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Here’s a rundown of our Christmas trip to Germany and London. Not a full writeup but at least a log of what we did. Photos can be seen on Facebook …

The trip was centered around a big family reunion in Bavaria, in the Chiemgau region east of Munich. Nearly all of the Americans were traveling over to Germany for it, and all the Germans would be there, about 40 people in total, all congregating in Traunstein and Mietenkam.

Day 0 / Tue Dec 18th: departed from Atlanta on a direct overnight flight to Munich. Chris can’t sleep on airplanes, so took advantage of the on-demand movie system: The Post, A Quiet Place and Fahrenheit 451. Day 1 / Wed Dec 19th: arrived in Munich, met by Renate. Chris split off and headed to Stuttgart by train, and Sharon stayed with Renate in Munich, ending up at “The Heuweg” with Sabrina and Marc (and Samuel and the dogs). Chris went to Stuttgart to visit Teresa and Nils, and meet the boys Theodor and Fridolin for the first time. Chris stayed awake until 7:30pm and then crashed hard (having been awake for 30-ish hours straight by that point). Day 2 / Thu Dec 20th: Sharon explored Munich’s Christkindlmarkts with Renate and Cornelia. Chris spent the days with Teresa and the boys, including a visit to the Christmas market in central Stuttgart, jammed with people and with lots to see. The boys rode the little train and we had gluwein of course. We finished the day with a dinner at a restaurant in their neighborhood.

Day 3 / Fri Dec 21st: Chris took the train back to Munich and was met by Renate at the eastside train station. After a quick visit to Renate’s apartment to spend some time with family cat Sasha, we all ended up at The Heuweg and enjoyed a dinner there. Family friend Nora stopped by and we got to catch up on how we’ve been.

Day 4 / Sat Dec 22nd: Sharon and Chris split up, taking separate cars with Sabrina (and Samuel) and Marc, respectively, out to Mietenkam where the family reunion was happening. Marc dutifully drove his Porsche 911 at 240 km/h (150 MPH) when the autobahn allowed for it; normally he’d drive faster but the winter tires are speed limited. In Mietenkam, we settled into the “Fischerhaus” next door to Andreas and Monika’s house, and welcomed Teresa and family when they arrived. Later in the evening we all had dinner together at the Hotel Sperrer in Grassau, in the back dining hall that Andreas had rented out for the family. It was a good thing we had that big room to ourselves, because the kids were going freaking NUTS. Julienne and family showed up early on, having flown in from Chicago. After dinner, we stopped by the Mietenkamer “Hausl” just as Jennifer and family were pulling up, having flown in from San Franscisco.

Day 5 / Sun Dec 23rd: Our last chance to get supplies before the Christmas holidays, everyone went grocery shopping et cetera, and then we met up at the Christmas market in Traunstein, where we enjoyed more gluwein, feuerzangenbowle, Bosna sausages and roasted almonds. We stopped by the Municom “bistro” where Cornelia was marshalling forces to prepare the little dining hall for the big family dinner happening in two days. Chris got a loaner car (a VW van) from Andreas and we drove back to Mietenkam, and we all eventually all met up in the Fischerhaus again and enjoyed a dinner prepared by … someone. It was all a blur. Somebody prepared food, I think Teresa and Nils, and we thank them for it!

Day 6 / Mon Dec 24th: Chris went on a hike with Teresa and Sabrina and kids, and then on a detour with Andi. At some point Renate arrived from Munich. Christmas Eve is the traditional day that Germans really celebrate Christmas. In the evening, everyone gathers around the tree, there are readings from the Bible, and then the kids get to tear into their presents. We had a beautiful evening, with gifts exchanged, a meal of my mom’s “Super Bowl soup”, games for the kids, and general merriment. A little later in the evening, Julienne and Chris were invited next door to join Andreas and Monika (and later Andi) for another dinner, this one of duck. Oof.

Day 7 / Tue Dec 25th: Christmas morning is when Americans traditionally celebrate, so the two American families in the Mietenkamer Hausl down the street hosted a morning(-ish) event for the kids. Afterwards, another hike around the environs, before heading into Traunstein for the bug family gathering. More German family had arrived in town and we were all gathering at the Municom “bistro” for a proper reunion and meal. Nearly forty people! The only people missing from the entire extended family were Oliver, now too old to travel from California, and Susann and Serafine who were planning to attend but had to turn around and head back home upon news of a suddenly very sick pet. Cornelia dutifully took lots of photos of the historic gathering and we all had a fantastic time catching up with each other. More gifts were exchanged — among the adults we all had “Secret Santa” assignments.

Day 8 / Wed Dec 26th: Most of the family gathered at the Chiemsee shore for some fun there. Chris and Sharon split off to take advantage of their one opportunity to get up into the Alps and do some sightseeing. From Mietenkam, we first drove up into Reit Im Winkl, a ski resort town on the Austrian border, and wandered around there watching cross country skiers passing through. Then we drove east along the Alps to Berchtesgaden, a historic and extremely scenic town tucked among the mountains, and explored the Christmas market there, open for the final day of the season. Sharon found some more Krampus / Perchten knick knacks and we noshed on more food. Then we drove down into Salzburg and enjoyed the old city center there, ending up once again at the Stiftskeller at St. Peters, a courtyard restaurant that was founded in the year 803 (not a typo). On the way, we stumbled onto the astonishing Petersfriedhof cemetery next door. With evening falling, we drove back into Germany and to Traunstein, where the family was gathered again at the bistro for a “leftovers” party, and we returned our loaner car to Andreas. The little VW van did a fine job and we greatly appreciate Andreas’ generosity in lending it to us for a few days. Since we would be leaving the area in the morning, as were most of the others, this is where we now started to say our goodbyes, and started to plan the next reunion — perhaps Fasching in Mainz in February 2021?

