Belief maps: part one.

I am still upset about the recent violence visited upon a faculty member in my department by animal liberationists. I am friends with members of his lab, I have taken a course with him (as well as with another psychology professor who made headlines several years ago after he publicly stated that he was discontinuing animal research because the lives of his young children had been threatened), he is part of my community. To see his property firebombed, his life threatened, to hear him called a "piece of human shit", because of his use of animals in research is horrifying (btw, if terrorists blow up your car, will insurance pay for that? I'm kind of thinking it probably doesn't. Seems trivial, but much would that suck to just lose your car? Second btw: what is going on with indymedia? They just post terrorist press-releases as news? Fucking hippies).

I have a long history of utter contempt for animal-rights activists who focus on animal testing in scientific research - there was a cadre of hippy dimwits at my small liberal arts college who periodically engaged in "actions" to shut down animal testing in the neuroscience department - think spraypainting messages on sidewalks late at night, rappelling from the roof of the library with banners and then just hanging out there for a few days, just a lot of really useful and productive shit. Left unaddressed in their endless letters to the editor of our college review was why they were so focused saving the lives of a litter of a few dozen rats (our neuroscience department was tiny) who died in order to contribute to the sum of human knowledge about the inner workings of the brain, instead of on all the thousands of fucking cows and pigs that we students were eating every day because we thought that meat was delicious and we liked delicious things.

I mean, obviously as a vegetarian I think there's a good argument to be made that the utter scrumptiousness of meat is, on balance, outweighed by the cruelty of the treatment that animals receive in factory farms (just slightly, though - god, meat is so fucking tasty). The strength of the argument against animal testing pales in comparison with the argument against eating meat, and the comparative numbers of animals involved are just ridiculous. So why was some scruffy asshole hanging outside of my library carrel with a banner when I was studying? I have to believe that there were some Daddy issues involved. Standing outside of the dining hall trying to get your peers to stop eating meat sounds like kind of a drag, but sticking it to The Man with an action? That sounds awesome! "All these know-it-all professors with their rules and their grades and their biomedical research, they're just like my dad! Fuck you, dad!"

So the terrorists are upsetting, but, I hate to say, almost expected. Just as I kind of expect there to be a couple of anti-abortion activists just this side of a murderous rampage somewhere in Colorado Springs, I expect there to be a few dangerously self-righteous animal rights nutballs somewhere in SoCal. What's actually been slightly terrifying is confronting the range of ignorance in the aftermath of the attack - the comments posted to news articles, etc. have been really terrifying. Some of them are just frothing at the mouth from vegan idiots - DID YOU KNOW YOUR GLASSOF MILK CONTAIN PUS ITS TRUE LOOK IT UP ON INTERNET, but some of it seems to be words put together by people who know how to read and write but not how to think or make decisions, e.g.

"I couldn't care less for the safety or welfare of anyone who inflicts harm on animals in the course of their work. Do your medical testing with computer models, on willing humans or not at all."

Really, you couldn't care less for their safety? What about the safety of people who kill animals and rip the flesh from their bones and then eat that flesh? Not worth anything to you either? So maybe we should firebomb little kids who like hot dogs? Also, this whole "computer modeling" thing is so transparently ridiculous. Computer models play a role in understanding how complex systems work, but how the fuck do you think you program a computer model? How do you think you set the parameters of the model and double check to make sure that your current model has some sort of biological validity? And even if your model is amazing and incredibly accurate and the best anyone has ever seen, the best you could hope for is to maybe model how one layer of cells in one small area of cortex handles one specific type of information under ideal conditions and never mind that it leaves out basically all of reality like genes and metabolic activity and all that stuff for the moment because no one in the scientific community would ever expect your computer model to replace reality; only a complete fuckwit would think that you could stop looking at reality entirely and now only do research on a computer model of reality and computer models will be science from now on and GAAAAH WHERE DID YOU LEARN TO USE YOUR BRAIN YOU DIDN'T LEARN RIGHT.

