Jason Wells

This morning I read an interesting article written by David Frum. I almost feel sorry for the guy. He’s one of a dying breed of Republicans–the kind that can think and are sane. That is, the kind that are getting purged from his party more and more as RINOs. I didn’t know much about him, so I poked around a little. I discovered this idea of his:

When I was in law school, I devised my own idiosyncratic solution to the problem of studying a topic I knew nothing about. I’d wander into the library stacks, head to the relevant section, and pluck a book at random. I’d flip to the footnotes, and write down the books that seemed to occur most often. Then I’d pull them off the shelves, read their footnotes, and look at those books. It usually took only 2 or 3 rounds of this exercise before I had a pretty fair idea of who were the leading authorities in the field. After reading 3 or 4 of those books, I usually had at least enough orientation in the subject to understand what the main questions at issue were — and to seek my own answers, always provisional, always subject to new understanding, always requiring new reading and new thinking.

Essentially, this is the Google PageRank algorithm as it might exist inside one’s head. That is, an informal method for identifying people and works of high centrality. Not only is this a brilliant idea (predating Google by decades, if he did it when he was in law school!), but it illustrates that it’s possible for someone to be conservative and have a functional mind. Something liberal people might want to keep in mind before getting too smug. Whether or not it will be possible for a Republican to have a functional mind much longer… that’s a different story.

Note: This is the 6th in a series of entries in my Glacier National Park travel photo journal. If this is new to you, please start with the first one for the full story of our adventures.

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September 11th. After breakfast we checked out of the hotel and signed up for a Red Jammer bus tour to a nearby Canadian destination, Waterton Lakes National Park. This is a fleet of really cool vintage vehicles. Their history is tightly bound with Glacier’s.

The Red Jammer is the signature of Glacier National Park, its icon. You see them all over the park. They were originally built in 1936 by the White Motor Company, a car manufacturer long since out of business. There’s a separate door for each row of bench seats reflecting its touring sedan design origins. Each has a canvas roof stretched across the top that can be removed on nice days.

Each bus originally had a wooden frame and an older form of manual transmission. Because of the steep inclines and low-power engines, the drivers had to downshift a lot, making a loud crunching sound. The drivers came to be known as “gearjammers,” or jammers for short.

Through a very complex chain of events, they were almost replaced permanently with ordinary vans, but were later gutted and renovated by Ford. They now have metal chassis, have modern engines converted to run on propane and have automatic transmissions. So the gearjamming days are long gone, but the drivers are still called jammers. I don’t really want to give the full history here, but it is worth checking out. If you don’t take a ride on a Red Jammer out here, you’re missing something special.

So we got on our bus and it departed. We met Jammer Joe, the chatty, elderly driver of the bus. He was full of stories about the park, the buses and himself.

We left Glacier, passed through Babb and headed north on the highways just east of park. It was a beautiful, sunny day, so Jammer Joe pulled over and we took off canvas roof. Chief Mountain, an imposing mountain at the edge of the park, loomed in the distance.

We crossed Canadian border into Alberta. For anyone living in southern California, the term “border crossing” refers to the one between San Diego and Tijuana. That is the busiest land border crossing in the world. If you haven’t been through it, imagine spending three or four hours stuck in your car, hardly moving and baking in the sun, staring at concrete blast walls and security cameras; a circus of vendors hawking cheap junk, snacks and beverages or washing your windshield; and a battalion of border guards with large dogs moving from car to car, searching for illegal immigrants and drugs. That’s about as wonderful as it gets, assuming you don’t then get sent to secondary on a whim for a very slow and pointless search of your car by the ingratiating and very disrespectful guards. Everyone seems bored and pissed off; there’s a sullenness to the whole thing reminiscent of prisoner processing. It’s nasty.

But this border crossing could not be more different. The jammer pulled right up to the gate separating Montana from Alberta and waved to the guard. There was no line of cars in either direction. It was cool and sunny, and there were rolling hills and forest all around. The guard was stern but friendly and processed our passports efficiently. We were on our way in under 10 minutes. I remember it being just like this when crossing into Canada as a kid on a trip to Ontario. It’s really stunning how different the two borders are.

After relaxing half hour drive, we arrived at Waterton Lakes National Park. This is the Canadian sister park to Glacier, the smaller of the two. They share a side, and together they constitute the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park.

Once in the park, our destination was the Prince of Wales Hotel. This is a kind of mirror image of Many Glaciers Hotel. It’s the dominant hotel of the park, and was built in a similar Swiss chalet architectural style by the same company, the Great Northern Railway. There Heather and I had a traditional afternoon tea, in the lobby overlooking the lake, with a three-level tray of cucumber and salmon sandwiches, scones and pastries. Heather really loved it.

