timeimmortal

…give or take a few months. At least, that’s what this whacked-out eco-nut greenhouse calculator tells me.

And as far as I can tell, the reason for this is because I:

1. took two long-distance trips last year (England and the honeymoon in Greece),
2. don’t really compost,
3. enjoy eating meat just a little more than average, and
4. tend to spend the relatively few dollars I bring in every month on normal, day-to-day things rather than throwing good money after bad with supposedly “ethical” investments or by buying ethanol-blended gasoline

Good gravy. On pretty much every other metric on the test, I’m at or below average, but the above is apparently enough to make me such a big producer of carbon that it would have been…er…more ideal had someone found a way to off me back when I was in the third grade.

I have to agree with RightGirl on this one: scratch an environmentalist, and you’ll soon find someone who is more than a little nihilistic where the continued existence of the human race is concerned.

For those who labour under the delusion that science and religion are in some way opposed and/or irreconcilable, it might do well to take a look at history:

History shows that the natural sciences grew out of Christian culture. As the sociologist Rodney Stark has so convincingly shown (See especially For the Glory of God: How monotheism Led to Reformations, science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery), science was “still-born” in the great civilizations of the ancient world, except in Christian civilization.

Why is it that empirical science and the scientific method did not develop in China (with its sophisticated society), in India (with its philosophical schools), in Arabia (with its advanced mathematics), in Japan (with its dedicated craftsmen and technologies), or even in ancient Greece or Rome?

The answer is fairly straightforward. Science flourished in societies where a Christian mindset understood nature to be ordered, the work of an intelligent Creator. Science grew where people assumed that the natural world is intelligible and bears the handwriting of its author.

Far from being an obstacle to science, Christian soil was the necessary humus where science took root.

Christianity’s unapologetic support of science is borne out by the immense direct contribution of the Church to science itself. To take but one area — that of astronomy — J. L. Heilbron of the University of California-Berkeley has written:

“The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial aid and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other, institutions.”

…

Just as the Christian church patronized the arts, so it vigorously supported scientific research. The caricature of an obscurantist, ignorance-promoting church simply doesn’t correspond to historical truth.

Some of history’s greatest scientists — Newton, Pasteur, Galilei, Lavoisier, Kepler, Copernicus, Faraday, Maxwell, Bernard and Heisenberg — were all Christians, and the list doesn’t stop there. Some important scientists, such as astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, were actually Catholic priests!

Christianity is not against science, but against an absolutist reading of science. The empirical sciences cannot do everything, and hold no monopoly on knowledge and truth. Many important questions — the most important, really — fall outside the purview of science.

What is the meaning of life? How should people treat one another? What happens to us when we die?

No matter how long a white-coated scientist toils and sweats in his laboratory, his instruments will never reveal the answers to these questions. Science is the wrong tool for the job.

The saddest part, I think, is that this sort of thing was, at one time, obvious.

That would seem to be Mr. Kinsella’s contention, at any rate. Or, rather, his contention would seem to be that because immature youth of today scrawl Nazi symbols on the walls of public bathrooms, MP Dr. Keith Martin should withdraw private members Bill M-446 and all the rest of us in Canada should just not worry about the HRCs or their mission of Censorship.

To be fair, I actually agree with Warren on one point:

That look like a useful contribution to the marketplace of ideas, to you? Perhaps Keith Martin and the editorial-writers at the Globe, Gazette and Post think it is, but I sure don’t.

No, I don’t much think it’s a useful contribution to the marketplace of ideas. But, equally, so what? So it’s a useless contribution to the marketplace of ideas. Again, so what?

Usefulness is a dangerous criteria to begin to use in determining what constitutes acceptable vs. unacceptable speech in any ostensibly free nation, much like wantedness is a dangerous criteria to use in determining whether it is acceptable, morally or under the law, to terminate the life of a human being prior to the point of natural birth. That is because usefulness, like wantedness, is a side issue, a distraction, a dodge that would-be censors can use in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable.

No, scrawling “White Power” and two swastikas on the bathroom wall is not a useful contribution to the marketplace of ideas, anymore than drawing a picture of a penis on the same wall would be. Strangely, I don’t hear Mr. Kinsella arguing that depictions of human anatomy should be outlawed. I mean, he makes the point of mentioning that the scrawlings he took a picture of* are at “a kid’s eye level**” — if this is all about “the children,” then one would think that Mr. Kinsella, and all decent people, would be every bit as up in arms over grotesque depictions of the human anatomy on bathroom walls as Mr. Kinsella is over this bit of Nazi-eqsue rubbish. Why should some scrawlings be allowed and others disallowed, if in fact all of them send poor/bad/hurtful/disgusting messages to the children?

