Inertial Fallacy Productions

Writer's Block: Food Loves and Hates

2008-07-18T09:23:01Z

What foods can you not live without, and what foods can you not stomach?

I could not live without cheese. This is a primary reason why I would never become vegan. Nuts are also high on the list. Though I don't eat them every day, they're so damn tasty and nutritious. I really do feel bad for those with nut and legume allergies. Also, I couldn't stand to be without tea, though I'm not sure you'd consider that a food.
Never been a big fan of okra (unless its in gumbo), jellyfish (unless it's been pickled beyond recognition) or sea urchin (no exceptions here... I just can't stand the stuff). That's about it - a very short list.
Oh, weirdly, though, I really don't like cooked salmon. Raw or smoked is just fine... delicious, actually. But cooked it just tastes too metallic for me to enjoy it.

A Whirlwind Month

2008-06-30T17:54:16Z

The following is a brief summary of what life has been like in the last two months. My God, a lot has changed!

Starting ~ March 15: Begin packing up my apartment a bit at a time and moving my stuff into storage. Average about 3 car-loads a week.

April 1st: At lunchtime I am close to tears because I can't get my computer model of subsurface ice growth on Mars to work. It's not numerically stable and the answers are coming out all garbled. I have half a mind to call up my advisor and my potential new boss at JPL and tell them both that I'm not going to finish my thesis in time to be part of the Phoenix Mission during landing and initial ops.
But a half-hour of eyes-closed resting on my couch reveals a potential solution. I try it out when I return to my office and BEHOLD! It works!

April 4th: Have dinner with Lauren (recent Ph.D. from MIT who'll be working on Phoenix, too) and her husband Ryan Hudson (great name, that!). She tells me, "You were close to tears on Monday? You'll defend in two weeks." She was close.. it was actually 4 weeks.

April 16th: After some frantic rushing about and trying to get 6 peoples schedules coordinated, I set a defense date: April 29th. This was just about the last major source of stress. After this was set, I actually became quite relaxed about the whole thing. Holy Crap... it's actually going to happen!

April 19th: Leave for the Mars Water Cycle conference in Paris. Conference goes well, despite major jet lag. Give a talk about my modeling and experimental work on the last day of the conference. Well received.

April 24th: Miss my flight. Stuck in Paris Airport (hotel) for 24 hours. A bit nervous because I HAVE to be back for my defense on the 29th!

April 28th: Run to IKEA to get 42 glass champagne flutes. There's no way I'm letting people toast my thesis defense in paper cups!

April 29th: 8:30 am. Defend thesis. Many friends and family there (about 20, all told). The defense goes flawlessly. I'm wearing a black pinstripe shirt, Mr. S leather pants, and boots. Wouldn't have it any other way. Jasun video tapes it. We have champagne and cake afterwards (Brian bakes a cake (actually 3) IN THE SHAPE OF THE PHOENIX MARS LANDER!!! Love ya, Brian!).

May 2-4th: Move big heavy stuff out of apartment to storage unit with help of David and his truck.

May 5th: Begin work at JPL. Orientation, sign papers, get as much settled as quickly as possible so I can get my butt to Tucson.

May 10th: Move last of my stuff out of the apartment I've called home for 7 years.

May 12th: Leave for Tucson with a car full of stuff. Stopping in Palm Springs and Phoenix on the way.

May 19th: Arrive Tucson.

May 25th: Phoenix Lands! I have a job!

June 12th: Fly back to Pasadena for Caltech Commencement.

June 25th: Fly to Ann Arbor, MI for a week to calibrate the TECP in the Mars Wind Tunnel.

And so, in summary: Lots of travel, lots of upheaval. No longer a student (OMFG!). Have a salary (OMFGBBQ!). Working on Mars(OMFGBBQWTFROTFLMAOLEQNPCOACJSO!)!)(&#)!!!!)!)!*@)!!).

IT WORKED!!

2008-06-29T18:40:55Z

Back from lunch, at least an hour, and everything is totally stable in lab-land. Completed three whole measurement cycles without apparent incident. w00t!

What the heck I've been up to...

2008-06-29T17:32:41Z

... a proximal summary. I'm leaving out a lot that's happened between the last entry and this one. The information is most current to within about a week.

So, what's up in my life? Well, as you've probably heard, the Phoenix mission is doing very well. Found ice, found soil with a mildly alkaline pH and a good combination of nutrients. Apparently, it would be quite easy to grow asparagus on Mars. Though I'm not sure, with competing effects of UV-rich light and a generally weaker intensity thereof, whether you'd get white or green spears. That should TOTALLY be on the next Mars mission.

Actually, Chris McKay of the NASA Ames Research Center (for whom I worked in my year off between MIT and Caltech), has proposed that one of the best indicators of biological potential on Mars (or any other solid body), as well as an incredibly good public-relations / media venture, would be to have a lander take seeds and water, scoop up some local dirt and put it in a bell-jar, and then see what grows.
A very elegant and potentially beautiful idea, but NASA's planetary-protection people would have none of it.

So, that's all going well and Tucson is turning out to be a decent town. Damn hot, though dry. Waiting for Monsoon season to start. It's been years since I've seen a good spate of electrical storms and hard rain. Woo hoo!
It should be starting around the 4th of July (they actually make predictions for the day of official Monsoon season start, with an implicit accuracy of +/- 12 hours, over two months before it's actually expected to arrive. Could be total hogwash, though. No one's ever threatened a meteorologist if they got their predictions wrong.) I'll be back there by then.

Back there? Yes, I'm not in Tucson at the moment, but Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have been sent on a remote assignment from my remote assignment to do some further calibration of the TECP (Thermal and Electrical Conductivity Probe). The thing is designed to measure thermal an electrical properties of soil, hence the mondo cleat-like needles on the tip. But some yay-hoo got the bright idea that it could be used as a hot-wire anemometer. So, several months ago, some folk did some simple tests on it in a Mars wind tunnel here at U of M.
Great in theory, and the wind-tunnel data show a significant correlation between maximum needle temperature for a constant current input and wind speed. At least over the range of 0 - 40 m/s.

Trouble is, the wind on Mars is, at this site and during this season, more like 0 - 10 m/s. And the data aren't correlating nicely with this wind-tunnel calibration data. So, me and my colleague Lauren have been tackling it with all sorts of mathematical and theoretical cleverness. Modeling the heat paths as a cascading RC circuit, fitting to exponential, bi-exponential, and exponential integral functions, constraining parameters, doing vacuum experiments in the lab in Tucson... and haven't gotten anywhere.

So, I've come here to resurrect this chamber, determine if anything was suspect in the previous data, make improvements if possible, and take some more data. When I got here,... well, let's just say that the lab was a bit un-tidy (my GOD it was messy.) It's better now. I've always been a rather neat person, and in my lab space (even if I'm only a guest) I run a pretty tight ship. Was able to fix some chamber leaks, get automatic pressure logging (as opposed to manually reading the voltage of a fancy multi-meter), and we got a new motor for the tunnel.

After an afternoon of taking data, I discover that the damn 3-phase motor is wired backwards and that my fan has been blowing instead of sucking. So the 15 sets of data (each of which take on the order of 20 minutes to acquire) which I have from that day are useless. And that really does suck / blow.

As it stands now, Things are running pretty smoothly. I'm going to leave for lunch and hope that everything runs fine without me until I get back. Problem with all that is that if things DO go bad, I'll have little indication of where / when it happened, and therefore which data-sets are suspect. If I had another month and a decent budget, I'd make even further improvements which would give me such indications.

And you know, there's a strong chance that I may come back here. In all, it's a nice facility. And also - Ann Arbor is REALLY PRETTY!
I mean, living in California and Arizona, I haven't seen this much GREEN (deciduous green, at that) in a long time when. And even then, back in Texas, it was accompanied by summertime humidity. Even when it's *raining* here the humidity is less than a Houston summer.

Okay, off to lunch with fingers crossed.

Troy

Last Days

2006-07-07T03:01:38Z

Wednesday, July 5, 2006 11:00 pm
Beijing

Our last day in Xinjiang was quite busy. We woke up in Kuytun and split into two groups. One group, the smaller of the two, went back to our site on the Anjihai anticline and did another round of seismic profiling. The larger group took two buses and high-tailed it for Urumqi. We didn’t go to Urumqi first, we went beyond it to a place called Tienchi, or ‘Heavenly Lake’ up in the Bogdashan. We spent about 5 hours there and it was definitely worth it.

High mountains surrounded this beautiful, peaceful lake. In thi distance, snow-capped Bogda peak was occasionally clear, but frequently shrouded in clouds. Along the shore of the lake there were a number of people selling traditional Uyghur clothing, food, and other items. I took some time on my own to walk around the eastern rim of the lake. They had built a walkway that was variously cut into the hillslope (which was rather steep) or built out from a vertical cliff face leading down into the water. Most of the time I was alone. I could see a few boats out on the lake. When I walked through or close to glades of grasses I heard the loud droning buzz of summer insects doing their thing.

It was a very moving experience. I see why people come to this place.

Following that, we drove into downtown Urumqi to go to Erdo Qiao. This is the modern bazaar. The epicenter of it is this large courtyard with a massive minaret in the middle. I’ve seen this structure before, both in my books on the Silk Road and in a music video made in the region. I don’t know if there’s more than one of these, but it was pretty impressive.

We didn’t have a long time to wander around the market. Ultimately, after dinner, we had plenty of time. But we weren’t aware of that then, so we urgently did some super-fast shopping. Not all of us were present, though. The seismic team was supposed to have met us up there, but they were running behind. And one of the buses from the Tienchi team got a flat tire on the freeway in the middle of the city and was delayed for repairs.

After we all met up again, we went into the same courtyard where now there were set up a bunch of tables in a portioned area and a huge buffet. We were to have a banquet and entertainment. It was excellent.

The fool was varied and quite delicious. Kebabs, nan bread, yoghurt, many meats and noodles, fresh fruit, soups. It was wonderful. Then, following dinner, we had our entertainment. The first half consisted of a tight-rope walking act along a line strung across the courtyard about 4 floors up. A man and a woman did several ‘runs’ across the tightrope, at times using implements such as hoola-hoops, stools, or chairs. It was very neat, but after a while got a bit boring.

Following that, we turned our attention to the stage which was set up and watched about two hours worth of traditional dancing and singing. The acts were almost all done with the same people, but there were many costume changes and the cultures represented ranged from Uyghur and Chinese to Kazach, Mongol, Russian, Turkic, and Uzbek. At the end of it all, the dancers came into the audience and plucked out many people to go dance on stage with them. Many Caltech folk got up there and some of us (Valerie, Andy, Min, Sarah, myself) gave them quite a show. They seemed rather happy and somewhat impressed.

I found it interesting how generally unresponsive the crowd watching the whole show was. When some of the singers (particularly those who weren’t singing in Chinese) were up there and made motions indicating they wanted the crowd to clap to the beat, I noticed that most of the Caltech people would comply, but almost no one else would. The clapping that did start would rapidly die down. I don’t know how often they put on this show. If it’s once a day, I understand the lack of energy. But overall I found the response of the crowd to be generally flat.

Sleep. Bus. Airport. Goodbye Chinese students. Fly to Beijing.

We’re staying this time at a hotel which is somewhat closer to the middle of the city. It’ll make for a longer trip to the airport, but we’ll have an easier time going around and looking at things.

And, in fact, we found some really cool stuff. First, before leaving the hotel to wander, we arranged a tour bus for tomorrow to take us to the Great Wall and Ming Tombs. 150 yuan for admission, lunch, and transport is a good deal. Thirteen of us are looking forward to going. So, after that a bunch of us left and walked generally south-east towards the middle of the city. After about an hour, some of the group were getting really tired and hungry and split off from our group. They went back towards our hotel and, ultimately, had some KFC. Yes, Kentucky Fried Chicken exists here. Apparently, it’s slightly spicier than American KFC.

The four of us remaining walked south-east again and headed for a restaurant mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide book. We walked down this long, narrow street. The norther part of the street was just a residential area, but residential in the sense of what you’d expect from old Beijing. One-story buildings, tiny alleyways, lots of dirt, junk, and people on bicycles. It’s the sort of place that looks like people actually live there, but at a standard of living quite a bit below what I’m used to. When we got into the sourthern half of the street, we started to see more and more shops with appealing items. Valerie bought an ink-stone for calligraphy and some brushes and an ink block. I found a few more souvenir items for my friends. We also came across this awesome Asian Fusion restaurant called Drum and Gong. It had a menu end both Chinese and English. The staff didn’t speak English, but by pointing we could make ourselves understood. We got what was perhaps the best meal we’ve yet had on this trip. We’re gonna try to get everyone to come here tomorrow.

We continued to walk after dinner and found a great many neat shops. Shirts, coats, scarves. Tea, scrolls, fans, knives. So much stuff here. All very cheap. We even found a bar called ‘Shut up and Drink’ which advertised a “Fucking good Mojito”.

I want to stay here a few more days. China Rocks!!

Thursday, July 6, 2006 1:01 Pm
Beijing

China SUCKS!

I have turned around completely in my opinion of this place. It may be unfair of me to judge a whole country by one bad experience, but judging from the warnings printed in the guide books, the statements of my friends that have visited China before, and a few of my experiences here, I’m now quite firmly disenchanted with the whole F*cking place.

Thirteen of us got up this morning at 5:00 am with hopes of getting on our tour bus and going to visit both the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs. About 5 minutes after the bus was supposed to have arrived, the hotel manager on duty came over to our group and told us something like there was some problem with our tour and that we’d need to pay 100 yuan extra. Oh, but not just 100 yuan, 100 yuan per person. WHAT THE F*CK! We, as a group were totally indignant and demanded therefore to have our money returned to us. The manager then got on the phone (presumably with the tour company) and remained thus for about 10 minutes. I then walked over and demanded that we be given back our money. He was, at the time, looking through a Chinese-English ideogram dictionary. Don’t know why. But after looking through this for another 2 minutes he starts explaining to me that the 100 yuan extra is for the cable car at the Great Wall. His English is quite poor, so I can’t really figure out what this cable car is for, but I tell him that we don’t want the cable car, we’re happy to walk, and if he can’t honor the agreement made yesterday that we want our money back.

Finally, he gives me back the 1950 yuan for the 13 of us. He then starts telling me that the receptionist yesterday didn’t explain to me fully what the costs would be and that he’s sorry for the miscommunication. Miscommunication my pasty-white American ass. We had Ying Wang right there with us when we made the arrangements, both the manager and the receptionist were there, and according to Ying, the engraved metal plaque advertising the tour group on the front desk counter specifically said “150 yuan for admission, lunch, insurance, tour-guide, and bus”. Nothing about an additional 100 yuan.

What’s more, Rob Clayton of our group who has a Lonely Planet guide book with him said that it mentions the Great Wall cable car, and that it only costs 50 yuan. So, the upshot is that someone along the line was trying to fleece us dumb, desperate Americans. Regardless of whether it was the hotel, this manager, or the tour company, I’m very, very pissed at the hotel. If it’s not the fault of them or their staff, they’re making excuses for a shitty tour company.

