Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area

There is one place in the national park system that we visit over and over again. In fact, we’ve been going there since before it was part of the national park system. The Boston Harbor Islands became a national recreation area in 1996. There are 34 different islands in the park, and they each have their own character. There are water taxis which will take you from island to island.

One of our favorites is Georges island. Georges is the site of Fort Warren. When the kids were young, we would always take a flashlight with us when we spent the day there. That way we could explore all of the secret passageways in the fort. There is lots of open room on Georges, and the wind is usually blowing pretty well out in the harbor, so we usually brought a kite too.

The boys’ favorite Fort Warren story is of the attempted murder of one of the officers by a soldier. He tried to drop a cannon ball on the officers head when he returned from Boston one night. A ranger giving us the tour showed us the cracked flagstone where the cannon ball landed (he missed). We always recommend you go on any ranger tours you can when you visit a park. Even when you think you know a place the rangers have something interesting you haven’t heard.

Of course, there’s a great view of Boston ...

… but the view out towards the ocean is even nicer. That’s Boston Light behind the kids. It’s the oldest continually used lighthouse in the US.

The newest addition is Spectacle island. It used to be the dump. They used a lot of the dirt from the big dig to cap the dump, and now it’s a really nice place to visit with two hills and some nice walking trails.

The islands have a long history. Several of them were important to the local Native Americans. They still use the islands for ceremonies quite regularly. On the day that we visited folks from one of the local Wampanoag tribes were showing everyone how to perform some of their traditional dances.

It’s a delight to have these islands in the middle of the city and accessible to all. We really have one person to thank for it. Edward Rowe Snow was the tireless champion of the islands for years and years. He was known for his great stories about the various islands. For example, there’s Nix's Mate, a tiny rock, where they used to hang pirates – aargh!

Dinosaur National Monument

Dinosaur National Monument is famous for the Douglass Quarry. This was the site of an enormous excavation in 1909 which supplied many of the fossils at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, the month before we took the kids there in 2006, they decided that they had to close the quarry because of problems with the foundation. You would think that would have made the visit a disappointment, but it didn’t. It turns out that the park has something even better which most people don’t get to see. That something is the river which runs through the middle of it.

This stretch of the Green and Yampa rivers has some of the most historic rapids in the world. In 1869, John Wesley Powell set out from Green River, Wyoming to explore the largest blank space on the map of the United States. His book recounting the trip is one of the classics of exploration literature. Amazingly, the stretch through Dinosaur is almost exactly as he saw it a hundred and forty years ago. Here’s Peter watching as our guides set up the rafts just above the Gates of Lodore.

 

The gates are just as impressive today as they were in Powell’s day. And the canyon continues on like that for several days, as you meet a series of famous Class III rapids with names like Hell’s Half Mile and Disaster Falls. It was an amazing trip. The canyon is closed to almost all uses except rafting, and it was late enough in the season that there were very few people on the river. This meant that the only sound we heard was the roar of the rapids echoing up and down the canyons.

We did see a few other users of the canyon though. On evenings when we camped in sites where the rock walls weren’t completely shear, these mountain goats would come down to drink from the river at sunset.

 

As the sun set, our guides would set up a tent and get a wonderful supper cooking. Everyone was very hungry after a day on the water.

 

After supper, the kids would play a few games of washers, or do some slacklining.

Then it was off to bed in our cozy tent. In the morning, our guides would get the coffee started and then wake us up while they started breakfast. Then we’d load up the rafts and start down the river again.

 

On the calm parts of the river, we would let the kids head off on there own in these little inflatable kayaks known as rubber duckies.

They thought that was great, especially when they got into a big splashing fight with one of the guides. When Randy had finally had enough, he reached out with one of the long oars on the big raft and flipped Tom’s ducky over, dumping Tom into the cold water.

Another thing the kids really loved was hiking up to the rim and looking back down into the canyon.

 

After a couple of days in the deep canyons, in the very heart of the park, it suddenly opens out into the most spectacular natural amphitheater you’ve ever seen. This is Echo Park. The name comes from the amazing echoes off the gigantic wall of white rock on one side known as Steamboat Rock. They say that you can hear eight echoes here, but I’m not sure any of us counted quite that many.

 

In the early 50’s, the Bureau of Reclamation planned to build a dam here and fill it to the rim. The Sierra Club fought this. Their victory was in many ways the beginning of the US environmental movement.

