nawl

Slashdotted.

2008-02-22T06:29:09Z

The project I've spent nearly all of the past two months working on has been released. We made a nice web page to tell the world about it: http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/

I think my one-sentence summary is something like "We broke your disk encryption system under the security model it was designed to be used in, and it was easy."

It's been a fascinating process all the way through.

The web site went up around 9 am. It was posted on Slashdot and BoingBoing within a couple of hours, then C|Net and Wired, and now the NY Times. To illustrate how much traffic that is, our site has been mirrored to deal with the load (and was still up and down in the afternoon), but the web site for the Center for IT Policy has been overloaded just by the fraction of visitors clicking through from the project page.

The universal experience of being slashdotted includes the inevitable frustration at reading dozens (hundreds) of comments that were quickly dashed off by people who didn't bother to read any further than a one-paragraph summary, although I'm encouraged that a good fraction of them are followed by rebuttals from people who did read further and think our results are interesting. The thing that really bewilders me, having not really looked much at slashdot since I was in high school, is the apparent disappearance of that strange underworld of trolling and "first post" that used to be visible when you chose a moderation threshold of -1. Where did they all go? YouTube? (Although currently even the YouTube comments on our video are generally on-topic.)

Smash!

2008-02-16T08:36:22Z

That's my bike in the foreground.

A drunk driver sped through a stop sign and slammed into the wall outside of the Equad at about 1 am. I somehow managed not to hear anything, until half an hour later Alex comes into the office and says "Hey, did you see the accident? Isn't that where you park your bike?"

The driver had already been taken away to the hospital and they were towing the car away. I filed a report with the policemen who were standing around and they told me to try calling in a week.

I'm glad that it was only my bike and not me.

Update: In the daylight I can see spatters of blood on the sidewalk. Eesh.

Like Jewels

2008-02-03T07:25:09Z

A clear winter's night, the air sharp against my skin and fresh in my lungs, the frost on the ground crunching beneath my feet. It is not quiet, as there are faraway cars, and it is not truly dark, as half the sky is lit by light pollution.

The barren branches of the trees are dark against the illuminated sky, and the stars hang from the trees like jewels. I imagine the predecessors of Christmas lights in a pagan world.

Like jewels! One of those emphatic pronouncements best practiced for one's grandchildren.

Blogging with TextMate

2007-08-04T18:59:01Z

So I tried writing and posting the past few entries using TextMate's blogging bundle. It's cool. You can write and post directly to your compatible blog from within TextMate. Dragging and dropping an image into the file you're editing will automatically upload it to the server and insert the correct markup into your post.

However, under Movable Type images are automatically uploaded into the "site root" directory specified under "Settings", and I wasn't so into the idea of having zillions of images dumped into one folder and mixed with all the index files.

So I modified the blogging bundle so that it will upload into a dynamic directory based on the date. There may be an easier solution that I didn't find.

Find the blogging bundle at TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/Blogging.tmbundle. Open it in TextMate and look for Blogging.tmbundle->Support->lib->blogging.rb. In the function upload_name_for_path, change the line:

prefix = mode == 'wp' ? '' : Time.now.strftime('%F_')

prefix = mode == 'wp' ? '' : 'photos/'+Time.now.strftime('%Y/%m/%d/')

(or whatever you prefer).

Instead of files appearing at http://www.site.com/blog/2007-08-04_name.jpg, they will appear in http://www.site.com/blog/photos/2007/08/04/name.jpg.

(Now, of course, I just have to figure out how to auto-rotate the images based on the exif data. The utility jhead should do this, but I haven't worked out how to pass everything through Automator.)

Lourtier, Switzerland

2007-08-04T10:40:02Z

Imagine, if you will, an ancient house, in the center of a tiny village of haphazard roofs, perched above a river flowing through a valley, carpeted with lush green terraced pastures that become, as the viewer's gaze rises upwards, the imposing rocky cliffs and spiky peaks of the Alps.

In order to get there, you board a plane in whatever horrid uncivilized country you were coming from (really, every country is uncivilized in comparison to Switzerland) and disembark in Geneva's charmingly retro airport, where you proceed to walk right through the terminal to the train station that is conveniently right where you need it, and board a swift, silent, and shiny train into the countryside. Somewhere you change trains to a smaller one covered with pictures of cuddly St. Bernards, and ride that one into the mountains to the end of the line at Le Chable. At this point, you could walk right out of the train station and into the telepherique that would take you right up to a glacier at 3000 meters of elevation, but instead you want to board the postcar bus, which is just barely narrow enough to fit between the stone and darkened wood walls of the villages that it winds through on your way up the valley. (Unless, of course, someone's father has decided to drive his shiny right-hand-drive Jaguar into town just in time to meet your train, and then you'd take a slightly different road.

The house has a new number attached to it, but old letters in the basement are addressed to "la maison en face du four".

The milk is fresh every day from the laiterie in the next village over, collected that morning from the cows on the high pastures for the summer. We asked how they got it down: they used to have pipes, but now they just use milk trucks. Each village has its own distinctive cheese--all somewhere in the spectrum of Gruyere to Raclette--and the artisanal butter comes imprinted with a flower. Water is fresh and cold from the fountain running across the street. Many houses in the village have impeccable vegetable gardens laid out in front of them.

The house comes equipped with a lovely Swiss mother who cooks simple yet fabulous meals for lunch and dinner for you every day from scratch, raclette and fondue and fried potato patties and lentil salad with local farmer cheese and salad from an enormous head of lettuce from a neighbor's garden that she dropped by to deliver just because. While walking through the village, an old friend of the mother's wordlessly gives you a handful of the raspberries she has been snacking on while walking.

We hike up a nearby trail. The scenery passes from grassy meadow to pine forest to wide expanses of many-colored wildflowers to a sort of short-grassed rocky wilderness by the time we're finally in view of the cloud-shrouded white peaks and glaciers.

At 2000m we find a herd of cows grazing above a lodge overlooking a perilous drop to the valley far, far below. The lodge won't let us sit on their benches to eat our lunch, so we walk further up and eat our lunch underneath an enormous wooden cross where the view of the glacier and the valley is even better, and listen to the many-toned cow-bells clinking.

