Category:

Transpac––Modern Technology

7/14/2019

When Spawn takes to the water and swims to Key Largo, I –– and some others we know –– feverishly tap the "refresh" button again and again to track the boat's progress.

After a couple of days of this kind of behavior, shore-crew feels as worn-out and raspy as the boys look at the end of the Everglades Challenge.

But that's only a couple of hundred miles ("only"! Listen to me, cool as a cucumber! Ha ha ha.) while the Transpac race runs for a couple of thousand miles. So with the 68-foot Merlin setting sail this afternoon...

Interested parties need to pace themselves. Seven days, ten days? Jeesh. That's a lot of click-click-clicking. That's potentially a lot of sleep-deprived calendar days –– even days set near Hollywood or Waikiki.

But I am happy to say there's a super-cool tracking site that shows all the boats in the several fleets.
Okay, super-cool –– but with a 4-hour delay, and the updates seem to come only every hour or so. So perhaps medium-cool.

Anyway. It allows those of us watching the race to follow the track and to guess at the weather. Plus, the class leaders get a little crown over their name. Which is nice.

Here's the link.

4 Comments

Independence Day

7/2/2019

3 Comments

My favorite line from the Declaration of Independence?

It's not how "we hold these truths to be self-evident" –– even though that is one of the neatest summaries of all time (all are created equal, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness).

Nor is it how governments "derive their power from the will of the governed," which is likewise very elegant.

That initial section endures and continues to inspire.

No, the part I enjoy most is where the reasons for the rebellion from Britain and its king are set out in full and querulous detail. It's a laundry list of offenses, including my personal favorite:

"He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation."*

This is just one of a couple of dozen of reasons that the 13 states agreed to start the Revolution. You can feel the outrage and exhaustion –– though it was written mostly by Thomas Jefferson, the whole document was agreed to by committee.

Committee-approved!

Booyah!

Sadly, other complaints against the King (like this one: "He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or incur miserable death in transportation thither.") didn't make the cut. How different a Republic it would have been had that one made it.

Committee-disapproved!

Sheeeeit!

*Don't recognize these lines? That's okay. National Public Radio broadcasts the Declaration in full every year and you can read the whole thing in a careful ten minutes or so.. Here's a link to our fantastic National Archives transcription.

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From the Middle of the Challenge

3/3/2019

20 Comments

The middle of the state. The middle of the night. The middle of a large pile of gear.

From the middle, ground-control for my Everglades Challenge team seems like a way of life.

It's probably sleep deprivation (I write this at midnight, over a bowl of dairy-free frozen dessert, in between reloading various tracking pages and checking the social media), but here I go again, blearily worrying, along with a clan of like-minded folks as we follow the progress of the 100 or so boats as they paddle, sail, and row down the left side of the Florida peninsula.

For those who haven't been following, here's the overview: The Everglades Challenge is a 300-mile unsupported expedition race put on by a gang called the WaterTribe. Competitors get a WaterTribe name. My favorite skipper –– AKA TwoBeers –– is racing with his childhood pal, the offshore sailing coach for the Naval Academy, Jahn Tihansky (tribe name Moresailesed). They set sail on the first Saturday in March at dawn from Fort Desoto in St. Pete, aboard a boat called Spawn designed by OH Rodgers (Ninjee).

As expected, the WaterTribe tracking site is experiencing some kind of technological version of the vapors.

Raceowl.com is doing better, but it means translating four-digit numbers back into familiar names. Spawn of Frankenscot is 3092, Safety Dance is 2969, Spongebob is 3072, the German guy, Schappi, is 3068, Jarhead is 3154, Puma is 3134, SeadogRocket and BermudaBoy are 3104, Ccock 3043. Et cetera.

Yesterday started for the Spawn team at o'dark thirty, when Jeff and Jahn and I piled into Charlie Clifton's van with yet more piles of gear, and made our way to the beach at Fort Desoto. Where we were met with a whole tribe of people wearing head-lamps and lycra-enhanced fitness clothing toting bales of stuff out to their various watercraft.

The Challenge begins, fiendishly enough, with the competitors needing to push their boats from the high-tide line into the water at the signal at 7 am. Some folks have wallowed in the sand for seemingly hours. Not my fellas!

The launching of the fleet was relatively slow this year –– not much breeze. Still, the moment passes in a twinkling of the eye.

At seven, the beach is packed, by a quarter after, only a lonesome boat or two and spectators are left on the beach.

I don't know what other ground-control people do, but given that Moresailesed was shedding virus and coughing like a consumptive, I cleaned up with a vengeance. Seven loads of laundry, autoclaving the dishes, a possibly unhealthy number of Clorox wipes, followed by a quick nip around to the non-dairy frozen dessert section of my local grocery and a nice cat-nap.

