Notes In The Margin

Nearly 10 years after buying the movie, I just finished watching Gettysburg. I think I made it most of the way through the first of two tapes, back when I bought it. As with many movies, I was not able to complete watching it because the co-watcher lost interest.

So, anyways, this evening I saw the rest of it.

It is hard for my mind to grasp that kind of slaughter. 53,000 men died in that battle. Many of them knew men on the other side.

In a time when a handful of casualties is considered a heavy blow, it is hard to grasp a 50% casualty rate.

Our LUG has put together a simple library thingy for our web site, which lets us list the books that we have in our library, and lets people post reviews of these books. This, in turn, encourages the publishers to keep sending us more books. (Lest anyone should think, for a moment, that this wasn't entirely mercenary in motivation.)

The software is mod_perl, and, now that it is mostly functional, we'd be delighted to let people poke around at the source. We had talked about moving it to SF.net if there seemed to be any actual interest, since, at the moment, the cvs repository is on my home machine, which makes me somewhat reluctant to hand out accounts like candy.

Yes, it is very limited, annoying in a number of ways, and lacks some rather important features. But we are making good progress, and hope to have something a little more functional pretty soon.

So this guy amputating his arm, and a variety of other things, got me thinking about the role of technology in outdoorsy stuff. Given sufficient budget, technology enables us to (almost) never be out of contact with other people, and made it (almost) impossible to get lost.

Whenever I go hiking or climbing, I carry a cell phone, and I carry a GPSr. The cell phone, most of the time, allows me to call anyone in the world from anywhere I happen to be. If I were to get injured, I could call the local police, and give them my exact coordinates.

The GPSr, on the other hand, makes it almost impossible to get lost. Now, it is very possible to be out of view of the satelites, but usually if you wait long enough, you can see them again. So, whenever I go hiking in unfamiliar territory, I put a waypoint marker in the GPSr called "JEEP". Thus, no matter how lost I get, I can always press "Go", select "JEEP", and know exactly what direction I need to go, and for how far, before returning to where I started. So even when I get completely turned around, as I did on Sunday afternoon, I simply *can't* get lost.

Now, perhaps this removes some of the thrill of exploring, and perhaps it dulls some of the instincts that hikers work hard to cultivate. But, should I ever get stuck on a ledge, or under a boulder, or just lost in the woods, the danger is largely removed. And, given my tendency to go hiking alone - hiking is usually about getting away from everything, anyway - this is a great comfort to me.

So, while I tend to think that technology makes us dumber, and that it is usually pretty hard to find emerging technology that genuinely makes life better, in the arena of outdoorsy stuff, I think that we've got a winner.

CNN.com - Climber recounts decision to amputate arm - May. 8, 2003

I suppose it's a measure of my weirdness that as I read about this guy amputating his own arm with a blunt knife, what keeps coming to mind was, well, at least I always carry at least one, and usually two, sharp knives, when I go climbing solo.

I simply can't imagine the kind of fortitude necessary to perform an operation like this on oneself. But I guess, after 3 days, that one can do extreme things.

Reading "Ghost Rider" by Neil Peart. He notes that the Bowen family owns 250,000 acres in Belize, and the Coca-Cola bottling rights for the whole country, and have been around for seven or eight generations. This would be interesting to investigate further some day.