Adventures in Onionism

I'm in Takengon. I did a short solo trip in Gunung Leuser National Park (guides apparently are not required, but should you actually want to get to any specific location as opposed to just wandering around, it might be a good idea.) The jungle was cool, but it's not my favorite--you don't get any vista-type views--it's solid jungle canopy all the time that in some sense doesn't really change. Leaches and insects and monkeys and hot springs are fun, but I prefer alpine country. So now I'm a little further north in Takengon, with one more horrible bus ride (and, ummm, GI issues) remaining between me and surfing/snorkeling in Banda Aceh. 

Greetings from Kotocane, Sumatra, Indonesia. You haven't lived until you've eaten mangosteens. Seriously. So good. Also, I ate a chocolate and sweetened condensed milk sandwich fried in a crap-ton of blue bonnet. I cannot believe this was concocted in any country other than the USA.  Being vegetarian takes a little fun out of my point-and-eat approach to developing country street food (especially since I was stupid and forgot to bring a phrasebook), but all is well.

I've been doing research. Or trying to. Mostly on the Forest Service's 2001 Roadless Rule . I'd be interested to see if I could estimate its effect on local employment. I can't think of an identification strategy other than diff-n-diff , and I'm not sure how well even that will work, plus I have to build the data using GIS. Also, importantly, it's been done before . But right now I have 935 pages of exams to grade. I bailed on the WFR course I was going to take in January so that hopefully I can get more some research done (down time between semesters seems like a good time, and although I'd love to learn the material, if I ever want to graduate, I definitely don't have time to join a S&R group right now, which is a good chunk of why I wanted to take the course). I leave Sat/Sun for Indonesia. I'm TA-ing again next semester but I applied for a short job in February teaching impact evaluation stuff abroad. More on that later if it actually happe...

I just finished reading Laurence Gonzales' Deep Survival , which I guess is about the psychology of surviving. I disliked it a great deal and would absolutely not recommend it, except for the appendix which makes up the last 20 pages. The book is a very unorganized collection of ideas from Zen, Tao Te Ching , Heroditus, philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology. It's also an attempted memoir, a tribute to Gonzales' pilot father, and a collection of very short re-tellings of survival tales. I know, sounds great, right? But in trying to do all these things, and jumping around between them, it ends up doing none of the above well. Also, you may already know some of the survival accounts from Alive , Adrift , and Touching the Void , and the original accounts are far more interesting. The stories you've likely never heard of are re-told with aggravatingly little detail. I was also irked by Gonzales' repeated mentions of spirituality and following hunches, but it's no...

I did a 10 or 11-mile kayak route around Brooks Island yesterday [ map ]. I'm beginning to think I'm a land mammal. The funnest part was getting out and walking around on the island. Also fun is when you're within 20 yards of the shore and can see the big pelicans and other birds flying around. The rest of the time on the open water is kind of boring. Plus I got seasick and puked while paddling back. It's always on the way back when I'm moving in the same direction as the waves so I get lifted from behind. Maybe I'll get used to it, or maybe I'll sell the kayak for a profit and buy a packraft or a bike. In hindsight, Steven Soderbergh's movie Che is probably not worth watching. I seem to recall reading reviews when it came out about how you had to already agree with everything Che did to enjoy the film. More than that, regardless of your opinion, I think you have to not be interested in history or politics at all, because the film doesn't investiga...

1. A good argument from Albany this morning: [ht Indecision] 2. I just saw Precious . I thought Lee Daniels' cinéma vérité-esque rapid zoom and shaky camera work were distracting. I also thought it was manipulative of your emotions. At one point while I was sobbing, I realized everyone else in the theater was sobbing too, and pretty loudly, but it was just so obvious that was exactly what we were supposed to be doing at that moment that I then laughed a little. However, I thought the acting was fantastic and the movie was absolutely worth seeing. 3. After Obama's speech yesterday, I was struck by this quote in a Joan Walsh column at Salon: I'm deeply disappointed, saddened even, but I don't feel betrayed. Obama has governed like the centrist he told us and showed us he is, from his early flip-flops on FISA to his Goldman Sachs-friendly bailout policies to compromising on the job-creation parts of his economic stimulus to his tepid backing of a healthcare reform public...

