New website!

I have set up a new site, Jack's travels, with the various long-form travel writing I've done. (Some of the entries are, in fact, taken from this blog...) If travel writing interests you, please stop by and have a look!

Moose Racing Handguards do not fit on the DR650 stock handlebars >:(

I ordered some Moose Racing barkbusters online for my '03 DR650, on the strength of several internet comments that they would fit on the stock bars with no mods whatsoever. It turns out that this is not true.

Since I pigheadedly wanted to install them anyway, what I ended up doing is using a hacksaw to cut off (1) the balls on the ends of my levers, and (2) about 1/4 inch off the ends of the handlebars. I bolted on the clamps right below the crossbar on either side. Once you've cut the lever balls off, the left handguard can be bolted on, although you'll need to twist the mirror mount backwards a bit to get the handguard to actually cover the clutch lever:

To get the right handguard on, you need to rotate the right mirror mount/brake reservoir, otherwise the bolt on the back of the reservoir will be in the way:

Assuming it is ok for the reservoir to be tilted like this...
Here are a couple other pics (sorry for the lousy quality, my phone's camera is kind of a joke):

As an aside, I should mention that the stock bars are really kind of awful. Therefore, I think I'm going to end up buying some aftermarket handlebars where the handguards can bolt on with no mods required... I've read -- and seen a picture! -- of Renthal 7/8 bars with the Moose handguards on, so I may just go with those.

Update: Got Renthal 7/8 CR high bend bars, and the Moose guards went on just fine. (Actually, one of the screws became cross-threaded, which sucked, but that isn't Renthal's fault...) Here's a pic:

Nature is my sanctuary

I can't even fathom how many shades and textures of green are in this picture. I would imagine there's more than 30 different species of plants and mosses in it, plus others I cannot see. Some, like the Sword Fern on the right, will be only in the watershed for a few months. Others, like the Oxalis clover at the bottom, persist about half of the year, and the mosses are constantly changing and growing. The trees remain year after year, the fallen ones decomposing and making homes for new plants. As the watershed gets older, it gets more complex. You can solve bioenergetics equations and put some numbers on the increasing entropy of the site. Or you can look at this picture. A picture is worth, in this case, quite a large number of bytes.

"The Last Mountain"

This just blew me away, and I don't mean that as a pun on mountain-top mining. I guess the most deep-down issue I want to be a part of solving is the energy crisis. And as a forester, I believe that trees are a tremendous part of that goal. But this is just a reminder of how big this crisis is.

As most southerners know, all of the "lakes" in the south are fake. (Many of the lakes in Oregon are also fake, but they would normally be in places that would get seasonal pooling due to melting of snowpack). In places near Clemson, there are little lumber towns that have quite literally "dried up" because of the damming of the rivers... the Keowee and the Tyger, particularly... that took the power from their mills.Yet at the same time, I and every other person in natural resource management at Clemson greatly enjoyed getting out on the lake in boats or swimming, or making a bonfire on the "beach" (clay beaches that were once mountain-tops), or looking out at the lake from the top of the stadium. With situations like this, what is the balance?

As an ecologist, we have a tendency to think that externalities are only spatial. Be it Tobler or Newtonian thinking, we find that what is near to us in space is more influenced than that far away. As a resource economist, I became very familiar with this (mathematically too complicated for me at the time) concept of "lambda"- the scarcity term.  Essentially, lambda was a way in which you weight the present today in order to account for its accruing impact on the future.

When I see things like this, I wonder-- what is the lambda? Or more, what was the lambda 30 years ago when someone thought, well, it would be a lot easier to get coal if we didn't have to mine. It would be a lot easier to get timber if we cut down the whole forest. It would be a lot easier to get food if we had McDonald's everywhere. It would be more convenient to get to work if we all had a car...no TWO cars. And yet I'm guilty as the next person in using the energy from that coal, cutting down those trees, going to the major chain stores, and driving a car.

I love this kind of ethical-economical debate and to challenge myself to think about being on all sides, to try to pick and defend a side. I love it because it's intractable and deep, and I can't figure out the answer.

But I do look forward to seeing this film in Portland.

What a clear-cut really looks like.

On Saturday at work, I saw this neat site. I followed the birding trail down towards the stream from the ridge line, until it got too steep.

You can imagine a watershed is shaped like a triangle. By definition, a watershed is the contributing area from which a stream drains, so think about how a valley is "v-shaped" and then imagine that "v" has a back-- presto! A triangle. The way in which the stream comes over the land is a "Y" super-imposed on that "v"-- at least, in my watershed, and many around here, that's how it looks.

Okay, so that is preface for where this photo was taken, standing at the intersection of the three prongs of the "Y" looking upward, It looks like a "hemispheric lens" from this angle because that expanse of triangle is all, naturally contributing to this point, and for just a second the visual and the functional are captured together.
The big dead stump is a douglas-fir-- the smaller trees also are douglas-fir-- these trees were planted about 55 years ago. The little guy on the left is Rhododendron, or as we call it "rhodie". You can see some rhodie also growing from the stump. In the foreground is "salal"-- a spiky plant that grows almost everywhere. That guy is so prolific that you can burn the entire site and it will resume it's previous cover within 1 year!

The mosses, I do not know their names. But I have heard there are more than 40 different types of mosses out there. Did I mention that this site is classified as a "clear cut"?

Snow falling on cedars

And, also on Douglas-fir and Western Hemlock.God, I hope I can come up with a good idea this month for defending so that I can keep working on this landscape forever. 

I can relate...

To this article...
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/the-college-majors-that-do-best-in-the-job-market/

I remember between college and graduate school, I wanted to find a job. I applied to literally 147 different places. Let me also say that probably 140 of the 147 did not involve any kind of college degree. Why? I was an English major. Which means that I had NO practical and NO intellectual skills, other than being able to write a little better than most people. I remember coming to my "great job" at the GNC one day and talking with a friend who ran the GNC up the street (the one that almost ended my career, eventually). She did not have a college degree. I was saying that I regretted getting mine because it took so damn long, and I didn't really learn anything from it. And it was true. I learned NOTHING while I was an undergrad. I saw the back of a museum a few times, and that was interesting. And I liked my architecture classes, because they were pretty fun, and now I feel like I can identify buildings. 

I see this and it reminds me of that sort of burdensome truth of getting a college degree in today's world-- it's just not enough anymore. I'm glad I have a masters, and I'm REALLY glad it's a practical masters. Even if I didn't get to start at the top of the pyramid with my next job, I'm glad to know that I've got a niche set of skills that makes me a viable candidate for positions that require a college degree-- clearly my goal is government work, which requires a Ph.D. in my field, but it's nice to think that I've done something for the backup. Get a certified masters degree and get your CF and you're in a much more luxurious boat when swimming the sea of job vacancies, although you may never find land no matter how nice your boat is.

Nonetheless, good read above. Good for those looking at college now too-- engineering sounds like they know what's going on. I've always thought engineers were particularly amazing. They both know and do... there's something to be said for that.