fuel for return is such a good idea; I'm not even sure if it needs to be a manned mission. Still, an amazing talk. Check it out.

Bill Stone: Journey to the center of the Earth ... and beyond!

Tid bits

"bush makes surprise visit to work" from the onion http://www.theonion.com/content/news/bush_makes_surprise_visit_to_work

"how to be your own phone company" from sci am
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=3D964001-E7F2-99DF-36CD82E1F9ED0C84&chanID=sa003

10 ways the world could end stephen petranek
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/167

To all my biking buddies

Folks,

This is the official invitation. I have after only 3 weeks found enough awesome mountain biking that I think it's worth a flight out. Southwest often has cheap tickets, or it's only a 12 hour drive. I don't have enough space for you to stay, and I don't know all the trails yet, but considering what I've found in just 3 weeks, without even checking out the more gnarly, built up trails in Park City, I think this spring will be awesome. So far I've been exploring American Fork Canyon which is about "Skeggs distance" away. This canyon has awesome rock climbing, backpacking, and now, mountain biking. This trail I would say is about on par with Demo. It's a rough high-elevation climb to the top. You can do about half of the climb on the road, or add on an earlier section of single-track uphill that will kick your ass. I can not pedal up it. Maybe with a granny-gear, but I doubt it. So, skip that stick to the road all the way to Timpooneke Campground, which is the same place that my hiking trip started from. From here you climb up on single track alongside a little stream, then up through alpine meadows with aspen and views of Mt. Timpanogos. The climb is a bitch, but the views are pretty awesome, you’re right at tree-line for a while. Then the fun begins. You go downhill non-stop for about 5 miles. I would describe it as a really narrow version of the Tractor trail at Demo. Lots of tight turns. The trail has been carved out by both mountain and dirt bikers to form a nicely rounded chute about a foot wide at the bottom and 3-4 feet wide at the top. The chute twists and turns down through the woods. You just carve back and forth from one side of the chute to the other, bombing down these trails which are like 70% perfect dirt (as good as anything in California) and 30% rocks and rock gardens. The rocks have good shapes and spacing to them. Not too sharp, and not that prone to roll around on you.

The one thing Demo wins on though is fun jumps and stunts. There are basically none on this trail. There are a few little root-drops and some sections that you can float over rocks, but nothing man-made. Shouldn’t be too hard to change that. There are lots of downed trees and dirt around that could be sculpted. The awesome thing about the trail is that because of the chute-like nature every turn is perfectly banked. There’s very little off-camber riding, and you can really rail the turns.

So, it’s really hard to take pictures while biking. I brought the new camera out yesterday and took a few photos. They don’t really capture the nature of the trail very well, but I think they do a really good job of capturing the scenery. Combine this trail with several other epic rides in that area, several more epic rides much closer to home, and three lift served mountains within a 45 minute drive, and you’ve got a pretty good place for a mountain bike destination. I’m thinking late spring would be perfect. By then I’ll have a decent shuttle vehicle and hopefully a place for people to stay. So, if you’re interested, drop me a line. Let’s start planning it out.

-Ben

New Website! (Sort of)

Hey Folks,

I've begun updating my webpage. I portentously named my webpage "the beginning" hoping it would spur me down a long path of web design and development. Since it was only the beginning I thought it'd be fine to host it on a free service like Googlepages. I'm now beyond the beginning. I've started to reach the limits of what Googlepages can do for me. So, this new page is my first real attempt at web design (as opposed to using those nice pre-made templates from googlepages). As my first true attempt I'd have to rate it medium rare. Because really right now, it's only a new front page, and it doesn't even do anything cool, just look good*. But it's still cooking. I need to update all the rest of the content with the new look and feel, but I think first I've got to find a real hosting service outside of Googlepages. I think it'll be pretty tasty once all that is finished grilling. In the meantime, I'd love to hear what you think about it.

*I hope.

Quick Backpacking trip

This week I took a quick backpacking trip to Mount Timpanogos in the Wasatch Mountains. It's the second tallest mountain in Utah, and probably the most popular. It's only a 40 minutes drive and 7.5 mile hike from Salt Lake. Even though I went midweek I saw at least 40 people over the three days (I saw 20 hiking up as I was hiking out yesterday). Still everyone I saw was very respectful of the outdoors and obviously happy to be there and very friendly. You can check out the photos here: Flickr Photoset. I'm still cleaning them up, so a few more might make it up on Flickr in the next day or two.

Disgust

Have you seen this video yet? "UF student tasered at John Kerry Speach". Near the end of a question and answer session John Kerry calls on a student with a question. He steps to the microphone and spends about 30 seconds setting up his question. He recommends a book called "Armed Madhouse" by Greg Palast, which claims that Kerry won the presidential election of 2004. Kerry says he's already read it, and wants to know if the student has a question. A police officer taps him on the shoulder and says something to him. From his response it seems that the police officer has asked him to stop talking. From here things denigrate. The student manages to ask three questions before the cops drag him off. I've paraphrased them below:

1. Considering the amount of fraud and confusion as outlined in "Armed Madhouse" how could you concede the election on the same day?
2. If you're against invading Iran why not impeach Bush?
3. Were you and Bush both members of the same secret society at Yale?

He is forcibly removed from the microphone by the police officers as he asks the last question. This is just absolutely wrong. The student was allowed to speak for one minute 30 seconds before he was cut off and escorted away from the microphone. In the background you can see a man in a suit speaking with a police officer when the student first starts rambling, and you see this same man move his hand across his throat making a "cut him off" type gesture which immediately precedes the physical removal of the student. As the student is removed he is confused and resists the removal. He asks loudly what are you arresting me for? He struggles and is eventually subdued by 3 or 4 police officers. While on the floor he continues to shout and struggle and then he is shocked with a taser.

