Isn’t it amazing how time flies? It’s been almost three months since I went on holidays, and I guess it’s time to concede that I probably won’t write much about them. Still, people have been asking for pictures and stories… well, ok then.

The short version, for those without much time (or interest): in early June I flew to Alice Springs, drove from there to Uluru and back, then flew back home; some of the pictures of this trip are here. A few days later I flew to New York, spent 10 days there just walking around and looking at cool things; a very raw set of photos is here (no descriptions, not much editing, ordered by date taken); then I flew to Las Vegas, where I spent three days having fun at the Amazing Meeting (photos here – also unedited, and frankly a bit boring), then came back home.

Now, for a bit more detail…

Alice Springs

I still find it a bit strange that this is a town of just over 20,000 people. Still, it’s the largest human settlement in central Australia, and when you’re flying there you can see why: it’s just a big desert all around. The city is in an area that is slightly less dry than average, thanks to the McDonnell Ranges just north and west of there, but it’s still very, very dry. Even though the very green lawns all around town can make you think otherwise.

But, really, it’s just a regular city. It does seem to survive mostly on tourism, and mostly thanks to people stopping by on the way to Uluru: there is a very large industry dedicated to offering cheap accomodation, desert tours and other traveller needs (such as Internet access). Other than that, Alice’s strongest claim to fame is the Todd River (picture), which cuts right through the city. True, it’s dry most of the time, but they seem to like it (one week after this picture was taken it reportedly was flowing, due to heavy rain just outside of town).

I didn’t do much in Alice; I arrived there late in a Saturday afternoon, and the city seems to close down at four on Saturdays. So, I just picked the car up, walked a bit around the city centre, bought some supplies and rested a bit so I could wake up at dawn the next morning to take the road.

On the road – Alice to Kings Canyon

There are two roads you can follow to go from Alice Springs to Kings Canyon. To take the first one, you go south on the same road that would take you to Adelaide if you drove long enough (Stuart Highway), then after some 160km you turn west on Lasseter Highway, which will take you to Uluru if you drive long enough. After some 100km you turn north on Luritja Road and drive some 150km more, and you’re there. This is a long but easy path, sealed all the way through and with (relatively) lots of traffic (so, if you car breaks down, someone will stop to help soon enough).

The other option is to drive straight west out of Alice Springs on Larapinta Drive, and just keep going. The road forks after a while, and you can choose between staying on Larapinta Drive to go through Hermannsburg, a traditional German town, or taking Namatjira Drive to stay close to the mountains and drive through Glen Helen and other similarly scenic places. Whichever path you take, the roads rejoin and eventually turn south and lead you straight into Kings Canyon after a bit over 300km… some 200 of which are unsealed. It’s not exactly a comfortable drive, and I wouldn’t recommend doing it without a four wheel drive vehicle (or after rain), and you do need to buy a permit ($2.20) as you’ll be driving through aboriginal land, and you’re not going to see much traffic in either direction at any time. Still, when it was time to choose, “I took the one less travelled by”… but I’ll write more about it next time.

I’ve been back in Melbourne since Tuesday, and by now I’m almost fully recovered from the jet lag and the very long flights. Pictures are forthcoming.

Some quick random notes about the US:

• the last time I went there was in 1999; lots of things changed since them, and they seem to have become a bit too paranoid about security (not that this is news to anyone); going through security checkpoints in airports is hell
• that said, going through immigration on arrival was a breeze, and everyone was very polite
• I fully expected free wi-fi to be much more prevalent than it actually is; in NY, you can find free access points in some parks (I used the one on Bryant Park, behind the public library) and in Apple stores, but in not many other places (paid wi-fi is everywhere, though)
• also not news, but… Las Vegas is unbelievably hot in summer; the average summer day there is about as hot as the hottest days in Melbourne
• the number of weird people per square km is much higher in the US than in Australia; the best one I’ve seen was a guy walking down the street with a cat sitting on the top of his head (and yes, I have a picture)
• I’ve met Adam Savage; that was very cool

More details soon.

