Alaska Trip: Anchorage (Day 1+2)

Urmi and I just got back from our Alaskan vacation this year, and so I thought it might be fun to write up a bit about our trip. The problem is that we did so much on our trip that a single write-up can't really cover it. I'm going to try to follow things generally chronologically, and see how this works as a trip report sorta thing.

We started our trip by flying from Washington, DC to Anchorage, where we spent two days wandering around the city. Our first stop was downtown. Downtown Anchorage isn't quite like other large cities we've visited; in fact, it reminded me more of downtown Spokane (where I grew up) than anyplace else I've been to. What really surprised me were all the flowers. Although Anchorage is cold in the winter (and not too hot in the summer), it still gets 21 hours of daylight in June. As such, when we visited in August, it was full of flowers -- everything from roses to tulips. The flowers were quite nice and we had a good time walking around them and seeing the bay. We also saw some nice artwork and birds. Since we only had a half day, though, and were still running on Eastern US time, we ended up cutting our walk short and heading home.

The next day we got up bright and early and headed out for a full day of hiking. Our first stop was 'Flattop Mountain', which we were warned was an extremely popular destination among local Alaskans. The hike was supposed to be fairly mild, but ended up being basically a hike straight up a mountainside. We did get some exceptional views, though, and saw plenty of wildlife. One really cool view we got was a look at the tidal flats in the Cook Inlet, just off the Anchorage coastline. At low tide, the outflowing tide creates cool patterns in the marshes. We never made it to the top of the mountain, but we had a good hike. And sure enough, by the time we were done, the entire parking lot was packed with hikers.


Our next stop was the Alaskan Native Heritage Center, which serves as a museum for the history and culture of the Alaskan Native Americans. This was a particularly cool stop, and we quite a bit about the difficult lives that native americans faced (and still face) in Alaska. We had an awesome tour as well, and our tour guide took us around to different model settlements based on the way settlements were built in the various parts of Alaska. The center also had music and dance programs which ran every hour or so.

Our final hike of the day was to visit Eklutna Lake and Thunderbird Falls, both north of Anchorage. Due to a poorly phrased review in our guidebook, we originally thought these were at the same location, but they ended up being about a dozen miles apart. Eklutna Lake is a glacial lake which actually feeds Thunderbird Falls, and it was quite a ways from the highway to Anchorage. As such, it was nice and peaceful, with very few people around. We didn't see any wildlife, but the views were beautiful.

Thunderbird Falls, however, was completely different. The falls is a much larger tourist attraction than even the Native Heritage Center was, so it was tough to get parking and the trail was full of people dawdling along to the falls. The trail passed through some nice forest, though, and with Anchorage's recent rainfall, was completely full of mushrooms. The falls weren't as spectacular as we were hoping for, but they were worth the short hike there.

For more photos, check out my sets on Picasaweb: Anchorage Day 1 and Anchorage Day 2.

NPR's top 100 science fiction books

NPR recently organized a poll of the top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books. The top items on the list are no real surprise (Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker, Ender's Game, Dune), but some of the later items really surprised me. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, for example, rates as science fiction by many scales, but Atwood is not typically considered a science fiction author. Other entries fall square into the "popular fiction" category, such as The Dark Tower and The Stand. Very few of the top entries are recent novels (with the notable exception of The Song of Ice and Fire). Anyways, the blogosphere has already ranted and raved about the list. I thought it may be more interesting to write about the novels on the list that I particularly enjoyed, but haven't seen much discussed elsewhere.

First off, The Vorkosigan Saga. Although it rated only #59 on the list of 100 novels, this series ranks at or near the top of my own personal list of science fiction novels -- or novels in general, for that matter. The characters are brilliantly written and deep, the plots are intricate, and, most importantly, you grow to love the characters and care about what happens to them. The series follows a highly disabled, but brilliant, aristocrat from a military society as he grows to overcome his disabilities and make a name for himself.