The PBS doc about the Western States 100 is available on YouTube [ht TrailRunningSoul ]. Interesting to me since one of the runners they follow (Patti Haskins) is a friend from the PCT in '04.

I hiked from Death Valley to Owens Valley. You can see more pictures on Picasa. Videos are at the end, and here's the full trip report: Late Sunday or early Monday I finished grading exams and mailed off my scores to the professor. I printed maps using the .tpo file provided by Brett "Blisterfree" Tucker on his website , but didn't even have time to double-check that I had actually printed two copies and didn't miss anything. Monday at 2PM I had an interview for an RA job that I don't think I'll get, and at 3:30 or so, the car was loaded and I was headed to Lone Pine. After an 8 hour drive I camped in the truck at Portagee Joe campground just outside town. In the morning my friend Nano and I (who I met at ADZPCTKO a couple years ago) left his car at Whitney Portal and drove my truck to Death Valley. After getting a permit (through perhaps the easiest process I've ever had in a National Park) we drove to Badwater, and took off hiking west from 282 fe...

Well that was fun. My truck is free, Nano's car is stuck, but aaa should fix that. While we wait, pancakes and hot cocoa in lone pine.

Snow storm. 8500 feet bailing to highway. I'm totally fine. But i think car might be stuck at whitney portal.

Ugh. Cranked out exam grading over the last 3 days. Now I just need to print two sets of L2H maps, buy food, pack, do a job interview about a possible research assistance position for next semester, then drive to Lone Pine and then Death Valley. I totally don't deserve this break, and should stay and do research, but I promise I'll start doing research as soon as I get back. Or maybe after I get back from Indonesia. Or maybe after I take the WFR course. Or maybe after the teacher training course next summer. Or maybe after going to Siberia next summer. Someday, definitely.

Well, next Monday is still a few days off, but I seem to have gotten a bad cold and completely lost my voice, so that's not great as far as L2H goes. At least my truck is fixed (read the comments on two posts ago). David Cross' I Drink for a Reason is un-readably un-funny.

A couple websites have created interesting ways to shop: Steepandcheap.com and Swoopo.com [ NYT article by Richard Thaler about Swoopo, HT to Brad Delong]. Or interesting to this outdoorsy economist, at least.

Just so everyone knows, the Cal econ grad students whooped up on the Stanford econ grad students yesterday. We beat them in basketball, football, and soccer. We lost in volleyball and ultimate. The Arrow - Debreu trophy, a bronzed apple core inside an Edgeworth box , depends only on football, so it will continue to reside in its rightful place (the grad student lounge in Evans) for at least another year. Photos . I did not run 50K today because it sold out before I could register. Instead I tried out my Fivefingers. They'll take some getting used to. I might try and hike from Badwater to the top of Mt. Whitney next week with a friend via the L2H route .

I just finished Jon Krakauer's Where Men Win Glory . I was disappointed and wouldn't recommend it. I've always defended Krakauer against critics of his previous books, but I have issues with this one. Briefly: 1. Cite your sources. 2. If you're going to rag on Bush, do it about something non-obvious. 3. Quoting endless quotidian sections of your subject's journal is not the same as showing us that the thoughts and desires inside the heads of crazy adventurous men are the same as those rattling around inside our own heads. In more detail: 1. Krakauer's method of crediting sources is to have a "Notes" section at the end with a list for each chapter that says "My sources were interviews and correspondence with Marie Tillman..." or "My main sources were Ghost Wars ..." or something to that effect. The main text has essentially zero footnotes, end-notes or end-of-sentence citations; each chapter just gets a giant list of general sources ...

