Post-posting edit - my brother-in-law informs me that this spider is a Giant Golden Orb Weaver aka Nephila Spider. Thanks, Josh.
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Spider
Post-posting edit - my brother-in-law informs me that this spider is a Giant Golden Orb Weaver aka Nephila Spider. Thanks, Josh.
Saturday, 26 November 2011
Learning to read Thai.
Ok, the title is totally misleading. I just managed to navigate my way through the "upload image" process entirely by iconography. Took a few tries but here they are. This is very much an abridge collection. I took more than 2000 photos in NZ and later went through and selected 234 as worthy of showing to others, should they have too much spare time on their hands. Here are six of them. Yeah, it was hard for me to cut it down but you (statistically speaking across the entire population) have an attention span of less than 3 minutes. Hrmph.
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| A Maori wood carving at the Auckland Museum. |
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| A beach in Abel Tasman National Park. |
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| A Takahe. Once thought to be extinct, these burly cousins to the coot (I think) are alive and working on a comeback. The only natural populations are in the Fiordlands of the South Island but this guy lives on Tiritiri Matangi which is a protected island near Auckland that is now home to a number of indigenous and endangered species. |
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| Two things NZ has in abundance. Green. Sheep. I took this picture on our way to see glow worms in the caves of Waitomo. |
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| Milford Sound. The single most spectacular spot in NZ that we visited. |
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| The view from above Routeburn Falls on the tramp of the same name. (Tramp = NZ for hike) |
A few NZ pictures
I was going to post some pictures from NZ but the entire blogger interface is coming up in Thai and my Chrome browser doesn't seem to be translating completely. Sigh. Maybe Firefox will be more clever? . . .
Faucetus bivalvus
Stephen Jay Gould used to write about the popular misconceptions of how evolution works. One of his pet peeves was the "ladder of progress" in which a simple and obviously inept early version gradually becomes refined through roughly 7 iterations (which fit nicely across the front of a t-shirt), all the while aiming for some perfect form (usual a human). My apologies to him for what follows.
Bathroom faucets (or toilet faucets, as I should probably call them down here) have come a long way over the last several decades. To save me spending a couple hours drawing cartoons to illustrate, simply imagine on the far left, a basin with two spouts each surmounted by a valve with four prongs for ease of twisting. To those still giddy over the fact that you have running water INSIDE the house, this probably seems like a real treat. All you need to do is get a bucket and fill it with a blend of the two flows. However, dare you leave the bucket out of the process, you are destined to scald or freeze your hands as you lather and rinse them off. If you're quick, you can alternate back and forth at a rate faster than your nervous system can register temperature and deceive yourself that this set-up is the product of a rational mind.
Next along the line of descent is a slightly more advanced form with ergonomic knobs on the valves instead of those awkward four-pronged devils that seem to grind a hole in your palm when the previous user over-torqued in an effort to quell the drip.
At the third step of progress, a stroke of absolute brilliance - there are still two valves but now only one spout. A desired temperature can now be achieved with minimal abuse to the hands. The scalding and freezing problem is still there in that temperature, for some reason, doesn't instantly adjust and the delay between your knob-turning efforts and the temperature of the water causes an annoying alternation between too hot and too cold. All this can be avoided through a combination of careful calibration of the valve-position to flow-through rates and a bit of matrix algebra but this is rarely done partially due to a lack of familiarity with 2x2 matrix inversion (even though it really is quite easy). I leave both the delay differential equation model and the derivation of the matrix equation as an exercise for the zealous mathematical reader.
The next three steps are more about ergonomics and aesthetics than full blown fitness optimization so I'll leave them, as well, to the reader to imagine as a creativity exercise.
The final and truly magical step brings us to the faucet equivalent of homo sapiens. It is sometimes cited by Intelligent Design advocates as an Irreducibly Complex specimen that could not possibly have arisen by simple random mutation through a series functional intermediate forms. Hot and cold are now so hidden from the user that it is not even clear from the bathtroom-side of things that the water is delivered through two separate pipes. The valve is now controlled by a flip-level that slides side to side, driving the temperature up and down almost as if it were directly connected, telepathically, to your mind.