My phone is buzzing more than usual: Spawn has a following, and even with the light wind there's an element of nail-biting suspense. Moresailesed send along a photo from onboard –– roughly, I am thinking, from the spot where they spent some time last year recovering from a bit of excitement.

Evidently the mosquitoes are making an appearance on board Spawn –– last year, the poor devils couldn't make headway agains the wind. Each Challenge is different, I suppose, and a new test of the competitors' varying skills.

20 Comments

Les Fleurs de Quoi?

10/4/2018

2 Comments

"Chrysanthemum" comes from the Greek for "gold" and "flower."

You know these flowers: big tidy pots of blooms that last for ages. They show up for sale in the front of high-end grocery stores and at the big hardware warehouse stores. Mums, as we call them in English. Mums at Halloween, autumn colors for Thanksgiving. In Australia, mums are the traditional flower for Mother's day.

In China, they are the symbol of autumn and purity. The chrysanthemum is the official flower of Chicago. Who knew?

In India, a girl wearing chrysanthemums in her hair is said to bring happiness to her family. And in Japan, they represent longevity. The royal family sits on the chrysanthemum throne. But also –– so I understand after reading one of the Sano Ichiru mysteries by Laura Joh Rowland –– it's a symbol of homosexuality in samurai times. Yeah, don't think about it.

But in France, they are the flower for tombstones. People put them in the graveyard on All Saints.

For years, I have mistakenly believed that Charles Baudelaire's famous book of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal –– a chunk of which I translated in college, for pity's sake –– was both "the flowers of evil" (a metaphor) and also an actual flower: chrysanthemums.

Whenever I saw the cheerful round faces of chrysanthemums, my busy brain would supply the subtitle, "Les fleurs du mal!"

But nope. Baudelaire anyhow wasn't referencing these particular flowers in his poems about the pursuit of novelty and erotic decadence.

How odd: such an infinitesimal and utterly trivial prejudice against an innocent flower, but I have held it for decades. Of course, it's worth remembering that one might also translate the title of that book (which I don't recommend, btw, as fun reading) as "the flowers from evil, or from suffering." Or something.

Anyhow. They are long-suffering and colorful blossoms, no matter what I've mistakenly held against them.

References
https://www.teleflora.com/meaning-of-flowers/chrysanthemum
http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2003/02/02/stories/2003020200110400.htm
https://www.gardeningchannel.com/top-flowers-for-indian-weddings/
http://www.cerisepress.com/04/10/four-translations-from-les-fleurs-du-mal-by-charles-baudelaire

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I Don't Always Waste Time On the Internet...

1/16/2018

11 Comments

But when I do –– oh heckydoodle, who am I trying to fool? Whole chunks of time are left bleeding and helpless in my wake.

I'm not sure even if "waste" is a strong enough verb. "Ravage"? "Murderize"? "Squander"?

But there is so much see –– and do –– out there in the vasty dark of the internet.

Such as, for instance, Google's Arts & Culture selfie app. Thanks a whole heck of a lot, NPR for featuring this on the Two-Way.

Way to lead me down a primrose path!

The idea is that you snap a selfie and then Google –– bless its mighty brain –– searches for matches among its many images of art.

It's nearly instantaneous, and you get a couple of matches, which are...

Huh. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt? O-kaaay.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, my sweet skipper was innocently trying to watch the World Championships of Darts on BBC America.

Is anyone surprised to know that not only is he glued to the television, but he knows the rules of the competition?

And so his 65% facial match is to Robert Louis Stevenson, not an unattractive fellow who certainly shares a certain mustachey something with Mr. Linton.

And with no one else handy in the living room to help me slaughter time, I turned to the way-back files.

I knew I've been scanning photos for a good cause...

My sister the artist as a chilly young offshore sailor of course matches a lovely painterly portrait.

And a photo from the Sunfish Worlds awards ceremony from sometime in the 1990s gives Jeff this match-up with a Union general who has a fantastic moniker: General Manning Ferguson Force.

I wonder if his buddies said things like "Oh, he's a Force to be reckoned with."?

I'd like to be bigger and better than this, but I just kept hoping to find a more flattering match for my own face.

Time, I will not pretend, was laid waste in the mostly fruitless effort.

Portrait of a Man Dressed as a Shepard, Sigh. Portrait of the Danish King Christian. Heavy sigh.

Fine fine fine. I didn't go so far as to put on make-up, which I hope explains why me and King Christian both look a little, um, fatigued.

Still, even when I went way, way, way back, to the passport photos that didn't turn into my first passport –– kind of a funny story. I was pretty sure I had been adopted after the passport office rejected my application MORE THAN ONCE –– guess who Google says I look like?

