Kayak Reunion

Since coming to America, my kayak, which I was using regularly in Amsterdam, has been in storage. A stall in New York is (like many other things there) way too expensive for me to afford as a student. I finally got the opportunity to get it out its case and put it together on Sunday - I am storing it at a place in Sausalito, on the bay just north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge. I'd been there before (night kayak with Laurie last year), and although it takes about an hour by bike to get there, its a much better location than in the city.

I thought it would be less of a novelty here than it was in the Netherlands (its collapsable, and looks really sleek when you put it together) but I got a lot of people coming up and asking me about it as I was putting it together. Which took time - over two hours, in fact. "That will be a pleasure well earned!", said one man. "If you had one of those tupperware boats, you'd be in the water already". I had forgotten the pedals (its been two years) so I had to take it half apart again once it was almost together.


It was a pleasure well earned - I went up the bay to the north, past crowds of plump seals with fur which looked like the cheap leopard-skin blankets which we had as kids, sunning themselves in the late afternoon sun. They are fun to watch; they bark and sometimes have a spat: huge animals slapping feebly at each other with dainty flippers.

Just beyond the seals was another colony: of eclectic boat houses. These are nothing like I'd experienced in the Netherlands. This example was like something out of a Grimm Brothers fairytale (and yes, it is floating on the water). Some were way out into the bay, floating by themselves, like the new age pyramid below.

Mission District

I live in the Mission in San Francisco. This is one of the best areas for a large number of reasons: its flat and sunny in a hilly and foggy city; it has a huge variety of cheap delicious food, great book stores and cafes and some of the best bars in the city. What's not to like about it?


It also has a huge amount of street art and murals. I spent part of today just walking around and taking some of them in. Here are a couple of photos from the walk on Flickr:

One of the projects I'd like to do before leaving here is getting a photo series of the some of the taquerias in the neighbourhood.

Fire Arts Festival, Oakland

I'd had the Fire Arts Festival recommended to me in my first stay in San Francisco, so this year I made a point of forking out for the expensive ($45) ticket and headed across the San Francisco Bay to Oakland for an evening of ... fire. It was pretty much what the name says, although the name could really have been the Amazing Incredible Fire Art Spectacle without much exaggeration. Towering vortexes of flames (so huge they reached up to the overhead suburban rail, and caused the drivers to slow down and have a look, passengers plastered against the windows), giant sculptures repeatedly emoliated in flame, perpetually burning cacti and people dancing with high-voltage electric discharge were just a few of the things I saw.

Somethings, like the fire-spitting fire engine and the steam punk tree house, were familiar from Burning Man 2007. It was great to see them again, especially since I had made the decision not to go back to Burning Man this year. I didn't realize how much the Crucible Workshop, which hosts this event, contributed to Burning Man - and this seems to be one of their major fund raiser activities.
There are more photographs on my Flickr page.

Bike Loop with good Closing Music

I have my Marin Bear Valley with me this time around. Its been getting increasingly in need of care and attention in New York (I didn't really fix it in any way for two years), so its been a real enjoyment to spend some time - and money - getting it fixed. New tyres, saddle, pedals, brakes, and on Saturday a new drive system (gear cones and chain). To celebrate it I took it for a 40km ride on Sunday, doing a loop around San Francisco to Lake Merced in the south west corner of the city, and then up along the Pacific coast. The photo of the crockery car is something I encountered on the way - its a city of eccentrics.

California is one of those cities (like Barcelona) which turns its back to the coast
and this is the first time I've seen the Pacific since coming back here. The suburb alongside the beach is called 'Sunset', which is a way of reminding people that live there that in the evenings in other places, such a thing occurs. In San Francisco, all you get is a deepening of the gloom as the fog blows in each afternoon. The beach itself is sandy, but that about the best thing you can say about it. The water is freezing cold and there are vicious back currents which make swimming risky.