Day 9 / Thu Dec 27th: Travel day! Chris and Sharon were heading to London to have a couple days there before going home to Atlanta. Andreas took us to the local train station, and thus commenced a long 10-hour train trip across central Europe. Five train stations, four trains, millions of people, and apparently millions of germs, because by the end Chris was feeling pretty sick. But we made it to London, got to our hotel, and got some rest.

Day 10 / Fri Dec 28th: Chris had full-blown flu and Sharon was heading downhill. But after a morning of sleeping in, we decided to head out and salvage what we could of our London trip, and at least get to the top two sights on our list. Sharon’s top priority was the Wellcome Collection, a medical museum, an amazing collection of artifacts gathered by a wealthy tycoon. Then Chris’ top priority was the Tate Modern art museum and specifically seeing Christian Marclay’s The Clock (click for explanation). We accomplished that, saw a bit of the museum including the “tanks”, and then headed back to the hotel for rest.

Day 11 / Sat Dec 29th: Chris’s health was improving but Sharon was in terrible shape. Chris headed out and managed to see some sights, but it was less fun doing it alone. The two major destinations today were the Greenwich Observatory and the Borough Market, both equally astonishing and wonderful, followed by a visit to the Imperial War Museum and the Holocaust exhibit there. After heading back to the hotel and checking in on Sharon, Chris headed back out for some evening wandering, combining some bus rides and riverfront walks to see a few more sights including the Tower of London (from the outside) and the Tower Bridge. The CityMapper smartphone app was very helpful in navigating all this, providing excellent guidance on transit routing and status — fumbling with paper maps and train schedules is definitely a thing of the past, and much more time is spent simply enjoying the trip instead of struggling with travel logistics. You just need a phone with internet access, which is another thing that has gotten easier to pull off in recent years. The evening ended up with a long taxi ride, where Chris spotted and hailed one of the new electric taxis that are now appearing in London, and had a long chat with the taxi driver, who was quite proud of his shiny new EV!

Day 12 / Sun Dec 30th: Travel day! The usual train out to Heathrow was shut down for the day (for planned reconstruction) so we took an expensive taxi out. Checkin and security was uneventful — what a nice contrast with CDG in Paris, which has been a disaster every time! Our plane departed on time, and Chris got through another three movies: Death Of Stalin (fantastic!), The Party and RBG. We were both in pretty bad shape by the end, and very very happy to be back home after a final taxi ride.

So, the Germany segment of the trip, the bulk of the trip, was fantastic, and the London part was pretty terrible. We’ll have to give London another shot someday in the future. Here’s a list of places we had planned to go in London, noted for next time: Brixton Village, Gasholder Park, the Old Operatory Theater, We Built This City, Horniman Museum, and a Premier League game (e.g. at Wembley Stadium).

Note: I drafted this post in 2018 but I guess I never finished it and I definitely never published it. In 2025, when Typepad shut down and I moved these posts to a new domain, I discovered this old post sitting here drafted. I am publishing it now as-is (backdated to 2018) to capture my thoughts, but please be aware that it is unpolished, both in the writing itself (e.g. grammar) and in the tone (e.g. maybe I said something regrettable that I would have edited out later). That said, here I go, pushing the publish button …

Two recent, related articles:

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

An Interview With ‘Losing Earth’ Author Nathaniel Rich

I probably first became aware of the climate change problem during the 1987-1988 presidential campaign. Al Gore was one of the leading candidates (he ended up coming in third for the Democratic nomination), and the looming climate change problem was one of the pillars of his campaign. He had been trying to draw attention to it since the 1970s, and as the NYT piece recounts, once he had enough power in Congress to do so in the early 1980s, he had held weekly hearings on scientific topics including global warming. Quote from somewhere:

The American Petroleum Institute [commissioned a study from the] Stanford Research Institute … in 1968, which concluded that the burning of fossil fuels would bring “significant temperature changes” by the year 2000 and ultimately “serious worldwide environmental changes,” including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap and rising seas. It was “ironic,” the study’s authors noted, that politicians, regulators and environmentalists fixated on local incidents of air pollution that were immediately observable, while the climate crisis, whose damage would be of far greater severity and scale, went entirely unheeded. And that was a decade after the 1957 study by Humble Oil, an Exxon precursor, that tried to quantify how much of the surging CO2 in the atmosphere was due to oil and gas, and thus represented a liability exposure for those companies.

We, as a society, have made many, many grave mistakes over the decades and centuries. Slavery, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Jim Crow. Japanese interment camps and Guantanamo. Reagan tax cuts and the T—p tax cuts. Most of these are now clearly seen as errors; some are perhaps too recent to yet be recognized as such.

But all are ultimately reversible. Sure, the damage was done, to generations of African-Americans, to Japanese families, to our children in the form of the national debt. But, over time, one can hope that time and steady effort will heal those wounds.

