Showing posts with label australia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label australia. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

april report

Sorry April.

Not that I haven't done things this month. May as well just do a quick report.

Not in any particular order:

Finished the Mass Effect games. Excellent story, very effective, really wraps you into the main character. When it all comes to an end, you feel really invested, so I guess I see why some people didn't like the ending, but they by and large were probably stupid people. Sorry. It was excellent, will stick with me.

Rented a car and drove around East Melbourne - Dandenong and Yarra territory. Had a tuna sandwich in the town of Gembrook, which looked a lot like Kingston Springs, except without an I-40 running through it. Took the guy 30 minutes at least to get around to making the sandwich - one guy, >10 customers. I went to the Upper Yarra Reservoir, where  most of our water comes from. It was nice. Nice to drive. Almost had an accident a couple times, but it wasn't that hard to get used to the reversal. A little worried about driving when JP gets here, afraid that when we're talking and I'm distracted, I'll revert to normal orientation. We'll see.

Watched a total lunar eclipse, the best one I've ever seen. The moon rose as the sun set, and it was at peak eclipse - not even red, very dark, could barely see it. Then, a threshold was crossed, and light sprang out of the southern edge, and it slowly, over another hour almost, became a full moon. Really nice view, out behind MBI.

I have a serious beard now. See how much longer it lasts.

Started writing a paper on my current project. Procrastinating on rewriting the blur adaptation paper. Need to be working on a grant proposal for UW by the end of the week.

On migraine business: Saturday, driving day, had a headache most of the day, but I also slept until 10 that day and started pretty slow, so it was a forced one. Seeing lots of weird transparent phosphenes lately, but I think the days of aura are past. Future maybe. But not present. There may have been a couple other very minor headaches in the last couple of months, but I didn't note them. I really think the "being in shape", i.e. TKD, was making me susceptible to migraines. What to do...

What else...

Guess that's it. I should be writing more lately, essaying and journalizing, but somehow it isn't happening. Working seriously, and writing the past couple of days, but most of my thinking has been done on the long walks to and from lab, rather than in journal entries. We'll get back to it, don't worry. I still love you, xuexixs.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

wilson's prom

a list of things I saw, heard, and did:

bull ant: someone wanted me to come stomp it, but i chased it across the street instead. apparently the sting can be pretty bad. she was super aggressive - i chased her off with a stick, but for the most part i had to actually flip her away, foot by foot, because otherwise she'd rear up and point her mandibles at me, very challenging.

kookaberra: loud, loud birds. middle of the night, both nights, awoken by competing kookaberras, laughing/screaming at eachother, "aaaAAAAAAAaaa!!! aaaAAAAAAAAaaa!!!"

wombats: i had heard stories about the rudeness of the wombat, and was not let down. once the sun is setting the wombats wander through the campsites, looking for food on the ground, tipping over coolers ('eskies'), looking on tables, getting into cars and tents. they're like tiny bears, or gigantic hamsters. they're completely nonchalant about it. you go to chase one off, and he's not skittish like your typical wild mammal: he just ignores you, and you have to really get serious and yell and swing a foot at him, and then he reluctantly backs off and trots off to a different site. surreal experiences with the wombats, especially once Nao and family appeared, and you had this Japanese family following one around, and all you can understand is, 'wombato! wombato!'

crimson rosella: a beautiful parrot, saw them several times. one on saturday afternoon, when Farid and I were relaxing at camp while others were away - this one landed on our table and started poking through things, tipping over containers and plates, like a regular curious bird, but then he started *picking things up with his feet* - holding a cracker in his hand and taking bites off of it, or holding up a bit of aluminum with nutella smeared on it and holding it as he licked off the sweet stuff. never seen a bird behave like that, using claws as hands.

brown honeyeater: there are lots of honey eaters in the neighborhood here, the ones with the yellow streaks behind their eyes that, to me, seem a bit unhinged. a visitor to our camp on saturday was, i think, a brown honey eater, very different looking, but also very quizzical and odd. i guess all birds are kind of odd, but this one walked around the whole camp, checking every location one time, never circling back, walking around our feet, tilting his head left and right to investigate this corner or that corner. it was like having a pet honeyeater (though at the time i was calling him a thrush - i'm still not sure it wasn't a thrush, but my visual memory right now is a better match for 'brown honeyeater').

fairywrens: i believe that these were *superb* fairywrens. tiny, tiny birds, smaller than a sparrow, closer in scale to a hummingbird even. but they hopped about like sparrows, mostly in bushes or underbrush. some of them, the males i suppose, were tinted blue. their most striking feature was the tail, sticking straight up like an antenna.

