The road not taken

For a while now I’ve been reading “The intellectual devotional: 365 daily lessons from the seven fields of knowledge”… It’s something you read one page at a time with a quick summary of some topic, history, music, literature, philosophy etc. It’s a bit too highbrow to be of use at trivia pub quiz (the answer to one of last night’s final round questions was “Kathy Ireland”). But yesterday’s entry was so riveting I’ll include the whole thing here:

“There exists probably no American poem so frequently quoted yet so widely misinterpreted as Robert Frost’s “The road not taken”. Almost without fail, readers miss the meaning of the poem by miles, seeing it as a rosy testament to the speaker’s faith in free will and an inspiring call to defy convention and take the road “less traveled by”. But close reading reveals that the poem actually is laden with the ironic resignation for which Frost was renowned.

The point most overlooked in the poem is the utter arbitrariness of the speaker’s decision about which road to take. In describing his choice between the two paths, he emphasizes repeatedly that they were essentially identical. One path looks “as just as fair” as the other, and despite the speaker’s desire to differentiate them, he acknowledges that “the passing there/Had worn them really about the same.” On a whim, he chooses one over the other.

In the last stanza, Frost injects his trademark wry humor. The speaker admits that “ages and ages hence,” as a reminiscing old man, he will probably retell this story “with a sigh” and claim that he courageously chose the unorthodox route, the one “less traveled by.” But such a claim would be false. The speaker just finished telling us that his choice was totally arbitrary, as there was no “less traveled” path to begin with: they both “equally lay/ In leaves no step had trodden black.” Frost recognizes the human tendency to self-aggrandize, to sugarcoat the uncertainty of life, to take comfort in viewing life as a series of conscious, knowable choices between good and bad alternatives. But his ultimate point is that in reality, we have no way of knowing which path in life is best, and our decisions are just as often random, uneducated guesses”.

I can't help but picture generations of English teachers wincing through graduation speeches misinterpretting this poem.

biosphere

Couldn't resist digging this one out. In 1997, I was finishing my first year of grad school in the University of Arizona department of meteorology (that summer I switched to hydrology). Biosphere 2 was nearby and had just finished the second mission of people living in it. "Biosphere 1" is the regular earth around us. Biosphere 2 was a ginormous greenhouse that was completely sealed, as an experiment to see if, for example, people could live in a similar deal on the moon.

Maybe this story is apocryphal, but I remember hearing that a worker had hidden a bottle of liquor inside the complex. It was meant as a surprise and upon discovery, there was supposed to be drunken merriment all around. Apparently things had devolved into such personal conflict that one of the Bionauts found the bottle, stashed it away and drank it in private.

Anyhow, in 1997 Columbia university had recently purchased it to turn it into something like an environmental science teaching lab. They were courting Arizona researchers to come collaborate. I got to go on a complete tour of the place, from the cavernous lungs and the living quarters to the filtration tanks in the basement (water was run over large mats of algae, to take out the carbon or something, I'm not sure). This picture is me in the master control room, sitting at what appears to be a Sun Microsystems SPARC computer.

corrals

I was looking through some old pictures from high school and found this one. Not sure of the entire story, I'd put the date at 1989 or 1990. I was in school with the subject (the jacket and tie were the school uniform). Its one in a series of photos of some friends goofing around near a corral. It's somewhere in Massachusetts I suspect but don't know where. Feels a bit like that stream of memory became a mental oxbow.

sunshine

We're going through a massive windstorm right now. There have been gusts of 90 km per hour (55 mph) out at the coast. All day the apartment has been creaking and it almost sounds like things are being blown off the roof.

I'm a big fan of Andrew Watkins' weather page that shows the current temperature and forecasts for melbourne. However I think this page is also fantastic, all you'd want to look at for melbourne's weather for the last week.

One thing caught my eye today. Down in the far corner of the weekly summary there was this:



Tomorrow will have two more minutes of sunshine than today. Sweet! How's that for simple pleasures?

Christine is sleeping. Her snoring sounds like a lumber mill. If we had a pet, I think it might be scared right now.... Speaking of which, here's a nugget of data- old men snore more. Who knew?

50 cent

A while ago I wrote some posts about australian money, including the wallet busting 50 cent pieces.

I've come across some more...

2004 50 cent piece... Designed by a student. A koala, wombat and cockatoo. No kittens though, sorry...

(inside joke... read the above posts)

And then there's 2005's 60th anniversary of the end of World War II 50 cent piece...Unusual to see a lot of empty space on a coin.

Devilish Tasmania

In Tasmania, we visited a Tasmanian Devil Sanctuary. Apparently about half the devil population has been wiped off the island due to a mouth cancer epidemic. They develop ulcers that spread across their entire heads and eventually starve to death - horrid. They're pretty cute little devils and you'd think they'd give a good cuddle...though they tend to be some labile mood wise. Ah, I've found my people. :) Oddly, they look almost identical to my little half Chihuahua / half foxy terrier dog friend, Ollie. Hmmm.

The park also had a bird show. We're not huge bird fans, actually. I'm afraid of pigeons and seagulls (same as any kind of airborne balls in team sports - meh) - they smack of "flying rats" to me. The giant emu's and cassowaries here are pretty impressive though. Anyway, we met another cool bird at the devil park, a Tawny Frogmouth. Although it looks somewhat like an owl, it doesn't catch prey with its talons....it has long pokey whiskers on its face and it just sits still and waits for some yummy morsel to present itself around its mouth....effortless snacking - now there's a species I can relate to.

Speedboat trip to Tasman island with our new friend from the US, Rick.... rough seas, lots of seal spotting, they loaned us foul weather suits that really kept us warm. One of the staff later mentioned that they cost $400 each - we missed them as soon as we took them off to board the bus back to the car.

Wish I'd had one when I drove up Mt. Wellington and saw SNOW for the first time since we moved here. It's not just a great pastry wrapped beef dish, Wellington, but also a stunning view of Hobart.