Climate change is different. It is truly irreversible, at least on the timescales of human civilizations. Those glaciers took many millennia to accumulate. The aquifers were holding truly ancient “fossil” water. All that carbon in the ground, in the form of fossil fuel, accumulated there over many millions of years. We have been liquidating those assets in the blink of an eye, in geologic terms.

The bottom of the ecosystems will collapse. We’re already seeing this in the coral reefs,

Eventually we’ll start seeing this impact the ocean’s haline cycle, and then the shit will really hit the fan. Do you know how important the Gulf Stream is to Europe? They will get plunged into a neverending winter and a famine and refugee crisis that has literally never been seen in human history.

From the NYT piece: “[a scientist] has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable.”

For me, the best illustration of this is in the ice shelves protruding off the Antarctic continent. Those shelves are borne in glaciers on the Antarctic landmass, and reach the shore to extend out over the southern ocean. The part of the glacier close to land has been “stuck” to the land and has been flowing out slowly But in recent years, the melting of that ice has allowed seawater to encroach on that ice-land interface at the bottom of the glacier, and is working its way upstream, under the mass of ice. That seawater is now moving up under the glacier, causing it to accelerate its movement towards the sea.

You don’t undo that by simply stopping the global temperature. That would be like saying you can stop

All this is of course terribly sad.

It’s our generation’s central failure. Previous generations have failed to deal with their problems (slavery, national debt) but later generations corrected the errors. Climate change is uncorrectable — you can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube. And for the rest of human history, we will be cursed for it.

Politically, the must repulsive aspect of this is that those responsible, the GOP that was so perfectly corrupted by oil money, will manage to reframe the conversation as if it isn’t their fault. And they’ll succeed, because the idiot army the Republicans have been cultivating since the 1990s no longer listens to facts or can think critically.

This isn’t meant to be alarmist. It’s meant to be a requiem. It’s so terribly sad that our society drove itself off a cliff like this.

The New York Times article really is a beautiful piece of journalism. You should read it.

Sharon and I again went to the annual Big Ears music festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s such a great festival that it really doesn’t matter who’s headlining — we will just go.

I’ll forget who we saw this year, so …

Thursday:

Prototype film screening (C&S) — hyped, terrible

Anna Thorvalsdottir / Intl Contempory Ensemble (C) — meh, fine

Susanna (C&S) — killing time, really, and it was pretty bad

Duet For Theremin and Lap Steel (C&S) — ATL hometown buddies made good!

Godspeed You Black Emporer (C?) — didn’t really care for them before, and now still don’t

Friday:

Bang On A Can All-Stars “Field Recordings” (C) — really good! was bracing for insufferable pretentiousness

Nief Norf & Wordless Music “Brimstone and Glory” live score — fantastic, a festival highlight

Algiers (C) — really incredible rock performance

Arto Lindsay (C) — either a disaster or a Brazilian poly-rhythmic delight, not sure which

Jenny Scheinman et al (C) — fine

Jaga Jazzist (C) — please kill me

The Thing (C) — only caught the end but it was good, nice to see Mats Gustafson again, some 20 years later

Jason Moran “Fats Waller Dance Party” (C) — pretty good and fun, and that singer, hoo boy

Saturday:

Rushes Ensemble (C) — “seven bassons” is better than it sounds, a festival highlight

Kid Koala’s Satellite Turntable Orchestra (C) — a crowd pleaser and he’s an engaging performer

Aine O’Dwyer performing William Eggleston (C) — pipe organ in a church, surprisingly fun and funny, ask me about it

Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda (C) — utterly unique and spellbinding

Diamanda Galas (C&S) — the headlining reason that mandated our attendance to this festival; electrifying

Four Tet (C) — no

12-Hour Drone (C) — a logistical mess but Duet at least made it work during their hour

Sunday:

Tyshan Story Trio (C) — fine

Suuns (C) — their recorded output is fascinating but this left me flat; however I only had time for like 10 minutes …

Abigail Washburn and Wu Fei (C&S) — extremely talented and engaging peformers but also slick and somewhat saccharine

BANGS (C) — kept falling asleep, and also I now hate the Bijuo balcony seats

Nief Norf peforming Steve Reich (C&S) — fine

Lightning Bolt (C&S) — yee haw, that’s a good way to end a festival

After 16 years at my current employer, I’m finally moving on. I gave notice last week.

Long term, I am making a career change to a different technology sector. In recent years I’ve been increasingly interested in energy technologies, in particular because I truly think they are going to change the world. I’ve decided it’s time to put up or shut up, and fortunately I’ve been saving money for a very long time so I can afford to take this chance.

Medium term, I will be spending the next couple months working on some long-delayed personal projects, while I also reach out to some folks in my newly target tech sector.

Over the past year I’ve found that I’m just not capable of getting those personal things done on my own time. I work too hard at the day job — I can’t help myself, it seems, from continuously working on the next thing and never carving out time for any personal stuff, even just 30 minutes or so. And at home I tend to either focus on shorter term tasks (i.e. fixing some broken thing, paying the bills) or simply vegging out. So I’ve decided that the only way I’m going to make progress on these things is to quit my day job. I actually did this once before, in 2001, and back then it took me longer than expected to get the next job. As a result, I swore that I wouldn’t do that again, and for the past two years I’ve been quietly looking for the next thing will continuing at my current job. But in the last few months I’ve come to the realization that I don’t make enough time for non-work efforts like finding a new job or even just home projects. If I slid from my current job directly into the next one, all those personal projects would continue to languish. And of a lot of those projects are quality-of-life things that I’ve been trying to get done for literally 3-4 years.

