The PenOpticon

We had a great outing in the Kleinburg this Saturday, looking for raptors and owls.  The hit of the day was probably the five long-eared owls we found in a line of pines at the Nashville Cemetery.  But it was a great day for hawks and falcons also. This Merlin seemed to be glued to a branch for a good half hour. The bird barely moved except to occasionally swivel his head 'round to glare at us.  This mash-up photo was made made by holding a digital camera up to the eyepiece of a scope. Couldn't get a single decent shot to describe the bird, so I put together the vignetted views of all the bad ones. A picture is worth a thousand words — and sometimes it takes eight mediocre shots to net just one Merlin.

Between work and the weather it’s been hard to find a spare minute to post this past week, but I did manage to listen to Richard Dawkins’ intriguing lecture on the Strangeness of Science on CBC’s Ideas. I haven’t read Dawkin’s The God Delusion, yet,  but it’s definitely on the list.  Now that you are thinking about the Supreme Being, have a gander at Mr. Deity’s hilarious and clever take on the problem of God and evil:

From the looks of it, Mr.Deity, deserves to become an ongoing series, though so far there are just four episodes on YouTube. Between The Daily Show’s "This Week" in God and our collective memory of  Dana Carve’s Church Lady, I don’t know  if the world of Godless Secular Humanist comedy can find room for Mr. Deity’s cosmic humour. But it should.

I was prepared to happily ignore Apple’s new iPhone, but waking up this morning I was assaulted by the voice of CBC’s Metro Morning host, Andy Barrie, on the subject of Apple’s latest gadget.  Barrie and his guest, technology analyst Jesse Hirsh gushed endlessly over both Apple and the iPhone.  Even for Barrie, who never misses an opportunity to praise his collection Mac toys, this morning’s segment was bloody awful.  Have a listen, but it’ll make your teeth hurt.  To be fair, Hirsh subsequently blogged a more balanced assessment of the iPhone. Therein, he points out they will actually cost about $4000 after Rogers and the rest collect their monthly fees for two or three years.   In other words, cellular providers may profit more from this innovation than Apple will.

No doubt Apple’s new toy will quickly find its way into the meaty hands of every CEO in North America (Andy Barrie will probably snag one also).  But many others will balk at the cost — both the monthly service fees and the cost of breaking an existing contract in order to share in Apple’s chic.  On the otherhand, the iPhone may spark more innovation from Nokia and Motorola and may even force cell providers to slash bandwidth costs over time. If the planet survives another five years, the cellular phone landscape will look much different than it does today. If it comes about, Apple can certainly take some credit.

But for the moment, Cisco is suing Apple for trademark infringement. That may slow things down a little, but most likely Apple will prevail on this one. Someone on Slashdot suggested Apple rename it the iConn.  In response, I suggested any of following: iSpend, iJob, iSue, iHype, iTod, iSore, iBore, iScream.  I don’t think it will ever become the i Formerly Known as Phone, however. And if you consider yourself a "Mac person", it will always be an iPhone.

For the record — I don’t own a Mac or an iPod and will probably never own an iPhone. But the device is impressive. A boatload of elegant software embedded in a slick piece of hardware.  But I don’t need it, can’t afford it and would probably break or lose it if I had one.  It won’t cure cancer or diabetes or stop global warming, but that iPhone thingy is still a thing of beauty.  And it has a nice ring to it as well.

It’s encouraging to see the Green Party of Canada growing in the polls. According to the January 8th Environics poll, Elizabeth May’s party is tracking at 11% nationally. It seems fitting and right to see the lacklustre NDP slowly tumble while the GPC gains.  Supposedly only 8% of Canadians are still undecided, so it will be interesting to see how many of those votes will go to the greens — and whether they will take even a single seat in the next election.  May’s seat ought to be a shoe-in, but Canada’s a funny place (even more so during elections). Let’s hope Harper doesn’t call the election during the NHL playoffs.

Anyhow, the fact that support for the GPC has essentially doubled since last June is extremely encouraging.  If Canada is in line for another minority government, we need a handful of Greens at the table to negotiate a substantive climate change policy.

One aspect of the Greens that should (but probably won’t) work in their favour is their habit of releasing technical policy and strategic planning documents. Take the recent "Investing in Biodiversity", plan for example. which calls for the completion of Canada’s national parks system, the protection of sensitive marine and land habitats and for the reinstatement of Canadian wildlife researchers.   As far as I know terms such as "nutrient cycling" and "taxonomic research" simply don’t occur in your average Liberal or PC policy paper.

We need a party that understands and invests in the eco sciences, a party that will steer our economic system in a direction that is in sync with the carrying capacity of the land. Let’s hope we are Green enough after the next election.

I stuck toothpicks in my eyes to stay awake for Stewart and Colbert last night, hoping for some good humour and insight — some fake insight at least.  Not much to be found there these days, though Jason Jones’ report on two lunatics (one trying to give guns to teachers and one trying to give students Kevlar textbooks) was funny and smart.  Meanwhile, in what passes for reality, we still don’t know what caused the Big Stink in the Big Apple yesterday, but the media’s great bloodshot orb has moved on to cover the U.S. air strike against al Qaeda in Somalia and the oil dispute between Russia and Belarus. 

So why am I thinking about Easter Island?  Today’s NY Times has an interesting piece by Larry Rohter on the issue of whether to restore the giant stone moai on Easter Island. Although about 50 of these large familiar gods have been restored over the years, hundreds more remain scattered around the island. The trouble is that it costs upwards of $500,000 to restore each one and many Easter Islanders feel that enough have been restored to sustain a healthy tourist industry. In fact, it seems that 45,000 visitors a year is already straining the island’s resources.

Rohter’s article describes the conundrum nicely, but fails to explain why there are hundreds of broken moai scattered around the island in the first place. For this information, we can turn to Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse: by deforesting the island in order to build these things while struggling to grow food for up to 30,000 people, the islanders essentially depleted the soil and used up their primary source of fuel. Competing tribes built the moai to appease the gods in order to "improve" food production. As resources grew scarce, it became easier to destroy your neighbor’s moai and harder to build new ones. Diamond provides a wealth of evidence on the island’s population growth, deforestation and subsequent food production problems.

Fearing for the sustainability of their island (and probably wanting to use the land for other purposes), modern Easter Islanders have no desire to restore all of the old gods so that  foreigners can gawk at "old stuff".  There is a good deal of irony and powerful metaphor here, ya think? Diamond thinks to so, also, and views Easter Island as a microcosm of humanity’s struggle on this planet.  The fact that some of us want to waste more resources to raise up hundreds of pieces of rock on a remote island (while others tear down "gods" like the giant statue of Saddam and the Bhuddas in Afghanistan) shows shows just how far we haven’t come.

The fact is, hundreds of old broken moai will teach us more about Easter Island — and ourselves — if we just leave ‘em alone.