Homes are Graves for the Living

(*Tuareg proverb)

In 2008, most humans will be living in cities. This figure doesn't count the suburban, exurban, industrial, agricultural, and other types of settled humans required for the existence of cities, and perhaps it is a good thing that it does not. If it did, we would see that the entire Northern hemisphere, meridian to meridian, will consist of settled humans come 2008. It's another victory for human civilization, but the important thing to remember about civilization is that it is not you and it is not me. It is a discrete entity, and its wants are not necessarily aligned to our needs.

If I had a penny for every group that claimed to be "oppressed" by the advent of civilization, I wouldn't be writing this, because I'd be too wealthy to be chained to a computer this fine afternoon. The reason all these folks think they've been put-upon is because, individually, they have. Life gets worse in the cities. You have less children, your life expectancy goes down, and your nutrition goes to hell. Your typical medieval city would have depopulated in thirty years if it didn't constantly receive an influx of farm youths. In cities, women married themselves into domestic prisons for their entire miserable lives. Men submitted to a primate power structure that sent them into certain death for nothing better than the whim or pride of an elite. If you didn't speak our language you were not entitled to the protections of society, you were, in fact, suitable only for the menial jobs rejected by the young men who were themselves scheduled to die. Individuals did this so that this huge thing, the city, civilization, what have you, could continue.

The reason we urbanize is not for ourselves but because as part of a city we build a thing that is bigger than any of us. In times of ferment, when everyone is doubting culture, people stop working for the sake of the culture. They've stopped believing in their civilization. They work not because they are inspired by greatness but because they've forgotten how life could be lived otherwise. Anyone reading this remember how to farm? Hunt?

If I continue along these lines I start sounding oddly like Patrick Buchanan, but without the strange racial aspect. Weirdos aside, something is very wrong when people no longer believe in the society that they are part of. Something to remember the next time you say to yourself that government is part of the problem. If the problem is collective venture, then you might as well be a Tuareg tribesman.

Steering Away from Vista

If there's one group of Internet partisans I hate, it is the Linux cultists. They rank somewhere between pornographers and furries in the internet food chain, possibly because they are both. Why do I dislike them? Because they assume that my life is so empty of meaning that I would love nothing more than to manually config a three hundred line text file so that I can run a web server. I do not wish to empty my head of all knowledge so that I can fill it up with command line sequences. There are better things to fill my mind with than meaningless clockwork babble.

Things have, however, changed in the Linux world, causing an endless uproar among the "I love config files" crowd and a sigh of pleasure from the rest of us. By "the rest of us", I mean those of us who steer the ship of IT for organizations that can not afford Windows Vista.

Not afford Vista? But it comes preinstalled! Sure it does, and then:

1) I get locked into another upgrade cycle for MS Office.
2) I need to make sure everyone has a gig of ram.
3) I need to make sure everyone has a graphics coprocessor with DirectX 9 HARDWARE PIXEL SHADING. For the OPERATING SYSTEM.
4) 40 gigs of HDD space. Ha ha. Ho ho.
5) It rejects unsigned hardware. Printer? What printer?
6) The components encrypt messages across the backplane. As in, encrypting messages from the memory bus to the processor. It's encrypting the chokepoint in the system. This is analogous to feeding a bypass recipient crystal meth to make him get more exercise.
7) Forget about watching DVDs on your computer ever again.
8) I am leery of any software project that is running four years late.

All these things wouldn't really stack up if it wasn't for the fact that my client is a small non-profit that can't afford even a quarter of the computer that Vista is asking for.

Wonderland

The Pacific Crest Trail, I've determined, is just too darned long. It is also the home of my nemesis, Heat. The Wonderland trail circumventing Mt. Rainier, however . . there's a nice, tidy 95 mile trail. It's repeatedly been voted the most scenic long trail in America, and it's plenty challenging; the profile map looks like New Hampshire at its worst. Even going six or seven miles a day, I'll have to be in pretty decent shape to tackle it.

The rewards, though, are nothing short of staggering. The vertical scale of Rainier is to the Whites what the Whites are to the mid-Atlantic. Even though the Wonderland trail never summits, it still goes up and over each spur ridge, circling the final seven or ten thousand feet of the massif, which is a kind of loom I've never seen.

Good times. I just need to see if they'll get their bridges repaired this season. If not, it might just be some other adventure this season.

EDIT Well, so much for that idea.

Children of Bradenton

I had not even turned all the way around in my seat when the stranger slapped me. I set up to put my head in the slapper's face, but was advised otherwise by two of the slapper's companions. They placed their hands pointedly in their pockets and shook their heads, as if saying, don't try it buddy. I leaned back against the bar and said, "Let's discuss this outside".

What followed was a long conversation about respect, how I was apparently well-educated, and how this difference in education resulted in a failure to communicate. I literally apologized for being educated in a place like Trailside Bar and Grill, and they apologized for being stupid, giving me advice on how to look stupid in the future. I pondered burning down the bar with everyone in it. My higher consciousness intervened, quoting Gibbon at me. It's time to leave the cities, said Mr. Brain. You'd have better chances in the Serengeti. I never set foot in a Bradenton pub again. A few months later I was on the trail in Georgia.

Mr. Brain was right. In the months that followed, I learned that Trailside had been the location of several shootings and two arsons. A woman I had chatted with at the pool tables had been stabbed by a hilariously inept prostitution/kidnapping ring pissed off at inventory. A friend of mine later identified Slappy as a compulsive stabber of people he thought were looking at him funny; one story involved Slappy getting off his motorcycle to assault someone through a half-open car window. Slappy/Stabby is, at the time of this writing, doing an altogether too short time at a state facility for- get ready for the shocker here- stabbing someone.

The hostility of cities is not restricted to Trailside or even Bradenton. I've had beer bottles thrown at me while biking along 41. I've had a gang of young nitwits stopping their car so they could threaten to shoot me. I've seen a lone middle-aged woman, screaming and bleeding from a head wound, threading downtown Sarasota traffic, which, when the light turned green, accelerated around her howling body. I've picked up a mutilated girl left on the side of I-75, only to have her accuse my friend and I of rape (a charge the police luckily straightened out). There is all this and more, and the motorcycle accident itself, where a stranger left me a life disfigured.

The tyranny of this place, though, is not its tortures or violence. The singular thing about Florida that crushes the spirit is its lovelessness. Loveless, people inject pleasure; torpid they hurt and maim. It is a form without function. It is, as Malcolm Gladwell observed, "the Crucifixion without the Christ". Things are good. Good people are good things.

Children of Men is not a movie about 2027. The urban battles are taking place as I write this. In the movie you can see this machine clearly, practically smell the diesel fuel, burning metal, gagging cordite: the blood, bone, and shit of modern society. Amidst all the other terror, though, is the one fact most horrible of all: in a world without children, without love, the machine has more life than any of those trapped inside it.

There are a lot of other things going on in this movie, which might well be one of the best of this decade. In the words of Anthony Lane:

"The people I know who have seen “Children of Men” have admired its grip, but they had to be dragged to the theatre; it’s a film that you need to see, not a film that you especially want to."

Diversity as Source

One of the failures of the conservation movement, at least the conservation movement as it has existed for the past forty years, has been its inability to explain how its concepts affect humanity's living standards. This is largely because conservation began as an elite movement, specifically, as a movement intended to keep the hunting grounds well stocked. This was back when hunters actually went into the wilderness to shoot large and occasionally dangerous wild game, as opposed to today, where well-to-do hunters go to small plots of private land to shoot farm raised animals.

