Monday, February 4, 2008 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
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Walking the Second Bench, Dog Canyon Trail, Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo, New Mexico, February 2, 2008
Aarrg... iPhoto renumbered my images
On my hike up Dog Canyon Trail Saturday I took way too many pictures and when I downloaded them to the laptop iPhoto ran out of hard drive space about 3/4 of the way through and I had to remove some old files to make more space on the drive. When I resumed the download, iPhoto started from scratch and downloaded ALL the images again and, of course, ran out of hard drive space again. Geeze, Louise, who wrote this thing? I removed some more stuff and started over. This time iPhoto completed the download, but renumbered the images. So now I have duplicates of most of the images with different numbering sequences. Go figger! I can tediously recover from this but I think it's time to abandon iPhoto before I lose something in the process.
I'm going to set up an archiving system but first I need to research how photo archiving is normally done before I paint myself in a corner as I'm so prone to do.
Just what I need, another project.
Night camp
Site 8 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - very good signal and access speed ( I have to qualify this - during my January 2008 visit the signal and access speed was excellent - in January 2009 it was practically non-existent during the day and slow at night with unpredictable short periods of excellent access)
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park website
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park on my Nightcamps map
- Check the weather here
Genetic Determinism and Human Nature
The "implication" that seems to worry people the most is so-called genetic determinism - the notion that if human nature was shaped by evolution, then it's fixed and we're simply stuck with it; there's nothing we can do about it. We can never change the world to be the way we want; we can never institute fairer societies - policy-making and politics are pointless.
Now, that's a complete misunderstanding. It doesn't distinguish between human nature - our evolved psychology - and the behavior that results from it. Certainly, human nature is fixed. It's universal and unchanging, common to every baby that's born, down through the history of our species.But human behavior, which is generated by that nature, is endlessly variable and diverse. After all, fixed rules can give rise to an inexhaustible range of outcomes. Natural selection equipped us with the fixed rules - the rules that constitute our human nature. And it designed those rules to generate behavior that's sensitive to the environment. So the answer to genetic determinism is simple. If you want to change behavior, just change the environment.