a big lizard: at first i thought i'd found the fairywren motherlode, walking along a brush-covered mound next to the campsite, so i went back to get the camera and take some pictures. when i got back the fairywrens were all gone, and instead i found a big blue-gray lizard. no idea what it was - maybe 6 inches long, stockier than a skink, shorter legs too, but since skinks are really my main point of comparison that's not too much information. anyways, a big lizard. i got some video of him.

lots and lots of millipedes: once the sun went down, the millipedes came out, and some could still be found during the day. they were everywhere, thousands of them, and it was impossible not to step on them. tiny, not the big imposing ones - these were all about an inch long, black or dark brown. not sure what that was about.

no mosquitoes: there were no mosquitoes! at all!

'mictyris' soldier crabs: a whole colony of them, hundreds, maybe a thousand. tiny crabs, each about an inch across, iridescent blue and pink shells, bodies shaped like a cicada's head, with this impression strengthened by these bulbous lateral patterns on the carapace that look like compound eyes; but no, the eyes are little black dots on short stalks right above the maw. they dig little holes in the sand to wait out the tide - i provoked one into burying himself, he did it in a quick spiral motion, creating a cylindrical hole, and he was then able to close it over himself. very neat. they left pellets of sand all around their area, which i've read are the results of their eating habits: they suck stuff out of the sand and spit it back out, leaving these little balls. hence the name, 'mictyris'.

anemones: saw anemones on rocks.

there were other birds. saw some little kangaroos and a pair of emus on the drive into the park.

also: saw the milky way, and the southern cross. lots and lots and lots of stars. i don't think i've seen the milky way in at least a decade. despite the haze - the skys were generally clear, but still a bit foggy - and the lights from the camping area, it was dark enough to see the milky way, it was magnificent. the southern cross is much smaller than i expected, but i got to like it. it's more of a diamond than a cross, or a kite.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

anxiety, nighttime kitchens, broken foot

Yep. So, I guess 2014 is the year that HAZ goes back to sleep, waking up now and then for a random update.

I suppose that when I'm especially introspective or, dare I say it, depressed, I write here more. Or anxious. Which is to say that lately I haven't been these things. There's a bit of desolation, loneliness, but I know that's temporary, so it's not actually that hard. And what I'm doing otherwise, during the days, is so fulfilling that there's not much energy left to fuel anxiety.

So that's why I'm not here much lately.

Tonight, as I left the lab, about 8:30, I went to the kitchen to get a candy bar. I don't usually do this, but my foot is kind of broken and I felt like I needed an extra boost for the walk home.

Coincidentally, the candy bar was called 'Boost'.

I walk into the kitchen - or cafeteria, or as the Australians call it, 'tea room', and it's dark out, but the lamps over the lunch tables are on, and there's a smell, something I can't identify, musty, an odor that didn't belong there. And suddenly I'm a kid, sneaking into the kitchen in my mother's parents house after everyone's gone to sleep, to look through the cupboards for cookies or crackers. The light was somehow the same, the smell of course was key - memory is so strange - and, certainly, my action was parallel. A few times I've done the same thing, probably once a week to be honest, but there's always someone else there, and I'm too embarrassed to let someone see me taking a candy bar. Ha!

So I stood there for a dozen seconds and observed the memory, and I could *see* Elizabeth's kitchen, and feel the space of their house around me. The light, the smell, the feeling of night time and quiet and not wanting to wake anyone, and being by yourself.

What else is there? Interesting birds. Doves with tall feather crests on top of their heads. Mynas fighting with their reflections in windows. They're my favorites lately, jovial, nervous birds.

Going on a camping trip tomorrow! With a broken foot! I went running Tuesday, barefoot, and it was totally fine. Short on oxygen, but didn't notice a single mechanical problem, not one false step, and I was concentrated on the feet, on the ground. But Wednesday morning I get out of bed and it hurts - and the long walk home at night, man oh man, on a bad foot. I strained some ligament or tendon or something, can feel a bruise, left foot, outside/top about halfway down. At first it felt like it was in the ankle or heel, but it's migrating. Hope it's better tomorrow, so I can do some hiking..

Had a sort-of headache a week or so ago, but they seem basically to have stopped, so we may need to revise the subtitle of this journal.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Australia 1

Why no Australia posts, HAZ?

In the first days, there was the tremendous heat (>40 degrees - I need to say that in C just to keep up the habit), the weirdness of the sun being in the wrong half of the sky (makes it hard to find your way), and of the cars (mostly Japanese, lots of Mitsubishis and Toyotas) and roads all being backwards. Aside from that it's all pretty familiar. Public transport and beer are really expensive. The peanut butter comes in tiny jars and the legendary Vegemite is almost inedible. Not sure what to do about this situation, but I will cope.