I read Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's sequel to their book Freakonomics , namely, Superfreakonomics . If I had to describe it in one word, I would say "smug." If given two words, I'd say "not funny." At times the book is a fascinating collection of recent research. But too often, the book feels like contrarianism for its own (or for coolness', or for conservatism's) sake. My beefs: Several times, they talk about how, by solving one problem, we managed to create another problem. (Ireland raised the garbage bill, so people burnt their trash, and set themselves on fire.) But the authors are not always careful to measure the magnitude of the unintended consequences, and seem a little too quick to mock whoever thought the change was a good idea (often the government). The University of Chicago (where Levitt teaches) is described as "perhaps the most storied economics program in the world." I admit that's probably true, but it comes acro...

This was a pretty good Fresh Air interview with Timothy Egan on his new book about the Forest Service and the giant 1910 fire that changed politicians' and the public's perceptions and thus saved the Forest Service. It portrays Gifford Pinchot in a much better light than Ken Burns' National Parks doc . "We are rich because we have [the forests.]"--Egan's mom

My room-mate paid $4 for a giant box of old photo prints. I think it was well worth it. YMCA I'll rub your chin if you rub mine. In the future, neck pain will be but a distant memory. So then I says to him, "why don't you watch where you're going?" America's hi-tech medical records system.

All my kayak gear came in at REI, so I had to ignore the oil spill and go paddling twice this weekend. I'm (obviously) still getting the hang of it, so I didn't go super long or far, just out along the Berkeley pier. It's also a little creepy when you have to park next to the oil spill response team's trucks and watch out for their boats dragging big balloon lines behind them. Anyway, no obvious oil slicks thus far, so it was good times. It's a blast to be charging out into open water with waves crashing on the bow, but coming back in it's a little nauseating and hard to stay in a straight line. Why did nobody tell me about the existence of bike kayak trailers ? That'd be so much cooler than driving the truck to the marina. [From streetsblog .] Chuck Klosterman has a new book out that I devoured this week-- Eating the Dinosaur . I love the essays on time travel and creative play-calling in football, and the ones on Kurt Cobain and David Koresh, ABBA, an...

As readers probably know, I've done a bit of running in the past few weeks. October 10 I ran the Dick Collins Firetrails 50-miler , October 18 I ran the Diablo 50K , and October 24-25 I ran 95.5 miles at the SF One-Day . Actually, I technically only scored 94.4 miles because, despite hauling apples one last time to try and get another lap done in under 8 minutes, I missed it by a half second. (See pic below, which I yanked from DC-H's facebook (thanks!) via a shift-apple-4 screenshot) All during these races my knee has been hurting, pretty badly at times. That's made me think more deeply than normal about running, and I've come up with two things. One, running is fun, but sometimes only type-2 fun . Two, running on pavement sucks. First, is running fun, and do I want to keep doing it? Of course, and of course. But with my knee hurting, I haven't really wanted to do much training, and when I have gotten out, I haven't been enjoying it as much lately. It's ...

The California legislature released some details on the proposed water bill. I can't honestly claim to know enough to properly evaluate this proposal, but I'm pretty skeptical--I don't want the state to spend more on projects like this unless they're willing to raise taxes to pay for it it, and I don't want new dams. I like that urban users will be forced to conserve, but I'd like to see that agricultural and industrial users have to do the same.

I didn't bring my camera to the SF One-Day, but somebody took a ton of photos, and some had me in them, so I made a small gallery on flickr .

Nope, those remains were not those of Everett Ruess .

I ran 95.5 miles at the SF One-Day. Thanks for the e-mails and texts, and mad props to EK and SH for doing a few laps with me. More later, perhaps. Good night.

I kind of really hate this. 67 laps.

I hurt. Terry gross, toe socks and new shoes don't fail me now! Email sys back up.

56 miles in 12 hours. Now comes the hard part. All i need is 15 min miles. Dinner sometime and much love are on me if you come out for a couple laps.

E.mail sys down. Sun going down. 9 hours 42 laps. Can i keep it up? Don't sleeping!

Oh, and if you happen to live in Siberia or Indonesia and want to call me during the middle of the night, that'd be rad too.

