Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
Through the Rockies
We thought about camping in the Rocky Mountains, but it started snowing. So we decided to drive until it was warm and we wouldn't get rained on or snowed on anymore.
Denver
After Rushmore we drove to Denver, which was only six hours. Lots of rain, even more fog for most of the drive. We got into Denver at 930 and stayed on the futon of a couple girls Pat knows from IU. Went out for a late dinner and drinks last night.
Woke up this am and rode bikes to brunch. One of the best brunches I've ever had, at Snooze. Then we rode around the neighbourhood and to a park. Denver is completely awesome. What a place.
Anyway we packed up and now we are headed west on 70. Arches National Park is 6 hours away. We will drive into the mountains and stop to camp if we are so inclined, otherwise will continue to Arches.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Mother Nature: 3: Human Adventurers: 0
We were on our way to Yellowstone, as I just wrote below. And I thought I would check the weather to see what its looking like out there. Wouldn't you know it, there is a winter storm alert. Late spring snowfall looking like 15 inches. Are you kidding me!? Tetons, which we were going to hit up as well, already has 3 inches.
We came equipped for mostly summer weather with some long sleeve T-shirts and light jackets. Not at all equipped for snow. Plans have changed. We aren't going to go to either Yellowstone or Tetons. We are going to go to Rushmore as planned and then turn south.
Headed to Denver now. Will stay there for a bit; day or two. Then we're going to go to Utah and hit up Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park. I checked the weather and they aren't supposed to get any snow there. After that we may drive to Vegas for a day or two and then we will drive up to Salt Lake City so I can catch my flight.
At this point, we are doing whatever. The only plan we have is to be in Salt Lake City on June 5th to catch my flight to Indy. No idea what will happen between now and then.
We came equipped for mostly summer weather with some long sleeve T-shirts and light jackets. Not at all equipped for snow. Plans have changed. We aren't going to go to either Yellowstone or Tetons. We are going to go to Rushmore as planned and then turn south.
Headed to Denver now. Will stay there for a bit; day or two. Then we're going to go to Utah and hit up Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park. I checked the weather and they aren't supposed to get any snow there. After that we may drive to Vegas for a day or two and then we will drive up to Salt Lake City so I can catch my flight.
At this point, we are doing whatever. The only plan we have is to be in Salt Lake City on June 5th to catch my flight to Indy. No idea what will happen between now and then.
Mother Nature: 1 Human Adventurers: 0
As I said below, we showed up at Badlands Nat Park last night at about 10:00 pm. The rain had started slowly just before we got there. It wasn't super bad when we were setting up camp, but it just kept getting progressively worse. The wind was relentless, too. It was blowing hard enough to drive water under our tiny tent's tarp. Actually, it could have been far worse. The tarp was being held down by two tiny stakes that I had driven into the ground. Had one of those slipped, the corner would have popped up and water would have poured into the tent. So through the night I was just praying that didn't happen.
We woke up and it was still raining, and hard. There are little shelters at each campsite, but that would have done us no good, since the angle of the rain was so sharp. So we just said screw it and got breakfast at the lodge. Sell outs.
After breakfast we went out in the car to try to do some hiking or biking. The problem is that it had apparently rained 12 of the last 14 days in the Badlands, even though in general it is a very dry place. Just out luck. The ground was SOAKED. Everything was pure mud. In most places you could hardly walk, let alone mountain bike. Climbing up on the sediment mounds would have been quite literally impossible, because the sides of them had turned into pure mud.
We did some biking in a relatively grassy field, trying to get a closer look at some sheep. Drove around a bit and took pictures after. We were done at noon. We had planned to spend the day at Badlands and go to Yellowstone tomorrow, but that plan has changed. Now we're headed to Mount Rushmore (which is right on the way) and hopefully will be in Yellowstone before dark. So we'll have 3 days in Yellowstone, maybe a fourth if we use our flex-day.
Meanwhile, we're driving west as I type this, and are just getting blasted by more rain and wind that is on its way to Badlands. Good decision bailing. Badlands will be there for at least a few thousand more years, so I can always go back. Spea later, bad weather.
