I'm already missing Phil Lesh.

I'm very sad to hear that Phil Lesh passed away.

I'll be listening to Box of Rain a lot for a while now. That song has always brought tears to my eyes, but I know it will bring a lot more emotion now.

I've been making this mistake for 40+ years!

It's incredibly embarassing that, for essentially my entire adult life, I thought that Stanislaw Ulam and Stanislaw Lem were one and the same person.

And every so often I would read an article about one of them, and think to myself: "how amazing that guy was! look how many different things he did! look how much output he had! how did he find the time!"

Most recently, there was an article about Lem in the New Yorker last spring, and an article about Ulam in the New Yorker this fall. That was, finally, close enough together that something clicked in my brain, and I looked them up properly.

I mean, each of them, separately, truly was amazing

But now at least I'm no longer harboring the impression that Stanislaw was simultaneously working on the Manhattan Project while living in the Lviv Ghetto.

Well, I guess he was, in a way, but it was two different Stanislaws.

Embarassing, indeed. But I'm set straight now.

Is Earth Exceptional?: a very short review

Earlier this month I found myself reading Is Earth Exceptional? by Livio and Szostak.

This is a popular science book (that is, not a textbook) which gives a status report on two related scientific efforts:

1. How did life on Earth begin?
2. Is there life anywhere else in the universe besides Earth?

Attempting to answer these questions involves both chemistry and astrophysics, and so it is reasonable that the book is co-written by an astrophysicist and a chemist.

Some 45 years ago, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I remember taking an introductory course, I think it was called something like "Moons and Planets", which talked a bit about both of these topics. I don't remember very much about the course, but I definitely remembered learning about the Miller-Urey experiment, which was of course a highlight of the course given that the work had been done at the UofC. Whatever course it was I took, it was very similar to this course that is currently taught, so it's interesting to see that the University is sustaining their efforts to keep their students aware of this very interesting area of pure science.

It was fun to return to this area and get a feel for how much things have progressed in the 70+ years since Miller-Urey.

For a book on pure science, Is Earth Exceptional? is quite entertaining and strikes a good balance between scientific accuracy and approachability to the layman. You will read a fair number of passages such as:

Similarly, activated nucleotides dissolved in water will not polymerize, but if that solution freezes, as might happen during a winter cold snap, polymerization starts to happen because the nucleotides become concentrated in the thin liquid zones between the growing water-ice crystals. Wet-dry cycles can also lead to the formation of peptides. In one interesting process, alpha-hydroxy acids, when dried down, spontaneously react with each other to form polymers known as polyesters. Amino acids can then attack these ester linkages, becoming incorporated into a mixed polymer of amino acids and hydroxy acids.

This is, approximately, about as deep and about as shallow as any other arbitrary passage in the entire book. Which seems pretty reasonable to me. If you're comfortable reading material like this, you'll probably like Is Earth Exceptional? a lot and find it fascinating! If the above turned you off instantly, well, then, now you know.

UPDATE: Forgot to initially mention that if you like this stuff, don't miss the Dave Eggers piece in WaPo: The Searchers:

But at the moment, much of the work at JPL is devoted to finding and examining exoplanets, and there is an urgency to the work that is palpable. In more than a dozen conversations with some of the best minds in astrophysics, I did not meet anyone who was doubtful about finding evidence of life elsewhere — most likely on an exoplanet beyond our solar system. It was not a matter of if. It was a matter of when.

Unusual Want Ad

We were wandering through the back pages of one of our local neighborhood publications, and we spotted a quite unusual help wanted ad.

Not the sort of ad you see every day.

Labyrinth: a very short review

I happened to take a vacation to France, and I was looking for a book to take on the trip. I ended up picking several books, and then the first of those books that I actually started reading was Labyrinth by Kate Mosse.

Mosse's book is 500 pages of summer vacation escapist fun.

And it fit quite nicely into my vacation beause it's set in southern France; more specifically it's set in the region of Occitania. Although my particular trip was to the regions of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, these are all adjacent regions and so it's close enough to be enjoyably topical to my trip.

Also, the book uses a simple but effective technique of telling two related stories, one set in 12th century Occitania and the other set in current-day Occitania. And since my trip was full of Bryan Goes Walking Around in Modern Towns Which Have Well-Preserved Medieval Old Town Areas, the book was really a good match.

There's not a lot more to say about Labyrinth. It's romantic historic fiction, with lots of lords and ladies and roughly realistic historical depictions. So I enjoyed it and it made my own wanderings considerably more fun.

Plus I learned a few things, such as what Languedoc means as a place name, and such not. Which was fun too!

Labyrinth is apparently the first book in a trilogy. I'm not sure I actually enjoyed it that much, but who knows?

Bummer that AnandTech shut down

I didn't visit AnandTech very often, but when I did, I found high-quality carefully written material. It seemed to have sustained that high quality information for a good long time, which is rare these days.

Editor Ryan Smith sums up the three decades.

I love the 1998 picture of Anand Lal Shimpi reviewing a motherboard!

Smith makes a good point about the challenge of finding high quality technical material nowadays:

A core belief that Anand and I have held dear for years, and is still on our About page to this day, is AnandTech’s rebuke of sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting. It has been our mission over the past 27 years to inform and educate our readers by providing high-quality content – and while we’re no longer going to be able to fulfill that role, the need for quality, in-depth reporting has not changed. If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative.