So while I do have very specific ideas for my next career move, I haven’t been putting enough effort into making those ideas a reality. And I’ve decided that I need to clear out my workday to make that happen.

Of course, there are things that are pushing me out of my current job from the inside. I see a lot of corporate dysfunction, which you probably would eventually see anywhere, if you worked somewhere long enough. And I will probably encounter it again at my next job, but I plan for my next job to be closer aligned with my personal interests, and so I think I’ll be willing to tolerate it more. Certainly, when starting over at a new place, you start with a clean slate and simply aren’t aware of the dysfunction lurking beneath the surface. Since I expect my next job will be a much smaller company (one focused on the cleantech sector), at the very least it would be a different set of problems than the ones I’m encountering at the huge company I’m at now. Anyway, it just seems to get worse and worse at my current workplace, and that’s just another sign to me that it’s time to move on.

I’ve always felt like a fish out of water at my current workplace, but that concept crystallized for me a few years ago. It’s weird, I remember when it happened. Nearly six years ago, I somehow had the realization that I just couldn’t “relax” and fit into the lazy work culture I saw around me. I had actually tried it for a while, “kicking back” as it were, and just couldn’t do it. In May 2012 I guess a lightbulb turned on over my head — I decided that I personally was happier when working my ass off, and so I started doing just that, and there was plenty of work to do. By 2014 I noticed that my efforts weren’t really being rewarded by the company — I mean, a 3.5% raise for working your ass off vs a 2% raise for sitting around? These are pathetic numbers but frankly what one has to expect in a large company, especially when working in a non-management role. So that’s when I decided I need to move on, but I had a huge project I had to get done first, and that project literally took me from 2014 to 2016. Then in 2017 there was one more “smaller” project, that I decided to stick around for, but I’ve now wrapped that up, and it’s time to move on.

I like to think I’m doing this because I still have some ambition in me. I want to work in cleantech, instead of just following the news about it, and I have some specific ideas about what cleantech niche I want to work in. Eventually I can see spending both my professional time and my free time in this sector, in that I can see charitable applications for the technology. For example, it could deploy to the third world, or to disaster areas, and help start (or restart) the local power grid. I can see that this stuff is going to change the world, and I want to be part of that.

First, though, I need to get through the next four weeks, wrapping up at my current job. Then I’ll spend a couple months work on the long-delayed personal projects, and then I’ll dive back into the corporate world, this time doing something that’s personally meaningful.

Wish me luck!

The folks at Riot Fest aimed their bazooka of cash at Jawbreaker and convinced them to reunite. Naturally, I wasn’t going to miss it.

Gotta document who else I saw while there, some good, mostly bad. Riot Fest is a “punk rock” festival, with a lot of throwback bands, but it’s pretty heavy on the shitty corporate punk of the 90s. I spent a lot of time avoiding terrible bands and their fans.

Nonetheless, there were some highlights. The image here is the printed schedule I was carrying around in my back pocket during the weekend, checking it constantly to decide who to see next.

FRIDAY

Saul Williams — came out and lectured us (no music) for 30 minutes. It was good.

X – seen only from a distance since they were playing on one of the two massive main stages. They dutifully played all the hits. Seen several times before, and I’ll just remember those shows instead.

Buzzcocks – ditto as with X above; it’s just Pete Shelley with a backup band, and a little painful to watch. Actually Steve Diggle may have been up there, but I was waaaay too far back to make him out, and the camera just sat on Pete, so time to move on …

Chon – I relaxed in the grass near this more remote stage, and was treated to the jam band noodling of this presumably stinky quartet.

Ministry – played newer stuff I guess, because I didn’t recognize a thing until they closed with “So What”. And once they were finally playing something I knew, the animated dude next to me ruined it by offering me a joint to buy and then getting pissy when I declined.

New Order – only caught a little bit of their set, kind of dreary like Buzzcocks, being so remote and all the camera attention on one guy.

Nine Inch Nails — I really tried to get closer to the stage (huge main stage) for this one, not so much to see the band (seen ’em in 1990) but to get a feel for how to get closer to the stage for future bands. Dear God there were a lot of people to plow through. This festival was huge. I weaved through people for a while and still never really got close. Noted.

SATURDAY

Peaches — got there in time to catch the tail end of her set. Ha, tail end. She is freaking awesome. I have regretted missing her perform in Atlanta like 15 years ago, and happily she’s still killing it. Very obscene, femme friendly, extremely fun. (Weeks later, Sharon and I would make sure to see her at the East Atlanta festival, and she was just as good.)

Shabazz Palaces — I liked their recorded material enough to want to see them, but I guess it didn’t translate to stage. At least not for me, and I’ll admit I didn’t wait for long.

Bad Brains — yes, no shit, Bad Brains. They’re basically ancient by now, and HR is possibly not much longer on this earth, but they still did a great job. They played all the hits, and the crowd was super appreciative. Dude from Lamb Of God showed up halfway through the set to close it out in true hardcore style. This is probably on Youtube.

Danzig — worst thing ever. I can not understand why people like this guy. No, it’s not funny. See also: Donald J. T—p.

The Regrettes — indeed, I have regrets.