From 9am on Saturday the 24th to 9am on Sunday the 25th, I will be running (jogging at best, really) in 1-mile loops around around Crissy Field in SF. Come join me for a few laps (you'll definitely be able to keep up, don't worry) or use this link to send me an e-mail which the race directors will print out and hand to me in real time. You can also see live hourly race updates. Jokes, college football updates, or any other light-hearted material to keep me from going insane would be much appreciated, especially during the night.

There's an NYT article about how some ultrarunners have their toenails removed. That one sentence is basically all there is to it. Back to your regularly scheduled programming. [Thanks to AS for the link]

I bought a kayak on Friday. Specifically, a Perception Eclipse Sea Lion. It looks like this one , except mine doesn't have a rudder. I got it used for $300 from the UC Aquatic Center at the Berkeley marina. Then I promptly ordered $500 worth of accessories from REI and Sierra Trading Post (spray skirt, wetsuit, paddle, paddle float, bilge pump, car carrying kit). That's a lot of money, but it's cheaper than a half-way decent bike (I've been thinking about a Trek 520, Jamis Aurora, or Novara Randonee touring bike for a while, but I guess I'll hold off for now). Two things that I pretty much knew, but which were strongly impressed upon my mind immediately upon purchasing: (1) kayaks are really long and fit neither in the bed of a Ford Ranger nor through a normal hallway, and (2) owning a kayak necessitates owning a car. I guess I'm fine with that since I can currently accommodate both of those issues. I decided to buy it because the UC aquatic center closes f...

There's an article about packrafting in the NYT. There's only a paragraph or so about their history or Roman Dial or rad stuff folks have done in them, however. Speaking of rad things people have done in them, Erin & Hig's book comes out in a couple weeks. Or read their blog . Yes, I'll probably buy their book (and a packraft) soon.

A UC Berkeley professor and a UCLA-trained professor will share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics . Thanks to the Scandinavians for filling in part of the state budget cuts.

I ran Firetrails 50-miler yesterday. Did I mention how boring I thought this race was last year? Yes, I did . Actually, knowing what to expect, it wasn't so bad in that respect, and instead I had a cold, did not train, and had really bad tendonitis preventing me from bending my right knee and causing me to walk for several minutes after leaving a few of the aid stations. I got to the Redwood Gate 15-mile aid station in 2:45, 15 minutes faster than last year, and I hit the turnaround at 26 miles in 4:55, but the worst knee pain was on the way back. Once I knew I wasn't going to beat last year's 9:52, I took the last three miles easy and finished in 10:20. I had fun, and the schwag from this race is great. Except I was pretty sure my collection of purple shirts was adequately sized at zero, but I guess not.

Some like to claim that while we have to subsidize public transit, highways pay for themselves via the federal gas tax (currently 18.4 cents per gallon). I don't think that is accurate . This episode of Fresh Air lays out a pretty good case in favor of sending more troops to Afghanistan. It's a little (lot) disconcerting to hear one of the best journalists covering the region say that Kabul would fall within six months of a US withdrawal. But will 40K more troops win it? Bill Maher posed an interesting question: when has a general ever said he couldn't win a war with more troops? Thinking back to these 1 , 2 Fresh Air pieces from earlier in the summer, I'm reminded of the scene in Apocalypse Now where Kurtz describes the impossibility of winning against a ruthless enemy--how do you compete with an enemy who, after you give people vaccinations, goes around and chops off any arm that has a needle hole in it? Is it possible to convince residents we'll be there long...

A research idea just came to me in a dream. In the dream I came up with a research idea that more hurricanes would lead to fewer Appalachian Trail hikers. I called this thru-hiker that I barely know to see what he thought about the idea and whether he thought I'd be able to get the number of annual thru-hikers from the Appalachian Trail Conservancy headquarters in Harpers Ferry (Why have place names so often dropped their possessive apostrophes?) He wasn't so stoked on the idea, which got me a little bummed out, so I switched from hurricanes to to the snowpack. Then I woke up, and my first thought was "regression discontinuity based on arbitrary cutoff in the Sierra snowpack." There are a couple problems, however. First, I haven't yet found a policy that actually has a fixed snowpack cutoff. But I assume there is one, and if you've ever heard of one (if the rainfall/snowfall reaches X inches a year/month/week we do Y) please let me know. Second, if it's ...