Our memories of this rafting trip are among our favorite memories of all of the parks we’ve visited, and we’re so glad that it was preserved so that we could enjoy it with our children. If you go rafting here, be sure to either bring along Powell’s book, and/or Wallace Stegner’s wonderful book about Powell.

Arches National Park

Arches National Park is a park that we've actually been to twice. Mike & I visited Arches on our honeymoon in 1991. We returned there in 2006 along with Tom and Peter. Here is Peter next to Delicate Arch. It's a decent hike up to the arch, and it's not one you really want to do in the heat of the day - guess when we did it.

The hike is across bare sandstone. Any patches of shade are few and far between. There's also not much breeze. Here are Peter and Tom enjoying the slight wind as we cross a sandstone rise. But you suddenly come around a corner and there's the arch standing by itself in a small bowl.

While Delicate Arch is one of the most famous, there are lots of other spectacular arches like Double Arch. One day we had lunch sitting way up in a shady spot under the arch.

One thing we've learned when we visit the parks is that you miss a lot if you just drive around and see the roadside sites. The best thing to do is meet up with a park ranger and take a guided hike off the beaten path. Some of the hikes are short and over easy terrain. But some can be more challenging, like the hike through the Fiery Furnace in Arches.

You learn a lot on one of these hikes, and the rangers always make it fun for the kids too. On this hike, our guide challenged all the kids to not walk on any sand through a certain section. For that section of the hike, the sand was considered lava so they had to hop from rock to rock and crawl through narrow spots.

If you visit Arches, you're going to want to look up Edward Abbey. He worked the park in the 50s before most of it was accessible, and before it was made a National Park. You might have been able to get to see this formation - the three gossips. While there is a campground in Arches, it doesn't have a lodge like many of the larger parks. So if you're not camping, you'll probably end up staying in Moab. While you're there, be sure to stop into Back of Beyond Books, where you can pick up one of Abbey's books like Desert Solitaire or The Monkey Wrench Gang to read while you're there.

Yellowstone National Park

In honor of the wonderful new Ken Burns series that starts tonight, we thought we’d do a series of posts about our memories of some of our favorite parks. We’re not going to be able to cover all of the parks we’ve visited. We figured out the other day that if you count national monuments and historic sites, we’ve visited well over 50 of them.

Yellowstone was the first large park we took the kids to back in 2002. There’s lots of great things to see and do without too much serious hiking, so it’s a good park for small kids. The thing that impressed them the most were the animals. They memorized all of the rangers’ rules about how far to stay away from the different kinds of animals. One morning they opened the door of our cabin and there were two bison grazing right outside. They slammed the door and asked “What do we do? They’re not 25 yards away!”.

 

What do you think of when someone says Yellowstone? Ok, what do you think of right after Yogi Bear and Jellystone? Probably Old Faithful, but in fact Old Faithful is not anywhere near the most spectacular thing in Yellowstone. For one thing, did you know there is a Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone? At the upper end of the Canyon there are two sets of falls, these are the Upper falls.
While it may not be as big as the Grand Canyon in Arizona; it's actually more beautiful. Especially the two big waterfalls.

 

We did go on one big hike with the kids. We climbed to the top of Mt Washburn. It’s a beautiful, cone shaped mountain whose peak is at more than 10,000 feet. It’s a nice, easy trail, but when you get near the top, you come to this part. It’s only about the width of a single lane, and there’s a big drop off on each side of the trail. If you look down on either side, you can see mountain goats hundreds of feet below you.

    

I didn’t like this part much, but I made it across by just looking straight ahead and not to the sides. As you can see, the boys were pretty excited about climbing such a big mountain. At just five years old Peter was probably one of the youngest to climb the mountain on his own feet.

That’s the canyon behind them. There was also a forest fire in the background. That’s why it looks so smoky. We got to talk to some of the rangers who were fighting the fires. On our way down the mountain some black thunderclouds moved in. We kept the kids moving at a good pace, even as they started to get tired, by singing The ants go marching …, and feeding them cookies according to Tom. Of course we were making up the words by about nine as we didn’t remember them.

Of course, Yellowstone is most famous for its geysers and hot pools. If you go to Old Faithful, you’ll want to go very early or late in the day to get good seats like these and to avoid the crowds. We stayed in cabins at the Old Faithful Lodge near Old Faithful. It’s a really nice area until the tour buses show up. The crowds don’t show up till about 10 AM because it’s quite a ways from any of the entrances to the park. At quieter times we often saw wildlife wandering around the areas which were going to be most crowded during the day. On our way back to the cabin after dinner at the Old Faithful Inn we shared the board walk next to Old Faithful with a coyote. The coyote didn’t seem phased one bit to be walking beside us.