Gogol Bordello — playing main stage, so I couldn’t really get close without some effort, which I felt no need to do since I’d already seen them twice years ago. They are great, for sure, but it just seems like schtick now. I’m so jaded!

WuTang Clan — KILLED IT. They were playing one of the side stages, thankfully, which made it a lot easier to get close, and daaamn that was a lot of fun. I’m not going to pretend to know their material, but I’ve certainly know of them since the early days. I staked out a good spot near the side of the stage, and just before they started, a gaggle of fratty bros careened in and were generally being assholes. Meh, this is their world not mine. But those bros did know their Wu-Tang, singing along with every bit, knowing every word. OK then! At some point one of these very amped-up but very-stoned meatheads decided I was cool and kept giving me fist bumps and offering me weed. Actually a couple people did. Great show.

Also, to open that show, the WTC invited a couple dozen community activists from Chicago to come up and be recognized for their heroic efforts in reducing the rampant violence that has been plaguing Chicago. The centerpiece was a 10 minute spoken word play / speech / performance by a group of teenagers; it was absolutely incredible, and for the life of me Google won’t tell me what the name of the troupe was.

After that, I watched Queens Of The Stone Age from an impossible distance, for about 5 minutes, and then I was outta there.

SUNDAY

That Dog — arrived in time to catch the last 15 minutes of so of these ladies.

The Voluptuous Horror Of Karen Black — one of my must-see bands, and they delivered! Frontwoman Kembra Pfahler is the sister of Jawbreaker drummer Adam Pfahler, and I’d seen them before in the 1990s, so I knew what to expect — a rock and roll freak show. Insane makeup, huge wigs, heavy guitars and drums, theremin played well by a very pretty gay dude, and lots of goofy banter. Normally they play only NYC and LA, so this was a rare opportunity for sure. A great show!

The Orwells — recommended by a friend, and also by some dude at the festival wearing a tshirt that said “who the fuck are the Orwells” in huge letters, so I dutifully stopped and asked him that question. They’re from Chicago and they were definitely good. Front man has a lot of snarl and swagger and steals the show, but the band behind him is great too and stands on their own. Which we got to see when the frontman stomped off near the end of their set to go climb the stage rigging …

Versus — another must-see band for me. This band is why I drove to Raleigh NC several years ago, and that show was fantastic. This one was more muted, probably because they were just another band in a rather expensive music festival, one that wasn’t really geared to their style (indie pop, Merge, etc.) They had the smallest audience I saw of the entire weekend, and their set was necessarily limited to 30 minutes. Still, I love the sound of this band so much.

Dinosaur Jr — played You’re Living All Over Me in entirety, and I gotta say it was great. It just creeps me out a little when bands are asked to play an old album all the way through — it seems insulting to ask them to do that. In between songs, they did an instrumental minute of Husker Du’s Diane (think bass chords) in tribute to Grant Hart, who had passed away a couple days prior, but I’m not sure that anyone in the crowd recognized the tune.

GWAR — new vocalist, replacing Oderus, R.I.P. They played the smallest stage but to a massive crowd. The usual spectacle, although they seem to have upgraded their red liquid delivery technology.

Jawbreaker — the whole reason I was here, saved for the very end. I worked my way up to within decent range of the stage very early, during the prior band’s set, which means I had to listen to the awfulness that is the Prophets Of Rage and their pandering cover tunes. But it ended soon enough. Happily, Jawbreaker opened with the one song that eeeeverybody knows and that I haaaaate (1, 2, 3, 4, who’s punk blah blah blah), which was awesome because it got that shit out of the way so I could enjoy the show without living with the cloud of that thing hanging over me. Haha, I know. Anyway, the show was completely surreal, seeing them on a colossal stage with not only a bazillion people in the audience, but with literally hundreds cramming the backstage around them (on three sides). Everyone was there to be part of it, watching these three guys pour their hearts out once again. They played a couple very early songs (Kiss The Bottle and Want), nothing off Unfun I don’t think, a bunch off 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, a bunch off Dear You, and closed with Bivouac. Blake’s voice survived.

Looking at the schedule, I did see lot of the other bands (see my annotations here), but apparently they were all utterly forgettable.

No regrets!

We’re going on a trip! Back in 2006, for our 10th anniversary, we went to Japan and New Zealand (via what ended up being two separate trips). In Christmas 2014, for our 20th anniversary, I (Chris) gave Sharon an inflatable globe and a magic marker and told her to pick where she wanted to go. After months of obsessing about it, she decided on southeast Asia — Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, that whole peninsula.

Then 2015 went by. I was too busy with work to go on a big trip, but knew that the project I was working on would eventually get to the point where I could travel again. By the end of 2015 the end was in sight so we started talking about the trip again. Again we both agreed that our heart was just not in it, at least not a full-blown, epic trip to southeast Asia. So we reevaluated, and somehow stumbled across the idea of Iceland. It started out as a “quick trip” to Iceland (it’s not as far as the rest of Europe) but then snowballed.

So, here’s the plan:

Iceland

Arrive in Reykjavik (via JFK) and spend two days exploring the city and acclimating.

Rent a campervan (from snail.is) and hit the road. We will be driving the Ring Road that encircles the island, taking 7 days / 7 nights to see everything that we can. We will be so far north that, at this time of year, it never actually gets completely dark — the sun sets for a while around midnight, but it only gets dusky, never completely dark. So with all that daylight we should get lots of sightseeing done, in theory at least.

