There seems to be a lot of bollocks being flung around that bicycle helmets are dangerous. The argument being that statistics say so, and Swedes, Danes and Dutch don't wear them so they must be bad. However statistics lie, and northern Europeans love their freedom of choice more than their heads.

I've devised a thought experiment to demonstrate that helmets are indeed safe.
1. Imagine kidnapping someone who believes that helmets are not helpful.
2. Give them a choice between having their head smacked with a cricket bat:
a) without a helmet on, and
b) with a helmet on.

Does anyone go for a? Probably not. People are willing to see reason when it's smacking them in the face.

The helmet debate should not be one of safety, but of freedom of choice. The Swedes and some others in that region legally force helmets upon heads deemed too young to make intelligent decisions. It's just that our system (perhaps rightfully) doesn't deem anyone intelligent enough to make their own decisions.

That saying probably came about because of the observations I'm about to mention, but after attending a couple of festivals recently I noticed it was happening to quite a great extent. Girls in small groups seem to very often bare a remarkable resemblance to their friends.

It is not particularly surprising that they share similar fashion sense and hair styles and the like, but they also share physical traits.

At Woodford, the Sydney Festival opening night, and just generally on the street and in bars I've noticed quite a lot of girls hanging around together in groups of two or three who are close to the same height and build. Short girls with short girls, tall girls with tall girls, average girls with average girls, fat girls with fat girls.

Why?

Does the same happen with guys?

Marilyn McCord Adams is a religious philosopher. One of those people who is religious and tries to rationalise it. On this episode of Philosophy Bites she put forward an argument that you can't be rationally optimistic without believing in a higher power.

The argument goes a little like this:

1. There is evil in the world that people can't do anything about. Atrocities like the holocaust, Stalin's efforts, all the fun of the Balkans... It's not really looking like these things will ever stop happening, and it won't because people are neither smart enough or good enough to stop it.

Fair enough. I can dig that.

2. A higher power could stop it.

Again fair enough. I guess they could if they were a higher enough power.

3. If we are to believe these evils will ever cease, we must believe in a higher power.

And finally, fair enough. If I agree with the first two, which I suppose I do, then I must agree with the third. It turns out I agree with Marilyn McCord Adams' argument that you can't be rationally optimistic without believing in a higher power. Praise the Lord?

Not quite. Even though I agree with it, I've still got issues with this silly argument:
- it calls us to believe in something without any evidence of its existence,
- it doesn't help that God is able to stop the evil if he doesn't do so, and
- her definition of optimism.

The point of the argument is silly for starters. It is akin to saying there is something we can't stop with anything we know about, and to believe we can stop it means believing in something imaginary. I would much rather go along being a pessimist than believe in something that probably doesn't exist.

She says the value in this is that if you don't believe in God you can't be optimistic, and optimism helps you leader a fuller happier life. Bollocks! I might not be optimistic about major atrocities never happening again, but I'm optimistic about a hell of a lot of other things. She recognises that certain kinds of optimism can still be rational, but she's wrong in thinking that these kinds of optimism are not important.

Marilyn McCord Adams defines optimism as believing that things can be fixed which only a higher power can fix. Taking that definition it's impossible to disagree with her, but it should make the argument completely uninteresting. It is compelling that I am compelled to discuss it.

We visited Taroko Gorge for a couple of days, which is totally packed with tourists, but as with most of these touristy places there's a good reason for it. It's quite beautiful. However it's the kind of place you want to have a scooter to get around and there's no scooter hire within the park. We managed with bus, a taxi service provided by the hostel, and walking, but a scooter would have been great.

On the way back to Haulien we hitch hiked. We've done it before, but this time it was almost accidental. The next bus was in an hour or two and we were waiting for a taxi when a young Taiwanese couple just stopped and offered us a lift.

Hitch hiking sounds like a fairly scary activity to some, but Millerine and I have hitch hiked in Estonia, Wales and now Taiwan and it's nearly always been a breeze. Once we had a strange pot smoking born again christian pick us up in Estonia who worried me a little, but otherwise the people who have picked us up have been very friendly. The guy in Wales even took us on a tour of his town when we arrived (and told us his entire life story).

When we've hitched a ride it's always been over a short distance of about 10km - 30km. In every case we've been waiting at a bus stop. Buses are infrequent, and can take ages to cover what it will take a short distance in a car, so it can be a big time saver.

Millerine and I have only about 5 days to get in some sites after the frisbee tournament, so we left the day after to the mountain area of Alishan. We caught the train to Chiayi and found that there we were too late for the trains to Alishan and had just missed out on the buses. We went to hire a car, but from what I could understand of the contract we were not insured at all so I didn't want to risk it. At 15:30 something fairly strange happened. The streets became full of military police, the roads were shut down, and some kind of curfew came into action for about half an hour. We weren't even allowed to walk on the streets. At 16:00 an alarm went off and suddenly everything went into action again. I'm still not sure what it was for.

We managed to find a bus to the mountain town of Rueili, about half way to Alishan. The bus trip was fairly epic. It took about three hours of winding up a steep mountain road, which didn't treat my hangover all that well. The view was great until it got dark, and then you could see lights all over the mountains.

The people at our Hotel were very friendly and fed us a good simple dinner and breakfast, but the bed was rock hard and there was a lot of noise. It was on the side of the mountain and the views reminded me a bit of Podolševa in Slovenia, except with more tea, bananas and bamboo. The town is between 1000m and 1200m altitude.

In the morning the hotel guy drove us to the trailhead for the Rueili-Fenchihu historic trail. It's a 7km walk, but the first 3km is quite a steep upwards climb. It was through a shady bamboo forest and the views were great, but I was sweating a lot and a bit worried that 1.2L of water was nowhere near enough. The trail leveled off and got easier by about halfway though.

Fenchihu itself was a nice but very touristy little mountain village (all local tourists I think - we were the only white people there). For NT$100 we got a good feed of soup and some rice and vegies (served by none other than Confucious himself), then jumped on the train to go back to Chiayi. This is a tourist attraction in itself. It's a tiny little narrow guage railway that ambles down the mountain through tunnels and over bridges. The mountain views are good but we were going through a fair bit of cloud so the visibility wasn't great.

From Chiayi we are taking the High Speed Rail to Taipei where we'll stay the night.