Another day we take the cable cars up to the top of Mont Fort, over a herd of grazing goats with musical bells, over the barren wasteland of short grass and piles of dirt that is the ski resort in the summer, a change of cars as the attendant tells us they're still having electrical problems as the cable cars were hit by lightning the day before and out for the entire morning, and finally to the very spiky pile of rocks and snow that is the peak. It's a long, rocky, snowy fall in any direction. Only one other couple is at the top, and they leave before us. It's desolate and deserted, and there are huge billboards on the wall of the cable car lodge for watches.

The next day we go on a long drive to the German part of the country to spend a day at some famous baths, which are more of a water fun park than a therapeutic bath. The most fun is the current pool, which at full speed is honestly dangerous, but we had a blast being pulled around the rapids. I was a bit surprised the first time a teenage boy rudely threw me off of an overhanging rock I was hanging on, and it quickly turned into an afternoon-long battle for king of the hill, with dozens of strangers jumping up to attack the current rock occupants as they were pushed by by the water.

The last day spent in Geneva, I decided to recreate my first Geneva experience and buy chocolate from as many chocolatiers as I could find walking around in an afternoon. This time I ended up with 19 truffles from six different stores for about 25 Swiss francs, of which 15 are currently still waiting for the taste test I promised myself.

Summer in New Jersey

2007-08-04T09:36:10Z

I threw a mediterranean dinner party before I lost my appetite for the summer: homemade pitas, hummus, baba ghanoush, white bean puree, feta, roasted bell peppers, tabbouleh. People came and ate and gathered around the picnic table outdoors, all candlelight and fireflies and clinking glass and voices rising through the darkness about such erudite topics as... facebook.

I've heard more since about the homemade pitas than any other food I've ever made, no matter how difficult or tasty.

The Wild Oats on the corner of campus closed, victim to Whole Foods's purchase of the Wild Oats chain, because, as rumor has it, the location was competing with the Whole Foods on Route 1. Nevermind that any store gracing this location was by default the grocery store of choice for the entire population of carless Princetonians. I've ridden my bike the five miles to the Route 1 shopping centers once, and while it was fine, I don't really enjoy being the only bicycle in a SUV-filled parking lot the size of a town.

Anyways, Wild Oats closed and reopened as Olive May. The reopening was awaited with much trepidation by the entire aforementioned population of carless grad students, and so it was a bit trippy to walk the aisles and see: the same products, purged of the Wild Oats brand, in the exact same arrangement, the same cashiers, the same 10% student discount. There are emerging signs of real funkiness, though. The manager can be seen daily wearing enormous MC Hammer pants with a fish pattern, and the music now tends more to the apparent "employee CD collection" (with daily selections such as Elvis) than internationally standardized store muzak, and they now stock Soyrizo, and the fancy chocolate rack (a staple of my diet) is hidden in a new location every day. The produce still sucks.

Thunderstorms. There was one that everyone referred to for the next week or two as "that thunderstorm where the world was ending", because of the way the lightning flickered every second for hours. I watched it from the hammock in my glass-roofed porch. When the lightning stopped, we sat in the hot tub and ate ice cream and watched the fireflies glittering among the high trees.

There was the gay pride parade, but I was too sick to enjoy it.

I spent the fourth of July in the hot tub, an unexpectedly decadent evening that resulted in a six-person massage ring in the hot tub (carefully alternating boys and girls) in the torrential rain, until we decided that perhaps the hot tub was not the safest place to be in a thunderstorm.

Summertime means outdoor dancing in New York: Saturday afternoon tangoing in Central Park, where disconcertingly the large crowd of spectators claps after every song, Sunday evening tango at the South Street Seaport, which is all fresh breeze and romantically lit tall ships.

Shortly after the iPhone came out, I spent an afternoon in the 5th Avenue Apple store playing with one. The iPod software crashed every few minutes. I feel justified in my decision not to buy one.

The garden, unmaintained, has exploded, providing me green beans every time I think to go out and snack on one. The tomato hedges are now weighed down with swelling green globules, and the whole area smells intensely of tomato. The pepper plants produced one single pepper before being consumed by a bunny. My row of beautiful red lettuce was consumed by a bunny before I could do much more than snack on it, but the bunny seems to have rejected the romaine, which is largely growing up instead of out. The yellow squash and zucchini plants are inexplicably enormous, and have produced several surprise squashes. The watermelon that we planted before Clay decided to plant his zucchini over it has also produced vines which are racing to find sun before being blocked out by the zucchini. Watermelon planted elsewhere in the plot appears to have been a mixed bag: some of the vines are oddly shriveled, some seem to be just taking their time to come along. My experimental cucumber plants have produced one cucumber. The pumpkins dumped in the horrid front yard plots are incredibly happy, and have started to take over the wide asphalt expanse of the front driveway. I wish them luck.

I got a second hand ice cream machine off of Tigertrade, Princeton's private craigslist replacement, and have been turning out batches of chocolate sorbet. Recipe:

Chocolate Sorbet

Mix 1.5 cups cocoa powder with 1.5 cups sugar and 2 cups hot water. Dilute with 2 cups cold water, chill until nearly frozen, then run ice cream machine.

It's fabulously good.

I tried making traditional vanilla ice cream, with egg yolks and cream and all, but I got a migraine shortly after and have been loath to try that again.

San Diego

2007-06-29T09:30:43Z

Very Californian, the wide roads and suburban sprawl, the scrubby little bushes and rabbit hutch apartment complexes, the brilliant shining sun over the gleaming outdoor malls, people everywhere saying "please" and "thank you" and "have a nice day" like they really mean it.

I stayed at Jack's place in an enormous shiny luxury apartment complex. With Alexf there too, it was an odd throwback to five years ago.

I took to calling the FCRC the Voltron conference, despite never having seen Voltron as a kid. Imagine, if you will, sixteen co-located conferences across wildly divergent areas of computer science, resulting in thousands of computer scientists converging on one hotel for a good week and a half.

Of course, everyone goes a little crazy after a couple of days of talks. Near the end of the week as the computer science conferences began to end, the hotel scheduled some unintentionally hilarious events alongside the computer science, including a high school sports awards ceremony and a conference on "Vital Aging".

I went to lots of talks (even some outside of theory, which made me glad to be a theorist) and met lots people and gave the same 30-second summary of my research to all of them and even learned some things that ultimately ended up being useful for my research this summer.

