It should not come as a surprise that almost across the board, Republicans oppose this policy change. From the article:

Republicans, who voted overwhelmingly against it, cited statements by some military leaders that they need more time to study how a change in the law could affect the lives and readiness of service members.

Here’s what I haven’t heard anyone say in response to this: why do we care what the brass thinks about the “readiness” of service members to have out gays serving with them? How does that take precedence over eliminating blatant discrimination in military policy? Some things are more important than appeasing some homophobic bigots in the military.

The case against repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” is usually put this way (to quote John McCain):

I think it’s really going to be very harmful to the morale and effectiveness of our military.

The interesting part is that this argument is not new. As is pointed out by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer in the article, the objection about “morale” is the same that was made by the people who opposed racial integration in the military 60 years ago. This was a cowardly and disingenuous argument then, and it remains so today.

The argument is cowardly because it implies that it is asking too much of the men and women in the military to serve honorably regardless of the sexual orientation of the people with whom they work. There are no evidence that the military will encounter huge problems when they abandon “don’t ask, don’t tell.” On the other hand, there are examples to show that letting gays serve is not a problem; one is the IDF. It is a sad coincidence that Israel abolished the last of their restrictions on gays in the military in 1993, the same year that “don’t ask, don’t tell” was adopted.

The argument is disingenuous because it’s really a more politically correct way of expressing an ugly, bigoted sentiment. In 1948, when Members of Congress suggested that allowing people of different races to serve together in the military would undermine morale, I contend that this primarily sprung not from a concern about tensions in the armed forces, but from the strong racist tendencies of the day. Politicians couldn’t come out and say that they just didn’t want blacks serving alongside whites, so they had to frame it in anxiety for the effects on morale. The same thing is happening with respect to gays in the military today, and when the Republicans trot out this flimsy assertion it is the same shiny wrapping on the same rotten core.

(Somewhat related aside.) A long time ago, it was Mormon doctrine that the mark God made on Cain was, to quote Brigham Young, “the flat nose and black skin.” Henceforth Cain’s descendants were cursed with this mark, and people who are born this way are so cursed because they were less valiant in the pre-existence. This was why blacks were prohibited from the priesthood in the LDS church (in which essentially all the males become priests). In 1978, the leaders of the LDS church said that they had received a revelation that all worthy males could be ordained, regardless of race. (Presumably, this was almost as humorous as God revealing that polygamy should no longer be practiced in 1890, just when the outside pressure on Utah was the strongest.) Nowadays the conventional Mormon explanation for the denial of the priesthood to blacks is that the white members of the church weren’t ready for it.  Sound familiar?

In all these instances, the real anti-minority sentiment has been hidden by a veneer of concern for the feelings of the majority. This is invalid. Blacks and gays don’t get their rights when the majority stop feeling squeamish. They are born equal, and the majority don’t grow to accept that until they are forced to confront it.

The low aperture is how you know it's a legit recipe.

• Half a bunch of asparagus (maybe 30 sticks)
• 2 t extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 small lemon, squeezed
• 2 T pine nuts
• Salt and pepper to taste

Put a couple inches of water in a saucepan and put it on high heat. Wash the asparagus and then break each stem by holding it near the top and bottom and bending it so that it snaps somewhere near the middle. When the water is at a rolling boil, leave it on high heat, put in the asparagus, and cover. After exactly 1 minute 45 seconds, remove the saucepan from the heat, drain the asparagus, and arrange on a plate with each stem pointing up. Sprinkle on a pinch of salt, then drizzle on the olive oil and lemon juice. Crack some pepper over the asparagus, sprinkle on the pine nuts, and serve.

[alias]
    addremove = !git add . && git ls-files --deleted | xargs --no-run-if-empty git rm

Tada—git addremove puts new files in the staging area and also removes deleted files. Now you don’t have to pay attention to your hipster friends who try to tell you how great mercurial is.

Today I experienced a real example of the problems that can arise from this design flaw, similar to the issues Jeff points out with Gmail. I live in a moderately sketchy house, and there is a switch which controls the power to several walls worth of electrical outlets. The arrangement of controls is about as good as the fighter jet. Here’s a picture of the switch panel:

Brilliant switch design

I don’t really understand what happened to the machine—the surge protector is fine and I didn’t smell any burning in the case. I verified that the cable is getting power, so either the power supply was blown (hopefully) or the motherboard/cpu are fried (hopefully not). Tomorrow we’re going to swap out the power supply to see, and hopefully I’ll figure it out soon.

I also had the chance on this trip to try out a new slope meter my brother gave me for Christmas. It was interesting to see how poorly I estimate slope—the very steepest terrain I skied barely hit 40°. It definitely doesn’t seem like that when you’re looking down from the top.

Here are some pictures I took on this trip.

A nice view looking out over Alta from near the Snowbird access gate.

Hiking along the Greeley ridge at Alta.

Looking down over the West Rustler area at Alta.

A box with avalanche control explosives near an access gate on top of East Greeley.

The path up to the high traverse on East Greeley at Alta.

Ready for the plunge.

This is in Glory Gulch at Alta.

Near the beginning of a long traverse to Devil's Castle at Alta.

At the end of the Devil's Castle traverse, near the Apron.

A snowy day at Snowbird near the beginning of the High Baldy traverse. There was an impressive cornice on the right side of the ridge, and all the Baldy chutes were closed.

Here's me, coming down off of Baldy with several inches of new snow.

Snow and fog hiding the top of Twin Peaks riding up Little Cloud at Snowbird.

The sun trying to break through the snow on our last day.

