Last summer I moved to Palo Alto, where I live in the middle of the urban sprawl that runs from San Francisco down to San Jose. One urgent need was to find a good place to go for walks, away from the traffic and the concrete, even if it meant a short drive. The answer was to return to an old favourite location: the Baylands Nature Preserve and the many trails that wind around Charleston Slough at the edges of San Francisco Bay. 
“Old favourite”, because during my many years at Sun Microsystems, I would often visit the SunLabs building (MTV29), and the parking lot behind the building backed right on to Shoreline Lake. On many occasions I would wrap up a day’s work in MTV29 and then go for a walk around the Slough (often before heading up to SFO to catch the red-eye home to BOS.)
Which brings me to birds, and photography. The wetlands around Charleston Slough are a mecca for birdwatching. Egrets, pelicans, ducks of many different kinds and colours, waders, insect-eaters… every visit brings something new. New, interesting, and usually several hundred feet away! (Though there are some incredibly tame fearless egrets at Shoreline Lake.) And frankly my current camera – the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ4 – doesn’t really hack it. The 10x zoom is fine for day-to-day stuff, but it’s not going to let me distinguish between the various kinds of ducks or waders out in the wetlands.
The obvious answer would be to grit my teeth and spend the money to get a DSLR with a couple of decent lenses. Obvious, but expensive: at least a kilobuck, all in. And I’m intrigued by the recent emergence of ultrazoom point-and-shoots. Things like the Olympus SP-590UZ (26x), the Nikon Coolpix P90 (24x), or the forthcoming Fujifilm FinePix HS10 (30x!). All of these look like much more affordable (and less fiddly) solutions to the problem.
Recommendations, anyone?
36 Arguments for the Existence of God
I just finished Rebecca Goldsten’s latest work, and I can’t wipe this silly grin off my face. This is the kind of book that makes my toes curl with delight: witty, arch, thought-provoking, funny, familiar, relevant, and deeply satisfying.
As in her previous novels, such as The Mind-Body Problem, Goldstein uses the stereotypical figures of academia to explore philosophical questions. A young professor escapes from the mad world of a Harold Bloom-like figure and writes a response to William James and Sigmund Freud entitled “The Varieties of Religious Illusion” (get it?). It includes an appendix listing 36 arguments for the existence of God, together with a crisp rebuttal to each. In this era of the “New Atheists”, this ensures that the book becomes a best-seller, catapulting the bewildered professor into the heights of academe, and culminating in a ferocious debate with a theist that includes all of the arguments that this reader would hope to make in a similar situation! And this narrative, with many fascinating twists and turns, is wrapped up in a novel complete with an appendix(!) on 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. With the addition of the subtitle, “A Work of Fiction”, this becomes the delightfully misleading title for the book as a whole.
Is it wrong of me to hope that some theist will read the title, assume that it’s a response to Dawkins, Dennett et al, buy it sight unseen, and be confused, angry, and – possibly – enlightened?
Mid-point of the trip
We finished our meetings here in Xi’an, and tomorrow morning some of us are flying down to Shenzhen. (The others will stay here with the Xi’an team.) Our last evening here went out with a bang: a team New Year party in anticipation of the Chinese Spring Festival in a couple of weeks. Much 白酒 (bai jiu) was drunk, food was consumed (including excellent duck and lamb – I like the cuisine here in the north-west), competitions were staged, raffles were drawn, songs were sung, and speeches were made. I won a soybean juice extractor in the raffle, an intriguing but bulky item which I decided to give away rather than trying to get back to Palo Alto.
And now I must shake off the effects of the bai jiu and try to pack. We’ll be checking out of here around 6:45am…..
The Terra-Cotta Warriors of Xi'an
So I have seen the Eighth Wonder of the World. And the title was aptly bestowed – it was magnificent, a wonderful experience. You can check out the photographs I took here.
I’m not going to give a detailed account, but there were a couple of interesting moments:
- While we were driving out of Xi’an to get to the Museum, there was a M5.0 earthquake not far away. I didn’t notice it, though.
- Having seen so many pictures of grey figures, I hadn’t realized that when the army was created the soldiers were all painted in bright colours. The museum had some photographs of fragments which had retained their (mineral) pigments, and gave a vivid impression of what the warriors might have looked like. I was, of course, reminded of early Christian church buildings: today we admire the pure beauty of the marble and stone, even though they would have originally been a riot of colour
- I resisted the temptation to buy a replica of one of the figures, and instead bought a coffee-table book about the warriors. After I had done so, a wizened old man behind an adjoining counter offered to sign it for me. He was one of the farmers who discovered the figures back in 1974; he now lives in an apartment near to the museum.
- When the army was created in 210 BCE, all of the figures had weapons. Most of them were stolen soon after the death of the Emperor Qin Shi Huang (presumably weapons were more valuable than statues), and wooden pieces like spear shafts rotted away long ago, but many weapons have been discovered. I was surprised to see that some the generals’ swords had been “chrome plated”, and that other pieces were stamped with the manufacturer’s name and batch number.
- I hadn’t realized that every figures was designed individually. These were not stamped out in cookie-cutter style. The detailed work – the patterns on the soles of the shoes, or the way that the fabric of a tunic folded and hung, or the facial expression – was simply amazing.
- And finally, the museum structures themselves are wonderfully laid out. Yes, the big (“Pit 1”) building was bitterly cold, but the environmental controls seem perfectly suited to the preservation of these extraordinary pieces. Of course we saw it all at the best time: mid-winter, with no crowds. In the summer the place must be a zoo.
Xi'an old city at night
Here are a few pictures from this evening’s expedition to Xi’an’s old (walled) city.
The full set is here in my MobileMe Gallery.