The first day I wore my hair down, causing many people to confuse me with my doppelganger.

I went to the beach to go surfing with some theorists, but instead of surfing I walked all the way down the end of the beach, or at least the part where the sand gave way to piles of large smoothed rocks and chunks of broken concrete, which some guys hanging out and drinking in a makeshift lounge area in the cliff told me were from WWII bunkers.

Had a fancy dinner at a restaurant of Haakon's choosing, which resulted in the consumption of some $60 bottles of wine. My wine palate is binary, so I couldn't appreciate the difference, but I guess it was an experience worth having.

California really knows how to build a beautiful highway. I love the plant cover draped over the sound walls, the dramatic ride under bridges and over ridges, the glimpses of ocean.

Drove out to the beach late at night on a semi-whim with non-Californians who wanted to experience the Pacific. The clouds were lit up dramatically with light pollution, and when a car pulled into the beach parking spots off the highway their headlights lit up the waves. When we arrived, the beach was crowded with Asian families wandering around with buckets. We asked one family what they were there for, and after some translational difficulties, we learned they were there to look for "silver fish". We saw no fish, and the families left soon after.

Sailing the Caribbean Sea

2007-06-28T07:56:52Z

So the most common comment I got from people I told about this trip was "Wow, I could never spend so much time with an ex-boyfriend."

A much more useful response might have been "What kind of idiot thinks it's a good idea to sail across a thousand miles of open ocean at five miles an hour?"

(Read Jan's account of the trip here.)

We flew to Antigua. Continental has one flight there a week, on Saturday. It's the kind of airport where they offer you free drinks on arrival. This means that the immigration officials also have to go around and pick up all the little half-filled plastic cups of alcohol that the arriving tourists then leave on the tables where one is meant to fill out paperwork.

After doing battle with the customs officials over Jan's 100 lb inflatable dinghy that he'd schlepped by hand all the way from Norway (who smuggles a dinghy into a country by air, anyways?) we took a taxi all the way across the island to English Harbour.

English Harbour is an incredible natural harbor, the base from which the not-yet-Admiral Nelson raided American ships trading in the Caribbean. Now there are costumed tour guides chatting at the entrance, and if you look enough like a tourist they'll charge you a few dollars to enter and poke around at the few stalls of Caribbean tourist schlock that are full of chickens at night, a tiny museum with handcrafted displays, and the variously restored ruins of the buildings and fortifications.

Two months ago, the entire place was filled with yachts and boat people for the Antigua Sailing Week, apparently the event of the year for yachts. Now it was a ghost town, and my experience of Antigua echoed the handful of sentences that the until-then florifically verbose Patrick Leigh Fermor dedicated to Antigua in The Traveller's Tree. "Alas, I can only just, after remaining there exactly twenty-four hours, claim to have been there; and I saw no evidence of it, perhaps because I scarcely saw anybody at all... the island while we were there seemed to be either empty of its folk like the village on the Grecian Urn, or locked by some spell in a state of catalepsy." It would seem that most of the tourists we did see were secreted away to walled-off all-inclusive resorts owned by foreigners, any remaining tourist infrastructure on reduced hours or closed for the season. What's more, the entire country was closed for Sunday and Whit Monday.

So we sailed for France.

Guadeloupe, that is. About eight hours sailing south of Antigua.

It really is France, in a way much more fundamental than a former British colony like Antigua might retain some vestiges of Britishness after being used up and tossed away. In the guadeloupeen town where we stopped, Deshaies, French cars with French license plates, French tourists, French restaurants with handwritten outdoor menus, and a Spar filled with imported French products.

We ate an expensive dinner where my assiette vegetarienne was filled with vegetables that I did not recognize (little French cat begging scraps from the carnivores at the table), and stocked up on all the canned soup, French cheese, and tropical fruit that we could find.

Never did manage to clear customs--another woman from a boat who trekked up to the customs office on the hill with us said it had been closed for the past three days.

And then we set sail. We lost sight of land by the end of the first day.

A couple of dolphins accompanied us during dinner, and after the sun set we watched a faraway thunderstorm illuminate clouds on the horizon.

After that we looked up in the On-Board Emergency Handbook what to do in case of a thunderstorm. (You ground the mast by running a cable from a stay into the water.)

One of the realities of long-distance sailing is that you can't steer by hand for weeks on end. You have to find a mechanism to get the boat to steer itself. There are a few options for self-steering. The boat has an electric autopilot system, but it would drain the batteries in about 3 or 4 hours, and without a gyroscope it was knocked off course by even 5-10 foot waves, a calm day of sailing in a pond compared to what we encountered later in the trip. There are mechanical wind vane systems, which are either expensive to buy or tricky to build yourself. And then there's the sheet-to-tiller system outlined in a legendary out-of-print book called "Self-Steering for Sailing Craft", which is what we ultimately ended up using.

Here's a summary of the main idea. Jan adapted it for his boat by rigging a small sail behind the genoa (that's the triangular sail in front, for non-sailors following along at home) and running lines from the end of it back to the wheel, counterbalanced with elastic. When the tension in the steering sail changes by heading too far into or away from the wind, the changing force on the rope and elastic pulls the wheel in the correct direction. This demands a lot of construction materials and a lot of tinkering to get right, and depending on conditions more modifications were necessary: a preventer to pull harder on the elastic in case of a jibe, more knots to precisely place the rope away from the inconvenient spokes of the wheel, a significant reduction in sail area and speed to keep the boat in control. But by and large it worked great.

Jan was somewhat rightfully proud of himself for getting the steering system to work so well. It's much more in the grizzled-old-man-on-a-boat-with-no-engine style of sailing than the shiny-new-yacht kind. The general opinion seems to be "Oh yeah, I've heard of that, I tried it once, it was kind of fun."

The wind out of Guadeloupe was somewhat less than could have been hoped for, so we made less than 5 knots average for the first few days.

On the sea the world shrinks to the snow globe of what's visible: boat in the center, a disk of water a few miles in diameter, the vault of the heavens above. Weather appears in the distance and moves towards or away from us, cargo ships appear on the horizon, grow closer, then retreat. Schools of flying fish leap out of the water in front of the boat and flap over the waves. The moon was near full for the first half of the trip. I was glad to see it rise luminous around sunset and light our way, silvering the crests of the waves and bathing the cabin in moonlight through the hatches.

