Category: Uncategorized

Darling River to Pachena Trailhead to Darling River (28km)

George earned the nickname Penny Candy, during our treat-crave-fueled theme for nicknames on this trip. He was continuously telling stories that could have been, and at times were, preceded by “back in the good ol’ days.” We figured that in those same days candy could be procured in individual samplings for the price of one hundreth of one American dollar, hence he was Penny Candy.

As you might expect, before falling asleep the first night discussions were taking place about the goings on the first day. One of the main topics was what George was going to do in the morning. That first day he had fallen behind and needed assistance at several point on the trail. All this starting from the north end of the trail, the section that everyone agrees is “the easy section.” Everyone knew that he was not going to make it but we also felt that he would have real troubles getting back to the trailhead with his equipment if we did not help. George knew most of all I think and was at a point where he was willing to accept the help offered by others. So in the morning a party of three – Matt, Josh, and I – split up George’s pack weight and escorted him back to the trailhead. He was in pretty good spirits, singing his show tunes all the way back to Pachena, but it was sad to see him defeated and leaving.

The return party ate lunch at the trailhead and started the breakneck journey back to camp. Now we had two packs between the three of us and enjoying that same good weather that had chaperoned us just one afternoon earlier. We did in just over three hours what had earlier taken us over five. Our compardes back at Darling River had spent the day licking their wounds (aches, perhaps) and gotten the site in proper order, including secure spots in the food locker for our things. Duke (I assume it was Duke) even made us a small, modestly decortated dining area where we sat and were waited on for dinner. This evening’s offering was one of the planned meals that Duke and Graham had researched and tested back in Seattle: real smoked salmon and dehydrated peas added to rehydranted pasta primivera with spices from the traveling ‘pantry.’ This is a bag that Duke prepared that included spices and things like butter buds to add to each night’s meal and made it just a little but more than a readymade meal in a bag. I highly recommend putting one together before any big trip. We went to sleep fed, relaxed and one man down but looking forward to moving after a day of rest.

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

Thanks to Chad for passing along this video, and thanks for the vote of coolness in thinking that I had already seen it. In fact, I had not and had no idea what was going on with it until I investigated further.

The whole video was shot without cameras or lights, which in passing sounds slightly unimpressive and takes some time to digest. This is not a digital recreation of the actors in the video characteristic of the Pixar productions we are all now accostomed to. Instead, the shapes and movements are literaly recorded using 3D scanning technologies at two scales: one that uses structured light(?) to small movements and fine grain topography, and a second to get record landscapes.

Radiohead has not only (again) embraced technology for its own expression but has taken steps to allow fans to use play with the technology themselves. There is a full google-hosted section of a site with info about the video, the technology and the code and an app that allow you to manipulate the data (the video) and create. There is also a making of the video (if we can call it that) that should be checked out. This follows their previous experiment with the song Nude, where they released snippets of the song to the world and asked for remixes.

Pitchfork says it all better and with much longer wind than me

Just back from San Francisco for the wedding of Paul and Hilary I found a few ideas worthy of pulling me out of my blogging slump. The first is obviously the wedding. It all went down in the Presidio on a beautifully clear July day. The whole weekend was a unprecedented success for which the couple deserves much of the credit.

The second thing to really capture my attention is a far more public matter to which I can provide more information. On Sunday during some free time I wandered down to Dolores Park with Lauren and Peter. We found great people watching and were content to just pick a spot on the side of a hill and relax for an hour but as we entered the park a gathering on the far side caught our eye. At first glance we thought it was a fight or maybe some performance art. We could see one man on stilts but no juggling and so we decided to go have a look for ourselves.

We found that many of the people were dressed in cardboard armor adorned with superhero logos or medieval flavor. In the center of the circle were two children doing battle with swords which were actually the remains of a roll of wrapping paper. It was a tournament that we watched in it’s entirety. Then, when we thought we could get on with our frisbeeing and people watching, the whole thing was taken up a level. Adults with wristbands of different colors were allowed to get their own tubes and do some battle and eventually the sides formed at opposite ends of the field to do Braveheart-style battle. We were standing near the person who took this video. Notice the guy in battle garb (red plume) riding a play horse. He was on the team at the far end and flanked the charging team to appear right behind them, wonderful strategy.

Looking into this further I found that what we witnessed has happened before in Seattle and Sydney and is called the Cardboard Tube Fighting League. Interesting enough. What I was surprised to find out was that there is a formal declaration of war from the Government of Box Wars against the CTFL.

Declaring that a state of war exists between the Government of Box Wars and the government and the people of the Cardboard Tube Fighting League and making provision to prosecute the same.