Then we spend a full day getting from Iceland to the other part of the trip, via a short stop in Helsinki.

St. Petersburg

I have wanted to visit the Hermitage for many years, ever since seeing Russian Ark in the theaters. We’ll be in SPB for 3 full days, and the Hermitage will be the centerpiece of that visit, but we’ll also see lots of other things, of course.

Back to Atlanta via a connection in Paris.

EDIT: the trip went great! Unlike previous trips, we never wrote about it here, rather posted pictures to Facebook. Ah, the scourge of Facebook. If you want to see pictures and read the stories, go the Facebook profile of either me or Sharon, go to photos, and look for the two photo albums we put together there.

Time for the annual MLA trip! Sharon has an annual professional conference that she goes to, and every year it’s held in a different city. I always take vacation days to tag along and do sightseeing.

Rundown of what I/we did:

Friday May 13th:

Arrived at airport to discover that our cell phones didn’t work. I realize that we are outside the US, but this is still North America and Canada is on the same NA freqency band plan as the US. And I have a brand new phone! Seriously pissed about this, and it put a huge logistical dent in the rest of the trip. And a dent in my wallet as I compensated with various technology purchases.

Met up with my Dad and his fiancee in Don Mills for dinner.

Saturday May 14th:

The weather sucked so it was a good day to NOT be doing a lot of sightseeing. Went to brunch with more family and that took up the day through 3pm. Sharon got sick and crashed at the hotel. I went out to get my bearings in this town and did a little necessary shopping: bought a burner phone for Sharon (my work phone was functioning) from a tiny storefront, and bought a Toronto city guide from a chain bookstore in the huge Eaton Center mall. I really needed that book, since I hadn’t actually done a single bit of trip pre-planning.

Sunday May 15th:

Weather continuing to suck (cold and rainy) but it’s going to get better on Monday. Sharon was at her conference in the morning, and I took it easy at the hotel. In the afternoon I visited my Dad to deal with his accumulated computer problems. Actually saw a snow flurry on the way there. I am now a pro at the Toronto transit system, which is quite good; thank God for NextBus. Had dinner with the folks and while Sharon attended more conference functions.

Monday May 16th

OK, here we go, actual sightseeing. Today would be my one day of bumming around by myself. alas it was a Monday so most museums were closed, but the Royal Ontario Museum was open so I took advantage of that (tattoo exhibit, bat cave, Judiasm exhibit and much more, and kooky architecture of course). Then walked through U of Toronto campus (past some sort of track meet) to a bikeshare stop and then biked all the way back downtown. Which was easy because Toronto slopes gently downhill towards Lake Ontario to the south. Biked all the way out to the water, dropped off the bike (penalties kick in after 30 minutes) and walked along the waterfront until I found some food. Well, it was a pastry shop, but they had poutine which was good enough for my needs. Picked up a bike again and biked out to the edge of the tiny (and somewhat controversial) downtown airport, then back to the hotel. Actually, I just went straight into the conference center to see Sharon doing her poster presentation — sneaking in with the counterfeit badge that Sharon made for me! From there, we hurried over to the Bata Shoe Museum, which was really good. Then we caught a streetcar down to Chinatown, and after a couple stops in cramped asian goods stores, we found a restaurant that took credit cards (we were attempting to make this a cashless trip) and settled down with some hot pot. After dinner, we took the streetcar down to the CN Tower, by way of the waterfront, intending to go up the tower, but a storm rolled in so we skipped that. Instead, we walked a few blocks over to the historic and beautiful (and colossal) Royal York Hotel where we enjoyed a cocktail in the Library Bar (after some people watching in the ornate lobby). Back to the hotel and some serious planning for Tuesday, which would be jam packed.

Tuesday May 17th

Second day of good weather and serious sightseeing. Took a streetcar out to the Distillery District, walked around and did some shopping. From there we walked along the Esplanade to the St. Lawrence Market, chock full of fresh meat and produce vendors on the main floor and all sorts of crazy dry goods on the lower floor. Had a peameal bacon sandwich, because that’s what you are supposed to do, and it was lunchtime. Walked towards midtown, stopping briefly in the Hudson’s Bay department store where I had a brief fantasy of buying a light coat (I need one) but quickly changed my mind. Walked through the huge and surprisingly pleasant Eaton Center mall, then through Nathan Philips Square past both the old city hall (1899) and the new city hall (1965) and ended up at the Art Gallery Of Ontario. Clock ticking, we spent an hour there and then hustled back to the hotel for about 45 minutes of rest before heading back out to dinner date with family.

Wednesday May 18th

CN Tower, finally. They have one of those glass floors, which I am genetically incapable of standing on. Airport. Home.

Regrets / to-do next time:

Toronto Islands

Mirvish Village

Casa Lomo

Ontario Science Center

Tot The Cat Cafe

sailing on Lake Ontario with family, visiting Lake

Niagara Falls

baseball game or hockey game

High Park

botanical garden

Big Ears (website/wikipedia) is an annual music festival that takes place in Knoxville in early spring every year lately. It’s not a rock festival, more like a jazz / electronic / weird music festival. Here’s how Atlanta music writer Chad Radford described it in 2015:

… The annual weekend of jazz, modern classical composition, minimalism, and improvised music rattles the street signs and storefronts of downtown Knoxville. Why these nebulous strains of experimental music are placed on the same lineup isn’t spelled out in an easy explanation. Big Ears’ website steers clear of pushing the festival as a forum for any particular musical genre. The festival’s identity is as much of an enigma as the music and the audience that will descend upon Knoxville when Big Ears returns …. Big Ears’ unifying aesthetics are steeped in musical abstraction and impressionism, and include a spectrum of sounds from droning ambiance and elegant string arrangements to squelching feedback.

