Pursuing praxis

The foregoing logistics aside, my trip has started off quite badly, actually. When I unpacked my microscribe, I noticed one of the joints sounded a bit crunchy (nnnnnnnnot good), and two parts of the accuracy tests it failed, one horribly so (on the wrist joint). I spent all weekend fiddling with calibration blocks, power supply and adapter configurations, re-reading the manual, you name it, trying to characterize how it was off and if I’d be able to apply a correction factor to my data afterwards. No such luck. It’s off by a good 10% on each measurement, and that’s regardless of size. Up from about <0.2% error a couple weeks ago. You name it, I probably tried it. No go. The MS is belly-up for my purposes. Which sucks, cuz I came to digitize stuff.

 

It obviously got damaged in transport, and what I think happened was security people opened up the case to have a look, then didn’t put it back together properly, and the joints traveled in a bad position and got tweaked with the rough and tumble (despite the Fragile tag and my request to have my bag plastered in Fragile stickers, which they didn’t do.) I also think they were rough or careless, because they ripped off about a quarter of the lining in the bag, and one of my calibration blocks was out of its spot in the foam. Of course, the airline absolves itself of responsibility for baggage (unless they completely lose it, which now I wish they had), especially for electronic and fragile items. I spent the weekend feeling extremely incompetent and a waste of good air, but hammered out a string of options and strategies for making the most of my time here, and for the next 4 months too.

 

Long story short, I’m sending the MS back to California for diagnostics and (hopefully) fixing, at which point they’ll charge me an arm and a leg and send it back to me (if it’s repairable at all). I can probably get it back in a month, which is just enough time for them to send it to the museum in Kenya, where I’ll meet it when I get there on March 1^st. Then, I should have a functional MS for the bulk of my collections work there and in the museums in South Africa in May. The collections here are good, but small compared to the other places, and I’ve only got a shed of springbuck skulls to get through in Namibia, as it’s mostly field and observation work out there. I’ll gather qualitative data on specimens here, as well as some old fashioned linear measurements with the trusty old ruler and string (and calipers, though using a 12 inch ruler I can get to within 2-3mm on larger measurements, and 1mm on smaller ones with just my eyeballs, and the ruler is often faster), as well as photograph some of the more important ones, like juveniles, on which I can hopefully do 2D morphometrics later on (the MS lets me do 3D morphometrics). If you haven’t heard me yabber on at length about my work yet (or in a while): morphometrics is the study of shape. It captures all the same data as linear measurements (if you do it right), but also captures the location of all the end-points relative to each other, so you can study shape and not just single linear measurements. It’s kind of a glorified connect-the-dots. Yeah, that’s what I’m getting a PhD doing: playing connect-the-dots. Dear lord. I won’t be telling the insurance people that or they’ll never take me seriously.

 

The excellent news came in tonight: I talked to KP, explained what happened and what my strategy was, and asked if he had any suggestions for getting reimbursed for this prohibitive but unexpected research expense. In about as many words, he said have them send the bill to me, I’ll pay for it out of my research funds because you really need to have this fixed, and your plan of action for this and the intervening time sounds great, carry on, give my best to James. Whew! It’s funny how not being out a thousand bucks, and not having your advisor think you’re a useless idiot, will really put the spring back in your step.

 

Now, I just have to find a better camera, cuz mine totally sucks. To my knowledge, it has taken one good picture out of (now) hundreds. For the life of me I cannot get it to alter the shutter speed or exposure time. I think I’ve tried every combination of buttons; it is permanently stuck on 1/16^th s shutter speed and 1/20^th s exposure time. The good pic had 1/64 and 1/81. I don’t know what happened. But it’s useless, and I need to avoid image distortion in addition to poor quality if I’m to document specimens and do morphometrics, so tomorrow I’m going camera shopping in Bloem. Hopefully they have something, and hopefully tomorrow morning the South African rand takes a nose dive and I can get more buying power with my struggling US dollars (man I wish they were in pounds! It’s over $2/lb right now). Yet another item I should have been more prepared on, and thought ahead for, a good camera for back-up 2D morphometrics, although 2D is such a poor substitute for 3D in bovids, it’s perhaps a lost cause. It’d be different if I was studying piranhas or blades of grass or sand dollars or fly wings or something existing mainly in two dimensions. Curly bovid horns just don’t fit the bill very well, and like hell I’m surrendering to the world of tooth-specialization and forget what the dorsal surface of my critters looks like. I will not spend all my research time labeling, counting and measuring tooth cusps. I’d rather splice a gene into bacteria, and there’s a reason I’m no longer doing that.

