Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

My hosts here in Omaha, Nebraska have the September 1, 2003 Forbes magazine in their kitchen.  One quote that might amuse you…

There are three roads to ruin:
women, gambling, and technicians.
The most pleasant is with women,
the quickest is with gambling,
but the surest is with technicians.
— Georges Pompidou

(Of course, the French definition of a “technician” is more akin to what we would call a scientist, engineer, or “technologist”.)

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Bryce Canyon National Park is beautiful but, within any reasonable walking distance of a car, essentially urban.  In fact, given that nearly all of the conversations that one overhears are in French, Italian, or German, Bryce is positively cosmopolitan.  Wanting to explore the backcountry a bit without wearing out my feet, I drove SE on Utah Highway 12.  This is billed as “the most scenic highway in America” and seems to genuinely deserve the title.

After 15 minutes the sign for “Kodachrome Basin State Park” appeared.  This is a beautiful peaceful place with a good paved road all through it.  I figured I’d come back and bike around a bit after the mid-day heat wore off.  I pointed the rental Buick down Cottonwood Canyon Road, a 46-mile red dirt track that cuts nearly the way south to highway 89 to Page, Arizona.  This is Bureau of Land Management’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, created in 1996 by Bill Clinton.  The scenery is fantastic.  You can hike or mountain bike if you want to, even bring your dog.  But really the vistas are magnificent just viewed from the driver’s seat.

After a few miles the road went down to the bottom of a steep wide wash and forded a stream that was perhaps 10′ wide and 6″ deep.  I kept going.  A bit of rain started to fall.  Hmm…  rain in the desert.  That little tiny stream had sure cut a deep steep wash.  Maybe it got bigger after a rain.  Perhaps a lot bigger.  I turned the Buick around, resolving to get back across that stream before it had time to swell.  Before I’d gone back 1 mile the road liquified and became as slick as ice.  You couldn’t even walk on it without slipping.  I maneuvered the car to the right side of the road and shut down.  Ten minutes later two cars carrying 8 Dutch tourists came skidding sideways to a halt behind me.  They’d come all the way up from the south and were on their way to Bryce.  As the rain continued it seemed possible that we wouldn’t get out before the next morning.  I took an inventory of the trunk  tent, pad, sleeping bag, food, 3 gallons of water.  Could be worse.

After an hour the rain had stopped and the road was drying out.  The Dutch folks took off and I followed 15 minutes later.  I caught up to them at the little stream.  It was 25′ wide, maybe 3′ deep, and raging with a fast current.  Periodically a huge section of the stream’s canyon would fall away and collapsed into the stream with a loud noise and a substantial dust cloud.

We sat for an hour, watching people in SUVs and 4WD pickups approach from the other side of the stream, get out of their car to have a look, and make a U-turn back to the pavement.  The Dutch turned around and decided to drive back the way they’d come, a 150-mile detour if you wanted to get to Bryce.  Local rancher Jim Milne, his wife Christine, and dog Stubby, showed up every now and then on the opposite back in their white 4WD pickup to see if Christine’s dad was coming up from my side of the ford.  Three Navajo in a jacked-up red pickup truck came roaring in from Jim and Christine’s side of the stream.  It was about 1.5 hours after I’d arrived at the site and the flood waters had receded quite a bit.  They made it across uneventfully.  The water wasn’t much more than 1′ deep at this point but the banks of the ford were extremely muddy and had been cut much more steeply than when I’d crossed just a few hours earlier.

Jim brought a shovel out from his pickup and started to dig out the bank on his side.  “C’mon, gun her across and you’ll make it,” he encouraged.  The Buick slide down one bank, got some good footing on the rocks in the streambed, then foundered 95% of the way up the opposite bank.  I backed up into the stream and Jim did some more digging.  Christine suggested backing up farther and getting more of a running start.  The Buick made it on the second try.  The Navajo cheered, as did a couple of Canadian schoolteachers who’d stopped to watch.

When I finally got to the little town of Tropic, Utah the locals couldn’t help staring at the mud-covered rental car.  The Buick’s hood was drenched in mud.  I told my story and everyone in turn had a story of their own regarding that road.  One man had driven down there in 1983 and come upon a car up to its axles in sand.  The occupants had been stranded for three days, two of which were without water.  Others talked about a French couple that had gotten stuck in the snow back in January.  The man walked out and got help.  The woman died.  Rescuers found that they’d never figured out how to engage 4WD on their rental SUV.

