ChezLark

When last we left our heroes, I had gotten up at dawn to photograph the overlook at Dead Horse Point State Park:

Dead Horse Point Sunrise 3

After the sun got up into the sky a little and I got tired of taking pictures, I drove back to the campsite and found Timmy already awake. In case I didn’t make this clear before, it gets pretty cold at night in the high desert (Dead Horse is at around 6,000 feet of elevation). During the day, the sun was quite hot, even though I’m not sure the air temperature broke 80 during our stay. At night, though, the air temperature gets down into the 40s and it’s pretty brisk. I was surprised to have to bundle up in the morning and at night to stay warm.

Timmy and I hung around in patches of sunlight as the sun came up, until Buck got out of bed and we had some breakfast. We had originally planned to pull up camp and move to Arches National Park, but it was enough of a pain to get our tents set up that we thought better of this plan and decided to see if we could just remain in the Dead Horse Point campground. The visitor center told us that we could have the first non-reservable spot that opened up, but that none were available. So we decided to kill some time and hike around the park for a bit.

Boy, am I glad we did! We took a trail that ran along the edge of the canyon that Dead Horse Point juts out into. This let us get right up next to some heart-stopping drops and sweeping scenery, and for our entire 90-minute or so hike, we didn’t see a single other human being. And this was on a Sunday!

We all agreed that Dead Horse might be superior to the Grand Canyon: the scenery was comparably stunning, but it was a great advantage to feel like you had the whole desolate area to yourself.

After our hike, we checked back in at the visitor center and were told that a site had opened up, but that the site we were on had been reserved for that evening. So we went back to our campsite, pulled up the tent stakes, and carried our tents over to the (nearby) new site. Since this involved walking through the campsite carrying fully-erected tents, we got a variety of bemused comments from other park residents!

Arches

Once we had gotten our stuff set up again, we took off for nearby Arches National Park. Arches’ claim to fame, of course, is its abundance of arch-shaped rock formations:

Double O Arch, Arches National Park

We drove straight to the end of the park and took the Devil’s Garden trail, which goes past several of the most noteworthy arches. The trail was a zoo, with the usual herds of thundering German tourists. I understand that the prevailing theory on why there are so many German tourists in the national parks of the southwest is that Germans are attracted to the cowboy aesthetic, for some reason.

As we got some distance along the trail, the crowd started to thin out. Timmy and Buck went scrambling up some slickrock faces, and we got to see lots of cool arches:

Navajo Arch, Arches National Park

OK, I guess that last one was sort of a tunnel. But they still called it an arch for some reason.

The Devils Garden trail ends at the Double O Arch, shown above. Then you can either backtrack or take a rougher trail back along a different route. I was getting a little fed up of scrambling over slickrock at this point, so I backtracked on the main trail while Timmy and Buck took the primitive loop back. We met up back at the trailhead.

Apparently the pluot now sports — hair! I’m not sure how the genetics of hair work, but Laura and I are both carrying genes for red hair, although of course Laura’s hair is nearly black and my hair is a pretty dark brown. Maybe the pluot will have brown hair with red highlights.

It’s worth remembering that Laura and I are both carrying the genes for blue eyes, too. Since I actually have blue eyes, that makes the pluot’s chances of having blue eyes 50%.

I just can’t resist these additional excerpts from yesterday’s news conference:

And so China is a fascinating country that is significant in its size.

Also this one:

A couple of more, then I got to hop. Keith. I get to leave. That’s not a very — a couple of more, and then I have to retire, as opposed to hopping.

Bush had some choice words about the recent Amnesty International report:

Q Thank you, sir. Mr. President, recently, Amnesty International said you have established “a new gulag” of prisons around the world, beyond the reach of the law and decency. I’d like your reaction to that, and also your assessment of how it came to this, that that is a view not just held by extremists and anti-Americans, but by groups that have allied themselves with the United States government in the past — and what the strategic impact is that in many places of the world, the United States these days, under your leadership, is no longer seen as the good guy.

THE PRESIDENT: I’m aware of the Amnesty International report, and it’s absurd. It’s an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that is — promotes freedom around the world. When there’s accusations made about certain actions by our people, they’re fully investigated in a transparent way. It’s just an absurd allegation.