By day five, I was going positively batty on the water. I was ready for a vacation from my vacation. So we made a halfway stop on Aruba.

When we were still 60 miles out, a gray military plane buzzed overhead, turned around, and went back the way it came.

At about 2 am we were sailing along the coast of Aruba towards Oranjestad when the Aruban coast guard swooshed up to us in a long super-fast motor boat with all its lights off. Several burly officers boarded us, inspected our paperwork, looked under the floorboards. I was amused to see such an enormous man taking down my address in a rounded girly handwriting.

I suppose such diligence is understandable, considering the proximity to Colombia and the popularity of drug-running as a funding source for boat owners who are not yet independently wealthy. But still, we could have left with bales of cocaine and a whole crew of illegal immigrants in the places they didn't look.

By 3 am we'd made it to the harbor, but when we called on the radio they told us to go away until dawn. So we drove backwards and forwards for three hours in the waves. The wind had picked up by the time the coast guard stopped us, we were going 7 knots downwind on only the genoa, and actually surfing down the waves. By dawn we were completely exhausted from banging against the waves, having both spent sleepless the hour rest from steering.

We followed another sailboat into the cruise harbor and recognized the name Cisnecito from a flyer they'd posted in a cafe in Antigua. When we docked they helped with the ropes and said "Hi! We're on our way home after sailing around the world for the past three years."

While I waited on the boat for Jan to return from immigration and customs at the cruise ship terminal, I watched hundreds of tourists disembark from their cruise ship in the most garish exercise gear, mill around and stretch for a few minutes on the concrete, then all set off at once for some sort of massive communal morning jogging routine. I hadn't seen anything but Jan, water, and boat for the past five days. Surreal, man.

We docked at the closest nearby marina, the Renaissance. Nobody was around on a Sunday morning to take our money, but we found out later that for $1 per foot per day we could use all the amenities of the associated nearby swanky resort, including a sort of private island they'd built up. Ultimately we ended up showering in the employee locker rooms, led past the employees-only door into the bowels of the hotel offices. (It's also possible to anchor for free near the airport south of the marina or along the high-rise hotels on the east, but we were hesitant to do that with no charts or guides.)

Early on that Sunday morning, all we could see of the island was an empty shopping mall, a handful of sunburned tourists wandering aimlessly among the deserted luxury shops. It's not clear to me why one would want to travel long distances only to spend one's time in a mall filled with the same stores as the Netherlands or the US, but it must be common enough to be profitable.

I ended up walking from Oranjestad nearly to the northern tip of the island, along five or six miles of nonstop white sand beach lined with luxury high-rise hotels. The whole way, I stepped over and around blissed-out tourists sprawled out in the perfect white sand and the perfect turquoise shallow water, stopped at the beachside bars for pina coladas when I was thirsty.

At the end of the row of hotels, I found the beach favored by the windsurfers and kitesurfers, and ended up talking to an Italian windsurfer managing a hotel there. He offered me water and a shower, warned about Colombian pirates who had robbed some friends at gunpoint off the Colombian shore, and gave me a ride back to the marina.

That night we had dinner with Chris and Julie from Cisnecito. They told us stories of trading empty coke bottles for lobster in Madagascar and dispensed advice for transiting the Panama Canal. Highlight of the conversation: "So about ten years ago there was this thing called string theory that wasted a lot of people's time."

The ground hadn't stopped moving the entire time I was on land.

The first two nights I slept on the boat in harbor, the mild creaking of the boat as it rocked gently in the waves had been disturbing, I didn't sleep well, and was up well before dawn. That night in Aruba I slept like a rock for twelve hours--a comparatively windy harbor was like a baby's cradle.

We left Aruba the next afternoon. Our departure was like a comedy of errors, except that it wasn't really funny.

On our first attempt out of the harbor, we unfurled the genoa only to have it collapse on deck. A shackle had lost its peg. We motored back to harbor, I winched Jan up the mast, and he installed a replacement. Moral: do not hand-tighten your vital shackles.

On our next attempt out of the harbor, Jan dropped the spinnaker pole on his head and let go of the spinnaker uphaul. It flew away in the 20 knot winds and swung about wildly above our heads in the growing waves. At this point, the sun was close to setting, and if we tried to return to harbor again we would have lost a night of sailing. In order to retrieve the swinging spinnaker uphaul of death, Jan climbed onto the boom, which jerked violently back and forth over every wave that passed underneath us. I was at the wheel under motor, but by this time the waves had built up such that we slid out of control on every swell. All I could do was try to go over the waves in a way that might encourage the spinnaker uphaul to further wrap around the mast stays.

He eventually retrieved it, put up the genoa, and poled it out in order to go directly downwind. As soon as the genoa was up, the boat pulled towards the wind harder than I could pull back, and the boat tilted so far that the the rails were underwater.

I'm not sure I can accurately convey how scary this is. At the time, I was screaming obscenities. I guess I now know why sailors are foul-mouthed.

It is perhaps important to note at this point that I was largely incapable of sailing the boat on my own. A 34 foot boat is a lot further from a 14 foot dinghy than I had expected. Most of the lines had been run back to the cockpit for ease of singlehanded sailing, which meant that there were ten unlabled ropes, several of which were the same color, to learn, remember, cleat, uncleat, let out slowly, winch up, and winch down in a variety of combinations to do any one of many operations (put up, take down, reef once, reef twice, tighten, loosen, tack, jibe) one can do involving sails. We're ignoring the actual art of balancing the sails, here, something I have little concept of. When pressed, I eventually managed to get a fair approximation of the correct ropes for commands yelled at me, but if any Jan-threatening emergencies had happened far from land, I'd have been alone and helpless.

We were sailing with the wind and current, which meant that even in the worst case, I would eventually hit land. However, in these conditions, one of Jan's sailing books suggests the following as the most realistic man-overboard procedure: a wave goodbye over the stern.

Additionally, every time the ropes tangled on the mast, or we needed to take down the main, or rig or fix the self-steering sail, or mess with a spinnaker, or any number of innumerable causes in the name of sailing, it was necessary to leave the safety of the cockpit and go up to the bow of the boat, by then likely bouncing wildly in the waves, often even worse when it was necessary to steer into the wind. We had safety harnesses, but in the dark of a moonless night with invisible fifteen-foot waves slamming into the bow of the boat and the wind screaming in whatever sliver of a genoa we were sailing on, this is a scary prospect. (Not one that I engaged in. I only went up in nice weather.)