Afterwards we went to the hotel gift shop, and Heather got dry tea and maple cookies. Then we returned to the bus and left the hotel. Jammer Joe gave us a little driving tour of the town near the Prince of Wales Hotel. Then we left the park and began heading back to the border.

It was mid-afternoon. On the way back, Jammer Joe took us through a public range for grazing buffaloes. It was very empty, a little eerie, quiet and beautiful. It was wind-whipped pale yellow grasses surrounded by dark brown mountains. Eventually we found the buffaloes drinking water.

Afterwards we crossed back into the US. Once again, the crossing took just minutes. Shadows were lengthening, and Jammer Joe got us back a little later than expected. I doubt seeing the buffalos was part of the official tour, but I appreciated the detour, and it was no problem for us. Once we returned to Many Glacier Hotel, we hopped in the van and drove off. We took an unoccupied spot in the Many Glacier campground and set up camp.

I’ve been tinkering with Arduino again. For the past few days I’ve been reading the O’Reilly Arduino Cookbook and it rekindled my creativity. My latest accomplishment: creating an object that senses its own motion and when it moves, a light blinks. In other words, I bought this quarter-sized triple-axis accelerometer breakout board; practiced soldering to the point where I could solder a 6-pin header to its six tightly packed through-holes; created a 3.3V circuit on a breadboard connecting the three X/Y/Z outs to three analog pins on the Arduino; added an LED indicator on a separate 5V circuit to a digital pin; and then drove the whole thing with this code:

const int ledPin = 12; // digital output pin to the LED
const int xPin = 0;    // analog input pins from the accelerometer
const int yPin = 1;
const int zPin = 2;

void setup() {
  pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
  int xValue; // fresh values from accelerometer
  int yValue;
  int zValue;

  static int prevXValue; // values from the last execution of the loop
  static int prevYValue;
  static int prevZValue;

  xValue = analogRead(xPin);
  yValue = analogRead(yPin);
  zValue = analogRead(zPin);

  // do the new values equal the old ones?
  // (with a little sensor margin of error.)
  if(!(withinRange(xValue, prevXValue, 2) ||
    withinRange(yValue, prevYValue, 2) ||
    withinRange(zValue, prevZValue, 2))) blink();

  delay(100);

  prevXValue = xValue;
  prevYValue = yValue;
  prevZValue = zValue;
}

void blink() {
  digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);   // set the LED on
  delay(10);                    // wait 10ms
  digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);    // set the LED off
  delay(10);                    // wait 10ms again
}

// To add tolerance to sensor reading comparisons.
boolean withinRange(int a, int b, int width) {
  if(a >= (b - width) && a <= (b + width))
    return true;
  else
    return false;
}

And voila:

See, it blinks when it moves.

If you move this assemblage of bits and bobs in any way, the LED will blink. It knows when it moves and lets you know. Since this senses the real world and responds to it, this is the first thing I’ve made that really constitutes physical computing.

Aside from the soldering practice, I started on this project last night, worked on it for ~15 minutes, and finished it this morning before breakfast. Yeah, it’s simple, kid’s stuff really. But this kind of kit just didn’t exist when I was ten, at least not this easy to work with and not for the price of a dinner. (I wish it did!) Regardless, this device is a milestone for me, and something I plan to build upon for a future project.

This is a time-lapse video of Black Rock City as it appeared for Burning Man 2011:

There’s something very soothing about the playa experience presented this unique way, as a familiar object from an unfamiliar perspective. It seems like a beautiful cyclical fluorescence, a city coalescing, glowing and dissipating like a desert flower that only blooms once each year. From this perspective, far afield and with day and night flying by in just seconds, the direct, intense, high-energy immediacy of the experience–people, art cars, theme camps, fire, music–dissolves into the large-scale emergence of Black Rock City as a kind of annual organism, torn with whorls of dust in the sunlight, and at night, a radial reactor of high-energy multicolor electric bolts shooting within the city’s great arc. And throughout, the rituals are followed: setup, early arrival, arrival, the man burns, the temple burns, and exodus. Rather than a hyperactive explosion of consumption and hedonism, it almost seems like a religious gathering. Amazing.

Last night, Heather and I were watching an old episode of Reaper. (This is courtesy of Netflix through the home theater.) In it, at one point, the main character climbs out of a sewer. First thing I think of is the old Microsoft interview question, “Why are manhole covers round?”

Then just moments later, Heather is looking up something on her phone and discovers this:

Is this really the most common “why are” question Google gets? I know Google Instant is a bit more than that, but why manhole covers exactly? Does it know what you’re watching on other machines… or can it read minds?