We hiked our first trail in Patapsco Valley State Park on Saturday. It was a peaceful two miles — thousands of flowers along the trail, the echoes of woodpecker activity, the gurgling of running water, and mountain bikers crashing down the hills.

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I awaited the launch on the edge of the base. There were hundreds of families, high school students and college spring breakers there. A favorite activity among the high school crowd was to mock the photographers with tripods and lenses as long as my leg by standing in front of their cameras without seeming to notice. I hadn't brought a tripod or my newer camera so I was limited to a point and shoot.

The general attitude among the teenagers was of being too cool to be there. They were talking to friends on cell phones, standing around in circles looking oblivious to the scene around them, and making jokes about last minute repairs that the shuttle might need. That ended quickly when the shuttle lifted off. At ignition, there was an audible gasp from everyone at the brilliant light. This video does a reasonable job of capturing what we saw (though with more detail). After several seconds of only seeing the shuttle take-off, we finally heard the rumble.

At some point while everyone was waiting around, some teenage boys were joking about swimming across the water to get a better look at the launch. A 7 or 8-year old boy quickly corrected their distance estimate. His fathered added some technical details to this and really impressed the high schoolers. At this, the father proudly told his son, "See, it pays to be a geek."

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Since I was braving the cold, the camera came out with me to produce a record of this event. I set it up on our deck with its mode set to night-time shots. The first shot was a blurry, bright mess. I started running through the menus trying to recall how to get this thing into some sort of manual mode. But of course, this is a consumer camera that only grudgingly allows anything resembling manual control. These sorts of settings each require the navigation of 3 or 4 menus using tiny buttons—buttons that don't seem to be designed for adult fingers, especially not gloved, adult fingers.

I eventually found a mode that gave me a little more control and managed to get some decent photos. The one on the left shows the Earth's shadow beginning to obscure the full moon. When taking these shots, I had the choice of setting the exposure to catch the part of the moon in the shadow or the other part. It was impossible to get both. If you click on this link, you can see the moon just before full eclipse. It is a rust color with a very bright sliver still illuminated by the Sun. Saturn is the yellow dot off to the lower left and Regulus is the blue dot above the moon. I tried to convince Shannon it you looked really closely at Saturn you could see its rings. I don't think she believed me.

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Let's consider two neighbors, Bob and Joe. They do not like each other. When they see each other on the street or in a store, they will greet each other with a ‘good morning’ and a ‘how are you doing?’. Neither of them actually cares how the other person is doing or truly wishes him well. They do this because it is a social norm.

Now let's take up the case of two co-workers, Greg and Tony. They despise each other though they try to hide that from the rest of the people at their office. Greg is actively working to get Tony fired and Tony knows this. Yet when they meet in the break room or at a work social function, they exchange pleasantries accompanied by smiles.

When does public politeness become hypocrisy or does it?

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I was recently asked by my undergraduate college to fill out a survey. The first question gave me pause. It was something along the lines of was I satisfied with the education that I had received. I wasn't thinking about education according to the broad outlines that Helvétius proposed. Perhaps I should have...

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This summer I read an Agatha Christie book titled Absent in the Spring. It is a single-character psychological thriller. A middle-aged woman is stranded in a deserted train station for a week in the Middle East. She has nothing to do except reflect on her life. These thoughts eventually lead to the climatic moment when she realizes that she is a horrible person making the lives of those close to her miserable. It was only this isolation that could force her to honestly evaluate her life and see truth rather than the reality she had constructed. Christie is careful to point out that it was the busyness (or rather the busybodyness) that protected her from the truth about herself. And, of course, once she re-enters her busy life, she excuses away her self-realization for the comfortable yet false world that she had created.

It seems to me that the modern world with its fast pace and endless entertainment does not encourage the quiet reflection necessary for separating perception and truth. In a Brave New World-sort of way we are kept amused and busy. We can think that we are happy and productive without having to struggle through any self-criticism. But this happiness is a perception that is fed by the images of the “good life” as portrayed by the mass media. What if we would rather have the perception of happiness and fulfillment regardless of the truth?

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“Relativism, Eclecticism, and toleration are so intimately related that they cannot be strictly separated even in thought. Relativism is a way of looking at the world, recognizing that no single set of convictions has absolute validity; Eclecticism is the philosophical method consequent on relativism—since no system has the whole truth, and most systems have some truth, discriminating selection among systems is the only valid procedure. Toleration, finally, is the political counterpoint of this world view and this method...”

This is the view developed in the Enlightenment. There is truth, but it is scattered throughout different ideas, systems, and world views. This knowledge is to be pursued through criticism and debate in an open forum. In our contemporary, post-modern world, relativism dictates that the various world views are either equally true or that there is no absolute truth (and I would argue that these two positions are equivalent). Contemporary tolerance is not based around a search for truth but a denial of its existence or at least the possibility of finding it.

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These trade-offs exist in the war on terror (or war on tara as President Bush calls it). What is concerning is the apparent oblivion of the administration to this fact. The preservation of life has become the seemingly singular focus at the expense of liberty and happiness. In some cases, it appears that decisions that have significant negative impacts on liberty are being made for small or negligible increases in security against terrorism.

A funny example is the case of a geologist who was prevented from taking a specimen onto a plane because it was a dual-use item. It is actually only funny until one considers that the extensions of this could apply to practically anything that is carried onto a plane.

A recent item in the news was the appeal by the Bush administration of the ruling against the domestic wiretapping program. The National Security Agency has been spying on international phone calls involving parties within this country without obtaining a warrant. I have been unable to find a copy of the appeal online so all I have is this quote from it in a Reuters article: the judge's ruling “dismantles a tool that already has helped detect and disrupt al Qaeda plots”.

This quote illustrates my point nicely. Any argument for an action that deprives citizens of their freedom should discuss the significance of this effect against the benefits to the security of the nation. I have not seen this kind of careful thinking and analysis coming from the government. Instead, we are suppose to trust the administration's statements about the effectiveness of domestic spying program when it has not proven itself to be trustworthy. We are prevented from observing any rational discourse occurring concerning the trade-off between rights and safety. There are plenty of ways to disrupt al Qaeda plots. They must be debated though as to their effects on liberty before implementing them. The objective function to be optimized contains more than just a single independent variable. (Oops, how did that get in here?)

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As I was driving home, I passed by that dumpster. There hung the yellow balloons with their big eyes and there sat a vulture oblivious to the scary balloons. Would have been a good photo. Oh well...

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Here is a quote I ran into by a Greek monk who lived on Mount Athos:

“Do not waste the precious time that God has given you to spend on good deeds ... Such a waste (of time, I mean) is more serious than that of material things because you will find all the material things you want, but not the time.”

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