 

So, tomorrow I make my first trip into town and, re-remember how to drive a stick, but on the other side of the car and the other side of the road. Good thing bad driving is the norm here; I’ll be going grandma-slow and checking every direction three times. And, given the habitual nature of driving, I’ll be going to bed now so that I don’t make tired, automatic US-driving decisions and crunch the tin can of a car they’re lending me. I don’t need whiplash or more paperwork at this point in my trip. To say the least.

The many stand alone bungalows (they call them chalets) all have a twin bed, a couch, kitchenette, several windows, full bathroom, and electricity etc. The door locks with a skeleton key, and the shower pipes are all exposed, but it works. All the buildings (save the research lab/shed) are in tan-orangey mud style, with red roofs. It’s very striking with the yellow-green grass, red and brown dirt, bright blue sky, and gray-green eucalyptus – the trees looked oddly familiar before I found out they are Australian. There’s even some Mexican trees around, and of course maize is originally American, and they’ve had to specifically plant native African plants, including acacia. I don’t know my African plants at all, but there’s a frighteningly thorny giant bush down by the creek, so maybe that’s the acacia. The thorns are widely spaced, true enough, but they’re about an inch and a half long, and it’s a dense looking bush. Personally, I’m glad plants don’t have legs. Ever wondered why plants haven’t evolved locomotory apparati, apart from passive means of dispersal? You’d think if echinoderms can manage a water vascular system, some plant would figure out how to manage xylem and phloem and the cell walls in order to move. I mean, it could be like one of those solar-powered cars; not exactly awe-inspiring, but it gets you from here to there, when the sun’s out.

 

Anyway, it’s mostly farmland around here, and probably some ranch land too. The birds are obnoxious in the morning, and in my eaves at night, and I wake up to rooster calls. They’re lovely, actually, and my only major gripe with the place is the bugs. I’ve been on the bug warpath the last two nights, fending off the ants and beetles and spiders and god knows what the other things are. My first afternoon here (Friday), a B-52 beetle motored in through the open window, loud, low and heavy. He plopped down behind my kitchen table and started the water-beetle GI-crawl in no particular direction. I got out my birding ‘noculars and studied him from across the room. Then, using an upside-down juice glass as a magnifying glass, I got a closer look at him. Black, with a yellow-green V down the back, and long, terrestrially useless hind legs that he had to drag around. I chucked him out the front door and he hit the air flying.

 

But really, he was the best of the worst to come. The ants remind me of summers in Las Vegas. There are little sand-trap holes everywhere, and little mounds spring up a day after the ground is raked. There are red ones and black ones, teeny-tiny ones and huge ones with heads like portable vice-clamps. Some move slowly and methodically, others zoom about with their butts in the air. All of them are body-snatchers. If I squash a bug and leave it on the floor, probably within 15 minutes the micro-ants will have found it and started working on eating, dismembering, and carting it off. That is, if the medium and big sized ants don’t wreck their plans. Thus ensues a little squabble that spirals into a call to arms and a mobilization of troops, all while trying to make off with the dead body. This is in addition to the (small) roach(es) in my kitchen, the giant black wasps that elect to lazily inspect a room and won’t be guided away, the beetles on little beetle-missions, the voracious colonizing spiders endemic to my bathroom (including the cute brown one behind my mirror, that inevitably I forget about till I’m two inches away without my glasses, then he comes into focus), the strange double-bodied winged things that freak me out and stink when squashed, the 40 decibel crickets, the occasional metallic blue-green fly, a few midges, one mosquito to date, and at least a dozen kinds of moths.