It's important to be reminded that the wind and waves are far more powerful than we can ever be, and that if you play with them you'd better know what you're doing or hope you're damn lucky. In this case, under unbalanced sails, I might not have been able to pull the boat back in control at all. It's weighted such that it should right itself even if the mast hits the water, but that would result in far more serious damage.

The wind and the waves kept increasing as we sailed along the coast of Colombia. At its worse, Jan estimated force 7 winds, waves at nearly 20 feet, cresting above us, foam blowing off the water. In order to get the self-steering to work, we sailed on a fraction of the genoa alone, and even so the GPS told us we were going 10 or 12 knots surfing down the crests of waves. Mostly the waves slid harmlessly beneath us, but every so often one would happen to break just so beneath or over us with a loud bang and roar, send the boat spinning 180 or 360 degrees out of control, undo the self-steering, and throw anyone unlucky enough to be sitting on the wrong side of the boat across the cabin.

This happened a couple of times a night.

(It was then that we concluded that even if the Jeanneau is marketed as having a hull capable of blue-water sailing, it certainly doesn't have the interior for it. There are not nearly enough handles. We both got some serious bruises and cuts from those days. Several of the cuts that I got stayed open and refused to heal until I was back in civilization.)

One such killer wave crashed over the boat and broke the steering entirely. Jan acted quickly: the emergency tiller came out (a length of heavy metal pipe), we checked the guide for the closest safe port in Colombia (two full days of sailing at that point), and began to prepare to cut the trip short. I was ordered into the cabin to unscrew some panels and see what was wrong (in fifteen foot waves) - the cables connecting the wheel to the rudder had twisted off their pulleys. We hove to, fixed them, and were back on our way to Panama.

We spent an inordinate amount of time staring off the back of the boat. Huge wall of water towering above us, boat is lifted up, huge chasm of water opens below us. Wave TV. Endlessly entertaining.

Sleeping while the boat is underway is a surprisingly loud and restless prospect. There are a multitude of noises--the water burbles and rushes past the hull, the boat creaks and strains under stress, jars and dishes slide back and forth in their cabinets, the sails snap and pull when the boat is too far downwind, and crack violently when we accidentally jibe. You learn what the boat sounds like when it's on course, and wake up when it speeds up and tilts into the wind, or slows down when it's about to jibe.

We kept six-hour watches at night, waking up once an hour to check the course and sails and for other ships, every half-hour or continuous when we crossed paths with too many cargo boats that day. We were both jarred awake several times a night by a huge wave breaking over the boat, necessitating a bout of groggy hand-steering while the self-steering was fixed. Most mornings I was awoken by an "Oh, fuck!" or a stream of curses in Norwegian "Fan i helvete!" or my name being shouted by a captain who wanted his oatmeal and I would stumble groggily, dehydrated and exhausted, into the sunlight.

We ate a fraction of the food I'd stocked. Most days it was all I could do to dump a can of something into a pot and heat it up, or stay below just long enough to gather a snack of bread and cheese or fruit. I wasn't seasick, at least not in the vomitous sort of way, but trying to remain upright down below while braced against multiple walls as gravity pulled strongly in new and entirely unexpected directions left me rather muddle-headed until I took a break in the fresh air.

My worst failure as a cook was the day of the biggest waves. I boiled two packages of udon on the stove. The stove is hinged so that it would swing with the waves, but it tended to stick at a tilt so that the next wave would unstick it and send boiling water flying across the cabin. Half the water was lost in the boiling process. I transferred the remaining soup into bowls and another half of the broth sloshed out. I brought a bowl up to Jan at the helm, and just then a huge wave hit and overturned everything. He ate his noodles off the floor of the cockpit.

By this point I had no more moon on my watch. The stars were incredible. Venus was bright enough to cast its own reflection on the water, and I could watch the milky way rise as my watch went on. The sky was actually just slightly brighter than the water. Without the moon it was possible to see the phosphorescence in the water, leaving a little glittering trail behind the boat and illuminating the crests of nearby waves. Every night thunderstorms surrounded us on the horizon, clouds lighting up in quick flashes.

We were becalmed a day out of Panama. We took the opportunity to go swimming in the open water. We were still out of sight of land, and the water was stunningly clear, below our bodies in the ocean nothing but perfect deep blue in every direction.

We motored in the rest of the way. We sat on the bow and dolphins came up to swim alongside the boat, first one then two then ten then twenty coming and going, jumping out of the water, swerving back and forth in front of the boat to show how much faster they can swim.

Finally we arrived in San Blas. The San Blas islands are a rather unique place in the world. The native Kuna rebelled in the 20s and managed to secure autonomy for their territory. Some of the communities have chosen to remain traditional, thatch-roofed cane huts built in villages covering an island to the waterline, or small huts alone on other islands. They have dugout canoes that they paddle and sail and pole between the islands. Many of the women wear brightly colored dress with beads around the wrists and ankles. They sew and sell brightly colored cloths called molas, which are inexplicably world famous as the local handicraft.

El Porvenir, the landing port we'd been dreaming of for two weeks, turned out to be an island containing an airstrip, a cement block hotel alongside the airstrip, a mola stand, a police stand, and immigration and customs.

While Jan was away doing immigration paperwork, two sets of women and children paddled up to the boat to sell me molas, and a guy rowed out to advertise his store on a neighboring island. Even when I wouldn't buy molas, they begged candy for the children. We'd run out of chocolate by that point, so the kids got a stale Petite Beurre with Nutella. (I'd tried to study some Spanish on the boat, but I got the feeling that the mola-sellers didn't believe my "No tengo dinero." I'd bought my souvenir molas before learning that the immigration had cleaned out most of Jan's cash with extra "fees", and we had to do some serious scraping to come up with enough dollars to buy my plane ticket off the island. Credit cards are not useful when electricity is only available from a flickering generator from 6-10 pm for the tourists.)

We motored out to a set of stunning pristine islands covered with palms and went snorkeling among the reefs. I realized that for all the snorkeling I'd done in Hawaii, I'd never seen live coral before. The reefs here were incredibly alive, and full of all sorts of any-colored fish.