Play stop rewind

I remember in high school, back before one could download an artist's entire discography in minutes, that I'd listen to certain albums again and again. I'd go to bed with a cd on repeat play- I even want to say that I listened the Cure's Faith album more times in my sleep than awake.



I think you've found a new favorite song when you listen halfway through and then start it over because you don't want it to end. I think in that way I've recently rediscovered New Order. I have their early albums in heavy rotation and can't seem to find my way through the end of their "Age of Consent".

Possum

My boss came in and showed me an apple with many small bites in it. He also said that some of his papers have small paw prints on them. We think that there's a possum living in our office. Can't even make that kind of thing up if I tried.

The strange thing is that this isn't the first time this has happened- a month or two ago one of our programmers had his tea collection raided and spread about the floor. We haven't ruled out the possibility of it being a drop bear.

I sometimes expect to wander into a new part of our campus and find a trough of unexploded ordinance... I never realized how thin the veil was between us and the fangs of the wild.

Get new posts by email

Hi everyone... seems like forever since I've written, it's been a whirlwind at work, travel, a visit from my mom. Lots to catch up on. We're headed to Tasmania this week.

In the meantime though, check out the new feature. Subscribe to the blog using the form on the right and you'll get an email (hopefully, fingers crossed) whenever there's a new post. Neat, right? I figured it out from the instructions on this page here.

Tom

I finally snuggled a koala and other ill-recorded memories

Koala snuggling (or, basically, "holding") is forbidden in Victoria, unless you're a park ranger, or, at minimum, highly qualified koala reserve volunteer, you're limited to, dare I say, "first base"? I have been all acquirer to have a koala cuddle puddle in the more animal-rights-liberal state of Queensland. We headed up there for our combined scuba trip/modelling conference.

Tom's mom didn't know Tom had already committed to the conference when she bought her ticket to come out and visit us for three weeks, but it worked out well. She got to do some great snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef and I got some variety in venues to show her around in.

One thing we have occasionally noticed is a psychic clash that can easily ensue between either 1) enjoying an experience or 2) adequately capturing it on film. Rarely do we find we are able to do both. For example, one bed and breakfast we stayed at in Mission Beach (just south of Cairns) is famous for its local Cassowary birds. When Mick and Sue, the hosts of the lodge, called us up from our rubber lobster search (a miniature treasure hunt through the rain forest, just behind their lodge), we had the treat of a lifetime to hand feed a female Cassowary, while her man-o-the-season was back sitting on the eggs. Male Cassowaries are smaller and less colorful, by the way, so we lucked out by meeting her. Of course my response was, "Honey, you are so much better at getting good shots with the camera, HERE!" (toss).

Later, when we were talking over highlights of the trip, Tom didn't remember much about the Cassowary...."I was kind of preoccupied trying to get pictures of it and it didn't really make much of an impression on me". This, a bird with a bright blue head which has a giant elephant toenail sticking out of it, not memorable?

Another phenomenon: when I reviewed images from the trip, including those his mom took, many of them smacked vaguely of the expressions I've seen Tom where through history, particularly between ages 9 and 23, where he only seemed to be able to muster the "I don't want a picture taken" look. It all kinda reminds me of one of my favorite websites, "Awkward Family Photos"...

For example, check out this gorgeous, yet camera avoidant teen:

Ruth and I visited an animal sanctuary while Tom was at his conference one day. For the low, low price of $20, I got to hold a koala and have a professional 8.5" x 11" photo taken. It all happened quite quickly and felt awkward. None of the intimacy I'd dreamt of for my first time. You know, in holding a koala. The ranger arranged me in a position, placed the marsupial and I was told to smile. My hair was in my face in an awkward way ("It looks like she has a giant birthmark on her face - her husband isn't going to like that photo at all!" - Ruth). The animal had a horrible musky smell that I adopted myself for the remainder of the day. We paid to have the photo retaken as Ruth dressed them down for the poor photography skills, but I was a bit traumatized by the whole encounter by that point.

It's funny, often photos don't do justice to what a glorious experience we actually had. Sometimes the act of recording the experience, or being the subject of someone else's desire to record it, changes the experience for the worse or even steals it altogether.

Sometimes it's the crappy memories that resonate the loudest some time later. At some point they stop being crappy memories and morph into good memories of crappish stuff that happened.

There's a lot of that in sailing as I remember...relatively few recollections of serene 73 degree days with easy jibes and calm waters...lots more running aground. Yet now it's easy to laugh when talking about it. As much as I treasure photographs as a valid record, in a way they aren't as objective as they seem. Maybe it's better to sometimes only capture the memories in our own minds and let our perceptions of events evolve over time?

The Great Outlaw Visit of 2009

Tom's mom has come and gone and what a lot we all did!

- The Great Ocean Road (see next post)...Melbourne to Port Campbell and back

- Immigration museum

- St. Patrick's church

- Movida (my favorite restaurant)

- Republica (another favorite)

- Lots more random eating and weight gaining, including polishing off at least half of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup cache Ruth imported for us

- Playing Killer Bunnies, the Beginner Pared Down Version with Ruth, and other German style boardgames that his brother sent for my birthday

- Playing Killer Bunnies, the Hard Core No Mercy Version with our new booster packs that we got Ruth to import for us

- "So You Think You Can Dance" tour concert (confirmed my belief that I cannot, in fact, dance)

- Salvador Dali exhibit (different, unusual, nice)

- Viewing Melbourne from the 360 degree overlook downtown - wish I'd done it sooner and maybe I wouldn't get lost so much?

- Trip to Cairns, Mission Beach, Trinity Beach, Karunda and Dunk Island

- Butterfly park and wildlife reserve

- Attended closing gala at a modelling conference....was duped...no models there at all, nor any high end designers or people with an interest in fashion...turned out to be, like, scientists + buffet.