 

But tonight was the best. I was greeted by a giant dragonfly when I returned to my room around 7:30. I had my windows shut all day, so how he got in I have no idea. I tried to convince myself he was worth having around, since he was enthusiastically eating bugs gathering at my kitchen light, but he was almost the size of a hummingbird, and my adrenaline skyrocketed every time he started flying, because he was huge, and fast, and ran into things with surprising speed and force and repetition, and dive bombed me a couple times (though at his rate, it might be expected by purely Brownian motion). I finally got him with a good dose of bug spray (after working up the courage for several minutes to do it, and after about a half hour of circling each other in my chalet [diameter maybe 18 feet]). He flopped into my dish drainer and I emptied probably a fifth of my can of spray on him. He was still flailing and buzzing about amidst the dishes, and I ended up squishing him between two dinner plates and finishing him off with the produce knife. Pity. He was beautiful, with dalmation spotted wings and a green and black striped body, and he ate lots of bugs. But man. Talk about nerve-racking. I just can’t live with bugs, and it’s a total toss-up as to which are worse – a giant single roommate, or a horde of tiny ones. And now I have to wash all my dishes again, too.

 

Oh, and I saw two cows today too. A red one and a black and white one, replete with their cute little horns, and attendant cattle egrets. They munched the tall grass under the eucalyptus, next to the cat-tail reeded creek out back of the research shed, with crop fields on the hills beyond. Ah, live bovids – so novel and refreshing a sight!

Florisbad is beautiful. Check it out on Google Earth. I’m about a three hour drive from the country of Lesotho (lots of mountains), in the Free State, with another state between here and Zimbabwe. Drove past lots of fields of maize, a nature reserve (dunno if I’ll have the chance to check it out), turned left at a field of sunflowers down a washboard gravel road, and arrived at the Florisbad Quaternary Research Center. We drove through the metal gate in the tan-orange mud/brick wall, right onto the lawn, and parked in front of the office. It’s very well maintained, though the buildings are old. It’s a bit dry (even though it’s the rainy season), so the well-groomed lawns are a bit crunchy, but everything is raked and watered and swept. Florisbad is a natural spring site, right on the property, and it used to be a spa where people would come for mineral baths. So the buildings probably date to the 1950s or earlier, and I wouldn’t be surprised if everything but the padlocked research shed is locked with skeleton keys like the one to my room.

 

There are a couple bath houses, a big pool (which looks a bit icky), the main house (which appears to be mainly empty except for a couple rooms used as museum displays). There are a few people here for the water, and a small collection of grounds staff and researchers. Mainly it’s pretty quiet. I’m doing quite well for it, actually. So few distractions, I actually get some work done and work on being organized. The head of research and my contact, James Brink, is a wonderful person. Very helpful, very interested in my work, extremely knowledgeable about the regional paleoecology and evolution, and evidently extremely busy, but very sincere and kind nonetheless.

 

Izak, one of the researchers, picked me up at the airport, and he’s here working every day. There’s an undergraduate working with James, and he’s been nice and helpful too. An assistant named Pete, who’s of unknown old age and could star in a famine movie, works with the undergrad (who doesn’t look so young either, but much healthier). They tend to move in packs of three and spend a lot of time bent over a desk and using the telephone, chattering in their language (Afrikaans? I don’t know). The grounds manager Dumaa has been by a couple times to check in on me, and James said Dumaa will lend me a bakkie (a little pickup truck) if I need to go to town. My cell phone works just fine, though a bit fuzzy at times, but there’s no internet. But I did discover that in-coming texts and phone calls are free for me (if you feel like footing the bill for an international call :o). I don’t think Dumaa even knew the word internet. So, I’m writing this ahead of time, and will make a trip into Bloem tomorrow for internet, shopping, food, and mail. Mmmm ice cream and fresh meat….

