Baby's First Backpacking Trip

We took Quinn on her first overnight camping trip the other weekend up in the Sierra Nevadas. It went really well (apart from the voracious, pigeon-sized mosquitoes) and Quinn seemed to have a great time. We went with my Dad, my sister Jessica and my cousin, Casey.


We got a nifty baby-carrier. Q was a little grumpy about it ...


... but the motion rocked her to sleep pretty quickly.



The big occasion for the hike was my Dad's 60th and my sister's 30th birthdays. Since we were bringing the baby, we chose a pretty easy trip, about 8 miles round trip. I confess I was a little apprehensive about taking the baby, envisioning all the bad things that could go wrong and mentally calculating how fast I could run the four miles back to the car in the middle of the night. But everything went awesomely.


We started near Huntington Lake and headed over Potter Pass.


Sadly even a short hike doesn't really reduce the amount of stuff you have to carry. You still need tents and sleeping bags, etc.


There is a beautiful view of the Sierra backcountry (looking north toward Yosemite) from the top of Potter Pass.


On the other side of the pass, our final destination was Twin Lakes. Here Quinn dips her toes in the lower twin.


We eventually found a nice campsite at the upper twin with a really great log for Quinn to play on. Quinn had a lot of fun splashing in the lake, picking up rocks and pine cones, tramping around the campsite and shouting the word 'chip munk!' Sleeping in the tent was just about the most exciting thing ever -- so much so that we had a hard time getting her to sleep.


Casey and Quinn.


Mmmm, camp food! (Actually, my Dad cooked a typically delicious meal of real pasta with feta, tomatoes and cookies for dessert -- he doesn't go in for any of that freeze-dried stuff.)


Upper Twin Lake, with island, as sunset nears. Interestingly, the stream flowing out of this lake travels underground for quite a distance.



Happy Birthday Dad and Jess!


Breaking camp the next morning.

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Oscar Top 10

Apparently the Oscars will start nominating 10 films for Best Picture. Weird. But on second thought, maybe not such a bad idea. It all depends on what the additional five nominees are, I guess.

Mainly the Oscars need to get outside the "prestige film" box. Would it kill them to nominate a comedy every once in a while? It is much harder to make a truly funny movie than to piece together your standard historical drama, but they get no love. By my count over the past decade only 4 (out of 50) Best Picture nominees were comedies (and only one winner) ... versus like 8 or 9 biopics and a whole raft of tasteful dramas.

Also, more genre films would be welcome. Most of my favorite films of the past few years have been sci-fi or fantasy tinged--Dark Knight, Eternal Sunshine, Children of Men, the Prestige, anything by Pixar--Best Picture nominees, not a one.

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Time Series Rant

For work, I often check in on the latest from the climate change skeptic/denier/contrarian camps. Since I spent several hours this week reading blogs and reports of that ilk, you will now be subjected to a rant. Sorry bout that.

<rant>
I'm not a climate scientist by any stretch, but I've become pretty familiar with most of the climate skeptic talking points -- and why they're wrong (or technically correct but off-point). I know about the sunspots and the water vapor and the Urban Heat Island effect. I've read a bit on the hockey stick and the British vineyards. For the most part this is all kind of annoying but basically OK -- healthy skepticism yadda yadda yadda -- so long as it doesn't slow down meaningful policies (which, unfortunately, it is).

Anyway the dumbest skeptic meme by far has got to be the whole "global cooling since 1998" thing. I mean, honestly? Tamino at Open Mind has a great breakdown of why this is just insane. The key plot showing the global average temperature trend (GISS data) is stolen from that post.
On one level, it's an honest mistake. In all these temperature series the year 1998 is either the first or second hottest year on record (sometimes following 2005, as it does with this data) thanks to an unusually strong El Niño that year. So if you look at 1998 and the latest data point, you might think, whoa, its gotten a tad chillier in the last decade!

But if you think about it for a second, you see that the average temperature varies quite a bit from year to year -- and yet the trend over many years is consistently and significantly upward. This is because the climate responds to increased CO2 on a comparatively long timescale, but short term weather variations will drive the temperature slightly up or slightly down year to year. Next year, random noise will likely drive the average temperature back up again. If global warming had actually leveled off or declined, it would be at least a few decades before we could say so with confidence.

In any scientific field, over-interpreting a noisy data set is a big no-no. If instead you add in a little cherry picking by taking the hottest year as your starting point then you've got yourself some industrial grade misinformation.

Which is why I always respond to this argument as a red-flag of bad-faith argumentation, particularly when it is made by people from a technical background. Stop fooling yourself: show the whole data set, fit a curve to it and figure out the error bars on your parameters. And yet... you see it all over the place. Here (Watt). And here (Pielke Sr). And here (George Will).
</rant>

Sigh. I guess this one irks me particularly since I was over-exposed to noisy time-series data sets as a child. OK. I'm done now.

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Tree and Sky

Dead tree, amazing clouds -- snapped on our hike to Twin Lakes (more on which forthcoming).

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Metro Accident

There's been a terrible accident on the DC Metro today. The Post is reporting at least four six people dead and many more wounded -- the deadliest crash in the system's history. The crash, which was apparently a high-speed rear-ending, happened during rush hour at the next stop out on the Red Line from where we live.

I've been thinking about the families of the victims--who thinks their daily commute is life threatening?--and am feeling very grateful that no one we know was involved (apart from some inconvenience getting home).

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Quinn Photos

Here are some Q highlights from the past several months.

Quinn at the Race for the Cure last weekend...

The hair is starting to come in little by little...

Quinn has decided that she loooooves dogs!

Quinn looking intent and strangely fierce.


Exploring the National Botanical Garden.

At the National Museum of the American Indian.

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Automatic Baby

We just did an all-R.E.M. service at church today - pretty fun. Anyway, while I was poking around on YouTube for inspiration, I came across this:

This being one-half of U2 (bass and drums) plus one-half of R.E.M. (singer and guitar) doing a pretty great live version of U2's song 'One.' A few years ago I actually spent several hours trying to track down a mp3 of this performance somewhere online. I should have known just to check youTube.

I really like Michael Stipe's vocal here and the very R.E.M.-y harmonies he does with Mike Mills. But still: this is really Bono's song - it's hard to beat the original.

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