- Played Roulette, the NON-European table kind (only one "0" for the house) - experienced similar result to usual Roulette (you have to know me pretty well here)

- Watch Ruth win our team a round of red wine playing Heads or Tails (you put your hands on your head or rear end and they flip a coin), then we won "dinner for 6" by getting lowest score of the the night (bag of chicken flavored potato chips, or "crisps" as we call them here)

- Had a lot of good conversations about Tom's family history, upbringing, etc. I decided that we live too far away to not spend our time covering relevant topics. We tried to stay away from chatter about the weather or bask in the glory of just how great being a cub scout was for Tom.

- Met a Cassowary face to face. Just wow.

- Went scuba diving with my OPEN WATER CERTIFIED husband on the Great Barrier Reef. Our last dive was the best of my life. Tom's mask fogged up, his ear hurt a lot and wouldn't pop and he had a myriad of other equipment problems. I was just glad he was there alongside me, in pain though he was...hmmm....sports imitates life?

Great Ocean Road Tour July 09

Tom's mom, Ruth, arrived on Friday. Our friend, Mel, and I took her on a two day trip down the Great Ocean Road, complete with 34 koala "bear" sightings (every American shows up talking about those crazy "bears"), a helicopter ride over the 12 Apostles, and quite a lot of snacking. Tom stayed back in Melbourne with his honey-do list and to go earn the fun coupons.

Trivia bytes from the journey:

• Three Paganos cannot eat a two kilogram lobster in one sitting, but we will try.
• Male echidnas have a five pointed penis (nice animal 'husbandry', huh?) (get it?).
• There never were 12 actual Apostles (limestone monoliths) - there were only 9, and even those still keep falling down. They were originally called "Sow and Piglets", but someone decided the biblical reference would be a sweet marketing move.
• The youngest person we can find a gravestone for in the Lock Ard cemetery was eight years old, but he wasn't part of the shipwreck. Still, sad.

On the second day, being the self-improving type of girls we are, we all set goals for each other..."get a lot of walking on the beach in", "eat healthier", "don't be such a chatterbox who speaks in one giant run-on sentence", "make a video of yourself doing at least 10 dances", etc....

Anywho...here it is...the latest Kitty-0 Video:

Trivia night

A couple days ago we went to pub trivia at the Corner Bar. Our friend Melissa is a trivia maven, but unfortunately she couldn't make it. It was Tom and Aimee and Sara and me. Step one for a trivia game... Get yourself a name. We had a couple in the running...

Sheik, Sheik Djibouti
Lance Boyle and the Pop Tarts
That Dog's Got Parvo
Chairman Meow and the Right Guards

It was a cool scene, lots of people into it. I do think that i-phoning and texting during trivia is like, yknow, not fair. I guess? But in a real survival situation, I would definitely go with the person with a web connection.

3 rounds of trivia, most of which were TV, celebs, movies, music and so on. We never fully grasped just how is out there that we don't know we don't know about it. Can't exactly call it an all-out rout. Tom went in, his brain throbbing with knoweldge... 3 questions in I think I heard the sound of a balloon rudely deflating. The only answers he knew were about Prince. Otherwise, about as useless as a screen door on a submarine. He was kicking himself for missing "what movie centers around the town of Gobblers Knob" question (can you name it?)

Aimee and Sara tried to hold our weight... But when it came to questions like "Men at work's smash hit 'Down under' is the subject of a court battle- What song are they accused of copying?"

All in all though, I think this made us want to redouble our efforts to catch up on australian TV. We try and we try...

nettles

this is post number 100... woohoo!

A while back I mentioned how we scanned all our old photographs and put them on a DVD. I was looking through them for a friend of mine in college and came across this gem

I would guess this is summer of 1993 after my freshman year of college. That's me on the right and on the left is my high school friend (different friend from above) Kendra Tgettis/Hutchins. I was visiting her and her husband Peter in Massachusetts.

She used to write for my literary magazine, The Outer Fringe. She was a great writer and I was a big fan and had some of her poems memorized. She had an inspirational story too. Her parents were Jehovah's Witnesses and her father wasn't going to let her go to college. Eventually she broke off from her family, worked at several jobs at once (one of which was a bakery if memory serves) and was eventually able to pay her own way through Bennington College. I think at one point she moved to England.

Sadly, we haven't kept in touch. This photo was taken by Peter when we went to an outdoor Shakespeare festival. Before the play started we were wandering around in the woods in the background. That's the day I discovered what stinging nettles are, never heard of them before. Our legs were itching like crazy, which is what's going in the photo.

towering clouds

Today I worked from home trying to finish up a major report. I'm really pretty stunned that I've been able to bang out 50 single-spaced pages in just under 10 days, most of which were either spent at scuba, bollywood, at a workshop downtown at the Bureau or losing at Killer Bunnies to Christine. I think now the tedious part starts, formatting references, table of contents and all that. I heard a story that Kerouac wrote On The Road on one giant scroll in a three week tear- I can't imagine what it'd be like to have to type all this by hand.

One nice thing about today was working near a window with a view. I searched around for the camera with no luck, but the clouds have been laughingly pretty today. They could be straight out of a hudson river valley school painting. Now, at sunset, the convective towers have blown out the top, the low angle light is filtering through the virga. Long bands are turning the pastels of sandstone deserts.

No doubt, everybody goes in for the giant cauliflower-head clouds. But I think after seeing time-lapsed videos of the skies over Tucson, I can appreciate how graceful cirrus clouds can be. They're just moving too slow to have that wow-factor.

Bollywood

Last night was our last Bollywood class. We went every Monday night for 10 weeks with our friend Diane to class at a local rec center. She graciously took me shopping in a suburb of Melbourne that has a retail district called "Little India" and we had a lot of fun getting what I call my "sari for dummies" - it had a skirt built into it so I wouldn't have to figure out how to wrap it around and keep it on while dancing. We also got some bedazzling bindis for our foreheads, bangles and a hilarious hat for Tom. It's comforting that, should the hydrologist thing fall through, he now has the gear for doorman work at the Taj West.

There are so many ethnicities of people here, no one pays much mind to different kinds of dress or the dozens of languages you hear people barking into their cell phones on the train. We sure got noticed last night though. You could almost hear people wondering, "What's this now?" as they tried to piece together what were up to.