We woke up and it was still raining, and hard. There are little shelters at each campsite, but that would have done us no good, since the angle of the rain was so sharp. So we just said screw it and got breakfast at the lodge. Sell outs.
After breakfast we went out in the car to try to do some hiking or biking. The problem is that it had apparently rained 12 of the last 14 days in the Badlands, even though in general it is a very dry place. Just out luck. The ground was SOAKED. Everything was pure mud. In most places you could hardly walk, let alone mountain bike. Climbing up on the sediment mounds would have been quite literally impossible, because the sides of them had turned into pure mud.
We did some biking in a relatively grassy field, trying to get a closer look at some sheep. Drove around a bit and took pictures after. We were done at noon. We had planned to spend the day at Badlands and go to Yellowstone tomorrow, but that plan has changed. Now we're headed to Mount Rushmore (which is right on the way) and hopefully will be in Yellowstone before dark. So we'll have 3 days in Yellowstone, maybe a fourth if we use our flex-day.
Meanwhile, we're driving west as I type this, and are just getting blasted by more rain and wind that is on its way to Badlands. Good decision bailing. Badlands will be there for at least a few thousand more years, so I can always go back. Spea later, bad weather.
Driving to Badlands
Praying the rain stops so we can start mountain biking. This place is amazing. More pics incoming.
Bad bad lands.
Pat and I show up to Badlands Nat Park last night at about 10 pm. That's when the relentless wind and rain started. It wasn't super bad at first, but really irritating because the rain was blowing at a 45 degree angle and getting everywhere.
We set up camp without too much trouble, lit some charcoal to cook hot dogs, and went to bed. All night it rained relentlessly and much harder. It was at such a sharp angle that it got in through under the tarp. Apparently we got hit by the only SD storm cell in a while. Fun.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Washington University 2
A golf course and park is right by the campus. Also the neighborhood is really nice. Awesome homes where some professors live. Reminds me a lot of Meridian / Pennsylvania near 50th street in Indianapolis. Old, unique homes.
Washington University 1
I had no idea how gorgeous the area around Wash-U is! More pictures to come. Can only post in threes.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
The Gateway to the West
Tonight and tomorrow we will be hosted in St Louis by Chris and Katie, two friends from undergrad. May get a round of golf in tomorrow if weather permits.
Road trip through western USA
As my last hurrah before starting residency, I am headed out on a road trip to some of the western states with a buddy from undergrad, Pat. We are headed to St. Louis tonight (the gateway of the west, appropriately) to stay with a couple friends for a day or two. Then we are headed out to South Dakota (Badlands), Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, Tetons, and I am finishing in Salt Lake City.
At Salt Lake City I will part ways and fly back to Indy for a long drive out to New Haven. I'll start residency a couple days after that. Pat will continue on alone in his car and head to Tahoe, where he'll stay for a few weeks at a family cabin.
Car is loaded up with camping gear. Got good traveling shoes, two mountain bikes, and some fishing poles. Will post pictures as they come.
At Salt Lake City I will part ways and fly back to Indy for a long drive out to New Haven. I'll start residency a couple days after that. Pat will continue on alone in his car and head to Tahoe, where he'll stay for a few weeks at a family cabin.
Car is loaded up with camping gear. Got good traveling shoes, two mountain bikes, and some fishing poles. Will post pictures as they come.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Impressions from East Africa: historical development, communities, and finances
Imagine Tanzania in the year 1900. This is a land that is 50% larger than the state of Texas, supporting a population of maybe 3 million. There was no infrastructure, no centralized government, and really, no history of a centralized government. Contrast that to Qing China, the Manchurian dynasty which ruled China up to modern times. Qing China in 1900 was arguably still one of the great powers of the world even if it was quickly falling apart. Back then, the population of China was several hundreds of millions. There was a history of civilization going back four millennia and certainly a tradition of strong centralized government, despite the fact that China is so geographically large.
