Backpacking tips to myself

Yesterday Laura and I returned from our four-days-and-three-nights backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon. It was fun. It was hard. I entered the canyon carrying a 49-pound pack, including water, and Laura's pack weighed 35 pounds. By the end of the trip we were both suffering for all the unnecessary stuff we had been carrying around. Here are some reminders to myself to reduce my encumbrance for future backpacking trips.

• Pack less food. I reached the canyon's rim on the last day carrying about five pounds of food. Laura had even more. This isn't the first time I've overestimated beyond prudence my caloric needs for a backpacking trip. In the future, rather than to guess quantities, I'll pre-measure everything and count calories.

• Don't pack alcohol. Laura and I carried nearly a pound of wine each, all of which is now back in our apartment, unconsumed. The problem was there was never a night that we weren't too exhausted to enjoy some wine at the campsite—and we were exhausted because early in the day we had carried around so much unnecessary stuff in our backpacks, such as wine.

• Leave the tent at home. Laura and I have been using a six-pound tent on our trips, which I carry. It's spacious and luxurious—and unnecessary. From now on if Laura wants to stay in a tent, she can carry it herself. I'm going to stick with the combination of a tarp and bivy, which should save three to five pounds.

• Use balloons for a pillow. A couple of veteran backpackers we met gave the advice to fill a stuff sack with two balloons to use as a pillow. This is lightweight and cheap.

• Pack a smaller cooking pot. I brought along a 2L titanium cooking pot, which was nearly twice as big as needed. A smaller pot won't save much weight, but it will save some space.

• Don't use a compression sack. For the hike out of the canyon, I experimented with rolling my sleeping pad and sleeping bag together and nixing the bag's compression sack. The combined rolling used less space because it fit more efficiently within my backpack's bottom compartment than two separate items. In addition to saving space, leaving the compression sack at home will save precious ounces.

• Use a smaller backpack. If I follow enough of my own advice and pack less stuff, I ought to be able to use a smaller backpack, which should save another pound or two.

Riddle #3

Wake up, everyone! Today's post is another riddle.

The answer has nine letters. The clue is: Stiff drink for a pet?

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Google Maps

Thank you for reporting this problem. We've reviewed your problem and you were right! The default view in Google Maps has already been updated to reflect your suggested change…

Two days ago I received notice of the correction to Google Maps resulting from my first report a problem submission, made a week-and-a-half prior. What was the problem I reported? The missing bike lane on N 59th Ave through Thunderbird Park. Google Maps was missing the designation for bike lanes even though to anyone who has ridden that stretch of road, or, say, has run on foot inside the bike lane as a part of a local informal race, it's clear that bike lanes are indeed there.

Seeing the report a problem feature of Google Maps work inspired me to report seven more problems later that day, all related to missing designations for bike infrastructure:

• Missing bike lanes on E Doubletree Ranch Rd east of N Scottsdale Rd
• Missing bike lanes on W Cheryl Dr near N 35th Ave
• Missing bike route on N 18th St north of E Camelback Rd
• Missing bike lanes on N 25th Ave north of W Dunlap Ave
• Missing bike lanes on E Via de Ventura near N Pima Rd
• Missing bike lanes on N 7th St near the 101

We'll see how those submissions fare. If they get accepted then maybe I'll try to get more of the missing 18th St route included. It's an ugly route, but those green Bike Route signs are already paid for—may as well add the full route to the database.

Google Reader

In two-and-a-half months, Google Reader will be going away. This will affect at least seventeen of us, if subscriber stats for Just Enough Craig are any indication.

Google Reader's shutdown is disheartening. I've been a happy user of the service ever since a former employer of mine implemented draconian web filtering on its employees. The web filtering stopped just about everything on the Web from getting through, including a lot of useful technical sites, but it strangely allowed Google Reader to get through. Eventually the web filtering went away, but not before my Web-reading habits changed so as to ignore just about everything online that doesn't have an RSS feed. Now Google Reader is going away. What to do?

For now, I've moved all my feeds in my Google account to Thunderbird, which is the email program maintained by the Mozilla people, who are the same people who make Firefox. Say what you want about Google and how they frequently shut down or make worse their free services; at least they allow you to get your data and go somewhere else. Anyway, Thunderbird works well for the time being because I do all my Web reading on one computer. However, Thunderbird doesn't scale to using multiple computers—such as, say, a home computer and a work computer—because it keeps track of which articles I've read and which I haven't in a local database. Multiple computers will each keep their own database, and the databases will be out of sync. Synchronicity was Google Reader's main strength: it was in the Cloud and thus accessible and up-to-date on every device with a modern web browser. In order to synchronize Thunderbird, I might revert to a thumb drive and Sneaker Net. Or maybe some other company will try to make money by providing a similar free Reader service? By the way, who pays for the Internet?

Zeno

Last weekend my friend Mark gave me his college textbook on paradoxes. I suppose I have a reputation for appreciating these kinds of gifts. I appreciated this one, and I managed to skim through the first chapter, about Zeno's paradoxes, despite being rather busy with the wedding goings-on at the time.

What are Zeno's paradoxes? They are paradoxes that all have to do with a regression to infinity that seems to lead to the conclusion that all change, or motion, is impossible. My favorite variant is the one about the race between Achilles and the Tortoise. Here's how it goes.