Ultimately, a reduced group of us took 3 taxis to the Forbidden City where, two weeks ago, a number of us had been accosted by people hawking tours of the Great Wall. Of course, that was a Sunday and NOT at 6am in the frickin’ morning. So, we walked around for about an hour with barely a nibble from hopeful tour guides. Most were out to sell tours to other Chinese and weren’t interested in English speakers. After a while, we broke up into two groups. My group, which included Rob, Becky, Tony, Brian, Sarah, and myself walked around and up the east side of the Forbidden City through a long plaza of shops. Many were not yet open, and most were higher-priced versions of the stuff I saw yesterday.

So, after about a hour of that Brian, Rob, and I took a taxi back to the hotel and the other three went to the Forbidden City (which didn’t open until 8:30am anyhow). Back at the hotel, I napped until just now and Brian puttered around on the computer (The one thing this hotel does have going for it is wired internet in every room).

In a while, we’re going to meet Tony and Becky for lunch (who, by the way, seemed rather under whelmed by the forbidden city). Later tonight, we’re gonna go back to that street we found last night and do some final shopping and dinner.

I can’t wait to get home.

Friday, July 7, 2006. 9:42 am
Beijing

I’m sick. Rather, I was very ill yesterday and last night. I’m feeling somewhat better this morning. I think something I had for lunch yesterday didn’t agree with me. It ended up coming out both ends. Blech. Hopefully the worst has passed and I won’t be totally miserable (or getting up every 5 minutes to go to the bathroom) on the flights home.

We check out at 12:00, leave the hotel at 1:15, and take our flight at 3:50. I’m ready to get going.

Thank you all for following along. Don’t know if I’ll keep up the journaling after returning. Definitely gonna take a few days and just veg at home in my own bed and spend time with my friends whom I’ve missed so much.

Cheers, y’all.

many miles, many entries

2006-07-03T14:52:19Z

Friday, 10:43 am. June 30, 2006.
Road 314, approximately 100 km north of Korla

We’re on our way to Urumqi. We have three geological stops today with a diversion into the Turfan basin (which contains the lowest non-submerged spot in Asia). It’s a cool day, somewhat humid, with a variable overcast cloud covering that forms a nice ceiling on the landscape. Horizontal visibility is good and I can see mountains in the distance whose tops disappear into the mists.

The basin just north of Korla, whose name I can’t recall at the moment, is quite green. There’s a good deal of agriculture lining the roads and extending as far as I can see to the horizon. Many stands of poplar trees border the various land plots and it’s all very peaceful and pastoral. Quite a sudden change from the dustier, drier environment of the northern Tarim.

I’m starting to long for a real Western breakfast. We have hard boiled eggs at breakfast, but otherwise my palate cannot distinguish between morning and evening meals. Indeed, a number of the dishes are exactly the same. Sure, they’re quite good. Pan-fried tofu, eggplant, cucumbers, all in various types of moderately spicy sauces, noodles, and numerous steamed or fried dough dumplings (with or without fillings). It’s not quite like dim sum – many of them have no fillings at all. There are, I presume, there to allow us to soak up the sauces on our plates. It’s all quite greasy.

I want bacon. Eggs over medium with toast. Ooohhh – eggs Benedict! Heck, even some cereal with milk and a glass of real orange juice. When I get back, I’m definitely going out for breakfast.

I’ve finished reading Stephen J. Gould’s “The Flamingo’s Smile”, his fourth collection of essays. I’m not onto Jared Diamond’s “Why is Sex Fun – the evolution of human sexuality.” I enjoyed the former and am enjoying the latter, but I came across an interesting juxtaposition. One of Gould’s essays attempts to debunk (or at least, call into question) the ‘well known’ tale of certain spiders and praying mantis eating their mates either during or immediately after copulation. In Diamond’s book, published something like 10 years later, he uses the example of sexual cannibalism in these species explicitly and in considerable detail. Now, Jared’s an accomplished researcher, and I’m sure he’s familiar with Gould’s work. So what is going on? Gould DID say that much research was lacking and that which was available was limited and somewhat inconclusive. So perhaps in the decade since his essay and Diamond’s book the practice has actually been confirmed. Can somebody who’s closer to the Internet than I run a wikipedia on this one? Now I’d really like to know.

Saturday, July 1, 2006. 7:00 pm
Shinezi, Xinjiang

Happy Canada Day everyone.

So. We left Korla and headed back to Urumqi. It was a very long day of driving, made longer be the fact that we had a significant side-detour to the flaming mountains on the north side of the Turpan basin. We didn’t really stop any any towns, just various road-side pit stops and the field sites. The Flaming Mtns. were beautiful, and had some awesome looking formations.

We arrived in Urumqi sometime around 10pm. We didn’t stay near downtown, but at a hotel far on the western edge of the city. I suppose such a thing facilitates our travel to the west the following day, but so far we haven’t stayed anywhere near the center of the cities we’ve been to. Pity, cause they’re usually the more interesting areas.

Actually, looking back over my Silk Road, Xi’an to Kashgar book, I’m realizing how much of this territory we’re NOT seeing. Lots of lakes, rivers, waterfalls, city centers, bazaars, ruins, etc….remnants of the Silk Road and the present-day life of the people are passing us by. Or rather, we’re passing THEM by as we drive lickety-split from one city to another. Occasionally, we stop at a field site, far from any people, for an hour or more. But our interactions with the locals have been mostly our free evenings in Korla and Kuche.

Last night in Urumqi, most people stayed in and watched the Germany vs. Argentenia World Cup game. I have a feeling we’ll be watching a lot of the game tonight, even though we’re supposed to get an early morning start to avoid the heat of the day.

We made a stop along one of the anticlines on the north side of the Tien Shan today as we began skirting west along the southern end of the Junggar depression. It was quite ridiculously hot. Additional hotness was experienced by me, sitting, as I do, in the front seat of the bus. It usually gives me a nice view out of the front wind-screen. But when driving West into the setting sun, the raw wattage falling onto my body tends to overwhelm the feeble attempts of the bus’ air conditioner.

I’ve got a number of thoughts, opinions, and other such ‘bloggable’ tales to tell, but none of them stand our particularly at the moment and I’m anxious to see if I can find an internet cafÈ. So, for now, signing off.

Sunday, July 2, 2006 7:30 am
Shihezi, Xinjiang.
Yet another hotel.

My recent international travels have shown me many new things. I’ve seen architecture, clothing styles, standards of living, and cuisine different from that which I was used to. One of the most striking things, though, has been the various styles of bathroom.

Speaking both about WCs and the bathrooms where you shower, I’ve seen quite the gamut. Greenland had a sort of dorm-style bathroom with individual compartmental rooms for toilets and showers. These were complete rooms with locking doors and light switches. The shower rooms had a small anteroom with a sink and some clothing hooks. A step up and you’re into the shower area. A flimsy curtain separated the two, but was completely ineffectual at keeping shower water out of the anteroom. The shower also drained VERY slowly.

In Copenhagen, our room at ZLEEP had a combined toilet / shower. Not only that, the sink and shower were practically the same thing. A diverter nozzle on the sink sent the water through a flexible hose to a hand-held shower head. A small curtain between the sink / mirror and the toilet prevented the latter from getting too wet. However, the wall-hanging position of the shower head pointed directly at the door to the room. I found out that if you didn’t take the head off and use it as a hand-held unit, LOTS of water got under the door and onto the all-weather carpet in the room. They should have designed a better seal.
The whole ‘bathroom’ was about 10 square feet.

In China, they do things a bit differently. Differently, but the same. The showers, for one, vary from regular bathtubs with regular shower heads to a small suspended water heater and hand-held shower head hovering over a fully tiled bathroom. Curtains usually exist, but they even more diaphanous than the ones in Greenland.

The toilets…well…if you’re in a hotel, you get a real toilet on which you can sit down. Most anywhere else, it’s a trough (occasionally separated by low partitions) or a rectangular hole cut into the floor. In higher-class places, the trough is continually flushed with water. At most road-side pit-stops, the hole just leads to a stinking pile below. Think of national park toilets and you’ve got a much classier version of what we have here. Toilet paper is a special commodity, most hotels only give you about 1/4 of a full roll… but at least you can flush what you use. At pit-toilets, you either throw the used tissue into a waste basket or onto the pile. Either way, a significant stench can build up.

Also, the hotel bathrooms here. They’re not really messy, they’re Meth-y. If you’ve seen the movie “The Salton Sea” which is about speed-freaks, or the movie “Saw”, which featured a rather hideous bathroom, you’re getting an extreme version of these. They’re grungy but not dirty. You could scrub that grout for 3 weeks and it’d still be brown and mildewy. Tiles are missing, the lighting is awful, pipes are exposed, and the ‘amenities’ of soap, shampoo, etc. are below the level of Motel 6 (that is, if Motel 6 actually gave you those things, which they don’t).

Sunday, July 2, 2006 12:41 pm
Anjihai Anticline, Xinjiang
We’re in the middle of doing a seismic line. This involves deploying 48 geophones along a special cable, connecting them all to a computer, and firing a specially built device, called a ‘Becky gun’ into holes in the ground. The becky gun looks like a pogo-stick with a shotgun shell in the base. You bury it, cover it with a plate, then hit the top with a rubber mallet to set off the charge. Also, the whole sensing apparatus, with attendant computer, is powered by an external battery. I mentioned before the lack of battery we were experiencing; this was mitigated by the purchasing of two very large car batteries this morning before we left Shihezi.

While acting to help out setting up the line, I carried the battery from the bus to the deployment site. As a result, I now have numerous small holes in my field pants and have completely destroyed my GPS division t-shirt. Battery acid leaks. Bad.
Fortunately, I don’t seem to have any burns on my skin (not even my hands) and I’m incredibly thankful that this didn’t happen while I was wearing the camouflage pants I’d bought in Copenhagen. Sure, I could have Jan buy and send me another pair…but that would suck. As it is, I can keep wearing the pants for a while longer, though they’re going into the trash as soon as I get home. I only brought two pairs of pants (in an effort to back light) so I’m sort of stuck with what I’ve got.

We’ll probably be here for another two hours at least. Some of us, like me, are just chilling out in the buses while the team deploys the Becky gun in 5 different holes. Once they’re done, we have to move the seismic line, then shoot the same 5 holes again. It seems to be going smoothly though. We’ve already done 4 (possibly 5) of the first 5, out of a total of 10. Once we’re done, we head to Kuytun where we spend the night. It looks like we’re already more than halfway there, so I may have a bit more time this evening to locate internet cafÈ and do some shopping.

There’s discussion that we’ll be able to do both the Bogdashan mountains and the Erdo Qiao market in Urumqi on our last day in Xinjiang. But I’m thinking that at least one of those will be dropped. Probably Bogdashan. I wouldn’t mind that as much as missing the market. Surely, the mountains will be beautiful, but I’d rather have one chance to really buy some Uyghur stuff.

Shihezi is a very Chinese town. I’m expecting that Kuytun will be the same. It’s quite different from the towns in the northern Tarim basin. Those were at least half Uyghur and most of the farmers I saw were obviously not ethnic Chinese. Kuche may well have been the most heavily Uyghur town we’ll be visiting.

5:49 pm

So much for my estimate. We’ve just now finished the seismic line and are movin on.
It took longer than expected for a number of reasons. Starting from the most recent reason and going backwards:
We had to do 48 hammer-hits at each geophone along the line to get reflection seismics (as opposed to refraction lines, which you can see better with the higher energy pulse from the Betty). We involved the Chinese students and a number of them got into it. But it was still a long process to get the plate set up, signal back to the computer team to arm the system, hit the plate, and confirm the acquisition of data. It, and much of this process, would have been much easer with small radios or Motorola talkabouts. Why we didn’t bring them, I have no idea.

Second reason: We got into a bit of an argument with the Chinese. It’s become obvious to us that one of the ‘professors’ on the trip, a so-called “Professor Li” is more likely a communist party bureaucrat sent to watch over this little trip of ours. The evidence is manifold. He rides up in the front car with our professor and the real Chinese geology professor, Prof. Lu. He shows absolutely NO interest in the geology or the work we’re doing. He’s fat and balding, as you’d expect an aging Chinese bureaucrat to be. He’s also the source of all our problems. By problems, I mean being told, after we’ve already deployed our equipment that we have to stop what we’re doing. It happened in the Tarim with the laser and the GPS system. And it’s sort of happened here. Appparently, they weren’t aware that doing a seismic line involved explosives. Or they consider the Betty, which as I’ve said looks like a pogo stick, is actually a gun which apparently are forbidden in Xinjiang. The charges look like shotgun shells and probably have the same explosives in them…but there’s no shot or bullets. How they can be ignorant of this, how they could care, and how it could take them an hour or more to speak up and say something is beyond the realm of logic. I grant that I may not have the full story, but I do know that this Li guy chased Nathan around as he was trying to load the Betty and kept trying to grab the shell away from him. JP is as frustrated as we all are. I mean, they applied and WERE GRANTED permission to do a seismic line in this area. What the hell?

Finally, the first reason for the delays is that at first we had something like 30 people trying to help. In laying out the geophones, it no doubt made the process go quickly. But when we were trying to give hand and arm-wavy signals back and forth (remember the lack of radios) people kept getting confused. Plus, there’s only so many signals you can make with your arms over long distances. Raise one, raise two, make a hgh x, make a low x. That’s about it…and we didn’t even use all of those.

So. We’re continuing along this side road on our way to what we’ve been promised is a “Spectacular” outcrop. We shall see. AT least the clouds came in and the afternoon was pleasantly cool.

The acid holes in my pants are getting bigger.

Sunday, July 2, 2006 11:30 pm
Hotel in Kuytun, Xinjiang

A word about dishes and hotels.

We’ve experienced approximately 10 Chinese dinners since being here. Each one has been slightly different. Different dishes have been served which range from a tomato / scrambled egg concoction to whole fishes to soups with inedible bits of bony meat to delicious spiced meats. Yesterday’s meal in Shihezi and the night before in Urumqi were, by common consensus, the best we’ve yet had. The worst, in my opinion, has been the formal banquet with the Tarim oil company. Too many obscure things which I suppose are delicacies. Still, I did get to try the ‘thousand year old’ eggs – an oddly textured pickled egg with a yellow yolk and a transparent, gelatinous, brownish albumen.
All of these dinners except a very few were served ‘family style’. Eight or ten people sit at a round table with a large revolving glass plate. Dishes are placed on that and you take what you want to your own small plate with chopsticks or a small Asian spoon as it comes around to you. Some dinners, they’ve brought out one dish at a time, slowly, so each dish gets decimated (or left untouched, depending on its suitability to the American palate) before the next one arrives. Another way is to have many dishes brought out in rapid succession.

Tonight, we experienced the extreme version of the latter style. Not an excessive number of dishes in total, mind you, but way more plates than the area of the table could handle. They were served on round plates, very large soup bowls, shallow glass (think pie-pan) vessels, and a long, elliptical one with a tail for the whole fish. Wouldn’t be so bad, but they kept moving things around ineffectually trying to get the damn plates to fit. Ultimately, they ended up stacking several at the intersection of three other plates. The platter of watermelon sat on top of the soup until we removed all the mellon wedges and they took the plate away.