Although the series doesn't sound terribly exciting, the sheer force of the protagonist's personality drips from every page. The situations in which he finds himself border on the ridiculous, but this only serves to heighten the excitement. The series is made even stronger by the fact that Bujold frequently reinvents where the series is going. Memory, for example, abruptly takes a military science fiction story and redirects it towards a mystery novel. A Civil Campaign is a regency romance, while Mirror Dance is a tragedy. The mixture of genres may sound confusing, but it allows the characters room to grow and makes them much more interesting. In particular, the three novel sequence, Memory, Komarr, and A Civil Campaign rate among the top three novels I have ever read.

Next, at number 77 on NPR's list, is Kushiel's Legacy. Before I attempt to describe the novel, I'd like to mention the one-liner on NPR's website: Sold into indentured servitude at the exotic Night Court as a child, Phedre faces a difficult choice between honor and duty as she deals with a world of glittering luxury, conspiracy, sacrifice, and betrayal.

One of the comments on the list of top 100 notes that this novel sounds like a Harlequin Romance novel, not a fantasy story. There's a reason for that -- Kushiel's Legacy is a romance story at its core, and is heavily inspired by the romance genre. However, Kushiel's Legacy -- particularly the first three novels in the series -- is not just a romance novel. The story follows Phedre from a young age, when she is sold into servitude and discovers that she has a unique gift for espionage.

The strength of Kushiel's Dart lies in its incredible prose. The world of Terre d'Ange comes alive through the narrator's incredible voice. This is the kind of novel that gets under your skin and makes you feel that you're reading an autobiography. Another strong point is the sheer immensity of the plot. Kushiel's dart starts out with the character being sold into servitude, being trained as a spy, uncovering a plot against the crown, and being betrayed, finally being sold into slavery. In most novels, that's where the first book would stop and the next begins -- not so in Kushiel's Legacy. The story continues for another two thirds of the book.

Kushiel's Dart, however, is not for everyone. The series plays true to its roots as a romance novel, with detailed and elaborate sex scenes. The sex scenes are rarely gratuitous, however, and frequently are quite important to the plot. In some of the later novels, however, they do become disturbing.

There are lots of great books on this list, but these two series I thought were thoroughly excellent books. Kushiel's Dart was a particular surprise to me. I initially picked up the novel on sale via Amazon, and was astonished at the narrative and plotline. I was more amazed when I found myself dying to find out what happened in the remaining five books in the series. The Vorkosigan Saga is more my typical reading material, but I had a similar experience where I had purchased it on a whim and found myself drawn so strongly to the series that I lost sleep reading it.

One thing that I find these series have in common is that neither is for everyone. I know that my wife, for example, would absolutely love A Civil Campaign -- if she could get the context from the previous 9 Vorkosigan novels. However, I wouldn't dream of recommending Kushiel's Dart. Both of these are meticulously plotted series with a lot to offer, but you have to be willing to be drawn into the series.

In short, it's worth while not just to read the heavy hitters on NPR's list, but also the series towards the bottom. I think the next book I read will come from the bottom as well.

Various & Sundry - July 9, 2011

Yeah, been neglecting my blog again, what with moving and all (back in the DC metro area again... hopefully for good). Anyways, several things I've been to write about.

• I took a bunch of good photos at the SF Conservatory of Flowers, Baltimore Inner Harbor and the Fourth of July Fireworks in DC. Lots of fun stuff. Fireworks are a pain in the rear to shoot (with or without a tripod). I wish I knew a better way to practice fireworks shots.
• I am now the proud owner of an Arduino Uno processor, which I bought as part of an experimentation kit from Adafruit Industries. So far, I've made a binary counter and a music box with it (due to lack of musical caliber, the only song I got it to play was Twinkle Twinkle Little Star). This thing is pretty cool, though; it basically gives you a C access to a small number of pins, which you can use to control various hardware elements. My kit also came with some basic sensors (a light sensor, pressure sensor, and a few others).
• Urmi and I bought a Betta fish. She wanted to get a dog (strictly prohibited by our lease), and I was pushing for a cat (also prohibited, plus Urmi hates them). Bettas are pretty, but don't seem to do very much that's exciting (except for hiding from anything that moves).

