In Hawaii for SAC'09

Hello all! This special edition of the Giraffe comes from Hawaii! I'm here for the ACM SAC'09 conference. I wrote a paper, which you're welcome to read if you're having trouble falling asleep. That got me a free ticket to Honolulu so I could inflict my brand of academic drivel on willing victims. Here's what's been going on.

First, sorry this post is so long. Internet access is $13/day in my hotel, and it doesn't get much better elsewhere, so I've been writing offline until I could post. I finally found a place with free WiFi for customers, and if I sit in the Starbucks across the street I can just barely pick up their signal. This wad of web rubbish comes to you on pirated air waves.

Anyhoo.....

I met another CS grad student named Conley in Roanoke, and after arriving in Honolulu we went down to Chinatown for dinner. We couldn't read any of the signs so we just picked the busiest restaurant. Conley got Duck-Foot-Sea-Cucumber-Hot-Pot which was brimming with boney duck feet. We had to ask the waitress how to eat them! You just gnaw the skin off. It's like a really skinny chicken wing. I got the sea food.



Next morning I caught a 5am flight to Big Island and Volcano National Park. Few people live there and you have to rent a car to get anywhere. Conley came along and we decided to climb Mauna Loa, Hawaii's 14,000 ft active volcano, that afternoon. We had breakfast at Lava Cafe (Loco Moco = delicious!) and visited the 450m lava tunnel.



After the lava tunnel we ran down a pig path we found in the jungle (we did a lot of that over the next few days). We found a gigantic fern plant with strange curled sprouts about 1-foot long, very springy, and covered in a soft brown fur. We broke one off, looked at it, and then at the same time said "Can you eat it?" It tasted like a dry apple and the syrup was very light and sweet.



The hike up Mauna Loa was fantastic and wet. It was drizzling when we started and at about 7,000 ft it began to pour like a garden hose. The landscape was stunning, blasted and barren. Coal-black volcanic rock surrounded around us for miles. Nothing grew there; no trees, no ferns, not even lichen. Huge cracks and crevasses opened on the sides of the trail. One of them was spewing stinking sulfur and steam which made our heads spin. It would have been insane to leave the trail. The volcanic rock was as sharp as broken glass and the flows were thin and weak. It was the most desolate and hostile place I've ever been. (Excluding my brother's bedroom.)



At 9,000 feet a thick freezing fog settled on us and soaked us to the bone. Visibility was less than 50ft and we started to worry about finding shelter. At 10,036 ft we found a cozy cabin complete with bunk-beds and a butane stove! The cabin had two blankets and a woman's jacket. We stripped off all our sopping clothes to dry and Conley claimed the jacket. If anyone and walked in, they would have found two men with nothing but a woman's fur-lined jacket between them! A 3rd party would have questioned the existence of our girlfriends.

We made canned-ham-blueberry-bagel and peanut-butter-jelly sandwiches and decided to wait-out the pounding rain. It kept raining long into the freezing night and we wound up camping until the next morning. At about 8:00am it was clear that we would never be able to reach the summit in this weather so we had to get dressed in our wet clothes and trudge back down the rainy mountain. The worst part was putting on those cold, wet pants. It was like putting on a bloated frozen frog.

About 2-hrs down the mountain the rain finally cleared. The sulfur vent wasn't blowing so we got as close as we dared. The black rock walls inside the vent were painted with fantastic yellows, oranges, reds and greens. It was like Pollock gone cave-man. We got back down the mountain around noon, soaking and smelly. It was some of the best fun I'd had in ages.



After we got down Mauna Loa we tried to see the rest of Volcano National Park, but sulfur plumes had shut down most of the park. We visited the volcano observatory and could see the main crater in the caldera, but all trails down to the crater were closed. Some jerk hit my rental car in the parking lot and ran off without leaving his info, so I had to call the rental agency and report the damage. Fortunately, I bought the $11/day insurance so everything was covered.



