Bascomb's Regrets

(I can never remember: did I tutor Discreet Math in college? Is it for not being discrete that I always get into trouble?)

I’m not a map-and-compass guy. Here’s me, hiking: I get to a place where you have to take the trail to the right or the trail to the left. I open up the map. I rotate the map until it lines up with the trail on the ground under the map. I put the map on the ground. I walk around the map and bend down to look and see which trail goes to what I have circled on my map as my destination. And that’s the trail I take. Painful. And what do I use a compass for? I use it to make sure I don’t walk in circles when I stop paying attention and walk off the trail.

For me, hiking would be easier if standard topo maps didn’t exist. What I need is a list of edges and vertices. The vertices are the points of interest: ‘Bitchin lake for swimmin’, ‘High peak with no skeeters’, ‘Water fer drinkin’, ‘Where you left the car’ (, ‘The other parking lot where you did not leave the car’)–stuff like that. The edges connect the vertices: ‘Steep hike in the sun: 1.7 mi ‘, ‘Rocky trail but nice views: 3 mi’–that sort of thing. Let’s call this a ‘discrete’ hiking map, because it just lists the vertices and shows the edges that connect them. Vertices are represented by pictures. And the trail markers (those posts in the ground on the actual trail) should just indicate which way to the next vertex (which is depicted on your map).

Why doesn’t the Park Service provide us with ‘discrete’ trail maps?

Desolation Wilderness pics

It happened more frequently to me as a kid, but still sometimes now: I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, wondering what woke me up. Then some part of my auditory memory comes online and plays back the sound that woke me up, and I process the sound consciously: something large fell on the floor in the kitchen. I get up to see and Dipsea has knocked something off the counter onto the floor. Again, this is pretty common for me. But something different happened to me this last backpacking trip, a bit of a twist: I went to sleep on the bank of the Rubicon River in Desolation Wilderness (near Lake Tahoe, CA), near the rapids, so it was loud. I went to sleep quickly but awoke with a start in the middle of the night:  the sound of the rapids had disappared. And for maybe 3 seconds or so after waking up, I still couldn’t hear them. Then I *listened* for them, to see if maybe they were just quieter, and I could hear them again. What happened? Had one part of my brain filtered out the sound (in order to listen for other, more irregular sounds)–and then another part of my brain noticed that the sound of the river was missing?

While hiking I noticed that, if I hum or sing or tap a rhythm, I can pretty much shut out the entire landscape as I pass through it (which is something you want to do for some stretches of Desolation Wilderness). When I walk long distances I don’t fight the earworms: they come and–if they’re walkable–they stay. The bass line / bass solo for ‘Le Freak’ (c’est chic) is a great example of an earworm I can hike on for hours. ‘76 Trombones’ works for me, too–as a solo hiker. ‘Road Runner’ cartoon theme song not good. But this trip: wow, I never thought I would get ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ stuck in my head. I was first exposed to Queen Night at the Opera as a nine-year-old: I liked the song ‘Killer Queen’ so well that I memorized it. But ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’–that was too complex and strange and, well, really, too dark a subject for a nine-year-old. So as a kid I would skip the track, and as a result only heard the song occasionally. As an adult, I remember snippets of it (and of course Wayne’s World) but had never tried to assemble the whole production from memory. For some reason, on this hike, I missed Camper Flat, China Flat, and was all the way over Mosquito Pass before I realized what happened: 6 miles and two hours later, I could sing the whole thing all the way through (complete with guitar solos). The biggest challenge for me was: what comes after ‘Thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening’: was it ‘Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, Figaro’? Or was it ‘Mamma mia, Mamma mia, Mamma mia, let me go’?

How do you explain Freddie Mercury’s writing this song? Some say he was working on four songs simultaneously and got writer’s block when he started trying to write the choruses: so he just rounded up all the disparate verses into a single song. Others say that he was drunk and accepted a bet from a friend: that no song with the structure A-B-C-D-A could ever make it to the top of the UK pop chart.

And yes, I checked: Bohemian Rhapsody only costs $.99 on iTunes (although it should really be $3.97).

Pics from the hike.

