I am … unhindered by talent

Last night, after some 17 hours of travelling (or 30 hours if you count the trip from Seward to Anchorage in the morning) (or 10 days if you consider the fact that we were travelling in some form or another almost every day were were gone!), Sub-Evil Boy and I returned from our wonderful trip to Alaska with my folks, my sister (Misty), and my foster sister (Linda) and her husband (John).

My folks (mostly Dad) planned a great trip, full of powerfully memorable events. There’s so much to write about, and absolutely tons of stuff that I need to be doing here, so it’s going to be a challenge. I took over 7K photos on the trip, which would be something like 200 rolls of film back in the “old” days, or several thousand dollars of film and processing. I’ll be posting photos to Flickr as I clean them up, but I suspect that process will take several weeks. (Sub-Evil now has a Flickr account, and has already posted quite a few pictures from the trip.)

Some highlights:

• Gorgeous weather. One could easily spend a week in Alaska and not see many (even any) of the mountains, but Mom’s amazing luck with weather continued to hold and blessed us with some spectacular views (e.g., the view of Denali at the top of the post, and the view of Northwestern Glacier below).
• Denali National Park, which is a remarkably vast and has a scope that’s really hard to get your head around. The wildlife was cool, but personally I found the immensity of the place far more affecting; I’ll try to say more on this subject in some later post.
• The train trips from Denali to Anchorage and from Anchorage to Seward on the Alaska Railroad. I love train travel, and these are easily some of the most spectacular trips on offer.
• Getting up close and personal with the Northwestern Glacier (pictured below). We had an excellent day on the boat with the Kenai Fjords Tours and saw lots of amazing things (orcas, humpbacks, birds, otters, seals, sea lions, etc.), but the half hour watching and listening to the glacier was truly awe inspiring. The power and scale of the thing is quite overwhelming, all the more so knowing that this huge glacier (and many others like it) will disappear in Sub-Evil’s lifetime.
• An excellent day fishing with Dad, Misty, and Sub-Evil on Puffin Fishing Charters. We again had great weather, saw some incredible views, and caught a nice set of silver salmon. Our share of the fillets should arrive tomorrow, so there’s a lot of nice salmon on the menu this week! (The photo of Dad is from that trip.)
• All the wonderful time with the family. In theory this was all to celebrate my folks’ 50th wedding anniversary (which isn’t actually until next summer, but this was when we could run the trip), but ended up being a great celebration of the whole family. (It’s a major bummer that WeatherGirl and Neal [Misty's SO] couldn’t join us to complete the group, but sometimes life is complex.) Huge thanks to Mom and Dad for everything up to and including this fantastic trip!

A few more pictures for good measure: Northwestern Glacier, an orca, and a wonderful glacial melt waterfall from the Kenai Fjords Tour boat, and a Tufted Puffin taken at the nice Alaska SeaLife Center.

And I had a bit of comment spam waiting for me pushing window blinds. I guess it’s a nice change from on-line gambling, loans, and sexual enhancements…

Oh, and it’s damndedly hot and dry here in Morris, but at least the temperature is supposed to change tonight. Probably too late to save a lot of the crops, though.

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…it’s the only one with chocolate.

(Lifted from the wrapper on a tasty Bat Bar: Intense dark chocolate with cocoa nibs - nummmm…)

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While Sub-Evil Boy and I were in Wisconsin in late June, he started seriously fiddling with GarageBand, and he went completely ape while I was away in Seattle, making buckets of little songs. He’s got one up on his blog, and I’m sure there will be more (too many more!) once we get back from Alaska.* There’s a very cool one with excerpts from Steven Colbert’s excellent roast of Our Fearless Leader that’s definitely worth hearing when it’s uploaded.

* Yup - Sub-Evil and are are off to Alaska bright and (too) early Friday morning! My folks are taking the family up there on a big mass vacation in celebration of their 50th wedding anniversary (which isn’t until next summer, but “Life’s uncertain - eat dessert first!”). I’ve never been, so I’m really pumped. Unfortunately (but not surprisingly) WeatherGirl chose to not join us - way too much driving and moving about in a short period of time for her tastes. She’ll have loads of fun without us, though…

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One of the recurring features of small town summer parades in the mid-west is politics, and yesterday’s Prairie Pioneer Days parade here in Morris must have had 8-10 different politicians ranging from the local sherriff up to candidates for U.S. Senate.

Included in this motley crew was Robert Fitzgerald, who was a student of mine as an undergrad here at UMM. Now, several years later, he’s running for U.S. senate as an independent here in Minnesota, and was back in town for the parade.

He’s got that politician’s smile down, doesn’t he?

Here he’s working the crowd, and actually talking about policy issues, which I didn’t hear any of the other candidates do. Klobuchar’s people at least passed out a little card with her key policy points on it, but everyone else just passed out stickers and candy and carefully avoiding conveying any useful information.

Perhaps following in the footsteps of a previous senator from Minnesota, he’s gone for the big, brightly colored campaign bus, which definitely was an eye-catcher in the parade. It would have helped its effectiveness if that bus had been full of supporters (or at least not empty), but such is life.

No idea if I’ll vote for him in November - I just haven’t done the level of homework necessary to make that sort of decision. I can certainly say, though, that he’s vastly cooler than 90-muchly-percent of the politicians currently in D.C. He was an exec at our student radio station, and still comes back to concerts that the station sponsors once or twice a year. Having someone in Washington that understands technological issues and digs Heiruspecs would certainly be a change.