I’m officially on holidays; no work for the next four weeks.

And I’ll start travelling tomorrow morning; I’ll fly to Alice Springs, and from there I’ll spend the next five days driving around the red centre, to Uluru and back. I’ll be twittering my progress (mobile phone coverage allowing), and my current position will be displayed on the small map here on the right. Which is reproduced here:

for the benefit of those reading this via RSS (click the image for a larger version).

I probably won’t post much over the next few weeks, but I may have pictures in about a week or so (and certainly at the end of June, when I come back).

So, I’m planning to buy a digital SLR camera in the near future. I currently use a film SLR which is almost 10 years old (a Minolta Maxxum 300si) and a digital point-and-shoot that is almost as old (an Olympus D200Z, I think). I’ve been doing a lot of research online to try to decide which camera to buy, and herein lies the problem.

The fact is, there is an amazing amount of information available about all models on the market. There are manufacturer brochures, specs, reviews, owners’ comments, side-by-side comparisons, “walk-throughs”, videos, audio recordings etc. etc. etc. But the problem is that there is way too much information. I have now read enough material that I would almost be able to write the user’s manual for the Canon EOS400D, the Nikon D60 or the Sony A100, and I’m nowhere near actually deciding for one of them. (At least I narrowed it down to these three models — plus the Sony A200, which is the almost identical twin to the A100, only two years younger)

The Nikon seems very good, but the auto-focus depends on the lens being able to do it, so the lenses are more expensive and the selection is a bit more limited. The Canon is, by far, the most popular of them, and it’s almost the “default” starting DSLR camera out there, but it is a 2006 model (its younger sister, the EOS450D, seems to be a bit too much for what I want) and the lenses included with the camera are universally described as crappy (yes, I can always buy the body only and get decent lenses separately, but this brings the price up). The Sony is, at its heart, an updated Minolta, and in fact it can use any Minolta lens (and I do have a Minolta); in fact, I can’t think of anything bad about the Sony models, but I’ve read much less about them than about the others, so I might have some surprises later. If no surprises show up, I am leaning towards an A200…

In the US, before each episode of Mythbusters, Adam and Jamie ask people never to try at home what they’re going do in the show (in Australia this warning is not shown, for some reason).

This is why. (and this is the episode I’m talking about) (this one too)

This weekend I went for a walk in the Sherbrooke Forest, part of the Dandenong Ranges National Park. I followed a track described in the book 150 Walks in Victoria, by Tyrone Thomas and Andrew Close, and everything went fairly well.

To get to the track, I took the train to Belgrave and, from the station, walked approximately 1km (uphill) on Old Monbulk Road to the gates of the park. From there, I followed the trail in a clockwise direction, first north up to Grant’s Picnic Grounds (close to Monbulk Rd and “infested” with cockatoos trying to get food from the families eating there), then approximately south-east on Lyrebird Walk, continuing south on Neumann Track then south, and later west, on Paddy’s Track leading to an apparently unnamed track going west from a clearing known as Jack the Miners back to the starting point. A map of this path is here, including some pictures I took on the way (more pictures at my Flickr page).

The length of the path is around 6.3km, with some significant vertical movement as well; the first leg of the track leads steadily up, while the southward leg goes a bit up and then steeply down. The final few hundred metres go steeply up and reduced my average speed significantly…

This was also the first “field test” of the GPS unit I bought (and mentioned here), a Magellan eXplorist 400. It did very well (as the map linked to above shows), but I did find a few things out:

• the “trip odometer”, which should tell me how far I’ve moved, is either very inaccurate or using the wrong units; at the end of the track it was showing “4.0km”, while the recorded route was actually 6.31km long (which equals 3.92 miles…); this is definitely not good
• when you turn the device on, it takes around 60 seconds to lock to the satellites and get your initial position; that’s normal and more or less unavoidable because of the way the satellites transmit data; however, if you are moving — however slowly —, it seems the device won’t reliably find the satellites after any amount of time; this is not very good, but I can live with that (after it finds your initial position, it can be moved with no problems; also, being inside a backpack is not a problem)
• it won’t find the satellites from inside a train; I’m honestly curious about how it will perform inside a car
• marking positions is a very easy and quick process, but “typing” using that on-screen keyboard and mini-joystick is a pain

I really like GPS; it’s one of the cooler “general use” technologies out there.

GPS is the closest thing we have to a worldwide information network. Granted, it doesn’t really give you that much information: it will tell you where you are and what time it is (assuming you know your time zone), but nothing else. And, ok, it doesn’t really work indoors and accuracy is not great in urban areas (because of shadows and reflections caused by buildings), but it’s still very cool. Think about it: I can be (almost) anywhere in the world and a small handheld device will be able to tell me, in just a few seconds, exactly where I am using only information from a constellation of satellites flying overhead, unseen and ignored by most people. Fifty years ago this would be the stuff of sci-fi.

The reason I’m mentioning this is that I recently bought a handheld GPS receiver, and I spent a few hours playing with it yesterday. The reason for that is that I’ve recently started engaging in bushwalking (or “hiking” for those outside Australia and NZ) with the Melbourne Bushwalkers. After my first somewhat “serious” walk, in the area of the Lorne waterfalls (about 13km downhill in the rain…), I tried to identify the path the group followed on a map and failed miserably. So, I thought “wouldn’t it be nice to be able to record the track so I could, later, trace it on a map?”. Well, a GPS receiver is a good way of doing that.

The model I bought is a Magellan eXplorist 400. It’s a discontinued model, but it is fairly decent and there’s a healthy market of new units on eBay for very good prices. It can track up to 12 satellites and will use ground-based (WAAS) and satellite-based (EGNOS) auxiliary signals to increase accuracy where available; none of those are available in Australia, alas. It has a grayscale LCD display with a reddish (amber?) backlight and can display fairly detailed background maps (it won’t give you address-based directions or convert addresses to positions without additional software), and it uses SD cards as additional memory to record tracks, routes, points of interest and maps. It’s also fully waterproof (full immersion of up to 1m for up to 30 minutes), which is great for rainy days… And it comes with a USB cable to upload and download data from/to a computer.

I haven’t yet used it “in the field”, so I can’t talk much about it’s performance there; I hope to remedy this soon enough. I can’t talk about battery durability either, for now. I did try to use it in central Melbourne yesterday, with sort of mixed results… it does well in areas that are somewhat open, but “canyon-like” streets (with tall buildings on both sides) are usually blind spots (I wonder how it does in real canyons…). I uploaded the track log to Google Earth, generated a KML file and made a public Google Map from it, which is here; the recorded path is in a barely-visible light blue, and it actually covers about half of the path I followed; I guess it lost the signal in the other areas. The receiver was inside my backpack, which may also not be the best possible position for it.

I will be using it in future walks (and in a trip to remote areas later this year, where I plan to use GPS data to geotag the pictures I’ll take — and to not get lost, also), and I’ll write about how it does later on.

G’day Mate: tomorrow’s Internet, today. Courtesy of Google Australia.

By the way, the theme of Google’s jokes today seems to be “time travel”. Speaking of which, someone in today’s Buzz Out Loud was complaining that, because April 1st starts early in Australia, they were seeing jokes on 31 March. Well, spare a tought for the Australians who will only see the American jokes on 02 April, waaaay too late for them to be funny.

And this has got to be a joke: Sydney’s stressed brains are shrinking, says the ABC. “Stress from high house prices and sporting failures is shrinking Sydneysiders’ brains, compared to those of their counterparts in Melbourne”. Well, I knew I had picked the right city!

