Adventures in Onionism

I spent the weekend at the ALDHA-West ( American Long Distance Hiking Association ) Gathering at the Lake Wenatchee, WA YMCA camp. It's pretty close to the PCT, and it just so happens that when I was hiking the PCT in '04 this retired Microsoft m(b?)illionaire and his wife picked me up when I was hitching back to the trail from Skykomish and gave me one of the best trail-magic hookups I've ever gotten, letting me stay at their private resort that is on the same lake, but I digress. ALDHA-West is the keeper of the Triple Crown award, so I had a pretty awesome time hanging out with several other CDT '07 hikers who were also receiving their awards. Also there were some cool presentations by Erin McKittrick and Bretwood Higman, who spent a year hiking/skiing/packrafting from Seattle to the beginning of the Aleutian Islands, and photos from Eric Ryback's '69, '70, and '71 hikes of the AT, PCT, and CDT, in what might have been the first triple crown. Also, ...

Somebody should start a pool on how long it will take me to start hating research. I'd say the over-under is about 6 days. But I'm loving it for now. I mean, I try and waste time on the interwebs like usual, but all the lies about " we had 23,000 people at our rally ," " thanks, but no thanks ," and " Saddam Hussein and his family had a personal relationship with al Qaeda and he's about to miniaturize nuclear weapons " (start about 2:30 in) make me too angry. Also, I discovered that I didn't have to learn Perl, re-invent the wheel, or pay an undergrad EECS major to re-invent the wheel for me--every baseball stat you could ever want is available in a free download at Sean Lehman's Baseball Archive . So, for starters, using all the MLB MVP's from 1911-2006 (excluding AL pitchers), players batted an average of .285 before winning their first MVP award and only .271 after, and 74% of the MVP winners had a lower career average after ...

As of 3:17 this afternoon, I'm 29 years old. I played (touch) football with my IM team on Saturday, and when I woke up ridiculously sore on Sunday I decided to run 29 miles today to prove that I'm not old. Sort of as prep for the 24-hour race I'll be doing in a couple months, I decided to do the miles around the dirt track at school. I got a late start and I forgot my running hat so my bald head was getting sunburned, so I only ran 100 laps (rather than 116) before I had to go to school. Oh well. When I got to school I checked my mailbox and found the results from last month's Law & Economics field exam. On an excellent-good-pass-fail scale, I needed a pass in order to fulfill the requirements for the Master's degree/coursework portion of my program. I got a good. So I'm all done with courses, I've got a master's degree, and I'll just be doing my own original research/taking time off to hike long distances from now on. Sweet!

I recently read/saw two econs saying that Democrat presidents make the economy grow faster ( Alan Blinder in the NYT , and Laura D'Andrea Tyson on The Colbert Report ). I was bored, so here's a little regression of 1948-2007 annual real US GSP growth on the number of Democratic senators, reps, and presidents to entertain you (chained is the BEA's real gdp growth using chained 2000 dollars, dsen is the number of Dem Senators, dhouse is Dem House member, and dwh is a Dem prez. Please ignore autocorrelation, endogeneity, omitted variables, and the whole host of other problems.) Of course, spacing is retarded since HTML doesn't recognize multiple consecutive spaces. reg chained dsen dhouse dwh, robust Linear regression Number of obs = 60 F( 3, 56) = 2.55 Prob > F = 0.0645 ...

The appeals court decided that, although they're going to hear the case, they're not going to keep the injunction going, so the trees are starting to come down. There are still four dudes in the tall redwood shown below, but the university gave them an ultimatum that ended exactly one minute ago. I'm at home, so I guessing I'm missing the show.

1. Fellow backpacker Andrew Skurka recently finished second in the Leadville 100, which he entered "on a whim," which makes me (a)totally jealous, and (b)think that, although I have a pretty small sample size, it seems to be an easier transition for backpackers to get into ultra-running than it is for ultra-runners to get into long-distance backpacking. I'm not sure if that's actually true, or why it would be true physiologically or mentally, but it's interesting. 2. I recently noticed a Reebok billboard in Oakland with a picture of a collapsed runner and the words "Congratulations, you can't stand up. Go run easy ." Or something to that effect. That sort of motivation might make a lot of sense in Oakland, especially given its lower-income residents that are more likely to be overweight and thus could use motivation to simply get out the door rather than motivation to do something hard-core. 3. It's interesting to compare that to Dean Karnaze...

I rode my bike 10 miles to the start of the Redwood Park 50K today. I timed it well and got there right before the start. I ran the 50K in 7:41 or something like that, which isn't very fast, but given that my watch thermometer had the highest reading (105.5 degrees!) I have ever seen outside of that time I dunked it in a hot spring, I'm happy with it. It was so hot that a lady in front of me sat down due to a cramp, and then while I was digging an electrolyte pill out of my pack for her, she said "I'm going to faint," at which point she fell back, her eyes rolled back, she convulsed a little, and had these horribly raspy breaths, so I held her head up and sprayed some water on her. She came to pretty quick and her friends came along, so they took care of her and I kept going. After finishing I was planning on riding home, but there was all sorts of chafing going on in the nether-regions, so I hung out till the race was all over and got a ride home. Good tim...

On my recent runs I finished three books on tape: Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean, Your Government Failed You by Richard Clarke, and The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby. Young Men and Fire is Maclean's (of A River Runs Through It fame) book about the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire outside Helena, Montana in which 13 smokejumper firefighters died. There was some controversy over the fire because the crew leader started an escape fire (start a fire where you are so that when the big fire gets to you there's no fuel left and you'll be OK) which was unheard of at the time, so his crew didn't understand what was going on and ran right by the escape fire and were killed; some felt the escape fire was actually what killed the men (unlikely). The books drags on a bit at the end, but it's a good read, especially if you like mountains/the west/the outdoors, etc. Your Government Failed You is Richard Clarke's (the terrorism czar that kept on trying to get ever...

Just to be clear, the thing Huckabee said that I guessed was false the second I heard it is in fact false. And I'm happy I'll be voting for the party in which the governor (Schweitzer) of a state (Montana) whose economy depends a good deal on the extractive industries said "the most important barrel of oil is the one that you don't use" instead of the one that chants "drill baby drill" and mocks someone for being a community organizer (ha ha, spending time trying to help disadvantaged people on the south side of Chicago when you could've gone to Wall Street? Sucker!)

I studied, I took my test, I squeezed in a couple trips, and school has started. So what am I doing to fill the time from now until December 19th when I can get a month of freedom and ski the JMT? I'm TA-ing Poli Sci 135/Econ 110--Game Theory in the Social Sciences I'm helping to teach a DeCal (Democratic Education at Cal, i.e. cool student-facilitated courses) called Global Poverty & Impact Evaluation: Learning What Works for the World's Poor [link to syllabus]. It's sponsored by Berkeley's new Center of Evaluation for Global Action ( CEGA ), an organization sort of similar to MIT's Poverty Action Lab . Basically, the idea is that although well-intentioned, it's not clear that some poverty alleviation projects actually do any good. So you should measure the impact of your project, and then, since money for such projects is scarce, you should focus your resources on those projects with the greatest benefit and not just your favorite pet cause. We...

I decided I looked less bald bald than with hair.

I went to Burning Man. Walking around the desert in a complete sandstorm white-out looking at participatory installation art while getting passed by roving double-decker buses decked out like pirate ships with blasting techno dance parties aboard is pretty awesome. The Man The Bummer The Temple A Real Live Thunder Dome Fire Dancing