What Bob Herbert has to say about my school: "Something wonderful is going on when a school that is ranked among those at the very top in the nation and the world is also a school in which more than a third of the 25,000 undergraduates qualify for federal Pell grants, which means their family incomes are less than $45,000 a year. More than 4,000 students at Berkeley are from families where the annual income is $20,000 or less. More than a third are the first in their families to attend a four-year college." Read the full article . Seriously (Californian) people, can we please repeal Prop 13, eliminate the 2/3 budget super-majority requirement, and fund public education?

This weekend I did a run involving bushwhacking and barbed-wire in Tilden, went swimming (after realizing I suck at swimming during a dip in Donner Lake this summer, I thought I better get in shape for my upcoming trip to Indonesia), and went sea kayaking. I rented from the UC Aquatic center and went from Berkeley marina to Emeryville marina and back. I got chased by a harbor seal for a good chunk of it. You might think that would be cute and fun, but they have solid black eyes, and I could think of nothing but Arrested Development season 2 episode 12 . There's still an old Perception Sea Lion Eclipse kayak for sale; I'm thinking I might buy it next weekend, but I'll have to see how much the paddle, wetsuit, skirt, paddle float, and bilge pump would cost first. (Renting is pretty cheap, but you're not allowed to leave binocular sight, so that puts a damper on things.) I watched some of the Cal game from Tightwad Hill. Horrible. I got free tickets to the 49ers game. Gre...

Some magazine (The Washingtonian, which I'm sure is absolutely free of regional bias) says my high school is the best .

I won't make a pun using the word "dam" instead of "damn," but I am stoked about this story. Four dams are coming down on the Klamath . UPDATE: This story seems to be part of a series. A few days ago there was bad news about possible future construction . I heard about a new long distance trail, the Bigfoot trail , from a friend named Squatch (because he's so into bigfoot stuff). I've looked into a route like this before, because there is public land all the way from Clearlake, CA to the Oregon border through Mendocino, Shasta-Trinity, and Klamath National Forests. However, it seemed like a lot of roadwalking and real danger of running into pot farms. Normally I discount that danger (and all other "dangerous" outdoor things like bears) but maybe not in this region. For years I've been dreaming of an AZ-UT-ID border to border route. I mostly kept it to myself, even though I knew it had been done before. I just didn't know it had been d...

I spent the weekend at a camp in Oregon near Mt. Hood for the 2009 ALDHA-West gathering. It was like most all hiker gatherings. At first, you're a little bummed because hiker X didn't show up even though he lives only an hour away, then you see some cool presentations, and then before you know it, it's two in the morning and you're doing one-armed pushups and cheerleading stunts while your friend is regaling a room full of people with a hilarious account of his vasectomy and train-hopping and so on and so forth. Then the weekend ends and you have to go home and your football teams lost and you have to go back to work. So fun, so bittersweet.

I finally finished reading Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water . If you have not read this book, you absolutely must. I guess people that have both never been west of the Mississippi and don't care about the environment probably won't be interested (but then, why would you reading my blog?), but everyone else must read it. It's pretty dense at times, so it took me a long time to get through it, but that's basically because it's very well researched and thorough. Summary: William Mulholland and LA stole (legally, mostly) all the water from the Owens Valley, the Colorado River has been thoroughly violated, and the Bureau of Reclamation (in competition with the Army Corps of Engineers) built way too many dams using absolutely fraudulent cost-benefit calculations and now sell the water to corporate farms (that are far larger than the legal size-limit to be allowed to purchase the water) for $7.50 an acre-foot ( far less tha...

