Adventures in Onionism

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 ...