 

Once the tour buses showed up, we’d head off to see some of the other geysers. The trails in the geyser basins tend to be very level hikes and the kids generally enjoyed them a lot. In a lot of ways the less famous geysers are the most interesting. At Old Faithful they keep everyone way back. At some of the less famous ones, the water rains down on your head when they go.

The Automobile: Electric Vehicle Issue

This is an interesting read in today’s climate.

I was trolling around in Google Books, and I ran into an issue of The Automobile that is entirely about electric cars. The interesting thing is that the issue is from January 2, 1913.

 

This was roughly the peak of the electric car boom, and the magazine was pretty excited about them. For example, at one point it says:

The field of the electric for city and intercity use is practically limitless. Such a statement might have seemed absurd to the minds of most people 3 years ago, but so rapid have been the strides in the development of storage batteries, the manufacturer meanwhile keeping pace in the development of the mechanical parts of the car, that their use in city and suburb 5 years from now will be universal throughout the United States and Canada is a logical conclusion.

Well, that might have seemed logical, but in fact, 1912, the year before this article was written, was the peak for electric car production. In 5 years, electric cars really wouldn’t be much of a factor.  Kettering patented his starter motor in 1911 and the oil booms in California and Texas caused the price of gasoline to drop quickly. The development of batteries and motors had been moving quickly when this magazine was published, but it slowed considerably after that.

The field was pretty exciting in 1913 though. Check out this cool new invention for charging your electric car from the new alternating current system in your house:

We might think that big vacuum tube rectifier looks strange, but it certainly looks simpler than this setup

 

doesn’t it?

I really like the section on all of the new heavy electric trucks that are coming out this year. Like this one from General Vehicles of Long Island.

A nice section  starts on page 42 about how we’re waiting for a new battery technology to come along and replace lead-acid cells. That transition hasn’t gone as quickly as they might have hoped, has it?

And on page 8, there’s some good stuff about how we need to start limiting the speed of the cars because they’re getting so fast. They suggest a limit of 6 1/2 to 12 MPH for trucks (depending on size) and as much as 20 MPH for some types of high speed cars. The author does question whether these speeds are too high for a car that is controlled by a woman though.

There’s also a lot of interesting things in this magazine that aren’t specific to electric cars. For example, on page 7 it talks about insurance, and it starts out like this:

When the matter of insurance of automobiles was first brought out some years ago, it was treated rather lightly by owners, dealers, and even by those insurance companies which did not at the time right it.

And later it says:

It was once a very common saying that there is nothing about an automobile to burn, but experience has shown both owners and underwriters that cars of all descriptions can and do burn.

Wait a second, they’re talking about fire insurance! What about collision, comprehensive, and all that jazz? You didn’t need that? When did car insurance become mandatory?

That’s actually an interesting question this year, because it is probably our best model for adding a health insurance mandate in the US. And it turns out that it started in Massachusetts (in 1927), just like the health insurance mandate did (last year).

Chickens and the Auto Industry

Have you been following the recent trade squabble between the US & China? The US imposed a tariff on Chinese tires, now China is threatening to respond with a tariff on US chickens. It reminds me of a story.

Did you know that the decline of the US auto industry can be traced (in part) to chickens? Back in 1962, when the European Common Market was first forming, they placed a tariff on US chickens. In response, the US placed a tariff on European small trucks (primarily VW). A car coming into the US faced a tariff of roughly 2.5%. For a light truck or van, that was 25%. That tariff remains in place today. As a result of this, US auto manufacturers haven’t faced as much competition in the light truck market as they have in the car market. As you may remember, when things got tough for the US auto industry, they started putting more and more of their development effort into pickups and SUVs. There’s probably a connection, don’t you think? The problem, of course, is that gas prices started rising sharply. US customers wanted fuel efficient cars, but that’s not what Detroit was developing any more.

You can read some more on this subject at Dani Rodrik’s blog. You can also read this post to learn about the sort of workarounds that result from the chicken tax.

Inboard Brakes

A discussion of hub motors (ala the 1899 Lohner-Porsche) on Ned’s blog, got me thinking about inboard brakes. Traditionally, making the engine (or motor) unsprung has been considered a bad idea because of ride quality issues. So why doesn’t the same argument apply to the brakes?

Well, if you’ve messed with cars for a while, you can probably name several cars which did use inboard brakes. Have you ever looked a a complete list though? The best one I can find is this list at Wikipedia. Go check it out and come back.