If you were to check the date on this post and then take a peak a few posts back to my travel itinerary, you might think that this natural history lesson was inspired by my experiences in Thailand. Don't be fooled. Thailand has it's quirks, no doubt, but primitive faucet technology is not one of them. The answer to this riddle lies in a second primitivity of the country that inspired this post. While in New Zealand, I was unfortunately unable to get my USB SIM card to connect to the relatively non-existent high-speed cell phone network often enough to find the time to upload this post.
Bathroom faucets (or toilet faucets, as I should probably call them down here) have come a long way over the last several decades. To save me spending a couple hours drawing cartoons to illustrate, simply imagine on the far left, a basin with two spouts each surmounted by a valve with four prongs for ease of twisting. To those still giddy over the fact that you have running water INSIDE the house, this probably seems like a real treat. All you need to do is get a bucket and fill it with a blend of the two flows. However, dare you leave the bucket out of the process, you are destined to scald or freeze your hands as you lather and rinse them off. If you're quick, you can alternate back and forth at a rate faster than your nervous system can register temperature and deceive yourself that this set-up is the product of a rational mind.
Next along the line of descent is a slightly more advanced form with ergonomic knobs on the valves instead of those awkward four-pronged devils that seem to grind a hole in your palm when the previous user over-torqued in an effort to quell the drip.
At the third step of progress, a stroke of absolute brilliance - there are still two valves but now only one spout. A desired temperature can now be achieved with minimal abuse to the hands. The scalding and freezing problem is still there in that temperature, for some reason, doesn't instantly adjust and the delay between your knob-turning efforts and the temperature of the water causes an annoying alternation between too hot and too cold. All this can be avoided through a combination of careful calibration of the valve-position to flow-through rates and a bit of matrix algebra but this is rarely done partially due to a lack of familiarity with 2x2 matrix inversion (even though it really is quite easy). I leave both the delay differential equation model and the derivation of the matrix equation as an exercise for the zealous mathematical reader.
The next three steps are more about ergonomics and aesthetics than full blown fitness optimization so I'll leave them, as well, to the reader to imagine as a creativity exercise.
The final and truly magical step brings us to the faucet equivalent of homo sapiens. It is sometimes cited by Intelligent Design advocates as an Irreducibly Complex specimen that could not possibly have arisen by simple random mutation through a series functional intermediate forms. Hot and cold are now so hidden from the user that it is not even clear from the bathtroom-side of things that the water is delivered through two separate pipes. The valve is now controlled by a flip-level that slides side to side, driving the temperature up and down almost as if it were directly connected, telepathically, to your mind.
If you were to check the date on this post and then take a peak a few posts back to my travel itinerary, you might think that this natural history lesson was inspired by my experiences in Thailand. Don't be fooled. Thailand has it's quirks, no doubt, but primitive faucet technology is not one of them. The answer to this riddle lies in a second primitivity of the country that inspired this post. While in New Zealand, I was unfortunately unable to get my USB SIM card to connect to the relatively non-existent high-speed cell phone network often enough to find the time to upload this post.
Sunday, 20 November 2011
Australia, impressions
Australia is huge and we didn't really see much of it, at least in the sense of fraction-of-total. It's similar to Canada in a way - a large space with everyone concentrated at the edges. Warmer, though. I think people mostly avoid the middle due to heat and lack of water. We didn't go there because we were kind of afraid we might fall into it and not find our way out. Well, not really but that's certainly a realistic possibility. We met a girl who had just finished her degree in Melbourne and was hiking in NZ on holiday. She had taken 5 months off school at some point and wondered about the outback in a van for the whole time. "Barely touched the surface", she said. The edges have plenty to keep wanderers busy, though. Next time, if there is a next time, we'll go deeper.