It was bitterly cold, and I used the opportunity to educate overseas colleagues on the old English(?) expression “monkey weather” (as in, “It’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey”). We took two taxis to the highly-decorated South Gate(?), then braved the traffic to cross into the old city, and went looking for a bar. The first one had cute kittens, but no cocktails. The second had decent drinks (the strongest Long Island Iced Tea I’ve ever had) and great music. From the “Bar Street” we headed up to the Muslim Street, which was a crowded riot of colour, smells (food, incense, spices) and music. Resisting the tourist trinkets, we found a restaurant that offered more and varied ways to serve lamb, beef and goat than I had imagined. (And the fish, mushrooms, and dumplings were good too.) It was halal, of course, and when pressed for an alternative to tea they came up with a couple of bottles of warm, sweet Sprite. (Sweet, because of course it was made from sugar rather than corn syrup.) And finally we flagged down a “cargo taxi” who agreed to take us all back to the hotel for 40 yuan, which was a great deal even if it did mean treating Roman as self-loading freight!
Tomorrow, hopefully, we’ll get to see the Terracotta Army. (I say “hopefully” because there’s a non-zero chance that we’ll have to head back in to the office.)
This is democracy?
Counting the new Republican Senator Scott Brown from Massachusetts, the 41 Republicans in the Senate come from states representing just over 36.5 percent of the total US population. The 59 others (Democratic plus 2 Independent) represent just under 63.5 percent. (Taking 2009 state populations from here. If you count up the totals and split a state's population when it has a spit delegation, you end up with about 112.3 million Republican, 194.7 million Democratic + Indep. Before Brown’s election, it was about 198 million Democratic + Ind, 109 million Republican.)
Let’s round the figures to 63/37 and apply them to the health care debate. Senators representing 63 percent of the public vote for the bill; those representing 37 percent vote against it. The bill fails.
Makes me quite nostalgic for the three-line whip. And reinforces my long-held belief that the USA is simply too big to govern as a single country.
Route map for the next trip
As so often before, I’m posting a map of my route, as calculated by Karl L. Swartz’s excellent Great Circle Mapper. 19 days, 14,313 miles:
Electronics for the trip
I’m heading to China for 19 days, and so the big activity this weekend is packing. I found myself enumerating all of the electronics gear that I’ll be taking:
- Apple MacBook Air – my personal laptop
- Dell E6400 – my work laptop
- Power brick for the MacBook Air
- Power brick for the Dell
- Mouse – my Microsoft wireless mouse will have to do for both; I’m not bringing my new Apple Mouse
- Moshi combined SD card reader and USB hub
- Apple iPhone
- iPhone USB cable and transformer (the original one, which accepts Apple international plugs, not the cheesy little adaptor which they introduced with the iPhone 3)
- Android G1 – my international phone (which I hope to replace with an unlocked T-Mobile Pulse from Huawei)
- China Mobile SIM card
- G1 USB cable (incompatible with iPhone USB)
- Amazon Kindle 2 e-book reader
- Kindle USB cable (incompatible with iPhone and G1 – standards are wonderful)
- Sennheiser earbud headphones
- Panasonic DMC-TZ4 camera
- Battery charger and spare battery for DMC-TZ4
- Apple Airport Express (so I can create a WiFi access point if the hotel only has wired Internet)
There are definitely too many cables.
That b100dy HP laptop
I just posted this one-star review to Amazon.com:
I bought my DV4-2045DX at Best Buy, on a whim. Soon after I got it, I headed to England for a family visit, and I decided to take this laptop along instead of my usual MacBook Air. Bad idea. Soon after we arrived, the machine began to malfunction. The symptoms were fairly consistent: I would close the lid (configured to “sleep”), and soon afterwards the logo would light up and the fan would come on. If the machine was unplugged, this would drain the battery in a few hours. Opening the lid did not wake the machine: the screen was blank, the keyboard unresponsive. More seriously, the power button wouldn’t work: holding it down for 5 or 10 seconds wouldn’t cause the machine to power down. The only way to stop it was to unplug it and remove the battery. After this, restarting was hit or miss. Usually, the machine would blink the CapsLock and NumLock lights in a pattern indicating “CPU failure”.
I struggled through the trip, and when I got home I called HP. They sent me a prepaid FedEx box to return the machine for service. I did so, and monitored the status of the service order on their website. For a couple of weeks it indicated that they were waiting for a part to repair it. Finally it was returned, two days ago. The service slip indicated that the problem had been reproduced during tests, and the CPU had been replaced.
I booted it up, loaded some software, and closed the lid. The problem returned in a few minutes: fan on, catatonic, wouldn’t power down, “CPU failure” after pulling the battery. I called HP, and they gave me a new service number. I’m still waiting for the next step.
Perhaps this is just a lemon, but the “waiting for a part” is suspicious. It suggests that this may be a common problem Hopefully HP will replace it this time. (I wouldn’t mind a refund, but that may be too much to hope for.)
Off I go again
Another month, another business trip. On Monday I’ll be heading back to China for nearly three weeks. First I’m going to Xi’an, flying United to Beijing and Hainan to Xi’an. A week later, I’ll fly down to Shenzhen, before flying home from Hong Kong. It’ll be my first visit to Xi’an, and fortunately I’ll have at least one day to play tourist.
The only annoying thing about preparing for this trip has been my China visa. Last year, I had a twelve month, multiple entry visa, and I got good use out of it. I just ordered the replacement, and what came back was a six month, two entry visa. This is frustrating; it means I’ll need to get another visa as soon as I finish my next trip. (Even sooner, if I need to visit Hong Kong during this trip.) Time to switch visa agents, I guess.