This post isn't about peanut butter and cars, though, it's about animals. I've been living in Boston for almost 5 years, where the only animals are rats, pigeons, and seagull (i.e. rats and flying rats). I keep expecting to run into a giant spider somewhere - I was excited to see the big huntsmen that supposedly live around here - but it hasn't happened yet. I did witness - and fail to react quickly enough to stop it - a bunch of fellow party-goers going to the trouble of vacuuming up a poor white-tailed spider, which apparently is something of a weaksauce Australian brown recluse. There's a flowering bush in my backyard that bees love, I sat out this past Sunday afternoon and watched them up close for half an hour. I watched a possum run down power lines for a block. I saw the biggest ant I've ever seen, an inch long, she was carrying a leaf that must have been very important to her. Saved a big snail from the sidewalk.

Like I said, I've been in Boston five years, so I've come to appreciate these little things more than I used to.

I'd say the best part of the experience so far, as far as visiting a new land goes, is the birds. All the birds are different! There are lots and lots and lots of birds in the neighborhood, all songbirds (counting crows). The crows - or are they ravens? - sound different from American crows, but a lot like the crow noise that Jingping makes - so maybe Eastern crows all sound like this? It much less like CAW, and much more like MEH. I prefer the CAW, but I guess neither is a very musical sound. There are lots of magpies, and they make very interesting sounds, musical, complex noises, like a cowbird but much more elaborate. They may be imitating other birds too, but I'm not sure.

In the mornings I hear lots of different sounds that I haven't tied to anyone in particular - there are mourning doves - or something very similar, except with a spotted collar - that sit in pairs on rooftops, and they make a mourning-dove-like call but a different tune than the American ones. And there are mynas, I think - mid-sized songbirds with yellow streaks extending behind their eyes. These are basically starlings, colored differently, making similar croaking-chattering noises, stalking around on the ground looking for food.

There are lots of fruit trees in the neighborhood, and they're often full of these colorful birds - completely colorful, colors of the rainbow - which I think are ringneck parrots. I've seen them in pairs or in flocks. Most colorful birds I've ever seen, very beautiful. I think they chatter a bit, but I haven't noticed distinctive sounds. I've seen swallows catching bugs, and walked around a corner the other day to surprise a pair of brown ducks - odd since there's no water anywhere nearby, I suppose they were resting on their way somewhere.

Then there are the white cockatoos on campus, huge flocks of them. These are mid-sized birds, and they make a variety of noises, ranging from chicken clucks to cat yowls to baby cries. I walked through a host of them occupying some trees last night, and kept laughing out loud, they were the most ridiculous noises I'd ever heard coming from wildlife.

When I'm walking home at night, after dark, the birds are quiet, but every minute I see a crow fly overhead, on his way somewhere. The crickets at night are very loud, loud and disorienting. I've gotten down and picked through grass trying to find one, and failed, despite it sounding like it was right there in front of me.

Okay, that's it.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

change of venue

Almost a month since my last entry. In that time, I've moved to Australia and become a neuroscientist.

Just in the last few days, I've gone surfing (or tried) and, for the first (and maybe only) time, made what might be an important scientific advance. I'm working on something really, really interesting. I won't tell you about it right now, but aside from missing my wife and sort of general decrement in living conditions, I am honestly really glad I came down here.

Melbourne weather is hard to deal with. I need a bike and a raincoat. The people here are generally nice. Beer is super expensive.

Just can't think of much to write, strangely. I'm in an investigative mode, very little writing lately. Much writing to do, but for once I feel like it can wait. Great things going on!

Sunday, December 22, 2013

something which seems to be true

  
Where D is distance between the subscripted cities, indicated by their airport codes, r is the radius of the earth, and p is population of the subscripted city.

Since I realized this, I've felt much more conflicted about my coming trip. Separated from my wife for what might be 6 months, in what is by the above measures the most distant city on earth from where I am now (of comparable or larger size). On the other hand, maybe it's symbolic of escape from a long feeling of being trapped - not with the wife, but with the job. Kind of proves I am free, and at the same time there's a cost. There's no cost function in these equations...

The first one was my first thought, just looking at distance weighted by whether the city population is at least as big as Boston's. Melbourne is top there, though Sydney is very close - finding different estimates for population makes the difference, but I think I'm using good numbers - Boston's 'metro' population and Melbourne's similar extent both include 4.2 million people.

The second function is more specific obviously, excluding cities that are larger or smaller, and maybe it's a little more comfortable, but I do prefer the first one.