Among the Thugs: a very short review

Nearly 50 years ago, in 1977, a young American writer named Bill Buford found himself in graduate school at King's College, Cambridge, studying English.

Within barely 18 months, Buford and a fellow student had successfully re-launched the university's 100-year-old student literary magazine, Granta. Only a few years later it was already thriving, and Buford's writing and editing career was taking off. He would later become an editor at the New Yorker and find enormous success.

In 1977, however, Buford was still young, in his late 20's, and for whatever reason he became interested in the world beyond the library. As he tells the story, he had a startling and confusing encounter while taking the train home to Cambridge from Wales:

The train was a football special, and it had been taken over by supporters. [...]

I changed trains four times; three were taken over by supportes. One was torn apart: the seats had been ripped out, and the bar, which had been closed beforehand, was broken up, its metal shutter door split into pieces and drink handed out to anyone who walked past. I did not know what was more surprising, the destructiveness, which was gratuitious and relentless, or that, with so many police, no one seemed able to stop it: it just went on.

Buford realizes that he has much to learn, but more relevantly and surprisingly, he realizes that he has much that he actually wants to learn.

I thought I'd go on my own. I didn't know that it wasn't done, that lads went with lads or that lads went with dads, but there was so much I didn't know -- which was the point. I wanted to find out what I didn't know; I wanted to meet one of "them" and didn't know any other way to go about it.

He tries, and tries again. He attends match after match, choosing teams and locations almost at random. He goes up to fan after fan, supporter after supporter, and tries to get them to talk about what is happening. Time after time they refuse him and shun him. Yet he is stubborn, and doesn't give up.

while I couldn't say that I had developed a rapport with any one of "them" yet, I did find that I was developing a taste for the game. I had figured out how to stand on the terraces and watch the play on the pitch -- an achievement of sorts. In fact I was also starting to enjoy the conditions of the terraces themselves. This, I admit, surprised me. This, it would seem, was neither natural nor logical. It was, I see now on reflection, not unlike alcohol or tobacco: disgusting, at first; pleasurable, with effort; addictive, over time. And perhaps, in the end, a little self-destroying.

More than a little, as we are soon to find out: much, much more than a little self-destroying.

The paperback edition of Among the Thugs has a black-and-white picture of young Bill Buford on the cover, presumably from his days with the lads. His head is shaved and his heavy-lidded eyes stare you down; a lit cigarette rests in the corner of his mouth.

It's an amazing picture; it's hard to look away from it.

It's certainly not the picture you'd expect to see of a graduate student at Cambridge University.

After Buford sets the stage, the rest of Among the Thugs has a definite structure, as Buford jumps around between three different sorts of segments:

1. He gives some historical background, covering well-known events such as: Burnden Park, 1946; Ibrox Park, 1971; Heysel Stadium, 1985; Hillsborough Stadium 1989; and others, some of them 100+ years ago.
   
   In these segments, in addition to the historical background, he appears to be trying to connect the dots, sometimes more successfully than others.
   
   
2. He tells stories of events that he, personally, witnessed, including: Juventus v Manchester United, 1984, in Turin; several Manchester United matches in London in the mid 1980's, at Tottenham, at Chelsea, at West Ham; and finally a detailed report of the 1990 England v Holland World Cup match in Cagliari, Sardinia.
   
   Buford notes that he went to dozens of football matches while researching and writing the book, but he chooses to tell just a handful of stories.
   
   However, he tells them extremely well. By "well", I mean that he relates what happened vividly and chooses events that explain the things that he is trying to explain. He goes into extensive detail; there is a thorough narrative. But more importantly, he is honest. By "honest," I mean that Buford includes his own thoughts and his personal feelings, and also I mean that he doesn't shy away from admitting his own culpability in what happened.
   
   
3. Interspersed amidst these various sections, Buford also includes some more abstract observations about mobs, about crowd mentality, about identity politics, about desensitization of violence. In these segments he includes his own thoughts as well as surveying those writers who have tried to discuss these topics in the past.

The vivid descriptions of Buford's own first hand experiences "among the thugs" are far and away the most powerful parts of the book. I don't want to reproduce them here, however; if you want to know more you should go read the book yourself.

In the end, these parts of the book are the "what", not the "why".

The observations that Buford makes as a result of these experiences, while they cannot fully explain the why, are certainly the most important parts of Among the Thugs, and are the reason that it's still worth reading, forty years later. English football hooligans have certain essential elements that are somehow universal in humans. Lynch mobs occur everywhere; xenophobia seems almost omnipresent in human behavior.

Buford is interested in what people get out of it. For one thing, he finds, there is a sense of belonging, of joining a club, of finding a community:

"For most lads," Mark was saying, "this is all they've got." He nodded, as we were walking out of the door, towards a cluster of supporters whose common feature was, I must admit, a look of incredible and possibly even unique stupidity.

"During the week," Mark continued, "they're nobody, aren't they? But then, when they come to the match, that all changes. They feel like Mr. Big."

[...]

"It was us against them, and we had no idea what was going to happen. There were so many different feelings. Fear, anger, excitement. I've never felt anything like it. We all felt it and everyone of us now knows that we have been through something important -- something solid. After an experience like that, we're not going to split up. We'll never split up. We'll be mates for life.