And what does Eleanor have to say?

I hoped she was the one who said, "If you don't have anything nice to say, sit here next to me."

(Nope, Alice Roosevelt Longworth.)

Instead she offers a non-piffling message from the wide reaches of Google herself.

Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering the strength to stare it down.
From You Learn By Living, by Anna Eleanor Roosevelt p 41

11 Comments

Recommendation Engines

12/19/2017

4 Comments

Social media.

Social medium.

Sometimes it does seem like a carnival trick: the interwebs and their logarithms churn through the ghostly trail of clicks I left in the ether and produces –– eh voila! –– customized marketing offers.

Amazon makes suggestions based on my recent browsing history.

For instance, if I liked those peculiar clunky European health sandals, perhaps I would like to see these other hideous shoe options?

In a word: almost never. Thanks anyhow!

One friend takes advantage of this Amazonian quirk by logging in as his bride and then not-so-idly perusing dirty adult playthings.

Her next shopportunity is marked by vocal outrage and hilarity.

In a Gibsonian twist, this kooky effort to lure customers to buy more is all math; it's called a recommendation engine. I imagine it puff-puff-puffing trying to get up the hill. (P.S., yes, I know he's Canadian.)

Facebook's friend suggestion of the month came with an unremarkable name and a North Country photo. I looked at it for a solid minute, thinking, really? Could it be? The boy who rode my school-bus all those years ago? The ricketty kid who captured flies against the smeared windows of Mrs. Gamble's Bluebird and ate their fresh-plucked wings in what may have been an attempt to impress the girls on the bus? In truth, it did leave an impression.

Again, wow, thanks anyhow!

And don't get me started on the social media's version of "news."

Oh, heckydoodle, it's too late...Believe that when you see another outrageous story about <fill in the heinous-mingus blank> it's not necessarily happening more often.

Perhaps, once upon a cyber time, you clicked and paused for a nanosecond longer on a story in a similar vein. The recommendation engines chug on.

Fer instance, say, based on your engagement with topics like Zionist conspiracies and homosexual conversion camps, the interwebs figure you will probably gobble up an article about lizardy globalists controlling the weather*.

Whereas in a reasonable** world, you should be sent directly to a discussion of Hanlon's Razor.

(*No links because, duh.)

(**That is, a world organized by me. Which is ironic, since recommendation engines try to sculpt a world to my taste. By way of my pocketbook. Full of ugly shoes and strange neighbors from my past. Sigh.)

Want to avoid such nonsense? Don't click on salacious material. Be suspicious. Use a private window when browsing.

And bone up on the basics, like this story on National Public Radio:

"Learning to Spot Fake News Starts with a Gut Check" by Anya Kamenetz

Gah, what a tangled interweb have we wrought. Here's me avoiding it.

4 Comments

15 Amazing Listicles That Will Completely Change The Way...Whatever.

9/1/2017

2 Comments

Even if you didn't know the name –– a combination of "article" and "list" –– you've probably clicked through one of these short articles. They promise valuable content in a compact package, which seems ideal.

But then you go to read it, and suddenly, it's not so ideal.

After all, it's the internet, so when you are prompted to click...and click...and click...and click –– understand that the listicle is less about providing information to you than it is about harvesting your attention for advertising pennies.

I know, no duh, but still, I worked in journalism for years. I write for a living, I edit the crap out of stuff, and I STILL feel drawn to the formula.

Formula? Take an integer + an over-the-top modifier and noun + a promise and Bob's your uncle. Like this:

27 Times Bacon Has Changed the Course of Modern History (Number 3 Will Make You Swear Off Eating in Restaurants!)

via GIPHY

34 High-Def Images of Dust Mites That Will Haunt You Forever

45 Amazing Hacks To Transform Common Household Products Into Creative Table-toppers

It's kind of addicting, actually, once you get going:

35 Things You Absolutely Need to Know about Roqueford Cheese

19 Pathetic Pick-Up Lines That Make Us Fear for the Future of Procreation...which links to 23 Most Ruthless Tinder Snaps

18 Shockingly Images of Celebrities Doing Housework –– You'll Never Guess Who Doesn't Sort His Laundry!

37 Ridiculously Simple Ways to Avoid Political Discussions Over the Holidays –– or any other time (#13 is Genius!)

Kind of addicting? Cripes. Must. Quit. Thinking. This. Way.

7 Horrifying Ways Your Creativity Leads You Astray

via GIPHY

The numbers alone make me stop and think. I consider the cabalistic weight of them: are they prime numbers? is it whenever the data ran out?

And I wonder -– is it better to have
17 of the Most Adorable Hedgehog Videos
or 13 of the Most Adorable Hedgehog Videos?

