Town of trees, and potholes

Last weekend I drove a 10-foot rental truck carrying all of my belongings from Pasadena, MD to Ann Arbor, MI. This was my first "serious housing move" since I was bringing large unwieldy furniture to an apartment I'll have all to myself. The drive was uneventful except for a nasty thunderstorm in western Pennsylvania. I arrived in the evening after driving all day, and since my apartment wouldn't be ready until the following morning, I stayed in my favorite inn, the Motel 6 on the outskirts of town. That night I found that Chipotle had opened a store in downtown, which was not there three years ago! This was a bittersweet find, however, because I have fond memories of stuffing myself with "Giant" burritos from the famous BTB (formerly Big Ten Burrito, sued for copyright infringement), an Ann Arbor icon. Fortunately the burrito market here is substantial enough that BTB remains in business.

The next day I took advantage of the four-day truck rental period to drive to Target to buy miscellaneous household items. There are some things you take for granted and are slightly taken aback when they're not there in your new apartment. Toilet paper, shower curtain, and dishwashing soap come to mind. In the afternoon the new MSTP fellows met together for the first time. The main purpose of this meeting was to inform us that as first-year MSTPers we were responsible for performing a skit at the upcoming MSTP retreat. This would be our only formal commitment for the first week, during which we were receiving $500, so apparently they want a very funny skit.

On Wednesday we had another MSTP social at Dominick's pizza restaurant. There I learned that the state of the roads around Ann Arbor is a hot issue, which I was encouraged to hear after a bone-rattling ride the day before. The nicest cycling road in town, Huron River Drive, is nearly unrideable, and repairs are way behind schedule due to town and state budget shortfalls. Ann Arbor cyclists are taking matters into their own hands, working to raise funds themselves to pay the construction crews. The hope is that they'll start repaving in a few months.

Here are a few pictures from my new apartment, located in the "White Coat Ghetto" a short walk across the Huron River from the Michigan Medical Center.

I'm in the basement, so the view I have from one small window is obscured by the big bush on the left. It is a little cooler down here though.

What's behind door number 6? The suspense is killing me.

Already busy with logistical items.
Bicycle workshop.
The "den."
The kitchen, with tiny but mighty oven and spectacular knife set. (Not shown: four beautiful new wine glasses)
The kitchen table. A real newspaper, other than the Ann Arbor 3-page biweekly less-than-rag, would be great but delivery of the NYTimes is very expensive.

This afternoon Nobel Laureate (Chemistry) Ada Yonath is speaking here. She's worked on the structure of the ribosome. Should be an awesome talk!

Pilgrimage to Napa Valley

I'm currently visiting my dad in Sacramento, California for a couple weeks and yesterday I made a pilgrimage to the wine capital of the United States, Napa Valley. To get in the mood I started the day with a visit to the Mondavi Institute for Food and Wine Science at the University of California Davis. Robert Mondavi was largely responsible for dissemination of Napa Valley wines around the world and passed away two years ago. On the inside, the Mondavi Institute looks like any other laboratory building for biology or chemistry, with labs full of scientists in white coats holding pipettes at long benches covered by reagent bottles and fancy equipment. The labs are connected by boring white hallways lined with scientific posters. The only way you would know it's a Food and Wine Institute is by reading the names of the labs (might say "Sierra Nevada Brewing Laboratory"), by finding the usual waiting room news mags replaced by Wine Spectator and The California Dairy Dispatch, or by noticing the abnormally large number of offices with signs saying "Closed from 12 to 1 for lunch." On the ground floor there was a wine marketing conference going on. As I walked by I heard the presenter insist that you might really like your dog, but it doesn't belong on your wine label.