The beauty of the marketplace of ideas is analogous to the beauty of the actual open-air market, of the sort that one finds all over places like, for example, Greece. At a food market, you can tell within seconds when rotten meat is on display, and react with appropriate revulsion to it. In the marketplace of ideas, the same principle applies; when rotten ideas are aired, the rest of us can react — almost immediately — with the appropriate levels of revulsion. We can hear these ideas and make the conscious choice to reject them.

When ideas are suppressed, even distasteful ideas, people will go in search of them, because curiosity is a part of the human condition. That alone is sufficient argument against the imposition of censorship through the human rights commissions. That those who would seek to maintain the imposition of censorship are reduced to taking pictures of bathroom scribblings to advance their cause is just icing on the cake, I suppose.

* who whips out a camera — even a cell-phone camera — whilst sitting on the can, anyhow?

** perhaps this is a clue as to the probable age and level of maturity of the person who composed the scrawl in question? And maybe, just maybe, could it be that we don’t want to be talking about censoring freedom of expression in Canada because some ten-year old thought to draw a swastika or two just for kicks?

Update: I like Kathy Shaidle’s take on this:

With all due respect to my commrade in arms Jay Currie, I believe he is missing the key point of this entire story, which is:

Jesus in a rainhat! Warren Kinsella is taking pictures of graffiti in public washrooms for &*$#’s sake!!

Seriously, what do these pictures prove besides:

a) crazy men shit, and

b) Warren needs a life?

Is there, like, some connection between this graffiti and that concentration camp they’re building on the old Varsity Stadium site?

What? Nobody’s building a concentration camp in downtown Toronto?!

It’s been how long since the Christie Pits riots? Wow, that long, eh…?

This would be like blaming Orville Wright for 9/11 — except that 9/11 actually happened.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

With the conclusion of the Greece series, I’ve decided to take some time to clear out what can only be called a backlog of good pictures that have been waiting for an opportune moment to come along that they might be posted. Some of them date back quite a number of months, in fact…such as this shot, which I took back in September of 2007.

This is a view of the sunrise along 34th Avenue in Edmonton that I took while walking to work. There was precious little in the way of traffic at that time of morning — only one car is visible in the shot — and so I was able to pause in the middle of the roadway to get the shot.

It’s got everything I look for in a sunrise; yellow and orange fiery colours, lower-level clouds for contrast, and higher-level clouds for decoration. As an added bonus, most lines in the shot converge right toward the Sun.

Edit-wise, I applied the Direct Positive preset in Lightroom, and then cleaned up a bit of chromatic aberration from the shot (around the trees, mostly). It’s nice when a shot requires very little in the way of editing.

For the duration of our stay in Greece, Grace and I had a running joke going about this sign, which we termed “the running man.” We saw it in a lot of places we were at, including the airports in Frankfurt and Athens — as near as we can tell, it’s meant to point to the nearest emergency exit (that is, it shows you where to run for your life).

We started to joke, at one point, that we were being stalked by the running man. Seriously, he turns up everywhere.

This is one of the last pictures I took on our honeymoon, and will be the last of the Greek series in the Pics of the Day that began back at the end of November, 2007, with #437. It was taken at the airport in Athens while we were killing time between our early-morning arrival there (which, despite being a bit physically taxing, I would recommend to anyone — it’s worth it for how quick one can get through the security lines) and our flight’s departure.

It was actually a tricky shot to get right — the light behind the sign is actually quite bright, and I had to boost the camera’s shutter speed quite a bit before the exposure on the sign was somewhere in the vicinity of “proper”. The background is still fairly dark, and this after I boosted the shadow exposure level in Lightroom. But that’s okay — it still looks neat.

Greece was an amazing experience, and Grace and I are anxious to go back there to tour some more. Sure, parts of it are loud and dirty, and there’s cigarette smoke everywhere you go, but there is an immense amount of history there as well, and some truly beautiful sights to see. And don’t get us started on the food!