Geeky Pet Names

So this all started when Urmi mentioned someone she read about in the latest issue of wired who had named their dog MOSFET (Metal-Oxide Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor). The cool thing about this name is that it's geeky, but actually sounds like a reasonable dog name, especially if sounded out rather than spelled. But it got me thinking about other, equally geeky pet names. Here's a few that I was able to come up with. If you don't get these, all that means is that you are not a CS geek.

• A Python named PERL
• BIOS the Hermit Crab (always switching shells)
• Segmentation Fault the cat
• A dog named GDB (chases the cat)

I'm sure there are plenty more potentials out there, but these were a few good ones I was able to come up with on short notice. Add more in the comments!

Computer History Museum

Yesterday, Urmi and I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Since Urmi and I are both a bit geeky (me more than her, although she joked on the way there about naming a pet MOSFET), we had more fun than any two young computer scientists are expected to have without the internet. A scant few miles from Google, the Computer History Museum features exhibits covering 2000 years of computing -- although many of the early computers are only now recognized as computing devices (tools such as abacuses, mechanical calculators, Napier's Bones, etc).


The Computer History Museum (CHM) also features a working example of the Babbage Difference Engine No. 2, invented in the 1800s by Charles Babbage and widely recognized as one of the most ambitious computing devices ever designed. Charles Babbage is one of my personal favorite people in history, and seeing the difference engine in action was well worth the price of admission to the museum. The CHM's Difference Engine is one of only two ever built (the other, at the Science Museum in London, is rarely demonstrated), and it is truly an amazing device. The machine computes the value of polynomials using no more power than a human-operated hand-crank. The internal numbers are stored on vertical columns of gears (like below), and percolate from one side to the other as the user cranks the drive shaft.


Once they reach the end, the Babbage engine "prints" them simultaneously onto a reel of paper as well as a tray of plaster, for use in printing tables of numbers. They had configured the machine to produce a 7th degree polynomial (the largest this particular machine can handle), but the machine could easily produce all sorts of different mathematical series. Babbage originally envisioned the machine as a means to produce tables of numbers without any human mistakes -- mathematical tables, such as logarithm tables, were a specialty of his and he particularly hated finding mistakes in his tables. For more details on Charles Babbage or Difference Engine, see Wikipedia.

The rest of the museum was equally amazing, featuring computers from the Apollo Mission, the Bletchley Park Enigma project, and more. Some highlights are below:


An actual wheel from the Colossus Machine, and one of the only remaining intact parts from a functional Colossus. Although the Colossus machine was not a Turing-universal computer, the Colossus machine was integral to the British efforts to break German encryption in World War 2. However, the machine was a groundbreaking effort at the time, and the fact that its design remained classified (and the blueprints destroyed) kept many of its original engineers from being credited with their work on early computers.


Wiring from the Cray 1 super computer. This was the first super computer, built in the mid 1970s by Cray Research, which is to this day a leader in super computing. The machine itself looks a bit like a piece of office furniture from 1970s, but the internal design is a brilliant work of engineering to maximize the speed at which the early computers could operate. This particular machine was used to simulate atomic explosions, meteorological phenomena and more. I'm glad that computers are not built like this anymore.


Joke napkin provided by an early Silicon Valley startup, showing that the get rich quick nature of Silicon Valley has a long history.


Intel goodie given out to employees -- a keychain containing an actual pentium computer processor, albeit one that failed testing.


A "Furby" from the CHM's artificial intelligence and robotics exhibit. A surprising number of the robots on display in the exhibit were children's toys. I'm not sure if I would describe the Furby as particularly intelligent, but I suppose it was no less so than many of the other devices on display.


The Utah Teapot. Aside from the Babbage Engine, this was the display that I found the most exciting. The Utah Teapot is a widely used graphics primitive used to demonstrate different graphics algorithms, mostly since it's a smooth surface, without texture, but with fairly complicated internal geometry. Early computer graphics algorithms had difficulty with the handle and spout of the teapot. Many libraries for graphics contain the teapot as an included object, and there are dozens of in-jokes in the graphics research literature related to teapots with bizarre textures (fur, leopard print, etc). Of particular interest, the widely used GLUT library has a procedure (glutSolidTeapot) that does nothing but make a model of this particular teapot. This is the original teapot that the model was based on.