To have a wilderness the wild has to function. This wasn't a problem in the early twentieth century. The wilderness worked because there was so darned much of it, but by the time of the latter twentieth century, things were looking a little different. Larger groups of species, whole families, in fact, were about to be gone forever.

Right around now is when the pragmatist in me says, "So what?". Everything has to die sometime. In one sense, this is correct. Cheetahs are probably overspecialized. Blue whales probably are stretching their environment to the limit, in terms of calorie per hectare. Why not accept fate? Even humans have to be extinguished sometime, don't they?

The difference here is a matter of attitude, an attitude of ownership. The difference is, do we want humans to be users of the system, or do we want humans to be administrators?

How does this work? Don't things come and go by chance? This is a situation similar to explaining the concept of source control. Source control is basically a way of preserving every step in a software project. Ideally, you can go to source control, say "I want today's application window with last year's login screen", and with a bit of pushing and huffing, get exactly that. At some point, non-technical staff- the users of the system- will say, "Why are we using all this disk space on historical source code?". The answer is, "Because we don't know how to make it anymore". We hold onto last year's login screen because- surprise!- it has a "Forgot my Password" widget that does things just so, in a way that no one can manage again.

So when we have an animal that eats this particular plant that no one else wants to eat, or if there's a termite that clears away all the shit, or if we have anything that fills a niche, we want a backup- because there is nothing else that can do what it does. Letting an insect leave this world is like removing a branch of the tree from a software project in the hope that something better will come up. Conservation, when you get past the cuddly animals and failed liberal arts majors, is a matter of source control. It's an attitude of ownership, of administering what is, after all, the most complex system of all.

Fun is Usable

A long time ago, some programmers I knew came upon a pretty familiar dilemma. The specifications required more data than could be efficiently queried from the database. Furthermore, the volume of data and the detail in which it was retrieved made it dubious that a mortal human of the early 21st century could make any sense of it whatsoever. What to do, what to do. In my naivete, I thought, Let's make a game! You could assign numbers to different levels of criteria, and when you total the numbers you get the cost of the query. Certain levels of staff could only "afford" particular kind of queries. It makes it a game to narrow down search terms. To make it really fun, the organization could assign goals, and when a staff member meets a certain set of goals, the system could let that user create more expensive queries. "SalesSteve has gained +20 Query Points". Which lets a bright employee do his or her job better, which gets better query points, etc. It seemed like a great idea at the time, but, well, I was younger and exceptionally excitable. Data mining isn't supposed to be fun.

Data might not be fun (for some people), but usability is. It's something I was thinking about during the holidays spent with my future in-laws, where I enjoyed a Christmas present of a computer game. This game, Knights of the Old Republic 2, is in many ways indistinguishable from work. You go through a somewhat repetitive series of number crunching exercises, face crises, deal with them by crunching more numbers . . . for what? Why, I asked myself, am I working for free? The reason immediately slapped me in the face: I'm playing to get Force Storm so I can really cream these goody-goody little Jedi freaks. Playing evil aside, I was playing because the game had a constant and consistent framework of reward and punishment. It was just that my character's idea of a reward was a goblet filled with the tears of the innocent.

In any case, the reason (good) computer games can get people to work almost indefinitely for free is because of this system. This is what makes them fun, and, ultimately, usable. All too usable, in some cases. Imagine, I thought, if when a programmer finishes a certain number of graph functions he gets a level up as "Graphmaster" (displayed in a tasteful little HUD below the IDE, like KOTOR's level up tooltip), or a programmer who is a rapid typist gets "Speeddemon". The guy who puts the smack down on the project could be "Finisher". These sorts of points could go towards awards, from micro-bonuses to extra training. Ideally the rewards help the player to work harder to get more rewards. Just like in the video game: you kill to shop, and you shop to kill.

All these different aspects or "levels"- Graphmaster to Connectrix- might not mean a hell of a lot by themselves. Probably the most important guy on the team will have high combined scores in all his levels. That's not the important bit (well, it is important to HR, but let's leave that out of this for now). The important bit is that each member of a team gets immediate feedback on something they're doing- and something they can immediately compare against everyone else.

Maybe when we start seeing the next generation of HR technology, we'll hear a new cry coming from the corporate office:

"Level! Woot!"

Sold!

I saw that a publicly traded company I used to work for had been bought by one of the more Aryan private equity groups. I had mixed feelings. Big companies are sort of cool in that they are democratic, but they tend to be retarded for much the same reason. While I was still thinking about this, I noticed that my old company's biggest competitor (one of them, anyway) was going through the exact same thing. Another Death-Star sized ball of money sucking in a company in a dysfunctional sector. Then the company that bought my former company decided, hey, what the hell, and started buying other competitors in the sector.

What the hell?, I asked myself, and I did not have to wait long for the answer. "2007: THE YEAR OF PRIVATE EQUITY!!!", screamed at least five newspapers. I was seeing firsthand the tinest fjord of the 2007 Private Money Flood. While the transfer going on in my old company doubtlessly was taking place for the most innocent of reasons, the drama of boardroom money in general has been going on for some time.

It's an old story now. Public company with a fantastic deal of assets gets bought by private firm with a fantastic deal of cash. Perhaps said public company has not had the most honest of boards, and the stockholders will not say no to millions of dollars of clean private money. Voila, instant new ownership and transition from public to private. The shareholders call it a day and the executives crawl back into whatever hole they came from, preferably in a directorship of HBS buddies. Meanwhile the private firm sits down to figure out what kind of "fantastic" assets they just acquired.

This is easier than it sounds because, really, no publicly traded company has a transparent, honest board. They're not set up to be honest, transparent, or even to maximize the profits of the shareholders. For the past twenty years the average board has had the singular goal of raping as much money out of the company as humanly possible. Those huge salaries you always read about are sustained by a consummate kleptocracy that is magnificently free from any type of oversight, be it from workers, shareholders, or the government. No executive would dare call attention to this magnificent machine for fear of clogging up its pendulous money tit.

Shareholders were more or less satisfied with this arrangement so long as they got added value from their overpaid CEO monkeys. The shareholder was especially satisfied if he or she was a mutual fund manager, because then you could pretty much guzzle whatever fees you wanted without anyone asking questions. In the sweet fevered dawn of the 401k era, you weren't dealing with a sharp Grieco-style Wall Street wanker- you were dealing with Gramma, who doesn't know active management from a runny colon . Worse yet, there's no rule saying you can't take money from a company while managing a fund that has that company's stock in it. Ho ho ho. What do YOU want to be when you grow up, little boy? Why, I'd like to funnel Gramma's money while talking up Enron stock, grandpa.

So between the fund managers and the board members waiting to be executives, American stockholders and employees became accustomed to that huge thing in their ass. Trickle down indeed.

But nothing gold can last. Nothing like a seizure in the money supply to wake people the hell up. In the midst of inflationary pressures and imaginary capitalization, it's clear that the cash sums given to leadership superstars are not reflected in value. The townsfolk have rounded up with pitchforks and torches around the laboratory of the mutual fund manager, led by folks like Fidelity and Vanguard. The managers in the private firms are pissed the hell off, wondering exactly what these people have been doing for, oh, sixty years.