One of the last sites we visited in Greece was the Theatre of Dionysos, which is one of two odeons situated at the bottom of the south face of the Acropolis. It is also the one that has not been restored. The actual site, however, is quite large, and the paths tour you not only past the theatre itself, but through a lot of the parkland surrounding it. There is also a bit of a palisade that overlooks both odeons.

This is a picture taken from the steps leading up to said palisade.

The staircase here leads to a path back down to the Theatre of Dionysos (which will feature in a Pic of the Day presently). There’s not much else to say about it, except that the way it’s all built out of rock looked, visually, quite appealing to me, and I thought it was worth a picture. A bit of editing in Lightroom later and it was even suitable for the web.

My beautiful wife, Grace.

I took this picture of her as she was wandering around some ruins at the Roman Agora, a bit west of the Ancient Agora in Athens. Unlike at the Ancient Agora, the security at the Roman Agora is rather lax — one is left with the impression that while it is a mortal sin to disturb even the gravel on the paths at a Greek archaeological site, it wouldn’t be all that frowned upon if one was somehow able to make off with an entire pillar from any ruins dating back to the Roman occupation of Greece.

(And don’t even bother looking for Persian ruins.)

Anyhow, Grace was looking at a pile of rocks that might once have been a wall, and I was mostly looking at her through the lens of my camera, and she turned and gave me this pose almost without warning. I normally hate posed shots, but this one turned out really well, and it’s now one of her favourite pictures of herself.

She really is so pretty, yes?

Edit-wise, I had to do a bit of fringe reduction, and some saturation adjustments to get her skin tone just right. But I think it would be fair to say that I’m very happy with how this picture turned out. It’s easily one of my favourite pictures I’ve ever taken, mostly because I dearly love the subject, but also because it’s just a darned good photo in general. So good, I thought, that I made it one of the pictures that rotates randomly through the left half of the site’s header.

The graveyard near the Ancient Agora is so old, as I mentioned previously, that one can detect in its tombs the varying social attitudes in ancient Greece as regards burial practices. In some eras, burial of the body was the norm, while in others cremation was in vogue.

This is a tomb from one of the cremation eras.

As the reader can see, whatever was once entombed in this small stone casing has long since vanished, the urn (if there was an urn) taken either to a museum or to parts unknown, or broken. A single, very green plant pokes its leaves up out of the middle of the tomb instead.

Edit-wise, this shot required only the slightest bit of fringe reduction — it emerged from the camera looking excellent already, with the green of the plant just as vibrant as you are seeing it now.

Near to the Ancient Agora in Athens is an ancient cemetery in the process of being excavated. Situated just a bit north and west of the Temple of Hephaestus, some of the graves in this cemetery evidently date back a good 3,000 years; there is so much history there that you can even track the changing attitudes in ancient Greek society toward full-body burials vs. cremation.

Also, they have tortoises there.

Grace and I were just walking along through the cemetery when I glanced down and saw this guy just sitting there. I almost thought he was a statue at first, until he moved. I took a couple of different photos of him, including this one from essentially ground-level.

This was an unaimed shot, as I was holding the camera by my feet at the time and hoping for the best. Fortunately, the best more or less happened, and the tortoise was even obliging enough to stick his head up and out (just a bit) for the photo. Edit-wise, I didn’t have to do much (shooting all of Greece in JPEG mode was such a good idea) to this shot apart from some chromatic aberration correction — the camera handled the saturation and sharpness just fine, and the picture turned out great. I’ve learned to keep the 17-85 mm lens locked at f/8 whenever possible, and this picture demonstrates why for how sharp the details are.

The day after we saw the Parthenon and the Ancient Agora, Grace and I set out to see a few more archaeological sites in the middle of Athens. The first place we set out for was an ancient graveyard, and along the way we had to pass down a rather busy, dirty, noisy road.

I couldn’t help but noticing that some of the buildings along the way were in…bad shape.

We saw it on Crete, and we saw it again here: a lot of buildings in Greece look as though nobody has bothered to repair the bomb damage from World War II. This was just one more example.

That said, I managed to capture the building from a pretty appealing angle. Edit-wise, I had to do some highlight recovery (clouds can make for a very bright background), as well as some fringe reduction. That was all in Lightroom. I then tried to run the iPhoto ‘Enhance’ option on the picture, but nothing really changed. It’s rare when that happens, but when it happens I usually take it as a sign that I got the post-processing almost exactly where it needed to be.