Like I said in my last post, I went down to San Jacinto to a trail work training session. I puked on the drive down (bad gas station deli hard boiled eggs or just really windy dirt Black Mountain Road), then spent Friday, Saturday, and half of Sunday learning to work a griphoist . Basically this is a fancy winch device capable of controlled tension and release of a wire rope under up to 4,000 pounds of pressure. Anchor the griphoist on a tree, attach the wire rope to a big rock, crank the handle, and the rock moves. If the rock is really heavy, put a block (pulley) on the rock, thread the wire rope through the block and anchor it back on the same tree in order to get a 2:1 mechanical advantage. Or instead of doing a direct or directional pull, you can set up a high line or high lead and fly (a very generous term, they're not actually flying or even moving that fast if you're being remotely safe) big granite boulders down a slope. Anyway, I had a pretty good time. The training...

I'm headed to San Jacinto to get some training in rock-based trail work from the SCA. I think I'll probably end up thinking that I'd much rather be doing brushing or logging for hikers than rock work for donkeys, but I assume I'll still enjoy it. I'll actually have AC for this drive. Thank goodness I didn't need a new compressor and got what was actually wrong fixed for pretty cheap, and my car mechanic (thanks VM for the rec) says I got new brake pads just in time.

I turned 30 years old yesterday. I don't know how I feel about that (I haven't done squat for research since orals and it's not looking like I'll get much of it done this semester with all my teaching, this isn't great for morale), but I had to teach until 7 PM, then I went out for a ~5 hour run in the dark. I haven't been in a while, so my right knee acted up a little/lot. I saw a bunch of raccoons and a grey fox (the only canine that can climb trees). Why haven't any of my running friends told me how fun night running is? The only times I've run or hiked at night is after having run or hiked all day long, so I was really tired at night, but if you don't start until 8 PM, it's actually pretty cool. It certainly doesn't hurt to have the killer views of the SF skyline and the fog.

Chicago econs respond to Krugman. Krugman non-responds to the response because he's traveling and hasn't had time yet.

1. I saw Ponyo this weekend. Why is it that only Pixar can make kids movies that aren't agonizing for adults to sit through? 2. I took a sea kayaking lesson on Saturday from the UC Aquatic Center . Learned basic strokes, a few rescues, etc. I enjoyed it (especially the few minutes in which we went outside the breaks of the marina and rode a few waves) enough to think about buying their last used kayak for $300. (Despite saying you should definitely, definitely try out many kayaks before buying one, the instructor also said I could easily resell this for more than I would pay for it.) My concern is that I'm too lazy to go kayaking with any regularity. I have ignored several outdoor sports (kayaking, cycling, rock climbing, ice climbing, skiing, snowboarding, fly fishing, basically any sport that's not running/hiking) for years and viewed them as "techie gear dork" sports, meaning it was more about the machine than the man. Part of me likes the beauty of low/no...

Paul Krugman had a great article in the NYT magazine explaining the history of the last 70 years of macroeconomic thought in relation to current events and reminding me once again that I am so glad that I didn't go to the University of Chicago. (Many thanks to the Chicago prof whose first words out of his mouth upon my admit visit were: "How can I help you Garret, and why aren't you just going to Berkeley?") I have never been a particularly big fan of macro; I remember once being incensed upon learning the Real Business Cycle model (explained in the article) and being told that I didn't really observe involuntary unemployment, I just thought I did. However, I'm now teaching my second semester of macro and given the horrible times we're experiencing and the views of the professors here, it's certainly more interesting.

"The Enchanted Gorge is where intimidation and challenge meet head on. This is not a place for the faint-hearted, the poorly conditioned, or the unadventuresome. Here is the proving ground for the Ultimate Sierra backpacker." --Phil Arnot, blowing smoke out his rear-end in his High Sierra: John Muir's Range of Light "The only thing "enchanted" about Enchanted Gorge is its name." --R.J. Secor, telling it like it is, is his must-own The High Sierra: Peaks, Passes, and Trails I spent Labor Day Weekend doing an off-trail backpacking trip in Sierra National Forest and Kings Canyon National Park. ( Skip the words and look at the pictures .) I read about the Enchanted Gorge in Steve Roper's Sierra High Route guidebook (he calls it "one of the wildest canyons in the range") and I immediately wanted to do it. I started Friday at Florence Lake and hiked maintained trail following the South San Joaquin up Goddard Canyon to Martha Lake. I camped on ...