I'm amazed, but there are actually a lot of people who are siding against the student. They say things like "He's annoying" or "He had it coming". You know what? Carrot Top is annoying, but we can't get the police to taser him. They say "He was grandstanding and wanted it to happen." That may be true, but it is still not a valid reason to prevent his free-speech or forcibly remove him.

I listen to call in shows on NPR like Forum and Talk of the Nation. Those hosts do an excellent job handling callers with rambling questions. Why couldn't Senator Kerry handle this? How could he allow this to go on right in front of him? I'm really unimpressed by how Kerry has handled the situation and am interested to see how this all turns out.

American Fork

I went climbing Saturday and Sunday at American Fork (45 minutes southeast of salt lake). I went with Heath Saturday morning and then again on Sunday with Mike and Cheryl. After being out late the night before (80's themed birthday party for Craig and Luke) we had a leisurely morning and didn't get to the cliff till about 1pm. No one was there; probably scared off by the very brief stream crossing required to access the cliff. We hopped on a few climbs and then worked on "Teardrop" a 13a and one of Cheryl's many projects. I've been in a perpetual state of soreness since I moved to Utah a week ago and it's great. This problem was well out of my grasp yesterday, but I can't wait to get back on this problem once the soreness starts to fade.

Flickr Photos of American Fork

New Camera!!

I just got my Tamron 28-75mm lens for my new Canon Rebel XTi and took it out for a test run in Mike and Cheryl's backyard. I took 48 pictures (I need a bigger memory card). 19 photos made the cut. I'm pretty damn stoked! The named photos have been "developed" I haven't cleaned up the others yet. The control and precision over the image taking process this camera gives me is awesome, and I don't even know what I'm doing yet. Practice will make perfect. I'm reading through the manual, but in the meantime if someone can tell me how to manually set the F-stop, or if you have other hints to improve my shooting I'd love the advice.

There are some really great photos of Khola I think as well as two kinda fun shots of the backyard. The camera allowed me to grab some really cool action shots of Khola too. It's got an auto-fire feature where it can take 3 pictures per second as long as you hold down the shutter button. The shots of her shaking the frisbee and chasing the ball were taken with this setting. I'm not showing all frames on flickr though, only the few that I thought were interesting on their own. I've still got a lot to learn. I'm sure I'm not pushing the limits of this camera or lens yet. I'm excited to take it out and try some landscapes later this week, hopefully after a bit more practice.

Check out all the photos on Flickr

Maple Canyon

Yesterday Mike, Cheryl, Khola and I went to Maple Canyon. It's about 1:45 south of Salt Lake City. Really cool area with strange conglomerate rock that makes the cliffs look like a big pile of river stones turned upside-down. The rock is relatively solid and makes for really interesting climbing that is very difficult to read. Is that next cobble going to be smooth and slippery-slopery or is it going to have some big sinker secret pocket? Who knows! It was great to get out sport climbing again. It used to be my favorite type of climbing, but there just isn't much around the Bay Area, so this was the first time I'd gone in about 1.8 years. The last time I went sport climbing was in Thailand in 2005/06. It's nice to be living somewhere close to sport climbing again. Maple isn't even the closest place to Salt Lake. American Fork is about an hour closer, but Mike and Cheryl had the whole day off so we went for a longer trip.

Photos of Maple Canyon on Flickr

Light Pollution

Great article in the New Yorker about light pollution. Here's an excerpt:

"In Galileo’s time, nighttime skies all over the world would have merited the darkest Bortle ranking, Class 1. Today, the sky above New York City is Class 9, at the other extreme of the scale, and American suburban skies are typically Class 5, 6, or 7. The very darkest places in the continental United States today are almost never darker than Class 2, and are increasingly threatened. For someone standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night, the brightest feature of the sky is not the Milky Way but the glow of Las Vegas, a hundred and seventy-five miles away. To see skies truly comparable to those which Galileo knew, you would have to travel to such places as the Australian outback and the mountains of Peru. And civilization’s assault on the stars has consequences far beyond its impact on astronomers. Excessive, poorly designed outdoor lighting wastes electricity, imperils human health and safety, disturbs natural habitats, and, increasingly, deprives many of us of a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old jaw-dropping wonder."

Read the article: "The Dark Side" by David Owen

Arrival

Khola and I are now in Salt Lake City. These last couple weeks it's been really hard to say goodbye to all of my great friends out in the bay area. Every dinner was a going away dinner. Every time I saw a friend it was the last time I'd see them for a while. I don't think moving or changing is supposed to be easy though. It's been hard for me to leave because the last 4 years were so good. I'll miss all the great people I'm leaving behind, but you've all got an open invitation to come visit me in SLC.

On the positive side, I am now officially "retired". At least that's what I'm calling it. I'm working for the fun of it, not for the pay. I live in a cool city close to the mountains and work part time as the product manager for Guyot Designs. Sure, I'm not making much money, and at my current pay rate I'll have to work forever, but the work is fun and not too burdensome. This whole thing should be a really valuable experiment for me. Is this really what I want? Can I follow my passions and find happiness? Only time will tell.

So, for now Khola and I are staying in the guest bedroom of my good friends Mike and Cheryl. They're on call at the hospital for the next 30 hours, so I've got the run of the place. In no particular order goals for today are:

• Look for more permanent rental housing
• Read the manual for my new D-SLR camera cover to cover
• Go climbing
• Update Blog (Done)