LECHTANSKI.NET

Back in January, Wired magazine had a special “Why Things Suck” issue. One of the articles has stayed in the front of my mind. It was a short piece written by Thomas Hayden about why science sucks:

Morality, spirituality, the meaning of life — science doesn’t handle those issues well at all. But that’s cool. We have art and religion for that stuff. Science also assumes predictable cause and effect in a world that’s a chaotic, bubbling stew of randomness. But that’s OK, too. Our approximations are usually good enough. No, the real reason science sucks is that it makes us look bad. It makes us bit players in the Big Story of the universe, and it exposes some key limitations of the human brain.

Look at it this way: Before science, we humans had dominion over Earth, the center of the universe. Now we’re just a bunch of hairless apes on a wet rock orbiting a minor star in a marginal galaxy.

Even worse, those same cortexes that invented science can’t really embrace it. Science describes the world with numbers (ratio of circumference to diameter: pi) and abstractions (particles! waves! particles!). But our intractable brains evolved on a diet of campfire tales. Fantastical explanations (angry gods hurling lightning bolts) and rare events with dramatic outcomes (saber-toothed tiger attacks) make more of an impact on us than statistical norms. Evolution gave us brains that crave certainty, with irrational fears of crashing in an airplane and a built-in weakness for just-so stories about intelligent design. Meanwhile, the true wonders revealed by the scientific method — species that change into new species over time, continents that float around the planet, a quantum-mechanical world where nothing is for sure — are worse than counterintuitive. To a depressingly large number of us, they’re downright threatening.

In other words, thanks to evolution, half of all Americans don’t believe in evolution. That’s the universe for you: impersonal, uncaring, and ironic.

Humbling. Nice.

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Last Saturday, me and about 150 close friends snuck out to Lake Samish for a sprint triathlon. It could not have been a nicer day. There was a 10 o’clock start, which is kind of late for a race, and by then it was on the way to being the hottest day of the year.

It was the first time I’d done a sprint triathlon and I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been. I might have been a little cocky having done Alcatraz in June, because I didn’t really go for a bike ride OR a swim until two weeks before this race. But I thought: This is a sprint. 800-meter swim, 15-mile bike ride and a 5K run. Taking such a long break from cycling and swimming would mean I was just well rested…

Not so much. I did the swim in 20 minutes. That’s pretty slow. I went without the wet suit for this event, well, because the water was so warm and my transition to the bike would be less cumbersome. I killed it cycling 15 miles in 46 minutes. I felt very strong on the bike. But then I was beat coming off the bike. The juice just wasn’t there. I ran nine-minute miles for the 5K. That’s at least a minute off my race pace. End time: 1:36:39.9

The event was a fundraiser for the Lake Samish fire department, and extremely well organized, especially since this was the first year for the event. I’m glad we have good local events in which to participate. Hopefully we’ll have two or three more next year!

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There are certain things that just aggravate me on sight. Clog dancing for one. I can’t tolerate it. The smug, yet stilted movements. Ugh. But even worse is Giancarlo Esposito. He has got to be the absolute worst actor ever. Maybe it’s not that simple. How about the least deserving successful actor ever. He is so bad it is almost painful. I kind of feel like a dick for feeling so strongly about this, because I’m sure he’s a nice guy. He’s just so bad.

He has polluted many a show that I like: New Amsterdam, Law & Order, Homicide, Kidnapped, even the movie The Usual Suspects! The moment he comes on screen, his ridiculous over-acting, over-pronunciation and faux-aggravation takes over. He ruins entire evenings for me, because he keeps getting jobs. Even in commercials for shows that I will never watch (South Beach, CSI,…), his ridiculous acting is apparent. I just don’t understand the attraction.

It’s not as if there is a mandate that this guy get a set number of jobs per year. Stop hiring him. Please? Maybe he’s smart with numbers and could go into accounting or something. I find faux irritation in accountants quaint.

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So, there are these two housing growth issues going on in Bellingham. One has been going on for a while, and the other I just found out about this morning. Both of these projects have gotten the local community’s hackles up over one primary issue. Stopping the growth. Good luck. It’s not going to happen, and frankly it’s not fair to wish it so.

First: Chuckanut Ridge. For a year or so, I’ve been seeing “Don’t Let Bellingham become Bellevue” bumper stickers around town. This is as it pertains to Chuckanut Ridge/Fairhaven Highlands/100-Acre Wood… Different names being used for marketing and sympathy purposes. And a developer wants to knock down a bunch of trees and build a bunch of water-view houses. Activists are concerned about too much traffic, a negative affect on the aesthetic of the area and the environmental impact on area wetlands.

Second: a former WSDOT site on Sunset Dr. This is very near my house. Someone dropped a leaflet on our porch announcing with great concern that a developer is proposing to build 50 living units in the rather small site. Activists in the neighborhood are concerned 50 units is too much for the space, and will result in too much of a traffic increase and a negative impact on the neighborhood.

My house is 80 years old. But 80 years ago, my neighborhood was part of Bellingham’s sprawl. It was way out in the country, with the Cornwall trolley as the mass commuter into town. Now we’re about as downtown as you get. I wonder if anti-growth groups were around in 1920s Bellingham.

Anyway, so people opposed to the two developments above have been able to buy a house and live in the neighborhood of their choice. And now that the area has grown enough to accommodate their house and to produce a neighborhood of their liking, the growing must stop? They want only enough growth to support them?

Packing 50 units into the former WSDOT site is exactly what we should be doing! Density. It makes better use of the area’s utilities and resources, and you create a more populated area. It is the opposite of sprawl. The site is now an empty fenced parking lot, with waist high weeds growing through cracks in the cement. It’s not a blight, but it’s no nature refuge.

While I’m not a huge fan of knocking over 100 acres of trees, and I’m not partial to lots of traffic, who am I to say that people can’t move to the town I found great enough to call home? If the market commands it and a contractor is able to build and sell a neighborhood, so be it. It may not be a very modern liberal mindset on my part, but let the market work. (Yes, I am a liberal. No, that is not changing.)

And by the way, City government’s are very effective at being a pain in building contractors’ keisters. This is over things such as parking, traffic and nature. Sure they are not always right, sometimes corrupt and mistakes happen. But growth is going to happen. Growth is what’s next. Whether we like it or not. So make friends with it, pet it, invite it over for a drink. I hear drunk growth is really fun.

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