I think that either the wait staff at these hotels should move a bit more slowly in getting the food to us (I mean, we’ve spent our longest day in the field and were ravenous – we were eating as fast as we could and it STILL wasn’t fast enough) or they should study the matter in careful detail and figure out the most efficient delivery and packing arrangements for the dishes they’re serving.

That, or they should invest in hexagonal plates.

Now, onto the hotels.
All of the hotels we have stayed at have a number of idiosyncratic features in common. I’ve already mentioned the whispy shower curtains and the various styles of bathroom. Other commonalities include:
Wall-mounted AC unit. Not typical of the ones found in America – these are 1 x 3 foot rectangles about 6” deep mounted high on the wall, operated by remote control (which has anywhere from 4 to 18 buttons, all written in Chinese).
Night stand between twin beds with master control switches. These include dimmer knobs for the sconces above each bed, and such things as “room light”, “corridor light”, “tv”, “floor light”, “desk light”, and (my favorite) “do not”. We’ve figured out that this activates some sort of “do not disturb” signal. But I prefer to think of it as the Douglas Adams variety: “Do not push this button.” A sign lights up saying, “Do not push this button again.” Whee.
A wall-mounted slot in the hallway just inside the door which says, “Insert Key for Power.” There’s a small switch inside that activates power to the whole rest of the room. You can’t get any of the other lights or the television to work unless you insert your key here. Actually, any plastic card will do, and I’ve used my Caltech ID a number of times when I go out (‘cause I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let that AC unit go off.)
Hot water boiling pot. Good for boiling tapwater if you didn’t bring bottled water to drink in the middle of the night. Also good for making tea. But some of them appear to not have been used or cleaned in years and would probably make you worse off than if you just drank the tap water straight.

Of special interest is that the last few hotels we’ve stayed at have had these features in common: 1) pretty red-shaded lights, 2) physically attractive, young Asian women wandering the halls, and 3) strange, unsolicited phone calls at various hours of the evening. We’re convinced we’re staying at semi-brothels. Or at least hotels with a very friendly staff. Brian has had several come to the door when I’ve been out asking him, “Ni hau ni hau ma?” Which apparently means, “Hello. Do you want?” The phone calls are similar.

I’ve taken to answering all such phone calls with, “Penguin?” (an inside joke amongst us Xinjiang trippers that I’ll share with you at a later date.) Brian answered the last call to our room this evening with, “WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT FROM ME?!?“

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Friday, 10:43 am. June 30, 2006.
Road 314, approximately 100 km north of Korla

We’re on our way to Urumqi. We have three geological stops today with a diversion into the Turfan basin (which contains the lowest non-submerged spot in Asia). It’s a cool day, somewhat humid, with a variable overcast cloud covering that forms a nice ceiling on the landscape. Horizontal visibility is good and I can see mountains in the distance whose tops disappear into the mists.

The basin just north of Korla, whose name I can’t recall at the moment, is quite green. There’s a good deal of agriculture lining the roads and extending as far as I can see to the horizon. Many stands of poplar trees border the various land plots and it’s all very peaceful and pastoral. Quite a sudden change from the dustier, drier environment of the northern Tarim.

I’m starting to long for a real Western breakfast. We have hard boiled eggs at breakfast, but otherwise my palate cannot distinguish between morning and evening meals. Indeed, a number of the dishes are exactly the same. Sure, they’re quite good. Pan-fried tofu, eggplant, cucumbers, all in various types of moderately spicy sauces, noodles, and numerous steamed or fried dough dumplings (with or without fillings). It’s not quite like dim sum – many of them have no fillings at all. There are, I presume, there to allow us to soak up the sauces on our plates. It’s all quite greasy.

I want bacon. Eggs over medium with toast. Ooohhh – eggs Benedict! Heck, even some cereal with milk and a glass of real orange juice. When I get back, I’m definitely going out for breakfast.

I’ve finished reading Stephen J. Gould’s “The Flamingo’s Smile”, his fourth collection of essays. I’m not onto Jared Diamond’s “Why is Sex Fun – the evolution of human sexuality.” I enjoyed the former and am enjoying the latter, but I came across an interesting juxtaposition. One of Gould’s essays attempts to debunk (or at least, call into question) the ‘well known’ tale of certain spiders and praying mantis eating their mates either during or immediately after copulation. In Diamond’s book, published something like 10 years later, he uses the example of sexual cannibalism in these species explicitly and in considerable detail. Now, Jared’s an accomplished researcher, and I’m sure he’s familiar with Gould’s work. So what is going on? Gould DID say that much research was lacking and that which was available was limited and somewhat inconclusive. So perhaps in the decade since his essay and Diamond’s book the practice has actually been confirmed. Can somebody who’s closer to the Internet than I run a wikipedia on this one? Now I’d really like to know.

Saturday, July 1, 2006. 7:00 pm
Shinezi, Xinjiang

Happy Canada Day everyone.

So. We left Korla and headed back to Urumqi. It was a very long day of driving, made longer be the fact that we had a significant side-detour to the flaming mountains on the north side of the Turpan basin. We didn’t really stop any any towns, just various road-side pit stops and the field sites. The Flaming Mtns. were beautiful, and had some awesome looking formations.

We arrived in Urumqi sometime around 10pm. We didn’t stay near downtown, but at a hotel far on the western edge of the city. I suppose such a thing facilitates our travel to the west the following day, but so far we haven’t stayed anywhere near the center of the cities we’ve been to. Pity, cause they’re usually the more interesting areas.

Actually, looking back over my Silk Road, Xi’an to Kashgar book, I’m realizing how much of this territory we’re NOT seeing. Lots of lakes, rivers, waterfalls, city centers, bazaars, ruins, etc….remnants of the Silk Road and the present-day life of the people are passing us by. Or rather, we’re passing THEM by as we drive lickety-split from one city to another. Occasionally, we stop at a field site, far from any people, for an hour or more. But our interactions with the locals have been mostly our free evenings in Korla and Kuche.

Last night in Urumqi, most people stayed in and watched the Germany vs. Argentenia World Cup game. I have a feeling we’ll be watching a lot of the game tonight, even though we’re supposed to get an early morning start to avoid the heat of the day.

We made a stop along one of the anticlines on the north side of the Tien Shan today as we began skirting west along the southern end of the Junggar depression. It was quite ridiculously hot. Additional hotness was experienced by me, sitting, as I do, in the front seat of the bus. It usually gives me a nice view out of the front wind-screen. But when driving West into the setting sun, the raw wattage falling onto my body tends to overwhelm the feeble attempts of the bus’ air conditioner.

I’ve got a number of thoughts, opinions, and other such ‘bloggable’ tales to tell, but none of them stand our particularly at the moment and I’m anxious to see if I can find an internet cafÈ. So, for now, signing off.

Sunday, July 2, 2006 7:30 am
Shihezi, Xinjiang.
Yet another hotel.

My recent international travels have shown me many new things. I’ve seen architecture, clothing styles, standards of living, and cuisine different from that which I was used to. One of the most striking things, though, has been the various styles of bathroom.

Speaking both about WCs and the bathrooms where you shower, I’ve seen quite the gamut. Greenland had a sort of dorm-style bathroom with individual compartmental rooms for toilets and showers. These were complete rooms with locking doors and light switches. The shower rooms had a small anteroom with a sink and some clothing hooks. A step up and you’re into the shower area. A flimsy curtain separated the two, but was completely ineffectual at keeping shower water out of the anteroom. The shower also drained VERY slowly.

In Copenhagen, our room at ZLEEP had a combined toilet / shower. Not only that, the sink and shower were practically the same thing. A diverter nozzle on the sink sent the water through a flexible hose to a hand-held shower head. A small curtain between the sink / mirror and the toilet prevented the latter from getting too wet. However, the wall-hanging position of the shower head pointed directly at the door to the room. I found out that if you didn’t take the head off and use it as a hand-held unit, LOTS of water got under the door and onto the all-weather carpet in the room. They should have designed a better seal.
The whole ‘bathroom’ was about 10 square feet.

In China, they do things a bit differently. Differently, but the same. The showers, for one, vary from regular bathtubs with regular shower heads to a small suspended water heater and hand-held shower head hovering over a fully tiled bathroom. Curtains usually exist, but they even more diaphanous than the ones in Greenland.

The toilets…well…if you’re in a hotel, you get a real toilet on which you can sit down. Most anywhere else, it’s a trough (occasionally separated by low partitions) or a rectangular hole cut into the floor. In higher-class places, the trough is continually flushed with water. At most road-side pit-stops, the hole just leads to a stinking pile below. Think of national park toilets and you’ve got a much classier version of what we have here. Toilet paper is a special commodity, most hotels only give you about 1/4 of a full roll… but at least you can flush what you use. At pit-toilets, you either throw the used tissue into a waste basket or onto the pile. Either way, a significant stench can build up.

Also, the hotel bathrooms here. They’re not really messy, they’re Meth-y. If you’ve seen the movie “The Salton Sea” which is about speed-freaks, or the movie “Saw”, which featured a rather hideous bathroom, you’re getting an extreme version of these. They’re grungy but not dirty. You could scrub that grout for 3 weeks and it’d still be brown and mildewy. Tiles are missing, the lighting is awful, pipes are exposed, and the ‘amenities’ of soap, shampoo, etc. are below the level of Motel 6 (that is, if Motel 6 actually gave you those things, which they don’t).

Sunday, July 2, 2006 12:41 pm
Anjihai Anticline, Xinjiang
We’re in the middle of doing a seismic line. This involves deploying 48 geophones along a special cable, connecting them all to a computer, and firing a specially built device, called a ‘Becky gun’ into holes in the ground. The becky gun looks like a pogo-stick with a shotgun shell in the base. You bury it, cover it with a plate, then hit the top with a rubber mallet to set off the charge. Also, the whole sensing apparatus, with attendant computer, is powered by an external battery. I mentioned before the lack of battery we were experiencing; this was mitigated by the purchasing of two very large car batteries this morning before we left Shihezi.

While acting to help out setting up the line, I carried the battery from the bus to the deployment site. As a result, I now have numerous small holes in my field pants and have completely destroyed my GPS division t-shirt. Battery acid leaks. Bad.
Fortunately, I don’t seem to have any burns on my skin (not even my hands) and I’m incredibly thankful that this didn’t happen while I was wearing the camouflage pants I’d bought in Copenhagen. Sure, I could have Jan buy and send me another pair…but that would suck. As it is, I can keep wearing the pants for a while longer, though they’re going into the trash as soon as I get home. I only brought two pairs of pants (in an effort to back light) so I’m sort of stuck with what I’ve got.

We’ll probably be here for another two hours at least. Some of us, like me, are just chilling out in the buses while the team deploys the Becky gun in 5 different holes. Once they’re done, we have to move the seismic line, then shoot the same 5 holes again. It seems to be going smoothly though. We’ve already done 4 (possibly 5) of the first 5, out of a total of 10. Once we’re done, we head to Kuytun where we spend the night. It looks like we’re already more than halfway there, so I may have a bit more time this evening to locate internet cafÈ and do some shopping.

There’s discussion that we’ll be able to do both the Bogdashan mountains and the Erdo Qiao market in Urumqi on our last day in Xinjiang. But I’m thinking that at least one of those will be dropped. Probably Bogdashan. I wouldn’t mind that as much as missing the market. Surely, the mountains will be beautiful, but I’d rather have one chance to really buy some Uyghur stuff.

Shihezi is a very Chinese town. I’m expecting that Kuytun will be the same. It’s quite different from the towns in the northern Tarim basin. Those were at least half Uyghur and most of the farmers I saw were obviously not ethnic Chinese. Kuche may well have been the most heavily Uyghur town we’ll be visiting.

5:49 pm

So much for my estimate. We’ve just now finished the seismic line and are movin on.
It took longer than expected for a number of reasons. Starting from the most recent reason and going backwards:
We had to do 48 hammer-hits at each geophone along the line to get reflection seismics (as opposed to refraction lines, which you can see better with the higher energy pulse from the Betty). We involved the Chinese students and a number of them got into it. But it was still a long process to get the plate set up, signal back to the computer team to arm the system, hit the plate, and confirm the acquisition of data. It, and much of this process, would have been much easer with small radios or Motorola talkabouts. Why we didn’t bring them, I have no idea.

Second reason: We got into a bit of an argument with the Chinese. It’s become obvious to us that one of the ‘professors’ on the trip, a so-called “Professor Li” is more likely a communist party bureaucrat sent to watch over this little trip of ours. The evidence is manifold. He rides up in the front car with our professor and the real Chinese geology professor, Prof. Lu. He shows absolutely NO interest in the geology or the work we’re doing. He’s fat and balding, as you’d expect an aging Chinese bureaucrat to be. He’s also the source of all our problems. By problems, I mean being told, after we’ve already deployed our equipment that we have to stop what we’re doing. It happened in the Tarim with the laser and the GPS system. And it’s sort of happened here. Appparently, they weren’t aware that doing a seismic line involved explosives. Or they consider the Betty, which as I’ve said looks like a pogo stick, is actually a gun which apparently are forbidden in Xinjiang. The charges look like shotgun shells and probably have the same explosives in them…but there’s no shot or bullets. How they can be ignorant of this, how they could care, and how it could take them an hour or more to speak up and say something is beyond the realm of logic. I grant that I may not have the full story, but I do know that this Li guy chased Nathan around as he was trying to load the Betty and kept trying to grab the shell away from him. JP is as frustrated as we all are. I mean, they applied and WERE GRANTED permission to do a seismic line in this area. What the hell?

Finally, the first reason for the delays is that at first we had something like 30 people trying to help. In laying out the geophones, it no doubt made the process go quickly. But when we were trying to give hand and arm-wavy signals back and forth (remember the lack of radios) people kept getting confused. Plus, there’s only so many signals you can make with your arms over long distances. Raise one, raise two, make a hgh x, make a low x. That’s about it…and we didn’t even use all of those.

So. We’re continuing along this side road on our way to what we’ve been promised is a “Spectacular” outcrop. We shall see. AT least the clouds came in and the afternoon was pleasantly cool.

The acid holes in my pants are getting bigger.

Sunday, July 2, 2006 11:30 pm
Hotel in Kuytun, Xinjiang

A word about dishes and hotels.

We’ve experienced approximately 10 Chinese dinners since being here. Each one has been slightly different. Different dishes have been served which range from a tomato / scrambled egg concoction to whole fishes to soups with inedible bits of bony meat to delicious spiced meats. Yesterday’s meal in Shihezi and the night before in Urumqi were, by common consensus, the best we’ve yet had. The worst, in my opinion, has been the formal banquet with the Tarim oil company. Too many obscure things which I suppose are delicacies. Still, I did get to try the ‘thousand year old’ eggs – an oddly textured pickled egg with a yellow yolk and a transparent, gelatinous, brownish albumen.
All of these dinners except a very few were served ‘family style’. Eight or ten people sit at a round table with a large revolving glass plate. Dishes are placed on that and you take what you want to your own small plate with chopsticks or a small Asian spoon as it comes around to you. Some dinners, they’ve brought out one dish at a time, slowly, so each dish gets decimated (or left untouched, depending on its suitability to the American palate) before the next one arrives. Another way is to have many dishes brought out in rapid succession.