Okay, deep breath. The other inaccuracy that's been bugging me is this word vivisection. I'm not even sure what these people mean when they say vivisection - to me it means the thing that 19th century physicians and scientists did where they would basically dissect an animal while it was still alive, which is fucked up but then have you seen the 19th century? Nobody does that now. There are plenty of scientists who anesthetize their animals and then perform surgeries on them and then administer pain medications once the animal wakes up again, just like we do with people, but that is hardly comparable. And, as far as I know, the professor who got firebombed doesn't even perform surgeries on his monkeys! He euthanizes them once the experiment is over so that he can examine their brains. If you find that horrifying and morally unjustifiable, then all I can ask is that you again look around you. You are surrounded by people who euthanize animals every day so they can eat them in sandwiches, which does nothing to help us understand or treat terrible disorders like drug addiction. Are you firebombing your friends and neighbors? Maybe you should start, see how far it gets you.

Okay, so it's taking me a while to get around to my point, so let's call this part one. Part two to follow.

Mt. Lowe Railway Trail

Sorry to have been absent from my blog for so long. Turns out dissertations are actually kind of hard to do, not to mention time consuming. Regardless, mine seems like it might actually happen this year, and I am also set up with a job in LA for next year, so I am breathing a little easier this week. In celebration of having a weekend that I didn't have to work through, I decided to go for a hike today. I picked the Mt. Lowe Railway Trail pretty much at random from my book of local hikes, and I thought it was pretty awesome. Basically, there was once a funicular that went up this mountain to a grand hotel that was the place to rest and recuperate in the late 1890's for a few years before it was destroyed in various fires and storms. They had bowling alleys and billiard rooms and all kinds of diversions for the rich and famous of Los Angeles and Pasadena to amuse themselves. Once you were at the top, there was also once a trolley line that went around the edges of the mountains purely for sightseeing purposes, and it went over all kinds of crazy bridges and horseshoes to make it up the necessary elevations. Apparently it was an engineering marvel of the time. Now the hotel is in ruins and the rail embankments have been converted to a lovely hiking path that anyone can enjoy, even impoverished saps such as myself. You park at the edge of Altadena on surface streets, and then walk up one hell of a hill to get the hotel. This stretch is like a non-stop party on Sunday mornings, because there's just so many people. Little 4 year olds running around and trying to dig up erosion-control equipment, delightful older couples taking their morning consitutional, just everybody was out. Once you get to the hotel, then you take the old train embankment around in a big loop that goes on for most of the day. This stretch was almost entirely empty except for a few pairs of mountain bikers speeding down the hill (one pair with a hilarious dog wearing a backpack running madly after them with its tongue hanging out the side of its mouth). Here are pictures of the things that I saw!

This is a picture of hotel ruins, possibly a dance floor? Possibly with a bartender informing you that you have always been the caretaker?


Here are funicular ruins, which sounds like an Enya song:


Here is the rail embankment as it goes through the "granite gates", which apparently took eight months to cut. People were way more patient back then.


Here is a burned out stump of a tree that is filled with rocks. I assume this happened when there was a crazy rockslide and all these rocks bounced into the tree and got stuck there. Nature crazy!


Here is inspiration point, which has little fake telescopes pointing to all the things you can see from there when it's not too cloudy or foggy. It was beautiful and sunny when I was there but unfortunately the lowlands were socked in with fog, so I couldn't see shit.


Here is the scope aimed at Silverlake. You can just make out some fucking hipsters.



Going on hikes for me is like a neverending conversation between Little Toph and Big Toph. Big Toph is all, "In any venture, it is paramount to consider not only the probability of misadventure, but the consequences thereof in the current setting - we may be certain that we will not fall, but if we should fall, will it lead to a bruised ego, a twisted knee, or certain death?" Little Toph is like, "Holy crap, there's a cave in that rock wall. There's probably treasure in there. We should try to scramble up that patch of scree and check it out."

Strong recommend for this hike! Although it's 12 miles and took me about 6 hours with lunch and snack breaks, and now my knees feel like I'm 90, so I'd pre-dose with Tylenol if you are old and feeble like me.