From Davis it was about an hour drive to Napa; the town didn't look too exciting so I headed up the Silverado Trail through the heart of the valley. Just about every acre of land was covered in grapes. Napa Valley is a good place to grow wine grapes due to its unique geography and climate. In some spots the soil contains volcanic lava, and in others it contains maritime sediments from when the San Pablo Bay reached into the valley. Thin and rocky soils cover the hillsides, which decrease overall yield but lead to grapes with concentrated flavors and sugars. Napa Valley's climate isn't too cold or hot, and it has a long growing season with warm sunny days and cool nights, allowing the grapes to ripen slowly over time.

I stopped at the Honig Winery in the Rutherford American Viticultural Area. I had read that Rutherford soil is a unique combination of gravel, sand, loam, and volcanic deposits that provides especially good conditions for Cabernet Sauvignon. I tasted four wines--first a Sauvignon Blanc in which some of the grapes had been left in contact with the skins for a few hours before pressing, presumably enhancing a grapefruit flavor. The second was a 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon with grapes from the Honig vineyard that had been aged in American oak for 18 months. Third was a 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon with grapes from a nearby vineyard that was aged in French oak. Last was a late harvest dessert wine made from Sauvignon Blanc grapes that were infected with Botrytis fungus, which dehydrated the grapes and concentrated the sugars. All the wines were good but at $40 to $75 per bottle they were outside my budget.

I finished off the day with a very hot but enjoyable walk on a trail up Cold Canyon near Lake Berryessa.

Today Alex and I went sailing on Lake Natoma near Sacramento, reviving an old hobby of mine. As I was reviewing sailing terms and techniques, I was reminded of the various points of sail, the possible orientations of a sailboat relative to the wind direction. Sailboats can't sail directly into the wind, but they can sail about 35 degrees to either side, called "close hauled." If the wind direction is perpendicular to the sailboat, that's called a "reach," and if the wind is coming from behind the boat, that's a "run." What is the fastest point of sail? At first it seems obvious that a run would be fastest--that's when the wind is squarely hitting your sails from behind. But the fastest you can go on a run is the speed of the wind. In fact, the fastest point of sail is usually a broad reach. This can be explained by considering two points. First, for all points of sail except a run, forward movement is caused by sails acting as airfoils, like airplane wings generating forward lift. Second, the wind direction experienced aboard a moving sailboat, the apparent wind, is different than the wind experience by a stationary object, the true wind.

Let's say you're on a broad reach, with the wind coming over the corner of the stern at a 135 degree angle to the direction the boat is pointed. The wind will flow over the sails and accelerate the boat forward. As the boat accelerates, the apparent wind direction shifts forward. It's the same thing that happens when you're driving in a car on a rainy day and the rain is pelting your windshield from ahead. When you get out of the car though, the rain is falling vertically.

When the boat has accelerated to the point at which the apparent wind is 45 degrees off the direction of travel, a comfortable close haul for most boats, the boat is going 1.41 times the speed of the true wind. Racing boats that can sail closer to the wind than 45 degrees can travel significantly faster--at 29 degrees off the apparent wind, the boat is going twice as fast as the true wind.

I found this wikipedia page helpful for visualizing with vector diagrams.

According to Wikipedia, "in 2009 the world land speed record for a wind powered vehicle was set by a sand yacht sailing at about 3 times the speed of the wind."

Greatest Survival Stories

I recently read South by Ernest Shackleton, an incredible story of survival in the Antarctic. In 1914 Shackleton and a team of 28 scientists and sailors embarked on an expedition to cross Antarctica, which Shackleton judged as the last important polar mission after Amundsen became the first to reach the South Pole in 1912. Their boat, the Endurance, became trapped in ice in the Weddell Sea, drifted helplessly for months and was finally crushed at 69 degrees latitude, forcing the crew to abandon ship. They drifted further on ice floes for hundreds of miles until their floe broke up beneath them and they scrambled into lifeboats. They landed on mountainous, ice-covered Elephant Island, 550 miles southeast of Cape Horn. From there, Shackleton took a crew of five others in the lifeboat James Caird for a fifteen-day journey to South Georgia. They weren't done once they landed on the south side of the island, however, because the whaling stations were on the north side. After regaining their strength, Shackleton's team walked for 36 sleepless hours over glaciers and through dense fog to the whalers, who would help the expedition rescue the remaining crew on Elephant Island.

