out of the blue

Sarah just sent me a link to a preview of an amazing game called "Auditorium". I love little puzzle games, and this one is simply elegant and beautiful. It doesn't even need instructions. I would tell you more, but it's more enjoyable to just go play it. You should do so.

Lawrence Lessig, a well-known copyright activist and digital freedom fighter, has put together open-government.us, a web site that urges the Obama transition team to commit to making their content free and accessible. Policy statements, speeches, and other content should allow free sharing, excerpting, and remixing. This would demonstrate Obama's principle of open, transparent government, and set a good precedent for later releases. If you think this is important, you should go to the site and sign the petition. It has already been signed by such notables as Tim O'Reilly and Jimmy Wales (and me, of course, at #206). It could use a few more.

Sarah likes my beard. I mostly keep it because she likes it. But there are sometimes unforeseen consequences to my beard-wearing.

For example, tonight Josh suggested a short walk along the river. We went outside into the cold Spokane night and discovered a thick fog, where St. Al's twin crosses hung like phantoms in the air. We walked down to the river and crossed to the other side. We brushed our way past tendrils of fog discussing art and education even as the fog pressed close into the gaps between tree branches, adorned each streetlight with an eerie halo, and artistically blended the various nighttime elements together into one muted masterpiece. The very breath of the city became tangible.

The river itself was dark. The fog left the water an inky slate color, robbing it of whatever light might waver upon its surface. Every opposite bank was invisible and unreal. We encroached upon the fringes of downtown, a grid of streetlights and dark store windows, but turned aside onto the dark paths through Riverfront Park. The water falling below the dam was muffled. It passed beneath us unnoticed as we crossed the river a second time.

We walked the familiar path home, cut across a corner of campus and watched a streetlight shine sharply through the needles of a dew-dappled spruce. We came up to the apartment and walked in. My glasses immediately fogged up. Josh laughed, and said "Dude, you've got to look in a mirror." My beard was hung with water droplets, having passed through about three miles of thick Spokane fog. I felt a sudden kinship with coniferous trees. It seems I may have to take up calling my beard a "fog-strainer". Especially if I get old and venerable enough to pull it off.

I've been playing with the dangerous combination of Photoshop and NASA again.

Google search suggestions:

Can anyone come up with a better set of search suggestions?

The tiny humpback whale and the giant elephant are neighbors.

"The lines in your eyes look like networks of something."

— Sarah, whose spontaneous poetic skills suffer somewhat under the effects of sleepiness.

The last day of the Yellowstone trip we got up and packed quickly. The tent was soaked, so we just rolled it up and threw it in the back of the car to deal with later. We drove north until we reached the Old Faithful region.

While the previous day had been a mixture of perfect and miserable weather, this day was consistently cold, drizzly and windy. We were torn between the intriguing bubbling and the crazy colors of the geyser basins on one hand, and the cozy warmth of the car on the other. So we confined ourselves to a loop around Geyser Hill, rather than going on some of the longer walks down the Firehole River.

Geysers are hard to photograph. They are dynamic fountains of boiling hot mineral water; they never stay still and they generate whole haunted villages worth of steam to obscure their form. My camera wasn't fast enough in the overcast morning light to catch any great pictures of geyser eruptions, although Sarah had more luck with her camera. Easier to capture are the bright bacterial greens and oranges and reds, the silica ledges around that rim the steaming pools, the hardy geyser grass and the stunted lodgepole pines. It's a desolate landscape there — Sarah called it "blighted" — and the effects are magnified on such a miserable day.

We went on from the Upper Geyser Basin to Biscuit Basin (don't ask me where it gets its name), home to Sapphire Pool and Shell Geyser. It's more restrained than the Old Faithful Area, tending toward pools and bubblers rather than large-scale geysers. Then we drove out along the Firehole River until we reached the boundaries of the park.

I drove until we got to I-90, where Sarah took over. She was unusually keen on driving, and seemed to enjoy the entire leg to Missoula. As she drove, the clouds came in waves over the land, and the sun struck rays through the gaps. When we came over the last pass into the vast Missoula valley, the sun gave a final burst of light and then disappeared behind a solid wall of clouds. I got back behind the wheel.