When we got home, we were playing cards (actually a card game we are obsessed with called Killer Bunnies) and talking about Tom's mother's upcoming visit. He has always been close with her and we knew that immigrating would hard in terms of only seeing each other once a year or so. His mom is a real "do-er". She doesn't sit around and complain. She doesn't yack about what she would/could/should do - she just gets out there and gnaws at every morsel of marrow from the bones of life -always in school, travelling, even still working in daycare, because, as a retired pediatrician, she likes kids.

Knowing we only have a finite amount of time to spend with people we care about gives us a different perspective than when we can be around each other all day/every day. Or a limited amount of time to experience everything there is to do out there - and isn't that the case for everyone? At least, shouldn't it be? I waited so long to find Tom - now that he's finally here, I need to remember what it was like without him and keep my torturing of him to a duller roar.

Scuba

In a couple weeks we're going to Cairns near the great barrier reef. Today I took my first class towards a PADI open water scuba certification. I'm taking it at Aquatic Adventures' Academy of Scuba. Whenever I say the name, I keep picturing Plato signaling to ascend where Aristotle is gesturing for a safety stop.

There's four classes in total over two weekends. One (today) in the classroom, tomorrow in the pool and next saturday and sunday out at the ocean. I did pretty good in the class, got 47 out of 50 on the final exam. I do have to say though, I was sitting next to the class-star Renee, a beauty therapist originally from New Zealand. I've taken grad school oceanography courses and could tell you about Ekman pumping and all that... but she could bark out the answers to dive-table questions like Rain Man.

Everyone was quite friendly and excited about what they're doing. People seem particularly excited about diving now in winter because the visibility is so high (pay no mind that the water's 50 degrees).

I read a lot that the secret to getting over culture shock is to join clubs. Who knows, this might be the good thing I need. I'm totally knackered from work. I've been reading, researching, analyzing, writing, reporting, etc all day all night for what seems like weeks now. It's all coming to a head in about 10 days when my first big deliverable is due, a huge report that I'm still trying to get results for while I write it. I think I'll be amazed to make it through all in one piece. Christine's been a real trooper putting up with all of it.

I'm a big girl now.

(Kitty here) - I turned forty.

On my actual birthday, Wednesday, we stayed out late, riding the Colonial Tram Car around town. You eat a five course dinner in a cute little velvet lined trolley car as it makes its way through all the inner suburbs.

The meetup spot for the tram was across the street from the casino, where we went to kill a few minutes and won enough money to pay for above mentioned tram dinner cruise. Sweet.

Tom played hooky from work the next day - we rented a Prius, loaded it up with booze and party foods, he (finally) got his Australian driver's license, we both had facials and we went out for tapas. The next day, his boss asked how his flu was (it's going around here) and Tom says, "Oh. I didn't have the flu. I stayed out too late celebrating my wife's birthday." Shameless bad boy, he slays me.

We invited guests over on Saturday afternoon for a oceanic tub of sangria and cascading mountain range of hors d'oeuvres. About thirty people came by - my girls group, reading clubs, other expats, Bollywood dance buddy, neighbors, half a punk band, friends, friends of friends of friends, a few people we'd never met, a dog and two babies. My girlfriends lent us dishware, cooked, kept the shrimp dumplings steamy, cleaned up, and made sure that all these fabulous and different individuals felt welcome. It's scary to "let your beams cross", but everyone seemed to have a fun time, even/especially Tom.

There were a lot of banner moments this week, a few where I was so moved, grateful, at peace or overcome with happy that I lost my breath for a spell.

Tom started his scuba course today and will be certified for open water diving in Cairns ("The Great Barrier Reef") this time next month.

Today we found out that there is a wickedly lovely apartment down the hall from ours that is on the market. I'm going to the mortgage agency tomorrow and see what it will take to qualify. I'd imagine that will end with "You. And a job." After doing a little research, I'm not optimistic. Even if I can't have what I want, it's not like some random ephemeral force is holding me back....kind of nice to have such a direct connection between one's choices and the associated outcomes.

It's winter but palm trees are everywhere, I'm driving a car that makes no noise and barely uses gas, people came to our house and saw my art and said they'd like me to do some pieces for their homes, and they gave me gifts even though I begged them not to and Tom has even taken to sleeping well again.

So many people rue the day they turn forty... Not so much, me.

Plant a tree

Paul Hawken gave an interesting commencement address at University of Portland recently. It was mostly about the environment, in particular climate change, and a call to action. Funny enough, he has honorary degrees from Portland and Melbourne.

Two passages stood out for me...

"There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. "One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice," is Mary Oliver's description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world."

and then there's

"Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television."

Flood warning and communication

This friday I was able to sit in on a training class for the Bureau of Meteorology's new flood forecasters. Earlier in the week they talked about the nuts and bolts of product generation and running models. This day however was on communication and working with users and so on. Senior managers also talked about what makes a good forecaster and what they can expect on the job. I find the psychology and sociology of forecasting and disasters fascinating. Everything from little tidbits (e.g. during power outages ATMs don't work so people can't get cash to buy food/water from stores) to the broader more philosophical aspects.

One of the talks was on the myths about flood warning. So, myth: people want information from one source. Emergency managers want an authoritative source for themselves, but the public wants to confirm their beliefs from multiple sources (even if it's the same info). You hear it on the news, you get an email from work, you talk to a neighbor, all to triangulate the truth. But if you hear "A" from one source, and "Not A" from another, your chance of doing nothing goes way up.

Myth: people respond to the first warning. It usually takes people about 3 hours to get their act together and get moving, and further reinforcement can build their momentum but they're likely to spend a good amount of time trying to confirm what's going on.

Myth: people will follow recommendations in warnings. People will follow warnings if the basis for the warning is given and the basis makes common sense. The obvious one here is to never drive through water. Doesn't matter if you have 4 wheel drive or it looks shallow to you. You'll never know how deep it is (even if you've driven there before, you don't know how eroded it is on the bottom). And it doesn't help when the media goes out and films cars driving through water anytime there's a flood, or people on the pier anytime there's big waves. Like this:


forget you ever saw that.