Trick question: There are not EVER enough adorable hedgehog videos in the world.

2 Comments

This Space Intentionally Left Blank

4/7/2017

0 Comments

A river of words is usually in flood. And while I write about nearly everything, my blogging impulse is toward humor. This spot abounds with absurdities and piffle.

This week has thwarted me.

Not on a personal level, but at the world-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket level. I'm not ready to josh around with words today.

I have high hopes. The sun'll, as Annie would belt out, come out –– tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun... Mashed up, inevitably, with the melancholic fall "Come What May" from Moulin Rouge. Be as kind as you can be out there.

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Everglades Challenge 2017

2/22/2017

7 Comments

The drums have begun to pound. The bagpipes have begun their slow wheezing and skrilling. Piles of camping and survival gear have accumulated. Boats have been readied.

The beach at Fort De Soto has taken a deep, whooshing breath in preparation for the onslaught of small human-powered craft.

The first Saturday of March brings the annual Everglades Challenge: 300 miles of unsupported expedition-style racing down the west coast of Florida, across the Everglades, ending on the Florida-Bay side of Key Largo.

This is the third such WaterTribe adventure my favorite skipper has undertaken. It's the second year for Spawn of Frankenscot, the purpose-built Tampa Bay Expedition boat designed by O. H. Rodgers.

As a requirement of the event, each person has an EPiRB (an emergency beacon) and each vessel has a SPOT personal tracker. They also recommend a snake-bite kit, but that's a whole other story.

A quick overview of SPOT: it's a hockey-puck sized piece of tough electronics that the user can set to "ping" and as long as it has an unobstructed view of the sky, a satellite will pick up the signal and put the user on an electronic map. It also has a "rescue me" and "I'm okay" message that the user can pick as needed. This is the individual ping track for Spawn of Frankenscot and the team of TwoBeers, Ninjee, and Moresailesaid. (In real life, that's Jeff Linton, O.H. Rodgers, and Jahn Tihansky.)

To follow the action from shore as it happens, there are several options.

First is the WaterTribe tracking site, which has dots for each of the competitors and gives a pretty-close-to-realtime picture of the race. It's a touch glitchy. Spawn of Frankenscot's dot has the green Frankenscot head and the skipper is TwoBeers.

A screenshot from 2016's EC.

Spawn of Frankenscot's logo.

And in the interest of a better mousetrap, the competitors are also going to be tracked on RaceOwl, a tracking site that even has a smart-phone app. On RaceOwl, Spawn of Frankenscot will appear as boat number 2755. It's new to me, so I can't say how it will work, but for those of us who hit "reload" a LOT in the middle of the night during the event –– it's got to be good to have an option.

Finally, (and the least immediately gratifying) is the Spawn of Frankenscot Facebook page, which I'll update as I can as I chase the team down the state.

Thanks and fingers crossed!

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Because Science

2/7/2017

2 Comments

What's easier than saying, "oh phoey!"?

Not to be all Pollyanna, but frankly, it's effortless to belittle other people's passions, to simplify other people's problems, and make sweeping generalizations about groups of people that seem different from oneself.

I've done it. We all do it.

But it doesn't make anything better.

via GIPHY

For instance, scientific research.

I recently witnessed someone lathering on about Pointless Research and the Waste of Our Tax Dollars, et cetera. I believe the phrase "Real Job" was used.

This topic chaps my butt. What –– we've learned enough already and ought to stop?

And as if their great-grandparents didn't say the same damn thing about the egg-head scientist working on penicillin, chemo-therapy, seat-belts, gel insoles. Jupiter!

I have faith in the unlikely but happy uses to which scientific research is put.

Witness Biologist Thomas Seely of Cornell University, who won the 2016 Golden Goose Award for his "honeybee algorithm," a description of how bees organize themselves to gather nectar in the world.

What makes the research "Golden" is how Seely's insight has been used to great effect by systems engineer Craig Tovey* to to improve internet traffic flow. Pure science going toward a practical application.

Footnote:
*Craig Tovey was also named in the Award. He was working at Georgia Institute of Technology, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, collaborating with the government of the United Kingdom and big team of other scientists and engineers.

I skip these details on the off chance my readers will finish that above paragraph, but the amount of cooperation and the network of public funding this research involved? It's kind of staggering.

Bees and the internet, who would have foreseen that?

This seems science-wonderful: a biologist working quietly among the hives ends up helping improve the speed with which we check Facebook statuses, hunt Pokeman, read e-mail, and basically get through our connected lives.

The final funding kicker: Craig Tovey connected to Thomas Seely after another team-member heard a National Public Radio feature on Seely's work.

And that? That is one hard-working fractional tax dollar at work.