Tonight, we experienced the extreme version of the latter style. Not an excessive number of dishes in total, mind you, but way more plates than the area of the table could handle. They were served on round plates, very large soup bowls, shallow glass (think pie-pan) vessels, and a long, elliptical one with a tail for the whole fish. Wouldn’t be so bad, but they kept moving things around ineffectually trying to get the damn plates to fit. Ultimately, they ended up stacking several at the intersection of three other plates. The platter of watermelon sat on top of the soup until we removed all the mellon wedges and they took the plate away.

I think that either the wait staff at these hotels should move a bit more slowly in getting the food to us (I mean, we’ve spent our longest day in the field and were ravenous – we were eating as fast as we could and it STILL wasn’t fast enough) or they should study the matter in careful detail and figure out the most efficient delivery and packing arrangements for the dishes they’re serving.

That, or they should invest in hexagonal plates.

Now, onto the hotels.
All of the hotels we have stayed at have a number of idiosyncratic features in common. I’ve already mentioned the whispy shower curtains and the various styles of bathroom. Other commonalities include:
Wall-mounted AC unit. Not typical of the ones found in America – these are 1 x 3 foot rectangles about 6” deep mounted high on the wall, operated by remote control (which has anywhere from 4 to 18 buttons, all written in Chinese).
Night stand between twin beds with master control switches. These include dimmer knobs for the sconces above each bed, and such things as “room light”, “corridor light”, “tv”, “floor light”, “desk light”, and (my favorite) “do not”. We’ve figured out that this activates some sort of “do not disturb” signal. But I prefer to think of it as the Douglas Adams variety: “Do not push this button.” <you push it> A sign lights up saying, “Do not push this button again.” Whee.
A wall-mounted slot in the hallway just inside the door which says, “Insert Key for Power.” There’s a small switch inside that activates power to the whole rest of the room. You can’t get any of the other lights or the television to work unless you insert your key here. Actually, any plastic card will do, and I’ve used my Caltech ID a number of times when I go out (‘cause I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let that AC unit go off.)
Hot water boiling pot. Good for boiling tapwater if you didn’t bring bottled water to drink in the middle of the night. Also good for making tea. But some of them appear to not have been used or cleaned in years and would probably make you worse off than if you just drank the tap water straight.

Of special interest is that the last few hotels we’ve stayed at have had these features in common: 1) pretty red-shaded lights, 2) physically attractive, young Asian women wandering the halls, and 3) strange, unsolicited phone calls at various hours of the evening. We’re convinced we’re staying at semi-brothels. Or at least hotels with a very friendly staff. Brian has had several come to the door when I’ve been out asking him, “Ni hau ni hau ma?” Which apparently means, “Hello. Do you want?” The phone calls are similar.

I’ve taken to answering all such phone calls with, “Penguin?” (an inside joke amongst us Xinjiang trippers that I’ll share with you at a later date.) Brian answered the last call to our room this evening with, “WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT FROM ME?!?“ <SLAM!> They’ve stopped calling.

Monday, July 3, 2006 3:09 pm
Duhanzi Anticline, near Kuytun, Xinjiang.

This is our last official geologic stop of the trip. We’re spending about 4 hours here and various groups have gone off in different directions to do different kinds of measurements and sample collecting. But those groups still didn’t use all the people here, so a number of us, myself included, were left to go explore the landscape on our own. Again, we’re blessed with low clouds which leave the mountains on the horizon clear, but block out most of the blistering sunlight. Sunburns are still a problem, though.

I daresay this is the most beautiful spot we’ve yet been to. Well, the spot where we’ve stopped for 4 hours is nice, but earlier we had a stop on a beautifully sloping, grassy plain in a gap in the anticline which made a wonderful frame for the southern mountains in the background. This is probably the closest and clearest we’ve been able to see the main part of the Tien Shan. The peaks are lightly snow capped, the clouds are hanging low, and there was a wonderful cool breeze in the morning / noon time.

I walked about halfway up the alluvial fan to our west and went to an old shepherds hut and corral. There was a low stone wall enclosing about half an acre and a steeply sloping hill above. There was no one there – apparently this isn’t the time of year they use this pasture.

We’re staying tonight in Kuytun. Then most of us get up wicked early and high-tail it to Urumqi. We’re actually planning to bypass Urumqi and head to a lake up in the Bogda mountains east of the city. Once that’s done, we’ll come back down, check into our hotel, and then head to the bazaar. We’ve been promised a trip to the Uyghur bazaar in town before we leave. I surely hope we get to do it. I’ve figured out the souvenirs I want to buy. Now I just have to be given the chance to do so.

One night in Urumqi (“… and the world’s your oyster.”) and then we fly to Beijing. We then have an entire free day in Beijing. Not sure how we’re gonna spend that time, but there’s been some talk of going to the Great Wall. Then we take off the following day for Seoul and from there to Los Angeles and home sweet home.
We’re scheduled to arrive at LAX at 3:30 pm on Friday, July 6th (20 minutes BEFORE we leave Seoul!….. yay international date line!)
I belive David’s coming to the airport to pick me up. I’ll be arriving at the international arrival’s terminal. Asiana Airlines, flight 204.

Cheers.

here and not here.

2006-07-01T15:05:38Z

The first time i have unlimited tiem to spend in a damn internet cafe here and I can't get my freaking USB jump drive to work. SO I can't upload the travellogs I've composed. And I can't download any porn to take back to my laptop. dammit.

We've got an early start tomorrow, so I'm making this quick. talk again when I'm in Kunlun.

in Korla

2006-06-30T00:36:02Z

Friday, June 30th , 2006, 12:05 am
Korla, Xinjiang

Yesterday was quite a nice ride up and down the Kuche river. We saw a great deal of the geologic cross-section. We traversed stratigraphy from the Paleozoic all the way up to the Quaternary. That’s over 500 million years worth of rocks. Not all a continuous section, mind you, but it was impressive nonetheless. In particular, various sections of the Triassic and Jurassic rocks were these impressively tilted beds of red sandstone that weathered into some fantastic shapes. One section was even a tourist stop called the Grand Canyon of the Tien Shan. Unfortunately, we only used this as a restroom stop and didn’t do any hiking up the 3.2 km stretch of canyon. If ever I were to come back here, though, I would certainly like to. I got a great photograph of the ‘engrish’ description sign for the place. Among its more impressive slips were the descriptions of ‘cliffs overhanging emptily’ and (get this) the statement that the site was located as such-and-such degrees North latitude and such-and-such ‘degrees of East foot-path’. Yes, you read right. The Chinese word for longitude was translated directly as ‘foot-path’. Whee, fun!

We did not, in fact, end up stopping at any Uyghur villiages. They’re just simple villages, not set up for any kind of tourism. The biggest amount of free trading goes on at the bazaar in Kuche itself. We, a group of 20 odd Americans and 20 more Chinese students would have totally overwhelmed them. And there’s not much we could have bought from them except fruit.

All parts of the drive provided excellent scenery. The last bit driving along the Kuche river through the Quilitake anticline was particularly nice, though the road was very narrow and my confidence in our driver not very substantial given his record so far. But we made it through without incident.

Our last stop was some Buddhist ruins just on the south side of the anticline. Not much to see, but they did have tourist trinkets to sell. I think a few of the girls bought some jewelry.

Funny thing happened while we were there. To understand, you need appropriate backstory. Since we’ve arrived, we’ve been at the essential beck-and-call of our Chinese hosts. They’ve been quite gracefull and haven’t been obtrusive in most ways. But one of the guys assisting the professor has indirectly incurred the wrath of us all. This guy has a small yellow and purple megaphone. It’s a tiny little thing; perhaps better called a ‘kilo-phone’. Anyhow, this device is used on occasion to amplify the voice of the speaker at various stops, though usually it’s not helping very much in those cases. But the designers of this little trinket designed into it a most insidious feature. Pressing a particular button will cause it to play, at quite substantial volume, the love song from some popular Chinese movie…in MIDI.

I can’t do it justice with any text, but trust me, it’s hellacious. And this guy, this ‘assistant’ uses it whenever we’re supposed to get back on the buses. I’ll admit, that when we’re widely dispersed it’s a great tool for getting us back together. But he uses it when a simply stated, “Time to go,” in a moderately authoritative tone would work just as well. The tune is distinctive, and cuts through intervening noise and the nerve cells of your ears with equal efficacy. Pavlovian response guaranteed, or your money back. And boy have we ever been conditioned.

Today, he didn’t even have to go through the whole cycle of the song (about 20 second worth) to get his point across. A mere half-second press on the button, enough to let us hear the first note, and we simultaneously groan, hold our ears, and run for the bus. We’re almost to the point of ignoring it completely, adaptation coming quickly on the heels of maximum annoyance.

But the ‘funny thing’ which I alluded to a few paragraphs back was that while we were at the Buddhist tourist trap (not, as the dangling participle might indicate, a trap for Buddhist tourists) one of our students, Steve, started whistling the ‘recall tune’ in quite perfect pitch… and got exactly the response he wanted. People started moving towards the buses. Amazing. I need to get a mp3 file of this and blast it though the halls of GPS. I’d get lynched for sure.

Last night after arriving back at the hotel and grabbing a shower a bunch of us went off do do our own thing. For the first time in the trip, there was no scheduled dinner, so we were truly on our own. A number of folk walked all the way to the Kuche Old City, which is at least a 2 hour walk from our hotel. We drove through it briefly as we returned to Kuche at the end of the day, and the bazaar looked interesting; but I later learned that in the later evening it was less active, had only a few vendors, and all the food to be had was on the street (i.e. no ‘restaurants’ as such). Rather than go that route, JP, myself, and a number of other students went to a sit-down Uyghur restaurant that the Chinese students had located.

We had an excellent meal. In addition to two kinds of kebabs (both with lamb, but one had meat on the bone, and the other was just meat), there were bowls of noodles with lamb or beef, nan bread, a sour yoghurt, and a fantastic dish of candied, cooked, dried fruits like figs, grapes, apricots, and other stone fruit, as well as walnuts, all in a moderately thin, sweet syrup. Delicious. Certainly the best sweet food I’ve had here, even though it wasn’t desert. Most of the Chinese meals we’ve had have had no sweet offerings at the end at all. Definitely no fortune cookies.

Sleep, then off again in the morning, heading back to Korla. Amazingly enough, we didn’t take any wrong turns on the way out of town (a running feature of our field days, thus far). Our first and only substantial geologic stop was at an exposure of the Yakeng anticline, a newly forming structure at the southernmost stretch of the range. It’s actively deforming, and so holds clues to the physical mechanisms underlying the shortening of the Tien Shan foreland basins. In addition to just telling us about this, we were going to actually use some of the equipment we’ve been lugging around for a week and make some geological measurements.

First, we were going to set up a laser gun to measure the precise curvature and dip of the beds in the exposure. To the best of my knowledge, this went well. The second activity was to set up the GPS receiver base station and get hyper-accurate (i.e. down to the millimeter) recordings of the outcrop shape. This was a total SNAFU. No discrespect intended to anyone involved, but it was an amazing display of unfamiliarity with the equipment and a striking lack of preparedness.

Putting the whole thing up should have taken 10 minutes. I think it’s a pretty good benchmark that when I, a total novice at this technique, was able to provide as much assistance in figuring out how to put it together as the individuals who had been trained on it beforehand. I admittedly have a rather strong knack for intuitive understanding of how things fit together, but when most of the boggle for the team comes from figuring out which cable goes into which hole, I think it’s a pretty level playing field.

Several times during the assembly, it was realized (note that clever use of a non-specific grammatical construction in the fine tradition of Ronald Regan…”Mistakes were made.”) that various critical parts, like the battery, had been left back at the trucks and needed to be fetched out over several hundred meters of increasingly hot desert pavement.

When it was all put together, we found that we didn’t have ENOUGH battery power. Apparently, at all other field deployments of this stuff, a vehicle had been near enough that the 12V car battery could be extricated from the vehicle and used to give the amplifier extra oomph. No such luck here. We sure as hell didn’t pack one from the US and all the vehicles were waaaaaay far away.

To prevent a long story from getting longer, the icing on the whole thing was that after fiddling with this thing for nearly two hours we were informed by the Chinese that the appropriate permissions for the use of either the laser gun or the GPS had not been granted or received (or both) and that we had to stop. Well, we got some data out of the whole thing and hopefully it will be enough (and will be politically insensitive enough for someone to publish it).

So. Filed stop done. Back on the buses, head for Korla. Make one stop on the way at a road-side fruit stand (actually an agglomeration of several) where dried and fresh apricots, dried plums and dates, and some other fruits were procured for the rest of the ride. It’s a good thing too. I’m getting tired of the same old lunch every day.

Lunch menu consists of:
1-2 large pieces of some kind of sweet cake, muffin, or ‘danish’. One day, I had something indistinguishable from pound cake. A nice treat, but not, to my mind or body, a substitute for real bread.
1-2 ripe tomatoes. Yummy, but without salt or pepper or a proper way to slice and serve, they’re both a bit messy and a bit monotonous.
1 hard-boiled egg, sans salt. See above description for tomatoes.
1 packet of salty, pickled cabbage OR 1 Capri-Sun style poke-with-straw pouch of warm milk.
1 long, unpeeled Chinese cucumber.
1-2 meat sticks. These come in two flavors: ‘Vaguely Chicken’ and ‘Barely Beef’. They are not, in fact, meat sticks at all. They’re mostly moist starch, with possibly a little fat, that at some point in their careers have sat atop another box containing boulion cubes and have thereby acquired their subtle ‘meaty’ flavor. I stopped eating them after the third day.
1-2 peaches. Yum. (though not as ‘yum’ as the flat, white peaches that Liz discovered).
1 packet of wet-nap handi-wipes. While not actually very nutritious or even that flavorful, they’re quite possibly the best part of the whole lunch experience: a brief glimpse of the ecstasy that awaits in the form of a low-pressure, drippy shower at the next hotel.

Fast-forward. We’re back at the hotel in Korla we stayed at a few days ago. After dinner, shower, and a brief respite, a group gathers downstairs to go exploring. After we meet up with a random bloke from Michigan (and his buddy from Ireland) who were in Korla teaching English, I break away from the group and attempt to find an internet café. Ultimately, I don’t succeed. But I do take a nice walk around a very large block of the city, eventually ending up on the river-front walk where a great many people are enjoying the evening air. It’s quite a beautiful place, and a beautiful time of day…le bleu heur (apologies for the mangled French spelling). I get lots of looks, no biggie. I walked past a shop selling calligraphy scrolls. Didn’t buy any, but I stopped and admired for a bit.

The far bank of the river (in which some people were swimming) has an elaborate bas-relief of various scenes, and occasionally there were large bronze sculptures with bowls of fire. That, the impressive skyline (for a city so far from most anything else), and the lively nature of the whole place gave me the impression that I wouldn’t mind spending more time here – a week or a month. Kuche, on the other hand, was like an expanded and overpopulated Baker, California: Hot, dusty, flat, and boring. I’m liking Korla better. Too bad we’re only here one night.