In the evening we anchored off an island covered in village. We tried to ask the hotel if they would sell us dinner, but the hotel only had one guest and had no food for us. They led us to the primary school where they sold Jan a plate of leftover turtle and rice for $1.50.

Outside the school three small girls were sweeping. "Camera" they said when they saw my camera, "Quiere photo?" "Si." "Un dollar." "Oh, you're clever. No." But later they came back and asked me to take a picture without paying. I showed them on the screen and this launched an extensive photo shoot where they would adopt a pose and then rush back to see the result on the camera screen. Picture previewing is just about the most brilliant camera feature ever invented.

The mother of one of the girls looked on indulgently. We talked a little, but we quickly reached the limitations of my nonexistent Spanish, and I was on edge from trying to remember my usteds.

Perhaps the pictures they took themselves (with my help pressing the shutter all the way down) are more revealing, a blurry child's-eye-view of the school, the mothers in traditional dress, the tourists towering above everyone.

For the most part, I felt enormously tall and foreign walking around the village. Mothers would send their babies running after me to try to sell us things, and I decided taking pictures felt weird and exploitative.

At night we sat on hammocks in the balcony of the hotel and chatted with Will, the one guest, who's working his way around the world by volunteering as an animal tour guide. We learned that the hotels here are all-inclusive deals, for $30 a day you get a room, all meals, and a full-time guide who schleps you off to pretty islands for beach-laying or snorkeling. According to his guide, the Colombian drug smugglers use San Blas for their dropoffs because the Panamanian police don't have jurisdiction here. Every so often, the Americans will bomb a drug ship, and bales of cocaine will wash up on shore. Best moment of the conversation: when he starts going off on how much he hates American girls, having apparently forgotten that I am one. (Worse, Californian.)

The next day we anchored off of Dog Island, snorkeled the wreck of a Colombian trading ship there (the winch is enormous), bought fresh coconuts. Jan bought two lobsters off some fishermen who sailed up to our boat for $2 each.

He winched me up the mast to take some pictures of the boat. (And incidentally, the guys who stopped by to ask us to charge a pump for them while I was up there.)

At 3 am I was up to vomit everything out of my stomach (Was it snorkeling in questionable water, the fresh coconuts, old Guadeloupan fruit? Who knows!), at 5 am to see the most incredible snunrise.

The 6:30 am flight out of Porvenir didn't leave until 7:30 am. I shared a cab from Albrook (local) to Tocumen (international) airports through Panama City with three Texans who'd flown to San Blas for one day. They paid my fare. (Thanks!)

The flight to Newark was delayed an hour in the air and almost diverted to Philadelphia when they threatened to keep us in the air long enough to run out of fuel. I made it through immigration, customs, an agricultural inspection, re-entering security, and running the length of the terminal in 20 minutes.

I was kind of shell-shocked after re-entering the first world. One of my first experiences was walking through a gourmet supermarket, not a light undertaking in any situation, positively mind-blowing after the previous two weeks.

I weighed myself and discovered I'd lost between 10 and 15 lbs on the boat, and weighed less than I have since I was 12. (This includes my post-mono weight at 16.) It took a good week for my appetite to return in full. Since then I've discovered an odd sort of aching hunger. (I'm fattening up again now.)

It was a week or two before I managed to sleep more than about six hours at a time.

Incommunicado.

2007-05-26T04:03:09Z

For the next two weeks I'll be in a sailboat in the Caribbean.

We're leaving for Antigua tomorrow, and setting out for Panama as soon as possible.

I have in my bag yellow fever vaccination papers, anti-malarial medicine, anti-seasickness drugs, antibiotics, a spare GPS, unopened nautical charts, precisely one pair of pants, A Continent of Islands, Dove, The Discrepancy Method, and Learn Spanish in a Hurry.

June 11-17 I will be in San Diego.

Garden report, May episode.

2007-05-22T07:05:16Z

Generals have come and gone, weeks solid of mad scribbling, LaTeXing, the studying and annotating of books and papers, my reading list, the culmination in some sense of twenty years of schooling condensed into forty pages of notes in increasingly erratic handwriting, three hours of awkward grilling, and then it was over.

It took me days to become human again.

It's not really the sort of thing that's supposed to be left until the last minute, but if things always went the way we wanted, grad school would be easy.

That dispensed with, this is the time of year when everything suddenly explodes in green. My Californian nature finds it difficult to believe that you don't actually have to do anything to grow a plant. It's sunny and it rains all on its own, and the next thing you know the weeds are three feet tall, the bamboo has grown five feet, and the seeds we put in the ground are unfurling little green shoots with perfect little wrinkled seedling leaves out of their seed casings.

The Garden Project has taken on a life of its own, expanding into two and a half beds in the back, peas, beans, tomatoes, carrots, squash, watermelon, cucumbers, onions, all the herbs we could think of, pumpkins in the horrid-rocky-but-sunny weed beds in the front.

The garden had some surprises of its own. The leaf-buds of last month's garden post turned out to be a rather numerous collection of enormous hostas occupying all of the relevant planting beds. Pretty ground-cover has emerged atop the seas of ivy. A well-established wisteria vine bloomed dangling from the trees twenty feet overhead.

The sticks emerging from the ground turned out to be trees of some sort that are currently furiously producing a funny little spout of leaves at the very tip. I take it they want to be pruned.

In a couple of afternoons of stress-relief in the form of ivy ripping, I uncovered a sandbox full of seashells and several yards of stone paths around the garden.

A fire pit behind the shed is thoughtfully lined with sand and edged with igneous rock.

Two trees in the back corner turned out to be the perfect distance (no, really, the perfect distance) to string a hammock between. And such a hammock turned out to be quite a pleasant place to stretch out and pound out a solid day's work in the sun.

And growing across the impossible wishing-well, tiny baby grapes.

MIT

2007-05-02T04:20:06Z

Man, what a great place.

I'm visiting for a few days unofficially, just to have a look around and meet people.

On Sunday I arrived, dropped my stuff off at Jacob's dorm room, ended up wandering around Harvard Square with Primrose and Jacob, ate Mexican food, shopped for overpriced cute things at the overpriced cute things store, comic books at the comic book store.

