“For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.”

—

Via The Referendum
By Tim Kreider

Thought provoking read about the risk of looking at and comparing your life as lived with that of your peers. We live and we make choices, and hopefully we make those choices intentionally so that when we look around the trap of comparison and jealous poison don’t overtake us.

Update:

Below is another excerpt from the above piece, that pretty clearly outlines the danger and cost of comparing one life to another:

The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.

The sad truth is there is no winning to be had.  We’re born, we’ll die, and the only thing we really have control over is how we react to the details between those two bookends.  To turn the Socrates quote around, perhaps if we all lived an examined life, an intentional life, then we’d have less reason to compare ourselves and could live more free, generous lives.

Black Peak, North Cascades, WA

The Northeast Ridge of Black Peak, III 5.6 30°. Reasonable (for the Cascades) approach, fun snowfield to cross, and good climbing made for a great weekend.  When BJ left SLC this spring to head back to Bellingham, WA, we had talked about me flying out to climb something with him in the Cascades.  Its easy to talk about things, and its never sure till you buy the tickets.  But in this case, everything worked out: got the tickets, got the time off, and luckily got a good weather window.

We had originally planned to climb the North Ridge of Eldorado Peak in Boston Basin, but a bridge was out on the only road to the trailhead and shut that down.  There was an alternate approach, but it was much more severe and would not have been stacking the odds in our favor.  So we opted to make Black Peak a second choice.

The hike in was strenuous for me, but apparently pretty moderate by Cascades standards.  We got to camp with lots of time to kill on Saturday, and a mini-deck of cards helped pass the time.

The next day started out early, 530am, and after a short hike to the base and up the glacial moraine, we got to the opening snow field.  We had chosen not to bring crampons in for the weight, and, per Murphy’s law, we found the snow field to much more icy than we had expected.  Chopping steps with an ice axe is not that much fun and makes for pretty slow going and we probably could have taken a less direct way across the field and not had to, but brute force and many axe swings got us past this difficulty.

The first 1/3rd of the climb was pretty chossy (loose rock) and exposed, but we were mostly on the side of the ridge and not yet on the knife edge ridge.  Thankfully nothing came loose.  Once we got on top of the ridge the rock quality improved.

The exposure on the knife ridge was pretty wild (only 2 to 3 feet wide in places with 1000 feet of air on both sides), but the climbing on the upper part of the route was low 5th class and a lot less loose rock, and a lot more fun as a result.

We got to the summit about the same time another party came up from our descent route on the south ridge (3rd class scramble).  It was nice to talk to them for a bit and to take pictures and eat before heading down.

The down climbing and scrambling went by pretty quickly, and the only remaining challenge was a loose dirt and scree slide to get us back to the moraine and then back to camp.  There used to be a permanent snowfield that made getting down a quick glissade, but alas, it was not there…

After hiking out we headed back to Bellingham, and it was great to hang out and see folks who used to live in SLC.  Then it was time to head to Seattle and fly home (thanks to BJ picking for me up and hauling me around Washington).  Its amazing how quickly one can get out to the middle of the mountains and back.

The rest of the pictures on Flickr

Education

“Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide … .

Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor — maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine — but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class…

So today, I want to ask all of you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make?”

- Barak Obama, in his address to Wakefield High School

This is why everyone should be invested in the education of their kids.  I know investments were made that allowed me to find design and make a careeer from it. Part of how I got be a orthopedic design engineer was finding what I was good at, and a lot if was finding what I was not good at. But to get there I needed help, guidance, mentoring and encouragement.  Its our collective responsibility to help teach the next generations how to find what they’re good at doing.

There are plenty of problems that will and do need solving.

Op-Ed Contributor: Big Food vs. Big Insurance

"There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry."

Which line at the grocery store is fastest?

Really cool use of linear regression and modeling (cool mathematics) to illustrate a simple problem.

If you’ve ever shopped for groceries, if you’ve ever stood in line with a candy bar, a soda bottle, and a matinee starting across town in ten minutes, you have an opinion here. And I can use that.

Polly Climbs Again!

3 months post-op, we were able to get out climbing; got to do 3 pitches of 5.6s and 5.7s.  It was great to see Polly excited and moving on the rock again.  I’ve been really impressed by her determination and discipline to do her physical therapy, swim, and bike to make her recovery work.  With ortho surgeries patient effort post-op matters almost as much as a skilled surgeon. I’m really proud of her, and I hope getting out like this will keep the optimism up to keep recovering (not every day is fun like climbing).

Donning the approach shoes

Nice short walk in

All smiles!

Rust Shadow:

Breaker box from the front porch of a 125 year old house in Park City. The rain, wind and snow must have blown predominately in one direction over the years as evidenced by the rust shadows created by the corners of the breaker switches.

Something westward burns

There are several forest fires and prescribed burns going on in Utah, and it hasn’t rained much at all since June.  The added particulates made for interesting changes in the hues in the sky as the sun set tonight.  Really fun to watch the light change and fade in front of me tonight.

I-215, Cottonwood Heights, and Downtown SLC on the horizon.

A grey-purple hue wasn’t what I was expecting.

IHC Hospital with the Oquirrh Mountains behind.