Myth: warnings cause panic. Actual panic only occurs in closed physical spaces when there's an immediate and clear source of death and an escape is available but inaccessible. Indeed, many peoples reaction to hazards is to freeze up, gawk at the disaster. Another example of an inappropriate knee jerk reaction that stuck in my mind is that when boiling water gets on a child, the first instinct of the parent is to rub the area to relieve the pain...while tearing away the skin. Yikes.

There's lot of other things they discussed, like door knocking during floods. Always explain who you are and leave them with a piece of paper with the relevant instructions (so they don't need to guess later what you said). Be positive in warnings ("Say in your home" rather than "Don't leave your home"), invite sociability (e.g. advise your neighbors, see if they need help) and so on.

The panel on what makes a good forecaster was interesting too. Multi-tasking ability, time management, intuition, team playerness are some of the obvious ones. Knowing when to ask for help or say you don't know are important also. Know yourself and recognize when you're tired and not making good decisions (there was mention of people having worked 36 hour shifts in the real heat of battle... my work was never that critical and I usually found I was useless after about 14).

I think the reward partly comes in comradeship and reaching that point when you can say "alright, this is it, the big one we've been preparing for" and have at it. Not to romanticize it too much but I imagine it's like when one marine meets another and says "semper fi"; it's only two words but volumes are implied.

vision of humanity

A bit of news that was recently in the top lists of digg and drudgereport... New Zealand is the most peaceful country in the world according to the Vision of Humanity index. Australia's not doing too bad at 19th. The United States was 83rd (out of 144, 61th from the bottom), right between Kazakhstan and Bolivia.

B- history student here, all I remembered of Bolivia was that La Paz was the highest capital (did a report on it in 3rd grade) and it was a narco-state (no report on that one). Some quick googling turned up some neat pictures of Bolivia though. Check this out:


And La Paz's skyline:


The Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat:


Will have to put that on the places to go...

Off topic, but in case you were ever wondering, here's the difference between Australia and New Zealand's flags. First Australia:



And then New Zealand:


Australia's flag has the commonwealth star on the left (6 points for the 6 states and the territories). Then on the right is the Southern Cross (only seen from the southern hemisphere). New Zealand only has four stars because it marks the four directions of the compass.

Media training

Last week we has media training at CSIRO. There was a lot of hands-on exercises on how to best represent your science to the public. The first was a TV interview with a local newsman. I was still a bit groggy and we were fresh out of the gates at that point. I have another interview with someone from radio news that was later and much improved.

I mentioned earlier that I missed working with the media from my old job- it's different now because my work is a bit more behind the scenes and more complex. Most people know that river forecasts exist, but they may not know how they're made. It can be easy to just say that the forecasts are getting better because of (a) better tools or (b) better understanding, but it's more nuanced than that. One doesn't want to discount the human element of the forecasting process. And there's vast empty spaces between research and practice. And when a proverbial hammer does the job, there's no shame in not using a nuclear powered superhammer with tassels.

VicRoads

In the US (and maybe here) there's a phrase "going postal" which usually means going crazy... or more specifically losing it and getting violent in the workplace, based on an incident in the early 1980s where a series of postal workers came in and shot up their managers. We recently saw a movie called "He was a quiet man" that has some of those plot elements (good movie, recommend, no spoilers here).

To be honest though, the post office doesn't seem like that bad of a place. There's something reassuring about the transaction, I entrust you with my goods, we exchange a tiny bit of money, you go off and take my stuff anywhere in the world. No way could I get a package from here to the US for under $30 if I had to do it myself. Good on ya, post office, big fan here.

Now, VicRoads, on the other hand... It's the equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) in the US. We're able to convert our US license to an Australian one without an actual test, which is great. But we do need to go in person to their office. We needed to make an appointment, and the earliest appointment was 8 weeks out. That's longer than the gestation period of an emu (all the way from "hey there good looking" to "hark, a little baby emu!" and still no license).

Their "downtown" office is about 40 minutes on public transit from the Docklands. Here's a picture of their front door:


And here's what I imagine it would look like if an asteroid to hit their office:



They asked for all kinds of ID, passport, utility bill, old license, local credit card, etc. There was also a form that asked a zillion things. One was if I was taking any medication. Oh, if ever there was a box that I could untick. Stop time... just reach across the counter... comically large eraser... wipe out the whole thing.

The bad news was that I'd need an appointment with a doctor and have him fill out a form and I'd come back a second time. It took a while to set up going to the doctor, paid some money for a rubber stamp really.

Today I thought it would be nice to do my follow up appointment, so took off work early. Getting cross town was nuts, almost none of the trams were working because of evacuations associated with a chemical leak downtown. Took forever to get a taxi then was stuck in traffic.

To make a short story long, I rock up and their first question is "passport please?" Even without my passport, they apparently wouldn't have given me the license anyway because my medical form would still need to be reviewed by their doctors which takes a couple days. One part of me felt like I'd lose my marbles and just go ape... Another part felt like "yup, of course, deserve that". Can we just get a replay on that asteroid?



Christine is quite effective at getting her way re customer service. My strategy is mostly to be quietly indignant and marbled with sarcasm.

"Do you really mean I have to come back a third time?" "Yes" "Like I have to take off work again?" "Yes" "And go all the way cross town?" "Yes" "Because my ID verification from the first time is in the computer but not your actual paper form?" "Yes" "And the same shift manager from the first time is right there and she saw everything I had last time?" "Yes" "Can you copy it from the computer to your form?" "No" "If you give me the pen, can I do it?" "No" "Is this a hoax?" "No" "Right, well forget you then, I'm off!" "Bye" I don't think it works. Having worked for the government, you would think I'd could speak in secret code to them. Hard to win against industrial strength bureaucracy though. I'm probably better of not driving anyway.

Microwave time

The Antarctica book talks about how starved for stimulation people get when wintering over. In particular they start reading the ingredients list on cereal boxes and canned food and so on. Yet at the same time hectic non-important importance of civilization seems so distant to them.

