Document type : vocene
Date : 2012-01-21
Description : VOCene #26 (complete)
Content :
In this VOCene:
I. Upcoming Events and Trips
1) Slideshow: Adventures on the Columbia Icefield - Oct 5th @ 19:00
2) Workhike: Meager Creek Route Construction · Cancelled
3) Castle Towers Scramble · Sat. Oct. 8th - Sun. Oct. 9th
4) Beginner-friendly Hike and Scramble Day trip up Brandywine Mountain · Saturday, October 8th
5) Workhike- Cerise Creek Trail Marking (Beginner Friendly) October 15, 2011
6) Beginner Friendly Lady then Cheam · Saturday, October 15th
7) Workhike: Cable bridge on the Phelix Creek Trail (Beginner Friendly) · Sat. Oct. 15th - Sun. Oct. 16th
8) Beginner Friendly Locomotive & Face Mountain Scrambling Trip · Sat. Oct. 15th - Sun. Oct. 16th
9) Annual VOC Gearswap! · Wednesday, October 26th
II. Trip Ideas and Partners Sought
III. This week in the VOC
1) Past trips and events
2) From the exec's desk
3) First Aid Courses at 40% Discount
IV. Miscellaneous
1) Rewards and incentives for trip organizers
V. Ms. Manners
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I. Upcoming Events and Trips
1) Slideshow: Adventures on the Columbia Icefield - Oct 5th @ 19:00
Ira S. and Nick M. will be talking about a week spent ski mountaineering on the Columbia Icefield this summer. Slideshow will be in the clubroom.
http://www.ubc-voc.com/phorum5/read.php?1,77131
2) Workhike: Meager Creek Route Construction · Cancelled
This trip has been cancelled due to the road being washed out, perhaps for a while. Read about it here:
http://www.ubc-voc.com/phorum5/read.php?3,76557,77439#msg-77439
3) Castle Towers Scramble · Sat. Oct. 8th - Sun. Oct. 9th
Join in this overnight scramble up Castle Towers, situated high above the beautiful Cheakamus and Garibaldi Lakes.
http://www.ubc-voc.com/phorum5/read.php?3,77234
http://www.ubc-voc.com/tripagenda/functions.php?tripid=103
4) Beginner-friendly Hike and Scramble Day trip up Brandywine Mountain · Saturday, October 8th
Come scramble up a classic BC peak, with beautiful alpine scenery. This one's a daytrip and beginner-friendly, so no excuses!
http://www.ubc-voc.com/tripagenda/details.php?tripid=54
http://www.ubc-voc.com/phorum5/read.php?3,76633
5) Workhike- Cerise Creek Trail Marking (Beginner Friendly) October 15, 2011
This trip is a great opportunity to contribute to the club by helping to improve the trail marking along the Cerise Creek trail. This could turn into an overnight trip; check the message board for updates.
http://www.ubc-voc.com/phorum5/read.php?3,77122
http://www.ubc-voc.com/tripagenda/details.php?tripid=121
6) Beginner Friendly Lady then Cheam · Saturday, October 15th
These two peaks tower over Chilliwack, BC and make an excellent day of scrambling.
http://www.ubc-voc.com/tripagenda/details.php?tripid=119
7) Workhike: Cable bridge on the Phelix Creek Trail (Beginner Friendly) · Sat. Oct. 15th - Sun. Oct. 16th
This trip will involve a small group heading up to the Brian Waddington hut to install a cable bridge. This trip is beginner friendly!
http://www.ubc-voc.com/tripagenda/details.php?tripid=127
8) Beginner Friendly Locomotive & Face Mountain Scrambling Trip · Sat. Oct. 15th - Sun. Oct. 16th
This beginner friendly trip will make a great introduction to scrambling in the Coast Mountains. Don't forget the camera on this trip.
http://www.ubc-voc.com/tripagenda/details.php?tripid=126
9) Annual VOC Gearswap! · Wednesday, October 26th
This will be our second annual VOC gearswap, where members can buy, sell, trade, or just give away outdoor gear. We've also invited the largest other local outdoor groups, so there should be plenty of gear floating around. If you've got some gear that never seems to make it out of the closet, start digging it out!
http://www.ubc-voc.com/tripagenda/details.php?tripid=126
http://www.ubc-voc.com/phorum5/read.php?1,77394
II. Trip Ideas and Partners Sought
-Roland may be heading up to Phelix for the long weekend to build window trim. If you're interested in joining, let him know or post here: http://www.ubc-voc.com/phorum5/read.php?3,77407
-Caroline S. and some others are heading to Skaha for Thanksgiving weekend: http://www.ubc-voc.com/phorum5/read.php?3,77478
III. This week in the VOC
1) Past trips and events
- The VOC's annual longhike event lived up to its reputation as barely controlled chaos tempered with a little bit of rock climbing. Read all about it here: http://www.ubc-voc.com/phorum5/read.php?3,76177,page=2
-Ron M. wrote a well-illustrated TR for the recent workhike to dig poop holes at the Tenquille Lake Hut: http://www.ubc-voc.com/phorum5/read.php?3,77283
-Katherine C. wrote a trip report for the recent workhike to Brew: http://www.ubc-voc.com/phorum5/read.php?3,76535
-Gili R. posted a TR of a recent trip to Saxifrage Mt: http://www.ubc-voc.com/phorum5/read.php?3,77489
IV. Miscellaneous
1) Rewards and incentives for trip organizers
Woohoo, prodeals for VOC Trip organizers! In return for leading trips, you now get not only immense satisfaction, but cheap gear too!!