Shackleton's story has been billed as the greatest survival story of all time, and I don't doubt it. What makes it so impressive is the length of time spent away from civilization (21 months for those left on Elephant Island) and the harsh conditions endured (hurricane-force winds and blowing snow were common, and temperatures were typically tens of degrees below zero Fahrenheit). What really makes the story, however, are the navigation, leadership, and decision-making skills of Shackleton and his lieutenants. Every member of Shackleton's Weddell Sea Party survived the ordeal, not by luck or fate, but by always keeping their wits and positive attitude despite unimaginable physical challenges.

This got me thinking about whether other survival stories could rival Shackleton's. Here are snippets of a few more incredible tales, most of which have associated books that I intend to read at some point:

1) Joe Simpson's "hop and crawl" back to base camp in the Peruvian Andes, recounted in Touching the Void. Simpson broke his leg descending from the nearly 21,000 foot Siula Grande. His partner Simon Yates proceeded to belay Simpson down the mountain, but Simpson went over a cliff and Yates was forced to cut the three-hundred foot rope separating the pair. Simpson fell into a crevasse and was presumed dead by Yates. Miraculously, however, Simpson survived by landing on an ice shelf and over three days struggled back to base camp.

2) Alexander Selkirk survived for four years on the Juan Fernández islands off the coast of Chile. He was left there in 1704 by his boss Thomas Stradling after he starting causing trouble on their ship Cinque Ports. Selkirk's story was the likely inspiration for Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which I also recently read.

3) Antarctica is not surprisingly a survival adventure hotspot. In 1911, a few years before Shackleton's cross-Antarctica attempt, Douglas Mawson and two colleagues Xavier Mertz and Belgrave Ninnis were sledding over the icy continent when Ninnis along with most of the group's provisions and dogs fell through into a huge crevasse, killing all but one dog that managed to hang on to a shelf 50 m down. Mawson and Mertz continued back to their base, eating dog meat and liver to survive. Mertz went crazy, fell into a coma, and died. Mawson made it back to the base to find that their ship had departed hours before, forcing him and a few companions left behind to spend the winter in the Antarctic. The experience is recounted in Mawson's Home of the Blizzard.

4) In 1971 Juliane Koepcke was aboard a flight from Lima, Peru to Pucallpa in the Amazon rainforest. The plane encountered a storm and a fuel tank was hit by a bolt of lightning, tearing the right wing off the plane. Ninety one people on the plane were killed except Koepcke, who was somehow ejected from the plane as it broke up 2 miles over the forest canopy. Still sitting in her row of seats, she spun through the air like a helicopter blade and suffered only minor injuries upon landing. She walked down crocodile and piranha-infested streams for 10 days, finally being rescued by Peruvian lumberjacks. Koepcke's story has been made into two films including Werner Herzog's Wings of Hope.

5) The following year another plane crash miracle happened in the Andes. A flight carrying 45 rugby team members crashed in the mountains when a strong headwind and clouds caused the pilot to miscalculate his position. Twenty-seven people survived, but the search for the white plane in white snow was called off after eleven days, as the survivors heard on a radio. There were no animals or vegetation on the mountain, so after the few chocolate bars they had were gone, the only option was to eat flesh from those killed in the crash. Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa hiked for 12 days across the mountains to alert a Chilean cowboy. Fourteen remaining survivors at the crash site were rescued by helicopter, two and half months after the crash. Alive: The story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read tells the story. In 2006 Nando Parrado published his personal account Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home.

Interesting that all of these occur in the southern hemisphere and 4 out of 5 in South America. Anyway, some exciting and inspiring reading material for the next few months.