My trip took me to the gorgeous Golden Gate park, which is San Francisco's equivalent to Central Park, and then (by plan) to the amazing Amoeba Records, in the Haight-Ashbury (back in the 1960's, this area was the center of the 'Summer of Love). Amoeba is a warehouse sized space packed full of music and DVD's, all of which you can listen to in their entirety at listening stations. This makes it both a very amazing place and a dangerous one, especially when - like me - you haven't bought any music for a while and the urge to do so is strong upon you. I walked out, two hours later and with $150 less in my account, with a varied selection of new and used CD's (if you're interested: King Kahn & The Shrines, Trentemøller Chronicles, Birdy Nam Nam, Bonny "Prince" Billy (Lie Down in the Light), Walter Meego (Voyager), Amadou & Mariam (from Mali, with contributions from Manu Chao) and Damien Jurado (On My Way to Absence).

Music isn't the only thing I've been spending money on recently. After a long time being a student, the temptation to spend when you're suddently on a full salary again is strong. Witness the bike, the $100 shirt and the $500 reading glasses (although that last item is more an example of what you have to pay in chronically under-insured America).

Working on the 4th of July

I spent the 4th of July holiday at Google at work, because I wanted to avoid the crowded weekend and get another day off some other time ... it was an eerie experience being alone in a big building normally fully of people and activity, but not an unpleasant one.

I only saw parts of the celebration around me: red-white-and-blued kids getting on the train, the beginnings of a parade in Redwood City (en route to work), and then, on my return to San Francisco, my suburb - The Mission - turned into a warzone of firecrackers, fireworks, billowing smoke and patrolling police everywhere (private fireworks are illegal here, but it doesn't seem to be strictly enforced). I escaped by going to have a meal with friends on Potrero Hill, which is biking hell but has grand views down into central San Francisco - where somewhere among all the fog, the official firework celebration was going up into the air.

In the Mission

Back at Google ... back in San Francisco ... and back at the same house with the same great people I got to know last summer. Stefanie - a middle school teacher - was heading off to Costa Rica for the summer but her grandmother is in a bad way so she is staying with her family in Los Angeles instead (I'm in her room). She came up to visit for the weekends; here she is in her West-African Made-in-India dashiki "Freedom Size" which she got for an event at her school, and now servers her as pajamas ...

San Francisco Gay Pride

San Francisco is a very gay city year round, but in June with the Gay Pride march, it becomes ... um ... well, GAY. The rainbow flag replaces the American one throughout the city (or sometimes the American one m orphs mysteriously into a rainbow-hued variation), and thousands of people flock in from all over to party. There is a woman's march on Saturday lead by the awesome Dykes on Bikes, and the bigger main parade on Sunday.

Marriage was a big theme this year - not that I saw much of the parade itself, because I marched with the Google group (which had huge balloons, swarms of crazy bikes, and included the lead engineer as a friendly gesture from management). I was a contingent monitor, and also helped out with some of the monitoring during the celebration afterwards - essentially pushing people out of the way so that ambulance carts could get through to people who needed help.

Gay Colours

Its that time of year again - San Francisco is awash with the rainbow flag as first the Frameline Film Festival and then the Gay Pride Parade party their way through the town. And Google has gotten in on the act - if you search on certain terms, like 'Gay Pride', the resulting page is not quite the normal one. Try it out. Its something which only happens on a few terms, and is in place for about two months.

Asymmetric Flights

Getting out of the USA was quick and pleasant; I was at the airport an hour ahead of my flight and it wasn't a problem. One look at the grimly pulled mouth of the Alaskan Air representative assured me that me leaving only an hour to get back into the US was not funny at all. And she was right. As in Shannon airport in Ireland, the US has staked out is immigration and customs office in a foreign international airport, all the better to refuse you entry with, and that meant queues: queue to check in (small, I was late) and then another queue to let good ol' Uncle Sam take my good ol' fingerprints and then onto the next queue for immigration and then finally (just when I thought I was in the home run, and was about to start running because my plane was about to take off) the mother of all queues through the off-with-your-shoes-belt-and-laptop-in-a-separate-basket bit.