One of the things required to create a modern nation state and the appropriate institutions is a sufficient population density in the surrounding area. China apparently hit that necessary population density thousands of years ago, but we should remember that Tanzania was nowhere near that threshold even one hundred years ago. A great book that expounds on this topic is "Guns, Germs, and Steel" for anyone interested. Despite these great contrasts, GDP per person in China and Tanzania 30 years ago was not so different. The take-home point is this: strong economic and political development doesn't just happen by default. It can get hindered by any number of things.
Think back to Tanzania in 1900: sparsely populated, inaccessible, every community for themselves. These communities, like other small communities throughout history, would need to be close knit. Vertical ties may involve patronage from a chief or leader who has surplus resources. That leader can distribute those resources to neighbors and subordinates in order to strengthen ties and bonds between them. Horizontal ties would involve relationships between friends, relatives, and neighbors who are on equal footing. In a small self-sufficient society, it is all about hedging risk. Sometimes one family has a good hunt, or a good harvest. Another family may fail to find an animal, or will have crops which get killed by fungus. Obviously, if neighbors are willing to readily share everything they have, the risk gets hedged throughout the community as a whole and everyone is better off.
In a century, the population of Tanzania has increased by 10-fold or more. It has been thrown into the modern world, and expected to develop sound Western institutions of government. Are these aforementioned cultural survival traits just going to disappear in a single human lifetime? Vertical ties of patronage in 1900 are manifested in the modern world as endemic corruption. Horizontal ties between neighbors manifest as a lack of savings. Let me expound on this last point. When we were in Kenya, one Westerner was telling me that if any person makes money or has a big payday, they immediately go out and spend it on all of their friends at the bar or restaurant. An employee of this person didn't want to keep her money at her house. She was afraid a friend or family would ask for it, and she would be obligated to give it away. These two examples help illustrate a source of serious economic problems. Without savings, there can be no investment. Without investment, there is no productivity growth.
I do appreciate that this dynamic is a testament to the strength of the community in Tanzania and Kenya, which is a wonderful thing. I've figured out that it is a big part of the attraction that Colleen feels to east Africa. Really, it is the same for me. The palpable sense of community is something we just don't have in the West anymore for the most part, and its something one can never perceive from photos of Africa. One has to be there to feel that pulse. Not to denigrate my own culture, because I love the West and I think it is the pinnacle of human existence: but this resource-sharing dynamic in east Africa is more instinctively "normal", in the sense that humans are hard-wired to operate that way. Sharing of resources in small, close-knit communities has been the norm throughout human history.
The communal spirit is what enabled clans and small groups of people to survive, because everyone is hedging their successes and failures on their close relatives. Only with the advent of larger towns and cities using national currencies have people in the West in particular moved away from this. There is still an intense attraction to what they have in east Africa, because I believe our brains were designed to function in small communities like they have (and we used to have) instead of the relatively lonely and unfriendly places in which we live in the West. In fact I've read psychological studies which suggest that 150 people is the ideal community size for Homo sapiens; we can keep tabs on and socially interact with that many people.
The move from small self-sufficient community groups to larger cities and towns in the West occurred over an extended period of hundreds of years. This gradual transition allowed for the culture to adjust slowly. We were able to develop a norm of anti-corruption (even though it still happens everywhere). Since everyone was participating in government we began to think in terms of nation or kingdom instead of tribe or clan. Notice in places where political participation was forbidden by some group or another (Jews in Europe, African Americans in the USA) there remained into modern times sort of "tribal" (us versus them) schisms that we see in the news all the time in east Africa and are oh so shocked by. Tribal tendencies, xenophobia, racism - we are talking about the same thing. Barack Obama, show us your birth certificate!