Two years ago, some of my friends went to it and came back crowing about how great it was. ONE year ago, I really wanted to go but could not for some reason, and that weekend seemingly EVERYONE I knew was up in Knoxville having fun. So this year, dammit, I booked the weekend and was going no matter what. And Sharon was coming with me!

Here’s a rundown of everything we were part of:

Thursday:

drove up from Atlanta (more on that below) and arrived in town at around 7pm

Knoxville Symphony Orchestra performing John Luther Adams

Sun Ra Arkestra with Marshall Allen

dinner at the nearby Public House while waiting for a line of storms that never came

Yo La Tengo, performing an hour of drone!

and THEN the storms finally came, and we had to run home through it. We were completely drenched!

Friday:

Tony Conrad short films: The Flicker, Landscape Is A Wish for Motion, Weak Bodies and Strong Wills, Beholden to Victory, In Line, Palace of Error, I’ve Never Been, Teddy Tells Jokes, Straight and Narrow. Mr. Conrad was supposed to be present but had taken ill, and in fact passed away just days later. R. I. P. Tony Conrad. This collection was fantastic!

nief-norf

lunch with Scott and Frank

Lou Reed “Drones” (six guitars in continuous feedback, with bean bags)

John Luther Adams piece in an old church

Eighth Blackbird with Bonnie Prince Billy and Bryce Dessner

dinner at Cru Bistro

Outside The Dream Syndicate with Faust — was supposed to be with Tony Conrad, but in his absence it was just the Faust duo (Diermaier on drums and Péron on bass) with a few more backing musicians, including Laurie Anderson hiding behind the amp stacks!

Yo La Tengo and Lambchop, in a show that would not end, with a moronic audience member right behind me

Saturday:

We split up, and I took it easy for the morning.

Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass

The Necks

dinner someplace?

Sunn O)))

Kamasi Washington

drinks with Scott and Frank

Sunday:

John Luther Adams composition for countless percussionists in a park that used to be a quarry

Drove home!

And now the drive … I really like to drive my own electric car whenever possible. However it does have range limitations — it can go about 80 miles on a full charge, and then you need to stop and plug it in for “a while”. How long depends on the type of stations. Increasingly, we are seeing “DC Fast Charging” stations appear around the region, and so last year I wagered that by now, March 2016, there would be enough DCFC stations along the route for me to make the run in an electric car. And indeed, just weeks before the Knoxville trip, a couple new stations went online on the I-75 corridor.

At right is the map that I sketched out when planning the trip, mostly to assuage Sharon’s reasonable concerns but also as a quick reference during the trip. In that map, the orange markers are for DCFC stations, and the black numbers are miles between stops.

We drove up (north) along the western route via I-75, and then drove down (south) along the eastern route via the Great Smoky Mountains. On each route, two of our three stops were relatively quick DCFC stops (30 minutes each), and one stop was using a slow charging station (about 90 minutes).

There was some drama along the way, no doubt. On the way up, the car seemed to get confused and kept giving me ludicrously low range values — sort of like your gas needle suddenly plunging to empty. I could see though that the range was good and we made it with no sweat (well, little sweat). On the way down, one of the charging stations in the mountains was non-functional, so I lost some time there.

In all, though, the trip was a success, and this is just the beginning. Every year the DCFC infrastructure grows by leaps and bounds. As I type this, the I-85 corridor up to the Carolinas and beyond is just about online. Electric vehicles are about to clear the last hurdle — road trip capability.

See you in Knoxville next March!

Yesterday’s announcement was hugely important, and in this writeup (and in the links below) I’m going to try to illustrate how. I hope you’ll take a minute to read this, because it’s a big deal. If you can’t be bothered, at least watch the first few minutes of the video I’ve embedded above to hear how happy and proud the NSF director is of this achievement, funded by the US taxpayer.

400 years ago, Galileo Galilei obtained an early optical telescope, turned it to the sky and observed the moons of Jupiter for the first time. Noting that the little dots were moving AROUND Jupiter, he realized that things might not all be revolving around Earth, which ultimately had obvious ramifications for science (and theology).

330 years ago, Isaac Newton came up with the mathematical laws that describe the natural motion of objects. Gravity, mass, F=ma … he laid it all out in Principia, and those laws stood for centuries.

100 years ago, Albert Einstein theorized that “Newtonian” physics was in fact just an approximation, that the reality was that space and time were intertwined, indeed that even energy and matter were interchangeable.

Since then, scientists and engineers have been looking for direct confirmation of all of the effects predicted by Einstein’s theories. Some were confirmed very quickly, such as Eddington’s confirmation during a 1919 solar eclipse of the effect on light beams, merely 4 years after Einstein’s publication. With the advent of the space age in the 1950s, Einstein’s theories were then proven correct countless times, and (for example) our GPS system would not function if Einstein were wrong.

But one effect had not been observed: gravitational radiation (gravity waves). The effect was so impossibly weak, even in the theory, that it was just impossible to detect. Even the strongest waves (from black holes annihilating each other) would take ludicrous precision to detect — measuring the distance to the nearest STAR to the precision of the width of a human hair.