Whereas the Government of Box Wars has formally declared war against the government and the people of the Cardboard Tube Fighting League:

Therefore, be it Resolved by the Representatives of the Cardboard Tube Fighting League, that the state of war between the Cardboard Tube Fighting League and the Government of Box Wars which has thus been thrust upon the Cardboard Tube Fighting League is hereby formally declared; and the President is hereby authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the Cardboard Tube Fighting League to carry on war against the Government of Box Wars; and to bring the conflict to a successful termination, all of the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Cardboard Tube Fighting League.

This group also meets in Dolores Park but appears to be less formal with fewer rules. Box Wars sells itself as an art movement or an edgy-eco-sensitive motivation to recycle. Both make the point that people need to get out and have simple fun more often.

I did find some LARP in Atlanta called Nero, but it looks a little too scripted. Until my next trip to San Francisco I’ll be waiting for the CTFL or another classically quirky phenomenon to make its way to Atlanta and wishing I had the energy to make it happen here sooner rather than later.

With gas prices as high as most people have ever seen, more and more news stories are popping up about transit use and biking to work. Also, May is National Bike Month. A couple of interesting bits of bicycle news have caught my attention recently.

First, there is the story of the Dutch cycling lobby group working to prevent bike theft by teaching people how to steal bikes in the hopes of making them more aware of how to secure their bikes.

Second, last weekend there was a nude bike rally in the UK. It was held in Sussex and full nudity was allowed by the police there. It seems a bit akin to Critical Mass, drawing attention to bikes as a mode of transport by throwing them right in front of motorists in a way they can’t ignore. But this goes one step further and captivates (or appalls) even the most apathetic bystanders. It also had a bit more focused purpose, taking on oil. This weekend a similar ride is planned for London and it should be even larger.

It doesn’t have to be bike month to bike.

About two months ago I went to a wedding out in LA. In this politically correct, main stream environmental age that we live in couples are now starting to make note of all the ways their special day is a nice day for a green wedding (I hear an updated single for the Billy Idol comeback). A poem written and read by two friends of the couple mentioned the Canadian roots of the wedding ring diamond. Perhaps the food was local and the flowers organic, but as we proceeded to dance the evening away I continued to think about how it could go a bit further. The thought crossed my mind, how could the energy being expended by this party’s patrons be harnessed and put to further use?. I thought that if underneath the floor were many cylinders (like springs) under pressure then the movement up and down of people on the floor could somehow be turned into energy. Perhaps for electricity to power the party. I didn’t take it very far and the idea fell to the wayside like many of yours, I’m sure.

Today I was watching a video called The 11th Hour and they had a short video simulation of a dancefloor that produces energy very similar to what I had envisioned. I googled “dance floor collects energy” and got over a 200,000 hits (actually not that many). Turns out a fitness club chain in Hong Kong, called California Fitness, actually put the idea into practice. The article mentions a similar idea that place the generator into a shoe and could be used to power a cellphone.

This came a few days after I finished reading Malcom Gladwell’s article on the how ideas are created and how similar ideas can often come about at the same time from different people and places. He reports on a briantrust formed by a former Microsoft Exec for the purpose of creating innovation. As Gladwell says:
“It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. [The exec] wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies.”

I have to admit that I am always a bit proud of myself for a new idea, especially when I see it appear in practice later. But for real innovation to happen different views need to come together and combine knowledge to create new ideas or fields. A lot of you readers are my knowledgeable and creative friends from a variety of backgrounds. Who wants to start our own Manhattan Project of sorts? Even if we don’t produce anything earthshaking (and it’s very likely we won’t) I think it will at least be enriching.

PS: DJs are the new fossil fuel.

Hear more from Gladwell Sports fans must watch!!

Sustainable Dance Club

Last Thursday we had the opportunity to see Radiohead play in concert here in Atlanta. We were on the lawn for a night that expected severe storms but most of the rain held off and we got a great show. Someone with us had binoculars, still most of the time I had no idea what J. Greenwood was doing over in his corner.

Below is a copy of the setlist. Nothing from Pablo Honey and a lot of new stuff (though noticeably lacking Jigsaw Falling Into Place). Though there were two of my favorite slower ballads, “How to Disappear Completely” and “You and Whose Army.” I know plenty of you are going to see them this summer, let me know what you think.

“All I Need”
“There There”
“Lucky”
“15 Step”
“Where I End and You Begin”
“Nude”
“Pyramid Song”
“Optimistic”
“Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”
“The National Anthem”
“Idiotheque”
“You and Whose Army”
“Reckoner”
“Everything in Its Right Place”
“Bangers and Mash”
“Bodysnatchers”
“Videotape”

Encore:
“The Gloaming”
“Talk Show Host”
“Just”
“Faust Arp”
“How to Disappear Completely”

Second Encore:
“Paranoid Android”
“House of Cards”

I was killing some time on Facebook today and came across a feature that was able to capture and hold my attention enough to warrant a post. It is called Lexicon and it allows you to query words from posts made to people’s walls. The results are plotted along a time line and you can perform searches on multiple words to compare trends.