I made it back. Yeah. Always so much excitement and will-they-wont-they fun. And the silver lining was that I (on the waitlist) got put into the side of the plane that I didn't want to be on, but it turned out to be just the right one: the plane passed over the series of giant volcanoes which I'd previously blogged about from the ground level, stretching from southern Washington State all the way into Northern California. Then it flew right over the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco downtown before making a U-Turn to land over the crazy coloured salt fields in the south side of the Bay. It was a beautiful flight.

The sunset photo below was taken on the outward bound trip, the others from the return one:




So for the joy of asymmetry, here is my list of the most striking differences between the USA and Canada:

• Canadians are even more polite than Americans. They stop for you if you're jay-walking across a road.
  
• the public transport in Canada is both usable and used, although cars are only marginally smaller than America's hulking monsters
• coins for dollars, and attractive money
  

And here's what's the same:

• checkerboard street grids with exciting names like "5th Avenue" "Broadway" and "64th Street"
• Fast Food Nations
• quarters, nickles and dimes
  

GoogleShare

Google had a volunteer day today which took me up to the top of the San Bruno Mountain State Park battling invading aliens with about 40 other Googlers. The photograph is my fellow intern, Altaf, from Bangladesh. The invading aliens were hemlock and monstrous tendrils of ivy; i'll never see this plant in the same way after the experience of ripping out 8 meter strands of it from the side of the mountain.

City Fjord

Today I discovered that one of the beauties of Vancouver is that with a short bus ride and about half an hour in a kayak, you're out in a gorgeous Fjord, the Indian Arm, with steep forested sides with snowy peaks behind them, and the illusion that you're in the heart of nature. Its gorgeous.

I had to do an eskimo roll in the sea kayak to prove that I could take it out by myself - the first time I failed, but they let me try again, and it worked fine. All those pool sessions in Columbia were worth while.

I kayaked for 5 hours and can feel it in my arms. I can hardly type, so I'm keeping this post curt.

Vancouver

I've been in Vancouver since Tuesday night at the SigMOD Conference on databases. When I told friends that, they said "wow, database conference, that sounds like fun" (that needs some heavy sarcasm punctuation of some sort). Actually, it wasn't half bad - stimulating and perplexing for me at the same time, some of the presentations I only half understood. But there was some good stuff. It was my first academic conference.
















The city is beautiful - verdant green, with snow-capped mountains off on the horizon over the water. At the same time, its eerily quiet, to the point that I find it disturbing. Its not a small city but it sounds like a quiet village. About the only sound is the buzz of the seaplanes taking off constantly. Large parts of the city are encrusted with tall condos of green glass which adds to the feeling both of its greeness and its sterility. I guess after New York, any city is going to seem sterile. You can't get less sterile than New York.

Renoogling

Back in San Francisco, at the house I was living in last summer (yeah! Stefanie! Laurie! Nicki!). And back at Google (which makes me a born-again Noogler) where I am working on the adwords backend. That's the system which supplies the Google web page with appropriate adverts - and helping out on it is a lot more interesting than it probably sounds. I never thought I'd say that about advertising.

Graduation!

My family (parents, sister Val, brother Pete and aunt Jackie) all came to New York to celebrate my graduation ceremony with me. Here I am with my parents in a graduation robe which looks a little like a Hogwarts nightgown, just after the SEAS Class Day. It was great to have them there - and man, is it great to have graduated!

Strictly speaking, I should think about winding this blog down now...

Alva Noto Concert

Good electronic music is relatively rare in New York, but tonight, I made it to a great performance by Alva Noto and other artists from the Noton label in the Project. Alva Noto is originally from Germany but is resident in New York. The visuals were great, and the acoustics in the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn were much better than the narrow space would suggest.

Window Washing and Window Dressing

Every year at the end of Spring Columbia spends a huge amount of effort sprucing up their campus for the graduation ceremony. For weeks before hand, flowers are planted, windows washed and hedges clipped. Even the dustbins get swabbed down. Here are workers washing the Lerner facade.