An early server from Google, circa 1999. Back in 1999 (when I started using Google), this server would have been one of the ones handling user queries.

For more pictures (but less detail), check out my Picasa Web Album.

Castle Rock State Park

View from Goat Rock in Castle Rock State Park
Yesterday, Urmi and I went for a short hike in Castle Rock State Park, located along scenic Skyline Boulevard in the Santa Cruz mountains. We've hiked in this area before (including Russian Ridge, El Corte de Madera, and Pescadero), but Castle Rock was a bit different. For one, the trail we followed took us through dense forest as well as along the edges of cliffs. In several places, we had to climb over rocks and cross small streams, which was fun but a bit more adventurous than we're used to.

Castle Rock State Park is particularly famous for rock climbing, but we had fun with the wildlife here. The migrating birds are just starting to return to the Bay Area, so we saw several Jays, Sparrows, and even a particularly up-close encounter with a hummingbird. We also enjoyed the fresh wildflowers which are just now starting to open up.


Waterfall along the Saratoga Gap Trail


Wildflowers taken near the top of Goat Rock


Small bird taken during our hike


Close-up encounter with a Costa's Hummingbird. This female flew right in front of me and starting eating from a flower I was taking pictures of. One of the luckiest shots I've ever had.


View of Castle Rock Falls from the top of the falls.

More pictures can be found on my Picasa page.

Death Valley

Death Valley from Dante's Point

I've always wanted to see Death Valley, a national park in the Southern US renowned for its lack of water and for nearly killing a group of lost travelers in the 1800s. Today, the park is well visited, particularly in the Spring when the flowers are blooming.

Urmi and I visited the park last week, but we had the misfortune to arrive during a storm with near hurricane force winds, lots of cold weather, and more. We visited many of the major landmarks: Badwater Basin (the lowest place on North America), Devil's Golf Course, and more. Most of the landmarks in Death Valley have similarly ominous names (Furnace Creek, for example, is famous for frequently being among the hottest places in the world), showcasing Death Valley's famous inhospitality. The scenery, though, creates a spectacularly barren landscape of brightly colored rock, salt fields, and other bizarre sights.


Mesquite Sand Dunes, our first stop in Death Valley, are a set of windswept sand dunes several hundred feet high. This picture shows one of the largest dunes, with the eastern Death Valley mountains in the background. This is something of an iconic shot of the sand dunes.


This picture is surreal once you understand the context. In the foreground lies the Badwater Basin salt flats. Badwater Basin is the lowest location in North America, 282 feet below sea level, and is composed of a several inch thick layer of pure salt. In the background is the tallest mountain in Death Valley, Telescope Peak, at 11,043 feet tall. I would suggest that the hikers provide a sense of scale, but they really don't. Telescope Peak is visible from nearly everywhere in Death Valley. Badwater basin is named as such because water from the nearby springs is salt water, and is not drinkable.


One of our stops in Death Valley took us to the aptly named Devil's Golfcourse, a field of razor sharp salt crystals and rock. Like the Badwater Basin, Devil's Golfcourse is mostly composed of salt, but unlike Badwater, the underlying substance is rock (Badwater is mostly fairly soft soil). The fields were named because, according to our guidebook, 'the links are so nasty that only the devil could play golf here'. Sure enough, the links are full of sharp salt crystals (shaped by wind and rain), lots of holes and miles upon miles of difficult terrain.


My personal favorite picture from our death valley trip. When we went to hike in Golden Canyon, we stumbled upon a Boy Scout troop having lunch. I caught this picture of them enjoying a rest after hiking the canyon.


The day we visited Death Valley was cloudy and very windy, so the weather was quite striking. We saw several lenticular clouds (like these) throughout the day. These were taken from Zebrewskie Point.


On our way out of the valley, we decided to make one last stop at Salt Creek to watch the sunset. The sunset from the valley was phenomenal, due to the weather and reflective terrain.

More pictures of Death Valley available on my Picasa Page.