I’m sad to leave San Diego, it has been a very good place to live for seven years. I’m leaving behinds lots of friends and a place I’m used to living with weather I like. Boulder is an exciting new place with new friends to make. It has four seasons, which will be a new thing for both of us. I don’t know if we’ll ever live in San Diego again, but I do want to come back and see my old friends and go for a bike ride with them.

Goodbye!

I like this ‘snub cube’ fountain:

The SciPy crowd:

A fountain in front of the building the conference is in:

What do you see just above and to the right of the wagon wheel? You can click on the image for the full view, or look at a zoom-in below:

It’s Che Guevara, of course! You can clearly see an eye, his beard, two nostrils and hat. He even appears to be sticking his tongue out. I am forced to wonder how his image ended up on a horse-drawn cart in New Orleans eighteen years before he was born. But clearly it’s a sign of something profound and mystical. Any ideas?

(Further reading.)

While I waited hours for the brief seconds of each pack of cyclists to pass, I decided to amuse myself by taking pictures of all the ‘brodozers’ that drove by. A brodozer is a pick-up truck that has been jacked up on shocks with huge noisy tires. They are a particularly nasty form of transportation. They are a big middle finger to the environment and are driven by young males in a very aggressive manner. One of my scariest moments on a bicycle was due to a brodozer in East County San Diego. This county is infested with brodozers, and Escondido is particularly bad.

Below are 16 of the 17 brodozers I was able to capture. There were many that passed before I had inspiration, and others I missed. It’s interesting that white is the dominant color, and none appear to have been off-road recently. The seventeenth was the only vehicle I saw escorted off the course by the police. That brodozer needed to be told more than once by the police to get off the course. This tells you all you need to know about brodozer drivers.

Let’s see how the the hopes and dreams of Obama turn out. I’m excited!

By far my favorite place to ride my mountain bike (that is reachable without driving) are the single track ‘tunnels’ that are typically reached through Peñasquitos Park (although they aren’t actually inside the park, they are on non-park city land). They are called ‘the tunnels’ because for most of their length they are covered by low bushes and trees just over head height. There are four of them that total a few miles in length and vary in technical difficulty. Until about a month ago, they were somewhat illicit and not patrolled, now they are very expressly illegal. During the rainy season I think it’s perfectly reasonable to close them. Muddy and wet ground is especially susceptible to erosion, and nature doesn’t need human help to erode the ground during the rainy season. The ditch my bike is pictured in above was fairly level ground the last time I was there, less than a month ago (*).

Unfortunately, there is strong evidence that the City of San Diego is planning on closing them permanently, or at least severely curtailing how many can be used. Since the tunnels are fairly far from any road, it’s only cyclists that use them with regularity, but the city feels it needs to consider all the other potential users. Cyclists are the lowest on the public land user totem pole, so you can see how this can do nothing but hurt our interests. I suspect that if they’re kept open, they’ll have to be upgraded so hikers and equestrians can use them, which will remove much of what is attractive about them (which is the lack of those two groups for a large part). If they’re closed for environmental reasons, only cyclists will miss them. It’s kind of a lose-lose situation for us.

The City of San Diego isn’t full of complete idiots, there is a series of legal drag race events that take place in the Qualcomm parking lot. This alleviates the pressure of what many people want to do and would resort to doing illegally without other options. There is a similar pressure from cyclists who want quality single track trails. If trails are available, legal and fun, cyclists won’t have to resort to cutting trails and breaking laws. We’ll see if the city has enough foresight to recognize this.

(*) For those my friends to are familiar with Peñasquitos, if you’re heading east, this is just past the big deep sandy patch where you used to have to ride on the extreme right, and just before the really rocky climb. I think it’s in the center of here. The second photo above is the top of the third tunnel, the farthest north of the three linked tunnels. The riding I did do today (I didn’t go into the tunnels) showed that many of the lines we rode in the summer are now completely different.

A few days ago while I was still in the Bay Area, I visited the new Academy of Sciences museum with my family. They just re-opened a few months ago after replacing their old earthquake-damaged buildings with a new, very unique building. You can follow those links to learn all about the ‘living roof’ and the various exhibits.

I have some mixed feelings about the new museum. The old museum (you can see some pictures of it at their time line page) was a funky amalgamation of several buildings built over many decades. You could see the history of modern American natural museums in one place. The old section had dioramas of stuffed animals in pseudo-natural scenes. Exhibits like lions hunting antelopes with Serengeti sounds playing on speakers. The newer sections had live animals and fish and a greater focus on education. The whole place was labyrinthine and dusty, and a well-used kind of ancient. It was never too full of people. I liked the old museum and I’m sad that a piece of my childhood is gone.

The new place is very shiny, flashy and popular. We waited for one hour and forty minutes to get inside. It might be bigger in cubic meters due to the higher ceilings, but I don’t think it’s bigger in square meters of floorspace. The main exhibition areas are limited to the two ends of the building, past the planetarium and tropical sphere, and the aquarium has been moved to the basement. The aquarium is quite a bit nicer than it was, with a few tanks that rival the Monterey Bay Aquarium in quality and cool curving Plexiglas, but not in size. Like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the museum pushes education on choices the individual can make to positively change their effect on the ecosphere. They have a ‘carbon balance’, but it mostly ends up being played with by children who generally don’t decide whether to buy a SUV or a hybrid car.