http://www.ubc-voc.com/wiki/Discounts_for_VOC_Trip_Organizers
2) From the exec's desk
We've recently updated our website, thanks to the tireless efforts of Marius M. If you notice any bugs with the new version, be sure to post them here: http://www.ubc-voc.com/phorum5/read.php?1,76386,page=3
3) First Aid Courses at 40% Discount
As a VOC member, you can enjoy a special deal on Essential or Advanced first aid courses through Slipstream First Aid. Information on signing up is available here:
http://www.ubc-voc.com/phorum5/read.php?3,77401
V. Ms. Manners
Dear Ms. Manners,
Wow - that Longhike sure was quite the trip! In addition to opening my mind to the world or rock climbing it got some other interesting ideas going in my head...
At times the hot tub and dance floor could be fairly... let's say open... with a large amount of love (in a variety of forms) openly expressed - even outside or across clear long-term relationships (perhaps mostly, in fact). Seems like the significant others generally approved or even participated, and everyone was having a good time - especially among the grizzled mountain people. You know what I'm talking about - I noticed you having some fun on the dance floor as well, Ms. Manners.
I like to think of myself as fairly open, and I'm intrigued by this phenomena... but I can't help notice that in some cases the age gap between grizzled old mountain folk and the new crop of attractive young additions might be getting a bit large. What is the standard here? For "regular" two-person relationships everyone is familiar with the Standard Creepiness Rule: age_young >= age_old/2 + 7. But what about polyamorous relationships - is there a similar rule to help us judge when the good fun stops and the creepiness begins? Does it depend on the older or younger age in the pre-existing relationship? Maybe the average? Does it matter if it's strictly platonic? Maybe just one dance? One night? One trip? Long-term trinogamy?
I'm interested, but Perhaps Only a Little Young.
Dear POLY,
Thanks for your question. First off, let me dispel this nonsense about yours truly having "some fun" at Longhike. Longhike is Ms. Manners' most important working weekend of the year, and my only activity for the evening consisted of empirical research for my column. Ms. Manners was sound asleep by midnight, cuddled up only with her Macbook Pro and dreaming about another day of ending the tragedy of self-doubt.
Your question is a bit out of my normal area of expertise (spooning and fart jokes), but as an avid fan of functions of several variables I'll take a stab at it. As you mention, the Standard Creepiness Rule of age_young >= age_old/2 + 7 applies only to two party relationships. One early attempt to extend this rule of thumb to larger groups was the via the Aggregate Creepiness Residual (Manners et al, 1972). Let a_1, a_2, ... a_n be the ages of the parties in a polyamorous situation. Then the Aggregate Creepiness Residual is defined as a summation over all older/younger pairs involved: ACR= Sum_{i,j: a_i lessthan a_j} (a_i-1/2*a_j-7). Insisting on a positive value for the ACR allows some pairings of individuals within the relationship to violate the Standard Creepiness Rule, so long as that is more than made up for by other pairs in the relationship that do not. However, the ACR rule is not really that constraining, as couples may easily backsolve to find the required age of a third person to bring into their relationship in order to make them feel OK about an existing age discrepancy.
Another approach to measuring the health of a polyamorous age distribution is by the standard deviation or variance of the ages involved: insisting that it be lower than some agreed upon value. Again however, one can always justify a given set of partners by adding ancillary people of the right ages to obtain a desired value. But this time the equation that one needs to solve is quadratic, as opposed to linear in the ACR case (one may even need some friends that are well, complex). IMHO, if you are willing to solve the quadratic formula for someone then you must really be interested in the person, and not be that drunk either. The first time someone solved the quadratic formula to get into my pants - in a tent on a rained out Baker attempt in 1971 - was when I decided that I believed in true love. Worth mentioning also is the use of higher order statistical moments to constrain the age distribution: skewness, kurtosis, etc. Engineering these values is considerably harder then it is even with the standard deviation. For example, no general closed form solution allows you to work backwards from the fifth order moment of a distribution, since there is no "quintic formula". So again I refuse to judge in these cases: a love so pure as to surmount such computational obstacles knows no age.
In the end, one might forget all of the math and try to come up with something like Dan Savage's "campsite rule" for couples: that the older partner ought to leave the younger partner "in at least as good a state" as they found them. In that spirit I'll put on the table* the Longhike Human Pyramid Rule: as long as everyone can sign the VOC waiver, nobody is getting hurt, and everyone at least begins wearing clothing: get a running start and pile on!
Sincerely,
Ms. Manners
*The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of the VOC, nor are they intended to be taken completely seriously. Also, the table referenced here is the Longhike table bouldering table.
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