"I will never forget these blokes. I will never forget Sammy. For as long as I live, I will be grateful that I could say I knew him."

[...]

Mark was still explaining. "You see, what it does is this: it gives violence a purpose. It makes us somebody. Because we're not doing it for ourselves. We're doing it for something greater -- for us. The violence is for the lads."

At one point, Buford meets up with some of the leaders of the National Front, trying to understand their connection with the football hooligans:

I am sure that Ian Anderson was right when he said that the football stadium was his ideal recruiting ground, but he would also have known that it provided a special kind of member, one already experienced, if not trained, in how to become part of a crowd, sometimes a violent one, even if it was not politically directed. And he would also have known that the crowd is a revolutionary party's most powerful weapon. On paper, it would have seemed so straightforward, and so many of the National Front's activities -- its discos, its marches, its propaganda -- were designed to create the crowd among its members and then make it political. But it isn't straightforward, and in the end the young, well-dressed executives of the National Front were not very good at their task -- they were there to lead, but few were following. But, although incompetent, they were not ignorant. The understood something about the workings of the crowd; they respected it. They knew that its potential -- its rare, raw, uncontrollable power -- was in all of us, even if it was so persistently elusive.

One of the things that Buford is most fascinated by is the topic of how a group of individuals stop acting as individuals, and become instead a mob. And, having done so, how they somehow seem to stop thinking, and just start doing, and then soon they are doing the unthinkable.

I am attracted to the moment when consciousness ceases: the moments of survival, of animal intensity, of violence, when there is no multiplicity, no potential for different levels of thought: there is only one -- the present in its absoluteness.

Violence is one of the most intensely lived experiences and, for those capable of giving themselves over to it, is one of the most intense pleasures. There on the streets of Fulham, I felt, as the group passed over its metaphorical cliff, that I had literally become weightless. I had abandoned gravity, was greater than it. I felt myself to be hovering above muyself, capable of perceiving everything in slow motion and overwhelming detail. I realized later that I was on a druggy high, in a state of adrenaline euphoria. And for the first time I am able to understand the words they use to describe it. That crowd violence was their drug.

Buford's conclusion is, finally, that we have met the enemy and he is us.

It is not the case that the violence is either a deviation or a continuation, but that it is both deviation and continuation. It is not: either ... or ... . But: both ... and ... and ... and ... .

I believe in the modern behavioral models of our conduct, and much of this book has set out to prove their validity: that the crowd is in all of us. It isn't an instinct or a need -- being in a crowd isn't necessary to our being complete human beings -- but, for most of us, the crowd holds out certain essential attractions. It is, like an appetite, something in which dark satisfactions can be found.

Among the Thugs is truly bleak. But it is simultaneously truly important, for Buford has looked deeply into the darkness and come away with the knowledge that it is important, and ever-present. To know this is to know that you have to always be aware of the possibility, and be ever alert.

The University of Chicago: verifying the Hubble constant since 1929

From New Webb Telescope data suggests our model of the universe may hold up after all , we read:

Freedman and her colleagues used the telescope to make measurements of ten nearby galaxies that provide a foundation for the measurement of the universe’s expansion rate.

To cross-check their results, they used three independent methods. The first uses a type of star known as a Cepheid variable star, which varies predictably in its brightness over time. The second method is known as the “Tip of the Red Giant Branch,” and uses the fact that low-mass stars reach a fixed upper limit to their brightnesses. The third, and newest, method employs a type of star called carbon stars, which have consistent colors and brightnesses in the near-infrared spectrum of light. The new analysis is the first to use all three methods simultaneously, within the same galaxies.

I feel like Tip of the Red Giant Branch would be an interesting place to go kayaking.

Backpacking 2024: Hoover Wilderness, Green River canyon, East Lake

THe Hoover Wilderness is one of our favorite backpacking destinations. It's located in the Eastern Sierra, sitting like a Scottish tam hat on the northeast edge of Yosemite National Park. In previous years, we've hiked from the Leavitt Meadows trailhead at the far north end of the Hoover Wilderness, and some twenty years ago we hiked up to the Robinson Lakes from the Twin Lakes trailhead.

This year, we decided to try the Green River trailhead.

And Dan was able to join us!

The two-volume Sierra South and Sierra North books from Kathey Morey and Mike White, now in their, what, thousandth edition, are the definitive source of information about backpacking in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. I own at least three versions of these books, and they are endlessly useful. They're now over 50 years old; the first editions came out in the mid 1960's!! My 9th edition copies, now 20 years old, are dog-eared and coffee-stained, but they continue to be the essential information about where to go and what to expect.

Here's how Sierra North describes the East Lake trip from the Green River Trailhead in the Hoover Wilderness:

This is a fine beginner's weekend hike. East Lake's scenery includes three colorful peaks, Gabbro, Page, and Epidote, each of which are composed of rocks varying in hue from vermillion reds to ochre, and set in metavolcanic blacks for contrast. Nearby Nutter, Gilman, and Hoover lakes offer good fishing to supplement the angling in East Lake, and the wide-ranging scenery along the way rivals any found on longer backpack trips.

I can confirm the truth of the second and third sentences.

And bonus points to Sierra North for managing to use vermillion, ochre, and metavolcanic in a single sentence.

But, I must protest that first sentence. A beginner's weekend hike this is not.