On board, I had to ask the guy next to me how to turn off my cellphone. I think I’ve touched a Nokia twice before in my life. Who’da thunk to mash down on the button on the top? I felt a little incompetent and dilettante-ish for that, but what the hell. We got drinks, snacks, and lunch all during the 1hr-10min flight, which means the stewardess basically started throwing goodies at us as soon as was feasible. And, wonder of wonders, I saw her open the cockpit door and serve drinks to the pilots. I saw daylight out the front of the plane! It really shocked me and excited me, seeing all those controls and the side of the uniformed, hat-wearing pilot, and the windows which are useless for seeing the ground. Man, how I’ve adapted to new standards after 9/11. Pity that seeing a cockpit is such a thrill these days.

 

Bloemfontein (that’s “bloom’-fon-taine”) is out in a very rural part of central ZA, southwest of Joburg, in the Free State. Lots of green farmland, and orange-red polygons of tilled land, spotted with farmhouses squeezed in the corners of rectilinear plots. Faintly rolling hills, no mountains in sight, bright azure blue sky and the kind of flat-bottomed fluffy clouds that despite their number don’t really diminish the sunlight.

 

Touching down in Bloem, I was delighted to see it so tiny – really, just a more recently built version of the airport at home, with two gates: “In” and “Out”, with no security checkpoint to walk through, just a door, and greeted by a crowd of people mashed between the bucket seats and the car rental counters, with the baggage claim in the room adjoining, the carousel rivaling some of the larger merry-go-rounds I’ve seen.

 

Got a ring from James, saying my ride would be there shortly. I asked for a description of Izak, and he said, “Um….. kinda tallish chap?” I asked, “20?.. 60?” “Mid-thirties I guess.” I was too chicken to ask if Izak was black or white. So, I got my bags, and chilled out, till an airport lady and a man approached me, and from about two feet away started talking to each other and looking at me. I asked if there was a problem, and she said yes, and finally asked my name, at which point I realized that must have been Izak, and all was ok. Smiles, hand shakes, and they grab my luggage and head out for the truck. I was a little surprised this skirted, scarfed, primped, heeled woman wanted to carry my luggage, and my offers to get it went dismissed. They chatted at each other in another language, and at the truck she got Izak’s number, then stuck out her hand for a tip with a demanding know-it-all smile. Hahaha. I liked her a lot, and Izak is very sweet and agreeable.

 

Izak is a researcher at the Museum and Florisbad, something about excavations, I want to say archaeological ones. Neither of us were terribly extroverted, so it was mainly a quiet comfortable drive. The truck is an old white tin-can Nissan with a shell, like a shinier version of Dad’s old Datsun but with less padding. I’m serious. We passed all kinds of people trying to hitch a ride, and of course they drive on the wrong side of the truck and of the road. We headed to a grocery store, where I picked up (hopefully) 3 weeks of food and much of the stuff I had to leave behind. Izak was rather worried about my stuff, and put my luggage from the bed to the cab and locked it, then almost left the hatch shell wide open, lol. After about 5 minutes in the grocery store, I thankfully convinced him that he needn’t wait on me and push my cart for me, and I’d meet him after the checkout. Frustratingly, it took me way longer to get what I needed than expected, especially since the brands were all foreign to me, and I had a good idea of what I wanted. I gave up on a couple things which I still need, and hopefully can get by without.

 

 

The in-flight map showed pretty much a straight shot to Joburg, no detouring for… whatever. The alien brail in Libya? (Found it on Google Earth, funny stuff). Saw the sun rise in the east just in front of the wing (nuts that I had to sit over the wing on both flights) – clear, orange-yellow, and smallish, but highly positive. Did I kid myself into thinking it looked like an African sunrise? It must have been over Zimbabwe or somesuch, a bit before touching down at 6:30am.