Back in Hilo, we visited Boiling Pots park where gigantic waterfalls, 150ft and higher, fall roaring into a natural rock bowl. With the rain and the waterfalls we were once again soaked to the bone, so why not run down this muddy path into the jungle? After a passing thought for leaches, we splashed along a stream and scrambled up a mud bank to the top of one of the falls. We found a nut tree with strange white walnuts which we cracked on the rocks and ate with fat blue berries and water gathered in banana leaves. It was wonderfully primal to crouch on the top of the falls in the rain, dripping wet, few clothes, cracking nuts and drinking rainwater. I tossed a small tree in the bowl and it was shattered to matchsticks in seconds.

After Boiling Pots we went to the airport, sopping and smelling of jungle. Security gave me no end of grief for the tent poles in my backpack and confiscated Conley's peanut butter as a security hazard.

That was the end of the weekend. Monday - Thursday I'd be in and out of presentations, but most days I'd slip away to see something interesting. Here's a few of the highlights:

Wednesday I visited Perl Harbor with Haiyan, a Chinese student from my lab, and her 8-year-old daughter Catherine. There's all kinds of museums around there, but they're all kinda expensive and only the Arizona Memorial is free. We went on the USS Bowfin, a retired WW2 submarine, and I whacked my head on the bulkheads until I realized I would never fit in as a submariner. The monument was very somber. You take the ferry out to it and you can see the outlines of old battleships beneath the surface. There's a viewing well in the floor of the monument where you can see the rusted deck of the Arizona. Hundreds are entombed there.




Every afternoon I've been swimming in the Pacific. The sea water here is crystal clear and a lovely 75 degrees. And so salty! Monday I went for a swim just off the beach and I was amazed to find beautiful fish of all colors and fantastic patterns swimming over the rocks! Most were about the size of a tea saucer, but some were as large as house cats. They're completely unafraid of people so I could swim right up to them! I spent a few hours just swimming around the reef near the shore.

Wednesday afternoon I decided to follow the reef out to where it gets deep. I swam out from the island for about 20 minutes, held my breath, and dove. It's really hard to sink in the sea water, so I actually had to swim downward! About 20-ft down there was a gorgeous coral reef, all pink, green, brown, and yellow. It was swarming with angel fish, sea urchins, and dozens others I couldn't recognize. There were large fish with a strange horn-like thing on their forehead, skinny semi-transparent fish about 1ft long, and a big fat fish I called the "quilt fish" because it was a patchwork of colors. Even at that depth the water is clear as glass. The reef was a maze of caverns, arches and ledges. I'd stay down as long as I could hold my breath and then shoot up gasping to the surface. Best of all, it was completely free! Nobody organizes this kind of thing. It's just the Hawaiian equivalent of watching pidgins in the park.

I wasn't on the reef long before I had a scare. A long white sea-snake with black spots and rings was writhing on the coral only a few feet away from me. I wasn't too worried because the animals clearly weren't threatened by me, but I did swim over to a different part of the reef. That's where I saw the moray eel. I swam down into a bowl in the coral, turned around, and found it's wicked grin just 2-ft away! It's head was about the size of a small dog's I could just barely see its jagged teeth. My friend Michael nearly lost a finger to a moray, and I doubted my arsenal of basketball shorts and swim goggles would be sufficient protection. I also remembered that I was 20-minutes from shore and nobody knew where I was! I decided I'd seen enough of the reef for one day.



Last night I went to the conference awards banquet at the Polynesian Culture Center. Everyone got a traditional flower lei on the way into the center. It was the first time most these geeks got leid (har har). The banquet featured delicious Hawaiian food and fresh pineapple, and was accompanied by Polynesian dances from Tahiti, Samoa, Tonga, and Hawaii of course. The show started by digging dinner out of the ground. An entire pig had been roasting all day in a pit covered by a heap of banana leaves behind the stage. An extra tasty pig! The Tahitian women were incredible! They could isolate the motion of just their hips, calves, or anything really. It was quite a show. The climax was a spectacular fire knife dance given by the 3-time world champion of fire knife dancing. I'd love to have "fire knife" on my business card somewhere.

Whew! That about catches everything up. If anything else happens I'll stick it here. Cheers!

Stuttgart and Winterbach with Guni

My work in Jülich is done! Friday was my last day, but I've got a few more days in Germany before I fly home, so I took a high-speed train to Stuttgart to hang out with my friend Guni and her family in Winterbach.