SO we can't really blame the shareholder who thinks, sincerely, screw this: just give me my cash so I can put it in a Chinese utility, ideally before the whole goddamn thing is revalued by someone who isn't some combination of incompetent, corrupt, or drunk.

War Stories

As I have mentioned before, a guilty pleasure of mine is comic books. Recently, I gave a friend of mine War Stories by Garth Ennis, a series of WW2 inspired vignettes that I hoped to read myself. I finally got the chance to read them. I was not disappointed. They are . . . everything one would expect of the deadliest conflict in human history. They are devastating. They are moving.

"Then one morning I woke up and realized my life was atrocity"

The transition from life to atrocity is an easy one to make. Thanks to Ennis and company for reminding us of that crucial fact.

Skinless

A vignette of violence and espionage.

Skinless

April 1, 2002 Central Eurasia, Kashkar

Seven years out of Bosnia, Ahmed Muhammed bin-Uruk-dur settled into a stinking yurt in the Hindu Kush. The tent flapping behind him was struck by his guide less than ten miles from the southwest end of the Tarim basin. It was the farthest that his guide felt Ahmed could go- a weakling khat from Arabia- and far enough into the mountains to hide. Ahmed (which was not his real name) knew the location of every piece of mass in orbit at any given time, what each thing did, and how it did it. He knew the location of the EM-630 (EQSAT5) over Eurasia, and knew that it would, within fifteen minutes, begin its last string of telemetry to the 509th Wing of the USAF flying to Afghanistan. He knew that the telemetry would be converted into binary by a Chinese-manufactured Motorola 4505 microprocessor (silent cooling), and the binary would go through the B-2's mainframe to the fire control computers, where it would enter the tiny brain of a JDAM. Running in secure mode, the JDAM would know where it was going better than the pilot of the B-2 would. Incidentally, in this case, the JDAM would know where it was going better than anyone except for Ahmed.

The Motorola 4505 (silent cooling) telemetry microprocessor, being Chinese, originally had firmware that was loaded with backdoors and built in buffer overflows to allow the PLA to take control of American equipment. The Pentagon, realizing this during the manufacturing process, politely asked the Chinese to take out the vulnerabilities so the Motorola equipment could be installed in the B-2 bomber. The Chinese specialized the firmware so it could take especially good advantage of the B-2, then gave the processors back to the Air Force, which installed them on their two billion dollar bombers. For any given day eighty percent of the USAF's firepower was under the de facto control of the People's Liberation Army. On a side note, B-2 manufacturer Northrop summarily refused to use elite domestic programmers because none of them could pass the mandatory drug test.

Ahmed (which was not his real name) had a deal with the Chinese, and had it for long enough that he was able to craft code that could take advantage of the backdoors in the B-2's Motorola telemetry receiver. He also had LANDSAT-1, a massive overengineered NASA satellite (presumed out of service) that was wide open to Ahmed's laptop and dish. LANDSAT-1 had a beast of an antenna- if Ahmed were so inclined, he could make every satellite phone ringtone in the hemisphere play "Fat Bottomed Girl" at seventy decibels. As the telemetry was beaming from EM-630 (EQSAT5) en route to the B-2s of the 509th, it would be overtaken and mugged by an overcharge signal from the LANDSAT. The pirate LANDSAT transmission would find its way to the B-2 antenna, then to the Chinese buffer overruns in the Motorola 4505 firmware, from whence it would cheerfully begin executing commands to the B-2 fire control mainframe, which would reprogram the JDAM so that it went where Ahmed wanted it to go. It would all happen when Ahmed pressed the "Return" button on his laptop. Which he did.

From that point the JDAM was the assassin, hired muscle from the Chinese stolen from the Americans, and Ahmed was sitting in a transmission center. The Americans would realize something had happened and would wipe out every dish-shaped object in the Hindu Kush. It was time to leave.

Ahmed threw everything into his mesh gear, hung it carefully from the yurt frame, and snuck into the inky night outside. Naturally a night person, his eyes found the ridgeline and the glowing cherry spot of his guide's cigarette, the only point of light in the darkness. Slowly- more slowly than the second hand on a watch- Ahmed aimed his silenced pistol at a spot three and a half inches up and to the right of the glowing spot. The trigger pull was light, about a pound and a quarter, and the suppressor functioned so well that the only noise was the metallic slap of the automatic's slide. A giblet of frontal cortex sprayed into the night, and the guard slumped like a drunk. Quickly, Ahmed jammed everything that made him Ahmed into the pockets of his guide, darkness and slippery blood making things take longer than they should; in five seconds, the guide became Ahmed, and Ahmed lost himself. The skin had come off again, and the skinless man, NV goggles and mesh gear packed, headed out of the narrow valley like all the fires of hell were after him. Which, in a sense, they were.

Ten minutes later Muhammed Shubai- the target of the skinless man- met his end at the hand of a misdirected JDAM dropped from a B-2 in the 509th. The wedding had been going on for some time, but odd how his son hadn't showed up, isn't it? He had always tried to get Shem out of the business, trying to tell him, Shem, stop dealing with the poppies and the Russians or someone will get you. His son sneered. As Muhammed lay perforated, watching his daughter die by fire, he knew that his son was behind this, somehow, and wished for the vengeance of God upon him. Allah forgive me, I have wished my son to Hell. Muhammed died. The Air Force apologized.

Almost immediately Shem Shubai -the client- wired five million dollars into a German-run mutual, from whence it would find its way - through a long and laundered route- to the man who had once called himself Ahmed. That was some assassination, thought Shem. Shem would be dead within two days, after unsuccessfully trying to find the man he thought was Ahmed.

Forty five minutes later three F-18 fighter/bombers streaked over the yurt and the dead guide who had become Ahmed. They dropped a total of three one thousand pound bombs laser-targeted on the yurt, clearing the valley of all life and scaring the local dovekie population to somewhere more peaceful, like Chernobyl. Soon the Marines would come and find the man who had become Ahmed, al-Quaeda lieutenant and mastermind of the signals campaign against Operation Enduring Freedom. His body, cellphone, and mule would be dissected, analyzed, wrung out for every last detail, none of which would show that the man was illiterate, had never handled a single piece of electronics (not even a radio), did not speak Arabic, and - most importantly- was not al-Quaeda lieutenant Ahmed Muhammed bin-Uruk-dur. The guide's wife wondered where her husband was.

The Ring in Four Color

I’ve always loved Wagner. It’s safe to say that now, certainly, but for a very long time it was not kosher to say you appreciated the man’s music. There are some good reasons for his banishment. He unwittingly wrote the soundtrack for the Third Reich, and, by extension, the leitmotifs for every bad guy in cinematic history. As I've mentioned before, the horror of the Reich has been magnified by our awe of it, an awe that was quite deliberately structured by Nazi propaganda architects, since making really great film is a good substitute for having a political philosophy. At least, it works as a substitute if you're a cynic and a loser who's never had a genuine feeling in your life. Indeed, what began as a party of hero worship soon turned, under Hitler's control, into what Hermann Rauschnung called "the Revolution of Nihilism": cynically manipulative, intellectually bankrupt, and one of the nadirs of human civilization. That's a harsh reputation for a composer to come back from.

It's said that classical music didn't die in the 20th Century, it just went into the movies to hide. Wagner is the lich-king of this undead realm; appearing in John Williams and in Howard Shore's The Lord of the Rings (which I understand has been made into an opera). I'm not a snooty New Yorker reviewer, so I don't mind Wagnerian touches hiding in pop culture. I enjoy them. I can't watch a weeklong opera. Pop culture makes all this highbrow stuff understandable.

