A HEPA-type air-filtration system for ~$25.

I'm just getting over my allergies -- that were causing me troubles for much of the springtime. It was with this in mind that it made me very happy to see a story about building a cheap air purification system.

To avoid indoor allergens, many doctors recommend using an air purifier with a High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filter. The cost of these machines can run from $75 up to $800 for high-end systems. For those who are looking for a cheaper alternative for high-use rooms such as the bedroom, Terrell offers a do-it-yourself solution at a fraction of the cost. “This is a filtration system that you can put together with items from your local hardware store for $25 to $30 and use in your home to cut indoor allergens by about 90 percent,” says Terrell.

h/t: Inhabitat

Increasing number of strong hurricanes

I'm reading Changing Planet, Changing Health, and I came across a mention of increased number of more intense storms:

Studies over the last five years have shown that hurricanes are getting stronger. In a 2005 paper in Nature, meteorologist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology described a new measure, the power dissipation index, that captures the amount of energy that flows through a hurricane over its lifetime. ... The same year, Peter Webster's team at Georgia Tech University reported in Science that while the total number of tropical cyclones per year stayed roughly constant worldwide, the strongest storms -- category 4 and 5 storms ... -- nearly doubled over thirty-five years.

Then, the figure from the Webster et al paper was presented. However, the data that was included was from 1970-2004. Looking at that, I realized that there was enough of a time interval since the publication of the paper to extend it by another lustrum. While waiting for students, I decided to track down the data for the period of 2005-2009. Using the various hurricane records from Wikipedia (and roughly estimating the lustral hurricane values published by Webster et al), I was able to come up with the following (expanded) graphic:

As you can see, the most recent lustrum was characterized by a slight decline in Category 1 storms, a serious decline in Category 2 & 3 hurricanes, and a very small increase in the number of Category 4 &5 hurricanes worldwide.

Recalculating to collapse the categories into decades, we can look at how many more (or fewer) storms were occurring worldwide during the 2000s relative to the 1970s. From the data, we find that there were 25% fewer Category 1 storms, 10% fewer Category 2 &3 storms, and 91% more Category 4 &5 storms worldwide in the 2000s compared to the 1970s! To quote further from the book about the significance of this trend:

Top hurricane researchers do agree that as the globe warms, hurricanes will intensify, though the total number of hurricanes will remain relatively constant, or perhaps even drop.

While I don't have worldwide data on this, it seems to track with the trend in the record-high-temp-to-record-low-temp ratio over the continental United States over the same period of time does indicate continued warming:

The trends of an increasing number of high power storms corresponds to the expectation of increased magnitudes of storms caused by increasing global temperatures, and the high-record-temperatures across the continental United States corresponds with expectations of larger-scale warming trends that are being seen throughout the world.

What does all this mean? Well:

In 2010, Science published a study by Morris Bender, Tom Knutson, and Robert Tuleya ... [that] concluded from modeling studies that category 4 and category 5 hurricanes will double in frequency in the Atlantic this century because of ocean warming.

And with an increased number of hurricanes globally comes increased incidence of disease outbreaks, famine, and price spikes in commodities (e.g., food, fuel) increasing the likelihood of war (or at least some sort of punitive action by one group of people against another; state-sanctioned or not).

ADDENDUM: The number of storms in the 1975-1979 and the 2005-2009 lustra were both well below the lustral average of ~240 storms/lustrum; '75-'79 had ~206 storms, and the '05-'09 had 217. All the other lustra experience between ~232 and ~270 storms.

ADDENDUM: Webster et al use the term "pentad" to refer to a period of five years, while I prefer the use of the term "lustrum". Looking at the Wikipedia entry for "lustrum", one finds that "pentad" is synonymous, as is "quinquennium." However, "pentad" is a general term that means a group of five things, while "lustrum" specifically means a period of five years. Of course, "quinquennium" also means a period of five years. However, it's a lot more difficult to spell than either "lustrum" or "pentad".

ADDENDUM (06/30/11): I tried to extend the graph to earlier lustra, but soon realized that this might be difficult, since gaps in the data exist on Wikipedia. (The gaps might not be problematic ... if I actually wanted to wade through all the raw data.) Therefore, since I don't want to commit too much more time on this, I'll be leaving the analysis (as much as it's an analysis) as is.

