Quit your day job. Go on. I dare you.

Wednesday was a big day in Chamonix. Starting early on Brevant was the 3rd race in the Helly Hanson Winter Ride competition organised by Evolution 2. Somehow I found myself entered as a competitor, along with Fred and Mark. We met at the bottom of the Brevant bubble lift to sign in at 8:30 am. The race format is simple. A course is set down a massive chunk of off-piste terrain. The course on Wednesday was over akilometre long, with a height difference of nearly 700m. It was huge, steep and straight down the Hotel Face. The rules are simple. No gates, no turns, just boot it down the course as fast as you can. The fastest skier wins.

They say you should do something which scares you every day. Well, I properly scared the hell out of myself that day. Helmets, avalanchetransceivers and insurance were mandatory for every racer, with good reason. The course was down a chunk of mountain it would normally take me 5 minutes or more to ski, stopping 3 or 4 times to rest, regroup and look where I’m going. This time I was just going to throw myself down it as fast as I could without stopping. Worse, the cloud was quickly coming up the valley and half of the course was in very limited visibility.

(a few pictures here… )

I couldn’t even see where the first flag was when I started - it was in cloud. As I hit the cloud layer at full speed my heart was nearly exploding from the physical effort of staying on my feet, and suddenly not being able to see what was coming was genuinely frightening. This was not a piste. There are rocks, cliffs and hidden bumps all over the place. The cloud thinned and I came storming out of the bottom of it doing massive high speed GS turns in great powder towards the finish line which I could finally see.

Then disaster. Past the last flag I hit a compression they’d warned us about. I failed to absorb it and went over the handle bars; crashing onto my head and loosing a ski. Thus ruining my time. Ah well - I still did that course in about 2 mins flat - which is pretty mad. Even though I was a bit annoyed with myself for not staying on my feet, it was fun & I’ll do it again when I get the chance!

So then it was over to Grande Montets for the Boss Des Bosses competition. As a spectator of course. It’s a real social event this one, seminaries from all over the alps come to drink beer & watch teams from Chamonix, Zermatt, Val D’Isere, Courcheval, Meribel and Verbier racing the bumps course. Zermatt beat Chamonix in the final as usual, this time on the very last run.

By the time Sarah and I had finished our dinner at l’Impossible that night, there was no question of going out for the after-party. It was all we could do to struggle back to the office to fall asleep. A great day.

So I watched Al Gore’s film. And liked it! Yeh! I was surprised too. I was expecting something quite….. American. And not in a good way. What I got was quite Amercan and in a very good way. It was slickly presented and not boring. The science was delivered from the mouth of a trained and successful politician. Someone who knows how to connect on the widest possible level. I connected and I learned. So my environmental tip for today is to download and watch the film. If you’re not into Internet piracy, then please buy the DVD from this website (or wherever) and watch it. Please do that. You won’t be disappointed.

And my lasting aftertaste from the film? I can’t believe how close we came to having an American president who would have changed.the.world. He’s so passionate about this subject there is no way that wouldn’t have come through during an Al Gore administration. Instead we’ve had 8 years of that puppet/muppet George W Bush. What a wasted opportunity. OK, so that first election was tight. And it went down to the wire, to the Floridian and then the highest courts in the land. But shame on you America for re-electing that retard the second time around.

However. Do NOT under any circumstances, subscribe to the RSS news feed from that site. It’s dreadful. I signed up a couple of days ago and got 40-50+ feeds into my reader. All of which cite death, destruction and general horribleness. That way madness lies. Learn about this stuff, this environmental science. It’s the only way to understand your own contribution to it, and be able to have an effect. But don’t let’s get carried away. We’re still human. Still people. We still have to get drunk, have sex, fight and frolick. Otherwise it’s boring.

Occam’s Razor is a concept in philosophy and science which states (kind of) that “All things being equal, the simplest solution is the best”. To me it means that if you’re trying find an explanation for something you don’t understand and you’ve got a couple of different ways to do it and both could be right, then the one that seems the most simple and relies on the least assumptions is most likely to be the correct one. If used along side the 80/20 rule the Occam’s Razor concept can help with the difficult process of deciding which 20% to focus on.

Occams Razor also happens to be the name of a radio program I listen to (by podcast) from Radio National in Australia (the aussie version of Radio 4). I used to listen to the program when I lived in Oz many years ago, and still do to this day. In fact I was looking at a transcript of one of the recent programs yesterday and found a link to a page about how to become a contributor to the program.

I think I might give it a go so I’ve been considering what my program might be about. And after discarding a few ideas I think I’ve settled on climate change. I’d like to try to apply Occam’s razor to the problem and see if I can come up with a theory of what will actually happen over the next 50 years or so. First step is some research. I think I’ll download ‘An Inconvenient Truth‘ - that Al Gore film, as a starting point.

A longer term project this one. Perhaps something to gestate for a few months and then get into in the Spring when inter-season comes around and I have a lot more time to play with.

I really love blogging sometimes. Today I received this response from my previous post about Israel, which is by far the best and most informative comment I’ve ever received on this blog. It’s given me a huge, targeted and detailed insight into a question that has been interesting me for weeks in a way which I might not have found out on my own by simply researching it on google for 30 minutes (which is about the largest extent I look into anything these days).

So thank-you M. I’d love to see this blog become more of a discussion and less of a diatribe, but I guess that’s down to me to write about more interesting topics :)