In any case, I never had the faintest idea of what The Ring was about until I bought these fantastic comicizations of The Ring by P. Craig Russell. Now I have a far better idea of the plot than perhaps I ought to; Russell does a fantastic job of translating the opera into lyrical- and often quite powerful- English phrasing. The art is four-color, very straightforward, a bit hippy, too literal in its visual representations of leitmotif, but barring a full Hollywood treatment, it's the best representation you're likely to get of this high-flying epic. I can't recall how many times I've run into the following phrase regarding Wagner's Ring:

"What follows is perhaps the most difficult to realise stage directions in the history of opera."

Well, no longer. Now you can practically hear the damn thing as you're reading it, and feel the chill with Alberich's words.

Outside In

The fundamental goal of all data modeling is to create a facsimile of the objective world in a semantic composite. A table of data does this by listing aspects of reality that matter to us (columns), then recording the data for these columns in a series of rows. The relationships between these columns is the important part, though, and these relationships are only really understandable when we view the data as a diagram. The problem here is that when we view the diagram, we hide the rows of observed data for each of the column values. Our diagrammed data model may become irrelevant as the data coming in changes, and we would not know it until it is too late.

We sympathize with the data diagram approach because that is how our brains see the world: as a series of fantastically complex interconnections. We don't store a whole lot of data in our brain. Instead, when we see an object, we make connections about various aspects of that object that link to other objects. In database terms, the human brain is a database where all the values are primary keys.

Our computer brethren, on the other hand, stink at drawing associations but are incredible storage devices. We rely on them constantly, minute to minute, on remembering our music for us, remembering phone numbers, movies, news, and whatever else will fit on our Blackberries and laptops. We would not, however, ask them for the shape of the data, or for a field that no one seems to want anymore, although the sophistication with which data design can do these things is increasing constantly.

Somehow the data needs to appear in the design diagram. Obviously it can't make a cameo in the flesh, because it would make a laughingstock of design. It requires some algorithm that can convert the pattern in the data into abstractions at the design layer. Perhaps the shapes could glow red when they haven't been selected from for over two years. Blinking red.

Flowcharts and Reformation

Not too long after I started reading the draft of my undergraduate thesis, I found myself completely and totally befuddled. In my usual fashion, I had written a document that assumes a knowledge level above and beyond that of its audience, who unfortunately happened to be me, in this case. It's probably unreadable even by a specialist, unless the specialist has a browser window and is feverishly entering names and places into Wikipedia, as I was.

While I like my work to be dense, I also do not want my undergraduate thesis to read like Foucault's Pendulum, mostly because I can not keep reading my own work like this. I will go crazy trying to figure out what I was saying. So, as I often do when faced by a phenomenon of overwhelming complexity, I started making a diagram.

Unfortunately, I have no Visio, and I have neither the time or interest in customizing one of the many UML modellers out there so that it could model different personalities of the 16th Century. That's not exactly work that could be re-used. So I went to Gliffy, an online browser-based Visio clone. I was so impressed that, well, I had to post about it. While I wouldn't use it for anything too technical, it's a great (and free) workspace for people to brainstorm in. As soon as my deadlines clear up I will publish a nice "Who's Who" flowchart of the Italian Reformation. There might be as many as ten people who would be interested! Thanks Gliffy.

Probably only a matter of time before Google buys it. In an IT world so strapped for cash, one of the few business plans worth a damn is designing software that you know Google would like. Then you just wait for Page and Brin to show up with a dump truck full of money.

Hmmm, sooo . . . what else would Google want? They've got a Google Office, a Google Visio (if they buy or reverse engineer something like Gliffy). What would I make do attract Google's Mad Millionz? Or Bonus Billionz?

Would they go for a Google IDE? I think the answer would be "no". Google is primarily interested in getting people closer to the hivemind, and IDEs are a barrier to that. Granted, they DO publish a 3D editor IDE, but a 3D editor is still rooted in reality (spheres and boxes), whereas a software IDE exists in a sort of idea space that is only interesting to programmers and metaphysicians. In many ways Microsoft's voyage into the IDE is what dragged them down in recent years, and Google probably wants no part of it. Semantic constructs don't pay the bills.

There's one piece of IT functionality that Google is unusually well prepared for, and that's test automation. They've got the hardware, they've got the pipes, and they have the knowledge. They could use their black magic to spider out all UI components, track user patterns among those components, then elaborate on those patterns until the application breaks and throws an exception. Then you assign an ID to that usage pattern, ID the UI components, and attach the exception. The resulting table could then be published. It's still a little too techy for the Google market, and I mean that in the sense that only software people would care, but if you make it slick enough, you never know, Sergei might come a'knockin.

Getting all travel data in one place for the consumer would be an awesome windfall, but doing it painlessly would take some sneakiness. Kayak.com does something like this, but even they are getting sucked into the eerie Cosa Nostra atmosphere that is the travel business. Sergei has probably had enough of violent crime.

A very nifty application would be one that tells you where you'd like to live. It could use a lot of the functionality of a dating site without the stalker aspect while still being creepy enough for Google to love. The user could fill out some questions, and the application could grade metro areas and the surrounding countryside based on such factors as:
1) Land (Climate/geography, i.e., desert mountains)
2) Density (Biking to work versus having a ten acre lot)
3) Economic Activity (Wealth/Type, i.e., median income/Ford Motors, high income/Dartmouth)
4) School quality (education level of children who graduate the system, teacher/student ratio, etc.)
5) Taxes
6) Availability and size of local parks, soil quality, "off the grid" power options (solar, hydroelectric)
This is all stuff that's already in Google Earth, you'd just need some simple algorithms to sift it and match it with users. Or, creepier still (in true Google fashion), you could skip the questionnaire and just guess what the user likes based on the personal data you already have of them, then show them the place they want to live.

The creepiness, of course, is why Google is so fantastically wealthy: the Hivemind will know us better than we know ourselves. And who could put a stock price on the future collective consciousness of the human race? I, for one, am ready to be assimilated.

Gastronomical Observations

For the first time in three years I actually made the smoked turkey as recommended in the recipe. I had always hesitated at one step or another for fear that the combined ingredients would make the turkey too sweet. I was so wrong. The end product from the Epicurious recipe was balanced and substantial, without modification. The only misgiving I would have would be making a pan gravy: if you use a roasting pan, the fluids yielded by this bird will be 1) very salty from the exuded brine, and 2) very smoky. Still, the pan fluids from this recipe were so rich, so very tasty from the orange, mustard, and maple, that I might just try and make a gravy from these pan fluids next year.

Happy thanksgiving everyone!

Moving Pictures

Katahdin Summit, October 13th 2006

Good point

IAG has a very good point about the Airbus meltdown

Too Much

One thing you notice about the past is that it was a lot smarter. People like Gibbons and Newton were making quantum leaps in human knowledge doing little more than just thinking about it very hard. I used to marvel at this. The Fall of Rome researched without the Internet?! Inconceivable! After the experience on the AT, however, and after a summary period of being a wart on the bum of my old life, I've determined that the surfeit of knowledge, like the surfeit of jalapeno poppers, is a bad thing.

