Pictures from Porcupine Wilderness Mountain Area

I didn't have time to add captions or do much sorting, but here are some pictures from the recent camping trip.

Obsequious Bouffant

I received an e-mail about a a going away party for a post-doc who's moving on. What was most interesting were the ads that gmail displayed at the side of the message -- I like to click on the links, the advertisers have to pay, and I never purchase anything. One of the links took me to a site that earnestly explained how to end a friendship. At first I thought it was some absurdist joke, but who would pay to have people read a joke? The article, hosted on a site called LifeScript.com, went on for better than five pages.

Walking home I decided to see what advertisements I could conjure by sending myself strange e-mails. I started with this message, "I have an obsequious bouffant." with a subject that was the same as the title of this post. There were several ads for surgical scrubs (??) and one for hairstyles for different face shapes. What was most interesting was that the hairstyle ad was a link to a page also hosted by LifeScript.com. Now, I'm not the most with it guy, so maybe LifeScript is in the midst of going supernova, but I've never heard of them. Further, the link didn't take me to a page relating to obsequiousness or bouffants, rather it was a result of a search of LifeScript.com based on the keywords, 'face-shape' and 'hairstyle'. 

The whole thing got me thinking that the ads Google displays aren't chosen based on the content of the e-mail alone. I suspect that Google is beginning to form a profile of me based on all the e-mail (and, perhaps, use of other Google products) and is choosing advertising based on that. 

Creepy, huh?

On an unrelated note, I found this '50s ad for thorazine via Boing Boing.

Blogging about Blogging

It's Friday and I don't feel like working, so I read this article in the New York Times about a blogger's online life. It's an interesting story of a woman who made much of her personal life visible to strangers via her blog/job and felt more than a small amount of regret for it. It got me thinking as to why I blog. 

I blog because it's halfway between keeping a journal and making faces in the mirror. There was a time when I thought I could capture something essential about myself in a blog so that a future me could objectively examine the me who was posting. I don't think I've quite done that. I censor myself for a number of reasons. Further, self-examination pays diminishing returns after a while. When I was a kid I decided I would catalog all the thoughts in my head. As I began to comprehend the difficulty of the task, the thoughts that needed to be cataloged were mostly thoughts about cataloging thoughts, and then thoughts about the nature of self referential thoughts, and then ...

Fastchance has turned out to be a place for me to try out different narratives for my life, and in a way to pick out the crucial aspects of my life. It is easy to see that meeting and marrying my wife has been an important part of the story of my life, but grad school for example, is not at all clear. Fifteen years from now, I may look back and say, "Grad school was walking through a door into freedom." I may look back and say, "I didn't have to do that." Having a record of these attempted stories, however imperfect, is of value. 

So why not keep a journal? Writing a journal entry doesn't require telling a story. A journal entry doesn't require analysis and can become nothing more than data collection.

Time runs short. I must meet some friends at a local pub before Banach-Tarski hour for pints of beer ends.  

Short Terse Post

I am horribly addicted to coffee, and for good reason. While grad school is ostensibly going well, being deprived of the time and energy to do the things I love -- boating, skiing -- has got me seriously down. The high point of my day is my morning cup of coffee.  I just reached for my mug. The weight indicated I am closer to the end of my morning joy than the beginning and a sense of sorrow washed over me.

I would like to feel better.   

Long Rambly Post

You should read this article here. 

If you're at all like me, part of you was totally like, dude! How cool is that? Imagine some guy standing next to a cell phone tower, and without him even realizing it, the tower melts! Wow! Part of you is also like, hmm, the military flying around an airplane full of toxic chemicals? This may not end well. The military doesn't exactly have a flawless track record regarding safety, see exhibit A. 

The other issue, of course, is that a bunch of engineers and scientists spent a considerable amount of intellectual energy figuring out how to make the laser small enough, light enough, and powerful enough to be effective when mounted in a smallish cargo aircraft. Not that this, in itself, is particularly wrong, but these same engineers didn't spend that energy thinking about how to to build effective solar panels, how to educate children better, how to grow food more effectively, how to transport goods efficiently. 

One of my first jobs out of college was with the defense contractor Lockheed-Martin. For a nerd, the place was heaven at first. I worked with really smart people on big, hard problems. I learned a ton, and to this day, I'm proud of the work I did there. The environment allowed me to accomplish more than I would have dreamed myself capable of. As a liberal the place left me conflicted. Our essential goal was to build computer games -- very, very realistic computer games. These games would help train our soldiers by providing battlefield experiences that were far more comprehensive than could be had rolling around Fort Knox in a bunch of M1's. Plus it's safer and more environmentally friendly to train in simulators than to tear up the terrain while guzzling fuel. However sound these arguments were, they did little to assuage my fears that I was doing wrong by pouring my intellectual energies into things military.