The image I had of Australia, from the other side of the planet, really missed the mark. It is a vast country but it is not a land defined by spectacular scenery. At the edges, at least the ones we visited, it is not the desolate unpopulated place I envisioned. In fact, there are parts that felt a bit like rural England, with it's endless networks of small towns and connecting roads. I'm sure the outback is a different experience but I was clearly mislead, at least in part. What shocked me, and Leah warned me about this but it only sunk in once we started touring around, was the wildlife and, in particular, the birds. Why doesn't anyone ever mention the birds in Australia? They are loud and colourful, with some similarities but largely different from those at home, and they are everywhere. That same girl who wandered the outback for 5 months mentioned being disappointed with the lack of wildlife in NZ. NZ is not a bad place for wildlife by any means but we also noticed the contrast. Poor girl grew up totally spoiled. It's like learning to ski in Utah.
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| Moor Hen. Looks just like a Coot with colour added. I think they're really cute. Oh, and then there's the Pukeko and Takahe, which I believe are cousins, but they'll show up in an NZ post. |
The image I had of Australia, from the other side of the planet, really missed the mark. It is a vast country but it is not a land defined by spectacular scenery. At the edges, at least the ones we visited, it is not the desolate unpopulated place I envisioned. In fact, there are parts that felt a bit like rural England, with it's endless networks of small towns and connecting roads. I'm sure the outback is a different experience but I was clearly mislead, at least in part. What shocked me, and Leah warned me about this but it only sunk in once we started touring around, was the wildlife and, in particular, the birds. Why doesn't anyone ever mention the birds in Australia? They are loud and colourful, with some similarities but largely different from those at home, and they are everywhere. That same girl who wandered the outback for 5 months mentioned being disappointed with the lack of wildlife in NZ. NZ is not a bad place for wildlife by any means but we also noticed the contrast. Poor girl grew up totally spoiled. It's like learning to ski in Utah.
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| Bush Turkey enjoying a yummy dried toad snack. Not a beautiful animal. They seem to like hiking (they'll walk right up to yo on the trail and look indignent when you don't step aside to let them pass) and are obsessive diggers. Lot's of personality. Not so bright, though. |
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| King Parrot. Just checking us out from the side of the trail. Very casual. Very bright. |
They just called our flight. Gotta go. More birds later. And then... HOPPERS!
Flights, flights, flights.
"Hello", says Eric to the friendly and relaxed not-so-neurotic-about-getting-to-the-airport-really-early looking woman behind the counter at the hostel's front desk.
"Good evening, how can I help you?" she responds.
"We have a 6:15 am flight tomorrow and would like to reserve a spot on a shuttle. What time would you suggest we catch it?", I respond.
"Well, there's a 3:30 am pickup and a 4:10 am pickup tomorrow. The drive can be anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes so, to be safe, I'd suggest you take the 3:30 am."
Several seconds pass as I consider this absolutely ridiculous idea. "JetStar actually recommends arriving an hour and half early for international - are you sure about 3:30 am?".
"Let me call the shuttle and see what they recommend.... Yes, they agree, 3:30 am would be safest."
As the shuttle pulls in to the airport at 3:45 am, I start thinking about how to design a quick reliable personality test for this kind of situation. All people can be ranked on a neurosis scale with the useful coordinate of "how long before an international flight should you leave for the airport". Surprisingly, Leah scores lower than I do and I am already quite a bit lower than average. Obviously, the woman behind the counter at the hostel is what a statistician would call an outlier at the far opposite end. A common approach to dealing with outliers is to report their existence but totally ignore them otherwise. The trouble is identifying them, and in this case, doing so without seeming rude or overly nosey.
Fortunately, our flight has been delayed until 9:50 am so I have some time to think about the questions that I could casually inject into conversation to diagnose such an outlier. In fact, as we'll be missing our connection in Melbourne to Singapore, we might have an entire day in Melbourne for me to contemplate this tricky problem. Or I could just babble on in a blog post about it.