Winterbach is beautiful! Fruits and berries and flowers grow everywhere. Apples, pears, cherries, peaches, ..... all sorts. The rolling hillsides are covered in vineyards and grapes grow like weeds in the town. The blackberries, raspberries, and gooseberries actually ARE weeds, they grow so well. It's a regular Hobbiton down here. Guni and I took a bike ride through the wineries and orchards until it started to rain, so we stopped in a little cafe for espresso.


Here's me at the beer-garden with a local hefeweizen. Tasty! I also tried some of the local Trollinger wine. Very light and fruity with a light color. Quite glugable. I glugged two bottles with Guni.


The local houses all belong on postcards. This tiny house was built in the 1600s and is one of the narowest in the city.


Another 17th-century house sported this ranchy brass handel on the front door. (Must ... resist ... lewd comment about brass door knocker....)


Guni's dad is retiring from teaching after 40 years. I attended his retirement party, which was incredibly boring, even for the native speakers. Someone decided to weight the napkins with painted building blocks. A big mistake! These board engineering professors soon had them collected to one table and were building away during the keynote speech. Half the table encouraged them, half ignored them. I was cracking up.

I only survived the boredom when a very nice old professor with long dirty-white hair and brown teeth joined our table. He looked so like the Crypt Keeper that I started mentally-translating his conversation into the lead-lined guttural tones of death to keep myself amused. For example: I always enjoy riding my bicycle.

Kölner Lichter

This weekend I went to Köln (Cologne) for one of the biggest firework shows in the whole of Germany! It's called "Kölner Lichter", the Lights of Cologne. Over 50 ships from the entire Rhine ferry passengers to Cologne and people crowd the bridges and banks to watch an enormous barge launch fireworks from the river. It was really fantastic!


We got there a few hours early and found a place on a pedestrian-soaked bridge. Many people had been camped on the ashfalt since noon and the crowding was intense. The (rich) people who could afford a spot on the Cologne river boats took a short trip downriver to meet the main convoy coming up from the lower Rhine.


It was like a carneval on both banks! TONS of beer, piles of delicious gummy candies, rides, and a live concert in the old city square. Over 100,000 people showed up!


I began to get impatient as the sun set, so I took pictures of the dome to stay distracted.


The boats arrived! The gigantic sound system riged around the area played Gregorian chants and people held sparklers and candles. It was all very mystical. (This is probably the best night photo I've ever taken. As with any photo on my blog, it comes in high-quality when you click it. Hint hint.)


The fireworks started at 11:30 and blew my mind. Indescribable. You'd have to be there to understand. So I'll try to tell you about it anyway.

The show theam was "fire as technology", staring with the Chinese fireworks and moving up to modern days. The period-style fireworks were synchronized with music depecting everything from the Chinese culture to ship warfare, to interstellar exploration. Colored lights illuminated the trails and plumes of smoke. I really enjoyed the bit about ship warfare. The barge appeared to bombard the city by firing long, silvery streams of flame over the crowded banks. It was quite convincing. My favorite was near the end when they brought out the most advanced firework technogies. There was an amazing "cluster bomb" kind of firework which rippled out from the center in hundreds of thousands of miniature golden explosions and sounded exactly like waves on a shore.

My viewpoint on the bridge put me directly under the show. I'd come back to Germany just to see this again.

Castles on the Rhine

This post is woefully overdue, but I'm running out of time in Jülich so work is getting hectic.



Tuesday last week I visited Castle Marksburg and about seven other castles and towers in various states of ruination along the Middle Rhine. Barons of various degrees built all sort of fortifications along the Rhine to levy taxes on the river traffic and "sell protection." The Mafia was alive and well in medieval Germany.

Marksburg is really fantastic and in excellent condition. It was never captured or destroyed, the only castle in this area to remain so, and is now the headquarters and offices of the Deutsche Burgenvereinigung (German Castle Association). It's the ancestral home of the Count Katzenelnbogen, which for some reason means "Cat's Elbows". Visitors are advised to control their dogs.