Ring juggling

The sounds of Jerusalem

Jared Diamond: Thoughts on Managing Change

Hurricane Categories: Why are we only using five categories?

In reading books and articles written about a future in which we have to adapt to a certain amount of climate change, one is struck by the consistency of using New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina as an example that illustrates many of the social considerations that future planning must incorporate. This make sense, since we wouldn’t care about the effects of climate change if it were happening elsewhere (i.e., we don’t care about how the climate is or isn’t changing on the planet Xenu, nor how it is affecting what may be living there). This is analogous to the underlying meaning behind the question, “If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” (The question never made sense to me, because I grew up with the “strange” notion that sound is a byproduct of the motion of air, and so it doesn’t matter who may – or may not – be in proximity of any object that makes a sound; it will happen. Considering the implication of the question to be something more than a physical description didn’t dawn on me until my 20s.)

In the last days of August, 2005, the city of New Orleans was hit by the eleventh Atlantic hurricane, named Katrina. It had – prior to landfall – reached a “Category 5” condition, but by the time it made landfall, had diminished to “Category 3.” Still, due to several factors – the greatest of which were undoubtedly the catastrophic failure of the levees, the lack of a city-wide evacuation order, and the systematic loss of buffering wetlands and barrier islands – the city suffered widespread flooding, and the death toll shocked the nation and the world. Many of us know these basic facts about Hurricane Katrina; many of us know additional facts. However, my most recent reading of these facts piqued a question: “In a world that is warmer, how strong might the hurricanes get?” From that, as series of other questions, including, “Why is ‘Category 5’ the strongest category?” or, to put it in another way, “Why are there only five categories?”

Looking online, it is easy to discover the basic facts of the “Category” system (called the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, or SSHS for short): there are five enumerated categories, as well as additional classifications of “tropical depression” and “tropical storm” that below the “Category 1” hurricanes; that Category 1 hurricanes have wind speeds of 74-95mph, Category 2 of 96-110mph, Category 3 of 111-130mph, Category 4 of 131-155mph, and Category 5 of >155mph; and that the system is used by the US (other places may use other systems). Doing a query for the fastest wind speed ever recorded in a hurricane, I found that Hurricane Camille (1969) maxed out the meter at around 205mph; 50mph faster than the minimum for a Category 5 hurricane, which is a much greater interval difference than any other category. True, Hurricane Camille-strength equivalents do not often show up in recorded history, making them a statistical rarity, and it would therefore make sense that their consideration might not have been deemed “necessary” at the time when the SSHS was conceived in 1971 – even though it was derived after Camille.

As a side note, looking at the historic hurricane data from NOAA, there have been 77 weeks – in the corrected data record – during which there has been a hurricane with wind speeds at or exceeding 155mph, 48 weeks of which exceeded 160mph, 12 weeks of which exceeded 170mph, and 3 weeks of which exceeded 180mph. As of the writing of this entry, the NOAA site has records for 1949-2010 for the Eastern North Pacific and for 1851-2010, with possibly some years missing (i.e., check the website for the most up-to-date stuff). For example, I cannot find the data for Camille in the NOAA data that I used to get these hurricane wind speed frequencies. However, even looking at the historic hurricane record of the waters near the US, it is pretty clear that there have been times when the winds have been significantly stronger than 155mph. In these conditions, wouldn’t it be better to have other categories in order to compare and discuss differences between hurricanes?

Now back to my original train of thought.

If we are going to be approaching a world in which hurricanes will be stronger, then wouldn’t it be likely that Camille-class hurricanes will be more likely? If so, then why not extend the range into Category 6 and possibly beyond? I mean, just because one has not yet encountered such a hurricane doesn’t mean that one cannot set aside a classification for it. Helpfully, the Wikipedia page for the HHSH presents a formula for deriving the maximum wind speed for Categories 1 through 4 (remember that Category 5 has no stated maximum) as: 83x10^(c/15) mph, where c is the category number, rounding the final number to the nearest multiple of 5. (One thing to note is that if you plug in c=4, then you will get a value of 147.8mph, which, even when rounding to the nearest multiple of 5, will only get you 150mph, which is kind of screwy. In my calculations, I will use the calculated value of 150mph, instead.) The resulting Categories 1-7 are:

Category 1: <95mph
Category 2: 96-110mph
Category 3: 111-130mph
Category 4: 131-150mph
Category 5: 151-175mph
Category 6: 176-205mph
Category 7: 206-235mph

If we assume that Camille did, indeed, exceed the 205mph that was recorded before the measuring device broke, then it would place that hurricane just inside Category 7; two categories higher than what the current system can allow, and thus making it possible to show just how much stronger those winds were. Furthermore, using 150mph as the corrected break point between a Category 4 and Category 5 hurricane, this would mean that there were 114 weeks of hurricanes at or exceeding 150mph! (Recall, too, that some data are – at this point – missing from the historical analysis, so it is likely that the true number is larger.) Of these 114 weeks, 5 of them would be classified as Category 6, and – because of the incomplete data set – none exist in Category 7 (save anecdotally for Camille).

Being able to say that there had been at least one Category 7-hurricane as well as at least five weeks of Category 6-hurricanes presents a very different description of hurricane activity than saying that they are all Category 5s. Furthermore, with wind speeds of future hurricanes expected to increase due to increased sea temperatures, we may well need to start adding higher categories as a normal course of action.

UPDATE: Looking at Wikipedia, someone had also listed a Category 6 criticism, with a quote from a former NOAA hurricane center administrator and co-inventor of the SSHS that, "there is no reason for a Category 6 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale because it is designed to measure the potential damage of a hurricane to manmade structures. If the wind speed of the hurricane is above 155 mph (249 km/h), then the damage to a building will be 'serious no matter how well it's engineered'." However, this sounds like the wrong logic. Why not have a Category 6, 7, 8 or more, since the metric isn't potential damage to structures (which might be expressed as a percent), but is rather wind speed. The implication of a wind speed is that there will be concomitant structural damage, but wind speed is not a measure of structural damage. Furthermore, the presumption is that it is impossible to build a structure to withstand the occasional 155mph sustained wind. Once people build structures that can withstand 155mph of sustained wind, the whole premise of the "argumentation" falls apart, since now there's a structure that is well-enough engineered to withstand the high winds. Hey, granddad! Technology progresses! I know that you invented the SSHS, but don't hobble us with your generational thinking and personal biases!

UPDATE: The Taipei 101 tower is a 101-floor skyscraper that was designed to withstand sustained 136mph winds. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is designed to flex 18 inches in sustained 150mph winds. Furthermore, according to one site, "Most steel buildings that are engineered to resist hurricane damage can withstand wind forces up to 170 mph." (This claim can be seen elsewhere on the interwebs.) Sorry, Bob, what were you saying about buildings not being able to withstand 155mph winds? Tell us again, using your incomplete and now falsified reasoning, as to why we don't need a Category 6?

Peak oil and what counts as a "big" find

Andrew Sullivan displays a graph of new discoveries of oil.

It's important to note that this is new oil discoveries using the MOST OPTIMISTIC estimates of the finds. Further, it's important to note that on top of these discoveries of oil, there is a world that is using increasing amounts of oil. (In other words, it's not just about your country's use of oil, but the world's use of oil.)

Unless companies, governments, and academics are all in on a secret cabal, we have reached peak oil, and we're on the downward slope, and it makes all the current discussions (in the US) about gas prices being too high (even though it is much lower in real and relative amounts than compared to any OECD country) absurd.

In a future world that is post-peak, one needs to learn how to find new sources of energy and learn how to diminish energy consumption. ... or create even more serious inequalities between rich and poor.

Cost of my commute

Andrew Sullivan has been posting commentary about riding a bike versus driving to work. I looked at the responses in his latest post on the topic, and felt an urge to state something plain about one commentator:

What about the opportunity costs of the extra time a bike commuter spends to get to work?  My 15-mile car commute takes 25-30 minutes.  To ride that same distance, it would take me at the very least 1.5-2 hours, each way. My round trip commute could go from one to four hours.  All those extra hours are ones I could have spent working - or you know, doing anything besides commuting.

This is a problem of mixed apples-and-oranges. The commentator obviously lives at a greater distance to work than would be useful to bike the whole way. Placing a single response to this issue is nonsensical. It's like me making the argument that I could cycle from Ann Arbor to Detroit every day, but that would create a huge opportunity cost for me.