Anyway. If I had one point to this post, I guess it would be this: many people look at the lack of economic development in Africa and think "what has gone wrong?" My reaction is completely different: How could they be anywhere else? There has been so much change in such a short amount of time in east Africa, there is just no way it could have happened smoothly. In east Africa we've been expecting them to make the sort of adjustments in 100 years that in the West we made over the last 700 and in China they made over the last 4,000. This isn't even adding in the complicated history of colonialism, the effect instability of neighbors has on local development, and the effect of poor government economic policies. I don't even need to think about colonialism to not be surprised by the current political and economic position in east Africa. Yet only 30 years ago China was every bit as poor as Tanzania. 70 years ago Italy still had endemic malaria, a high birth rate, and extremely high infant mortality. I don't know how the current situation could make anyone pessimistic about the future of Africa, because to me it makes perfect sense that Africans are where they are now given from where they have come.
Its all about where they are going, and I think the future is promising. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but its never smart to bet against humanity. Topic for another post.
One of the things required to create a modern nation state and the appropriate institutions is a sufficient population density in the surrounding area. China apparently hit that necessary population density thousands of years ago, but we should remember that Tanzania was nowhere near that threshold even one hundred years ago. A great book that expounds on this topic is "Guns, Germs, and Steel" for anyone interested. Despite these great contrasts, GDP per person in China and Tanzania 30 years ago was not so different. The take-home point is this: strong economic and political development doesn't just happen by default. It can get hindered by any number of things.
Think back to Tanzania in 1900: sparsely populated, inaccessible, every community for themselves. These communities, like other small communities throughout history, would need to be close knit. Vertical ties may involve patronage from a chief or leader who has surplus resources. That leader can distribute those resources to neighbors and subordinates in order to strengthen ties and bonds between them. Horizontal ties would involve relationships between friends, relatives, and neighbors who are on equal footing. In a small self-sufficient society, it is all about hedging risk. Sometimes one family has a good hunt, or a good harvest. Another family may fail to find an animal, or will have crops which get killed by fungus. Obviously, if neighbors are willing to readily share everything they have, the risk gets hedged throughout the community as a whole and everyone is better off.
In a century, the population of Tanzania has increased by 10-fold or more. It has been thrown into the modern world, and expected to develop sound Western institutions of government. Are these aforementioned cultural survival traits just going to disappear in a single human lifetime? Vertical ties of patronage in 1900 are manifested in the modern world as endemic corruption. Horizontal ties between neighbors manifest as a lack of savings. Let me expound on this last point. When we were in Kenya, one Westerner was telling me that if any person makes money or has a big payday, they immediately go out and spend it on all of their friends at the bar or restaurant. An employee of this person didn't want to keep her money at her house. She was afraid a friend or family would ask for it, and she would be obligated to give it away. These two examples help illustrate a source of serious economic problems. Without savings, there can be no investment. Without investment, there is no productivity growth.
I do appreciate that this dynamic is a testament to the strength of the community in Tanzania and Kenya, which is a wonderful thing. I've figured out that it is a big part of the attraction that Colleen feels to east Africa. Really, it is the same for me. The palpable sense of community is something we just don't have in the West anymore for the most part, and its something one can never perceive from photos of Africa. One has to be there to feel that pulse. Not to denigrate my own culture, because I love the West and I think it is the pinnacle of human existence: but this resource-sharing dynamic in east Africa is more instinctively "normal", in the sense that humans are hard-wired to operate that way. Sharing of resources in small, close-knit communities has been the norm throughout human history.
The communal spirit is what enabled clans and small groups of people to survive, because everyone is hedging their successes and failures on their close relatives. Only with the advent of larger towns and cities using national currencies have people in the West in particular moved away from this. There is still an intense attraction to what they have in east Africa, because I believe our brains were designed to function in small communities like they have (and we used to have) instead of the relatively lonely and unfriendly places in which we live in the West. In fact I've read psychological studies which suggest that 150 people is the ideal community size for Homo sapiens; we can keep tabs on and socially interact with that many people.