In Hungary, I had limited vocabulary. Two words I learned to identify early are the words for ‘no’ and ‘nada’. I became pretty sensitive to the fact that people responding to my questions or requests often used these words in their responses. And I secretly–cynically–suspected that listeners were narrowly interpreting my questions so that they wouldn’t have to help me. I can imagine one typical conversation (translated from the Hungarian):

Me (holding up my water bottle): I would like a wagon very much.

He: No, I’m sorry–I don’t have a wagon. A wagon?

Me (gesturing again with the water bottle): Wagon. Please?

He: I’m sorry; I don’t understand.

I found that, in cases where a listener didn’t understand my broken Hungarian, if I just stood there then eventually they would figure out what I needed and help me. It helped if it was clear that I didn’t have any other place to go.

Later Henning and I were again looking for water and we just tried using one of the non-functioning pumps (we knew that they didn’t work, since they were pretty uniformly disabled along the Kektura). When I did this, a guy jumped up from where he was waiting for the bus, walked over to me and gestured for me to come with him. He leaned through a neighbor’s gate, called for the woman who lived there, and got her to fill our water bottles for us from her kitchen tap.

Henning and I had bought a really accurate map of the area around Eger, and were using it to hike to a nearby town. We were walking a short stretch of road, and a car pulled up beside us. A woman on the passenger side rolled down the window, and the driver and passenger both looked at us hopefully as the passenger asked us a question, pointing forward and behind the car. I instinctively responded in the best Hungarian I could–”I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Do you speak English?” She said no, and thanked me anyhow, and they drove on. Only then did I think about the detailed map we were carrying and how, even though I couldn’t understand her question, the map was what she needed and what we should have offered.

I started to think about how we’re stimulated to helpful action. When confronted with an unknown individual asking for something, is it more difficult to assess what the need is and whether we might help? I think that’s true for me–

Pictures from Hungary and Germany.

Late lunch in Placerville–now up 50 for the twisties.
If you don’t see a post on Saturday morning, then my bike is here at echo lake put-in!

Henning and I had varied success in finding a place to sleep. On this particular night we had stopped at a summer camp for kids in a neighboring village (thinking it was a pension or something), and asked whether there were any places ‘like this’ to sleep for the night. The young woman there gave us careful directions, and after a few more kilometers and a car ride from a friendly local, we arrived at…another summer camp for kids. So we ate noodles and meat served from a metal trash can. Whether food is ‘good’ depends a lot on what you’ve done that day before you eat it.

1. Realizing I need bifocals
2. Staying out til dawn … without working (well, it’s the first time in a while, anyhow)
3. Speaking to a young woman on the plane, saying ‘du’ to her the whole time while she says ‘Sie’ to me: it was odd, but I recognized it was an appropriate way to allow her distance: 5 years ago I would have just told her to say ‘du’–

When I got off the bus at Ferihegy airport, I bought a pastry and a cup of coffee–then I looked into my wallet to discover I had just 15 Forint left. That’s about $.02. It seems, the better you come to know a place that you visit, the more likely you are end up at the airport with just a little left of the local currency. In this case, I just got lucky.

Performing conversions was simpler in Forint than it usually is for me: the exchange rate is almost exactly 200 Forint to the dollar, so you just move the decimal point and divide by two. Or you just program your eyes to look at a 1000 Forint note and see a five-dollar bill. I am always happy to get home and see how good US currency looks compared to all the Monopoly money out there.

When I first arrived in Frankfurt, I started making notes for a new post: ‘Germany on $200 an hour’. To American tourists in Europe: stay as far away from the euro as you can.

Why is it that, in all the years I’ve heard Car Talk on the radio, I’ve never heard anyone take a cellphone out to the car and have the car make the real noise?

While we’re at it, why is it that mail clients don’t recognize when you are replying to yourself? Probably 30% of emails I write are follow-ons to emails I’ve already written (because I’ve remembered something else I wanted to say)–from a formatting perspective they are replies, but the To: field should be the same as the To: field of the email you’re replying to.

George HW Bush and Aretha Franklin hat exchange following the ceremony.

49% of Americans hearing Barack Obama speak for the first time.

Rick Warren’s encoded message: ‘hingepoint’: WTF?

Special Guest Appearance by Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove

Elizabeth Alexander: “Somebody … is … reading ….   ….. a … very … boring … poem …”

Joseph Lowery actually trying to plow a field with a tractor that began life as a tank before it was beaten into a tractor: there’s a reason tractors don’t have treads!