I felt then, as I do now, that the problems of the world will be solved when people decide to solve them. More precisely, the successes and failings of the world cannot be pinned on some abstract notion of "society", but on the sum total of all the decisions we as individuals make. If we each live our life trying to make the world a better place for everyone, then this would be manifest on a large scale. With this starry-eyed idealism I got a job in a poor, rural high school as a math teacher, got my ass and idealism handed to me, and was shown the door. Not that I was a good high school teacher, but compared to the smooth efficiency at Lockheed, the high school was dysfunctional. Things that you would expect to happen in a high school just didn't. Of course, an institution that employed better than a hundred people with the task of educating some six hundred kids had a quarter the budget of the thirty five person division of Lockheed I had left. When I left teaching, I was broke. My old boss at Lockheed called me up and offered my job back (at better than twice the pay of the high school.) I said yes. For a while Lockheed continued to be a great place.

Even after Lockheed, I found that many of the jobs I took had some peripheral connection with the military. I have two immediate family members whose paychecks come, at least partially, from defense spending. Many of my friends work, in some way, for projects funded through the military. My high school best friend's dad helped design guidance systems for ICBMs. This same friend recommended Lockheed to me (and me to Lockheed.) I'm sure that some of my job opportunities after grad school will be defense related. Again, none of this is bad. The military has funded lots of basic science, which, arguably benefits everyone. 

The thing is that we need something more. Everyone I know seems to be wired so that their creative urges drive them to create in scientific and engineering realms, but no one I've met seems to have a sense of creativity that leads them to solve social issues effectively. Put another way, we as humans can build cell phones the size of a credit card, but we can't seem to provide basic food and healthcare to everyone. In movies the future is always signified by hyper-advanced technology or the consequences thereof, but rarely is the future signified by an end to social ills. One could argue that the notable exception, Star Trek, replaces social problems with armed conflicts with alien races.

Sometimes I think that the process of addressing these issues is like waking up. We've become aware of technology and are currently developing it as fast as we can, but I think, or hope anyway, that humanity will continue waking up, take another step forward and develop an equally strong interest in addressing, what seem to be, more significant needs.

Camping, News and RSS feeds

The camping trip to Porcupine Mountain Wilderness Area was mostly good.  We stayed at a cabin right on Lake Superior. The benefit of staying in a cabin was that we could lock our gear in, and go for long day hikes. This allowed us to see much more of the park than we would have been able to were we carrying packs. Coming from Nashville, Michigan's Upper Peninsula was surprisingly cold even in May. One stream crossing required that I take my boots off and walk through knee-deep water. This was a shocking experience. In addition to the cold there was a lot of mud, which, I assume, came from snow-melt. Two of us got quite good at what we called swamp-hopping, whereby we would traverse a hundred or so feet of muck by hoping from dry tree-stump, to rock, to downed branch in an attempt to keep our feet dry. The third in our group opted to march straight through and his boots and pant-legs were caked in mud by the time we were done. Aside from the cold and muck, the park was nice. The sections of shore along Lake Superior were quite beautiful and there was almost no one in the park. The few in the park besides us were fishing the creeks and streams. One evening we watched a kid walk by with a fish the size of his arm. 

Upon returning I fired up a my news reader and noted that I had eight bajillion unread items. I tried to scan the list to get a sense of the major events and failed. The problem is that "Typhoon in Myanmar" and "McCain Eats Pancakes in NJ" gets the same billing, and when you have eight bajillion items to scroll through it's hard to be discriminating. I've decided to go back to some of the news websites that I used to read and see what's on the front page at least. 

It Could Have Been Worse

Going Camping, Reviewing Another Paper and Giving Up

Tomorrow I leave for a long weekend of camping with two former grad students, one of whom lives in Minnesota. The other student and I bought tickets for Minnesota and then we started planning the trip. This is not the best way to do things as several of our initial plans were shot down when we learned that the desired destinations are completely frozen in. We ended up deciding on a state park. I probably wouldn't have flown to go on a camping trip in a state park. But the tickets have been purchased, and at least I like the guys I'll be hanging out with. 

Contrary to my earlier proclamations, I got roped into helping review another paper. This time I spent two hours on the review process. I am not the official reviewer, the official reviewer just wanted a second opinion. I read the paper and offered just that. 

Finally, I've decided that I'm going to write up what I have and call it good.  I think there are better results around the corner, but I've felt this way for a while, and I don't think anyone will really appreciate the better results as opposed to the ones I have now.