I found a couple things I really liked; click on the thumbnails above. Read the tag on the human skull, and take a look at a whole wall of very carefully pinned ladybugs. I took three pictures a various zooms. That may have been a PhD thesis, right there.

There are more pictures here.

Yesterday, Melissa and I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We were met there by my brother Adam and his lady friend Shinji, who not coincidentally decided to also see the aquarium on the same day. The aquarium has expanded since my last visit. There is now a northern wing that has fresh water otters, an “outer bay” tank and a seahorse exhibit (that was under construction, sadly). More than the last time I was there (or maybe I was too young to pay attention to things not cute), the aquarium really pushes conservation and ethical seafood consumption. They have a set of cards you can carry to help guide seafood and sushi purchases in stores and restaurants.

But what about the cute animals? (These links go to movies.) Fresh water otters gamboling! Feeding the penguins! A huge wolf eel in the kelp forest tank!

There are lots more photos here.

Melissa and I are taking the slow route up to the Bay Area for the holidays. Tonight we’re staying in Santa Barbara, and we’ll visit the Hearst Castle tomorrow. For dinner we ate at a decent Mexican restaurant on State Street. Afterwards we walked down State Street looking at all the shops and restaurants. It’s clear that the economy has started to hit Main, err… State Street America. Despite the Christmas decorations, and the huge tree in a left-turn lane, there are quite a few empty stores and others going out of business. I guess now is the time to start a new business cheaply in Santa Barbara – as long as you can weather the current economic storm.

More tomorrow!

Just like when the race goes through the Bay Area, I am familiar with much of this route. The race starts in Rancho Bernardo, and heads east on Highland Valley Road. That road has several nicely steep sections that kick my non-professional racer butt. I’m sure that the pros won’t charge up those hills so early in the race, but their pace would drop me, no doubt.

They go up the hard side of Palomar which is a world-class climb. It is every bit as hard as the Tour de France cols I’ve climbed. In February the top of Palomar can be quite cold (sometimes it even snows) so the temperature changes along the route could have an effect on the race.

I wish the race organizers would have given us the grand spectacle of a mountain-top finish. I am grateful, however, that they’ve finally dipped below the Los Angeles divide.

Oh, and I can’t forget to note: parts of the race go through Indian reservations, so the racers can get their gamblin’ on, if they feel like it.

I am considering selling my Volvo. I drive it perhaps two or three times a week because I ride my bike to school. Melissa has a fine automobile that she would let me use. My car is a 1997 model (it was actually sold in 1996) 850 T5 Vovlo wagon with every premium package except for the ‘winter’ and multidisc CD changer packages. Kelly Blue Book says I can sell it for between $4000 and $5000. I encourage you to tell me what do to in the comments. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Amazing.

I can’t wait for January 20, 2009.

Play Quicktime version

She’s cuter than my work buddies at school, of course.

As I walked to lunch I saw the unveiling ceremony ending while the UCSD band (we have a band?) played the UCSD fight song (we have a fight song?). Below the statue there is a few streams of bubbly water and a a plaque which explains that the Triton doesn’t get to use his awesome trident, he just blows really hard on his conch which scares all the other gods and baddies away.

I, for one, am now waiting for the UC Santa Cruz banana slug statue.

Above is a graph showing my net worth since January 2007. I have removed the actual dollar values for the bars because I’m ashamed of how poor I am. Or wealthy I am. I’m not telling. But remember that I’m a grad student, not a former CEO of a failed investment bank… you get the idea.

I’ve put two numbers in orange on the graph. If in my richest half month I had one dollar, now I have 68 cents. Put another way, I’m now about two-thirds of my former self, and this took five months. The graph above includes my cash accounts, which haven’t gone down, so my investments have declined even more than a third. Luckily, I don’t need that money any time soon (I have to graduate before that), but it’s a bit depressing.

It’s also an opportunity to buy some really cheap bank stocks and hold them until they recover. Which would more or less cancel out the inevitable tax increases my generation will have to pay to bail out our selfish parents.

At least I can say that I’m ahead of the curve on the grad school thing.

Original here.

You’ll notice that China, which leads the gold rankings by a fair amount in the link above, is by far the most affected by this correct ranking. Indeed, only three of the American golds are improper, while 25 Chinese golds are trash, which is just less than half their total. Eliminating judged sports is not anti-China, it just happens that China focuses on those kinds of events. Many other nations, including the USA, lose a fair number of overall medals due to this modification.

(If you’re looking at this with an RSS reader, you’ll have to view the full post to see the tally.)

I recorded the BMX races last night out of curiosity. (I’ve included some HD screen grabs of crashes for your enjoyment; click on them for the full size image.) BMX has been introduced to increase the interest of young people, those who like Xtreme sports. NBC even has a BMX crashes compilation for you to watch while you drink your Mountain Dew or get another tattoo.