Best Seinfeld episode ever: The Marine Biologist. Best Friends episode ever: The One With All The Haste (but not with Channel Ten’s cuts). Best McGyver episode ever: Hell Week (close second: Ugly Duckling). Just thought I’d say it.

In 1987, the American ABC network started broadcasting a show created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, of The Bedford Falls Company, with music by W. G. “Snuffy” Walden. “thirtysomething” (not capitalised) was a drama dealing with the lives of, well, thirty-somethings: the main characters are Michael and Hope Steadman, interfaith couple (he is Jewish, she’s Christian) with two kids; other characters include Elliot, who works with Michael in advertising; Michael’s sister Melissa; Elliot’s wife Nancy, who develops cancer later in the series; Michael’s former roommate Gary, who dates Melissa but then marries Susannah and later dies in a car crash, just as Nancy recovers from cancer; and a few others. It was a show about real life without being about anything in particular; it’s sort of a drama version of Seinfeld. It was very well received by critics and public, and aired for four seasons (85 episodes in total); it also won one Golden Globe and several Emmys.

I first heard about this show in the early 90s, and I first watched an episode in 1996 or 1997, when a cable network in the US was showing repeats every night. I really enjoyed it, despite the fact that I wasn’t then in my 30s (I am now). This is one show I would like to buy in DVD, but it’s not legally available (there are a few illegal versions that you can buy on the net, but they’re not cheap and the quality — so I’m told — is very poor). Apparently there’s a company now working in restoring the original film stock used in the series and converting it to digital formats, which might be a first step towards releasing a set of DVDs…

Update 10 May 2009: the DVD is coming! Season 1 is available for pre-order from Amazon.com, to be released in 25 August. You can pre-order it from here: thirtysomething: The Complete First Season

A few years later, in 1994, the same ABC network started broadcasting another show created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, with music by W. G. “Snuffy” Walden. “My So-Called Life” wasn’t too different from “thirtysomething”, but it focused on another period of life: the high school years. The main character is Angela (brilliantly played by Claire Danes), who is in the process of finding her place in life — as are most teenagers at this time of their lives. We also get to know Brian, the geeky neighbour who’s in love with Angela; Jordan, the not-so-smart handsome guy Angela’s in love with; Rayanne, the party girl; Rickie, the latino bisexual friend of Rayanne’s (and later Angela’s); Graham and Patty, Angela’s parents, also going through interesting changes; and many others. This show was also loved by critics, and had (still has, in fact) a huge and amazingly dedicated following. Not huge enough for ABC (or maybe not huge enough at the time), as the show ran for only one season of 19 episodes. It still managed to win a Golden Globe that year (for Claire Danes).

Once again, when I first watched this show (probably in 1995) I was not in the right age bracket. Still, I fell in love with the show. I could see myself as Brian, and the way Angela showed the indecision of the teenage years was very convincing; it was beautiful. And the parts of the plot involving her parents were sort of a “fortysomething” embedded in the middle of the show. I used to have all the episodes in VHS (recorded from MTV, oddly enough), but those are long gone… I do have the soundtrack CD, though (as I do for “thirtysomething”).

Not long after, in 1996, ABC did it again with “Relativity”, another Herskovitz/Zwick show with soundtrack by Mr Walden. This one was about two twentysomethings who meet in Italy, fall in love and continue their relationship after they get back to the US; it dealt mostly with family relationships and the interaction between the relatives of the main characters. It was also short-lived: despite a large fan following, it was cancelled after 17 episodes. In 1999, the trio had a bit more luck, as their new series, “Once and Again”, had three full seasons, with a total of 63 episodes. I have to say that I watched the first few episodes of “Relativity” and didn’t like it that much, and I’ve never watched a full episode of “Once and Again”… it’s in my list for the future, though.