A circular polarizer brings out what’s left of the blue in the sky and the cloud-shadows.

A different lens, and a tighter view of the clouds and sun.

Corner-burst

The end.

Lone Peak Cirque

Earlier this summer I dropped Polly off at work and picked up Sam and we headed down to Drapper, UT to hike up to the cirque of Lone Peak, and after climbing and hiking down I’d pick her up at 730pm. This sounds like a normal day out climbing, but the approach is about 5 miles and 5000 vertical feet.

The fastest way up to the cirque is apparently the Jacob’s Ladder approach, which starts just up from the town of Drapper.  Via Mountain Project:

Follow Draper Parkway south until it also bends and heads west. At the first light after it heads west, turn left onto 1300 East. Follow 1300 East to the “Roundabout”. Exit east out of the roundabout onto Pioneer Road (12300 south). Follow this east until you hit 2000 East. Turn right, and head south as it transitions from pavement to dirt.

From the dirt parking lot hike down the road and to the trailhead for Jacob’s ladder. From here, its a lot of up.

We made the hike up in 4 hours, and I slowed us way down in the middle section that gains most of the elevation.  Even with a super light pack (only water + food + camera + climbing shoes because of a stash at the cirque), I was moving really slow.

Once at the cirque it was time to refill on water and hike a short ways up to the Question Mark Wall and to the Lowe Route.

The above shot is the start of the Lowe Route, the first pitch is a cool hand crack in a corner that finishes at a small ledge/platform.  I think the first two pitches can be linked, but I opted to stop at the platform. The last pitch is really exposed, but has enough gear that it’s safe (Sam led pitch 2 & 3).

Sam stayed up in the cirque for the night to climb again on Sunday, and I headed down to pick up Polly.  Going down was much easier than the other direction and I made it down in 1:45 at a jog most of the way.  The trail is steep enough in a lot of places that a trekking pole-controlled jog is faster and easier on the legs than a slow plod down.  Even had time to spare to pick up Polly.

Learning to think (and to live)

Stumbled across this commencement speech today, David Foster Wallace on Life and Work via the Wall Street Journal.

This is not a matter of virtue — it’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship…

Its a really cool concept to change one’s thought patterns in such a way that way in which we view/experience the world is not as controlled a self-centered bias, but in a way, that’s freeing and allows us to give grace to others and find meaning outside the grind.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Its been my impression that a lot of my generation would like more out of life than just a stable job and a paycheck, but also that feeling like our place in the world should matter. Maybe its just time to start mattering to those around us, instead of waiting for others to value us first.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

That last line of his speech is the telling one, it is hard to live that way, but the alternative is the same, self-centered grind day in, day out. Its worth at least attempting to live and think in a better way.

null

More New Math 203

A Hummingbird

It was a fun challenge to try and get an interesting photo of the hummingbirds out our back door.  They haven’t really been around all summer, and now within the last 3 days or so, they’ve been out in force!  Getting one to hold still is all but impossible, and the camera’s autofocus didn’t stand a chance at tracking them (got a couple sharp shots of the bushes behind before I have up on AF). I’ve not really messed with manual focusing before yesterday, and the only way I got this one was pre-focusing on the feeder-flower and use burst mode to get several frames.  I don’t normally have the patience for wildlife, but I learned a lot, and these birds are just fun to watch.

Hummingbird @ 1/500th

Polly Portrait

Polly Portrait:

85mm f/3.2 1/400 ISO100, Bounced flash off a white ceiling. Canon 430EX, 1:1, bare. Triggered with PocketWizard miniTTL and TT5 receiver. Used highspeed sync.

Blue, yellow, red:

Smoking Loon, Merlot, and a cool (blues to purples) color palate for a background.

A House is not an investment [its a home]

To each their own opinion, but I tend to agree with this piece. If you renovate much in/around your house you eat into that 1-3% of appreciation and bring the sum total back to break-even. My thoughts: buy a house to pay yourself rent and have a place to call your own. Invest for investing’s sake elsewhere.

Using redshift data, a 3-D animated view of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field was created.

pho⋅tog⋅ra⋅phy [fuh-tog-ruh-fee]

A year and a half ago, I was able to get a DLSR and have even be able to upgrade a few things, and feel like the major technical hurdles are behind me (f-stops, shutter speeds, focal lengths), what remains is putting emotion, soul even, into images. How does one translate inspiration into a .CR2 or .jpeg (or a print)? Faster lenses and large sensors help, but they don’t do any more than they’re told.

I enjoy taking photos to help tell the stories of climbing and skiing and the back-story of a big day, however living in Salt Lake City, the market for such images is utterly and totally saturated. I have a day job that I’m good at and am not interested in leaving (I love design), but I would like to find a way into the part-time-photographer world. There seem to be lots of ways to get paid in photography, but far fewer ways to get paid shooting what I love.

Trying to figure out the non-technical side of photography feels similar to angst of being inspired (or in my case, not feeling inspired) to climb things that are above my ability at the moment and require more of you as a climber than you currently offer (think the mantle on the 5th pitch of Nutcracker in Yosemite Valley).

If I knew what directions to start jumping, I could work on the courage to jump. And that about sums it up.

Backlight

Back lit clematis vine on our front porch last night.