The distance wasn't that long; it was four miles from the trailhead to our campsite at the far end of East Lake. But the elevation was substantial: the trailhead is at eight thousand feet, East Lake is at nine thousand six hundred feet, and the trail, which follows the Green River canyon, ascends and descends several hundred feet at a time in places where the river dips around a cross canyon or encounters a sheer face that the trail must circumvent. All told, we climbed close to two thousand vertical feet on our way in (and came back down that much on our way out).

More challenging, though, were the numerous river crossings. There are about six substantial river crossings between the trailhead and East Lake, each with the typical hazards such as slippery rocks, fast current, decaying tree branches, and uncertain footing. It's one thing to spring across a river crossing carrying little more than a camera and a water bottle; it's another thing entirely to cross one with a full pack, tired after hours on the trail, and light-headed from the low oxygen levels found at nine thousand feet.

But the result was worth it! East Lake is just as beautiful as the guidebooks suggested, the weather was glorious, and we enjoyed every minute wandering through the forest and admiring the vistas.

We had our share of adventure! Dan's old boots proved not up to the task, and after only a few miles he decided to be wise and head home before the torn footgear became nothing but fabric shreds. And Rich's tennis elbow flared up, giving him such stabbing pain from shoulder to wrist that he could no longer heft his pack, and he too departed early. Roger and Chris and I enjoyed an eight mile round trip day hike from East Lake past Nutter Lake, Gilman Lake, the two Hoover Lakes, and up at last to Summit Lake, which sits at ten thousand two hundred feet atop the crest of Green River canyon and drains down into Yosemite National Park to the west.

Exhausted but happy, we returned home, pleased once more by the stark and majestic beauty of the Eastern Sierras.

Nice local article on the Posey Tube

A reporter for The Oaklandside takes a walking trip with the Oakland Heritage Alliance: Touring the Posey Tube, a 100-year-old engineering feat connecting Oakland and Alameda

Engineered by George Posey, the Posey Tube was the widest in the world and it was built using an innovative method. Most tunnels back then were constructed from a steel shell later filled with concrete. To build the Posey Tube, construction crews floated concrete tunnel pieces on a barge in the estuary to precise locations before sinking and connecting them. Only London, New York, and Philadelphia had large tunnels built this way back then.

The portals were designed by architect Henry Meyers, who’s known for designing Highland Hospital, the Veterans Memorial Building, and the Caldecott Tunnel as well. The quintessential Art Deco Oakland portal structure “was kind of an influencer of this area,” said Levy, inspiring stylish modernist buildings to be constructed nearby.

I don't think there are many of the stylish modernist buildings left.

Sadly, there are no pictures from the control center part of the tunnel infrastructure ("Caltrans did not allow us to take photos inside the portal").

The Oaklandside article now becomes the second most famous article about Alameda's tunnels.

I kept meaning to write about my trip to Las Vegas ...

...

But I've been busy and yada yada yada.

Anyway, I feel bad that I didn't write about the trip, because it was actually really interesting, and I had a great time.

It's so hot in Las Vegas at the end of May that the golf courses won't give out any tee times after 10 AM. People start their rounds when it's barely light, to try to finish when the temps are still in the double digits.

Indoors, however, Las Vegas has no seasons. It doesn't even have the diurnal patterns of night and day. People have remarked for decades at how the inside of casinos never have clocks, nor windows, nor any other way for you to tell whether you should be ordering omelettes or steak dinners. Just stay and play, 24 hours a day!

But yes, I went to Las Vegas, although specifically I went to the Sphere, partly because I wanted to see what the Sphere was like, but mostly because the Grateful Dead were playing.

And I'd write more about that experience, but as it turns out Nick Paumgarten has done it for me (paywall warning): Reckoning with the Dead at the Sphere.

Paumgarten and I differ in a few of the details, but for the most part he nails the scene.

Generally speaking, it was not a young crowd, or a particularly crunchy one. I saw more canes than dreadlocks. The people skewed middle-aged and heavyset, sporting an infinite array of merch, predominantly store-bought and Sphere-specific, as opposed to the D.I.Y. parking-lot goods of yore. But there were young people, too—converts, families. The crowd, overwhelmingly white, was evidently prosperous, no surprise when you consider the cost of the travel, lodging (presumably no one was pitching a tent on the Strip), and tickets, whose face value, given the fees and so-called dynamic pricing, runs from two hundred dollars to seven hundred dollars. People seemed more weary and dazed than elated, as though overwhelmed by the sensory experience, the scale of the place, and the distance of the walk along the endless faux-palatial hallways that passed from the Sphere back to the Venetian.

Paumgarten gets lost for a while, for instance in a long and bizarre rant about people in the audience talking during the Drums segment -- what the heck is wrong with you, Paumgarten?

And he wanders around in the article for way too many column-inches about his trip to the Experience, a quasi-museum of the Dead set up in the adjacent casino. On our trip, we didn't even bother with the Experience, and after reading Paumgarten's experience in the Experience, I don't regret our decision for an instant.

But with this observation, Paumgarten sums it up far better than I could possibly do:

The Sphere program wasn’t just a concert. It was a show, in the Vegas sense, with a concept, a narrative, and a retrospective intention. It called attention to itself. It wasn’t the Dead, or even an adulteration of the Dead, so much as a presentation about the Dead, confusingly featuring a couple of its survivors. It brought to mind a Civil War reënactment with a few Vicksburg veterans thrown in for authenticity. Or “Beatlemania,” featuring Ringo.

