The differences between biases of various US media outlets are often small compared to the difference between any of them and media elsewhere. And the existence of numerous blogs that pounce on media biases doesn't seem to make US media any less brazen about being biased. The public evidently likes slanted news.

Citing examples of bias from The Wall Street Journal is like shooting fish in a barrel, but I can't resist this one from a couple weeks ago:

WASHINGTON -- Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

[...]

The stolen video feeds also indicate that U.S. adversaries continue to find simple ways of counteracting sophisticated American military technologies. [...] In July, the U.S. military found pirated drone video feeds on other militant laptops, leading some officials to conclude that militant groups trained and funded by Iran were regularly intercepting feeds.

The article is full of claims from unaccountable unnamed sources, but that's unremarkable. What killed me was how the WSJ called the video stolen and pirated, terms they would never use for NSA intercepts.

I know three people who were born on December 29 (not all in the same year). Two of them died in unsavory ways and the third seems to be working on doing the same. If I were superstitious, I might say there was something funny about this date. The route I'm climbing in this pic is named Dec. 29; the two dead guys and I developed the routes on this wall at this time of year in 2000. One of the two told me that he'd been on track to have been born in January, but his father had doctors hasten his birth with hormones so he could be claimed as a dependent for the earlier year's taxes.

Some magazines use/d an icon to mark the end of an article. The New Yorker uses a diamond:

SPY used a crescent moon:

In the 1960s, Popular Electronics used a -30-, which I thought was appropriately geeky.

There's something to be said for tasteful end markers in general. I like seeing a QED at the end of a proof.

I was amused to see this archaic way of saying "that's all" at the end of an affidavit filed today (in support of charges against the man who brought an incendiary device on the plane with him on Christmas):

But not everyone likes further, your affiant sayeth not. "The best choice, stylistically speaking, is to use these phrases not," says A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage.

I like how desert plants take their time to grow, partly just because they defy familiar conventions. (Familiar, that is, to those of us who grew up somewhere else.)

I've wondered what slooooow growing plants look like initially, especially cacti whose mature form is rather squat. Seeds usually sprout slender stalks; what form, I wondered, would the sprout of say, an Echniopsis subdenudata take?

I mention that species because I have a few specimens (pics here and here). They flower readily but can't self-pollinate, thus mine have almost never yielded seeds. But...! This year, a few flowered at once, including one I'd given to a neighbor, and I think bees or some other agent(s) cross-pollinated them. Seeds followed. I asked my neighbor to save me seeds from her Echinopsis, which she did--but a mouse ate those.

I still had seeds from one of my own. (I use mousetraps.) Around three months ago, I planted about two dozen seeds--out of which about four sprouted, out of which two have continued to grow. Well, I think they're growing. The larger of the two is about one centimeter tall and is not in any hurry to get much bigger.

I showed them to a biologist friend and said that I was curious to see how they'd develop. "I think that's how my wife feels about me," he said.

I wonder if this Echinopsis will end up with ten ribs, like his parents. A guy at a cactus store once told me how it's cause for celebration when a saguaro adds another rib. As if to remind me of the inevitable pitfalls of desire, he was quick to point out that a saguaro could discontinue a rib as well, and how that was cause for discouragement.

It occurred to me that I could take daily photos and make a time-lapse Echinopsis video. I immediately thought of several reasons not to do that (how much fun it is to rationalize laziness!), my favorite being that it would be hard to get uniform lighting day to day.

But in the interest of not ending today's entry on a note of non-productivity, I offer a time-lapse video of a procession of clouds marching up the valley on Monday that reminded me of a train: YouTube or .avi download (11.4 Mbytes). The black speck flying left to right at 0:44 (harder to spot in the YouTube version) is a raven. The soundtrack is excerpted from Cumbres & Toltec Double Header Chama Departure, used by kind permission.

To the extent Lone Pine has a claim to fame, it is its proximity to Mount Whitney, the highest point in the 48 contiguous United States. Lone Pine is also known for having been near the epicenter of one of the largest earthquakes in California history, but more people have heard of Mount Whitney.

Proximity to Mount Whitney led one Franklin Merrell-Wolff and his wife to settle in the area and build an ashram, as "they believed that the spiritual center of a country should be near its highest point of elevation". If perhaps you think that a country's territory is about as mundane a matter as there is, and you're wondering what relation terrain has to a spiritual center--or if you're wondering what a country's spiritual center even is--I regret to inform you that I can be of no help. Likewise, if you're wondering whether the USA's spiritual center suddenly left California in 1959 when Alaska was admitted to the union, I am not the one to ask. Such inquiries are better directed to mystics who, like Merrell-Wolff, capitalize lots of nouns in their writing.

The Mount Whitney trail is the most popular trail in the Sierra Nevada, so popular that access is limited. It is a nice trail, but its niceness alone does not account for its popularity; people like it because it leads to the highest point in the lower 48. I'm told that if you succeed in hiking the whole trail, half the people you'll see at the top will be talking on their cell phones.

This kind of fascination with the tallest/biggest/best is a bit silly, is it not? If Vijay Singh or Retief Goosen drove his car into a tree and cheated on his wife, would he get even half the attention that Tiger Woods is getting worldwide?

All this is a roundabout way of responding to Rahul's question. I have not been to the top of Mount Whitney, nor to the top of Lone Pine Peak. I tried once and couldn't take the elevation. I have climbed routes on several of the lower granite faces ("buttresses", as climbers know them).

Lone Pine Peak is not in the Mount Whitney zone where a permit is required.

Mount Whitney is dead in the middle of today's pic. Lone Pine Peak, near the left edge, appears higher on the skyline because it's closer.

moon and snow blowing off Lone Pine Peak

"Nobody, and I mean nobody, knows how to program large parallel machines." - Seymour Cray  (quoted in Business Week, 1976)

"The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things." - Steve Jobs  (quoted in the NY Times, 2008)

What a difference 32 years makes.  :)