In terms of the detainees, we’ve had thousands of people detained. We’ve investigated every single complaint against the detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of — and the allegations — by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble — that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is.

(emphasis is mine, although you have to respect the White House transcriber to leave this stuff in in the first place!)

Here is an image of the Colorado river, taken at dawn at Dead Horse Point state park:

Dawn over the Colorado River

Pluot sized!

My brother pointed me to this very interesting lecture given at the Elliott School of International Affairs by Martin Wolf, an economist who worked for many years at the World Bank and who now works for the Financial Times.

The lecture is a discussion of the economic issues that are increasingly getting the public’s attention: it’s not at all clear that the US’s current budget and trade deficit is sustainable.

Quotable quotes:

Most economists who have looked at this all come to the conclusion that the real exchange rate for the dollar has to fall by about 50 percent. And what we’ve seen so far is that the real exchange rate has fallen by about 16-17 percent. So at most, it’s a third of the way there.
[...]
[U]nder almost any plausible assumptions with current real exchange rates, plausible rates of growth for the American economy and plausible rates of growth for the rest of the world, the net liability position of the United States continues to deteriorate to unprecedented levels for a major industrial country. So that’s where we are as far as the U.S. is concerned. That’s the happy part of the picture.
[...]
Now, is there any reason for this to continue? And the answer to that, I think, is that if you start looking at the Asian predicament, there are good reasons for them to change this line of policy. They are finding it very hard to sterilize the monetary impact of these reserve accumulations. The real returns on the assets they are owning in the U.S. are low, and they have a huge risk of further dollar depreciation, so they’re going to experience gigantic losses in the end. They are now sitting on reserves which are sufficient insurance against any conceivable shock and it is very, very expensive.
[...]
The evidence I have at the moment is that there is no serious discussion whatsoever of this, and for this reason I do in fact expect the trends that I discussed at the beginning to worsen, the net liability position of the U.S. to worsen, and the ultimate pain when the adjustment occurs also to be far worse than it need be. I have no idea whatsoever when this is going to come to an end. The only thing I am confident of – and it doesn’t help you very much - is that it will come to an end, and the later it does, the worse it will be. I believe it is powerfully in the American interest to act to stop this situation from continuing, for many more years. That is not what the U.S. is doing. I believe it’s a profound mistake.

On the evening of our the first day of our desert trip, after stopping for supplies in Moab, we arrived at Dead Horse Point state park.

Dead Horse Point overlooks an enormous canyon (”The Grand Canyon of Utah”) and provides spectacular scenery. We piled out of the car at the visitor center and gawked at the canyon; it was our first wallop of expansive desert scenery.

Dead Horse Point Sunset

The small campground was well-maintained, and our reserved campsite was waiting for us, with a note clipped to the site’s marker post with my name on it and everything. We pitched our tents and then headed up to the outlook point for sunset. On the day that we arrived, it had been raining, and there was tremendous visibility:

Dead Horse Point overlook, sunset

The river below running through the canyon floor is the Colorado. As the sun went down, Timmy and I took lots of pictures of the canyon and the outlook area. Compare the images above with Timmy’s overlook shot.

Dead Horse Point Scene

We spent quite a while struggling to get Buck’s camping stove to work in the gusting wind that night, and managed in the end to fry up some sausages, which we downed with excellent Utah beer we had picked up in Moab.

Early the next morning, I was feeling adventurous and went back up to the lookout to take some pictures at dawn, when the canyon was illuminated from the other direction. I was a little over-aggressive with my timing and got to the overlook at least 20 minutes before the sun crested the horizon, so I wound up standing around for a while in the cold desert morning, stamping my feet and blowing into my hands. After a while I noticed that there was a family of deer grazing on some bushes nearby, and I quieted down to watch them. Whenever I moved or made a sound, the deer’s heads would pop up and they would look at me carefully. If I held still for a few minutes, I guess they would decide that I wasn’t a threat and go back to munching. Unfortunately they didn’t strike me as particularly picturesque so I have no pictures of them.