Like jalapeno poppers, knowledge in this modern world is everywhere, sticks to your guts, and smells delicious. If you do not know something, you can know it in moments by opening your friendly google page and entering "wikipedia whatever". Then you know it. This, however, cuts out the most important part of learning: pretending to know something you don't. I don't know how many new avenues of thought I've arrived at by pretending to know things I don't. I imagine that the sum of Mankind would be a lot smaller if it weren't for people pretending to know things that they don't in fact know. To be honest, this makes a sort of sense. The human brain's memory storage mechanisms are relatively weak compared to its ability to hook things together. We don't remember things so well, but we synthesize like nobody's business.

When we get away from civilization, Google, and Wikipedia, we are forced to actually think about the knowledge in our head- and make up explanations for those things we can't look up instantly. Sometimes those explanations are good ones. I'm pretty sure we'd still be exploring the underpinnings of the Ether if Wikipedia and CNN had been around in 1912. Unfortunately, like jalapeno poppers, this pure distillate of knowledge in the 21st century is impossible to remove yourself from. It's how we communicate and how we live, as isolated nodes in an enourmous hive-mind we call "Western Civilization". You just can't stop eating the damn things.

Unfortunately, sucking knowledge and jalapeno poppers will get you to only one place: morbid obesity. And on that note, I'm going for a walk. A stroll, rather.

A Glass Jaw?

It's amazing how things can change in just a few months. When I was leaving for the wilderness, everyone had Boeing on the ropes, on one knee, with its trainer in tears. There were a few who pointed out the big manufacturer's advantages: better capitalization; a virtually endless larder of military contracts; the fact that their planes still did what they did quite well even after ten or twenty years. For the most part, though, the air transport business was jumping up and down like a JV Cheerleader team: Go Go Airbus!

As it turned out, a lot of the statistics we got on the new generation of Airbus planes look like they came from an aeronautical branch of Arthur Anderson. Everything from cabin to burn. Just google Airbus to read the dirge for the "Airbus Century". Cancellations include Austrian, JAL, TAM, Emirates (ouch), Qantas, Virgin, and God knows who else as EADS picks out the dirt. Doubtless one of the chief problems lay in selling a very large aircraft that had not quite been put through all its paces. Once you sell you are locked in, which means, well, that there's a very strong incentive to overlook problems with the aircraft. Which means that investigators from Emirates will be visiting your facility shortly. And then, lawyers.

Another long term problem that the company is experiencing is its market. The LCC carriers are tying down their growth as they truly discover what "low-cost" means (and as the CRS advantage fades, with better data sharing among legacy carriers). It means bigger problems for Airbus than for the older Boeing, which can still make a fortune just selling parts for its flying fossils. The China market for Airbus is proving to be, well, a China market- which means you do your business their way, or you can not do business at all. If it's anything like the Chinese and Indian software companies, they'll buy one aircraft, reverse-engineer it and sell it for the price of a used Lexus.

I won't join in on the cat-calling of Airbus yet. Sure, they'll have some growth problems, and it's possible the bigger LCCs might disintegrate or be absorbed by the end of the decade. But we don't know what the hell Boeing is doing right now. Airbus has some great, great logistical advantages for any carrier, and a lot of fantastic features and ideas. What's the reigning heavyweight going to do now that he's found his quick competitor has a glass jaw? I have a funny feeling they'll just send more teams down to Washington, to send more no-bid contracts their way.

Wheels Down

Mile: Home

The brightness of the sun makes sunglasses mandatory, at least until these eyes get used to my home state again. The water and thickness of the air makes me feel like I am drowning, a feeling not aided by my deep chest congestion. Running is a sweatbath. Sometimes in Pennsylvania or NJ when I felt it was humid, I had totally forgotten what real humidity is. Sand drags at my steps, and for whatever reason, the first joint of my big toe has become stiff and swollen. It's the body's way of saying, "We're taking a break now, you bastard from hell".

Tomorrow I'll have been home for a whole week. The smells and sensations of home are coming back to me, and it doesn't seem quite so much like Venus anymore. The world around me seems almost unchanged, and I remember how short a time six months is in the land of the grown-ups. Six months used to go by without me hardly noticing. In my subjective world, though, six months can last a lifetime. People sometimes ask, "What was your trail name?"

"Mash," I reply, sort of embarrassed, then I am overwhelmed by a sense of dissonance, remembering the name I answered to for six months. It's no accident that the first thing a cult does is give its members new names. Our names are the root society has into us. Our names are the user id and password combination. When we change names, we change our user base. User John Mogilewsky has been reactivated, although I haven't revoked Mash's access to /home. Not yet.

This journal is no longer a trail journal, although I will probably still continue to update it with interesting tidbits from the worlds of history, science, and whatnot. Thanks for following along.

Anthropics

You know your branch of academics is in trouble when its dirty laundry is aired in the New Yorker. The recent article on the state of string theory is a pretty good example. I've always sort of felt that the string theorists needed to pull themselves in just a little bit, since you need truly Star Trek gadgets to test even the least of their predictions. No, scratch that, you need gadgets a few magnitudes beyond the energies harnessed in Star Trek.

But on the other hand, I don't think the anthropic principle, and particularly the multiple-universe incarnation thereof, should bring out so much ugliness in the anti-string theory crowd. It's just a tad disingenuous. Anthropic principles are not limited to string theory. In one way or another, the anthropic dilemma has been with us since Einstein-Bell, and before that. It's the nature of the quantum beast. It's why the standard model of modern physics splits things into objective, Einsteinian reality, and bizarre, Daoistic subatomic reality. The two realms rarely intersect, except at the terminii of universes, inside the event horizon, and, apparently, in the complexity of the human mind.

I say the last one half-jokingly, but in truth, there seems to be something to this, at least to my sleep-deprived mind trapped here in the airport. What if what looks like an anthropic principle in modern physics is just the manifestation of a lower order of physical law? What if the very existence of complexity, when it exceeds a certain limit, affects the behavior of elementary particles in a way analagous to the way mass affects space-time? If mass is tied to complexity, it would explain the relationship between anthropics and quantum observations.

Mass and complexity would seem to have a one-way relationship; you can have mass without complexity but it'd be pretty hard to have a critical mass of complexity without a relatively dense mass. You could argue that certain primitive forms of material, gluon plasmas and the like, can sustain complexity, but the energy needed to maintain exotics is too high- to have enough time to reach some sort of critical level of complexity in such material you'd need more energy than is present in the visible universe. Mass and complexity are very good friends, but it does not at first glance appear that it's a two-way street.

Until you take into account that complexity allows mass to avoid losing density through energy release. Your brain, a complex organ, allows your body to walk across the street without losing mass due to energy, or collision with little old ladies in Lincoln Towncars. Feedback mechanisms in stars work the same way, most of the time, except for those times they fail spectacularly.

We won't sidetrack into the secret lives of stars and stellar masses. But complexity can help mass out. Complexity navigates the multiple worlds and finds the best one; mass gathers all potential to itself. As things get more massive, they get more inevitable, until you get to something like a primordial black hole, or, if you add sentient complexity to the mix, an intelligent agent that is possible everywhere, from which there can be no ultimate escape. It's a shame that just when you think you have a good grip on some cosmological problem, Yahweh has to make an appearance. Hi, Yahweh.

Seriously, though, what if the complexity of galaxies and the visible universe *is* some sort of possible-universes-scheme by the sentient black holes to encompass all possible realities. This sentence makes me sound like I should be committed, so I'll stop there, or maybe write a short story about it. Ziggy Stardust and the Black Hole Archons.

