I thought it was really funny when, as a freshman at MIT, I asked a company for whom I did consulting to pay me in cases of coca cola. My room was packed from floor to ceiling with coke; I practically brushed my teeth with it. What a crazy boy! He's so crazy!

Crazy like a dodo.

This week I started to learn to ride a unicycle along with my friend Rony. We've spent two evenings mounting the thing, wobbling for a while, and then falling off. I can go about 30 feet on a long, lucky run, but I'm learning fast. My shins and ankles are covered in bruises. And yesterday, Rony hit a curb and popped the tube, so we've got to replace that.

We're using the MIT method of learning to ride a unicycle, which seems to be a pretty fast way of learning, considering that some people have told me it's taken them two weeks of solo trial and error to get as far as I am now. Of course, I can't unicycle in the mountains in the snow, nor can I unicycle across the United States, nor across China.

It is so similar to learning to ride a bike. Once you've got it, it starts to come really easily, and it seems impossible to unlearn. You feel your brain exploring and storing patterns: a mounting-the-unicycle subroutine, an idling-in-place subroutine, and a few disaster-recovery subroutines for when the uni tilts or pivots you forward or backward.

Once you've figured it out, and gone a few turns of the crank solo without falling, you're no longer thinking about it as analytically. It's no longer "head up, eyes straight ahead, weight on the seat, pedal evenly." You just remember the feeling of when it worked, and try to go back to that place. It's like all the learning is right there in the tissue.

And of course there's that frustrating point in learning anything that takes practice where you know glory because you've tasted it, but you just can't seem to get back there again...

e^(2πi) is the loneliest number that you'll ever do 25 July 2005 19:02 EDT I dropped my laptop on the floor last week and so I've not been able to post a recap of the IronNat bike ride to Provincetown, and in the intervening week most of that day has smeared in my memory into a homogenous blur of lactic acid and chocolate-covered espresso beans. Fortunately Robert posted a brilliant play-by-play of the event as it transpired.

Beginning

End

On the eve of the ride, I was so hepped up on my own juices that even after three pasta dinners, try as I might, I could not fall asleep. I just sort of lay there in bed, tossing around. Around 2am, I decided that this was a dire problem, and that some sleep — any sleep — would be preferable to attempting the single greatest athletic feat of my life completely sleep-deprived. So I took three doses of NyQuil and prepared to bed down for the night.

Sleep did not come. But 4am did, and rested or not, it was time to go.

Leaving at 4 was smart. There was no traffic on the road and it was cool. On Alex's advice, I told myself that the first thirty miles were just a warm-up, and cruised pretty easily down the totally untrafficed route 53 before forcing myself to stop and send a video to Robert's waiting mailbox. Just before, I passed the largest piece of copyrighted art in the world.

Anyway, thirty miles quickly turned into fifty and I was on the Cape. From there, the hills were gentle and rolling, and it was just a matter of staying on route 6A/6 for another 60 miles, and the ride was over. Cars whizzed by pretty close, which was often scary, but the cape is sleepy and the roads were nearly empty till about 10:30 in the morning.

The end of the ride was hot, and I was sweating profusely, and at one point I think I ran out of salt because the sweating stopped abruptly, until I ate pretzels and started to sweat again. Or maybe I was just freaking out.

Critical equipment included: my GPS (not the Forerunner), which continuously reassured me I was heading in the right direction, allowed me to relay my location to Robert on the phone, and made it really easy to make last-minute changes of plan (I decided to take a bike path for 12 of the last 20 miles); my telephone; and my awesome LeMond bike, which I can pick up with one finger, and which I no longer feel like a total poser for owning.

All in all, it was a lot easier than I expected, and I felt like a titan when the ride was over. The whole thing took me nine hours of clock time, and 7 hours and 20 minutes of bike time, with an average speed of 16mph. Various people have expressed disappointment that I didn't do the full 240-mile roundtrip, so maybe I'll try to do that later this summer. Better would be to find some other seemingly implausible achievement and go for that. Like getting four root canals in one week. Oh, wait...

Joe has repeated his stipulation that it is physically impossible for any human being to ride 120 miles and then spend the night partying in Boston, and I believe I stand before you ready to demonstrate the triumph of human will over the physical laws of the universe once again.

Thank you all for the generous donations that have come pouring in from every inhabited region of our planet. The $24 that tomorrow's ride will raise will be used to raise global awareness of various issues to be determined, at our discretion, etc etc.