Let’s review the Weather v. Philip..  Thursday: couldn’t land at Bryce due to thunderstorms; landed Cedar City instead.  Friday:  had to come away from overlooks in Cedar Breaks National Monument due to lightning strikes, stop the car for 20 minutes due to obscured visibility in heavy rain, and wait for 20 minutes to get around a washed-out portion of a road.  Saturday: got stuck for nearly 3 hours.  Weather: 3; Philip: 0.

A few snapshots from the experience: http://www.photo.net/philg/digiphotos/20030816-grand-staircase/

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… both like to summer on Martha’s Vineyard.  Check out Kyle’s blog for some photos of how a water-crazed Samoyed spends August.

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Like every other U.S. national park (and unlike Canadian parks), Bryce Canyon tries to make life tough for dogs and bicycles.  You can’t walk a Golden Retriever on a leash on a trail anywhere in the park, even on paved trails at overlooks.  In theory you can ride a bike from overlook to overlook but there are no racks in which to park or lock them (the National Park Service did get up enough energy to put fancy “no bikes” signs on all the paved trails to the overlooks so you can’t keep your bike with you).  Needless to say there are no trails specifically built for bikes or trails on which mountain bikes are allowed.  Basically the park is set up for driving SUVs or putting on a pack and hiking in without a dog.

Sound like a paradise for Sierra Club members?  Sure, as long as they love the smell of jet fuel in the morning.  I enjoyed a sightseeing ride in a turbine-powered Bell JetRanger this morning.  We screamed down into the canyon at 70 knots, perhaps 500′ over the tops of the trails and less than that over the tops of the hoodoos, well below the rim of the canyon.  I must come back on Monday morning and buzz the place in the Diamond Star before proceeding onward to Salt Lake City.

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The August 18-25 double issue of Newsweek, whose theme is “The Future of Technology”, contains a brief interview with Paul Saffo, identified only as being from the Institute For the Future. Asked “are there any obstacles to innovation?” Saffo responds “We’ve got a couple of gorillas holding back innovation. Microsoft is a big intellectual roach motel. All the big minds go in and they don’t come out.”

Of course Saffo doesn’t address the question of what alternatives the big minds have. If they want to work at a software products company and have a reasonable chance of getting their creation into the hands of customers, the choices pretty much boil down to Microsoft or some company that is likely to be put out of business soon by Microsoft.

[Of course there are quite a few programmers, as distinct from engineers, who are happy with a warm cubicle and a fat salary even if they have no impact on users or their employer’s profits. Sadly, however, in an age where spectacular managerial incompetence continues to be the norm it seems that many managers have gotten smart enough to eliminate tech jobs that aren’t directly profitable.]

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Left the Bay Area on the morning of the Great Blackout of 2003. Oakland Airport turned out to be one of the most peaceful and least crowded spots in the Bay Area: vast open space, never more than three or four vehicles moving at the same time, each in its very multi-mile corridor. Parking was $8 per day, more than 99 percent of the airports in this country, where parking is generally free, but less than it costs to park a car at the O-town airport. Flew over Yosemite Valley and crossed the Sierra at Tioga Pass (10,000′) where N505WT began to be buffeted by turbulence that continued for three more hours (the price of having slept late). Somewhere over south-central Nevada a JetBlue pilot called Air Traffic Control: “This might sound crazy, but have you heard anything about a blackout in the New York area?” After a few minutes, the response was “You’re not going to like this but LaGuardia, Newark, and JFK are all shut down.”

After four hours in the air it seemed the better part of valor not to fight the line of thunderstorms looming over Bryce Canyon so I landed one ridge short at Cedar City, Utah. It turned out that a big Shakespeare Festival was in town. Back in 1971 the good folks here built a replica of an Elizabethan theater and have filled it for six weeks every summer ever since. I got the last ticket for Much Ado and was shocked at how poor a grammarian Shakespeare was. This play alone contains a character asking “with who”, someone modifying “perfect” (“perfectest”), and a character saying “you learned me” for “you taught me”.