Went to an Amon Tobin concert at the Paradise Lounge in the evening. I don't go to concerts very often. It was amazingly, stunningly, mind-bogglingly loud. So loud my clothes were vibrating on my skin, and my skin vibrating on my muscles, and my organs vibrating within me. On the one hand, it's kind of a cool sensation to get a full-body massage with sound, and on the other, I felt kind of bad thinking about all the poor little nerves in my ears dying a horrible death.

The Stata Center (that crazy building housing the CS department) is certainly very striking. I appreciate that the building certainly imparts a sense of whimsy and playfulness, huge jagged irregularly-shaped spaces, preschool-themed decor. Certain people seem to appreciate a little less that the whimsy verges on thoughtlessness in offices with enormous slanted columns blocking off large areas, and tilted walls that one can't lean a bookshelf against, and actual high-school lockers for students in unlockable cubicles.

Actually, most of the architecture on campus is striking, even in more conventional buildings. I'm sort of struck by the inventive use of space, everywhere. The buildings are all interconnected, and the game is to figure out how to get from any part of campus to any other without going outside. This led me through long corridors lined with amusing displays, murals, classrooms with music coming out of them, gas canisters chained to the walls. The infinite corridor, which I learned extends up multiple floors, the big dome that I had only seen in pictures of the R2D2 hack, the august halls and impressive columns dedicated to Big Science a century ago.

I was lost for half an hour trying to find my way from the math building back to CS without going to the ground floor, and when I finally made it to Stata I kept finding myself in apparent dead-end nooks and crannies until I ran smack into Christine and Jacob at the same time, and it turned out I was right on time for the colloquium that I hadn't even realized was next door.

Serendipity.

This morning in the dorm room a loud *poing* woke me up. Another *poing*. And the silhouette of a window-cleaner swung into view against the screen, the squeegee outlined a continuous space-filling curve over the window, and the silhouette swung out of view.

I feel like I understand the people here better. Less preppy, more funky. Big posters for the MIT Pagans' Beltane festival, random students with blue hair, that kind of thing. Then again, I'm told that the dorms have lists of stalkers who are under no circumstances to be let in, and the suicide rate is astonishingly high.

I'm hearing about lots of interesting problems and talking to lots of interesting people, and most surprisingly making progress not quite on actually solving my current problem, but on learning how every version of the statement I want appears to be obviously false for any examples not precisely the ones I need to prove it for. I think my generals talk is going to end up being about all the interesting ways of proving related statements that are false in my case, a tour through classical arguments in calculus, induction, and graph theory.

Lately I've spent a lot of time in the grad student mire of feeling lost and academically lonely, having difficulty connecting to research problems and having difficulty making progress on the ones I connect to, but I am reminded that this is exactly what I want to be doing with my life.

Awesomizing the garden.

2007-04-28T03:53:12Z

On saturday morning a pair of giggling girls showed up in our backyard with champagne, strawberries, and whipped cream. We were peacefully eating breakfast in the sun in our porch-dining room. They were here to use our hot tub.

Over the next several hours the hot tub was continuously occupied by a rotating phalanx of mathematicians and physicists.

We found a couple of rakes and started raking up the leaves still in the yard since whenever they fell. It was slow going. Ivy has completely overtaken the front and a good portion of the back, but beautiful little flowers are peeking through.

We uncovered stepping stones, paved walkways, overgrown planting beds with little buds shooting out, little stone statues tucked away in corners, hidden in the bamboo forest.

Already the garden had surprised us a few weeks ago by suddenly throwing up clusters of daffodils and lovely purple flowers out of the nondescript sea of ivy in the front yard.

"It's like the freaking secret garden in here," said Clay.

We found a rotting clothes line tied around a planter, clothespins still attached, and strung it back up across the yard. We discovered the bottom of our murky pond, coated in leaves, is actually sand.

There's a fake wishing well smack dab in the middle of the backyard, complete with decorative bucket. Vivek and Sam vigorously deny the existence of any such wishing well, on the grounds that it clearly can't exist.

Here's a picture.

The rectangle in the back right corner demarcated with bamboo poles remains a mystery.

On Sunday we ripped out the weeds from a planting bed in the back, turned the soil, and planted some vegetable seeds. I know nothing about gardening. We'll see if anything grows. The weeds seemed pretty happy.

This is my first step into middle age.

The more time I spend here, the more I like it. It's like your grandma's house, except taken over by college students who think that decorating choices like a basket chair room and an indoor hammock are a good idea.

After a prolonged winter, everything is exploding in flowers, sunlight, birdsong. The magnolias were frozen in half-bloom for three weeks as the weather dipped back into winter, then suddenly exploded and fell in a day.

You can practically see the leaves coming out on the trees, little buds in the ground unfurling into leaves as you watch.

Caye Caulker, Belize

2007-04-04T08:56:15Z

The taxi driver offered us a joint. Seriously, he just passed a fat one back to us in the rear seats of the rickety minivan he's swerving around in the traffic. One of the girls squashed two to a seat in the middle, of some sort of nebulous relationship to the driver or the Canadian guy with a backpack and a ratty blond ponytail up front who'd also mysteriously ended up in the car, helpfully hands back a lighter. We raise our eyebrows at each other and try to figure out how one politely refuses the offer without damaging the Caribbean goodwill.

Fortunately we arrive at the water taxi terminal in one piece (well, four) and take the boat to Caye Caulker.

Caye Caulker is amazing, the sort of place that manages to be an island paradise with an extensive (if funky) tourist infrastructure without actually seeming to lose a semblance of authenticity and sincere friendliness. It's a tiny island, you can walk from one end of the tourist area to the other in five or ten minutes, and from one end to the very other in less than an hour. There are no cars to speak of, just golf carts and bicycles swerving around on the sandy roads. We were told the cayes to the north had problems with golf cart traffic jams, but there was none of that on Caye Caulker.

Our hotel was minimalist: a room with three beds, bathroom with cold-water shower down the hall, $25 a night for four people. We found it by wandering around for a morning. If you're staying for longer with more people, you can rent a house for less. You can rent a bike to explore the island for $7 a day. All the restaurants we ate in were charming, tasty, and cheap. There's a bar where the upstairs terrace has swings for seats.

The houses in the village brightly colored and picturesque, a small power plant in the middle producing all the power and quite a bit of noise to boot, men swerving around at high speed on bicycles far too small for them, little kids and dogs playing on the street until late at night, girls on sundresses on bicycles in the dust looking ever so much like Burning Man, palms bent against the ever-present trade winds.