Which finally takes me to the point of this post. Last month, NBC aired in the US the first episode of a new series by Herskovitz and Zwick, “quarterlife” (once again, no capitals). It is a peculiar series, as it was first shown online: starting last November, short episodes were released every few days, and NBC “stitched” them together to show them as a regular 48-minute TV episode. It is about a group of twenty-somethings; the main character, Dylan, is a hopeful writer who works for a women’s magazine and keeps a video blog where she talks about her life and her friends. All other characters are somehow artistically inclined (a dancer, two film producers etc.), and the website of the series actually acts as a social network for artists. I’m not sure how it did online, but it didn’t work too well for NBC: they cancelled the show after airing a single episode (of a total of six that were produced; the other five were aired, all together, on cable a few days ago, and everything is still available online).

My impression of that first episode was that it showed some promise, but it was probably trying to hard to be “cool”. I don’t know why the ratings were so low as they were, though; it was not a particularly bad show, and I don’t think everyone had watched it online already. Sadly, we’ll never see whether it would deliver a good result… at the end of the day, Herskovitz and Zwick (and their company) have a track record of producing TV of great quality, which doesn’t always attracts that much of an audience as one would expect. Their shows are always very close to real life and real situations, and they make you think, and feel for (and with) the characters. That’s not something you see every day.

I’m pretty sure the Oscar ceremony shown on Channel 9 was “abridged”. I don’t remember seeing the award for best foreign language film, and I’m 100% sure the award for best documentary short was not shown (in fact, I think the award for best documentary feature was only shown because one of the winners is Australian) — the rather sudden appearance of Tom Hanks on the stage was a give away. Also, there wasn’t any mention of the scientific and engineering awards ceremony; they usually show a short clip during the main ceremony.

If “Duck Power Cleaner” kills 99.9% of the germs, it also selectively breeds the strongest 0.1% of the germs. Think about it.

I’ve yet to find a cat that sits as passively as the one in the ad while that Revolution anti-flea medication is applied. They don’t like the smell of the product and they’re not very fond of cold, wet products being applied on the back of their necks.

There were reports in the news recently about findings by researchers at the University of Copenhagen that show that all people with blue eyes share a single ancestor. This ancestor was supposedly the first person to express a gene mutation responsible for producing blue eyes; he or she lived in eastern Europe (probably around what’s Ukraine today) between 6 and 10 thousand years ago and all persons living today who have pure blue eyes (as opposed to blue eyes with brown spots/rings) are related through him/her.

Well, I have blue eyes (so do Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz; hi there, cousins!), and I mentioned this report to my wife; she asked “how do they know that?”. I started to answer something about looking at genetic details and then I realised… I didn’t really know. So I went after this information.

Looking for this on the net I found many copies of the same press release, with small changes here and there. It took me a while to find a link to the original article with the research results, and I have to say that it’s not an easy read for someone (like me) who is not a researcher in the area. Still, a few things were somewhat clear, and merging information from the article and from the press release I think I understand how they came to their conclusions.

So, the answer to “how do they know?” is, they actually don’t: they assume this is what happened, with a very high degree of confidence, due to what they found in the genes of the people they’ve surveyed.

Basically, the “normal” eye colour for human beings is brown; up to the moment when the blue-eye mutation first occurred, everybody had brown eyes. There’s a large degree of variation in the gene that codes for brown eyes, which indicates that it’s an “old” gene (in fact, it is shared with many other mammal species with brown/yellow eyes — other primates, cows, cats etc.). This also has the effect of introducing large variations in the actual colour of the eye (from pure brown to very dark brown almost black, to hazel, to blue with brown spots. to blue with brown ring around the pupil, to grey, to green — yes, green eyes are a variation of brown), due to differences in the amount of melanin in the iris.

