The Road to Aspen

JoAnne at 12:00 pm, August 23rd, 2005

I have recently arrived in Aspen! While Clifford was flying back to California from Aspen, I was driving the route in the opposite direction. Took me 2 days to traverse the 1200 miles compared to Clifford’s 2 hours of airtime. Bottom line for the reader: continual blogging from Aspen by the CosmicVariance team.

I always find driving across America to be entertaining and enlightening and I never fail to learn new things about my country. (Well, there is Nebraska…but even that has the giant cattle pens and the Great Platte River Road Monument.) The route from California to Colorado through the Western desert is simply beautiful, if not slightly endless. We were treated to some rather wild (and rare) desert thunderstorms. There was the standard Americana, giant plastic statues of cowboys and the like, and the far-flung Western towns such as Ely, Nevada consisting of a hotel, a gun shop, and a railroad depot. My personal favorite was the Shoe Tree - a lonely cottonwood on the side of Highway 50 with hundreds of pairs of shoes dangling from its branches.

There are, of course, scary bits as well. One 10-mile stretch in Nevada had large black spots on the highway. At first they looked like pieces of a blown tire - then we noticed they were moving! Closer inspection revealed the biggest, nastiest looking insects that I have ever seen. Insects large enough to be discerned from a car traveling at 90 mph! They were for sale, encased in glass, for $10 in the motel lobby in Utah and are known as Mormon Crickets.

trip

The scariest bit was a letter to the editor in a local smalltown Utah newspaper. You guessed it, the author was promoting Intelligent Design. This line bothered me the most:

The atheistic scientists are ill-informed and are becoming the flat-worlders of the 21st century.

Flat-worlders! I felt personally insulted! It seems that since I have data on my side in my scientific belief in evolution, the ID folks have to resort to name calling as a counter argument. Name calling is a standard debate tactic, of course, and succeeds all too often in my view. This single line, however, demonstrates the complete breakdown of scientific education in this country. I wish this letter was just one more piece of harmless Americana….but I fear much worse.

Anyway, I am here for the Collider Physics Workshop, of which I am a co-organizer. This is going to be great fun: 3 weeks of stimulating physics with 60-70 fellow collider folks in a beautiful atmosphere. Simultaneously a 2-week workshop on the physics, detectors, and accelerator for the International Linear Collider is being held at Snowmass, Colorado, which is only 10 miles down the road from Aspen. I will post more on this later.

Travel
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21 Comments on “The Road to Aspen” rss feed

Simon DeDeo on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 1:23 pm

Perhaps the writer was referring to spatial flatness?
Clifford on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 3:47 pm

90 mph? Naughty.

-cvj
Gordon Chalmers on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 3:52 pm

I really like the AI though.
hack on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 4:14 pm

“The atheistic scientists are ill-informed and are becoming the flat-worlders of the 21st century.”

Apparently he’s confusing scientists with Tom Friedman.
JoAnne on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 4:56 pm

Actually, my top speed (according to the GPS) was a bit more than 90 mph….
Richard on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 5:58 pm

It’s nice to read the comments of another Great Basin traveler on US 50. This is one of the great roads of North America. The Shoe Tree is a great grassroots work in progress and worth contributing to.

I am going to guess that the pic on the lower right was taken on I-70 near Green River.

I live in a small Utah town, Moab, that is emphatically not like the rest of Utah. While most of the folks around here recognize ID for the intellectual load of crap it is, it is still disturbing that in the 21st century evolution on every level (stellar, biological, computer automata, etc) is seen as controversial. Stop by on your way home.
Clifford on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 6:07 pm

JoAnne: Shhh! I’m not sure you’re publicly supposed to be admitting to speeding !
Oh, of course, you mean 90 using that number system that starts at 25, right? Ah!

-cvj
spyder on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 6:48 pm

Summer thunderstorms in the Great Basin region of the US are part of the monsoonal patterns that occur as moisture from both the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Coast off Baja/Mexico is pushed north by the various troughs of low pressure that also just happen to form, or have been formed by, those dastardly season hurricanes. Desert thunderstorms in the Summer are not rare, but can be exceedingly dangerous.

Wasn’t that 90 kph??? so she could be driving along and taking pictures??
Moshe Rozali on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 6:48 pm

cvj,

Canadian cars would do the job, I normally go over 90 on the highway.
Clifford on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 7:48 pm

Moshe…I’m pretty sure that most people do…. 90 is not very high, especially on long open roads cross country. I used to do cross country a lot, so….. Anyway, I was just trying to leave some doubt, in case JoAnne runs for president one day and the dirt-diggers find archives of the post and this comment thread!

-cvj
Sean on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 8:00 pm

I suspect that Moshe was referring to the common use in Canada of units known as “kilometers,” in which doing 90 is no big deal. They still use the blatantly non-decimal “hours,” though, so I don’t see why they’re so pleased with themselves.
Moshe Rozali on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 8:12 pm

Sean,

Just trying to salvage the aforementioned presidential campaign, chances are she’ll be competing with a Bush.
Sean on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 8:25 pm

Associating with Canadians would be a greater electoral liability than being caught speeding.
Clifford on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 8:26 pm

I think they’re pleased because they’re the nicest people on the planet! More or less.

-cvj
Clifford on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 8:27 pm

Careful Sean….. “They’re in our midst”. Some may even read this blog…..no…I go too far!

-cvj
JoAnne on Aug 23rd, 2005 at 11:58 pm

So, you are saying that I shouldn’t mention the radar detector that may (or may not) have been hooked up??
Clifford on Aug 24th, 2005 at 12:03 am

On balance, best to leave that out, I would say. You have your voters to think about. More traffic-cop beating paraphenalia in the car equals more babies to kiss. Not good.

-cvj
JoAnne on Aug 24th, 2005 at 12:12 am

Richard,

I’ve been to Moab (gateway to Arches National Park) and found it to be a great town! And yes, you have demonstrated excellent knowledge of Utah scenery - that pix is indeed from the rest stop on I-70 just before mile marker 180, just east of Green River.
Fyodor on Aug 24th, 2005 at 12:33 am

By the way, I see that everyone here seems to think that Aspen is, without qualification, a great place. But one has heard some rather unpleasant stories about the atmosphere there, along the lines sketched in Magueijo’s book — attempted theft of ideas, etc. Any confirm/denies?
Clifford on Aug 24th, 2005 at 12:42 am

Many needlessly inflammatory things were said in that book. It sells books. Does not mean that they have anything to do with reality. I don’t know what he said about Aspen’s atmosphere, but if it is as you say, then that is sad. I’ve been to several places to do physics all over the country and all over the planet. Aspen is in the very top bracket of great places to do physics. I speak as someone who’s been there many times. Did he say how many times he’s been? Maybe he had a misunderstanding there and extrapolated (as autobiographers are wont to do), thus sacrificing some accuracy. All by accident, I imagine.

-cvj
JoAnne on Aug 24th, 2005 at 2:13 pm

I don’t know Magueijo’s book, but I can confirm that Aspen is a great place to do physics. I have never experienced any unpleasant situations here.

The Road to Aspen

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