We were given an excellent English tour by a German hunchback with a bundle of enormous iron keys. I'm not kidding.


The castle residents sported a variety of lung diseases. All the beds were deliberately too short, forcing you to sleep sitting up. If you fell over in the night, you risked drowning in your own phlegm.


This anatomically-correct coat of arms hangs just inside the main gate. I think the Landgraves of Hess were compensating for something.


The castle kitchen was very impressive. The meals for the great hall were prepared and arranged on these tables and then the entire table would be carried up the uneven stairs to the hungry guests. They could have passed the food bucket-brigade-style to the main hall, but they were too busy carrying that heavy table to stop and think about it.


I found this chastity belt in the armory. Guaranteed to prevent damnation or your virginity back!



Back in the day, the castle's walls were plastered and painted, inside and out. This was common to every castle, but our movies filmed in castle ruins make most people think the plaster is unusual. The German Castle Association is restoring the plaster and paint according to contemporary color sketches.


After Marksburg, we drove through a few small towns on the Rhine. It was just like what you've seen in postcards and tourism movies: beautifully-constructed traditional-style houses with old churches and fragments of the ancient town walls scattered between. The Rhine has very few bridges, so most people cross with ferries. The ferry advertisements, typically German, sound more like warnings. My favorite: "Without this ferry, you don't stand a chance!"


This is wine country and vineyards abound. Germany is at approximately a 45-degree latitude, so most of the grapevines are planted on a 45-degree slope to receive maximum direct sunlight throughout the day.


There's a cat-and-mouse pun started by, or related to, Count "Cat's Elbows" Katzenelnbogen that runs up and down this valley. This is Burg Maus, the "Mouse Castle". There's "Mouse Tower" further downstream.


The impressive Burg Rheinfels, the Rock of the Rhine.


Here's Burg Gutenfels, Castle "Good Rock". The origional owners were pirates of a sort, levying heavy taxes on the river traffic. It's a hotel now, so they're maintaining the tradition of extorting passersby.


The nobles of Burg Gutenfels built this interesting tower on a small island in the middle of the Rhine. It's blatantly intended for levying taxes on passing barges, and sinking those who don't feel spendy. The Germans recaptured it from the Spanish in 1504 when a small girl showed the German forces a way to sneek up on the castle undetected. The tennents of the modern Hotel Gutenfels wish she was still around so they could sneek out undetected.


Burg Sooneck.

Smoking

Just about everyone smokes in Germany. This is ironic given the severity of the German cigarette warning labels, which are printed in black letters you could read from space. None of this wimpy "The surgen general recommends...." stuff. For example:

Smoking can lead to impotence due to circulatory system disorders.

Rauchen kann zu Durchblutungsstörungen führen Impotenz

Smoking while pregnant harms your unborn child.

Rauchen in der Schwangerschaft schadet Ihrem Kind

Smoking can lead to a slow and painful death.

Rauchen kann zu einem langsamen und schmerzhaften Tod führen

Protect children! Don't let them breath your tobaco smoke!

Schützen Sie Kinder -- lassen Sie sie nicht Ihren Tabakrauch einatmen

Smoking damages you and the people around you considerably!

Rauchen fügt Ihnen und den Menschen in Ihrer Umgebung erheblichen Schaden zu

Smoking can be deadly.

Rauchen kann tödlich sein

Smoking causes fatal lung cancer.

Rauchen verursacht tödlichen Lungenkrebs

Your doctor or pharmacist can help you give up smoking.

Ihr Arzt oder Apotheker kann Ihnen dabei helfen, das Rauchen aufzugeben

Germany in the finals!

Germany has made it all the way to the final match of the European Soccer Championship! I watched the half-final game against Turkey in the bar, and I got some great footage of the Germans at their wildest. Check out this video! (The kids at the end are the best.)


The crowd spilled out of the bar and into the street. Tensions were really high and everyone was half-drunk. The guy with the German flag on his cheek (first row, middle) screamed that the Germans were playing like **** for the first ten minutes of the match, and then wanted to fight me when I (and the two guys sitting next to me) told him "Relax man! It's just the first 10 minutes!" After some intense staring he gave it up, and by half-time he had forgotten it completely and gave me a big, beery hug.