Oh, and now for the requisite pictures. I took this at the beach on Stradbroke Island. I'm not sure who constructed this diorama or why but I think it's really beautiful. To give you a sense of scale, the hole is probably a bit less than a centimeter in diameter. Explanations welcome. The best I can come up with is a small and severely OCD crab.
Post-posting edit - Later in trip, we saw this sand-ball making in process. It was on the beach in Thailand. Here's a video I took. After a bit of googling, I found out that the crab is filtering through the sand for food.
"Good evening, how can I help you?" she responds.
"We have a 6:15 am flight tomorrow and would like to reserve a spot on a shuttle. What time would you suggest we catch it?", I respond.
"Well, there's a 3:30 am pickup and a 4:10 am pickup tomorrow. The drive can be anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes so, to be safe, I'd suggest you take the 3:30 am."
Several seconds pass as I consider this absolutely ridiculous idea. "JetStar actually recommends arriving an hour and half early for international - are you sure about 3:30 am?".
"Let me call the shuttle and see what they recommend.... Yes, they agree, 3:30 am would be safest."
As the shuttle pulls in to the airport at 3:45 am, I start thinking about how to design a quick reliable personality test for this kind of situation. All people can be ranked on a neurosis scale with the useful coordinate of "how long before an international flight should you leave for the airport". Surprisingly, Leah scores lower than I do and I am already quite a bit lower than average. Obviously, the woman behind the counter at the hostel is what a statistician would call an outlier at the far opposite end. A common approach to dealing with outliers is to report their existence but totally ignore them otherwise. The trouble is identifying them, and in this case, doing so without seeming rude or overly nosey.
Fortunately, our flight has been delayed until 9:50 am so I have some time to think about the questions that I could casually inject into conversation to diagnose such an outlier. In fact, as we'll be missing our connection in Melbourne to Singapore, we might have an entire day in Melbourne for me to contemplate this tricky problem. Or I could just babble on in a blog post about it.
Oh, and now for the requisite pictures. I took this at the beach on Stradbroke Island. I'm not sure who constructed this diorama or why but I think it's really beautiful. To give you a sense of scale, the hole is probably a bit less than a centimeter in diameter. Explanations welcome. The best I can come up with is a small and severely OCD crab.
Post-posting edit - Later in trip, we saw this sand-ball making in process. It was on the beach in Thailand. Here's a video I took. After a bit of googling, I found out that the crab is filtering through the sand for food.
Saturday, 19 November 2011
Itinerary
Reading my first two posts, it occurred to me that blogging the way I'm doing it (partially after the fact) is a bit too much like the movie Momento. Just to straighten it all out for you (and me!), here's a rough outline of where we've been already and when we were there.
Oct 3-4 Bangkok
Oct 6-9 Sydney
Oct 10-11 Blue Mountains (west of Sydney)
Oct 12-13 Lamington National Park (south of Brisbane)
Oct 14-15 Stradbroke Island (east of Brisbane)
Oct 16-19 Melbourne
Oct 20-25 Tasmania
Oct 26-28 Wilson's Promentory (south of Melbourne)
Oct 29-30 Great Ocean Road (west of Melbourne)
Nov 1-2 Auckland
Nov 3 Tiritiri Matangi (island near Auckland)
Nov 5 Rotorua and Waitomo (Central North Island)
Nov 6-12 Northern South Island (Queen Charlotte Sound, Abel Tasman and Nelson Lakes National Parks)
Nov 13-18 Queenstown, Te Anau, Milford Sound and some "Great Walk"ing
Nov 19-20 Christchurch
Nov 21 - off to Thailand...
Holy crap, no wonder I'm so tired. That's a lot of running around.
Hmm, I should include a cool picture. Any guesses what kind of animal this is? I got up early while camping in Mt Field NP (Tasmania) to try to find one. Leah thought there was no chance I'd see one (neither did I, really) so she stayed in bed. Fortunately for her, we managed to spot another two of them later in the trip. Need a hint? It's furry, lays eggs, and uses electrolocation to find it's prey. It is also the most stealthy animal I've ever seen. I knew I was watching it but could barely tell it was there. Moved like an oil slick.