Well, duh. In my example, I have multiple options: drive (if I owned a car), take AmTrak, or carpool. Note that none of these options actually change the distance I need to commute to make bike commuting competitive, but at least I'm not mixing apples and oranges. If I wanted to only have a barrel of apples (i.e., compare the costs and benefits of cycling against driving), I need to put things into a perspective that makes sense: by either moving the location of my job or the location of my domicile (i.e., live closer to where I work). This option isn't available to many people who have already made the decision to subsidize their living standard with a higher travel cost (i.e, people who wanted to live in a larger house way outside of the city compared to living in a smaller apartment in the city), and since it's not available to these people, they shouldn't be commenting as if their situation is equivalent. It just plain isn't.

Now the other comment was:

I'm all for being green and fit. Unfortunately though, the whole concept of biking to work is nonsense. I've worked with about 1000 people in my life and I have known 1 person who regularly biked to work. I can't bike to work because biking results in my body sweating, thus offsetting the purpose of my morning shower. So next time we calculate the cost of biking, can we factor in the cost of smelling like sweat all day and getting fired because no one wants to sit within 15 feet of you?

My response to this is that one could find a place to take a shower near to where one works. If this isn't possible, then you are in a situation in which you are comparing apples with kumquats. It's hot and humid today in Ann Arbor (likely going to be another 90F/90%humidity day), and I biked my 4 miles this morning, headed to the gym to take a shower, and then came to the office. (No, I didn't take a shower before leaving home; that would have been pointless in the overall picture.) I am a person who sweats quite liberally at any provocation (cycling in the Michigan winters creates the potential problem of my sweat freezing when I stop), but I haven't had problems with "smelling like sweat all day and getting fired" because I have access to shower facilities. If you don't have access to shower facilities, this is a separate issue than the costs of biking versus driving in general, since it is a variable that is independent of either. I could easily make an analogous argument that I can't drive to work in in Tokyo because I can't find a place to park near where I work, and the extra time it takes for me to walk from the parking lot to work will make me late, "so can we factor in the cost of walking from the distant parking lot and getting fired because I will likely be late to work?"

When couched in these latter terms, I would imagine that the reasons why the argument is a non-generalizable one will be more clear: the availability of showers (or the willingness to take one outside of one's home and closer to one's work) is not a general problem that people have. Therefore, it's not a comparable cost of biking and driving in general.

So the next time someone says that they are "all for biking, but..." examine the premises of their arguments. Sometimes (often in my experience) they are comparing apples with non-apples, and as tasty as these non-apple fruit may be, their tastiness doesn't make them an equivalent fruit for comparison.

Google is like kratom

Well... using Google Correlate, it is anyway. If you go to the site, you can type in any search query, and (if it is popular enough to have enough of a hit history with Google), you will get a list of other searches that have a high correlative search history with yours.

Typing in "Google" came back with "kratom" with a correlation value of 0.9807.

What is kratom? It's a "trendy" medicinal herb. So, I guess that Google is as correlatively as trendy as a medicinal herb. (Or is it the other way around?)

Moving Beyond the Automobile

In a series of ten short videos, StreetFilms has put together a collection of public work projects in cities that help move their populaces away from relying on cars. (True, most of the filming takes place in NYC, but although NYC is a common theme in StreetFilms' videos, there are plenty of other cities that are investigated as well.)

Examinations of the urban environment is an important (and ought to be integral) part of what it means to investigate "the environment." StreetFilms' various series on sustainable transportation and re-claiming the streets speak to a portion of that realization.

Enjoy:

Part 1: Transit-Oriented Development

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 2: Bycling

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 3: Car Sharing

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 4: Bus Rapid Transit

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 5: Congestion Pricing

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 6: Highway Removal

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 7: Traffic Calming

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 8: "Road Diet"

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 9: The Right Price for Parking

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Part 10: Parking Reform

from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

One thing that you can do to show (during the summer) how much you don't rely on your car (if you one one in the first place) is to go to 2MileChallenge, join a team, and log your biking miles and challenge others to do the same!

Sitting at the Corner Brewery

It was already warm when I work up this morning, and although waking up at 10 am is, in some quarters, considered "late", I did just have a work day at the forest, and (although not sweating-bullets hard work) it was warm and humid enough to be exhausting, and so (coupled with the lack of good sleep leading up to last night), I was able to tuck into 11 hours of sleep with no problem.

What to do, what to do, what to do? Ran through my mind.