The move from small self-sufficient community groups to larger cities and towns in the West occurred over an extended period of hundreds of years. This gradual transition allowed for the culture to adjust slowly. We were able to develop a norm of anti-corruption (even though it still happens everywhere). Since everyone was participating in government we began to think in terms of nation or kingdom instead of tribe or clan. Notice in places where political participation was forbidden by some group or another (Jews in Europe, African Americans in the USA) there remained into modern times sort of "tribal" (us versus them) schisms that we see in the news all the time in east Africa and are oh so shocked by. Tribal tendencies, xenophobia, racism - we are talking about the same thing. Barack Obama, show us your birth certificate!
Anyway. If I had one point to this post, I guess it would be this: many people look at the lack of economic development in Africa and think "what has gone wrong?" My reaction is completely different: How could they be anywhere else? There has been so much change in such a short amount of time in east Africa, there is just no way it could have happened smoothly. In east Africa we've been expecting them to make the sort of adjustments in 100 years that in the West we made over the last 700 and in China they made over the last 4,000. This isn't even adding in the complicated history of colonialism, the effect instability of neighbors has on local development, and the effect of poor government economic policies. I don't even need to think about colonialism to not be surprised by the current political and economic position in east Africa. Yet only 30 years ago China was every bit as poor as Tanzania. 70 years ago Italy still had endemic malaria, a high birth rate, and extremely high infant mortality. I don't know how the current situation could make anyone pessimistic about the future of Africa, because to me it makes perfect sense that Africans are where they are now given from where they have come.
Its all about where they are going, and I think the future is promising. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but its never smart to bet against humanity. Topic for another post.
Monday, May 09, 2011
Humans evolved to be persistence hunters
An interesting article about how humans evolved to be runners is found here. Anthropologists have recently started coming to the conclusion that humans relied on persistence hunting in ancient times.
Persistence hunting is just what it sounds like. A human runs down a prey animal on foot over an incredibly far distance in the middle of a hot day, only catching the animal when the prey is too heat exhausted to run any more. Humans can pull this off because we run on two legs, which is more efficient over long distances. We stand upright, and so expose less surface area to the sun. The sun only touches the top of our head and shoulders; in prey animals, the whole back is exposed.
Humans also have no hair, and have sweat glands over our entire body. Both of these things allow us to efficiently cool ourselves even in the hottest weather. In fact, military experiments demonstrated that humans can withstand 400 degree heat for an hour easily IF they have enough water and the air is dry - that is how efficient our sweating is. In the prehistoric human, intelligence allowed the use of containers to carry water on these persistence hunts. Empty ostrich eggs were the Nalgene bottles of 100,000 years ago.
I had read about persistence hunting before going to Africa. When we were driving through Kenya, and I felt the intense heat and appreciated the lack of water, I thought to myself "oh, that makes sense." You see, the Kenyan sun and heat isn't a liability for the humans - its an advantage. The dry hot weather and lack of water exposes the vulnerability of the prey animals: they can't cool themselves in such weather as well as humans can. In a temperate or wet climate, persistence hunting would never work.
Still not convinced that persistence hunting can work? Check out you tube video. Humans still persistence hunt today. Wouldn't that be a fun thing to do. Screw training for a marathon. I'm going to train for a persistence hunt.
Sunday, May 08, 2011
Mount Meru
Three photos of Mount Meru, which is a large mountain located by Said's house. One of the photos was from many miles away, taken on the way back from safari.
Africa rehash: Arusha market
One of these I think I have shown before, but this was an open air market in Arusha. The produce was amazing!
Saturday, May 07, 2011
Rwandan Genocide Tribunal
This is a low quality picture, but I thought it was interesting. This is the international tribunal for the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. It is located in Arusha, Tanzania.
Friday, May 06, 2011
Africa rehash: pictures of US Embassy monument in Nairobi
The embassy was bombed by terrorists in the late 90's. We were in Kenya when the execution of Bin Laden was announced, and the country was on fairly high alert. There was concern of retaliatory measures being carried out. Even at a Wednesday morning church service, the pastor reminded the people in attendance that people should be vigilant. Given Kenya's history and proximity to Al Qaeda safe havens like Somalia, I don't think the concern was unreasonable.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)