But we can, I think, safely play with the assumption that complexity is tied with mass. Mass gathers all that potential where complexity can occur.

To bring all this back to tying mass and complexity with subatomic systems, it would be interesting to see if the existence of complex systems force strings into new harmonics, as the complex systems suck up the local information available to the strings. The harmonics may just be adjusting to the complexity of the observational system. The string harmonic would be like a gerbil hyperventilating while stuck in a locked airtight room with a string theorist, with fifty magnitudes difference in proportion.

Seriously, though, these sorts of tests are devilish to pull off, because quantum states do not like staying in the state they are observed in. Someone managed an experiment something like this late last century using lasers and Bose condensates and space robots, but I'll be damned if I can remember how the hell it worked.

Ah well, so much for the link between quantum physics, mass, and complexity. It's time to return to the social sciences before landing, so I can throw myself into areas I might still be competitive in, even at the ancient age of thirty-one.

Totally off topic, but after so long in the wild, flying in a plane is a whole new experience, like being trapped in a vast beast of limitless power. The pressurization of the compressors, the throttle on the tarmac- it really feels like the tightening of muscles before a leap. A thousand mile leap into the air. We humans do have some cool tricks, and the JetBlue Airbus 320 I'm on is one of them.

Delmonico's circa 1834

The Inn at St. John's, Portland, ME
Waiting for the flight

There's a copy of what is supposedly the first regular menu in the United States here at the Inn in Portland, from Delmonico's Restaurant in New York. The menu is quaint but intensely interesting. The prices of foodstuffs were proportionally much different back then- the roast chicken is twice as much as roast mutton, for example. A decent fraction of the menu is dedicated to "& Cabbage" dishes: sausage and cabbage, corned beef and cabbage, pig's head and cabbage, and the ill-defined "knuckle & cabbage".

I really can't make fun of this British-American fascination with cabbage, since last night I ate a pint of kimchi from the Korean supermarket, and kimchi might just be the least rational cabbage-based product ever to arise from the hand of man. I would love to take some on the plane but that would doubtless lead to imprisonment or my being shot by sky marshalls.

They make good kimchi in Portland, which means it smells bad. I mean, really, really bad. It's not stuff you necessarily want to eat indoors.

And now, the Bill of Fare, circa 1834, with prices following each item.

##############

Delmonico's Restaurant
494 Pearl St

Cup of Tea or Coffee-.01
Bowl of Same- .02
Crullers-.11
Soup- .02
Fried or stewed Liver- .02
Hash- .03
Pies- .04
Beef or Mutton Stew- .04
Corned Beef & Cabbage- .04
Pig's Head & Cabbage- .04
Sausage & Cabbage -.04
Knuckle & Cabbage- .04
Fried Fish- .04
Beef Steak- .04
Pork Chops- .04
Pork & Beans -.04 (What the hell? I mean, pork and beans?)
Sausages- .04
Puddings- .04 (The pudding of this time was probably more like a rindless sausage than anything we think of as pudding, and could be made from blood, innards, brains, what-have-you)
Liver & Bacon - .05
Roast Beef or Veal- .05
Roast Mutton- .05
Veal Cutlet- .05
Chicken Stew- .05
Fried Eggs- .05 (I have no idea where this price comes from, although I think the lack of refrigeration in 1834 might have made eggs a bit more of a luxury then than now, and it's also probable that a fried egg in 1834 was more something like a Scotch Egg than sunnyside up)
Ham & Eggs- .10
Hamburger Steak- .10 (Big spender! Again, a hamburger must have been something different in 1834)
Roast Chicken- .10

Name Not the Shadow

It's very hard to sleep in motel rooms. Hopefully I get the knack back, the ability to sleep in the city.

So until I finally pass out in a puddle of my own drool, I'm watching hour after hour of Law and Order. I find myself growing increasingly angry at the psychologist who is pulling demons from the cop characters in the show. It's a bit of a side plot, this head-shrinking, but it seems cruel and ultimately self-defeating. By pulling demons from their cop souls, this useless shrink is making the shadows real. You've got enough problems being a cop without having to second or quadruple guess yourself just because some jackass wants a writeup of your "psychological health", whatever the hell that's supposed to be, since I've seen absolutely piss-all in terms of actual consistent medical practice that shows what constitutes mental "health".

This pulling shadows, naming shadows . . . It's the equivalent of jumping off a cliff to see how far down it goes.

I know the bottom is very far away. I know there are bad little boxes inside me and inside all of us. So effing what? We put them away in careful little shelves inside us and we run on. Run, run, run, run, run, until it stings in our lungs, saltwater in our eyes, burn in our shoulders. It's the thick voluptous stuff of life, where our insides meet the outside, that is the vertex surface of conscious experience. The rest is just neurons, atoms, the shifting strings and gums (and God knows what other exotic nine-dimensional shapes) of the reality grid. We live in the interface. Psychiatry (and, to some extent, all post WWII aesthetic thought) wants to take that away from us.

I've always hated psychiatrists.

The AT Evaluation

Bangor, ME

Unless you are needing to give life a good kick in the pants, there's no real scenic reason to hike the entire Appalachian Trail. Maybe ten percent of the trail is worth a good vacation; the rest of the miles are drudging, viewless climbs through somewhat less-than-notable second-growth forest. The Smokies, the Roan Highlands of Tennessee, Grayson Highlands and McAfee Knob in Virginia, some of Vermont, the Whites, and Katahdin are all worthy of visits. I can't be objective about the Smokies. They're where I vacationed as a child in the summer, and they are where I first fell in love with the outdoors. Some folks have a much less positive impression of them.

The trail starts brutally, with steady two thousand foot climbs and drops up and down Georgia clay. No rocks, but if there's any water on the trail at all the clay is incredibly slippery. This trend holds until you get near Virginia. The Roan Highlands are the incredible centerpiece of the southern section. I'd recommend an overnight trip starting at Roan mountain, spending the night at the gorgeous Overmountain Shelter, and finishing at Mountain Harbor Bed and Breakfast.

"Virginia is flat," so say locals and ex-thru-hikers with a perverse sense of humor. It's not flat in any way, and it's five hundred miles. I've known thru-hikers who have taken two months to get through that state. It's the state that breaks your spirit. There's pretty much nothing notable between Grayson and the Shenandoahs, except for McAfee knob, which is an OK summit. You could skip from Grayson in VA to Greylock in MA without missing an awful lot.

Get ready for the civil war state! I have great memories of Maryland. The trail in this state follows the great skirmishes around Antietem, a plaque every ten miles documenting your hike around that field of slaughter. Through MD And southern PA you can get town food every day, right on the trail. Stop at Caledonia State Park, Pen-Mar's pizza delivery, and Pine Grove Furnace for the "Half-Gallon Challenge", where through hikers race through half-gallon size portions of ice cream, to celebrate the halfway point.

Pennsylvania up to Port Clinton is really honking boring, but at least it's passable. Northern PA is nasty, nasty trail, and if I had a time machine I'd go back and tell myself to skip this section. Defining experience: after an attack of clear vomit during a one hundred and seven degree day, I collapsed in a shelter, cursing the ridiculous boulder field they called a trail. I hear a truck engine. This guy pops out of a pickup a dozen yards from the shelter. "Hiya there," he said, "I'm the Ridge Runner for this section!" If I wasn't so blasted I would have killed him with my bare hands. Ridge runner!? Ridge Driver, more like. When was the last time you saw this goddamned trail?