After walking most of the way along the river back to the street on which our hotel was situated I came across a public concert of sorts. Various dance troups and singers were performing. I arrived just at the end of a Uyghur dance and unfortunately didn’t get to see much of it. There were no other Uyghur events – just Chinese dancers and singers. Man, was this ever amateur night. The dancers were poorly choreographed (we did better in high school) and the singers were quite impressively bad. Sure, I’m no expert on Eastern music, but these people were not even singing at a semi-professional level. It was like community theater. Some of the dances were comically bad. Two in particular stand out.

The backdrop of the stage was red with the right side bearing some white Chinese characters. The left side was dominated by a giant golden hammer and sickle. I’m already overwhelmed by the socialist sentiments wafting over the audience. It’s really brought forth in one of the dance numbers, though, when 15 women in red work boots, white pants with silver lame stripes down the outer legs, yellow shirts and bright yellow hard-hats come out and do a dance. Rosie the Riveter, meet Yin Wing the Oil Worker. What made it even better was that one of the women had her whole costume but had forgotten her hard-hat. Doh!

The second noteworthy dance was the ‘finale’. This had a cast of about 10 men and 10 women in quasi-traditional costumes, each with a double-sided, double-tapered drum strapped around their neck and resting on their chests. Think the human version of a St. Bernard, but with drums instead of whiskey casks and you get the picture. But instead of actually playing anything on those drums, they all just pranced around and pantomimed as if they were playing things. The recorded soundtrack didn’t even feature drums prominently.
To add to the effect, each of the guys onstage was a slightly different size – thin and wiry to tall and chubby. But they all had on the SAME SIZE COSTUME! Got to see a lot more pale Chinese belly than I really wanted to at that point in my evening’s drinking.
The end of the number featured a main dancer running up a small human staircase of his troupe-mates while pulling a large sheet of imperial yellow silk across the stage. The expressions on the individual ‘stairs’ faces was priceless. “OOOFH!”, “UUUNGHH!”, and, “OH MY GOD!! MY SPINE!” about cover it.

Back to the hotel and ready to bed down. One final thing deserves mention. I bought my first souvenir today. Actually, it’s two copies of the same thing, one for me and one for my friend David. He wanted a cool shirt. I found a cool shirt.
Picture a black polo shirt with prominent lettering in a somewhat art-nouveaux / haphazard way down the left front lapel. Sounds like the sort of thing you could easily pick up at Macys or Target. But, it’s written in the most spectacular variant of “Engrish” I’ve ever seen. Rather than being random English words thrown together in an ungrammatical way, it’s random English LETTERS thrown together in what could have possibly been real words, but aren’t. I’ll conclude this ridiculously long entry with some examples from the shirt. Thoes of you who played the Davinci Code challenge on Google can try to decipher these. Share and Enjoy.

NOFAWO. AIE. WYAN. ITUDCYGFS. EIYA-IE4MCN I’UT WLITASD.
I’UT ITAE I’UT DU
IEYA UIYXJKGSM DUTA.

DLLBE. IN AINEIYA. ILYD.
TAICIEYACDT.

halfway through china

2006-06-29T00:47:00Z

This is the first chance I've had to connect to the internet. I can't reach g-mail, but I can post my accumulated travellogs here. So excuse the LOOOOOOOOng post, read, and enjoy.

China Travellog
Entry 1
Thursday, June 22, 2006 10:49pm
Los Angeles International Airport. International Terminal. Gate 105

So begins the China trip. It’s less than a week since I arrived home from Greenland and I’m already off again. It’s been a whirlwind week of making lists, running errands, shopping, packing, and taking care of various administrative rabbledash. But it has been a manageable set of tasks and on the whole this week has been rather rejuvenating. I owe this last to my wonderful friends who have kept me company 95% of the time I’ve had at home.

David picked me up from the airport and made my first day at home most enjoyable. Then we had a crowd (David, Jasun, Carlo, Mike) over to my house for dinner the following night. Incidentally, it was at around 11pm that evening that my checked baggage that Continental had lost finally made it to my home…approximately 30 hours after I’d landed at LAX from Copenhagen / Newark. I then spent the next few days running around with Mike, having a great time and taking care of essential errands (Chinese Visa being the most important). Then yesterday, Thomas came up, we three went over to David’s for a fantastic dinner and a bit of televised hilarity. Finally, today, I bade farewell to Mike, David came over, we took Thomas to the train station, and David dropped me off at Caltech for my ride to the airport this evening. I just can’t tell you guys how wonderful you all are and how great you made this past week. I feel totally recharged and ready for the trip around the world.

So, a few remarks. The Chinese Consulate for visas and passports was amazingly efficient. It may have something to do with my going there at 9 am on a Monday and again at 12 pm on a Tuesday. Still, I was impressed. It took 5 minutes in line to get my passport submitted for visa approval. Coming back the following day, I presented my receipt after only 2 minutes in a different line, pay my $70 with a credit card, and voila! There’s my passport, with my very own Chinese Tourist Visa. Wow. They do bureaucracy well.

An interesting linguistic note. According to the Consulate website, they are at 500 Chateau Pl. in Los Angeles. But when actually following the directions and getting to the appropriate street, you’re presented with a street sign (stardard, white on vert City of Los Angeles street sinage) which says “Shatto Pl”. Huh.. I wonder which is ‘correct’ according to the city…and which version came first.

So, we’re now at the airport waiting for our flight. We got here around 9pm and made it through everything and to the gate by about 10:20pm. This AMAZES me. Not only because I’ve done international travel before and realize what a hassle it can be… But also because the baggage check in process was a total CLUSTERF*CK!

We were all urged to try to pack light and only take 1 checked bag so that we could fill up our extra checked-baggage slot with the scientific equipment we’re taking to the Tien Shan.
But at no point did someone take charge and say, “You, you’re responsible for this yellow plastic case. And you, you must make sure this tripod get’s checked.” No – we sort of nervously divided them all up for the security check…then people lost track or ignored the principle of multiple check-ins and we had to do the whole process again an the actual baggage check.. And I use the term ‘process’ loosly. It eventually ended up that four of us (out of something like 20) were standing there with our personal bags, one or two pieces of scientific equipment that we’d tagged as ours, and a sea of bags. We could ASSUME that all the other pieces of equipment had been checked. But they don’t all have big “CALTECH” stickers on them, a uniform color, or other means of unique group identification. Lacking that, it would have been nice to have someone who was familiar with all of the equipment to be able to say, “Okay – I don’t see any of our equipment here. We’re good. Head to the gate.” But so far as I could tell, the four of us left there were just…well…kinda guessin’.
Ah well – if we’ve missed something, we’ll do without.

For the moment, I’m hangin’ here. I’ve changed my currency (exchanging both US dollars and leftover Danish Krone for Chinese Yuan), have my bottle of water and energy bars. My laptop is plugged into a wall socket and I’m even able to sit in a comfortable airport chair. I’ll beg you to look beyond the glaring oxymoron at the end of that last sentence and instead marvel at my good fortune. As any inveterate computer-toting traveler knows, power ports are a precious and rare resource at most all airports…and when they can be found they’re in the middle of a thoroughfare, under some pay phones, ANYWHERE but near a chair. As Thomas will tell you, I’ve been lucking out today (got Doris Day parking TWICE!). Hopefully the good karma continues throughout the trip.

Cheers all. Here’s to long flights and sleeping pills.

Saturday, June 24 2006. 1:31 pm Beijing time.

We’ve arrived in our hotel room. For tonight, I’m rooming with Brian Balta, a geophysics grad student in my department, about 2 years my junior. He’s in the shower now washing travel sweat off his body. I’m next.

The flight from LAX to Inchon, near Seoul, South Korea, went surprisingly quickly. I slept through the most tedious part, but was awake for both meals that were served. The first was a choice between Korean Bulgogi or some sort of beef steak. I opted for the Korean food. Breakfast had either a cheese crepe or something that looked remarkably similar to the Korean dinner. I chose the crepe. I good flight all told. Had an aisle seat. TV in the seat in front of me had a number of selections, the most interesting of which was “Eight Below”, the story of the Antarctic sled dogs which get left to fend for themselves over an Antarctic winter. Decent movie, though I’d seen it before.

We arrived in Inchon at around 4:30 am. Getting out to the international transit lounge was easy. It was eerie. The terminal was very clean and modern, rather large, and at that hour of the morning, VERY empty. Also, it was incredibly foggy – you couldn’t see the tarmac from the windows. It all contributed to a general feeling of being in purgatory…or waiting for the Langoliers to show up and devour what’s left of the wasted world. (Stephen King reference, for the interested.)

Short hop flight to Beijing, another meal, and then a total clusterf*ck at the Beijing airport.
Again, we had problems stemming from the fact that no one was assigned particular pieces of Caltech equipment. That, plus the delay of three items (two tripods and an ‘aseismic source’) through oversized baggage contributed to the fracturing of the group. Some went through customs without telling the rest of us and we waited around for 10 minutes trying to figure out where they were. Then Rob had to change his currency at the ATM. Then we got trapped in the sea of people waiting outside customs. Then we had to fit all of us plus the equipent and our luggage on a bus that was about 5 seats or two undercarriage luggage bins too small.

Finally, we get to the hotel after a 10 minute drive, check in with fairly little incident, and Brian Balta and I go up to our room for a quick shower before heading out for a couple of hours in Beijing. (The logic being we need to stay awake for a few more hours to fight the jet lag…and we’ll get a taste of what one part of the city has to offer.)

Sunday, June 25, 2006 5:50 am
Beijing Tian Yi Hotel, room 421

Yesterday was quite neat. We got a group of taxis to take about 16 of us to Tien’anmen square so we could wander around for about 3 hours. That’s not nearly enough time to see the Forbidden City, but one could walk through the square, and through the Tien’anmen and Duanmen gates, and check out the parks on either side of the vast courtyards.

Last week, I was in Copenhagen and climed the spire of a church which was built in 1669. Until today, that was the oldest man-made multi-story structure I’d ever been in. Today, I passed through these gates which are at least 1000 years older than that.

But the juxtaposition of old with new is not as striking here as it was in Copenhagen…it was hard for me to see anything that WASN’T relatively new. Two reasons for that: The Chinese economy is exploding so there’s tons of recent construction. The other reason: we still have significant fog here. The whole city is in a haze; the Beijing version of June Gloom. As we drive towards the city, one building with weird architecture rises after another out of the dull grey haze. And by weird architecture I mean that each one looks quite interesting and some very stunning, but there’s no coherency among them whatsoever. There’s everything from Art Deco, to ultra-modern, to early asian ugly.

The square itself was crowded, but not overwhelmingly so. Brian and I split off from the main group and did our own thing, though we frequently encountered other splinter Caltech groups. Once, I was accosted by some Chinese tourists who wanted a picture with me. Not sure why – either they want photos with foreigners or they liked my Mohawk…or both.

We wandered around the square for a bit, making a large circuit. Then we walked through the Tien’anmen and Duanmen gates. We got all the way up to the gate to the Forbidden City itself, but chose not to go in due to time constraints. Instead, we walked a little bit around the left of the city along the moat. The moat, incidentally, was populated by regular and duck-shaped paddle-boats. Certainly says a lot about the cultural revolution that you’re allowed to buy a ride in a DUCK-SHAPED PADDLE-BOAT in the moat of the FORBIDDEN CITY!

After just a bit of that, we walked back to the front of the city and chose to look into the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen memorial park (a.k.a. Zhongshan Park). It cost 3 Yuan to get in, something less than $1. Still, there were far fewer people in there. The park itself had apparently been around since the 1400s, but had been renovated and reconfigured a number of times. But many very old Chinese conifers were growing there. It was very quiet, peaceful, and the haze which before had seemed to shroud the city give the park an air of isolation and other-worldliness. It was quite beautiful. We wandered around for 2 hours. Very interesting architecture, ponds with goldfish (Coi and otherwise), trees, monuments, statues, and a rather incongruous concert hall with very modern architecture.

I have a few pictures from Tien’anmen square, but many from this park. When we have our next free day in Beijing, I may just spend my time there.

We all came back to the hotel around 7pm and had dinner at 7:30. Dinner was so-so. No really remarkable dishes, at least not for someone who lives so close to REAL Chinese restaurants. But it was hard to get the drinks we wanted to our table.

Crashed hard after dinner and slept well until 5:30 this morning. Now we’re off to check out, breakfast, and then to the airport. I think all we have on our agenda today is to fly to Urumqi, so we may have a chance to go shopping / wandering there as well.

Ready to get my travel on again. Cheers.

Sunday, June 25th 2006. 5:19 pm.
Mini-bus #3
Toksun, Xinjiang, China

We’ve just stopped for a brief bathroom break and a slice of watermelon. Not sure exactly when we’ll be having dinner, but the plan is to drive from Urumqi through the Turpan Depression and stay in Korla tonight. I’m sure we’ll make it, but at the current rate we’re not going to arrive in Korla before 10pm. Many of my travel-mates are just fine with that, though, since the next World Cup match starts at 11pm local time. China has administratively declared itself (as only China can do) to have only one time zone, so the time in Beijing is the same as the time way out here in Xinjiang.

I’m sorry if I gave you all the impression that the luggage claim procedure and customs at the Beijing International Airport was a bit haphazard and poorly organized. No, in fact, it was a paragon of efficiency compared to what we faced in the domestic flight terminal this morning.

Apparently, there are special rules for Chinese airlines. Most airlines allow two checked bags per person and have a maximum weight limit on those bags of something like 40 kilograms. Well, here, the limit is 20. And the restriction is more about total weight than about individual bags. So, in a very seat-of-the-pants sort of way we had to choose the few bags that were way too heavy to even consider carrying on, and those other bags which were somewhat light, but too bulky for any carryon capacity. So, whereas I would normally have checked my hiking backpack and carried my regular backpack on, I ended up with both. Not too much of a problem, really. I had to make sure I put my leatherman tool in one of the bags that got checked, but I knew where that was and affected that change rather quickly.

Others in our group were not so lucky. They, like me, were forced to bring their normally checked luggage. I guess you can’t blame everyone for not immediately thinking, “Ah, I’ve got to carry this through security now – gotta make sure it’s ‘free and clear’ of offensive items.” (which apparently, at this airport, also includes bottles of anything alcoholic – much to my friend Brian’s chagrin, who had to give up a 1 liter bottle of vodka to the security girl. Guess who’s havin’ a fun time tonight!)

So, about a third of us are through security when the problems start to hit. Hey, we’re geologists. We have hammers. Geology hammers – specially designed with a square blunt end and a very sharp pick-like end. We also carry chisels, picks, files, knives, and small bottles of dilute hydrochloric acid for carbonate testing. These, as you might imagine, cause problems.

After a few tense minutes, during which the capacity of our enlisted translators (the two Caltech girls of Chinese background who are along for the field trip as well) was taxed to the limit, we manage to get all the offensive equipment (though NOT the vodka) back through to the check-in counter where Jean-Phillipe manages to find an extra box and has them all checked together.

Of course, after all of this, we arrive at the gate for our 8:50 flight at 8:35 and don’t actually board until 9:10 or so.