With Lexicon we, the users of these mass social networking (read preference collection) sites, have the ability to mine some of the data we provide. Facebook, even give the data a first-cut cleaning to correct for common mispellings (sp.) and problems with apostrophes. Notwithstanding the absence of a scale on the y-axis, the conclusions we draw from the data are not always incredibly interesting. Take, for example, the graph below showing the appearance of each candidate’s name on Facebook walls. You can add the word ‘delegates’ to your search and watch the peaks line up. You can pick out Super Tuesday (Feb 5) easily. More than that, you can see that Obama is getting a lot more free press out there in the Facebook-a-sphere.

I think this could be useful to get a rough idea about some associations we suspect to exist. Unfortunately the wall is not the best place to collect data as only certain topics are discussed and the makeup of the users is likely to screw up any generalizablity, and sometimes the scale of the two things you are comparing makes it difficult to find what you might be looking for (see ‘cold’ vs. ‘bike’). Nonetheless it is fun to see you suspicions confirmed (no one mentions ‘smog’ in Dec or Jan)and to think a bit about what people are talking about. Remember that you will not be able to infer causation from anything you find here so be humble with what you discover. Here are a few more of my favorites.

Over the weekend I had some time to sit down with some reading materials that I have not had time for recently.
This article was one that I particularly enjoyed and find myself bringing up to people over and over.

Like many of articles in the New Yorker it concerns a topic of only superficial interest (elevators) but covers it with penetrating detail. The article is built around an anecdote about a man who experienced one of the most dreadful thoughts many of us have about elevators: being stuck in one. A video of the ordeal is included below.

More than impressing me with this rare account, the article made me think of elevators as a legitimate form of transportation – enabling societies and furthering ‘progress’ for the last 150 years.

In the middle of another late frost advisory I thought it was about high time to finally post something of the tornado we had about a month ago. It ran through downtown and then hit Cabbagetown, but little known to everyone is that it continued south and east into East Atlanta. We haven’t attracted as much attention from the press and the volunteer corps but quite a few houses were hit hard over here.

Luckily we were about one block south of the real damage. We only lost a ‘small’ cedar in the front between our house and the neighbor. Several houses had damage from debris, if not a whole tree, hitting them.

We were out of town for a wedding but got plenty of calls and texts from family to check on us, from the neighbor about the tree, from Jorge about his first tornado and
from Mikey about the NCAA basketball in the Georgia Dome.

We expect that this type of event is a rarity and hope not to see our house crushed by the massive trees that surround it.

more pictures from Matt

I have been away for awhile and as you may have guessed that means a lot has been going on. I have been accepted to the planning PhD program at Georgia Tech and have been awarded a three year assistantship to work on climate change and urban planning. I am still working out the details of it all but I will keep you informed.

This week I was in Washington DC presenting a poster on my thesis work at the Active Living Research Conference. Friday’s schedule featured some activity for the participants in the form of walking tours, group runs and even yoga. I figured that I should disseminate some of the information I was exposed to at the conference. The theme related to linking research and policy and we heard from Oregon Rep Earl Blumenauer. He’s a bike fanatic and you can see him on The Colbert Report below. Also are some of the best links I hear about.

http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/video_player/view/default/swf.jhtml

Travelsmart a site from the Australian Government with information to help citizens make smarter travel choices. Also, the old guy at the top looks like he has the same helmet as me.

Perils for PedestriansThe guy who ran this was also at the conference. It looks like he puts out a show about the perils for pedestrians on some public tv station.

I first heard about Smart Growth America’sGrowing Cooler Report at APHA in November. It came up again in a talk from DC’s director of planning on Friday morning. It relates directly to the type of questions I’ll be asking about how climate change affects urban areas and vice versa.

The Participatory Photo Mapping Project at the University of Wisconsin was one of the coolest presentations I saw while I was at the conference. It combines photovoice with GPS and GIS to map the issues that residents identify themselves. Reminded me a bit of the work we started in Bogotá this summer and gave me some new ideas.

There was a lot of talk and presenting at the conference that related to schools and children. At times it seemed that we were always talking about tackling childhood obesity but not much about changing our own habits. CDC’s SHPPS website has the baseline data to introduce you to this issue and to point out some of the weaker spots in the policy that guide school diets and curriculum. Some of the best slogans to come out of these discussions were
“you can’t spell GPA without PA” and
“No child left inside”

There were plenty more informative speakers and tons of things I guess I could point you to but I hope that this gets you thinking and maybe even more active.