 

Jo’burg was uneventful. The airport is quite new looking, and spacious. Picked up my phone no problem, dodged the offers for taxi rides to the domestic terminal (which is a five minute walk) from all the guys wearing orange. (Why orange? I think all the construction guys wore orange jumpsuits or coveralls also). I noticed that asking questions didn’t always get me correct answers, and people were quite content to give me what turned out to be blatantly wrong answers. I mean “Bloemfontein” and “domestic terminal” can in no way be mistaken for “international departures”. But there you have it.

 

I made my way down, got my checked bags weighed (23kg! But how did I lose 0.6kg? They must have rounded down from 23.4kg), no questions about my hand luggage. The SAA ticket guy did give me a scare, when I showed him my confirmation page on my PDA, and he said “Your flight was on Jan. 3^rd. The next isn’t till Feb. 11^th.” What!?! I had to scroll down and show him my flight reservation time (not the date I purchased the ticket), at which point he said I wasn’t in their system, then I pointed out the departure time (I was 2-3 flights early), then he processed my ticket without further care or aggravation on my part. I asked about changing my return ticket (since I no longer need it) and he pointed behind him. I found a counter for another airline, and they promptly pointed me in the opposite direction for the SAA counter. Sigh.

 

The dude at the security checkpoint eyeballed my backpack (though not my two other pieces of hand luggage) and asked what was in it. I said books and he waved me through. Must not have been weight concerns, since books have a density second only to gold and lead.

 

Went downstairs for the SAA departures, the area strongly reminding me of the United Coach (bus) departure area in O’Hare airport, back in the day of taking the bus back to school from O’Hare a few times a year. About 10 min before take-off, they collected tickets, funneled us on a bus, drove us to the plane on the tarmac. I dropped off my backpack (with laptop and everything but my purse wedged inside) at the nose of the plane. They didn’t care that I didn’t have a bagtag on it! I insisted. They insisted. I asked if I’d get my bag back. That was what deprived me of my laptop from Ottawa to SFO returning from the SVP conference in October. No tag, wrong tag, security concern, FAA policy, yadda yadda yadda, tough luck sweetheart, we’ll give you some old dot-matrix paper to write on during the flight. Here, they were like – you know which bag is yours, just pick it up when you get off the plane. Sweet!

 

The terrain around Joburg was surprisingly … zoned. All the residential areas were neatly (though not linearly) clustered, with red roofs and paved streets, perhaps like Florida or Vegas at home. But they abutted completely un-developed land (pastureland?), and the main roads were all buffered with extremely wide swaths of grass, making the area look very park-like. I can only imagine that people are prevented from developing these areas, given the amount of construction I saw, and knowing that there are a lot of ambitious, poor, get-ahead types in Joburg, who from the sounds of it, will do almost anything to improve their lot (often, it sounds, at the expense of others, which apparently contributes to the violent reputation of Joburg).

 

I kept getting the impression that the ZA government models itself strongly after the socialist European countries, and the concept of individual rights is completely alien, but not “women’s rights” “minority” or “ethnic rights” “consumer rights” “human rights” a la the UN, etc. And then the newspaper columnists ogle at the paradoxes of expected vs. realized outcomes of governmental policies. One article said all the expected benefits of globalization have yet to materialize, despite 15 solid years of globalization, 25 if you go back to the 70’s. I noticed a lot of focus, in the newspaper articles, about achieving ends (and the lack of achieved ends) without any examination of the means. Basically, rampant disregard or ignorance of the law of cause and effect. They desire all kinds of effects, but fail to inquire what genuinely and robustly causes them at the most basic level, and note only rough correlations between things, i.e. X is typically associated with Y, and since we want Y, let’s try to preserve or promote X. Yet X may be not a lineal cause of Y, but a side-consequence of the process actually producing Y, which can only be known if one pauses to genuinely investigate the causes of Y, to ask what it is and where it comes from, without a preconceived notion of what the answer must be. So, they conclude wrongly, act wrongly, and wonder why they don’t get what they’re after. A few pot-shots at the US and the Dollar help soothe the disappointment, it seems.