Alex Graveley has volunteered to wake me up at 4am so that I can get an early start on the day, and as I previously mentioned, Robert will be posting video footage of my progress as I go. PJSW 15 July 2005 14:41 EDT Last night I was talking to my friend Joe Shaw about our weekend plans, and I mentioned that I'd been thinking about riding my bike to the tip of Cape Cod.

"But what about all the parties Saturday night?" Joe asked. "You're just going to skip them?"

"No, I'll make it back in time for the parties."

"It can't be done," Joe said. "No man can bike to Provincetown and make it back in time to party in Boston."

And thus was born the "Prove Joe Shaw Wrong" challenge.

Cape Cod, the only man-made structure which can be seen from space.

Tomorrow morning, I will be leaving my comfortable home in Back Bay and biking down to Cape Cod, around the horn of the Cape, and to the very tip of civilization at Provincetown. A total distance of 120 miles (193km), more than triple any daily distance I've ever covered before.

As part of the PJSW pledge drive, we will be accepting donations of $0.10 for each mile covered. All pledges go to the PJSW foundation.

Along the way I will make videos of my fatigued and belabored state and send them to Robert Love for posting online. Thank you for sharing 13 July 2005 23:16 EDT One of the things that seems to happen when you write about dental adventures on your web page is that many strangers and old friends email you with their own gruesome tales. Stories much, much worse than your own.

To those who wrote I say: your hideous traumas have put in perspective the constant throbbing in my jaw. Thank you all.

One of the people who mailed me is my friend David Miller, who now has a gripping blog about his adventures in the Linux kernel.

David and I hung out a lot the summer of 1998, when I lived in Mountain View and worked at SGI testing context switch performance on some new graphics hardware they were developing. Actually, not on the hardware, but on the simulator. Before the hardware was finished, SGI would build a software simulator of the card so that the graphics subsystem developers would have something to work against until the hardware is done. A good idea in practice. And I remember fondly the meeting in which we discovered that the hardware was big endian and the simulator was little endian...

Anyway, David took me hiking in Big Basin in a car he called the "bitchseeker," and I used to crash at his place in Los Gatos and watch laserdiscs. It all seems so retro now!

(Visit David Miller's blog to learn about his latest activities.) Coca-Cola rots your teeth 12 July 2005 1:09 EDT My dentist spent the morning drilling into the bottom-left side of my mouth. One premolar and two molars.

Grind, grind, grind.

The drill is a little atomizer, and tooth bone-dust fills the air and you smell it and you breathe it in. You breathe your own bone. And it smells burnt. Flecks of tooth fly out of your mouth and land on your shirt.

His office is right next to the public garden in downtown Boston, on the sunny side of Beacon Street. Right next to Cheers, in fact.

After three hours of drilling, before he could affix the temporary plastic cap, I took a break to stretch my legs and use the bathroom. Three hours in the dentist chair is a long time. The bathroom had a mirror. Should I look? Can I look? I did.

And oh, the horror.

The gory sight of what remained of my mouth after the morning's excavation will not soon leave me. There was blood, there was raw exposed gum, there were bone fragments and there was not much tooth. There were the remains of three teeth. Three devastated teeth. Three tooth corpses. Three little stumps. Three little mounts for porcelaine and gold. But they weren't my teeth anymore.

It was like the worst tooth dream you've ever had.

The face staring back at me was the blood-and-bone-flecked face of a lunatic with terrible bedhead and bloody stumps for teeth. It was like staring at my own mortality. Looking extinction in the face.

After the novacaine wore off, the pain was blinding and unbearable, and neither acetaminophin nor ibuprofin nor oxycontin did a damn thing, and so I had to find an endodontist and get a root canal immediately.

That was pretty fascinating, and entirely painless. The premolar was the problem, and my root was 22 millimeters long. Tiny precise screws of steadily increasing diameter are used to progressively hollow out the pulpy interior of the tooth (or what remains of it), and the resulting cavity is filled with the exact same material used on the insides of golf balls. The whole process took about 20 minutes, and all the pain is gone.

All in all, a somewhat traumatizing day. I've been resisting the urge to lie on the floor in the fetal position most of the evening. Burning Man 7 July 2005 22:46 EDT Last night I bought a ticket for this year's burning man. I've seen so many amazing pictures and heard so many good things, I am pretty excited about checking it out (despite some of the bad things I've also heard).

(I'd always pictured that if I ever went to burning man, I'd parachute in, to see the place for the first time from the air. But ever since Chema died, that hasn't really been a very appealing idea.) NPR: Remembering the Scopes trial 5 July 2005 18:26 EDT NPR has a bit on Remembering the Scopes Trial today. A great song is referenced. Scopes trial reenactment/BBQ 5 July 2005 14:25 EDT It was an interesting weekend...

