Adventures in Onionism

i sent this from my phone. Does that make it more interesting?

I was considering sending myself my old Rio MP3 player halfway through the trail, but when I tried syncing it with my computer, it gave me the light grey screen that says "You must restart your computer" with a picture of the power button behind it (apparently technically called a " Kernel Panic ") on four consecutive reboots and attempts. This is the first instance I can recall of getting this screen in the year and a half with this computer. Screw it, I guess I'll listen to nature, because I don't want to listen to what's currently loaded (Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle ) on repeat the entire hike. I'd be curious if anyone has any AA or AAA battery-powered, AM/FM-receiving, large capacity (5+ gigs) or SD card slot-having MP3 player suggestions. All food, guide and databook sections, batteries, TP, Vitamin I, band-aids, duct tape, electrolyte tablets and such are now allocated, Brooks gave me a pro-deal on shoes, and I think I'm ...

Too lazy to rotate this picture. I think I'm done buying food. I've boxed most of it, and now I'll start putting in socks, batteries, toilet paper, and (crap I need to buy some) hand sanitizer. Do you think all these boxes plus three people will fit in a Subaru? That's kind of my current plan for getting them to the person who'll be mailing them for me. I'll probably mail the first four before I leave town, so that should help. This preparation stuff is getting annoying. I'm trying to be more prepared for this trip than for any other because I can't be wasting time in town ordering gear, mailing bounce boxes ahead, or shopping if I need to be hiking 41 every day. Maybe the prep would be more fun if I spread it out over months instead of putting it together in a week while I was also moving. Econ nerd moment: maildrops are a constrained optimization problem. More frequent packages means lighter loads, and less catastrophic problems if one package do...

On previous hikes I ate "Snickers, Pop-Tarts, and Bagels." One time I accurately recorded everything I ate in a day and it was 2 bagels (total 580 cal/7 oz.), a bag of PF Goldfish (840/6.6), 3 Quaker Chewy granola bars (270/2.52), 4 Odwalla bars (900/8.8), Peanut Butter Twix (280/1.84), 3 Balance bars (630/5.28), Milky Way (260/2.05), and Hot Fudge Sunday Pop-Tarts (400/3.6). That's 4160 calories and about 38 ounces (i.e., too few calories and too much weight.) This time I'd like to not guarantee myself diabetes, so I'm copying my buddy's healthier diet. Basically, it's a protein shake for breakfast, fig bars, pretzels, and rice crackers for snacks, a giant-home made energy bar throughout the day, and re-hydrated beans with corn chips for dinner. Along those lines I've got 43 energy bars, 66 dinners, 25 bags of chips, 65 breakfast shakes, and 60 bags of snacks so far. I'm hoping that if my food's a little healthier I can get by with a little ...

$36 at REI on a new Platypus, stuff sack, and tiny plastic vials, $88 on a second trip to B-bowl, and $50 on 19 pairs of cheap nylon dress socks at Target. Rayon is a wicking fabric, right? Moved half my stuff into storage in my friend's kitchen. Just put my PCT permit app. in the mail. Still need shoes and boxes.

Just dropped $233 at Berkeley Bowl on food for the trip. I expect I'll triple that by tomorrow. Let the mail drop prep begin.

I think I'm going hiking. When else will I have the chance to try and break the supported PCT speed record unsupported with one of my best friends? The job market will probably stink this coming fall (although one you introduce the game theory of other students realizing this and also delaying a year, you probably can't be sure what type of equilibrium will result), if I really want a teaching (as opposed to solely research) position going in 7 years will only let me get more teaching experience, a prof. I hugely respect said it doesn't hurt to go in 7 if you've got a good paper, perhaps if I manage to finish, but not quite in time for the real job market in October/November, maybe I could still manage to get a post-doc somewhere else if I were sick of Berkeley (maybe I'm just dreaming that), and I've become less certain that baseball salary data is going to be immediately forthcoming anyway because a prof. who would know says it's way more complicated th...

I'm guessing these thoughts will sound better in my head than in print, but regardless, here they are. I stumbled across a mildly amusing commencement speech this weekend, and among it's more maudlin pieces of advice: get somebody to pay you to do what you love. So what do I love? Being sarcastic in front of an audience, hiking long distances, running long distances, and getting well-identified estimates of causal effects through randomized controlled trials, regression discontinuity, or valid instrumental variables and two-stage least squares techniques. So who out there is going to pay me to be roughly 25% teacher economist, 35% fast long-distance backpacker, 15% ultra-runner, and 25% research economist? I don't actually want anyone to pay me to hike or run, so mostly I just want someone who will pay me to be an economist. Except I pretty much need to go hiking all summer every three years or I'll go crazy. It takes six years to get tenure, so is there a school o...

A post from a while ago I never finished: Using parts of the school library I've never been to before, I watched the 2001 Sundance Best Documentary Audience Award winner, Scout's Honor , about people trying to get the Boy Scouts to change their discriminatory policies. It's not the greatest documentary I've ever seen in my life in a technical sense, but I strongly support the cause and it's worth watching. Film website . Scouting for All , the organization featured in the film. I also looked at a 1945 copy of Clinton C Clarke's book Pacific Crest Trailway from the Bancroft library. It had 12 loose prints of famous mountains along the trail, and eight maps of the trail, all on delicate tracing paper, hence the book's location in the fancy-pants no-circulation no-pens-allowed we-have-Mark-Twain's-private-letters Bancroft library . It was interesting to compare the original idea with the finished version. I'd say the original is very close to toda...

Always include pictures of Jessica Simpson and Marilyn Monroe in academic presentations as it helps to lighten the mood. Time to go running for several hours.

Orals/my qualifying exam/trying to advance to candidacy is tomorrow. So I thought I'd take this moment to tell you that I finally mapped the Butte Super Cutoff that I took sobo on the CDT in '07. You can go there and download the maps (23 jpegs, 51 megs) if you want. Also, Rachel Getting Married is perhaps the most annoying movie ever, Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres is a great "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me" motivational book for empirical social scientists although it gets repetitive by the end, Earth the movie isn't different enough from the BBC's Planet Earth to warrant paying to see it, and that's about it.