That’s a pretty odd list, isn’t it? How many car lists can you think of that include the following cars? Citroën 2CV, Jaguar E-Type, Hummer H1, Lotus 72.

Citroën 2CV

Drums mounted on the transaxle in front.

Jaguar E-Type

Disks mounted on the differential in back.

Hummer H1

Disks mounted on the differentials in front and back.

Lotus 72

Inboard front disks on a rear engined car!

What do these cars have in common (besides the brakes)? I think the common thread is that they were all designed by engineers who thought, instead of by engineers who followed trends.

There are certainly good arguments to be made for making the brakes sprung, while making the engine unsprung. Inboard brakes often have more parts that could fail. There are heat dissipation when you move them inboard. Etc, etc … But I still think that it’s nice that the world includes engineers who are willing to question assumptions and try something different. I hope that never changes.

One Trillion Congruent Numbers

Do you know what congruent numbers are? They are integers which are the areas of rational right triangles. A rational right triangle is a right triangle for which none of the 3 sides are irrational numbers.

You’re already familiar with some rational right triangles. The first one you learned about was probably the famous 3,4,5 triangle.

The area of this triangle is 3*4/2 = 6, so 6 is a congruent number. There is actually a smaller one. The number 5 is a congruent number because of the triangle 1/2,3,4. There are obviously an infinite number of congruent numbers, but predicting which numbers are congruent is an interesting problem.

The congruent numbers form a pretty odd pattern. If you go to one of my favorite websites, you’ll find that the sequence of congruent numbers starts like this:

5, 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 37, 38, 39, 41, 45, 46, 47, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 69, 70, 71, 77, 78, 79, 80, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 92, 93, 94, 95, …     (id:A003273)

Mathematicians have been studying this sequence since al-Karajī (ca. 1000), although he was obviously influenced by Diophantus (ca. 200).

Recently, an international team has been attacking the problem with computers. They’ve now computed the first one trillion values and written an interesting paper about their work. It gets into elliptic curves, FFTs, the Chinese remainder theorem, and lots of other cool stuff.

From a physorg article.

John Fitch

A little bit more Lime Rock in the news this week. Hemmings Motor News had this really nice interview with John Fitch. John was an important part of Lime Rock (and all sports car racing in America) from the earliest days, and he’s a really interesting guy.

We saw his cool, Corvair based Phoenix at Sunday in the Park this year, but I don’t seem to have a picture of it.

If you’re at all interested in cars, go read the interview.

Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire

I finally got around to reading Rafe Esquith’s book Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire (my to-read pile has gotten a little deep). You’ve probably heard of Rafe. He’s a fifth grade teacher in downtown LA. His class is famous for their annual production of a Shakespeare play. He recently published his third book, so I guess my list doesn’t get any shorter.

His take on how to teach children is simultaneously realistic and inspiring. I’m sure that he rubs a lot of people he works with the wrong way. He refers to the bureaucracy of the education system as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth. But he cares deeply about the students and really wants to help make the education system better.

If you don’t know about Rafe and what he’s doing, read one of his books. Or if you prefer listening to reading, there are good interviews with him online, funny talks he’s given, and POV did a special about his class a few years ago.

What is Time?

Specifically, what is time in parallel programming?

Have you heard about Rich Hickey’s talk at JVMSummit. It’s worth checking out. It is pretty thought provoking and I think it’s getting close to some issues which are plaguing concurrent programming today.

He makes the analogy that the problem of dealing with change over time in a programming language is similar to the problem of dealing with memory. If a programming language has a bad model for one of these, then you introduce incidental complexity to any program written in that language. Think about the differences between programming in a language where you have to explicitly manage memory to programming in a language with garbage collection. A lot of developers have decided that the benefits of a language like C aren’t sufficient to pay for the complexity the explicit memory management adds to programs which have to deal with complex object lifetimes.

Is there a similar paradigm shift possible in thinking about how state changes over time in a concurrent system? One possibility of course is pure functional programming languages. They basically avoid the whole question. This makes them very powerful for concurrent programming, but it also them makes it hard to use them to model mutable objects.

Hickey’s basic model is that values are immutable (as in a pure functional language), but the entity you can actually refer to (an identity) is not a value, but a series of values which represent different states over time. The current state of an identity is actually associated with the observer.

Once you’ve included time in your basic model like this, then it becomes possible to start talking about how mutable objects interact with processes on unsynchronized, concurrent processors.