Oct 3-4 Bangkok
Oct 6-9 Sydney
Oct 10-11 Blue Mountains (west of Sydney)
Oct 12-13 Lamington National Park (south of Brisbane)
Oct 14-15 Stradbroke Island (east of Brisbane)
Oct 16-19 Melbourne
Oct 20-25 Tasmania
Oct 26-28 Wilson's Promentory (south of Melbourne)
Oct 29-30 Great Ocean Road (west of Melbourne)
Nov 1-2 Auckland
Nov 3 Tiritiri Matangi (island near Auckland)
Nov 5 Rotorua and Waitomo (Central North Island)
Nov 6-12 Northern South Island (Queen Charlotte Sound, Abel Tasman and Nelson Lakes National Parks)
Nov 13-18 Queenstown, Te Anau, Milford Sound and some "Great Walk"ing
Nov 19-20 Christchurch
Nov 21 - off to Thailand...
Holy crap, no wonder I'm so tired. That's a lot of running around.Hmm, I should include a cool picture. Any guesses what kind of animal this is? I got up early while camping in Mt Field NP (Tasmania) to try to find one. Leah thought there was no chance I'd see one (neither did I, really) so she stayed in bed. Fortunately for her, we managed to spot another two of them later in the trip. Need a hint? It's furry, lays eggs, and uses electrolocation to find it's prey. It is also the most stealthy animal I've ever seen. I knew I was watching it but could barely tell it was there. Moved like an oil slick.
North end of the South Island
After a week on the North Island (I'll get back to that later), we flew from Auckland to Christchurch. Having plans to come through Christchurch a few times, we picked up our 1992 Toyota Corolla with vintage stereo from the A2B rental company (read "cheap") and headed straight out of town. Our target was Picton, a small town on the north coast that serves as a focal point of the Marlborough region and a ferry terminal to the North Island. The region is home to many vineyards (including Alan Scott's, who we met a few years ago in Vancouver) which we largely ignored except for trying out some of their wines with dinners throughout the trip. For us, the main attraction of the region was hiking and site-seeing the peninsulas, sounds and islands. Upon arrival, we stopped in at the local iSite (a cross between a visitor centre and travel agent) and got ourselves booked for two days of "tramping" along the Queen Charlotte Track. Tramping is the NZ translation of hiking but it seems to involve a lot more infrastructure and comfort than in North America. For example, our tramping itinerary included (1) a boat ride across the Queen Charlotte Sound to the trailhead, coincidentally crossing the path of a local pod of dolphins, (2) delivery by boat of our camping gear to our site 15 km up the trail (and gear pick-up the next morning), (3) dinner at an excellent restaurant in the "backcountry" with a gorgeous view across the Sound, (4) another ride across the Sound at the end of our second day out. It was kind of a summer version of what I imagine heli-skiing is like.
We met some interesting people along the way. We spent a day walking with Tamar, a naturopath from Brooklyn, about whose life and family we learned a great deal, and Danielle from Germany, about whom we learned that she wasn't as talkative as Tamar. I also had a nice chat with a young French kid whose English was not as good as my French so I got a little French practice. He was on a two month trip through NZ, powered entirely by foot and thumb. He had covered an impressive fraction of the North Island on foot and was just starting to do the same on the South Island. We bumped into him again in the Abel Tasman National Park (more later...) and were apparently the first ones to explain to him "blisters" which he was starting to find out about through direct experiment with his rapidly aging boots. He reminded me of younger version of another French wanderer I know. We also met a number of birds on the trail, including a Fantail who performed some impressive acrobatics for us but was too quick for me to catch fanning his tail on film and several inquisitive Weka.
Saturday, 12 November 2011
Retrospective
The long-intended blog, now set up. We've been traveling about 7 weeks already. To start from the beginning or just get going with the present? Maybe I'll do both in parallel...