In short, the kind of place that twenty-somethings trade amongst each other. "It's cool, man. Check it out."

For our part, we spent a lot of time on the porch of the house that the Livejournal team was occupying for the week.

We paddled around and snorkled at the "split", a channel ripped between the north and south pieces of the island by hurricane Hattie in the 60s. When Sam gashed himself open on something in the water, a bouncing rasta-man with long dreads brought a first-aid kit, then bounced nearby as we mopped up the blood. He had ugly scars across his stomach, he told us, from getting robbed at knifepoint in Belize City. "I don't like it there, much better here." he told us.

He bounced away and was later seen being thrown off the dock into the water by blonde girls in bikinis that he'd tried to throw in first.

I swam across the split to explore the other side of the island, consisting largely of mud, aggressive mosquitoes, a handful of houses, a few more houses under construction, lots for sale.

We splurged on a trip to the Mayan ruins at Lamanai. We were picked up at the water taxi terminal by the taciturn brother of the normal guide and his girlfriend who ferried us awkwardly and wordlessly across the country, stopping at regular intervals to pour water on the engine. We were then loaded on a speedboat full of other tourists and followed the speedboat trail up the river at high speed. (Any stories we were told about seeing "animals" on this "jungle tour" were greatly exaggerated. We did see the Mennonites, though, who were fishing on the river in the afternoon and sitting in their finery in a horse buggy on the shore.

Our guide for the ruins themselves recited the stories of the ruins and their excavation with great gravitas, often repeating several synonyms of a word for greater effect. We were told how the Maya civilization collapsed in the middle ages, but Lamanai was inhabited long enough for the Spanish and the English to find people live there, and remains one of the only Mayan sites to retain its original name. We were told how Dr. David Pendergast began excavating the jungle-covered mounds at Lamanai and uncovered the stone buildings layer by layer, the top layers destroyed by jungle, but the deeper ones perfectly preserved. We were told the buildings rose tall in layers as each new ruler erased the memory of the old one by building a new majestic layer of building over the existing structure.

On the way home, we skipped the water taxi experience a last time and took the $50 small plane ride direct from the island to the airport instead. The Caribbean is very beautiful from the air.

Hiking, pre-spring, another move.

2007-03-23T03:29:44Z

Somehow moving off-campus has suddenly opened up a new Princeton to explore.

The satellite images on Google maps show a great treeless gash running through Princeton just north of my neighborhood.

It's the Transcontinental natural gas pipeline, and the treelessness runs uninterrupted all the way to Texas. A map of natural gas pipelines in the US shows them stretching from Texas and Louisiana to the northeast and midwest. Northern California is conspicuously empty.

Northeast of here are Herrontown Woods and Autumn Hill, to the southwest is Mountain Lakes. On recent lovely weekend afternoons, trails were largely deserted. A handful of footprints in the snow.

The weather is playing bait-and-switch with us.

One day it's 70 degrees,

the next a winter storm dumps the best snow of the season and keeps all the poor undergrads from going away for spring break.

The day after the snowfall, we went through four stores before finding one that was still selling winter gear, and bought sleds at the spring price of 50% off. An afternoon of rough-and-tumble sledding was enough to wear me out for the rest of the evening. I must be getting old.

I'm glad that spring is on its way. The first breath of warm air after a long cold spell is incredibly relaxing, as if some part of me has been unconsciously tense through winter. This is, oddly, not a sensation I feel when I merely fly on a plane from cold to warm. As I put it to a friend recently, I never really *understood* daffodils until I moved here.

That said, winter does have its moments of hilarity.

I moved offices, too, out of my lonely little abandoned office on my lonely little abandoned floor to a corner office with *two* windows where I don't have to go so far to see people. I may still spend days trying to prove things that are not true, but at least I'll be happier about doing so.

I moved.

2007-02-09T06:25:48Z

I have moved off campus, into a lovely little house north of the university.

It was sort of a last-minute fluke. The subject of where we wanted to live next year came up in conversation after brunch, and a quick perusal of tiger trade and craigslist later, we found ourselves touring the one house in the area currently for rent that fit our price range, size, and location constraints.

(A six-bedroom mansion with a pool, hot tub, and tennis courts was tempting, but in order to make the rent we'd probably have to house the entire graduate school, so that was, sadly, out.)

It was perfect, so after a little scramble for housemates, we moved. It's sunny. It's a block from a grocery store and a mile from campus. It has a nice kitchen. It has a big backyard with a barn and a bridge over a little frozen pond.

I imagine a previous owner of the house a plant fanatic, compulsively remodeling the place to add the multiple glassed-in porches, big windows, extended rooms cut out of the original walls, doors everywhere.

Of course, moving wasn't without its adventures. The day we decided to move in also happened to be the day the power company decided to shut off the power, and it took them two days to turn it back on again.

One outlet in the entire place worked. (Wired, we presume, to the separate apartment upstairs.) So we chained extension cords and power strips across the house, lit candles, managed not to blow any fuses. The stove, fortunately, is gas, and so I cooked myself a lovely birthday dinner that we ate over candlelight in our new dining room, bundled up against the cold as the inside temperature crept through uncomfortable towards freezing. I was glad that night to have a real down blanket.

Since then I've been on a sort of cooking rampage, burning through the pent-up urges that built up over a year and a half of dorm food.

I present a partial list of things that have been cooked since moving in last week, along with superfluous macro shots of selected dishes:

blue cheese, apple, and pecan salad
lentil soup
chocolate mousse
home made boursin
cheese fondue
chocolate fondue
hot cheddar spread

baked goat cheese salad

cream of broccoli and cauliflower soup

chocolate cake "Le Marquis" from Julia Child

avocado maki
chocolate cake "Devil's Food Cockaigne" from the Joy of Cooking
cheese enchiladas
beans
green salad

It's been a long time since I lived somewhere with a dishwasher. It's become an almost unimaginable luxury, the ideal of 20th century pushbutton housekeeping. I put dishes into a machine, push a button, and they come out sparkly and pristine. I put my clothes into a machine, push a button, and they emerge warm and fluffy.

(Another hope I had with moving is that the dorm food was contributing to the migraines. We'll see about that one.)