Back in Portland I remember the time when Christine complained that "our microwave is too slow". I didn't know how to react. Is there something faster than a microwave?

Recently however I realized a thing I was doing subconsciously. If I wanted to cook something for a minute, I'd set the timer for two minutes. I'd open the door when the first minute was up and cancel the rest. I'd say to myself "right, that was going to take two minutes but I did it in one. I just saved an extra minute that I can use to do something important".

antarctica

I'm almost finished reading Sara Wheeler's book "Terra Incognita": Travels in Antarctica.

Since about third grade, I've had a general infatuation with Antarctica on maps. I would place my finger on where I was on the globe and try to place my other finger on the other side of the earth. It may have had something to do with wanting to get as far away from wherever I was at the time (I later turned into a serial runaway in high school and now my adult skills have allowed me to switch continents). Antarctica was a massive ribbon of white along the bottom of most maps, like the edge of the world, beyond which you'd find ye olde seamonsters. Going to Antarctica is one of the things that has reliably stayed on my list of things do to before I die.

Anyhow, I always thought that there are only two kinds of people that they let
visit Antarctica: scientists and artists (not true actually). But for years this made me think that someone like me would never make it there. But what a way to separate the scientific "clergy" from the lay- give them a whole continent. One thing I enjoyed as a 10 year altar boy was going all over the parts of the church that were off-limits to most people (the balcony, the back rooms, various store rooms). Solemn, quiet, forbidden.

Sara Wheeler was one of the earlier writers to participate in the Antarctic artists program. Her book is about 40% about herself, 30% mechanics of snow life 20% quotes from other famous explorers and 10% taking in nature. I was somewhat surprised that Antarctica is practically money free. Everything is stocked for you and you just take it off the shelf if you need it. She talks about the effects on the psyche; there's an interesting passage about boat crew members that were so desperate they'd break open the compass to drink the alcohol!

Today I came across this passage "...everyone who went to Antarctica came back vowing that nothing in heaven or earth would tempt then to go near polar regions again....at the end of six months they were on their knees in front of whomever might be able to get them there."

Not there yet but hopefully sooner than later.

Before and after

When I first arrived in January, CSIRO took a staff photo:



Today they took another...



Bags under the eyes have gone from a clutch to a satchel perhaps but doesn't seem too different?

Andrew Bird

Lately I've been going on an Andrew Bird bender. I've liked his music for a while. The first time I heard his work was on headphones while hiking up to the top of Mt Tabor in portland. At the time it just came up on shuffle play and I thought that it was from the 1920s, early jazz/swing.

Soon after, I put "Opposite Day" on a mix for Christine and "A nervous tic motion of the head to the left". "Glass figurine" was the first song on our wedding album (right before Billie Holiday's "I'll never smile again").

One thing I especially like is that it's easy to hear his voice just as an another instrument. If you focus on the lyrics they're also ambiguous so they have almost any meaning you want. Music like that can have a more profound impact on your being than something with a ham-fisted message or trying to build up the artist's brand/identity. For example, I didn't know what he looked like for years until I found one of his live performances on youtube. Woody McBride was probably my favorite artist throughout most of college (1993-96ish) and I'm still not totally sure what he looks like. Some artists (e.g. Mike Banks) refuse to be photographed on principle. I suppose the same should probably go for science - my first advisor told me "when journals will publish your bad articles (because of your fame), it's time to switch fields".

media training

Today CSIRO sponsored a media training at my work. Reporters from radio, newsprint and tv came in and talked about science and the media with the help of a facilitator. About 10 or so scientists participated and it was the whole range from people who were working on relatively arcane topics to things that were more immediate and maybe even controversial. It was quite participatory which was good experience (I have a video that hopefully I'll be able to convert and upload).

Aside from Neko, today I realized that one of the other things I miss in my old work was interacting with the media. There's a love/hate relationship of the nuanced, soft spoken, rambling professor interested in gnats knees with the fly-by sensationalist reporter... but my experience was that it could be an unfortunate stereotype.

I often did interviews with newspapers and even had one NPR radio interview (disclaimer- not my most articulate um like work...and stuff...). CNN TV called me for a story once but never followed up.

True, when it was bad it was bad. For example, one time a reporter was sly and got me to forward him an email chain of a heated (but at that point very internal) controversy about global warming and the washington state climatologist. You know you're in trouble when your exasperated boss storms into your cubicle and says "Right... you do NOT answer the phone for a week".

But when it was good it was great. They'd call interested in the latest forecasts for runoff and I was probably one of only three or four people who know what was going on and could give them the best information. It made me feel like an "insider", I suppose a bit like that presidential staffer that nobody's heard of but actually knows all. The drama, the suspense, all fleeting but very engaging.

It is especially flattering when you get repeat business from a particular reporter. There were several I liked but I delighted when working with John Fleck of the Albuquerque Journal. He clearly "got it" and was always able to draw out the good quotes, making me sound much more erudite than I probably am. Henry Brean in Salt Lake was good too.

Of course, there was no matching the Utah snow surveyor Randy Julander. I can't count the number of times I came in and scrolled through the morning news and did a spit take all over my screen on seeing his latest quote. Can't put my finger on one at the moment, but while accurate they were strikingly visual, and occasionally bawdy (he's only person I knew who could legitimately work the phrase "brass monkey" into a story). He also wrote the narratives for the utah water supply outlooks which are surprisingly fun to go back and read.

a stray cat

On the way to work today a strange thing happened... I saw my first cat since arriving here. Strange because I saw cats all the time back in Portland. I suppose we're living in an urban enough area that there wouldn't be strays, but my workplace is a bit more suburban. 

I stopped briefly and pet its cheek but had to move on. It mewled and I have to say it really tugged at the heartstrings.

Ok, right, it can be a truism that people don't realize that "your baby is boring". Zillions of photos of all the minutia... A long stare and a burp can send parents tittering. But I'll confess that I had a love affair with the cat, Neko, I left behind.