We arrive and claim our baggage, to be greeted outside the claim area by a crowd of enthusiastic students from Nanjing University, along with our guide, and Jean-Phillipe’s (hereinafter ‘JP’) colleague professor. This goes VERY smoothly. They have a list already made up of which students are going to be on which of the four mini-buses. We end up with an even mix of Caltech students, Chinese students, and equipment on the buses and we’re off and out of the airport within 10 minutes of leaving baggage claim. Amazing.

Aside: first exposure to Chinese pit-toilets in the baggage-claim bathroom. Mildly disturbing and amusing at the same time. Each has its own individual stall, but the toilet paper is by the sink. You have to use the paper and then throw it away…you can’t flush it or the toilet will clog. Also, the ‘toilet’ (to be polite) is really just an elongated porcelain basin in the ground. It’s at ground level. Do you hear me? You can’t sit on it. You have to squat and push. Hopefully, you have good balance.

Immediately, we’re on the road out of Urumqi. It looks much like I’d expect any moderately sized (2 million people) Chinese city to look like. A number of high-rise buildings mark the downtown area and there’s an obvious impact of nearby rural activity. The only real giveaway, I suppose, is the dual signs in Chinese and Arabic script.

We trek on out and head south. We eventually stop about half an hour out of town at a rest-stop in the middle of a windmill farm. Apparentely, it’s the largest electricity producing windmill farm in China and is funded (at least in part) by the World Bank. While the number of windmills (that I can see) doesn’t compare to the multitude in the Cochella pass East of LA, it is, in fact, more areally extensive – it took nearly 20 minutes to drive through it all at highway speeds. The rest stop ‘toilet’ was even less of one than the pit in the Airport. This was three rectangular concrete holes leading down to a mound below. The stench was awful.

Still, the ride is quite pretty. I’m fairly content with the way the trip is going so far. Though I do hope we occasionally change seats on this bus. The one I’m in now doesn’t have much leg room.

On approaching the town on Toksun in the Turpan depression, we went from a largely desert area (akin to traveling along the 40 from Barstow to Vegas) into a much more verdant and eye-pleasing area. A number of small fields framed the roadway. This was also the first time, I think, that I’ve ever seen, with my own eyes, humans with beasts of burden working a field. No trucks, no tractors. Just a few lone figures with their hooved companions doing the whole agriculture thing. Pretty neat.

We’ve now passed through the Turpan depression, the lowest spot in Asia and are proceeding up the southern spur of the Eastern Tien Shan. They’re quite steep, even at this ‘low altitude’ end.

A final note: at the rest stop in Toksun there were, at the entrances to both the men’s and women’s rooms (which incidentally had iconographic signs, as well as declarations in Chinese and English!), two super-gruesome posters showing actual photographs of people caught under the wheels of huge trucks, their heads wedged between wheel and asphalt, red streaks stretching across the road behind them. I didn’t as for a translation, but I’m guessing these are public service / safety announcements. Something like, “Don’t get super drunk and fall asleep in the middle of the road,” or, “If you need a ride, hail one from the shoulder.” Else it could be some sort of political statement. Still….

Tuesday, June 27, 2006.
8:12 am
Kuche hotel, Kuche, Xinjiang, China.

Yesterday, after something like 90 hours of traveling, we actually stopped and did some geology. It’s taken us a great while to get here, a fact lending credence to the idea of the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility (which we’re within 500 km of right now). Our stop an the Quilitake Anticline was brief, only about an hour and a half, but the features in the rock were quite impressive. I’m given to understand that this particular feature is world famous in the parlance of structural geology. No doubt – it was very impressive.

That was our only real ‘field’ stop so far. We also went to an gas field of the Tarim oil company and saw a few parts of gas mining up close. It was a new facility, only around since 1998 or so. But, coming from Houston, I’ve seen oil and gas mines, wells, and refineries before. It wasn’t the highlight.

We finally got into Kuche around 10 pm last night and went to have a banquet in our honor given by the representatives of Tarim Oil. The food, like all we’ve had so far, has been authentic Chinese (as opposed to Uyghur). I’ve enjoyed most of it. I’d say I’d eagerly partake in over have the dishes we’ve been served again. Many of the flavors are very salty, and the Chinese apparently don’t have a problem with lots of little bits of bone that you have to chew around or through in their pieces of meat and fish. Last night there were two bottles of alcohol on the table. All of the Chinese at our table opted for the red wine. I and one of the other Caltech students at the table tried the Chinese wine – a clear liquid which I think is the Asian equivalent of grapa. It was something like 50% alcohol by volume and had a very pungent, sweet odor. I couldn’t get down more than two small sips of it. For the numerous toasts we were subjected to, I had to fake it and just touch the glass to my lips.

I’m sure you’d all like to hear more about the terrain I’ve been going through. As a geologist, surely I must have a lot to tell about it. It’s true, there’s a lot I could say about the landscape. But unlike my recent Greenland trip, this expedition has covered enough ground to take me from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City. Not easy to say anything unifying about all of it. The mountains have mostly been in the distance. What passes we’ve gone through have been interesting, but unspectacular. Not a lot of views of high, snow-capped peaks except for our pass near the Bogda Shan in the windmill farm. I hear we’ll spend a day going up in the Bogda Mtns. at the end of the trip, as purely a scenic exercise.

One thing that has struck me in most places is the amount of green. I suppose I didn’t excpecet to see that much forest. I use the term ‘forest’ even though what I’m seeing is mostly a monoculture of orderly rows of planted trees. They are too tall to be fruit trees, so I wouldn’t call the stands ‘orchards’. I’ve seen such things in Beijing, Urumqui, Korla, Kuche, and on all the roads between these. Having just read Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” wherein he talks about the deforestation of China, I’m guessing these are efforts by the local people to reduce soil runoff, increase wind protection (very important on the rim of the Taklimakan desert), and provide a timber resource. Though I’m not sure how much of a timber resource these trees would be. Many stands had trees that were up to 5 stories tall…an impressive amount of growth and indicative of a decent amount of time in the ground. But the trees are tall and slender, like poplars, but with more serrated leaves (occasionally palmate, like maple).

It’s now time for breakfast, then we’re off to the field! We’re told that we’ll be staying in this hotel for 3 nights. W00t! We may actually deploy and use today some of the seismic and GPS equipment we’ve been lugging half-way round the world.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Kuche Hotel, Kuche, Xinjiang.
7:42 pm.

We’ve had what amounts to a half-day in the field and a half-day doing ‘culture’. We stopped at an interesting fault-bend fold anticline and spent about an hour looking around and another hour taking samples for OSL. That’s optically stimulated luminescence. Certain minerals can retain electrons in high-energy states after they’ve been knocked off their parent atoms by natural radiation. These high-energy states are meta-stable and can decay back to their ground state with the addition of a little energy…like sunlight. So, if a particular bit of sediment has been buried for a long while and hasn’t seen the sun, an amount of ‘damage’ proportional to the both the time of burial and the flux of local radioactivity accumulates. So, we can sample fine sediments using a technique that doesn’t allow them to be exposed to light. Then, back in the lab, we can administer a controlled amount of light and get a burial age. We do this for two widely separated layers in a section and can get a deposition rate for the whole section (assuming that, to first order, the deposition rate is constant.)

Getting the actual samples required a lot of effort with a pick axe and rock hammers – which also required us getting very, very dusty. I’ve just taken a shower and a ton of griddlies came out what’s left of my hair.

We had lunch and then continued up the road to visit the Kizil Buddhist caves. There are over 300 caves there, most of which have been heavily damaged by earthquakes, local looters (chipping the gold leaf off the Buddha frescoes, or distant ‘looters’ like von le Coq who took away whole sections of them for ‘preservation’ and display in places like Berlin. Still, what remained of the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th century artwork was stunning, and the whole area was surrounded by various little pavilions and a large grove of Mulberry trees (the only plant on which the silk worm can feed) and poplar. Yes, it turns out that nearly all of the tall, slender trees I’ve been seeing have been poplar, just various different varieties from the smooth-leaved ones I’ve seen in the US.

We wouldn’t have had the chance to go to the caves if we’d been able to do a seismic transect today. But apparently, we’ve been denied permission to do the necessary blasting (i.e. shooting the ground with a gun. If you’ve ever seen the original Jurassic Park, one of the early scenes gives a highly Hollywood-ified version of this sort of tomographic profiling.)
So, we’re gonna lug this equipment around until we’re on the north side of the Tien Shan in the Junggar basin and do some profiling there.

Tomorrow’s gonna be a munch longer day with lots of stops (according to the printed itinerary), but we probably won’t spend much time an any one stop.

Other things I’ve learned since being here:
I need a new power adaptor which can handle three-prong (i.e. grounded) plugs, like the one I have for my laptop. Or I just remember to bring the little apple frob that allows you to plug the transformer directly into the wall.

Most postcards you can by won’t be delivered by the Chinese post office – they’re just souvenirs. If you want to post to someone in the US, you should buy a postcard from the post office directly.

Soy ice cream bars taste darn good.

Chinese tour guides are desperate and brazen. This one asked a girl in our group, Valerie of the green hair, if she would ever come back to China and would she be his future girlfriend. We were all quite amused. Valerie was speechless. Well, except for her standard expletive, “Balls!”

I want to buy a traditional Uyghur hat. I didn’t think I would, but they’ve got beautiful patterns. I also want Uyghur food. I can get authentic Chinese food easily in the US…but I’ve yet to sample true ‘local’ cuisine.

We’re off for dinner at 8:30 tonight. Maybe we’ll get some local color. Pity we’re not here on Friday – that’s when the Kuche Bazaar gets happening.

Wednesday, June 28, 2006.
Kuche Hotel, Kuche, Xinjiang.
8:15 am

Last night, after having dinner at a local Chinese restaurant (looked like a banquet hall and had Kenny G playing over the PA system…YUCK!) a group of us gathered around 10 pm to go to a ‘night market,’ a place apparently hopping after the sun goes down where we could potentially get some beer.

Brian, myself, and a Chinese student walked the 2.5 kilometers there, while the rest of the travelers took taxis. The was was interesting – we got stared at a lot! Nothing hostile, but these people have probably seen Caucasians very infrequestly if ever, and I’ll bet they’ve NEVER seen one with a Mohawk. The was was also very dusty. We were walking west, which is the direction from which the prevailing winds blow, so we got a lot of that in our faces. We were also walking along one of the main streets in town – so we got the smell of lots of car pollution. I wasn’t looking forward to walking back.

The night market was pretty neat. It was mostly food that people were selling, but there were some small, portable kiosks set up where kids could shoot small balloons with fake guns and make lots of noise. Nearby, a colorfully lit playground where more children were playing.

After one orbit around, Brian and I found the other Caltech students and joined them for a few large bottles of Chinese beer. Elizabeth had purchased some oddly flat white peaches for a ridiculously low price (something like $0.5 per kilo) which tasted fantastic.

I hung out for about an hour on this pleasantly warm evening before beginning to feel the ache in my bones and needed to get back to the hotel to sleep. About 5 of us headed back; and after checking that Brazil was up 2-0 in their World Cup game against Ghana, I went to bed.

Time for a long day of many field site stops up the Kuche river. Apparently we’ll be stopping at a Uyghur village along the way. Looking forward to that.

A note on Greenlandic Language and Pronunciation

2006-06-10T01:08:30Z

The Greenland Inuit (singular: Inuk), who are actually the sub-groups Kalaallit and Inughuit, did not have writing until about 100 years ago when a German decided to help them create a written language. There are a number of sounds that not occur in English, or at least are not given the status of letters or common consonant confluences.

I’ve learned what I’ve learned speaking mainly with our guide, Kim, who is Danish, though he has lived in Greenland since 1985. He states that he can’t speak Greenlandic, but he can understand others speaking it. Some rules I’ve been able to discern thus far:

- K is pronounced like G
- G is more of a glottal stop than an English ‘G’, pronounced way back in the throat…almost like a K
- T is pronounced like D
- Q is pronounced like K
- SS is a consonant cluster similar to what in English would be ‘SCH’ – sounded with the tongue pressed firmly against the hard palate, and the air whistling around the sides of the tongue past the teeth.
- RL is another cluster which is a very hissy ‘SCHL’. If you’ve seen “Finding Nemo” and remember the scene near the beginning of the movie where Nemo swims out towards the boat away from the reef when no-one is looking and one of his classmates yells out, “Oh my GOSSCH! Nemo’s SSCHwimming out to SSCHee!!!”, you’ll understand what this sounds like. Not lispy, but definitely heavily aspirated.
- dipthongs are pronounced completely. ‘UA’ is sounded like in ‘oo-aah’
- double vowels are slightly (imperceptibly to my ear) longer than single vowels

Examples:
Kangerlussuaq (meaning: Big Fjord) – sounds roughly like “Gan-ker-Schloo-Schooak”
Kalaallit Nunaat (meaning: Land of the People – the Inuit word for Greenland) – sounds like “Ga-laa-schleet Nunat”
Akuliarusiasuup Kuua (meaning: unknown. It’s the name of the sandy stretch of the glacier meltwater stream east of Kangerlussuaq) – “Ah-Goo-lee-ar-OO-si-ah-soup Koo-ah”.
Akuliarusiasuk (the tall hills on the south side of the same sandy wash: “Ah-Goo-lee-ar-OO-si-ah-sook”

I’ve noticed that a lot of words here have many similar parts. It dovetails nicely with the explanation I’ve heard debunking the “Eskimo’s have 40 words for snow” urban myth. It turns out that they don’t have 40 ‘words’ for snow. It’s just that in Inuit, word are easily compounded into new words, like in German. Hence, where we would have a 12 word phrase for “slightly wet, puffy snow that packs easily and is bad for sledding”, they would have one long ‘word’ made of various compounded roots and modifiers that would express the same meaning.

And listening to the music of Chilly Friday, a Greenlandic Rock Band, I’m actually getting to like the language quite a bit. The heavily aspirated consonants are still sticking out, though.

Catching y’all up - Part I

2006-06-08T00:52:13Z

Wednesday, 10:22 PM West Greenland Time
Kangerlussuaq

So, a whole hell of a lot has happened and today (by which I mean yesterday, plus today, plus a little bit of the day before that….it all blends together here) has been very long, very involved, and a lot of stuff worth writing home about has happened. So, I’ll give you a chronological catch-up as best as my memory can provide.

To begin, we land in Copenhagen.

The country looks like a miniature golf course. Rivers, lakes, ponds, islands, little houses…all it’s missing is a windmill and a giant scary clown face with a obscenely long tongue and the illusion would be complete. Didn’t see much of the city, but it airport is very cool. The passport check-in line was very efficient, though you ultimately ended up going through about 5 airlock-type doors and turnstyles before getting to baggage claim. Scenes from “The Bourne Identity” kept going through my head. So, we’ve arrived, and we’re in a hurry. We have to get our baggage, re-check into Air Greenland with those bags, go through security, and get to our gate. We had about 55 minutes in which to accomplish this. Obviously we made it because I’m here now, but it was something of a close call. It would have gone faster if the gate where we arrived and the departing gate of Air Greenland hadn’t been in an entirely different terminal than the Air Greenland check-in counter. What’s more, our arriving and departing gates were RIGHT NEXT to each other… ah well, such is life with airport security.