This is the first year BMX is being contested at the Olympics and I’m conflicted about it. While I support any kind of cycling, in order to introduce this kind of cycling, the Olympic Organizing Committee cut two track events (the men’s 1000m and women’s 500m time trials) to make room for the BMX events. This was done to conserve the number of cycling events. According to this page there are 18 cycling events. Swimming has 34 events. So increasing the number of cycling medals wouldn’t have given it a ridiculous number of medals (unless you think swimming has a ridiculous number of events, which I in fact do). Granted, Olympic cycling isn’t as popular as Olympic gymnastics, and that only has 14 medals, but at least gymnastics takes place on different equipment. The cycling events range from 40 seconds to over six hours on four different kinds of venues that require very different types of skills and strategies. Each medal rewards a clearly different set of accomplishments. All but two of the swimming events are in the same damn pool (the 10K open-water swim is new this year) with the same equipment, only the strokes and distances change, and the distances vary by far less than cycling. It’s not clear that adding BMX is a net gain for cycling in the Olympics, and they could have very easily increased the number of cycling events, in my opinion.

Of course, cycling has the Tour de France every year, while swimming has ?

I think the best thing that can happen is if BMX becomes a kind of gateway drug into cycling. Get the young ones into the sport and then push them into the real hard stuff, like the velodrome and road cycling. Then they’ll really be hooked and there’s no going back.

Breaking news: These sports will be immediately eliminated from the Olympic games, due to the fact that they are incredibly lame and arbitrary. Any sport that is judged is “inherently flawed and unfair,” the UN ruled today, and subjecting the worldwide public to these events will be deemed an “act of cruelty.” Any medals already awarded in these sports in the undergoing Olympics will be reclaimed and turned into equipment for legitimate sports, like weights or shot puts (much like turning ‘swords into plowshares’).

• Boxing: A borderline event, it does have a clear scoring system, but matches can be called when “in the referee’s opinion, (a boxer is) being outclassed or excessively punished.” Also, boxing is brutal and thuggish.
• Diving: Until and unless the diving competition becomes quantifiable (e.g. splash height and distance in the belly flop competition), diving is prohibited from the Olympics.
• Equestrian: While this isn’t always judged, any Olympic sport that uses another animal is so obviously disqualified it needs no further comment.
• Gymnastics: The king of judged sports. Incredibly popular world-wide. This event pits tiny men and girls (and they’re almost entirely girls, see the “16″ year-old Chinese girl) in events where grace and style are actually part of the scoring. There have been scoring controversies every year. Until and unless scoring can be done by an objective computer, this event is banished to the WE channel between reruns of Hallmark movies.
• Judo & Taekwondo: While these are awesome events, they are judged. An electronic scoring system, similar to fencing, would be acceptable.
• Modern Pentathlon: See equestrian, above.
• Rhythmic Gymnastics: See gymnastics, above. Also, no real sport needs a ribbon which one twirls artistically.
• Synchronized Swimming: While the world loves a pool full of young women in swimsuits (see Baywatch), any sport set to music and that has choreographers is clearly eliminated from the Olympics. Dancesport isn’t in the Olympics, and Synchronized Swimming shouldn’t be either. (*)
• Trampoline: Most don’t even know this is in the Olympics. So most won’t miss it.

The UN also ruled that in evaluating future Olympic sports, the IOC will only consider events that Stephen Skory cares about.

(*) With apologies to my good friend Chris S., it seems to me that Dancesport is hijacking the word ‘sport’ like so many humanities hijack ‘science.’ If dancing was obviously recognizable as a sport, it wouldn’t need to append the word at the end. We don’t call it Baseballsport. Or Physicsience.

I’ve seen this Lotus Elise parked on campus often, but recently it got this “007″ sticker. Putting the double-oh-seven on your car is about as bad as putting random Japanese characters on your windshield. James Bond did drive a Lotus Esprit in The Spy Who Loved Me, but it went underwater. This Lotus doesn’t even have a roof. And yes, this is the same parking lot where I saw the Hawaiian GT-40.

After I took this photo, the driver came up and I chatted briefly with him. I did not say to his face that he’s a doofus, but I was thinking it the whole time. Apparently he has the numbers on because he took the car to a race course, but there are 998 other three digit numbers he could have chosen that were less ridiculous than 007. He said his other car he races has “666″ on it and he calls it “The Beast.”

In the same lot today I saw this Smart Car. While I disagree with the color choice (red? on a 71 HP car?), the owner of this car is ever so much cooler.

I have previously groaned about the Tour of California ignoring everything south of Los Angeles. But today it was announced that next years tour will visit San Diego County! The final stage is Rancho Bernardo to Escondido. They must plan a circuitous route as those communities aren’t very far apart.

I’m excited.

Be careful around those sharp coconut milk can tops, or else you could cut your finger. Then you’d have to go to the emergency room to get your finger glued and a tetanus shot.

I’m just saying, I think it’s best if you take my word for it.