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Joel was looking a little out of shape so I suggested that he ride his bike up to the 1500′ ridge behind Berkeley and Oakland… with 200 lbs. of dead weight on the back of the bike (me).  Two guys on a tandem bicycle in the Bay Area it is just about the same as painting “We are gay” on the back of your T-shirt.

What’s it like being gay?  Attractive young women on bikes going the opposite direction smiled and waved at us.

What does one talk about when riding a tandem?  There are the fabulous views out over all the bridges of San Francisco Bay, of course, but also gay marriage.  In this day and age of private contracts it seems that the one truly concrete benefit gay marriage confers is the ability to transfer property, tax-free, upon one’s death to one’s partner.  George W., however, has basically eliminated the “death tax”.  Thus gay couples, even without the benefit of a civil marriage of some sort, are able to enjoy substantially all of the benefits of being married.

Ergo, George W. Bush is the greatest gay rights activist of the 21st Century (so far).

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At dim sum on Sunday Arthur was wearing a Lisp Conference T-shirt.  Kleanthes asked “What do they do at the Lisp Conference?”  I chimed in “it is a bunch of old guys talking about how a 20-year-old version of Lisp is so much better than all the language tools being hyped right now.”  My position was that this isn’t a credible stance.  Though it is probably true that you can be more productive in Common Lisp (1982) than in C# (2002), nobody will believe that the industrial software world has stagnated for 20+ years.  I said that nobody will take Lisp seriously until it at least adds the truly state-of-the-art language features such as type-inferencing (from ML) and preconditions, postconditions, and invariants (from Eiffel).  Bill came up with a novel objection to this idea:  “My style of programming is exploratory and anything that gets in the way of that slows me down.”

Could he be right?  Is old-style Common Lisp or Scheme actually the best that we can do?

——————– a quote from a problem set that I wrote a few years ago

“Another issue is a perennial side-show in the world-wide computer programming circus: the spectacle of nerds arguing over programming tools. The data model can’t represent the information that the users need, the application doesn’t do what what the users need it to do, and instead of writing code, the “engineers” are arguing about Java versus Lisp versus Perl versus Tcl. If you want to know why computer programmers get paid less than medical doctors, consider the situation of two trauma surgeons arriving at an accident scene. The patient is bleeding profusely. If surgeons were like programmers, they’d leave the patient to bleed out in order to have a really satisfying argument over the merits of two different kinds of tourniquet.

“If you’re programming one Web page at a time, you can switch to the Language du Jour in search of higher productivity. But you won’t achieve significant gains unless you switch from writing code for one page. You need to think about ways to write down a machine-readable description of the application and user experience, then let the computer generate the application automatically. “

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Powerboats are noisy.  Electric boats have limited speed and range.  Why not a hybrid boat?  The Toyota Prius can pull itself along at low speeds with only its electric motor.  Why not find a wrecked Prius and remove its vital organs to form the basis of a fantastic power boat:  silent when poking along the shore but capable of cruising at 20-30 knots at the cost of a big increase in noise.

Thoughts?

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A visit to a used bookstore in Omaha has caused a detour in the planned summer reading list:  The Prize.  This is a landmark history of the oil industry.  It seems that we’re coming up on the 100th anniversary of political and religious violence sending shock waves through the oil markets:

“[Russian] government officials, fearful of revolution, provided arms to the Moslem Tatars, who rose up to massacre and mutilate Christian Armenians, including the leaders of the oil industry [in Baku].  … Strikes and open rebellion spread again throughout the empire in September and October 1905.  In the Caucasus, it was race and ethnic conflict, and not socialism, that drove events.  Tatars rose up once more in an attack on the oil industry throughout Baku and its environs, intent on killing every Armenian they could find, setting fire to buildings where Armenians had taken refuge, pillaging every piece of property on which they could lay their lands. …

“The news from Baku had a profound effect on the outside world.  Here, for the first time, a violent upheavel had interrupted the flow of oil, threatening to make a vast investment worthless. … As for the Russian industry itself, the tally was dismaying: Two-thirds of all oil wells had been destroyed and exports had collapsed.”

That’s page 131 out of 900.  We’ll see what happens next…

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