I'm sitting in our room in Queenstown, waiting to fold laundry and then go get some dinner. We flew in this morning from Christchurch. Christchurch was interesting. Our first couple hours back there (after a week in the north of the South Island - more on that later) were spent hunting down a place to stay. We learned that most of the hotel capacity of the city was destroyed in the earthquakes last year or subsequently demolished to be rebuilt with insurance money. What capacity is left has been strained by locals who have finally got insurance approval to level and rebuild their homes and are living in motels in the meantime. In addition, we happened to pick the weekend of a major agricultural show to visit the city. So after three failed attempts on the NW side of town, we headed to a B&B south of downtown to catch the second to last room available for under $200.
The "red zone", which consists of a number of blocks in the center of Christchruch, is still closed although they started running bus tours through last week - a reportedly sobering excursion which we might check out on our return to the city. Our GPS, which has been a great tool since we picked it up in Brisbane, tried desperately to get us to crash through the barriers but we didn't take the drive-through-an-urban-demolition-site-insurance when we picked up the rental car so instead made our way around the edges. We've since learned that much of the splendour and interesting stuff to do has not yet recovered and probably won't for some time.
Queenstown is a former gold-rush centre tucked in between the beautiful Lake Wakatipu and the surrounding mountains. It has a reputation for being the adrenaline capital of the country (world?), being the birthplace of bungy jumping and a favoured venue for skydiving, jetboating and mountain bike downhill among other junky sports. It's surprisingly nice, especially considering what we expected.
Today was a planning day. We're now set for a two day hike on the Routeburn Track with a night at a backcountry hut. The Routeburn is one of the Great Walks of NZ, usually taking 3-4 days. Because of snow and avalanche danger on day 2 (recall that it's mid-spring here), a short helicopter trip is required if you want to do the whole thing (helicopter? really?) so we're only going in to the first hut and then back out the same way (probably what we would have done anyway given out time constraints). After that, we're headed to Lake Te Anau and Milford Sound for more hiking and a possible sea kayak trip around the Sound if the weather is ok.
I'm sitting in our room in Queenstown, waiting to fold laundry and then go get some dinner. We flew in this morning from Christchurch. Christchurch was interesting. Our first couple hours back there (after a week in the north of the South Island - more on that later) were spent hunting down a place to stay. We learned that most of the hotel capacity of the city was destroyed in the earthquakes last year or subsequently demolished to be rebuilt with insurance money. What capacity is left has been strained by locals who have finally got insurance approval to level and rebuild their homes and are living in motels in the meantime. In addition, we happened to pick the weekend of a major agricultural show to visit the city. So after three failed attempts on the NW side of town, we headed to a B&B south of downtown to catch the second to last room available for under $200.
The "red zone", which consists of a number of blocks in the center of Christchruch, is still closed although they started running bus tours through last week - a reportedly sobering excursion which we might check out on our return to the city. Our GPS, which has been a great tool since we picked it up in Brisbane, tried desperately to get us to crash through the barriers but we didn't take the drive-through-an-urban-demolition-site-insurance when we picked up the rental car so instead made our way around the edges. We've since learned that much of the splendour and interesting stuff to do has not yet recovered and probably won't for some time.
Queenstown is a former gold-rush centre tucked in between the beautiful Lake Wakatipu and the surrounding mountains. It has a reputation for being the adrenaline capital of the country (world?), being the birthplace of bungy jumping and a favoured venue for skydiving, jetboating and mountain bike downhill among other junky sports. It's surprisingly nice, especially considering what we expected.
Today was a planning day. We're now set for a two day hike on the Routeburn Track with a night at a backcountry hut. The Routeburn is one of the Great Walks of NZ, usually taking 3-4 days. Because of snow and avalanche danger on day 2 (recall that it's mid-spring here), a short helicopter trip is required if you want to do the whole thing (helicopter? really?) so we're only going in to the first hut and then back out the same way (probably what we would have done anyway given out time constraints). After that, we're headed to Lake Te Anau and Milford Sound for more hiking and a possible sea kayak trip around the Sound if the weather is ok.
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