The Turkish competition! They look happy here, but by the end of the match they were pouting like two-year-olds.


The match ended 3:2 for Germany, and everyone went wild! What an awesome night!

Drachenboot-fest in Essen!

Last week I was lucky enough to compete in a Drachenboot (Dragon boat) race at Essen Baldeneysee. I got in at the last minute because a friend/coworker at Jülich got a nasty mosquito bite on his hand and couldn't compete. Poor guy's entire hand was puffed up like a balloon!

I looked up dragon boats before the race and found some fantastic pictures. I thought we'd be paddling something like this:


but our were a bit more modest:


A dragon boat is a really long, narrow paddle boat with a caller in the prow and a helmsman in the stern. Our boats had 20 paddlers and massive animal-hide drums for the caller to beat time with. The sport originated in China and is popular in Germany. There's even a national dragon boat association! The Berlin team was the world champion in 2005.


The drums were my favorite part. Waaaaaay better than the plastic dragon prow. The beating sounds like a giant heart and makes me feel like Ben-Hur.

Our valiant team, composed of mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and nerds in general, was called "Die Blauen Füchse" (the blue foxes). The explanation for the name, given in English, went like this: "There is a kindergarten called the foxes. And when you drink too much, you are blue. So we are the blue foxes." Apparently, we are a walking tribute to juvenile delinquency.


The team!

We raced four times, and every race was fantastic! The race starts with the announcement "Are you ready? Attention! Go!" and then everyone paddles furiously. We splashed and tossed water everywhere and if anyone's stroke got out of sync he was sure to toss buckets of water in your face. There was a gentle headwind for the whole of the course, which grew into a powerful, gusting wind by the end of the day. We finished each run with an inch or two of water in the bottom of the boat, and several gallons in my lap. It was easy to see which side of the boat you sat on; your inward side was your only hope of a dry stitch.



There were 36 teams in total, all of them crazy and most of them sporting outlandish costumes. There was a prize for best team uniform, so people came dressed as old fogies, hippies, sea creatures, secretaries, pirates, and monks. Team Love Boat wore tie-dye, and team Daytona showed up as race car drivers, and even brought their own mini-cars.

I wish we had dressed up and mentioned it to my friend Ivo. "Come on!", I said, "We're not even competing. You'd think 25 mathematicians would come up with something." We both thought a moment and then said, in the same breath: "Integral signs." Nerds on parade.



Some teams were really competitive and showed up in skin-tight waterproof shorts and spandex. Never in my life have I seen more banana hammocks, even counting the 15-or-so triathlons I've done. These people know they have to win to regain any self respect for their appearance. Its not like a bike race where you're going too fast for anyone to see anything. And when that cloth gets wet... well... the Germans have a relaxed sense of decency.



It was brilliant sailing weather, and by the end of the day boats of every size were flying up and down the lake. One guy nearly capsized his dinghy on an jibe when his jib tangled in the forestays. (That's the last time I show off my nautical vernacular. I swear.)



The wind gave a spirit of joy to the giant yellow people, prompting them to hug small children.



This is team Dragon Hunter, by far the best-dressed team in the place. Not only did they dress as monks, and not only did they bring Gregorian music to play as they boarded their boat, but they even dressed in hokie colors! They won the much coveted costume party prize.

We played around on the lake all day, and in the end came in 16th of 36. Not too shabby for a boat full of geeks. If you want to see what we look like in action, take a look at this movie I made.

The adventures didn't end at the lake, though. The weather had been fantastic all day, but on the way home we got caught on the Autobahn in the most intense hail storm I've ever seen! The hail was a good 1/2" across and brought traffic to a screeching halt. We had to cover our ears for the sound of ice smashing on the roof, but we didn't get really worried until we started watching cracks crawl across the windshield. We were literally watching the ice destroy the window before our very eyes! The hail was so large it tore branches off trees and smashed up dozens of cars. Our windshield was a complete write-off, and the car was covered in dents. It looked like a toddler had taken a ball-peen hammer to the car. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture.

Not being the owner of this dearly lamented automobile, I had a marvelous day.