People with blue eyes, on the other hand, display almost no variation in the gene coding for eye colour (and, hence, in the amount of melanin in the iris); they (well, we) all display the exact same mutation in the same location of the same gene, which causes an iris almost devoid of melanin. This indicates that the mutation is very recent and, at the same time, point to what the authors refer to as a “common founder” mutation – that is, a mutation that spread from a single person. As far as I could tell from the article, the date and geographical location of the original mutation is determined from the prevalence of the mutation in current populations and our knowledge of human migrations in the last 10,000 years.

Interestingly, the article does mention that the very high frequency of blue-eyed individuals in some areas of the globe (say, Scandinavia) indicates that this is a trait that is positively selected; that is, blue-eyed individuals have historically had a better reproductive success, at least in these areas (and this makes it harder to calculate the age of the original mutation). The reason for that advantage is not clear; it could be related to vitamin D absorption in high latitudes, or even to sexual selection (blue-eyed people being more successful in attracting partners). Your guess is as good as mine (and the authors’).

So, here it is; that how they know that.

Until very recently, I though all news headlines refering to “Fergie” were talking about Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York. That made for some interesting moments.

Early morning in the city; girl in her 20s is running alone, wearing a t-shirt that says “Helsinki City Run”. At the corner of Elizabeth and Franklin she stops and looks around, seemingly very confused. I guess she was in the wrong city.

If I ever become the dictator of a small country (not that this is in my career plan), I will decree that car alarms going off in residential areas will be punished with the impounding and destruction of the car. Even if the car was being robbed.

For reasons that will become clear in the next few months, I’ve been recently browsing travel books about Japan. Amidst all the comments on the, say, interesting cultural aspects of the Japanese people, one thing that I found particularly puzzling was the number of Japanese words that seem to be derived from English words, adapted to the local pronunciation rules.

For example: “milk” is “miruku” (ミルク) (“l” sounds become “r”, consonants are always followed by a vowel); “beer” is “biiru” (ビール); and at least one book claims that “water” is “uota”, but that seems to apply only to mineral water; the “standard” water is “mizu” (水). And that’s only in the “beverages” chapter!

So, what has me puzzled is… what happened to the “original” words for these things? It seems obvious to me that the Japanese would have had words for beer and milk before being contacted by English speakers; the original words must have somehow been displaced by the imported ones. It is a common process for a language to acquire words from others, but it’s not so common that this would happen to words that are so regularly used.

Very interesting… I hope to find out what process caused this.

Seriously. Watch the video below. No further comments needed.

I don’t usually drive around Melbourne; I don’t own a car, so I take the public transport or simply walk to wherever I need to go. However, in recent weeks I had the need to drive to a few places, and I’ve made extensive use of the “directions” feature of Google Maps.

In short, it works quite well. It got me to my destination every time. But… the directions needed some retouching every now and then. That is, it does make some interesting mistakes.

For example, this path, part of a trip from Point Cook to the city:

It seems very reasonable, and it is indeed the shortest possible path. The only problem with it is that the area shaded in dark grey is a Royal Air Force base, and they don’t really like random people driving through their roads. Granted, there is a road there, but there’s a heavy barrier and an armed guard on the way…

Or this, which is how Google Maps suggest you drive from the city to the western suburbs using the West Gate freeway:

One can see in this map a very sharp right turn from Kings Way onto the freeway, which seems odd. It seems even odder when you switch to the satellite view:

It looks like they’re suggesting that you drive over a barrier and across four lanes of traffic to enter the freeway. Hardly the best possible route.

One more: a path from the Franklin Street, in the city, going south to the Eureka Tower (which is at 7 Riverside Quay):

See that sharp left turn from Queensbridge onto an unnamed street just south of the river? Well, look at the satellite view:

The proposed path takes one onto the footpath and over a very tall barrier (the large red thing) before reaching the destination. Again, it’s a very good path, but not legally – or physically – doable. I guess you could do it on foot, of course…

Don’t get me wrong, Google Maps is very useful and helped me a lot. But, if I found these problems in just a few weeks, I guess their maps need some serious revision…