The saving grace of PA was Palmerton, which was easily the friendliest trail town of the whole trip. Doubly impressive considering the whole town sits on top of a toxic Disneyland, the EPA superfund site I might have mentioned.

I raced through the mid-Atlantic so fast I hardly remember it. The Low Point at Bear Mountain Zoo was fun (124' in elevation). Crossing the Hudson was awesome. Hiking with Tin Man. Seeing Monica, getting engaged.

Once you get to Vermont, really, after Greylock, things get really scenic again. And they get scenic very fast indeed after you get to NH. I can't talk up the Whites enough, and really, southern Maine is gorgeous too. Southern Maine is also home to Mahoosuc Notch, which although it is not the "hardest mile", it is the slowest. It took me an hour, but non-thru-hikers generally want to allow four or six hours for navigating the notch.

And then Northern Maine, where the climate definitively changes to Canadian, and the trail gets intensely muddy. You fly through the wilderness- although the warning signs say to bring ten days of food, even novice hikers will probably not need more than seven, and there are resupply points in between. The fine folks running White House Landing winter in Anna Maria Island, funny enough. I told them I'd drop by when I got home. It seems a lot of people on the trail in Maine winter in or near Bradenton.

Then the big K, or Miss K, Baxter Peak, Katahdin. Easily the best summit on the trail, even without the emotional underpinnings. It's also the most challenging.

I'm just starting to get used to the idea that I'm not climbing mountains anymore. My hands are shaking. I have way too much excess energy. My kingdom for a stairmaster!

Lord knows I'm going to need one, and fast. I'm trying to eat well now, but my body still wants enormous quantities of food. I've lost thirty five pounds, and have a resting heart rate just shy of fifty BPM. I won't be able to keep this kind of shape (ten to twelve hours of aerobic exercise a day is a great way to live, but doesn't exactly pay the bills), but hopefully I can add enough muscle to this somewhat depleted frame so that my metabolism stays high.

Thanks to everyone back home for all the support- sometimes it was the emails from home that made it all worthwhile. We thru-hikers forget, sometimes, exactly the scale of this thing we do. A lot of the time we just sort of feel like hobos. "It's a very thin line between being a thru-hiker and being a vagrant". But the emails from home reminded us of who we are, and helped to restore a bit of our dignity.

And more than anyone else, a huge thank you to my future wife Monica, who's really been supernaturally patient with this whole project.

Time to get that flight set up. Time to go home.

And . . . What's this? A book about the Pacific Crest Trail?

Interesting . . .

Gear After Action Report

Bangor, ME

My Vasque full boots blew out before I got to Hot Springs, not even three hundred miles up the trail. It's excusable because the Vasques had done everything from trail work to office duty in the three years I owned them. I rarely wore anything else, and so they died very early.

The Innovate trail runners I got in Hot Springs were the best shoes I had on the trail. Light, very grippy soles, and protected with a full-length rigid shank. Tragically, it's a small British company and the only place I ever saw them was in Hot Springs, else I'd have walked the whole trail with these things.

The Hi-Tech trail runners I got in Harper's Ferry win the value prize. Less than forty dollars, but they got me to New Hampshire from Harper's.

The absolutely worst shoes of the entire trail are the Merill trail runners I got in North Woodstock,NH. The soles blew out less than thirty miles up the trail. I summitted on a mess of shoe goop and duct tape. That's a brand I'm not touching again.

I had what I consider the best tent on the entire trail, a Brawny Tarptent, made by Dancing Light Gear (which I learn has since gone defunct). 19 oz with a sewn-in floor and full bug protection. I love that tent. Unfortunately, like pretty much all my gear, the tent is trashed and needs serious rehab to be used again.

The Granite Gear Ozone backpack (2003 model) lasted the whole trail with no complaints. Less than three pounds but padded like a Byzantine throne.

I cooked on a little alcohol stove the whole trip with no problems. Alcohol, unlike cannister fuel, you can get anywhere, and unless you carry ungodly amounts of fuel, it's lighter than a cannister stove too. So long as you're just cooking for one person. Then physics step in, and cannister stoves become more efficient.

The Leki Ultralight Makalu trekking poles just about died as I came down from Katahdin. Their locking mechanism failed halfway down, and I had to break them up and stow them away. They needed new tips in Delaware Water Gap, but other than that, proved to be good poles. Leki promises to repair them at no cost.

The Campmor 20 degree down bag is hands down the best value in a sleeping bag anywhere. Less than two hundred dollars, 32 oz net weight, and a very cozy 20 degree rating (if you wear all your clothes in the bag this thing could easily take you to 0). A 20 degree bag is all you'll need on the AT, unless you plan on starting in February or something. You could probably go with a 32 or a 40, actually. I didn't have any trouble with down, although if it were a wetter year the down bag would have been useless- it loses all its insulating loft when it absorbs moisture.

Get a good food bag before you start. The Outdoor Research Hydrolight is a nice one. If your food bag is not waterproof it will start smelling like a dumpster, which really screws with your appetite.

Finally, this Palm TX has lasted the whole trail, and allowed me to journal from pirated signals the entire trail. Much more durable than I ever thought it would be.

Ice and Stone

Mount Katahdin, ME
Mile Last

We get up in the same way we have gotten up for hundreds of mornings. The sky is not yet light. First people up blow puffs of steam, then break out their cigarettes and pipes, filling the shelter with tobacco and pot smoke. Sleeping bags get rolled up first, to destroy the temptation of curling up in them again. Thermorests get rolled. Breakfast is broken out, and after we eat it, we go to the ranger station to fill in the form, under a gray sky of freezing rain.

If we do not return the form by the end of day, they will send Blackhawks to look for us. In this northerly climate, in this time of year at Katahdin's elevation, lightly equipped hikers can not be expected to survive above the treeline after dark. We pack daypacks with essentials, leave our big packs at the ranger station and head up.

The four thousand foot climb up Katahdin is concentrated in a one point five mile boulder scramble. I remember looking at the mountain from the wilderness, all excitement drained from me by wet and an incipient fever. Shouldn't be so bad, I thought, looking at the approach from the totally wrong angle. From the angle the AT actually uses, it is that bad. The day packs save us. We become quadrupeds on the way up, scared apes on the way down. It's a scary ridge. Concentrate too much on how high you are and you'd fall. You have to have a good sense of here-ness. This rock is here. I am here. I am going to the next rock.

After the scramble we are in the Katahdin Tablelands. It's a shockingly civilized climb from this point on, past Thoreau spring, so named for the prissy little bastard who never made it this far up the mountain. It's fantastic, like the Presidentials, but without the AMC presence, and the snackbars. On to the summit.

I break into a run for the last three hundred meters. Sprint to finish! People on the summit cheer. The run is a broken dancing thing, across rocks and scree, but it feels good. My body is so changed that when I summit I do not feel particularly winded. Holy Jesus in Heaven, I think, there's no time on Earth I've been in this shape. I've just run uphill for scores of meters and my lungs don't even notice.

It's freezing up here, literally. I avoid ice patches because they glow like polished stone. Don't step on the shiny bits. The view is incredible. I can see Avery Peak, more than a hundred trail miles back. My hands hurt. My nose really hurts. I don't feel either.