Dissent Networks of the Supreme Court

Although I have blogged a lot about my New York experiences in the last two years, I have rarely blogged about what I am really here for: living it up in the party capital of the US .... uh .... no, I mean working like crazy at grad school. But I've done some things which I have found really interesting. So I'm going to post a couple of results from some recent work.

This semester I did a great course on Network Theory, or the study of complex systems represented as theories, under Professor Dragomir Radev from the University of Michigan. What I liked about this course is how it applies to so many fields: computer science, of course, but also biology (protein-protein interactions), politics (committee structure of the US House of representatives) or linguistics (word networks like WordNet)

As a final project for the course, I wrote a paper called Dissent Networks in the US Supreme Court. Based on data from the Rehnquist I court (1986-1995) I linked the Supreme Court justices based on the extent to which they dissented together against the majority opinion in the court rulings. Then I ran a clustering algorithm on the network to cluster it into different blocs. Here is an example of the work, from the year 1989:
The abbreviations for the Justices are Ma=Marshall, Br=Brennan, Wh=White, Bl=Blackmun, Re=Rehnquist, St=Stevens, O'C=O'Connor, Sc=Scalia, Ke=Kennedy. The size of the nodes represents how much the justices dissented altogether, and the strength of the lines shows how much they dissented with each other. The colours represent the dissent blocs as identified by the clustering algorithm. The clustering is what is interesting: based on the dissent links, very clear blocs emerge. For 1986-1989 it was pretty much the same picture as the one shown above: heavily dissenting veteran justices Thurgood Marshal (the first black justice on the court) and William Brennan from previous liberal courts joined with their younger colleagues Stevens and Blackmun to form a consistent dissent bloc in a conservative court lead by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan.

Things get really interesting after this, because the older justices retire and are replaced by conservative nominations by first Reagan and then George Bush, the dissent bloc falls apart. Here is the situation in 1992, look at how different it is:
It is only after the nomination of Justices Ruth Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer by Bill Clinton in the mid-1990's that the clear dissent bloc re-emerges, although in a weaker form.

Five Boroughs

It was a crazy weekend. Beers on Friday night, a half marathon early Saturday, night in a bar with friends thereafter, and too many cranberry vodkas and not enough sleep later up early again (with a hangover) to do the 43 mile/69 km Five Boroughs Bike Tour, which makes a giant loop through Manhattan, the Bronx (token bit), Queens, Brooklyn and ends at Staten Island. I rode with the weekend's partner in sports craziness, Marie, and Ryan and Mark from Columbia's Asian Studies Institute.

The tour was a great experience: most of the roads were closed, and it started off cool and misty, with a dream-like feeling of cycling down the canyons of Manhattan with no traffic light to stop you.

The cyclists took over entire freeways and used bridges otherwise closed to cyclists, like the Verazzano Narrows bridge. For me, a highlight was crossing the amazing (and spectacularly rusting) Queensborough bridge. We did it in about 5 hours, and then I got home, showered ... and went out again to meet friends.

Well-Earned Bagel

With a head cold, five hours sleep and very little training, I stumbled through a half marathon this morning, and got a half-way decent time (1:47). Marie, a friend from IHouse, joined me. The race went along the Coney Island waterfront and then headed up the Oceanview Parkway to Prospect Park, ending pretty much right in front of where I live.

In Berlin after the marathon, you can get a beer. In Sweden, it was a coffee. In Brooklyn it was - what else - a choice of bagels in familiar variations: cinnamon raisin, sesame, onion. A bagel never tasted so good.

High Literary Concentration

One of the great things about New York is that it is relatively easy to get to hear internationally famous people. Tonight at the 'Town Hall' theater, as part of the PEN World Voices literature festival in New York, I saw on one stage in quick succession Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje (English Patient), Annie Proux (Brokeback Mountain), Ian McEwan and South Africa's own Rian Malaan. Tomorrow, Zimbabwe's Chenjerai Hove is taking part in a reading for the same festival.