Yes, exactly.

But the beer was cold and the seats were comfortable and the sound system was spectacular and the four-hour-long video on the ten-story-tall screen was at least somewhat interesting and fun.

And it was a Dead show, so I'm glad I went.

Robotic Jigsaw Solver!

I love jigsaw puzzles, and can easily be distracted by them.

And of course I love computer programming.

So what could be more wonderful than reading this 50 page book about how a team of a dozen or so engineers spent more than a year building an absolutely gorgeous robotic jigsaw puzzle solver? Jigsaw Puzzle Robot, Or: How We Solved a Puzzle in 15 Months

Oh, and there's a fun movie, too!

If you had told me...

... that this summer I would see both Christiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi fail to convert a given penalty kick from the spot in international competition, I would have wagered a significant sum that you were wrong.

Both Copa America and the European Championship have lived up to their reputation this year, very fine play indeed!

Well, OK, except for the USMNT.

Sigh.

Fargo season 5: a very short review

[Only!] six months late, we watched Fargo season 5, the Juno Temple/Jon Hamm season. I think that Noah Hawley and team actually pulled off the "horror comedy" genre successfully, which is no easy feat. And Juno Temple is just astonishingly good, certainly she's one of the greatest actresses working right now.

As was probably the case for many viewers, my favorite episode by far was the Linda episode, in which Dorothy has a dream visit with a mystical imaginary battered women's shelter where everyone is named Linda. The allegorical treatment of issues of domestic abuse was extraordinarily powerful.

But I also completely loved the Ole Munch character, the strange medieval assassin character, the one who tells Dorothy at the end that when he was a sin eater in Wales in 1522 he became immortal, and traveled to North America on a boat, and lived with the Cree.

I originally thought Munch said he came on a Viking longboat, but the timeline for traveling on a Viking longboat in 1522 doesn't really work. In fact, he says:

Across the sea. But here a long time. From the age of the carrier pigeon and the 600 tribes. The Arapaho, the Cree and the Tonkawa.

...

By long boat we came. Three dozen men pulling at the oars. The rain so heavy, some drown in their seats.

The passenger pigeon became extinct in the 1870's, and the 600 tribes could be anytime from the 1500's to the 1800's, so I guess the writers just wanted to be deliberately vague ("here a long time")...

But a Viking longboat is certainly the sort of image they wanted to give...

Meanwhile, I love the symbolism of choosing the name Munch, particularly since last winter I made a point of checking out a bunch of Edvard Munch's work in all the places we visited.

Munch was best known in Norway, but also is extremely well known throughout Sweden and Denmark.

And of course the Minnesota town in Fargo 5 is named Scandia.

Munch (the painter), did much, much more than The Scream, and many of his themes are certainly echoed throughout Season 5. So I think that symbolism works for me.

Anyway, here's a nice interview with director Thomas Bezucha, touching on some of my favorite parts, including the use of Village People's YMCA when Roy Tillman calls the faithful to "come heavy" (great Jan 6th riff!)

Fargo's not for everyone, and I definitely haven't watched every Fargo season (we skipped seasons 3 and 4), but season 5 was amazing.

Thinking about Bill Walton

I loved watching college basketball games on TV when Bill Walton was on the broadcast team. Not only did he educate me about basketball games, he also educated me about life. That's just how his mind worked. Even if I wasn't terribly interested in the particular game being broadcast, if Bill was on the air I was glued to the screen.

Now, of course, there is no more Pac-12 conference, and as a result I haven't paid much attention to college basketball in a while.

And, worse, now Bill Walton isn't around anymore.

Here's a wonderful article about another side of Bill Walton's life: Bill Walton remembered by Grateful Dead members: ‘Biggest Deadhead in the world’.

It's easy to remember when I saw Bill Walton at shows. It happened at least half a dozen times in my life. Of course, you never needed much assistance to see him, he stood out when he stood up. It was always interesting that he wasn't just sitting in some special VIP area or backstage with the band (though he did those things too); he also just loved coming out into the audience and being with the rest of us.

As Bill the Drummer says, "That was a happy place for him".

Great backpacking essay

Death of the Hiker is a wonderful essay published recently by Leyton Cassidy, who I've never read before.

It's about backpacking. More specifically, it's about a backpacking trip gone wrong. In a foreign country. In the Alps. On a trail you've never been on before. In a rainstorm. In the dark. Alone.

I've definitely had some of those experiences. I've been on backpacking trips gone wrong, on trails I've never been on before, in a rainstorm.

Happily, though, I've never been alone. I've thought about whether I would ever go backpacking alone. I've thought about it on-and-off over the 50+ years of my life during which I've gone backpacking. I've never gone backpacking alone, although curiously the older I get, the more likely I think it might be, as the people that I regularly go backpacking with get older themselves, and slowly, one by one, withdraw from the hiking group that I belong to.

Leaving only us stalwarts^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlunatics.

Cassidy's trip ends well, with some important lessons: did you tell anyone where you went? have you discussed, considered, rehearsed what you would do if the trip went wrong?

She says:

So how did I get here? Ignoring the weather forecast with a damp, useless map from some random, unvetted travel company? Why did my brain block out the risks? Why had there not been even a tremor of doubt through the fantasies of being some new Walt Whitman-Cheryl Strayed hybrid?