After a while, the sun crested the horizon:

Dead Horse Point Sunrise

As I was finishing getting set up, an obviously more experienced photographer also showed up, having timed his arrival precisely with dawn. It was so quiet that his camera’s shutter was clearly audible to me even though he was shooting dozens of feet away.

I seem to be on an anti-Bush tear today.

Slate has an interesting article highlighting the inconsistency inherent in the White House supporting the death penalty but opposing stem-cell research.

The more I read the transcript from this Bush event, the more I think it’s a good example of Bush’s oft-criticized tendency to set up events where the participants lob the president softballs. Consider this selection of “questions” from audience members about Bush’s suggestion that people be able to divert some of their payroll taxes to private accounts:

• MRS. CEGLINSKI: Okay. (Laughter.) I have five children, seven grandchildren, and that’s my concern. I think you, making the young people aware that there’s a problem, is going to make them aware and encourage them to save. And I think that’s what we need to do. [...] I’m getting my check, and it’s wonderful.
• MRS. BROWN: [...] I will never be able to build a good retirement in the amount of time I have until I retire. So it’s very appealing, the plans that you’re talking about, because I’ll be quite dependent on Social Security.
  THE PRESIDENT: Yes, set aside a little money, watch it grow at a better rate than the current Social Security system.
  MRS. BROWN: Exactly, so that — certainly, for Jeremy and for my other three sons, as you said, it would make me happy to know that they’re taken care of, too, and that they would have options.
• MR. BROWN: Well, being the younger generation, I’m just starting to pay into the system. I like the idea of having these personal accounts, getting a better rate of return in the end, and compound interest and everything so I build up something for myself that I could leave for my future kids and everything. And I like the fact that I’ll have something to show for it, because people go and pay decades and decades into Social Security and when it comes time for me to retire, if we don’t change, I’ll have nothing to show for it.
• MS. RILEY WEITZEL: [...] We’re really excited about your plan, and that we can set up personal accounts and then watch compound interest grow, and hopefully get a nest egg and be able to hand that down to our kids.
• MS. McKENNA WEITZEL: Yes, definitely. I feel like there’s definitely a problem in the system right now and things need to change. And I want to say that it’s completely commendable of you to stand up and tackle this issue. [...] I feel like being able to take more ownership over your future and over your investments is very wise.

These are the kind of tough “questions” that need to be asked. Good work, panelists!

Our illustrious president would like to remind you that getting good grades in school isn’t really that important. At a promotional event for his Social Security reform ideas, this exchange occurred:

THE PRESIDENT: Good. First of all, what are you doing with yourself these days?

MR. BROWN: Well, I’m 18; I’m a sophomore at Canisius College, in Buffalo. (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: What’s your major?

MR. BROWN: I’m dual-majoring in business marketing and business management.

THE PRESIDENT: Great. All A’s?

MR. BROWN: Hopefully. (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, don’t worry about it. That won’t disqualify you from being President. (Applause.)

Here is a particularly amusing Bushism, reported by Slate:

“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” — Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

Amnesty International released an extensive report on Guantánamo Bay today, which is sharply critical of ongoing US policy about foreign detainees. MSNBC reports:

As a superpower, the United States has shirked its responsibility to set the bar for human rights protections and has instead created a new lexicon for abuse and torture, Amnesty Secretary General Irene Khan said for the London-based group’s annual report launch.

“The United States … sets the tone for governmental behavior worldwide,” Khan said.

“Attempts to dilute the absolute ban on torture through new policies and quasi-management speak, such as ’environmental manipulation, stress positions and sensory manipulation,’ was one of the most damaging assaults on global values.”

The report focuses its criticism on the Administration’s continued insistence that the executive branch should be unfettered in its ability to identify “enemy combatants” and deal with them as it sees fit, without domestic judicial oversight. This, of course, is the main thing that is shocking to me, since it’s inconsistent with the US’s dedication, in principle, to democracy, the rule of law, and civil rights. It often seems to me that the US administration, and certain Americans, are supportive of these principles only for themselves, and that the fate of non-citizens is not their concern.

Here is another image taken from the viewpoint outside Moab:

Rock crease and flowers, outside Moab, UT

I recently spent a week camping in the Utah desert.