From: Nat Friedman <nat@nat.org>
Subject: Scopes trial reenactment/BBQ.
Date: Sun, 03 Jul 2005 02:26:25 -0400

You are cordially invited to attend our

FOURTH OF JULY SCOPES TRIAL REENACTMENT AND BARBECUE!

Starring:

Joe Shaw............as William Jennings Bryan
Rony Kubat..........as Clarence Darrow

In a gripping dramatic reenactment of the famous July 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial in my living room! Watch as science is pitted against religion in a court of law! Gasp as Darrow calls Bryan to the stand! Applaud uproariously when William Jennings Bryan does body shots off some girl from Somerville after the play is over!

 

I spent all Sunday night reading the 270-page transcript and compiling it into a script. It was an eight-day trial, so of course much of the action had to be excised. In particular, all of the debate over expert testimony was removed. The defense's strategy was to use the media circus surrounding the trial as a vehicle for educating the American public about biology and science. So they wanted to call a different expert witness to the stand every day and have the papers report a new set of interesting scientific findings. Zooligists, geologists, biologists, etc.

 

Over three days of objections, the prosecution managed to squash any hopes the defense had, and the judge struck from the record what little testimony they had managed to get. (They did end up convincing many journalists to republish written statements by the various experts, which were also submitted into the record, but not shown to the jury.) Also culled from the script was the bit where Darrow is held in contempt of court.

 

Other than that, however, I think we managed to hit the high points and tell the story pretty well. What people forget about Scopes, eighty-years later, when all we have to go on are the movies, is that the evolutionists lost the trial. And in fact, the trial was a setup from the beginning. Judge Haulston ordered the jury to rule only on whether or not the law had been violated, and not to question the validity of the law. He speaks extensively during the trial on the separation of powers in the US government.

William Jennings Bryan gets the best lines, in my opinion.

The script is, in the end, mainly a cut-and-paste of the various parts of the transcript (which is in the public domain). This is harder than it sounds. And of course I did have to write some lines myself, to make it flow. And yes, to spice it up a little bit here or there (Bryan never actually says "October 23rd, at 9am" in the trial). But overall it's a lot more documentary than Inherit the Wind. Whether it has any value for anyone else is highly questionable though .

The script is available here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

Joe Shaw........ as William Jennings Bryan
Rony Kubat...... as Clarence Darrow
Taylor Hayward.. as Judge Haulston
Peter Teichman.. as Atty-Gen Stewart
Robert Love..... as John T. Scopes
Me.............. as Narrator/Reverend
Emil Sit........ as the Bailiff

Here are a few of my photos of the evening.

Car Bugs 2 July 2005 17:30 EDT Six weeks ago returning from some trip, I landed in Boston and went to the airport garage to find my car. It wouldn't start. The entire electrical system was dead, and not even the remote key would work. So I had it towed home, jumped it off one of those handy portable battery units, drove it around for 45 minutes to let the alternator charge the battery and switched it off. And tried to switch it back on. Nothing.

So I figured either the alternator or battery was dead. I don't drive very much, so for weeks the car just sat idle and lifeless behind my house. This weekend I finally got around to having it towed to the dealer to get repaired, and today I picked it up, fully working. The service receipt says:

CUSTOMER STATES VEHICLE HAD TO BE JUMPED AND AFTER DRIVING FOR AWHILE, THE VEHICLE DID NOT START. CUSTOMER ALREADY HAD A BATTERY REPLACE. HE THINKS IT IS THE ALTERNATOR. PERFORMED DIAG AND REPLACED FAULTY BATTERY. TESTED ALTERNATOR, NO PROBLEMS FOUND. FOUND LSZ DRAWING POWER. RECODED LSZ.

It turns out that LSZ stands for the German equivalent of "Lamp Switching Center" and is one of the several software modules that control the various systems on a BMW. For example, the "ZKE" module controls the locks and power windows. The LSZ seems to control the various indicator lights inside the car, as well as some elements of the air conditioning and heating (which BMW calls the IHKA).

Well, it turns out that there was a bug in the BMW's lamp control software program that can render your BMW useless. The official BMW service report states that

If two or more [heating or air conditioning] settings are modified during an ignition cycle (e.g. the temperature and blower setting), the result is an increase in closed circuit current of approximately 800 mA. This could cause a discharged battery when vehicle is not used for 2 to 3 days."

"So why don't you write a letter to the building management company and explain to them how you're too special to carry a badge?" she retorted.

Filling in the log book, where it said "purpose of visit," I wrote "truth, beauty, meaning."