It drizzled through the rest of Montana. When we crossed into Idaho it had grown into a steady downpour. Not a torrential downpour, but thin pervasive sheets of rain like you get on the Oregon Coast. It was almost indistinguishable from the spray kicked up by semitrucks. We drove up and down passes. By the time we entered into the upper reaches of the valley that drops down to Coeur d'Alene, I was exhausted. It was another 40 miles to Spokane. I took them sorely, in a physical sense.

Luckily, Spokane has decent sushi, even if it is expensive. We comforted ourselves with a few rolls, then came back to the apartment for tea before Sarah had to hit the road again to make it to Pullman. Apparently she got her snails nestled safe and sound in the lab, then got some sleep herself.

All in all, it was a great weekend. Bloody lot of driving, but time spent with Sarah is always a plus, even in the cramped quarters of her car. One of these days we're going to have to go back and see Yellowstone properly.

The next day we went straight to the first snail collecting site, an hour and a half hike in on the Yellowstone-Teton boundary trail. We hiked through a stand of lodgepole pine and a burned-out section of the forest scattered with aspen before we finally reached the stream. We put on our sandals and shorts, and waded in. This "unnamed reach of Polecat creek" is heated by geothermic activity; in the entire time we were there, my feet didn't get in the least bit cold.

Now for the task of snail-collecting. We would scrape the snails from the bottom of plant roots and algae growths. Then we would put them in a container with stream water, and begin selectively draining off the plant matter that floated to the top. After a number of these cycles, the snails were isolated enough to sort the desired species from the undesired (and more numerous) one. After about four hours, one thundershower, and numerous thunderstorm near-misses, we had met our quota — something on the order of a thousand snails.

But we weren't done yet. First we had to hike back out in the midst of a massive thunderstorm that pelted us with 5mm hailstones and spattered us with heavy raindrops. After an hour and a half of this, we were soaked to the bone and freezing cold, no matter how energetically we hiked. We drove to the nearest lodge and warmed up with some hot chocolate before heading to the second snail site.

There I discovered just how miserable scientific research can be. The first site was sunny and warm and cheerful. Here the constant drizzle and overcast froze us heart and limb. Here the collecting was less of a game than an arduous process. We gathered two thousand tiny snails in about 45 minutes, but I felt no accomplishment: only a desperate need to warm up.

Fortunately, cars are well-built for that: they have heaters. We asked for nothing more as we drove down towards Jackson Lake and the Teton Range.

Perhaps this is nature's way of apologizing: just as we came down to the lakeshore the clouds drew just far enough back to see the glow of the sunset and the illuminated forms of the Tetons. We ate a dinner of wild rice and salmon, went back to the campsite, and fell asleep.

[To be contiued….]

This last weekend Sarah roped me into going to Yellowstone to collect thousands of snails for her research project. We left Spokane at nine in the morning. It wasn't until seven or so that we arrived in the park. And we still had a full hour at least before we could reach our campsite.

The one nice thing about the lack of large animals in our countryside is that you can drive at eighty miles per hour with impunity. In Yellowstone you will meet with some combination of cougars, bears, elk, moose, and bison. You drive slowly. At night, when there is no light except from your mostly-inadequate headlights, when the roadtwists as if it were trying to buck you off, and when the wild is most active, you can't go very fast.

I would not suggest passing a bison at 40 miles per hour in the pitch-dark of the wilderness. It is a terrifying experience. Bison are enormous, and they move as though they have an alien number of legs.

We arrived at the Fountain Paint Pots Basin and decided to walk out on the boardwalk in the dark. The least mote of light lingered in the heavens. The eerie bubbling of the geothermic springs was the only sound. The pungent steam hung in the air like a ghost. We walked farther into the realm of the gTeysers and finally came out onto an overlook where a geyser not thirty feet away threw ropes of boiling water up towards the stars. We leaned into the wooden rail.

After watching it for a while, we went on around the loop, now moving into the darkness of some trees. We heard a small rustling sound, perhaps that of a jackrabbit, we thought. We stared into the dark, and out of it lumbered a giant shaggy bison. We backed off as quickly and non-threateningly as we could. It walked up to the boardwalk right where we had been standing, crouched, then heaved its bulk onto the structure. It shifted forward and let its front legs drop onto the ground, then followed with the rest of its body. It continued back into the darkness as Sarah and I walked feverishly back to the car. We could see that the bison were out to get us.

But nothing further happened that night. We reached the campsite, set up the tent and paid, then went to sleep.

[To be continued….]