Welcome to the Jungle
May0
I just returned from a fantastic adventure in the Malaysian jungle with good friend and fellow Tarheel J.J. Raynor. She wrote an account at http://longwayforatarheel.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/welcome-to-the-jungle/ that I will repost here for convenience of readers:
“Taman Negara, the largest national rainforest reserve in Malaysia, was one of the few remaining adventures still on my list of things to experience while in Malaysia. I was almost worried that I wouldn’t have a chance to explore it before my time here was up, until last week when my friend Mark Laabs who is working in Shanghai emailed to arrange an impromptu visit to both Malaysia and the forest. Only a few emails and a long boat ride later we were welcomed to the jungle.
Mark, an accomplished hiker and outdoorsman, made an inadvertent but apt observation while comparing the forests back home to Malaysia’s rainforests. “I prefer hiking in temperate forests; they’re just more comfortable.” Rainforests certainly come with a few more hazards than our familiar deciduous forests back home. Constantly checking socks for leeches can make it hard to appreciate the canopy above. During the day, most of these hazards can be managed. The real challenge comes after dark when some of the more deadly creatures in the forest, vipers and their ilk, come alive for their evening hunt. Thanks to an overzealous commitment to intensity, Mark and I almost had the privilege of experiencing the forest at its most intense – i.e. over night.
Our first morning in Taman Negara, we asked the park rangers to recommend a good trail for a day hike. They recommended Latah Berkoh as a nice out and back that would take about six hours. However, only an hour after setting out, we came to a fork where the signposts revealed we had already gone halfway down the Latah Berkoh trail. At this pace, we figured we could easily hike the Kuala Terenggan loop and be back in time for an evening at one of the river restaurants right outside the park. Pleased with our decision, and that we would be putting more space between us and a loud group of tourists, we set off down the trail. After another hour of hiking we found the second fork on the trail, which should have put us half way around the loop, close to the Kuala Terenggan lodge, and already on our way back to the main camp. Unfortunately, soon after leaving the second fork we discovered two things – that the distances on the sign posts and on our maps were ridiculously inaccurate, to the tune of a couple of kilometers off, and that every time I led we would end up losing the trail. (Here, I blame Mark’s height advantage – tall people have an easier time surveying ahead, totally not a difference in skill . . .) By the time we found the trail after our second time losing it, we were both running behind on time and behind the group of noisy tourists we had passed earlier.
While the noisy group took an ill-advised swim break in some pretty leach filled waters, I chatted with their guide about the remainder of the trail after the lodge. Standing wisely with his socks still on atop a rock just barely jutting out of the water, he informed us that the trail ahead was both more difficult and would take us five hours. At this point, the last thirty minutes of those five hours would be after dark. Our options as we left the tourists in the stream seemed pretty limited – push on at top pace to make it back, spend the night at Kuala Terenggan or hope that somehow we could catch a ride with one of the boats coming down the river.
Our first sight of Kuala Terenggan made the overnight option seem out of the question. Instead of a nicely functioning lodge, the trail spilled out of the forest upon an absolutely shattered building, destroyed in a giant tree fall with no sign of even an attempt at restoration. Fortunately, the next two or three chalets we came across were in much better condition if equally abandoned. It wasn’t until we came to the last two chalets that we found any sign of recent occupancy – a solar panel installation, drying laundry, and a pride of mewling cats. Our second attempt at knocking on the doors of the two occupied chalets finally produced a sleepy-eyed older man who agreed to take us in his boat back to camp. Even scruffy from sleep, he was at that moment one of the most welcome sights in the world.
After a quick smoke break, he piled us into his boat and we set off down the river. On our way through the rapids, just the two of us and our rescuer, we passed scores of boats loaded down with a dozen tourists each. We could tell from their envious waves that they were wondering how the two of us had scored a private trip down the rapids. Instead of a hard night in the forest, we ended up maximizing our time at Taman Negara by doing both an extended hike and the rapids all in the same day – a much better outcome than we deserved after trusting the signs over the advice we received in the morning!!