 

Getting there was the easy part. Packing turned out to be a greater challenge than I had imagined. I found out a little over 12 hours before departure that I could take (free of charge) about *half* as much stuff as I had thought I could take – 51 lbs for all my checked luggage combined. A thousand thanks to Steve for finding this out, otherwise I’d have been up a creek in baggage fees – a good $300-400 for 50lbs of stuff. And mailing it? Yeah, try $800-1300. It’s almost cheaper to buy a plane ticket and import a friend as well!

And before you scoff, remember my microscribe and related stuff weighs over 20lbs (not counting my laptop, which I took on the plane with me, and weighs a good 13lbs with its case and such), and it’s a 4.5 month trip in hot weather, wet weather, dry weather, cities, the country, the bush, meeting museum officials and asking for permits, grubbing about the collections, vacationing, swimming, going to tea, and going camping in order to collect poop samples. And that’s just clothing. I’ve got one travel guide per country, ONE field/bovid guide (perish the thought), two class books (instead of four, none of which are available digitally, and photocopies weigh more than the books; trust me, I tried), 4 months of scheduled prophylactic and what-if medication… and then find out I’ve got less than 30 lbs (including the bag) with which to make it happen? And what about a minor amount of duplication, in case one of my bags gets lost? At 51lbs, if they lost either of my bags I’d have been 100% screwed. That’s a really crappy gamble they force you to take.

But I did it. 23.6kg at the airport, with 23 allowed, and they didn’t bat an eye. Of course, my “one carry-on 13 pounds max!!!” weighed closer to 25 or 30 pounds, but so long as it *looked* light I didn’t figure they’d stop me. And they didn’t. But at Heathrow I approached the “connecting international departures” line and the guy looked at me and said “one bag.” I pointed to my backpack. He pointed to my purse, which was obviously doubling as a second carry-on. 15 minutes later, I came back with one bag. I fit a laptop (plus case) four books, two folders of papers, binoculars, my purse, all the contents of my purse, plus power-adapter supplies in my one blue (non-field) backpack. Of course, I was wearing four shirts, a hat, field boots, and two pairs of sunglasses, but what the hell, I made it past him without shoving books down the back of my pants (always have a Plan B). Ten feet later I unpacked the thing to go through security, promptly re-modularized my carry-ons, and was on my way. What a waste of time and effort.

Flying into Heathrow was fun. I guess there was really bad weather, Amsterdam calling it the worst storm in years if not decades (so I heard). I thought I heard the co-pilot say 50mph winds at the runway, and that he wasn’t man enough to bring us in, so the captain would be landing us today. On the decent to the runway, maybe a couple hundred feet up, we pulled up somewhat abruptly and banked to the left in what immediately struck me as a wussy touch-and-go. The co-pilot said something about there being squally winds and hangars in the way. We circled back around, much to the dismay of the motion-sick fellow in the seat ahead of me, who barfed several times on each decent. In all my years of flying, I think that’s the first time I’ve seen someone barf on a plane. The landing was quite smooth, and honestly the ride wasn’t very bumpy at all. I couldn’t even feel buffeting from the wind. Disembarking the plane and heading down one of the windowed corridors of Heathrow, I turned back to look at the Virgin Atlantic 747 with all it’s awesomeness and amenities and saw….. a giant Tinker Belle on the nose. Yes, that’s right, I flew a fairy plane from San Francisco to London. And their in-flight goodies are in neon green. What are they thinking?!?

Funny also how you can talk yourself into thinking that the sound of someone barfing “must have been” a really big sneeze or something. Till the stench of it drifts back to you. Such a strange sound though. I spent a bit of time thinking exactly where the sound comes from. Vocal cords? But it’s a gastro-esophageal action. Simple vibration from the forcing of liquid against the rings of the trachea? But then why do I sound awful after barfing? All groggy and stuff. I’m now thinking it must be the vocal cords, from the stomach muscles contracting so strongly that the diaphragm gets pushed up and forces air out of the lungs, and against the vocal cords. Not completely sure though. Where’s the air go?