On the evening of Friday the 6th of May, I got in a car with Buck and drove for 13 hours until we reached Salt Lake City, Utah. This was a pretty monotonous exercise, particularly since we were driving at night. In Salt Lake City, we picked up Timmy, who had just flown in from Atlanta. Together, we drove another 5 hours or so until we reached Moab, in southeastern Utah.

Moab is a small town almost entirely devoted to serving the hordes of twentysomething outdoor adventurer-type people who descend on it every summer. The town offers endless jeep rental, gear sales and expedition organiziation shops, along with cafes, restaurants and pubs for recovery and rejuvination. It’s a fun town to visit: there are young people milling around everywhere, and people are friendly and outgoing.

On the Saturday that we arrived, we were on our way to Dead Horse Point State Park, not far outside of Moab. Our plan was to also visit the nearby superstar parks: Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park. We headed into town to get food and supplies for camping.

Not far outside Moab, we stopped on a whim at a scenic overlook to admire the scenery. By this point, Buck and I had been in a car for something like 18 hours, so we were getting a little fed up. Timmy was in somewhat better shape, but he had gotten up at some rediculously early hour that morning to fly out of Atlanta, so he was also a little groggy.

Slickrock hillside, outside Moab, UT

We stretched our legs by wandering around the overlook. Timmy and Buck decided that the local slickrock looked good for scrambling, so they headed up the hillside shown above. I hung around on firmer ground and took pictures.

One interesting thing about our trip was that Timmy and I both had reasonably good cameras and tripods along, and we wound up taking pictures of a lot of the same subjects. It will be interesting to see what differences emerge in our treatment of the same subjects. At the overlook, there was a rock face that had some cool detail in it, and Timmy and I both took pictures of it.

Rockface and bush, outside Moab, UT

Compare these images to the version Timmy produced, starting with the same scene. Timmy uses some additional foliage that I hadn’t even noticed at first, and uses a distinctly different post-processing approach.

The Washington Post reports that representatives of the American Psychiatric Association approved a statement “urging legal recognition of same-sex marriage” on Sunday.

If approved by the association’s directors in July, the measure would make the American Psychiatric Association the first major medical group to take such a stance.

The American Psychological Association stated last year that it was in favor of gay marriage.

There is a very interesting interview piece with master photographer Melvin Sokolsky on the Bowhaus site, on the issue of artistic vision vs. technology. Sokolsky uses digital capture and Photoshop extensively, but is critical of technology worship:

I want more than just technical perfection. I want to discover something new each day in my life, something that moves and ignites my interests creatively. With that I wish those embarking on photography to think of ideas being more important than mega pixels or sharpness.

We are living in a strange period of time. We worship technology more than ideas and artistic vision. The tools of technology have become more important than the content of the image.
[...]
In light of these great tools, I see very few photographers who can create images that in my opinion are worth considering. It is only those Photographers who have ideas and vision that make great pictures. Technical expertise is not the passport to the land of great images; without the idea you have nothing. Photoshop is like a mechanic’s toolkit. You can’t make a Porsche without plans. You must have the blueprint of an idea to create a work of art.
[...]
My concern is that the attractiveness of photography in conjunction with the tools available to everyone has created a subculture of photographers who are more attracted to the technology than the potential the tools offer them as image makers . The watchword in most of the debates about photography is about resolution and mega-pixels more so than content. We are now able to shoot by candlelight with a handheld camera, which has magnified the landscape of expectation tremendously. Today anyone can shoot quality images by candlelight, but with out any thought about composition or reason, the images other than technical accomplishments are shallow.

I also like this story about his ingrained compositional tendencies:

Before he was ever a photographer, he reflects, he was already a photographer. “I started as a photographer when I was 9-10 years old, but it had nothing to do with taking pictures; it was all about the idea, which is to say, composition.”

“My mother was cooking at the stove and on the table was a little vase with a flower and a salt and pepper shaker. When she moved I had to adjust my view to make the composition please me. I kept squinting and moving around so much that it turned into a whole megillah ( a Yiddish word that means: rigmarole). My mother thought something was wrong with my eyes and I wound up going to the eye doctor for a bunch of tests; at the end of the day it turned out my eyes were 20-20.”