So, we get on the plane, all sweaty and straining, and I’m sat in the middle of a 4 seat row with 3 strangers while the rest of my party is up a head of me in a center row with only 3 seats. Ugh… This is bad news. Not only do I not get an aisle seat (which I usually prefer), but I can’t even see out of the windows, the plane being in a 2 x 3 or 4 x 2 arrangement of seats. The flight begin as normal and was unremarkable…except that the airplane safety briefing was this animated feature delivered in spoken Greenlandic with subtitles in Danish. (Lonely Planet says that most TV programs in Greenland are dubbed in Greenlandic and subtitled in Danish…because Greenlandic words are too long to make good subtitles.) So. I read a bit more of my book, listen to some music, eat the meal the provide (which was actually quite good) and go try to sleep as much as I can. It works, because when I wake up some time later, we’re descending into Kangerlussuaq.

We walk from the plane to the terminal and immediately upon entry, after passing the drug sniffing dog, I’m pulled aside and placed behind a black curtain with some other passengers, a few more of whom trickle in as the plane continues to empty. Apparently, they do the random searches here AFTER you get off the plane. Unfortunately, I chose to sit in the wrong corner of the holding area and was the last person to be searched. No big deal, and nothing at all to be nervous about…but a noteworthy experience nonetheless.

Of course, they could have taken their sweet old time with it. It took at least another 25 minutes for our bags to come through. Though it’s the largest in Greenland, Kangerlussuaq airport is NOT that big. The luggage should have been out in less than 2 minutes. Apparently, they were in the process of training a bunch of new policemen and drug dogs, and so were doing thorough, instructive inspections of the bags back behind the carousel. Occaionally, a curious dog not quite clear on his obedience duties would poke his head our and / or walk onto the public side of the carousel. Cute.

Thankfully, Kangerlussuaq (Airport code SFJ, very close to SFO, and named thus for the town’s old Danish name: Søndre Strømfjord) was our final destination, so we didn’t have to worry about other connections or luggage transfers.

Our hosts from KISS (Kangerlussuaq International Science Support, administered by VECO Polar) met us at the airport including our quasi-official guide for the trip, a man named Kim “Safety” Peterson. I suppose “Safety” is a good name to have in a potentially harsh environment such as this! So, Kim et al. load us up into a truck and drive us across town (which takes about 2 minutes at 40 kilometers per hour…it’s a SMALL town). We get our room keys, have our initial conference about the week’s activities, and then, FINALLY, we’re able to drop our luggage, unpack, and partake in a much needed shower, shave, and tooth brushing. Feeling human again, I make use of the KISS wireless internet to re-establish contact with the outside world and get my bearings before we head out to town for a quick tour. The tour doesn’t take long, but Kim points out the post office, the airport café (where we grab a meal a bit later on), the general store, the ‘Christmas Store’, the swimming pool, and the bowling alley. Kangerlussuaq is the Greenlandic equivalent of Club Med. Since this whole town used to be Bluie West Eight, a US military outpost from WWII until the end of the Cold War, it’s got a lot of amenities as befits such a base. We also go to the VECO polar holding buildings and verify that our shipped equipment has all arrived safely. We acquire a few more items (generator, large tent, fuel cans) from VECO and are ready to head out.

The tour completed, we return for an hour and a half sleep, which did the body a LOT of good…though I still hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in a bed since Saturday night in Los Angeles. (That is, if you can call the events at Spa Night ‘sleep’ ;-)). Finally, we drive over to VECO, meet up with our heavy equipment mover, and load up to go out to the ice.
The mover is a two segment, track-driven, snowcat-looking thingy which gives a very bumpy ride, but can navigate just about any terrain of rocks, water, ice, and snow. They should send one of these to Mars. It would be awesome!

That’s all for now. More about the trip to the Ice, the ICE itself, and our first day of experiments later.

The beginning of the Longest Day

2006-06-06T01:14:47Z

Monday, 11:08 PM West Greenland Time.
Kangerlussuaq.

We’ve just spent half a day out on the ice cap getting our camp set up. We spent an entire day before that on airplanes traveling here. I haven’t slept in a bed in over 18 hours. Come to think of it, I haven’t slept in 18 hours. I can loose consciousness on a plane, but whether it’s the 3 degree recline or the close proximity of smelly other people…but I wouldn’t call it sleep.

So much has happened today, and I’m so tired, that I’ll have to report most of the happenings in a subsequent post. Tomorrow’s gonna be a busy day too – probably our first day of drilling if all goes well. *Finger’s Crossed*

I’ve been taking tons of pictures, and even a movie of the snowcat negotiating some impossibly steep hills. Somehow I’ll find a way to post them.

But for now, I’ve just enjoyed a much-needed makeshift meal of pasta, onions, kippered herring, and some unnamed, pungent cheese. Tomorrow, I try the reindeer goulash.

Other facts of note:
The Copenhagen airport is beautiful and (mostly) efficient
Saw two live reindeer and a male musk ox today.
It’s now 11:08 pm local time and the sun is still up.
Things are f*cking EXPENSIVE in Greenland.

On my way to Mars, via Greenland

2006-06-05T14:51:04Z

I can see dawn creeping over the eastern horizon. It’s been a long day of traveling, and there’s still lots more to go. Oded was mentioning previously that he’d often had to take long trips which are subdivided into two legs; a condition worse than one single long trip.
I could debate the merits of that, but his point that, “You get on the plane, you fly, you get off the plane…you want to be done. But no, you’ve got to get back on and do it again.”
Well, we’re in the middle of the second of three such long-durations legs.

Looking at a map, it is indeed absurd to go all the way to Copenhagen and then fly back to Western Greenland. But hey, that’s what you got to do if there’s no direct service.

So. I got up today around 4am. Finished getting my last things together at home (mostly addresses if I have the chance to send postcards), saying good-bye to David, and going to pick up Kevin in South Pasadena. The trip to the airport, check-in, and really the whole flight thus far has been pretty problem free. I was able to buy a dedicated charging station for my new video iPod (THANK YOU, DAVID!!!) in Newark, I’ve gotten reasonable amounts of food throughout the day, I’ve exchanged $100 US for approximately 500 DK, and I’ve read nearly half of Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”. Oh, I’ve also watched the first episode of “Prison Break” on the iPod. Damn cool show!

The toughest part, or at least the most stressful, is coming up. We have a scheduled hour and a half layover in Copenhagen before we take off for Kangerlussuaq. That’s gonna be hard to manage, because we’ve got to deplane, claim our luggage, go through customs, change terminals (I think), recheck our luggage on Air Greenland, and board the plane for SFJ. Not a lot of time. Oded and perhaps Hermann will be going on ahead to try to hold the plane while Kevin and I claim all of the baggage (8 bags including three large military surplus duffels and a large aluminum case).

To compound the difficulty, we sat on the tarmac for nearly half an hour in Newark before taking off. I didn’t notice much of it because I was trying to read or sleep. But the upshot is that we’re scheduled to get into Copenhagen 35 minutes late. That’s cutting it CLOSE!

Ah well. Perhaps I’ll have to spend an extra day in Copenhagen. Can’t be all bad. ;-)

In-flight movie over. Digital map up. Looks like we’re just past the halfway point in our flight, We’re south-southeast of Iceland, and we’ve crossed the Mid-Atlantic ridge.

Other facts of note: I’ve got an empty seat to my right. Horray.
The woman checking boarding passes in Newark looked EXACTLY like my friend Cara Hanes in Los Angeles.
Kevin wasn’t on the list for Vegetarian meals and so didn’t get much of a dinner on this flight.
My neck is still giving me some problems, but I’m popping my mid and upper back about once every 20 minutes….so the tension isn’t really building up.

I wonder where the hell I can post this where people will read it. It’s times like this that I wish I had a more vibrant ‘blogging’ presesnce. Perhaps friendster, yahoo 360, and orkut could hold these. Don’t think my LiveJournal account is still active at all.

For the benefit of those following along at home, the next chapter or two will have some summaries of why the heck we’re going to Greenland in the first place.

Measuring Mass

2005-07-25T04:05:06Z

So, I'm in the process of testing and working out the kinks in my experimental setup to measure diffusion coefficients of water vapor through porous media under conditions of martian surface temperature, pressure, and atmospheric humidity. The trick to believing my experiments is repeatibility...If I can use a static porous sample and get the same diffusion coefficient to within about a factor of 10 in a series of three experiments, I'll be very, very happy. But that's proving to be frustratingly difficult. And in total, I've been working on this problem for well over a year now.

To determine the diffusion coefficient, D, I need to know three other numbers: 1) thickness of my sample, 2) gradient in vapor density across that thickness, and the flux of vapor caused by the density gradient. Item 1 is really easy - you use a ruler. Item two involves two separate measurements- the density above the sample and the density below. We're assuming a linear density profile with height, and that can be justified mathematically. To get the number above, I use a hygrometer. to get the number below, I measure the temperature of the ice (my source of water vapor) and calculate a saturation vapor denity over ice at that temperature. Number 3 is apparently the hardest, though you wouldn't think as much. Flux is simply mass flow per unit area per unit time. So, if I monitor the mass of the sample, ice, and caddy over a long time, I should be able to get a mass loss rate that can be turned into flux.

To ensure that the mass transport is caused mostly by diffusion and not another process such as advection, the actual concentration of water vapor needs to be small, say less than about 5-10%. To make that happen, the temperature has to be low, about -30 C at least. But this means that even with a very dry chamber atmosphere that the rate of mass loss will be very slow. So, to get a reasonable signal, I need to run teh experiment for at least 12 hours, the first six of whach are so the chamber can come to thermal equilibrium. But even with that much time, the mass lost is less than 1% of the total mass of the system...and it's turning out to be really hard to extract a good number.

The problem is noisy signal. Strain gauge load cells are inherently noisy, even at low temperatures. the S/N ratio in constrained by the output of the cell, wich is usally on the order of milivolts per volt of excitation. So even just sitting there I get systematic erors on the order of plus or minus 1 gram around a median value. I can average over all those points and a long base line to get a very accurate median value...but that isn't a good way to extract trends, even if they are linear.

So, I need either to find a way to reduce the noise on the line from the load cell I have or find a load cell or mass monitoring technique that can meet the following constraints:
It must give high enough signal to noise to extract linear trends over a short temporal baseline.
It must be able to operate in moderate vacuum at low temperatures.
It must be able to handle a total load of about half a kilogram, possibly up to a full kilo (ice and dirt are heavy).
It must not cost an exorbitant amonut of money.

ANy suggestions?

Planetary Scientist's Weblog Clearinghouse

2005-07-20T05:33:34Z

I've got quite a few things to take care of these days. So setting up a blog is hardly the most efficient use of my time. But I was struck recently by how useful blogs could be to my current and future career.

Through my best friend from high school, Meredith, I get some first-hand experience of just how much time some people spend reading and writing blogs and posting response entries to that which they read. I've known this for some time. But recently, while I was on a research trip to the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile, I kept a detailed blog on the events, people, and science that struck me as newsworthy during the week or so I was down there. I was told by several friends, following my return, that the blog was well written and enjoyable to read.

Well, of course, flattery is always a boost to one's ego, but I was particularly glad to hear it. It's encouraged me to start a new blog here and attempt to keep up with it unlike previous attempts. In addition to being a bit cautious about revealing my personal feelings on-line, I was self-conscious about my own writing style. I've always thought that I write clearly and with good structure and composition, even in my first-drafts (which is what most blogs are anyway...), but I used to compare my blog entries with those of Meredith and felt somehow inadequate. Of course, she's a professional writer who has a superb grasp of HTML and types at about 90 words per minute. She's also damn funny at times. ;-)

So, being told that I did blogging well has given me confidence. But just this evening I attended a talk at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where I do my thesis research, and was inspired to start one up again. The talk was given by George Whitesides, Executive Director of the National Space Society and a friend of mine. Of the many good points he made, he impressed on me the importance of involving the public in space exploration as much as possible. Whether it's engineers at a NASA lab, members of the astronaut corps, or high-up executives, they are all capable of capturing the public's attention and inspiring them to get excited about space. One way I thought would be excellent to do this is through weblogs. People read them, they're easy to make, and the concepts therein spread rapidly.

OF course, in research science, weeks can go by without anything exciting happening. But if you have 5 or 6 people doing different projects, there will be something worth reporting every day, and a digest or other summary would be easy to produce. So, I'm going to try to start a trend...or I'll start this blog and discover than a planetary scientists weblog clearinghouse already exists. Await further details on the research, and occasional blips about my personal life.

CHeers, all.

Troy

candidate for the space party

2003-05-16T19:16:46Z

Yahoo! My application for candidacy has been approved! I am now an official PhD candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Planetary Science.

For those of you unfamiliar with the process (which, I suspect, would include everyone reading this post), candidacy is simply an application to the faculty - you fill out a form with the classes you've taken / intend to take, and have it signed by the division officer, your academic advisor, and your thesis advisor. They then meet and vote/decide. It's not as big a hurdle as my qualifying exams were...but it is teh next step. 

Now all I need's a thesis.

Ha ha ha!

2003-03-16T18:46:43Z

I have a new laptop! It has bells and whistles. And it was free!

Gosh - it's great having a boyfriend who's CEO of a computer consulting company!!

EEgah, Eegah, BONK BONK on the Head!

2003-03-12T17:33:35Z

Sorry for the recent lapse in updates.

Went to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Earned lots of beads and had a great time with George and Neil.
Was in San Diego last weekend to visit Sean and for the Mr. San Diego leather contest, with my friend Sam Bacon won.. GO SAM!
And this week and last has been full of work up at JPL and other end-of-term madness.

In general, this term was really easy, but it's made up for it all in the last week or so.
On a more specific note, I've been working with Matlab again for the first time since fall of 2001...an experience which was entirely unpleasant and frustrating.

Yet somehow this time it was much more smooth and satisfying.

The difference is, in the first case I was asked to do problem sets using Matlab and had to write all the code from scratch. This presumed a working knowledge of Matlab that I did not and still do not possess. The more recent involvement with this package had me modifying someone's existing code.

I know - working with someone else's code CAN be nightmarish - but this individual did a really good job documenting his stuff...even wrote his own help files! 
Well, by this evening the worst part of the week will be over. Then I'll just have to take two final exams (one of which ammounts to little more than a standard problem set) and I'll be on Spring Break! Yay!
Most of which I'll spend here working at the Lab...but I might get away to San Diego for a bit.
Upcoming travel plans:

Washington D.C. (April 26-28)

Boston (sometime in May before the current MIT seniors graduate)

Texas - Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, and (time permitting) Houston: Sometime this summer

New York - Folsom East (June)
And there may be a division field trip to either Iceland or India/Nepal....but that's still pending.

The Incredible, Inedible Hulk...with a tan and blonde highlights

2003-02-18T02:09:08Z

I had quite a nice Valentine's Day weekend. Sean came up from San Diego on Friday and I'd been cooking intermittently since Thursday to make a fantastic 5-course meal.
The Menu:

Scampi Crostini (a shrimp blend on toast with melted Parmesan)

White Bean and Pasta Soup

Beef Roast in Wine with Tomatoes

Simple Salad with Balsamic and Apple Cider Vinegar

Red D'Anjou Pears poached in Chianti
It was well received by both parties and my roommate and I have been enjoying the left-overs for the past few days.
The rest of the weekend consisted of kinky sex, sleeping, making Sean breakfast in bed, shopping, dinner, Mr. Bullet Leather Contest (attending, not competing), sleep, dinner with Sean and my best friend on Sunday, followed by a leisurely stroll through West Hollywood, then a small party at a friends house. In all, a most enjoyable weekend.