7 hours of layover in Heathrow went quite fast. Got in around… 10 in the morning? Something like that. Left around 5:30pm for Joburg. Two red-eyes, as it were. I got little done on the plane. Mostly I slept and ate. 10 hours and 9 hours really aren’t that long, that way. Beats the 15 to Sydney which turned into 20 because of bad weather. Dude, that was almost 7 years ago.

Wow….

I’m more than 3/4 the way there now, parked at a crappy internet cafe in the Jo’burg airport, siphoning wattage and longing for a shower. Oh yeah, and I found out last minute that I was allowed HALF the luggage I thought I could take.* And it’s not like I was trying to take a barbie-doll micropooch AND the kitchen sink. So now my song is "23kg checked luggage, the rest on your person." That amounts to 51 lbs in cargo, 20+ of which are devoted to my research equipment. That’s right - 30 pounds including suitcase and sleeping bag for 4.5 months of stuff to do. Then I get to Heathrow and they look at my backpack, laptop case, and purse and say "One bag." Guess what - I did it. Wearing four shirts, a hat and two pairs of glasses, but I got ALL of it inside my one backpack. After security I promptly re-modularized it all so I could do work on the plane. And by "do work" I mean hold up the side of the plain and catch up on REMs. 19 hours on two flights goes mighty fast that way. Now I’m just ridiculously behind in paperwork - but hey, no fun in being completely on the ball, eh? uh…… right. I have a hell of a lot of work on skulls to do before I even touch one - tonight. Possibly.

 *I should note here that the option of just taking extra anyway turned out to be … not feasible. $300-400 surcharge to pack an extra 50lbs of gear (no sweat for me), and (get this) $800-1300 to mail it to myself somewhere! It’s cheaper to plant someone’s ass in a seat and have them fly your luggage to you. Christ. What a mess. So… I’ll be buying some essentials over here. Like, quite a few.

Quite possibly the coolest email I have been the subject of (to my knowledge). From a labmate, to all my other labmates:

Hi folks,

On Wednesday, Katie is off for a four-month slog through the
malaria-ridden, leech-infested overgrown stinking hellish man-eating
jungles of the Dark Continent. In the name of Science, bitches. In honor
of her awesome, probably lethal sacrifice, why don’t we go for a
farewell lunch Tuesday? No crying, though. If, by some freak of nature,
Katie survives her descent into savagery, madness, and probable
cannibalism, you’ll feel like a real wimp later.

In any given situation, remember to ask yourself, "What would Leonidas,
king of Sparta, do?" Shed some cowardly tears for his doomed labmate, or
cut out his own quadriceps muscle with nail clippers and smoke it into a
nutritious jerky to send along as emergency rations? I think the answer
is obvious.

—

I’m off tomorrow. Two days of travel just to get to my first destination. Although I could catnap with my leather field hat over my eyes a la Dr. Jones, or drink uber-cool martinis a la Mr. Bond, or read up on ancient Greece while calibrating my myriad gadgets a la one Croft, probably I’ll string myself out on backlogged paperwork in an effort to ignore the periodic adrenaline-spiked flashes of OhMyGodness as they wash over my body and grip my stomach with cold, steely fingers.

Hilariously to me, I day-dreamt about doing this sort of thing (biology research on big mammals in Africa) over a decade ago, as my quasi-consciousness mixed scenes from The Lion King with my recent re-discovery of Indiana Jones and my reading of Cry of the Kalahari written by two PhD students who studied lions and hyenas for several years in the ’70s. And here I am, actually doing it.

(Really?) Really.

Holy shit. 

26 - an auspicious year. For some reason, this age has always stood in my mind as a landmark, an age at which big important things would happen (for me, to me, by me), either materially, mentally, experientially, whatever. 25 was the I-have-arrived year of numerical beauty (5^2 - c’mon, it’s beautiful in so many ways), but 26 is the year for doing stuff, setting the stage for the next couple decades. I don’t know why I always thought that, and I certainly didn’t plan my trip to square with this irrational impression - but there you have it.  

Here I go.