There was the outside possibility that a community member who helped out at yesterday's clean-up would come by to help use the two-man cross-cut saw to chop out the large Scots Pine that had been downed on the other side of the lake for a few weeks' time now.... However, I did also need to seriously knuckle down on writing a paper for an upcoming conference... and -- come to think of it -- I needed to seriously get cracking on figuring out what sorts of questions to be asking people in my interviews for this summer... and I really wanted to get out of the forest, out of Ann Arbor, and (in some way) out of my skin.

Well, Ypsilanti was a good solution to most of the problems. Well... at least the physical, positional problems. So, I packed up my bike and headed out of the already bird-calling, insect chir-chir-chirrr-ing forest and onto the (somewhat) open road toward the border-to-border trail that basically follows the Huron River as it flows in from Livingston County to the north and out to Wayne County to the east. The 10-mile (ish) section between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti is one that is well-traveled (possibly the most traversed part of the whole thing).

This time, to change things up a little bit, I decided to stay on Dixboro Road instead of following the BtoB along behind St. Joe's Hospital, and soon I found myself approaching Washtenaw Ave (a bane of cycling and walking, having been expanded with the sole purpose of pushing cars down an ever-widening (now six-lane beast) of a roadway, and damn the people who don't want to drive).

Wooops! Gotta turn around now.... Hrm.... Clark Road? It seems to ring a bell. I'll take that one.... Oh, yeah... the EMU stadium. That looks familiar. And the BtoB is really tempting now that there's a bastard of a Ford Focus riding my tail as if I didn't have a right to the roadway. Read the law, you bastard!

Eventually, I made it to the Corner Brewery, at which I was hoping for a little bit of quiet repast in addition to my mug of locally brewed magic. However, the latter was not to be: there was a pub crawl in session. Oh well, at least I've got Ypsilanti Wireless and a fresh 1/2 liter of Mackinac Fudge Stout to help me through before I go out and try to find a coffee shop with WiFi and a plug-in. I'm thinking Bombadill's on Michigan Ave.

UPDATE: Well, Bombadill's is apparently no more. Long live B-24's!

Obama as a TCK

I grew up as a kind of Third Culture Kid. True, my father's culture is "American", and I did grow up until the age of 8 in the US, and true, my mother's culture is Japanese, and I lived the following 7 years in that country. However, in neither case was it as an "American" or "Japanese" family. In that way, the culture inside my house was the culture of neither parent (although a strange synergistic hybrid of the two).

However, going to school in Japan with international students, as I did in Taiwan and Hungary, really did expand my horizons. I was introduced to the concept of TCKs by a friend of mine after I had started graduate school (I never knew that there was a term for this differently socialized group of people), but once I learned it, certain things did start to make sense.

When Obama won the Democratic ticket in 2008, I was very happy that a mixed-race, TCK candidate had the chance of being the president. As a mixed-race TCK, I felt the ineffable strengths that such a worldview could bring. Predictably (perhaps depressingly so), very few people in the popular press seem to have actually delved into the points about Barack Obama's cultural heritage and TCK upbringing. Recently, though, I came across some collected snippets of commentary on this point, posted over at The Daily Dish:

You are indeed right regarding Cornel West. He is a an articulate, well-read, pseudo-intellectual who plays the part of the black Yoda well, but is ironically very provincial. His world is literally black and white which limits his analytic powers and makes him ineffective as a true intellectual and impotent as a true force for change. Contrast this with Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama, is what we call, a TCK—A Third Culture Kid. TCK’s grow up as the children of missionaries, or as military brats, or as the children of businessmen. It means that you grew up during your early developmental years in a culture outside of your parents’ home culture.

And  in a continuation, some detractors of the TCK viewpoint (written, it seems, by people who didn't grow up that way):

Travel the world and try to transcend your culture all you want, but you won't ever succeed.  Not really.  As Alasdair Macintyre put it, we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives.  There will always be a part of us that it is the product of the time and place and family in which we first came of age, perhaps especially when we are reacting to that experience and trying to "transcend" it.  And even if by some miracle we actually succeeded in that project, then whatever else we may have gained, we will also have lost the ability to be truly a part of any culture from the inside. 