There’s some interesting ideas here. You can read more in an interview with Hickey at Artima Developer. And you have to love a talk about programming which repeatedly invokes Alfred North Whitehead.

In a way, these questions remind me of the book Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Galison.

Before the 19th century, people thought of time as a constant which permeated the universe. Poincaré and Einstein overturned this view, but there were actually some hints of their revolution earlier. Before the telegraphs and railroads were first built, each city ran by its own clock. As the cities were connected, it became difficult to talk about things like train schedules because of all of the conversions between local times. Galison makes some interesting comparisons between this paradigm shift and the one which swept through physics after Einstein. In fact, a number of Einstein’s gedanken experiments involved observers on trains.

It is still possible to talk about mutable objects in Einstein’s physics, even though events are no longer simultaneous to all observers. Perhaps distinguishing between value and identity is part of a similar paradigm shift in programming.

 

BTW, if you don’t know Rich Hickey, he’s the creator of Clojure. Clojure is a Lisp dialect which compiles to Java bytecodes. And if you don’t know who Peter Galison is, he’s a professor of the history of science at Harvard.

WGBH buys WCRB

This is probably only of local interest, but ...

The state of classical music radio has been going downhill in Boston in recent years. We used to have a number of good choices. WBOQ gave up and switched to oldies in 2003. WHRB at Harvard still plays some classical (notably the orgies during finals), but it has really been down to WCRB and WGBH in recent years. That wasn't a bad pair. WCRB was commercial, but played classical 24 hours a day. WGBH was public and did news and jazz, but when they did classical, it tended to be more diverse than WCRB (esp. back when Robert J was there). It seemed like a stable situation, because WGBH was one of the more successful public stations and Ted Jones had locked up WCRB in a trust that would keep it doing classical for 100 years.

Then a couple of years ago (after Jones died) the owners hired some lawyers, broke the trust, and sold the station. They sold it to a company from New Jersey who switched the big transmitter over to a country and western station they owned and moved the classical music to a dinky little transmitter in Lowell that is very hard to pick up in most of the Boston area. The handwriting was on the wall at that point.

Today they announced that WGBH was buying WCRB. This means that they're going to eliminate classical music on WGBH and only have it on WCRB. So much for choices.

Oh well, I guess it's time to load up the iPod and turn the radio off.

Maker Faire Rhode Island

There was a Maker Faire in Rhode Island last week. We visited on the final Saturday. It was a pretty fall day and everyone was out showing off the things they’d made. For example, some students from Ponaganset High School brought this neat little T-Bucket hot rod they’d built.

That doesn’t look much like a normal motor because it’s a hydrogen fuel cell. They’re hoping to get it ready to drive down to Washington DC. They’ve already driven it to the Rhode Island State House.

Some people from Big Nazo were there showing how they make they’re cool costumes.

And here’s Peter checking out a submarine that Sean Bagge is building.

Of course there were some folks there from my group at the Media Lab and the Computer Clubhouse, along with some collaborators like Ed Baafi from the South-End Technology Center who was showing off a new way to program Arduinos called ModKit inspired by Scratch blocks. As an experienced Scratch programmer Peter thought that sounded like a good way to program his Arduino. He was also excited by the TouchShield Slide which would plug into his Arduino. It’s a really sweet touch sensitive OLED screen. So he could build his own hand held video game.

There were lots of cool things to see and do. Here’s Mike trying out a pair of Brain Machine glasses.

But the best part is that you could make things like the glasses yourself. They had kits with all the parts you needed and rows of tables with soldering irons set up where you could sit down and make something.

The boys were being kind of shy about it, so I decided that I was going to jump in myself. I decided to make a Trippy RGB Waves Kit. (Take a look at the second video on that page to see what they do).

Of course, once I got started Tom jumped in to build a little portable electronic game called Mignonette.

After he finished building it, Mitch Altman, the designer of these kits helped Tom program it.

And here are the finished projects:

The Mignonette game was a big hit at Tom’s book club tonight.

Argiope Aurantia

Here’s another picture from our garden. This one might not be as popular as some of our earlier ones (link, link) though.

This is Argiope Aurantia, or the Black and Yellow Garden Spider. She really is beautiful. The body is an inch or so across. She seems to be eating small grasshoppers, which we have plenty of this year.

They’re also known as writing spiders. It’s hard to see in this picture, but they’re called that because of the heavy white line zigzagging through the web. This is called a stabilimentum. It actually does look a little like text. Perhaps this is the type of spider E. B. White had in mind.