Achilles and the Tortoise have a footrace. Achilles, being fleet of foot, is much faster than the Tortoise, so to make things a bit less unfair, the Tortoise is given a head start. Each racer takes his mark, and the starting gun fires. Achilles, fast as he is, soon reaches the Tortoise's starting position. However, during the time it takes Achilles to reach that position, the Tortoise has inched farther along, so the Tortoise remains ahead of Achilles. However, Achilles soon catches up to that second notable position of the Tortoise—i.e., where the Tortoise was when Achilles reached the Tortoise's starting position—but during the time it takes Achilles to move to that second spot, the Tortoise has moved yet farther ahead. And so it goes, with each time Achilles catching up to where the Tortoise was, only to have the Tortoise meanwhile move forward and maintain his lead. This sort of reasoning is then taken ad infinitum, leading some old Greek sages to the conclusion that Achilles can never overtake the Tortoise.

As I said, there are many variants on this paradox, as you can use it to show that motion in general is impossible. For example, you can show that for an airplane that's taking off from a runway, either there's no last moment that it's on the ground or there's no first moment it's in the air. And you can prove that it's impossible to push a pencil a full inch along a table. And that it's impossible to transition from one second to the next. And that it's impossible to eat a cookie. Hopefully you get the point.

Zeno's paradoxes had people baffled for at least a good two thousand years, until calculus was invented. The crux of the paradoxes' arguments goes like this:

1. You can take any change and subdivide it into an infinite number of progressively smaller changes.
2. It's impossible to realize an infinite number of changes, however small they may be.

According to calculus, the second point is wrong. For example, if you move an inch today, half an inch tomorrow, a quarter of an inch the day after that, and so on, with each day you moving half as far as the day before, you won't go an infinite distance. Instead, you'll merely get ever closer to having moved two inches. This is an amazing fact that is learned, ho-hum, by thousands of high-school students each year—that sometimes an infinite number of positive numbers add up to a finite number. But it's exactly what allows Achilles to indeed catch up to the Tortoise, overtake him, and win the race—so long as Achilles manages to stay awake for the whole race.

Nevertheless, calculus, like all of mathematics, is just a model of the real thing. Calculus, in its continuous form, assumes an infinite divisibility of all things, just as Zeno's paradoxes do in point 1, above. Whether reality truly is continuous or else is innately discrete is left up to the physicists to try to figure out.

Glasses

This past weekend, as many of you know, Laura and I had our wedding. This isn't to be confused with our getting married, which happened nearly two months before at a local courthouse. I'm not going to write today about the wedding or getting married; instead I'm going to write about another recent life change that some of you noticed this past weekend: me wearing glasses.

Growing up I was the ocular oddball in my family. Both of my parents wore glasses, with my dad being nearsighted and my mom being farsighted and having an astigmatism. Those opposing traits didn't cancel out for my sister, who ended up nearsighted with an astigmatism. Perhaps Rachel could clarify in the comments below, if she wishes, but I'm pretty sure she became at an early age one of those people who struggles to read the big E on the eye chart without correction.

Meanwhile, I went through my teenage years with 20/20 vision, like a positive genetic atavism. I also went through my twenties without wearing glasses or contacts, though in hindsight I'm sure I had lost my 20/20 vision no later than by my mid-twenties. But I soldiered on anyway because I thought I would hate wearing glasses and I didn't want to give up my delusion of superiority. That delusion ended this February—while waiting outside the Justice of the Peace's courtroom to get married, no less—when Nick and Bobby, the two witnesses for Laura's and my marriage, got to talking about their wonderful uncorrected vision, and it occurred to me, with plentiful examples given, that the world wasn't in actuality becoming blurrier every year but that my vision had deteriorated quite a lot. Perhaps the proverbial slow-boiling frog experiences a similar realization of how water doesn't naturally become bubbly over time.

The next day I scheduled an appointment with an optometrist. This was OK by the JP and the advice he gave the previous day, when he explicitly advised against Laura getting her eyes checked but said nothing about me doing the same. Later at the eyeglass store, I learned to no great shock that I had an astigmatism—hence the vertically-aligned blurriness I see everywhere—and also to some mild surprise that I'm nearsighted as well. I picked out some glasses by relying on the salesman's advice to get square frames for my round face, and anxiously went to the store the next day for pickup.

The result has been entirely positive. My earlier fears of hating glasses proved unfounded, probably because with corrected vision I've gained the ability to do many more things. Using a computer no longer gives me eyestrain or headaches—ditto for reading books—and I can read blue neon signs at night without problem. Also, nighttime bike riding is a lot easier, as I no longer depend upon my sense of smell to avoid running into stuff.

We'll see how I feel about glasses as time goes on. A lot of people who wear glasses seem to hate them, or resent having to wear them, and move on to contacts or surgery. Also, I worry about the heat of the looming summer months and being able to keep a pair of glasses on my face without sweat streaming down the lenses. We'll see how that goes. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying the strange neural effects of having corrected vision after having gone without for many years. Perhaps the strangest is how whenever I wake up in the middle of the night, I feel certain that I'm still wearing glasses even though I'm not. I see phantom frames in my peripheral vision and feel phantom temples on each side of my face. Sometimes in a groggy half-woken state I go so far as to clutch at my face to remove the phantom spectacles, before realizing my mind is playing tricks on itself.