People who don't like cats, or even other peoples cats, all this probably doesn't do anything for them. But there's something to be said for that warm ball of fur laying on you and purring contentedly to let you know it's going to be alright. As long as the food keeps coming and nothing too scary happens, life is good.



I've probably had about 5 cats over the years, some of which liked me and others didn't but something just bumped Neko into a whole other category. I mean, how many people photoshop a valentine for their pet?



Or dedicate their dissertation to them? Neko, if you're out there reading this daddy misses you terribly!

Off topic but today I also got carded for my ticket for the first time on the train. It was a little stunning how many people didn't have tickets actually. And there's no excuses they accept, so no use stammering. One guy was spitting mad that they were carding him, but what can you do?

nowhere

Christine got me a gift of a book of australian national parks. The places that seem to interest me the most are the ones that are the least accessible. When I was flying to Portland for the first time, I talked with my seatmate for most of the trip. She brought out a map of Oregon in the in-flight magazine and talked about different areas. I pointed to southeastern Oregon where there was a large blank on the map. I asked what was out there and she said "nothing". That sounded like the place to be. Unfortunately I never did make it out east before moving away. 

But tonight when I was looking in the book I came across one place labeled "unnamed conservation area". Unnamed? Really? There is nothing in the world that's unnamed, especially places. Is it waiting for a name and nobody has gotten around to it yet? Sure enough, googling turned up only one or two links. There's the "unnamed conservation park management plan". The area's been thought about enough to have a plan, just not a name?

I can relate in a way though. My research has been on building a piece of software for forecasting. Although naming your program is always one of the biggest steps, a bit like naming your band, we've gone months without agreeing on a name. Good acronyms are especially important. VIPER, SPUR, VIC, all good. DWOPER or unpronouncable strings of consonants (strangely common here) not so good. Middle-of-word acronyms are a definite sign of weakness, like Hydrological EstimAtion Program Sofware (HEAPS).

Anyhow someone really did suggest the "unnamed model" and I kind of like it... UNM. I'm almost at the point of calling it "Claire" just to get that out of the way. Tom

The stamp on the letter

So coming home on the train today I saw two old men that I would swear could be Richard Nixon impersonators. Really, got on the train and thought "that guy looks just like Nixon" and thought "how often does that happen?"... I kept walking through the car and sat down across from another old man and thought "look at those jowls...and the cross-legged slouching... you could ski jump down that nose!" Can't make this stuff up.

Unrelated but last year Christine gave me a self help book, David Burn's "Feeling Good"
In the early pages it talked about how the expected satisfaction one gets from a task is often quite different from the actual satisfaction. The example he gives is that he asks, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much of a sense of accomplishment and well being one would get from the parts of writing a manuscript (foggy memory, so apologies if it's not the actual example). 

How much joy for preparing the first drafts? Some enjoyment perhaps, 6. In revising and editing? That's probably not fun, 3. Getting an envelope and putting a stamp on it? Maybe thrilling if you're in to stamps, 2? And what a hassle to go to the post office. 

But when someone goes through the process and records their satisfaction as events occur, people often have a different reaction than they'd expect, e.g. in editing, one can get a certain enjoyment from coming up with a particular turn of a phrase (my former office-mate Holly once delighted at the chance to use "a seeming surfeit" in one of her papers). And certainly those last minutes before and the afterglow of dropping it down the chute of a post box... It can take you by surprise. 

I think the thesis of the book was that depressed people often don't "do" because they don't expect that they'd enjoy. The context for thinking about this was that I've recently been working on a conference paper about my group's research. I'm not sure I'd say I'm the best writer...Scientific writing, with its sentences, shaped in tortured passive constructions, and a seeming surfeit of clauses and commas, can resemble, in a way, the literary equivalent of River Dancing. But nonetheless, I probably wouldn't have believed if you had asked me a week ago how much better I'd feel after the draft was finished. But there it is, felt good to know it was done and could leave work before the security guard tossed me out. 

One can't help but wonder the broader context of what else is enjoyable but not necessarily an obvious thing that one would want to do. There's something to be said from learning from experience and knowing what one likes (I once heard that one's life-long musical tastes are set by 22). At the same time though, there's that cliche that you should do at least one thing a day that you're afraid of.  

Sun....it burns.

I can't begin to tell you guys how clucking easy it is to get sunburned here. 

Even when I wear a high SPF sunblock, hat and (good, polarized) sunglasses - I still get fried. Melanoma is TEN times more common here than in most countries. We're #1 in the world.  Click here for other facts about Australia and skin cancer. 

It's starting to freak me out.  Statistically, the chances of getting metastasized melanoma (which is, oh by the way, basically fatal) are slim.  It's not even completely clear how UV rays relate to melanoma. 

But basal and squamous cell carcinomas - geez, I see a lot of people with telltale patches of gauze taped all over them. Those ones are rampant. It's treatable, but wouldn't you want to do about everything possible to not have chunks of skin regularly lopped off your body?   Yick.

Literally, I feel like I should wear a bag over my head. I don't know what to do about the eye holes though, because my eyes seem to get burned the worst.  That mostly just hurts. I don't think it causes eye cancer but it's can't be good.  I can see wearing Terminator style wrap-around glasses (ewe) or those old navigator Ray Ban's, the ones with the protective leather guards on the sides.  Tom suggested some Nicole Richie's, the kind that cover half your face.  We're going to look into that as an option.  This isn't me, it's her, by they way:

Actually, I'm not even completely clear on the action items.  Apparently the high levels of UV radiation here are due to the hole in the ozone.   Supposedly, due to legislation banning chlorofluorocarbons  (CFC's) and other ozone damaging chemicals, the hole will heal itself in say, another 50 years.  Those pesky fluro-clurvo-flavins (I accidentally called them that on one of our first dates...don't ask.) 

In the mean time, I mostly see advice like:

• Don't drive a car (check)
  
• Reduce, reuse, recycle (mmnnn...check)
  
• Buy CFC-free fridges (not sure, checking...)
  