This issue is interesting to me because it’s something I struggle with myself: as a technologist, it’s natural and easy for me to focus on understanding the technical aspects of photography in great depth, but that, of course, does nothing for my ability to compose compelling pieces of art.

To date, my image compositions are straightforward and simplistic. Many of them don’t work very well. The ones that do work are not particularly profound or enigmatic; they’re straightforward representations of the world around me (and mostly without people).

There is a long-winded article on Luminous Landscape by Alain Briot about Being an Artist which attempts to express what it means to live as an artist. I’m not nuts about Alain’s work, largely because I find it too literal, but I appreciate his thoughts on the dedication and focus it takes to express yourself artistically.

So much to learn…

OK, one last beach image (Laura’s snarkiness notwithstanding). I should have time to put some polish on at least a handful of Utah pictures this weekend, so try not to be too disappointed.

Depending on who you believe about how the trimesters break down, Laura is entering the second trimester. As hoped and expected, her nausea seems to be receding. She has also gotten her taste for coffee back! Now Lark Junior will be wired all the time…

Some immigration-related news stories kicking around lately:

Immigrants use US medical facilities in emergencies

USA Today reports that Mexicans routinely drive across the US border to use emergency rooms in the US, then frequently fail to pay the resulting medical bills:

Along the border from Chula Vista, Calif., to Brownsville, Texas, U.S. hospitals serve as a medical safety net for undocumented immigrants and residents of northern Mexico. Each year, their care costs American medical centers, consumers and taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. During 2002, 38 Arizona medical centers surveyed by the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association reported losses on foreign-national patients of $153 million.

After years of pressure from the health care industry, the federal government last week announced a plan to repay hospitals across the USA for up to 30% of the unpaid bills they rack up for such patients from now through 2008. The payback could total $1 billion. Arizona hospitals stand to receive $45 million a year.

Hospitals are required by law to treat all emergency patients, regardless of nationality or legal status.

Jim Dickson, chief executive officer at Copper Queen hospital, says he is happy to care for anyone who is sick or injured. But about 15% of his patients are poor Mexican nationals, and financial losses have been excruciating for a little hospital in Bisbee (population 6,000).

“We had super-deficits the last two years,” says Dickson, who solved his budget crisis by laying off about 35 of the hospital’s 130 employees and eliminating medical services such as the long-term care center. “This has had a very negative impact on our hospital.”
[...]
Dickson says some pregnant women from Naco used to cross the border after going into labor, obtaining the best medical care plus citizenship for a newborn child.

That’s no longer a problem because financial losses forced Copper Queen to close its maternity ward.

I’m all for everyone having access to medical care, but what to make of a healthcare burden created by people who don’t pay into the system?

More border vigilantism

The Washington Times reports that the Minuteman Project is expanding to California, beginning in August. “more than 500 volunteers have signed up to patrol areas of the California-Mexico border in August”.

More than a dozen Border Patrol agents told The Washington Times last week that agents in Naco, Ariz., had been ordered not to arrest illegal aliens along the section patrolled by the Minutemen because an increase in apprehensions after the volunteers left would prove the effectiveness of their border vigil. They said supervisors at the Naco station instructed them during daily briefings that arrests were “not to go up.”

[The Minuteman's] goal was to show that increased manpower on the border effectively would deter illegal immigration. Organizers said the protest resulted in Border Patrol arrests of 349 illegal aliens, and Border Patrol field agents said the flow of illegal aliens through the targeted area dropped from 500 apprehensions a day to about 15 a day.
[...]
The supervisors blamed the volunteers for unnecessarily tripping sensors, disturbing draglines and interfering with the normal operations of the agents. They said their impact on illegals was “negligible,” adding that civilians should leave immigration enforcement “to the professionals.”

Alabama Sued for Offering Multiple-Language Driver Exams

CNSNews reports:

Southeastern Legal Foundation filed the lawsuit on behalf of five Alabama residents who belong to a group called ProEnglish. The suit says Alabama’s current multiple-language policy violates Amendment 509 of the Alabama Constitution, which makes English the state’s official language.