That night, after our river boat dinner, I slept harder than I have in a long while. If the students in the room next door reformed their midnight drum circle from the night before, I had absolutely no clue. All I know is that I woke up the next morning just in time to enjoy the breakfast buffet that, among other, perhaps more serious hardships, we would have missed if we had spent the night in the forest.
On our last day, after a brief stroll around the canopy walk, we wound up hiking to the top of Bukit Indah (literally “beautiful hill”). After clambering over granite boulders and under fallen trees we emerged from the deeper forest into a thin copse of trees with the most incredible brilliant red bark that looked like sheer slices of crimson parchment but were moist and pulpy to the touch. Looking out from the hill top clearing, we could see wooden boats rounding the river’s curve on their way to the rapids. That restful moment seemed like a perfect time to think about why we hike and why we venture, despite the hazards, into the forest.
For Mark, the answer was reflection, the chance to explore his inner world away from the noise and chaos of the daily press. Mine was a desire to get closer to the incredible intrinsic beauty of the forest. There is an intricacy of design and a fitness of purpose layered within a living breathing freshness that makes the forest both wondrous and stunning. A few ant bites and thorn spikes, and the occasional risk of an overnight stay are more than worth it to experience such vitality firsthand.
To check out photos from the trip, visit Mark’s photo website at http://photos.laabs.net/ under Taman Negara and Kuala Lumpur”
The Power of Scarce Time
Jan0
Yesterday afternoon, I was tired. Very tired. It was the kind of bone-weariness that comes when you have a straight week of late nights for work but where the morning still come just as early. Yeah, that’s right, tired.
As a result, I was a hair’s width of backing out of my evening’s plans and trying to get some rest. What a loss it would have been! In the course of last evening, I enjoyed dinner at the coolest apartment I have seen in all of Shanghai, got to know a pretty interesting MD from a innovation and design firm called Continuum along with getting to know a fellow environmental entrepreneur better, enjoyed drinks and live music and a nice club called Anaar, met a Deloitte consultant who has done a lot of Prop 8 work in California (with common friends of mine!), made it out to another club where a solid Israeli DJ was spinning, and closed out the night at a late night place called Mao that I had often heard about but never visited. In short, it was an epic night!
Why, though, was it post-worthy here?…because of the thing that got me out of bed to begin with – the sense that I didn’t have time to waste. As with London a year before, I unexpectedly found myself essentially exiled from Shanghai for the end of 2009 to be at home with my father. Then, I returned to Shanghai with the turn of the new year realizing that I was scheduled to have less than a year more in one of the most dynamic cities in the world. Where had my endless time gone?
The result, then and now, has been a recommitment to, as Thoreau would put it, suck all the marrow out of life. I’ve been better at connecting with old friends. I’ve been discovering new ones. I’ve begun living in Shanghai, not just working here. In some ways, it is a strain. Taking advantage of social opportunities comes at the cost of sleep and more recuperative relaxation, but when my grandkids want to know what it was like to live in China when it was a debutant to the world stage, at least now I will have some stories to tell!
walkscore.com
Jan0
Through a status update by J J Raynor (who is doing fascinating work in Malaysia these days, by the way), I came across walkscore.com.
It fills you with the same sort of fascination as zillow.com did when it first came out. Essentially, it looks up all sorts of restaurants, gyms, transit options, etc. on Google Maps, and uses the density of these facilities around your home to determine just how walkable your place is.
It was fun to play with. My friend Warren’s house in Tribeca accurately comes back as a “Walker’s Paradise.” Interestingly, my home in Memphis (one of the least walkable cities I have ever found) comes back with a half decent score largely because we happen to be close to a giant strip mall that most Memphians who lived across the street would still drive to.
Either way, check out your score, and, if your house isn’t walkable, I hope it is at least bikeable!