After messing around with it for a couple of days, I am very happy with it. At 1.8, the depth of field is ridiculous—for example, it is very easy to get the wrong part of a face in focus. The lens has a bit of trouble focusing, particularly in low light, and the motor is fairly noisy. Going for the $350 f/1.4 USM lens would probably fix these problems. I also definitely noticed the lack of IS as compared with the kit lens, but as this thing is so fast I really can’t complain about that. In fact, any criticism of this lens can be more or less rebutted by recalling the absurdly low price.

So, here are a few pictures I took with this thing. Several of them were outside at night, and they were all taken without a tripod(!).

My brother Josh.

The street outside my house. Driving was a challenge today.

A branch on our apple tree.

Our mailbox.

My footprints on our front wall.

#!/bin/bash
 
EVAL_STRING="notify-send -u normal -t 5000 -i info \"Task completed\" \"$@\""
eval $@; eval $EVAL_STRING

I put it in a folder which is in my path, and now I just do

$ notify ./takes_forever

This is the second-to-last last entry for the summer. The week before school started, I went on an ambitious hike to some fourteeners known as the Wilson group. We had initially intended to hike all three in a day, but as it turned out we only managed to do one: Wilson Peak. You may have seen a picture of this mountain before:

Not depicted: me at the top.

Coors uses the mountain in its logo because from some angles it is a very majestic and picturesque peak. I went with my Dad, my brother, and my friend Chris (from the first installment of my summer photoblog). We hiked into the camp at about 11,000 feet in the evening, set up tents, and set our alarms. At about 2:30am we woke up to beautiful, perfectly clear, moonless skies and frost covering our packs. We started up the trail to the first mountain. After some initial confusion we found the path properly, but my brother had an upset stomach and turned back with my Dad early on. I continued with Chris, and we slowly worked our way upward. It was very dark, and we only had our headlamps to light the path. It was also colder than I expected, but I was prepared and ended up wearing all the clothes I brought (but stayed fairly warm).

5am found us high on the side of Wilson Peak, trying to find our way from a saddle up to the main ridge line. We missed a few crucial cairns in the dark, and so we ended up doing some very interesting class 4 climbing across a band of cliffs by headlamp. We later realized that we were supposed to drop down below them and then hike up. This slowed us down somewhat, and we gained the peak much later than intended, just after sunrise. The hike down was fast, and the weather was absolutely perfect without a single cloud in the sky. Unfortunately Chris wasn’t feeling particularly energetic, having recently given blood, and so he didn’t feel up to doing the other two peaks. We also had a hard time finding the split from our route to the next mountain, Mount Wilson, and because of this and the fact that I hadn’t studied the map particularly well beforehand I didn’t feel up to soloing the remainder of the hike. So, we turned back to camp early and took our time heading down. I brought my new camera with me up to the camp, so I took some pictures of the lake and surroundings before we left.

A VW Bus that fell off the road years ago.

The trail to Navajo Lake goes through beautiful meadows.

Scoping out the terrain.

A month ago the wildflowers would have been gorgeous.

The late afternoon sun on El Diente.

The sun was setting as we got near the campsite.

The view out of the valley across Navajo Lake, before turning in for the night.

The first time it was light enough to take a picture. The trail is pretty rough here :)

The final summit approach. The route we chose is on the very right edge of this picture.

Me at the summit. In the background are Gladstone Peak (left) and Mount Wilson (right).

Mount Wilson (left) and El Diente (right). The traverse along the ridge between them is classic. It's definitely on my todo list for next summer.

A very chubby marmot.

There were pikas everywhere.

Gladstone peak is in the distance.

Navajo Lake, by daylight this time.

Looking back up the valley.

Some rapids below the lake.

My last day of work this summer was August 14th, and I planned to drive home the following day. Unfortunately, I still hadn’t hiked the last Saint, San Gorgonio Mountain. This is the highest mountain in Southern California and I certainly couldn’t leave without bagging it. So, I packed everything from my summer accommodations the night of the 14th and woke up at 3am on the 15th to do my hike. I had been unable to get a permit for my desired trail, Vivian Creek, so I instead had one for the longer South Fork trail. This trail is about 11 miles long (each way) but has the nice feature that the top section can be done as a loop so I didn’t have to retrace my steps the whole way. I got on the trail at about 6:00 and, hiking quickly, gained the summit at about by 11:00 traveling up the Dollar Lake fork of the trail.

Shortly into my trip I discovered that both the batteries in my camera and the spare set I brought were almost dead, so I didn’t take any pictures until the top. I snapped a few there and a few more on the way down. The hike was fairly uninteresting. At the start I could smell wildfire smoke and it made it a bit difficult to breathe. Higher up, everything below was obscured by smoke and smog except for the surrounding mountains. I did the downhill trip very quickly in running shoes via the Dry Lake side. This gave me a chance to see the aircraft wreckage from the 50s that is still on the mountain (see pictures below). There were a lot of tourists from Dry Lake to the trailhead, and I actually had my permit checked by a ranger (which I hadn’t expected). I made it down in a little over 8 hours from the start, including a half-hour break at the top.

Me at the summit.

The Inland Empire underneath the smog.

The summit flag with San Jacinto Peak in the background. The whitish smog is partly from wildfire smoke.

Aircraft wreckage between Dry Lake and the summit. Notice the prop just to the right of center.

Here I have included a picture from a late July sunset on the beach. A few days later, I went up to Lower Trestles with my friend Kevin to check out the big waves that were the result of a nice southern swell.

Sunset at South Carlsbad State Beach

It was a popular day to be at Trestles

10+ foot waves

It was very crowded out there

Kevin wants to ride waves like this someday

Climbing at Big Rock

I went climbing with some friends outdoors near Riverside. It was the first time I had climbed outdoors, and it was a fun experience. The wall was all granite slab, and in some places tended to be worn pretty smooth.

It got hot when the sun came over the cliff

This guy is a good climber