40 years ago, technology had improved to the point that researchers started to think it might be feasible to detect those strongest waves, and so the National Science Foundation started funding development of the technology and systems. Over time, this would become the largest and most ambitious project ever funded by the NSF.

25 years ago, construction started on the first “observatories” (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory or LIGO), two pairs of long tunnels in the US countryside with sensitive equipment that MIGHT detect the waves. A decade later, in 2002, the system went online, but failed to detect anything for years. In 2009 they upgraded the systems to gain higher senstivity and tried again — still nothing.

Last fall, they completed another upgrade to the system, now dubbed Advanced LIGO, and very quickly observed their first wave. Five months later, that data has been reviewed and vetted by the community, and they’re absolutely sure of it.

Just as Galileo’s first telescope changed astronomy forever, and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is providing new insights into quantum physics, yesterday’s announcement opens a whole new window into the universe. This is just the very first glimmer of a look at gravitational radiation, and just as optical (and radio, and X-ray, and gamma ray) telescopes have improved over the past centuries, and microscopes have delved deeper and deeper into the minutiae of matter, we now stand at the doorstep to whole new way of looking at the universe, via gravity waves.

The press conference video that I have embedded above really does a fantastic job of explaining all this, even to an average person. Each person speaks for just a few minutes and provides their own video animation to illustrate what this is all about. Watch 3 minutes, watch 10 minutes, watch 30 minutes or watch the whole thing. You will see some of the happiest scientists on the planet, and some of the best video illustrations of what all this about that you will ever find.

USA! USA!

Other links:

The chirp!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egfBaUdnAyQ

Here’s a great overview of what happened when in the runup to yesterday’s announcement:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_gravitational_physics_and_relativity

Remember that recent sci-fi movie Interstellar, the one with Matthew McConaughey? Kip Thorne was the lead scientific consultant on it, and he co-founded the first gravity wave detector. He was on the dias for the press conference I link to hear (last speaker) and spoke eloquently of the historical context of this. Here’s a lecture of his from 2005 on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXaukctamdQ

A neat illustration of the sensitivity of the various systems. Note how improving from LIGO to Advanced LIGO allowed them to dip deeper into the region where the theory said they should detect gravity waves — and they did!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO#/media/File:LIGO_detector_sensitivity_curve.png

Last fall, PBS’s flagship science program NOVA devoted an hour to describing Einstein’s revelations. The entire program is absolutely worth watching, but at least drop in on the last couple minutes (starting at 47m00s) where they discuss what was yet unconfirmed — gravity waves!

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/inside-einsteins-mind.html

Georgia Tech computer scientists have already been creating simulations of the binary black hole merger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pryd0mUmbCM

https://twitter.com/AstroKPJ/status/697808292022718464

Georgia Tech’s Laura Cadonati explains what gravitational waves are, how they were observed on September 14, 2015, and why they unlock more secrets of the universe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu64i49Y_ps

A quick overview of the significance of yesterday’s announcement, produced by Chicago’s Adler Planetrium … “The universe is speaking to us. Up to now, we have been deaf to what is happening.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGoVqalcST0

Here’s the Rochester Institute of Technology crowing about how their computational simulations helped the LIGO team know what to look for. Pretty cool graphics at 1m30s, showing the evolution of the spin vectors as the black holes collide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOGOR69HsKM

Some of the scientists did an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/45g8qu/we_are_the_ligo_scientific_collaboration_and_we/

I went on a rare work trip, to Los Angeles, and after the first couple days of work managed to have some free time in the evenings to go see stuff.

I’ve been to LA twice before. My first time was in 2003, when I went to visit my sister (in Orange County) and did some initial sightseeing. As I recall, we went to Watts Towers and the Getty museum, besides just hanging out.

The second time was in 2011, a work trip, and I was able to do some high-speed sightseeing of some more places: the Hollywood Bowl, the Warner Brothers backlot, Mulholland Drive, Santa Monica beach, a downtown art gallery … I had tried to get to Griffith Observatory but it was under renovation, or maybe just JAMMED with people on a Friday night, I forget which but I failed to get in. I also drove out to Pasadena to try to see JPL, but they are not set up to accept the public. Just once a year they have “Open House Day“, and it is my dream to get out to it someday.

This time I had another list of places, and more time than usual to tackle it. Via RelayRides/Turo, I rented a Volkswagen e-Golf, an electric version of the Golf that is available only in the California market. That gave me the mobility to zip around and see things — although “zip around” is a relative term in Los Angeles.

I saw my sister Julienne rappel down a skyscraper! By pure coincidence she was also in LA at a conference, and she was participating in a charity event where people were descending down the side of a 27-story downtown tower. I can barely look over the edge of a building that’s five stories tall — I can’t imagine actually stepping off. But I was able to duck away from work that one morning to watch her do it, and be a welcoming face when she reached the bottom, alive and well.

Art museums and other sights:

The Broad

Los Angeles County Art Museum (LACMA)

La Brea Tar Pits

Griffith Observatory (finally!)

SpaceX factory (drive around, and snuck into the campus a little bit)

Amoeba Records

Junk food:

Mexicali Tacos

Tito’s Tacos

Pink’s

Tommy’s

Places that were recommended that I didn’t get to:

Museum of Jurassic Technology

Arcana Books

Huntington Beach library and garden