• Dispose of old fridges and air conditioners properly (other than just removing the door and leaving it behind the garage indefinitely)
  

How the hole is the ozone relates to global warming (or the performer previously known as Global Warming) is also unclear to me.  I know my friend Kitty (weird, I know, there are two of us) went on a cruise to Alaska three years ago and the same one again last year.  Apparently she had no recollection of the first one because the second one looked NOTHING like it. The glaciers were just gone.  When they do melt entirely, it will raise the sea level and cause, I don't know... famine, draught, petulance, clothes with labels sewn into them that can't be removed without tearing the fabric, more bad stuff, etc.  Tom said that he went to a conference and someone started a speech with:

"For the last decade, scientists have been warning us that climate change will cause the polar caps to melt entirely by the year 2075.  We now know that the timeline has evolved and this catastrophe is now expected to occur.....by the time I finish this talk." 

Anyway, I hate to get all freaked out and full of hyperbole (you know me) about what's happening to the planet.  It's just really strange, and doesn't quite seem okay, to step out of our house, into paradise, and be actually and instantly burned alive.  It's not cool. 

 

Puffing Billy, A Train Ride

Every month or so, we rent a car for the weekend. Yesterday I went shopping with a girlfriend and we stocked up on bulky objects like an oil space heater, crock pot and a few metric tons of TP. That's just sad to have to make a special trip to the store for TP, lean thinking be damned.  Tom also got me a beautiful pair of kidskin elbow length gloves for our 32 month anniversary that is tomorrow. This will be the first he knows about it (thanks, Honey....they're PERFECT!). 

Today we all went to the Dandenong Mountain range, about an hour north of town and took the Puffing Billy train ride.  There were fabulous views. We stopped in a small town and found a scrumptious bakery before returning back to the starting point and then headed off to a skyline viewpoint site and heading home.  Let's hope I don't get any more speeding violations.  On the last day trip I got 2, which added up to almost $600 in fines and 5 demotion points (you can get 12 demotion points before you lose your license).  (I haven't gotten around to getting a license yet, will be interesting to see how that plays out when I do.)

The funnest thing about Puffing Billy is that they don't mind if you climb up on the gunwales of the cars and hang your feet out the side.  This was exhilarating while going over creakity old wooden bridges and it was fun to try to reach the local flora with our feet.  Hard to imagine being allowed such reckless abandon in American.  It was exciting enough that one could hardly escape the sense that it must be naughty, adding to the excitement, creating a positive reinforcement loop of foot swinging, train riding bliss.

  

We went to the Footy

Australians just love to endear nouns by shortening them and tacking on a long "e" sound.

• In the morning, they eat "brekkie".
  
• Instead of college, they attend "uni".
  
• If someone, who shall remain nameless, takes home all the teaspoons from his company kitchen, they are said to have "gone walkie".

A little while ago we were lucky enough to come by some free "footy" tickets 3rd row right behind the goal posts on Sunday.We were at the point of, why not, even if only to get the t-shirt that said we did (available for $89.00 btw). Footie is Australian Rules Football, a combination of rugby and American football. It's played on quite a large field. It's constant action, very few lets-stand-around-and-get-reorganized moments. Kind of tough to tell how violent it is, they don't wear any protection, although sometimes there are people all up in a pig pile.

On the train there someone was leading the car in a war chant, half cheering half booing and a third half of commuters a bit afraid for their lives. The stadium is really convenient... We took the train and were in our seats in less than 35 minutes door to door.

Christine has a new "I don't want to take public transportation without being medicated" policy. It's true, the train rides are especially memorable on game days. Knowing this, she donned her special train "stimulus minimization uniform": 

There is something that happens when the compartments are too crowded to find a handhold...when the train lurches, because everyone is so closely packed together, no one falls. You're really far more stable than when you standing freely.

So a couple things we noticed that were weird about this sport...

1. No "commercially prepared" food allowed inside. Didn't quite understand what that meant, but everyone brought food... One guy in front of me pulled out a steak knife (how did that get past security??) and goes to town on some lunch meats, I couldn't bear to watch. I just know the sandwich was gone in three bites but the smell of egg salad stayed through most of the second quarter.

2. Alcohol on the property, sold at reasonable prices... ~$5usd for a beer (labeled light, medium and heavy beer... there was a sign that no heavy beer was to be sold at tonight's event... makes you wonder what nights they _do_ serve heavy beer). Oh and Whiskey and Vodka. You can get hard alcohol at pretty much every 4th stand. And yet, no heavy beer. (?)

3. On the Jumbotron, around the end of the first quarter, they flashed the score and made an announcement to get your last bets in at betfair.com an online sports gambling website. Right out there in the open, on the very jumbotron itself.

4. The mix of foods is all different, meat pies, fish and chips, sausage rolls, chikka (aus for chicken) roll, etc. We saw a hot dog on the way out but Christine reminded me that we haven't found a hot dog we've liked since moving here (I think 99% of her samples have come from Ikea where the hot dogs are reshaped recycled cardboard marinated in Bragg's Amino seasoning). We do like the Slurpees though, and have a new recipe of adding a full can of lemonade to the 7-11 large size which gets the slush to sugar ratio just about right.  They don't have the long straws that fit the large cups here yet though.  In fact, only about half the places you get a take away (to go) drink will provide a lid. We're okay with that.  No one said immigrating would be easy, they just said it would be worth it. 

5. No protective nets behind the goal lines like in the US. If a just-kicked touchdown sails into your drink, oh well, ha ha.

6. We counted about 5 uniforms on the fields, 1 for each side, one for referees, one neon for runners to the fields for the coaches, and then sideline folks who have refreshments and a medical bag. One of the rules has to do with bleeding players so it's important to staunch the flow so they can get back up again.

Overall, we'll admit that we can see the draw now, though we don't see picking a favorite team or investing in any mascot motif apparel anytime soon.  Our next sporting adventure will probably be the Melbourne (horse racing) Cup, for which Christine is already being coached by some girlfriends and planning her outfit. Apparently some very big hats are going to be involved.