Myself, I have known many TCKs. Some have gone to do amazing things. Some have gone to do average things. Some, less so. However, they all share that interesting view of the world: a world that is somehow more united and common than our peers who grew up in once place, to one culture have seen the world. Not a different world; the same world, just seen and experienced more broadly (if not deeply).

A daze of Saginaw Forest

A meal of morels (and things bought at the store)

While I love mushrooms, I love even more wild mushrooms, and recently I was able to sit down with some friends (who had been out all day hunting mushrooms) for a repast of morels... and items purchased at a local store.

I was able to join in on the last leg of the morel hunt, which took place in town (yes, they do grow here, but they can be hard to find). With my mycologist friend (BC) moving out of town, he was less reluctant to bring along some friends (PE, who was interested in learning how to hunt for mushrooms, and me, who was less interested in the hunting, and more interested in the company). BC and PE had already been to a few sites that day and, on their swing through town, picked me up for their last search site. (We stopped to pick up some additional fare: beer and complementary comestibles.)

After about an hour at our last site (sorry folks, no comment), we only had two morels to show for it, and they were both found by BC. Still, these two would add to the small haul that BC and PE had managed to get earlier in the day.

We headed back to BC's house. Together with other friends and housemates, we set to making a wonderful dinner for seven. The cutting preparation of the morels required a bit of work to ensure that bugs and worms (which often crawl up the fruiting body to live and enjoy the tasty morel, too) were removed before cooking. (As much as I don't mind a little extra protein, I felt that this step is warranted when one wants to have a nice meal.)

The final meal (chips with freshly made guacamole, grilled grass-fed beef steaks, organic pork chops, scalloped potatoes, chopped bacon and cabbage, peas cooked in butter, and (of course) the morels), was a wonderful combination of very earthy flavors, and melded flavors so very simply and very well.


The conversation softened as people tucked into their plates, BC playing the part of the host and making sure that all got enough food before sitting down himself. After about a minute of silent eating (well, silent eating interrupted with exclamations of how good everything tasted), the conversation started to meander lazily along many streams, flowing like a river lazily reaching its delta: slowly pushing through dense stands of personal experience, returning to the main channel of conversation, breaking off to surround and build memory sandbar, slowing down to near-stillness of pregnant pauses of conversation.

The evening ended, as evenings eventually must, and we all left, saying our good-byes, promising to help BC with his packing, loading, and moving come the start of the week. It was, in all, a great meal for a great friend.

At the AUT Bar

I'm sitting in the AUT Bar, having finished a nice repast while sitting next to two couples that don't really know what an "indoor voice" is. I've learned that one of them is trying to finish her dissertation (and another person at the table is telling her to make a schedule and stick to it; again and again she's saying this to her). Two others at the table are (apparently) nuclear/particle physicists (or engineers). The older of the two men is French and quiet. The younger is definitely not French and definitely not quiet. They spent most of the time that I was seated talking about this, that, and the other; merging conversations with as much skill as ... well, stereotypical physicists (or engineers).

However, the food was brilliant -- as usual. The weekend brunch is in celebration of three simultaneous things: the 25th anniversary of the AUT Bar, the recent Cinco de Mayo celebrations (with the bar being decked out with red, white and green; sunbursts and globes; different color palette on the tables; and paper cut-outs of sombreros and cacti), and Mother's Day (which is actually today, while the others are -- likely -- not). In celebration of their 25th Anniversary, I decided to get their Chile Relleno with eggs... y fue excelente y delicioso! (It it weren't for the discussions of dissertation-writing schedules and particle physics, it would have been like being back in one of the taquerias in Mexico City. ... Well, facing the full bar was a little different than the taqueria.)

In town on a Sunday

Yup, it's another Sunday of some memorialization during which I find myself in town. A couple of weeks ago, it was Easter, now it's Mother's Day. Soon it will be Memorial Day, and then Father's Day. Now don't get me wrong: I really have no problem with the days themselves; I enjoy Easter celebrations (well, most of them), I really do love my Mother and Father, and I really don't have anything against remembering the servicemen and servicewomen that have died in service to the US.

However, I really don't like the implication of the day. Living in Saginaw Forest, I get to 'enjoy' the (usually) significantly greater number of people who are out in the forest. *Sigh* I really don't mind that people are there, either, but I do mind when they decide to flout the rules. Well, I really don't like it when people flout the rules at any time, but I really don't like it when I get the response of, "But it's [X]'s Day. Can't I [break this rule]?" To me, this makes no sense at all. Would the people really be okay with encountering a burglar in their home on [X]'s Day saying, "Why can't I break the burglary law, it's [X}'s Day!"