The Half Marathon

I ran the half marathon Saturday and it was a mostly fantastic experience. The company that organized the event, Elite Racing, did a great job. This is not too surprising since they charged $90 to register and had something like thirty thousand people running/walking either the half or the full marathon. Once you sign up, you start getting really useful e-mails reminding you to eat well and keep training. As the date gets closer Elite Racing mails you a standard release waiver, which you take to a convention center to sign in. 

Upon entering the hall where racers were signing in, I saw something that made me smile. Instead of long lines, I saw a wide open area with tables upon tables set up for people to sign in by first letter of last name. There were no lines at all. Upon leaving the sign-in area, I walked through a checkout area where I was given a computer chip to attach to my shoe. I then walked over to the t-shirt tables, tore off the first of two tabs from my race number and exchanged it for a t-shirt. Racers were then shunted into the shopping section where vendors were selling all manner of crap. The wife and I purchased two pint glasses, which go quite nicely with our athletic lifestyle. All of the stuff I had been given or purchased fit in the plastic drawstring bag I got at sign in. 

The night before the race, I attached the chip to my shoe. I tore the remaining tab off my number and  zip-tied it to the plastic drawstring bag. Into the plastic bag went everything I thought I might need after the race. The morning of, the wife and I woke up, dressed, ate some fruit and a couple of Cliff bars, and walked down to the starting area. Once at the starting area we found our way to the bag drop-off, which consisted of a long row of UPS trucks organized, again, by first letter of last name. You find your truck, hand over your bag, and wander over to your starting corral.  The only downer was that there was about a half hour of standing around, feeling nervous while trying to keep muscles loose. Several times an announcer would tell the racers that the event was very close to starting. Eventually, the gun went off and the first corral was let go. The gun sounded strangely flat, like it was insignificant for the job of setting thirty thousand people in motion. We were in the fourth corral and so we didn't go with the gun. Instead, we walked forward after each corral ahead of us was let go. At long last we were the next corral to go.

Each corral held a thousand people and when we were released I could watch people ahead of me beginning to run. Heads would begin bobbing and moving away, forming this rippling, backwards wave that finally reached the wife and I as we started running the longest race either of us had ever run. 

You probably never gave much thought to the sound of running shoes on pavement, but it really is an impressive sound when there are thousands of people running right next to you. Running down the middle of one of the main streets in Nashville, surrounded by other runners with miles and miles ahead of me felt similar to the few times I've been swimming in the ocean further from land than I can swim.

Everyone seemed quiet at the start of the race and the pace was pretty uniform. We went out a few miles, turned around, came back a half mile and began the first real hill. I was feeling good and cruised on up, leaving the wife behind. At the top of the hill we followed a loop through fives miles of residential area. The wife caught up with me at this point and we ran together for a while. The field was thinning out and people were beginning to talk. We passed a number of bands, some playing great running music, other not so much. At the end of the residential section we had completed about eight miles and went back down the hill we had come up. At this point the wife left me, and I didn't see her again until the end of the race. As she was running away from me I decided that I wouldn't make it if I spent the energy to keep up with her. I figured I had five miles left, I was feeling good but a little tired and should conserve so that I could maintain a reasonable pace through to the end. This plan almost worked. I, more or less, rolled through miles nine and ten, just concentrating on maintaining a smooth, even stride.

But at mile ten I was cooked. My longest training run had been nine miles, and suddenly my body wanted to know what exactly was up with all this not-stopping business. My legs began to feel leaden, and my smooth, even stride that had carried me through ten miles at a seven minute and fifty second pace gave way to a pained shuffle that carried me at a nine minute and twenty second pace. I consumed my Power Gel and started grabbing water, although it did little for me. The slightest incline was excruciating and I kept having to fight off the urge to quit. It seemed preposterous to stop running with two miles left, but my legs were running on reserves I hadn't dug into in as long as I can remember. The last half mile was down hill and I kept thinking that if I had the slightest kick, I could maybe shave a few seconds off my time. No such luck. Runners poured past me as I tried and failed to maintain a decent pace. There was no euphoria as I turned onto the last two hundred yard section to the finish line. I completed the race, and it was all I could do to keep walking.  I immediately found my wife, or rather she found me, and we wandered through the finish area.

The finish area was stocked with free food and water. There was a station where you leaned against a railing and someone clipped the computer chip off your shoe -- you didn't even have to bend down. Upon leaving the finish area, we headed over to the bag pick up area. All you had to do was make it to the right UPS truck. Even if you couldn't speak, people could read the number pinned to your shirt and go retrieve your bag. 

I ran thirteen and one tenth miles in one hour, forty-seven minutes and twenty-five seconds. I missed my target goal by just over two minutes. Not so bad, for such suffering at the end, but I wish I had done better. The wife did really well, running the same distance in an hour and forty two minutes, placing her at 894th out of better than twenty one thousand runners. Next time I wont pull my calf and I'll do more distance training.