The sign. Katahdin. Northern Terminus of the Appalachian Trail. I feel curiously empty. Another crazy ass mountain. It's done. I'm done.

Coming down it is another matter entirely. It is by far the most treacherous part of the entire trail. The alternate route down Knife Edge looks even worse, not something I'd ever want to tackle without some real climbing gear. Hopping Gautama Buddha, do I have to walk down that?

Yes you do, says the Buddha.

And then I am down. I'm coming home..

Hundred Mile Enron

The Hundred Mile Wilderness, ME
Mile: 2152

Given a certain number of hours bog-hopping, any person will get his or her feet wet. Jet Li may take a thirty hours, Deputy Colchrane of Hazzard County may take thirty seconds. It takes me three hours or so of solid root and rock hopping before it happens. Bog jumping is like dodging bullets: you only need to make the mistake once. One slip, your foot is wet. And what the hell, if one foot is wet, why not both? Then you can just tromp through the bog and stamp out miles, instead of mincing about on rocks and roots and trekking poles.

But then we have a quandary: why not just stomp into the bog at once and make the miles from the get go? Because we do not know where the bog begins and ends. When we start bog jumping, we are doing it in the optimistic hope that the bog will take less time to traverse than we can expect our reflexes to hold out.

This hooks into an interesting study on loss aversion I alluded to a few weeks ago. In it, we see people turning down a 50/50 $100 bet that offers 150 on a win and 0 on a loss. Well, it's easy to criticize people for turning it down, but maybe their intuitive distrust of the situation is a good survival strategy.

For example, the game assumes the odds stay the same throughout the play time. What if they don't? What if the odds improve later, or start bad and get better? Then other players "in the know" get ahead, which brings in a whole lot of other very unscientific feelings.

Or say that one player has 200 to start the game, and another has a grand. The guy with a grand has a much better chance of not being shut down, where the guy with 200 could get shut down after one bad break. This is why you distrust fund managers who advise retirees to take risky investments. The retirees have no more cash coming in- if it's all or nothing and you go broke, you are done.

And if the client is also your employee, you open up a whole other set of risks. Like them wanting to kill you. Slowly.

The Last Town

Somewhere north of Monson

Mile 2070-ish

 

The Hundred Mile Wilderness is not quite so wild as one would expect. "I can drive you anywhere in the Wilderness", said Buddy, a local Trail Angel and all around good guy. So I've taken advantage of the driver to slack me through a few dozen miles. Slackpacking is the practice of hiring a driver to pick you up at the end of the day, so you don't need to carry a heavy pack. Without a pack, you can literally jog down the trail, covering twice the distance normally possible. It's nice. You're a lot more agile when running than you are when walking.

 

This morning we are getting dropped off for real. I probably won't be updating this journal until after I summit Katahdin, from the town of Millinocket. Less than a hundred miles left.

Avian Culture

There's not a lot of birdsong in Maine. It's a largely silent wood, apart from the rut moans of moose. It makes one reflect on the rich birdsong of the woods further south. The texture of the call and reply was something to marvel at. To be honest, the complexity of the calls seemed to indicate that a fairly high degree of information exchange was taking place. It would hint at the existence of culture.

Avian neurons are capable of some amazing feats compared to their mammalian counterparts- bird brains can do a lot more with less. Pepperberg's work with African Grey parrots has, in anecdotal evidence, shown that these amazing birds are capable of manipulating symbols through language, human language at that.

I'm reminded of how Europeans, when exposed to the oceancraft of the Polynesian voyagers, immediately assumed that the human brain was capable of innate directionfinding. Naturally these primitives were incapable of developing skills on their own. As it turned out, the Polynesians simply had incredible cultural tools to find land without compasses or maps, by analyzing wave patterns.

Researchers have been looking for magnetic sense in birds for a very long time. Some evidence has been found, some is lacking. What if the bare spots in this research is filled in with an avian culture? Parents teaching children how to read the lay of the land, how to find their way along a coastline?

It's not too farfetched, After all, we are sitting where we are because a few primates managed the same trick, and so many others.

Who we are

Northern Outdoor Lodge
Caratunk, ME
Mile 2018

Who are through-hikers?

They are:

7 retirees
An airplane mechanic
8 college graduates
An offshore crab fisherman
A data architect
5 software QA staff (plus me, I suppose, although I never really thought of myself as a QA person. I was more like a professional pain in the ass.)
3 sales executives
A restaurant tycoon
An executive at a CRS company
An IT professional at Cendant, my former employer
2 ex-Rangers
1 ex-Recon Marine
A golden retriever
An ordnance loader on an aircraft carrier
A small print shop owner
A real estate entrepreneur
A nuclear engineer on an unnamed nuclear missile submarine
One technical writer (plus me)
An adventure swimmer
A burglar
A gourmand and caterer
A lawyer for the tobacco lobby
A wildcat oilman, swordfighter, and expert in archaic weapons of all varieties (seriously)

And many, many others I did not have the pleasure of meeting. With two exceptions, they are all good people, and a few of them are exceptional people, people I would not mind knowing for a lifetime.

It's who we are.

Deep What?

Little Bigelow Shelter, ME
Mile 2002

Deep Survival endorses, somehow, the fact that survival in extreme situations is the result of the survivors' competence. I take issue with that hypothesis: the primary decider in extreme situations is luck, and lots of it. But given the hypothesis, he makes some interesting assumptions about the nature of a survivor.

If any through-hiker were to follow his rules for survival, for example, they would never, ever finish the trip. "If you're sweating in cool weather, you're working too hard". Horse puckey. You go until you can't go any further, then you find something inside that makes you go beyond that. I've hiked until I felt like the mountain was beating me, extravagantly and at leisure, like the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse beats Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona. No need to squirm or wiggle, I remember thinking. The heavy blows come all the same.

It seems that there are two personae in extreme situations- one is the survivor, and another is the acheiver. The two types have little in common. After all, survivors specialize in getting out of trouble. Acheivers specialize in getting into it.

That said, it's still a pretty good book, with some good real-life lessons in it. Survival is a very important part of acheivement after all.

As a postscript, it turned out to be a good decision to get off Washington when I did- there were three Lifeflights from the Presidentials that evening. I'm glad not to have been on any of them.

Flattening

Harrison's Camp, ME
Mile 2014

Maine is flattening, and will continue to do so until I get to Katahdin. Ten days left now. I'm starting to feel, once again, as if I am on an exceptionally long vacation, rather that a slog across the width of the country. With that comes the realization I will be out of the mountains again. I'm making strategies in my head to adjust to normal life, while keeping up a high level of physical activity.

Harrison's is a paradise. It's an old fashioned wood-heated fish and game camp, with a twelve pancake breakfast. "We only feed this to through-hikers", said Tim Harrison. "It'd kill anyone else." He might be right. But the view from the dining room wouldn't kill anyone. Pierce Pond Creek cascades across a little valley, with Pierce Creek Falls visible up the ravine. Bluegrass plays softly in the background, and I take a break from stuffing my face. The fall colors are peaking too, the valleys look like they're made of stained glass.

It's shocking how little time you have as a through-hiker, to just sit and look. You're either pumping at hills furiously, eating, or sleeping. Stop and look, though, and you see heaven on earth. I remember a piece of dialogue from Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

"I'm not sure if I can take much more of this, but I don't want it to stop"

Near the beginning of this trip I thought of this line often, and now, near the end, it comes to mind again.