Why we’ll all soon wonder how we lived without a Tablet
Jan0
Over the years, I have grown to be quite an admirer of Apple. From a company that seemed to be fighting on the edge of marginalization a decade ago, Apple has, in the relative blink of an eye, been a critical part of revolutionizing not one, not two, but three major industries in the last ten years while pushing several others to raise the levels of their games. First, they release a neat piece of kit called an Ipod that changed the way the world listened to music. Then they released iTunes, which changed they way they consumed it (at least legally). From there they embarked on the iPhone, which has made the consumer smartphone a reality for the first time. The recent “iDecade” article in BusinessWeek summarizes all of this well.
The next rumored Apple development is the Mac Tablet, described by pundits as a “ten to eleven inch, touch-screen hybrid between the Iphone and a MacBook.” The timing is right, they argue, with a set of technologies that have been around for a few years but with no product, whether Tablet PC, eReader, or otherwise getting it quite right. This, they say, is just what Apple is so good at, finding what the consumer wants before they know they want it.
At the same time, they argue, the outcome this time seems less certain. ”What, really, does a customer need an oversized iPhone for? It will be too big to carry in your pocket, so you’ll need a bag, and if you need a bag, why not just bring your laptop with you?”
After spending a regrettable amount of the weekend pondering the subject, my answer is that the pundits’ two statements bely the very reason that tablets have failed so far and the reason that Apple, or someone, will make a success of a tablet in the near term.
As I look at the tablet market of the past, it failed for one primary reason: the touch screen was an appendage to a traditional keyboard and mouse system of interaction. Software run on those same devices assumed keyboards and mice for interaction, so the potential of the touch-screen to enhance their applications lay dormant. Furthermore, in a single-touch touchscreen environment, the user is really just using their finger as a mouse anyway, and, given that a mouse tends to be more accurate, even that enhancement was really a drawback.
In comes the iPhone, and two things happen. First, multi-touch goes mainstream. Pinching, dragging, spinning, flipping. Virtually endless commands suddenly become possible in a single movement that would have required a number of keystrokes before. In all honesty, we are just beginning to conceive of the potential applications. Second, but related to the first, Apps begins to prove that these new modes of user interaction really can outperform the keyboard-and-mouse infrastructure with which we have become familiar. From “Bump” to Slutterbug, there’s really just too many examples to count.
Now, for a moment, imagine scaling those trends up to a laptop. Yes, you will still want a keyboard-and-mouse for Microsoft Word and Excel for some time to come. Writing requires letters, and you won’t beat a keyboard for that for at least two more generations of voice recognition or some kind of mind reading device. But imagine, for a moment, a fully multi-touch enabled version of the Adobe Creative Suite where one could be shifting a color gradient with one finger while painting with another, or scaling an image while rotating it simultaneously on a shifting axis. These tasks may sound simple, but they would be dramatically freeing in a creative process that often forces designers to prioritize process over vision. Alternatively, imagine a DJ software where your screen became a turntable, enabling a dramatically more organic interface for creating and modifying music.
In short, I believe it is the artists who will first show us how a less-encumbered medium of interaction with our computers can lead to exciting results. However, I do not believe it will end there. Consider our model of media consumption, usually structured in a vertical, prose structure and just now beginning to integrate different media types into the same “feed”. What if that media looked more like a mind-map where articles and videos were grouped by similarity of topic and sized according to popularity? It could happen in a keyboard-and-mouse world, but it would be outright painful to interact with. In the world of a multitouch screen, it really would be almost as natural as the movies have made it seem for years.
The Tablet will not try to couch itself between the iPhone and the MacBook. It will help the bring the MacBook to the next level of interactivity, leaving us yet one step closer to the way we interface with the real world. The PC pundits are evaluating the Tablet concept from a worldview where the keyboard-and-mouse interface is the best option whenever available and everything else is second best. That world is disappeared in 2007.