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Yesterday we had our annual “Small midwest town summer parade”, as required by the by-laws of the Small Midwest Town Association. It was the traditional blend of politics, commerce, community groups, bands, flags, and princesses, and despite the fairly atrocious heat was lots of fun. I took way too many pictures, some of which will probably find their way onto Flickr over time.

This fellow was riding his bike down the (quite busy) sidewalk, which was bad. He did have his helmet, though, which was good. But he wasn’t wearing it, which just makes me want to throw things! <Deep breath…>

He was actually riding with a (younger?) girl that I’m guessing was his sister. She was wearing her helmet, which is further evidence that women are smarter than men. The fact that he had his at all is probably due to some parently requirement, but it would appear that a little follow through might be necessary.

Thus endeth the rant…

And big ups to Sub-Evil Boy, who continues to demonstrate excellent judgement in the face of his hormonal heritage: his helmet gets used. Further props to his wonderful Aunt (my wonderful sister) for getting him his first helmet and making sure that they were an integral part of his world view from the beginning.

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This little mayfly is hardly an intimidating creature, is it? Yet when millions of them hatch on the same night, they’re capable of making their presence felt. Below is an animated GIF from the National Weather Service showing a mayfly hatch a few hours down the road as it appeared on their weather radar. Yikes!

Tip o’ the cap to Keith Brugger for the pointer to the NWS page.

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Over on Notional Slurry, Bill Tozier (who’s one of the many cool people I get to talk to here at GECCO) uses a funky anomoly in a Google map image to raise a very interesting question:

Google Book Search will become a stunning addition to the armamentarium, but is full of first drafts of scanned books: full of errors and missing pages.

Will we all go through Google Book Search and replace those missing and damaged digitized pages, or will we adapt to their lack by simply calling it good enough?

Way back in the pre-dawn of history (i.e., when I was an undergrad and we still copied LPs onto cassette tape), I made a copy of a friend’s (”Hi Jean!”) LP of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Unfortunately my cassette was a hair (2 minutes at most) shorter than the music, so my copy was missing those last few bars.

About three years later I was studying math in Budapest, and a bunch of us went to a (wonderful) performance of Four seasons. After many minutes of thoroughly enjoying the experience, all of a sudden something just felt wrong, and shortly after that the piece ended. As everyone stood and applauded, I figured out what the “problem” was: In my head, the piece was supposed to have ended a minute or two earlier! I’d listened to that tape enough that I’d internalized a finish that I intellectually knew was not the actually ending. The live performance then became “wrong” or “broken” when the orchestra didn’t abruptly cease playing at the point where (in my head) the tape ran out. (Imagine the chaos and confusion in the hall if they had!)

As a much more significant example, consider the errors and modifications (often unintentional, but no less serious as a result) introduced in the millenia of hand copied texts, including such politically and culturally powerful documents as the bible. Here we have mistakes and changes becoming internalized to the point of becoming church policy, cultural norms, and sometimes even civil law!

So obviously we can adapt all too well to errors and manipulation, and these things can become the new “truth” all too easily. It would thus seem crucial that we be vigilant in looking for these errors (especially in potentially powerful repositories like Google Books) and expect (even demand!) that these things be fixed when they’re brought to the attention of Google (or Amazon or libraries or …). This is one place where a public resource like Wikipedia has an advantage over a private resource like Google Books: If I see an error in a Wikipedia entry, I can fix it myself without having to rely on someone else to actually make the change for me.

After all this carping, though, it’s worth returning to the title of Bill’s post: “Bill in Escherland”. Much great art is great in significant part because it breaks and reassembles your conception of art, information, and the world. While I would hardly call my copy of Four Seasons art, the effect it had on me is quite similar in many ways to how sampling and remixes can help/force us to perceive ideas in a new way. Viva la Escher!

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As has been reported elsewhere by Sub-Evil Boy (complete with wild and enthusiastic mis-spellings of her name), Portia shuffled off this mortal coil over the weekend. We started 2006 with two wonderful cats, and now have zero, which is quite sad.

Apparently she got into a serious tussle with some other animal outside, and then crawled off into the landscaping instead of seeking aid. Her absence was eventually noted, and she was rushed to the vet, but it seems that the stress and her age (14 or 15) was more than she could handle.

It’s particularly sad that I was so far away when it all happened. I really wish I’d been with them; hearing about it on the phone is at best a little odd. There seemed, however, to be an strange thing going between Portia and I, as I was away for her one other major (if less fatal) accident. When Sub-Evil was a wee babe, Portia got the tip of her tale cut off by a screen door that proved to be faster than she was. Poor WeatherGirl had to corral a bleeding cat and an undamaged but hardly helpful infant and wrangle them both to the vet to have things repaired, while I was off enjoying myself at some conference or another.

She was a total sweetie and will definitely be missed.

Given that we’re planning to return to the UK for the 2007-08 school year, it wouldn’t make any sense to get any new cats until we return. We might offer to act as a (temporary) foster home for Humane Society cats, however. Otherwise the quantities of cat hair under all the furniture might drop to dangerously low levels…

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I’m happily ensconced here in Seattle for GECCO 2006 (one of the major conferences in evolutionary computation, my primary research area), and managing to sneak in a few pictures now and then. The photograph above isn’t a great one, but it shows the mighty mountain in the distance, which isn’t something one sees all that often. The shot below is of the Seattle Public Library (the white glass building in the foreground), which is one cool building.

And I’m missing WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy’s World Cup party tomorrow, all in the name of science :-).

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Sub-Evil Boy just got back from an excellent week with family in a strange land without any internet, which accounts for the silence from both of us.

Now I’ve got a frantic couple of days ahead of me before I head off to Seattle at the end of the week for GECCO ‘06. I’d really rather just take a nap at the moment, but such is life.

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