An overview of what’s to come, starting next Wednesday:

Travel: CA to Heathrow to Johannesburg to Bloemfontein to Florisbad 

Stop 1: Florisbad, South Africa. Collections/museum work, maybe some field observation. 3 weeks.

Stop 2: Etosha National Park, Namibia. Assist with field work. Shed full of springbok skulls. 3 weeks

Stop 3a: Nairobi, Kenya. National Museums of Kenya. Bones bones bones. 4-5 weeks.

Stop 3b: Laikipia District, Kenya. Some form of bovid-watching. 1-2 weeks.

Stop 4: Cairo, Egypt. Fun. 2 weeks.

Stop 5: Pretoria and Cape Town, South Africa. More museums. 4 weeks.

Travel: Johannesburg to Heathrow to CA.

Stop 6: My bed. Sleep. Duration undefined. 

 

Not recent thoughts, but recently re-thought:

The universe is not infinite.

No thing is infinite.

Infinity is an idea abstracted from finite things.

Infinity is an idea that acts like an equation on whatever number you’re thinking of: infinity > whatever you are thinking of.

It does not mean "bigger than anything you can think of".  Because: how would you know that?

Mathematics is an epistemological tool, not an independent statement about the nature of reality.

"Five" does not exist apart from the concept of "five". Only things numbering five, as defined (by humans) by the rules of counting, exist.  

Fractions also don’t exist "out there." Only stuff exists out there, and fractions are just relationships between stuff previously designated as units (i.e. single objects, "1") or multiples thereof (i.e. whole numbers). The relations exist, and exist in certain ways, but the perception of those relations, and the conceptualization of them by means of numbers which results in quantification, is just that - conceptual, not physical.

Fractions are one step more abstract than whole numbers.  

Irrational numbers, such as square-root of negative one, also do not exist apart from the idea of such. They represent relations between concepts, and do useful cognitive work (i.e. in equations and calculations), but do not refer to anything in reality.

In order to work, and be of value, irrational numbers rely on concepts accurately derived from reality. 

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Entropy is an observation about combinatorics and probability. It is not, by itself, any kind of driver of change. It’s a summary of observed change. It’s not a "thing" itself, but a pattern among things that exist, as perceived by a pattern-identifying consciousness such as ours.

Theories about the origins of the universe which state that at some point all matter was identical, cannot possibly be right.

To the extent that the Big Bang Theory(s) say such things, they are wrong.  

Because: heterogeneity cannot arise from complete homogeneity. There would be no mechanism for diversification in the identities of stuff (particles, atoms, elements, stars, organic compounds, life, organisms, etc.)

The observation of increasing diversity of "stuff" in the universe over time shows that the law of entropy is far from all-powerful.

In fact, it shows the drive towards order (by means of matter acting in accordance with its identity) is a stronger long-term force.

"Order" is simply the result of repeated application of the laws of identity and causality.

Probabilistically, a combination of things that look "ordered" or "patterned" are no more exceptional than all other unique combinations of things. Drawing four aces out of the deck is as existentially significant as drawing a four of clubs, seven of diamonds, jack of spades, and two of hearts.

Metaphysically, two different combinations of things must necessarily have different properties, at some level, no matter how insignificant or unexciting to the human mind or human priorities.

Properties are simply the manifestation of identity.

Because things act in accordance with their identity, it is not surprising that things with different identities act differently.

Thus, a combination of "ordered" or "patterned" stuff, with an identity that results in actions and interactions significantly different from  stuff that is "unordered" or "unpatterned" is metaphysically expected. 

This includes stuff whose properties result in increased retention or production of similar stuff - that is, stuff which is stable and promotes propagation of stuff like it.

Apply this scenario iteratively, and do the math, and the increasing heterogeneity, order and complexity of both the universe and living systems are no surprise.

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The above is subject to editing and revision, though not without good reason. I think the bulk, or at minimum the gist, is correct. Targeted, constrained, considered comments appreciated, but I’m not about to re-justify the basics at length.

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