Whilst Thomas, Sean, and I were in the Starbucks in West Hollywood preparing to begin our little trek, a most interesting thing walked in the door.

It was quite obviously gay, and certainly had the appearance of being male. But beyond that, there's not much I can tell you other than a significant percentage of this entity's bodily fluid was composed of anabolic steroids.

Without so much as a nod to one another, we all noticed well enough to be completely aware of the subject matter when one of us brought it up about 10 minutes and half a mile down the street. It was THAT obvious.

Surely, gay men have a natural tendancy to look at muscles, but I'm not even sure that's what these were.

The function of skeletal muscle is to permit you to articulate your limbs and perform the complex process of self-locomotion. That functionality appeared to be impared in this individual - due to an unconscionable overabundance of said tissue. He lumbered in the door, having what appeared to be moderate difficulty (or at least expended conscious effort) to open said door.

His mode of walking was rather unusual: a waddling galumph with a significant sway component which, save for his sizable mass and correspondingly low center of gravity, should have tipped him over. I don't believe he'd be able to get a grant from the Ministry of Silly Walks for it, but it was quite distinct.

Combine this with loose white warmups, a tank top with dental-floss shoulder straps, blast-shield mirrored sunglass (not sunglasses - it was a single lens which went from one temple to the other), brilliant blonde highlights, and a skin the color of 'I can't believe it's Caucasian'...and you have the most 'roided out circuit-boy I've ever laid eyes on.
Sean offered to us that he lives, or used to live, in San Diego...whereupon I recall having seen him at a dance club in that very city..in white warmups and dental-floss tank top, mirrored sunglasses (in a rather dark danceclub), and spikey highlighted hair.
His mode of dancing consisted of alternately bending each knee in a highly agitated fashion with occasional leg-shakes, and a lateral tossing of his right forearm as if he were trying to throw a frisbee with a dislocated shoulder.

Sean also related that a year ago, he (and thus most likely *I*) wolud have licked him from head to toe...(provided that he didn't say anything - I shudder to think...)

But that was out of the question now...even with whipped cream, honey, or a really thick protein shake. 
There must be a homosexual converse to anorexia nervosa. Hypomyotic Dementia?
Or maybe a new species: Homosexuals Inadequatia, sub-sub-species musclemania?
i would like to improve my appearance and gain larger and more visible muscles...but it's a continuum, really. And like every population spread, there are outliers.

Speaking of which - I was pissed off that the gym was closed today. There's no class and it's an institute holiday, what else was I supposed to do? I've shot my wad on shopping recently and there's only so much housecleaning one can do!
(I ended up substituting laundry for entertainment)

halax @ 2003-02-13T19:46:00

2003-02-14T03:46:20Z

As promised, here's an interesting little tale from my trip to SF this past weekend.

Those of you who know me reasonably well know that I'm into fetish gear and BDSM play. I have an appreciably sized collection of leather, rubber, and uniforms for someone who's only been collecting for about two years now. But, as with any hobby, you never finish collecting the things you need and I'm always on the lookout for new stuff.
Mr. S is one of the world's largest producers of fetish wear and fetish gear. And they're home store is right in San Francisco...how convenient.

So, naturally, I have to pay homage every time I visit the city. However, the past few times, I haven't really bought much of anything (fetish gear can be expensive!)

This time around, I was with my Dads, George and Neil, and they're always getting interesting things for me to wear, use, or have used on me

During this trip, some of the items purchased were a pair of puppy-mitts (essentially mildly padded bags of leather with strap securely to your wrists and render your digits useless - just like a puppy), a rubber thong (like a jock-strap, but with a strap up the butt - so it's street legal), and a new leather collar and chain leash. 
As with any gay man who's worth his salt, I had to find an excuse to wear or use as many of my new purchases as possible; and the Eagle beer-bust on Sunday provided just such an opportunity.
The interesting, though perhaps anticlimactic, point to this whole story is who I ran into while at the Eagle.
Though we both knew each other to be gay, and he lives in the city, I'd never actually ran into Richard in the city...until that evening. But there i was, in boots, *kneepads*, a rubber jock, rubber tank-top, and a collar...trying my darndest to hold a beer bottle between my puppy-mitted hands...and Richard, my BOSS FROM NASA, taps me on the shoulder and says, "Hey, Troy."

...dot, dot, dot...

Actually, I'd always hoped to run into Richard whilst wearing fetish gear - sort of a directly indirect way to let him know what all I'm into. After all, he is a colleague of mine and there's a strong chance we'll be doing work together in the future. I wouldn't have wanted to if he was a vanilla guy, but according to where he hangs out and his complaints that Folsom Street Fair has become 'too touristy'...I figured it would be safe.

We'll see if he brings it up next time we're by ourselves at a conference. ;-)

"Rain, rain on my face. Hasn't stopped raining for days."

2003-02-13T21:24:10Z

It finally appears to have stopped raining. But it did that last night, too, yet we got another deluge this morning.
I seem to have been stood up for lunch, so I've eaten some of my invented salad with mustard-lemon chicken cooked on my George Foreman Grill (first time using it - it turned out rather well)

the Invented Salad is just a sample of mixed greens with random things from the fridge:

walnuts, pepper-jack cheese, boiled asparagus tips, pepperocini peppers.

drizzled with baslamic and apple cider vinegars and sprinkled with finely grated parmesean.

was quite good. Too bad I didn't have any cranberries or rasins.

Now I have to go to the store and figure out what I'll be cooking my boyfriend for our Valentine's day dinner. Hrm... Shrimp scampi is always a winner, but i think i've made that for him before. Time to do some cookbook hunting.
Stay tuned - funny story about last weekend to be relayed later.

"I like to tape the weather channel so that I can watch it later."

2003-02-13T03:05:06Z

It's been raining for two days solid. Not an unusual thing in inself; and not completly out of the ordinary for southern california in February. But growing up in Houston I always associated heavy rain with lots of Strum and Drang and there's really not that much of it here. Just a leaky faucet in the ceiling of the big blue room (well, it's been grey for two days now) with varying water pressure...no electrical shorts and no explosions.
I'd really like to find a bunch of people with similar facial features and statures, a lot of umbrellas, bowlers, 1920s English gentleman clothing, and some stepladders and make my own Magritte painting...
I've spent some time in the last two days searching the internet for various instruments I'll be needing for my thesis experiments. It's really not as easy at it sounds. There is not, contrary to my expectations prior to entering the World of Science, a giant SEARS catalog through which one can order all manner of standard laboratory equipment.

No, even the simplest thing, like a stirring rod or a plastic dish has inneumerable manufacturers, whose products all differ in very subtle ways.

The obverse problem is not being able to find out if anyone makes a particular device you might need, regardless of the cost.

Case in point: I'm trying to simulate a Martian atmosphere in a near-vacuum chamber - but unlike many previous studies of this nature, I wish to have controll over the humidity in the chamber. Easy enough to find something that'll suck out all the water; slightly more difficult but still possible to find something to maintain one particular consatant humidity level. But well nigh laughable to hunt for a 'vacuum chamber humidity controller' on google. I keep getting either humidistats for in-home use (not nearly accurate enough, and quite cumbersome) or complete chambers for maintaining any desired humidity (useless since I already have a chamber). All I want is the little controlling device that allows such chambers to maintain a humidity level.

Grr...aarrrgghh.....
On a lighter note, the students in my division had a meeting to plan out our Division Sponsored geology field trip. We've narrowed it down to two possible 2-3 week trips:

Iceland or India/Nepal.

Where would you go? Iceland will be pretty much the whole island at various times.
India we would start in Maharashda province (near Bombay) and move north east through Uttan and into Nepal. 

Currently, I'm leaning towards India/Nepal. I could conceivably do Iceland whenever I like and it would be easy; being an industrialized western nation where everyone speaks English. India would always present more of a challenge. 
Especially if we hit the monsoon season. But I don't have to go to India for that.

And the rain continues to fall...
For

"Breathing knocks the wind out of this guy..."

2003-02-12T02:59:19Z

Okay, well, strictly speaking I haven't had the wind knocked out of me. What I have is more long-lived and considerably more annoying because of it. So, I was running every day for the past week - about 20 minutes or 3 miles or so. I was even so dedicated as to get up at 7am on the morning I was due to leave for San Francisco this past weekend and went running in the cold of the morning - something I can't recall ever having done before.

I did it because I knew I wouldn't get much of a chance while in SF - I'd be too busy hanging out with friends, going to the leather bars, bopping around SF shopping, and going to see Cirque du Soleil's 'Varekai', the ostensible reason for the trip.

The plan all along had been to jump right back into my schedule when I returned...
which would have meant running yesterday and today - neither of which happened.

the reason is an unconscionably stiff neck - which has come about for no readily discernable reason.

I was lying on a friend's bed in SF, actually, more sitting up - watching "All About Eve" (a supposed classic of gay camp and required viewing for any card carrying member of the Family - though after watching it, except for a few choice lines, I can't imagine why. I mean, it's good enough - but not nearly so 'gay' as I was expecting).

about 3/4 throught the movie, I noticed a stiff neck developing, and by the end it was full blown. THis has never happened before. Sure, I've gone to sleep and woken up with a stiff neck and said, "gee, I must have slept wrong." BUT NO! This time I was awake! I was fully conscious and have discovered that I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING WRONG! For reasons of its own, the left side of my cranial supporting post said, "thou shalt not turn thy head to the left." ...and I witnessed it all.

of course, true to form, it prevented me from sleeping well at all that night and was considerably worse when I 'woke up' the following morning. It still hurts...and has prevented me from going to the gym for fear of causing myself some real damage. 
Why in the hell does this happen? And what can I do besides heating pads, Ibuprofen, and slow head rolls to make it go away faster? any chiropractors out there? 
Oh, and another thing - this is unlike most other stiff necks I remember having.
The pain is on the left side, but instead of preventing me from turning my head to the right, thereby stretching those muscles, it hurts to turn TOWARDS the pain...most odd.

A slow recovery and a glimmer of hope

2003-02-06T20:26:29Z

It's been a rather difficult week. For obvious reasons. Fortunately, the press of school-work hasn't been too overmuch recently, so I've been able to find lots of time to myself to think. 
I continue to mourn, though the pain is less intense and I can actually read the newspapers without getting bleary-eyed. The week has been a struggle between two opposing forces:

The desire to know as much as possible about the accident

and the avoidance of anything which jerks my emotions around too hard.
With the way the news media operates, that's a virtually impossible task. 
Still, it gets easier. And life goes on.

I've found myself thinking a lot lately about my becoming an astronaut. I occasionally have daydreams about my interviews, or I think about my chances compared to the field of other applicants.

Things may be a little skewed because here at Caltech, I don't think I know of one other person...well, maybe one - but it's just a guess on my part...who actually wants to be an astronaut. Everyone else is content to do their work on the ground.

I don't really understand that. I mean, why WOULDN'T you want to go into space? Yes, yes, I still actually feel legitimate asking that question even in light of current events.

I guess it's been such an integral part of my life and my ambition for so long that I can't imagine ultimately wanting to do much of anything else.
So, how *do* I think I stack up to the others who might be applying the same time I do:

I'll have two degrees from MIT and a doctorate from Caltech

I'm in excellent health and exercise regularly

I have experience in both engineering and science (i.e. I'm not a pure theoretician, and therefore am not afraid of (and actually enjoy) getting my hands dirty in the lab.)

I have a photogenic aspect and enjoy talking to people about my love for space

I'm a moderately charismatic and quite comfortable public speaker

I work well with teams of motivated and ambitious individuals, but can also perform well on my own

And I represent a minority group which as of yet, to my knowledge, has no expression in the astronaut corps. I have actually read somewhere that there has been at least one gay astronaut as of 1992, but who it was, what program they were involved in, and whether or not others knew about it I do not know. Considering where I read it, and the context in which it was places, I'm guessing that whoever it was was quite well in the closet about it. 
Of course, being gay could be interpreted by some people as a roadblock to becoming an astronaut. Yet being the incurable optimist that I am, I have hope that now, and even more so in the future, NASA or future manned space flight groups will see it as, if anything, a public-relations opportunity.

So yeah - the dream is alive in me. And I think my chances are damned good.
Now I just have to pray that there's a program for me to apply to when I graduate in 4 years.

I'm 8 years old again...

2003-02-02T00:58:37Z

...at least, I'm reliving the emotions. Yet as one might expect they're clearer, deeper, and more sorrowful now that I'm an adult with full understanding of the situation.
Whin I was in second grade, we sat down and watched the launch of the first teacher into space. Now, just as they're gearing up to send another one, this happens.

I was driving home from my best friend's house this morning when I got a call from my friend Randy in San Francisco. He wanted to know if I knew any details. It was the first I'd heard of it. After getting home, I turned on the TV (it really didn't matter what channel) and watched the latter half of Bush's speech.

He said that America's human mission to space would continue. I'd like to think so; I'd like to think we won't have another 2 year hiatus. I also hope it lights a fire under whosoever will help bring about the replacement for those 20 year old Space Trucks.

But the Space Shuttle exists to service the ISS, essentially. And the ISS was built for the Space Shuttle to have something to do. This is going to hit both programs pretty hard. 
I guess I'm working through it as well as could be expected. Not knowing any of the astronauts personally, the connection isn't as deep as it might have been. But it's a mixture of sorrow and pain, as well as anger...because this is going to affect my options for the future pretty strongly. It remains to be seen whether or not the effect will be positive or negative.

Several of my friends have called me offering their condolences. I do appreciate that. But many people have also called, e-mailed, or talked to me directly and asked my if I had any *detials* about the accident. AS IF I HAVE SOME FUCKING INSIDER CONNECTION TO NASA'S DISASTER INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE! As if there's a MAILING LIST or WEBSITE which I'm part of which immediately tells you all the stuff you can't fucking read on CNN.com or hear about on TV. 
It's an interesting note on our country's culture and our latent fascination with and appreciation for space that an airliner crashing and killing all aboard gets a few new mentions; and the deaths of 7 astronauts lowers the flags to half-mast.

Surely, I of all people understand the incredible risk involved with going into space, and how tragic it is to have it all end so unexpectedly. But it's also annoying to have the news commetators try to be sorrowful and under-the-surface emotional by pulling on all your heart-strings.

I mean, this fucking guy read "High Flight" while they were showing footage of the orbiter breaking up. Even without the poem, I would have been a wreck. As it was I was bawling my eyes out.
I think the anger has taken over, so I'm going to end this here. But I do resolve one thing...

Until the next non-essential manned space flight happens, I.e. not counting the one we'll need to get the three crewmembers off of the ISS, I will be in mourning.

I will be mourning for the 7 astronauts, I will be mourning for their families.

But I will also mourn our destiny in space - *my* destiny in space.

I need to know it will still be possible for me to, "slip the surly bonds of earth..."