Invictus
Jan1
I cannot believe it took a Hollywood film to lead me to discover it, but this poem that Mandela carried with him on Ellis Island stands up in my mind aside Teddy Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech as one of the most powerful messages of courage in the face of adversity.
- Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
- In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
- Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
- It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
~William Ernest Henley, 1849–1903, original
4 Degrees Map
Oct0
I am excited to see maps like this beginning to come out. It makes things a little bit more tactile.
However, this particular one gives me mixed feelings. It is riddled with “could” and “might”; however, it does not effectively present evidence of likelihood. As a result, I fear it comes off feeling light on substance. I could credibly say that aliens could land on Earth by 2050, but that does not make a particularly compelling case for action.
Is there some way that we could start putting some more measurable bands around climate change risks, so that our reports won’t sound quite so much like scaremongering?
Alternate Theory for Obama’s Nobel Prize
Oct0
Like pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to (and seemingly Obama himself), I thought the recent Nobel Prize announcement was rather inappropriate. In that light, I thought this alternate theory was pretty fun.
Slowpoke by Jen Sorensen
Where Americans spend their money.
Jul0
Scary statistic: the proportion spent on housing is significantly higher in London.
Visual Economics brings numbers from The US Bureau of Labor Statistics to Life
Yosemite
Jul0
Even if I weren’t in the midst of Shanghai’s high-rises, I’m pretty sure I would still find this photo absolutely stunning…
Yosemite in Winter on an amazing morning, taken by a great photographer.
Forth of July in Ramallah
Jul0
I have just returned to Jerusalem from Ramallah where I spent the afternoon having a 4th of July barbeque with an old friend from UNC, Brian Phelps. Even amidst the great beaches and nightlife of Tel Aviv and the history and spirituality of Jerusalem, I think it is likely to be the single part of this trip that will have the greatest affect on me.
Ironically, the trip was not all that exciting beyond meeting some cool people, and that’s just what made it special. I caught a bus to Ramallah at the Old City’s Damascus Gate. We drove through some traffic and through a border check that involved little more than some soldiers walking around the vehicle. Everyone knew the Friend’s Boys School where Brian lives and teaches, and they kindly gave me directions in very good English. On the way back, the border crossing was much more thorough with a series of gated turnstiles, metal detectors, and the like. Still, it certainly wasn’t overwhelming.
While in Ramallah, I enjoyed great barbeque, enjoyed the local beer (Taybeh), ate some amazingly good Kanapeh brought in from Nablis, lit a couple sparklers for the Fourth of July, and met tons of very cool people. One man, Andrew, is an old friend of one of my mentors at UNC, Terry Barnett. He has worked for a decade on preparing leaders for Palestine-Israel negotiations. Another guy is building a very cool company that builds micro-scale geothermal heating a cooling systems for buildings (hoping we may be able to do a carbon project!). They have good bars, a fairly robust arts scene, and very good food. Brian told me in all seriousness that he felt much safer on the streets of Ramallah than Jerusalem late at night. In short, it wasn’t fancy living, but it was quite comfortable living.
Spending time there made a conflict that I’ve heard about from my earliest memories much more real. In the similar experience to those that I had when I first went to China or to South Africa, that transition seemed to make both of the outliers in my emotions much stronger:
On the one hand, as I’ve experienced elsewhere, life really does go on. The security situation within Ramallah (unlike the Gaza Strip) really isn’t dire today, but I’m sure life went on even when it was. When you’re a million miles away, it is easy to forget how great humanity’s ability to adapt, to live, indeed to be happy, really is.
On the other hand, relaxing in Ramallah allowed me to understand just a little bit better what the pain of a violent conflict in your home would really be like. All those people around me were living their lives day-to-day, just like I live my own. Yet if I imagine my own life and livelihood being profoundly disrupted, as so many of theirs must have been repeatedly over the course of their lives, it is hard to imagine the fear, the sadness, even the hopelessness that one would have to battle as a result.
All in all, I am yet again humbled by the strength and vitality of a community far too often dismissed. I have a lot to learn.