Nowadays I think a lot about things and how they go wrong.

It's actually my job; my company pays me a lot of money to sit around and think about how things could fail.

I'm better at thinking about how computer programs could fail, than at thinking about how backpacking trips could fail.

But practice is crucial in this sort of thinking, so I'm glad to take some time out of my day and think about how backpacking trips could go wrong.

The Searcher: a very short review

I've been a great fan of Tana French for many years, but recently I had not been keeping up with her latest work. Then rather unexpectedly I re-discovered her and picked up The Searcher.

And immediately I was transported back into her world, and how glad I am to be reading her work again!

The Searcher is different in various ways from her previous work. It's much more rural, set in an utterly quiet place somewhere in west Ireland, perhaps County Mayo or County Galway, as opposed to much of her earlier work which was set in and around Dublin.

And it's different in another way: it features an expat Yankee named Cal Hooper, recently relocated to Ireland after retiring from active police work in Chicago.

And my oh my is Cal a fish out of water! A lot of the joy of the book is just following along with Cal as he learns about a different place and a different culture.

On sunny days they go back to the desk, but sunny days are getting scarcer as September runs itself down. More and more often, rain whips the house, and wind packs sodden eaves at the bases of walls and hedges. The squirrels are in hoarding frenzy. Mart announces that this means a bastard of a winter ahead, and provides dramatic accounts of years when the townland was cut off for weeks and people froze to death in their own homes, although Cal fails to be properly impressed. "I'm used to Chicago," he reminds Mart. "We don't call it cold until our eyelashes freeze."

"Different kind of cold," Mart informs him. "This one's sneaky. You wouldn't feel it coming, not till it's got you."

[ An aside: I don't think I'd ever heard the word "townland" before. ]

Now, don't get me wrong! This is a Tana French novel, so there's a crime, and there is an investigator, and there are various people in and around the event who each have their own stories, their own agendas, their own perspectives to reveal. And there's suspense, and conflict, and drama all around.

And, too, as every Tana French novel does, The Searcher has shocking plot twists, and races against time, and setbacks and simple human mistakes, and everything you've come to expect from her.

And just like the Irish country cold weather, you won't feel it coming, not till it's got you.

But if you're like me, you'll be plenty happy enough just to be riding along in her world, listening to the conversations, gazing at the landscape, and finding that you're fascinated by each page and can't wait to turn to the next page.

As long as she keeps writing books, I promise not to wait so long before reading her next ones.

Back to grey clouds, at least for now.

Locally-focused web site The Alameda Post reports: City Halts Climate Experiment: University of Washington cloud brightening experiment on hold while Alameda investigates impact

The City of Alameda has instructed the University of Washington (UW) to halt the cloud brightening experiment that it was conducting in partnership with the USS Hornet Sea, Air, & Space Museum.

Honestly it seems like a big to-do about nothing, the article seems to describe a bureaucratic snafu about whether such-and-such a permit is required.

My wife can tell you all about the joys of trying to figure out from the City of Alameda whether or not such-and-such a permit is required.

The joys of small town living, even in an urban area like this.

Oh, well. After all, it wouldn't be "May Gray" or "June Gloom" without the gray morning clouds that we so routinely experience here.

We'll have to wait a little longer for our clouds to become brighter, it appears.

A tiny followup on the Alameda whale

Local TV station KRON reports: Whale that washed up near Alameda likely killed by vessel strike

A dead gray whale that washed up off the shore of Crown Beach in Alameda earlier this month likely died due to a vessel strike, according to the California Academy of Sciences. The whale, which appeared off the coast of Alameda on the night of Saturday, April 20, was towed to Angel Island State Park where scientists performed a necropsy on the mammal.

On Tuesday, officials with the academy and the Marine Mammal Center announced the whale likely died “due to blunt force trauma from a vessel strike.”

Not much more to say about that, I think.

The island that almost wasn't

KQED's Bay Curious podcast series did a nice episode on the dredging of the canal that eventually formed the Oakland-Alameda estuary.

In the late 1800s, Oakland was coming into its own politically and economically, developing its own banks, businesses and shipping companies.

“That grows and grows so that Oakland, by the early 20th century, is really thumbing its nose at San Francisco,” Walker says.

In response to local lobbying, Congressmen worked to bring in millions of federal dollars to pay the Army Corps of Engineers to improve the harbor.

Read it here, or listen online.

ZooKeeper ZOO_SEQUENCE ZNONODE

How's that for putting the search terms right there in the post title?

I wrote a little ZooKeeper program, very simple, basically just the lock recipe out of the ZooKeeper examples. You know, the one where you create a sequenced child node inside the parent container node, and your child node represents your position in the line of tasks waiting to acquire the lock.

My program seemed to be working quite well, I was pleased. But once in a long while it would fail, with an error message stating that it got a "no node" error when trying to create a sequenced child node.

Impossible! I said, for I knew that I had successfully created such a node just a few moments earlier, and I definitely hadn't run any of my own code which deleted the lock container node. So why wasn't it there?