Sure, no one is immediately being harmed by having a dog off of leash, however, for me, it's both a cumulative effect of people seeing other people with dogs off-leash then feeling that they can also do it along with the feeling that people really don't have much respect for the property.

So, instead of confronting people on a day that they are more happy than other days, I just avoid them by coming into town. After all, I don't want to be confrontational, either. Nor do I wish to remain ensconced in my house.

Help day in Stinchfield Woods

Today was a help-day out at Stinchfield Woods. I decided to ride the 15 miles to Stinchfield Woods (mainly because I don't have a car, of course), and it turned out that the day was a really good one for removing invasive species: sunny and breezy for much of the afternoon.


The final chop up (well the second half of what we pulled out of the area we worked).

After about 4 hours of doing some hard work, we decided to scratch the final hour -- partly because of impending rain, partly because the tarp was completely filled with Japanese barberry, and partly (mainly perhaps) because we were dog-tired. Therefore, we went up to the caretakers' cabin and had some hamburgers and hotdogs (and lots and lots of water).


Don't we all look really tired? :D

I raced back (along with another helper) most of the way back to Saginaw Forest, mainly because we (well, me, anyway) were trying to beat the threatening rain.

In the end, it was a great day of physical exertion. The only thing that I hope is that I didn't get too much poison ivy.

UPDATE: I just calculated my average speed to and from Stinchfield Woods to be 17mph. A personal best for a distance greater than 10 miles. Maybe I will have to change out my handlebars for something that gives me better aerodynamics.

Feeling tired

These past few weeks - for some reason - have been rather fatiguing for me. There is the now-normal fatigue of cycling every day (well, "sprinting on my bike" would be a better description of how I like to ride), however, there is more to it than that: there is a mental fatigue that I am starting to have; a sort of malaise that is settling on me.

I've felt this way before, of course, and I know what it is. (Or at least I would like to think that I know what it is.) It's a feeling of settling, of being sedentary. Some people seem to revel in the point of staying in one place. However, the feeling of being settled is itself unsettling to me. Perhaps it is that I grew up moving all over the place. Perhaps I would have felt this way regardless of my upbringing.

A part of me yearns to take a trip to Chicago for the remainder of the weekend. Or maybe to Seville, Spain. I don't know. Just somewhere that isn't "here." Somewhere that isn't anywhere related to "here." A place, you know, that is just far enough away that I am not thinking that I need to return to "here"; to settle "here"; to just be "here".

Sometimes, I can trick myself by meeting new people; hanging out with them; absorbing myself in their lives. You know, traveling away from "here" in another way. I've been doing this my whole life, and meeting new people isn't such a chore for me most of the time (especially when it is done in English - Spanish is more difficult for me).

The rain doesn't help. The threat of rain helps even less. Today it was the latter together with the fulfillment of the former. Staying cooped up in the forest on such a day - when I am feeling more "stuck" than usual - isn't mentally healthy. And I think that this mental malaise is one of the reasons why I have been more fatigued than normal these days.

(Okay, so there are other things that I have thrown myself into - including another committee - but I doubt that any of these things are actually the source of my problems. Indeed, they may be a symptom of them; a desire to "branch out" to "get away" from my regular, slowly settling life.)

Grey days are, perhaps, good days to think about these things a little more deeply than one would normally contemplate. Still, Toronto also sounds like a lovely place to escape to/visit for a while.

Ann Arbor time lapse

Found this time-lapse video of Ann Arbor:

Ann Arbor from Seth McCubbin on Vimeo.

Long ride

In total, the ride was roughly 48 miles long.


Heading out from the campus


Yummy prune-filled cookie


"Fried cinnamon" pastry


Custard creme


Heading along Whitmore Lake Road


Buzzard tree


The trip -- which I'm counting as starting and finishing at my house -- went to the central campus, headed to Dexter along Huron River Drive (stopped at the Dexter Bakery for a little bit), headed north along Mast Road, turned right along Strawberry Lake Road until reaching Whitmore Lake, and then took Main Street/Whitmore Lake Road back to Ann Arbor, cut through Bandermer Park back to the central campus, and then back home.