After a while, I found a line in my ZooKeeper leader's log:

[ContainerManagerTask:o.a.z.s.ContainerManager@135] - Attempting to delete candidate container: /path/to/lock/node

That led me to the ContainerManager documentation, which in turn reminded me to check this note in the ZooKeeper documentation, which described my mistake precisely:

Container Nodes
Added in 3.5.3

ZooKeeper has the notion of container znodes. Container znodes are special purpose znodes useful for recipes such as leader, lock, etc. When the last child of a container is deleted, the container becomes a candidate to be deleted by the server at some point in the future.

Given this property, you should be prepared to get KeeperException.NoNodeException when creating children inside of container znodes. i.e. when creating child znodes inside of container znodes always check for KeeperException.NoNodeException and recreate the container znode when it occurs.

On my system, ContainerManager seems to make this check about once a minute, which meant that every so often, after enough minutes and enough use of my program, ContainerManager would delete the lock node just when I was about to try to create a new sequenced child node.

Voila!

I love this quote about the xz compression utilities event

From Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack? :

In the cybersecurity world, a database engineer inadvertently finding a backdoor in a core Linux feature is a little like a bakery worker who smells a freshly baked loaf of bread, senses something is off and correctly deduces that someone has tampered with the entire global yeast supply. It’s the kind of intuition that requires years of experience and obsessive attention to detail, plus a healthy dose of luck.

Ah yes, database engineers.

Yes, that's a profession that definitely involves "years of experience and obsessive attention to detail, plus a healthy dose of luck". Spot on!

There are still a lot of mysteries left about what exactly happened with xz, and this article is just a high-level summary.

But this database engineer loved that quote!

Why does housing cost so much?

Here's a very interesting article on the underlying costs of building a single family home. Well-researched, clearly-written, lots of detail about why it costs to much to build a new house.

Because of the enormous costs of housing, it's worth understanding where, specifically, those costs come from, and what sort of interventions would be needed to reduce these costs. Discussions of housing policy often focus on issues of zoning, regulation, and other supply restrictions which manifest as increased land prices, but for most American housing, the largest cost comes from building the physical structure itself. However, in dense urban areas — the places where building new housing is arguably most important — this changes, and high land prices driven by regulatory restrictions become the dominant factor.

I really enjoyed the entire article, lots of fascinating observations and lots of additional links to chase for those who want to learn more. So I wanted to share it.

Sweet Thursday: a very short review

One day, on a trip from somewhere to somewhere else, we happened to stop at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California. If you've never been to the Steinbeck Center, but you happen to be in Salinas and can spare a bit of time, you should definitely visit; it's a very interesting place.

While we were there, I stopped by the gift shop and picked up a copy of Sweet Thursday, a Steinbeck work that I wasn't familiar with.

Sweet Thursday is a sequel to the much more famous Cannery Row, and returns to the same setting and the same characters, for the most part. Cannery Row was set before WWII, Sweet Thursday was set after WWII, and there are many other ways to compare and contrast the two.

I think that if you liked or loved Cannery Row, you'll probably like or love Sweet Thursday just about as much. And, possibly, if it's been a while since you read Cannery Row, you might like Sweet Thursday even a bit more, since it will bring nostalgia and reminiscing about those earlier stories and how much you liked them and how nice it is to read some more about all those kooky characters.

Of course, the converse is true: if you found Cannery Row to be gimmicky and shallow, you probably won't enjoy Sweet Thursday

Happily for me, I was in the first camp, and I enjoyed Sweet Thursday very much.

It helps that I have always loved reading Steinbeck, and it also helps that the format of Sweet Thursday, with its three to eight page mini-chapters, is pretty much ideal for a commute-time reader, who has a scant 15 minutes of uninterrupted ferry-boat time for the occasional read. It was wonderful to carry Sweet Thursday around in my backpack, and pick it up when I had a few spare minutes, and read just one chapter, or maybe two.

Stretching it out this way may have even made me like Sweet Thursday better; I don't know. I think although it is quite short and easy to read, it was not actually meant to be rushed through, but rather to be sipped and savored, reflecting on those earlier times.

Kinda super Wednesday

So California joined Super Tuesday, hoping that would bring more enthusiasm for primary elections and for elections in general in these parts.

Our county's website has a quick take on the answer to that question.

More practice needed.

Bone: a very short review

My holiday gift from my sister-in-law was the marvelous Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume, Jeff Smith's career-defining work.

Bone is quite the gift to receive. It's almost one thousand four hundred pages long, and it's big enough that you can lose your coffee cup behind it. I have to confess: at first it was a little intimidating.

But a nice quiet day happened along, and there it was, waiting for me, and so I dove in.

Well, there went 2.5 months!

Bone is everything you could want from a fantasy epic. It has demons, dragons, monsters and villains galore. It has the lovely Princess Thorn and her force-of-nature grandmother. It has cow races!

But most of all, it has Fone Bone, the most lovable and approachable hero in many a year.

It takes a while to read a 1400 page book, even if it is a graphic novel.

But it was worth every page and I enjoyed it through to the end.

I hope Bone is read for generations to come, it's definitely got staying power.

Confession time: the dragon was the best, but Ted the cricket was superb, and I really liked Roque Ja.

Ted Chiang on AI

Have you read Ted Chiang's Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear ?

It's beyond remarkable that this essay is more than six years old at this point, it's still astonishingly accurate and insightful.

Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”

...

... in its pursuit of a seemingly innocuous goal, an AI could bring about the extinction of humanity purely as an unintended side effect.

But as Chiang observes, this really isn't a discussion about runaway superintelligence, it's a discussion about modern capitalism.

Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.

Chiang's essay is extremely important, even more important now than when he wrote it more than six years ago.

I hope more people will go back and rediscover this under-acknowledged gem, and read it all the way through, and re-read it some more, and go and tell everyone they know about it.

Oh how embarassing...

The Sunday crossword had a clue:

• Agricola author

I was getting all irate that neither "Rosenberg" nor "Uwe Rosenberg" fit.

Heh.

Well what the heck, worth a try!

Dead & Company: Dead Forever - Live at Sphere - Reserved Seating Fri · May 31, 2024 · 7:30 PM

Important mathematical observation

January 2024 happens to be a period of time during which, with a very small number of exceptions,

• All of the people born in 1961 are 62 years old,
• while all of the people born in 1962 are 61 years old

We state this without proof.

All the Years Combine: a very short review

Ray Robertson, a Canadian writer best known for other genres, joins the long list of people who have written books about the Grateful Dead and their music with his All the Years Combine: the Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows.

Robertson has the clever idea to orient his book around the band's concerts. Most other books about the Grateful Dead take much more traditional approaches:

• many are memoirs, by members of the band themselves (Lesh, Kreutzmann, etc.) or by members of the larger organization (road crew, managers, engineers, etc.)
• some are biographies, of individuals and of the band as a whole
• others are directly about the songs and music themselves, as more conventional music criticism

But very few have written directly about the band's enormous thirty year catalog of concerts (a notable exception to that is Cornell '77, an entire book about a single concert).

There are at least two good reasons why this is indeed a clever idea:

• Firstly, the material is unusual. The band made the decision very early on to encourage and emphasize recording and preservation of their live concerts. This was performed by the band themselves, who invested heavily in both equipment and personnel to enable capturing the shows as accurately and completely as possible, and then preserved that collection of material over the following six decades. But it was also performed by the fans, first rather anarchically, then later under the acceptance and support of the band, who made and curated and traded their own recordings of the shows. I have fond memories of friends who knew tapers and shared tapes of their favorite shows.
  
  Moreover, although Robertson doesn't overly dwell on this, the Grateful Dead were present at many of the seminal live performances of popular music during an extended period of several decades: the Summer of Love concerts, the Acid Test events, the Altamont Free Concert, Woodstock, Watkins Glen, the Concerts at the Pyramids, etc.
  
  This is rare, at least in popular music, and this rarity by itself makes it noteworthy.
  
  
• Secondarly, the concerts were important to the entire artistic process for the band. The Grateful Dead had a very unusual creative process, with multiple composers, multiple songwriters, influences from many other popular music genres, and so on. But also they had a very strong culture of music performance. In this respect the band drank deeply from musical areas such as jazz, blues, gospel, and bluegrass, in which improvisational performance, audience interaction, and other techniques were practiced in their music to a much greater extent than most people realized. As Phil Lesh noted, the studio recordings that the Grateful Dead made were generally viewed, even by the band themselves, as just advertisements for their live performances.
  
  This totally inverts the general approach taken by most popular musicians over the past 50 years (and still now): whereas the typical musician tours in support of the new album, the Grateful Dead nearly always issued a new album to support the upcoming tour.
  
  Understanding this is critical to undertanding why attending a Grateful Dead show in the 60's, 70's, and 80's was such an unusual experience: you weren't just hearing songs that you already knew and loved being performed by the artist in a live setting, you were actually participating in the composing, refining, and elaboration of works that were still in progress, still in the process of development.
  
  Very few artists had the willingness to experiment with unfinished new material live, in front of a large paying audience, before it had been thoroughly worked through and rehearsed and revised behind closed doors. And fewer still would see this as a process that they wanted to use. So this makes it worth describing.
  
  

Robertson is enthusiastic about his subject, and he's an enthusiastic writer, and reading All the Years Combine you get a good dose of his passion and enthusiasm and excitement.

It doesn't make for great literature; it's more like sitting around in some late-night diner after the show has ended, swapping observations about the event with your buddies, reveling in the high points and laughing about the missteps.

It's not the sort of thing that translates well to the printed page, and I think it's unlikely we'll see a lot of additional works attempting to do what Robertson has tried to accomplish.

But I definitely enjoyed the book, and happily sent it on to another Deadhead friend of mine.

Rebel Moon, reviewed by somebody else.

This review of Rebel Moon by SFChronicle columnist Drew Magary, is the best and most accurate movie review I've seen in years. Every word is oh, so true.

I am suffering. This movie is awful and promises to get no better. None of the characters are interesting. All of the visuals look like a high-budget Scorpions video. The script is like if you assigned a dozen seventh graders 10 pages each. And the fight scenes are boring as s—t. The more of “Rebel Moon” I watch, the more running time I appear to have left. You should get your name on a wall for finishing this movie, like when you polish off the 96-ounce London broil at Jim Bob’s Steak Barn. I really want to stop watching “Rebel Moon” and play some PlayStation. The effects alone would be 10 times better, and I can just finish the movie tomorrow morning. But I’ve come too far now. At this point, “Rebel Moon” is less a movie to me than it is a challenge, and I refuse to back down. I will defeat this movie, even if I die in slow motion while trying.

My review, had I bothered to even try to write one, would have been nowhere near as fun to read as Magary's, but would have come to precisely the same conclusion.