São José dos Campos, Brazil

The name of the city sounds like Solapur Jaipur Delhi Chennai, made of multiple cities. But it is a single entity and means Saint Joseph of the Fields. A chance chain of communications made this the first point of my (first) visit to Brazil. I will be attending the LSST meeting in Rio next week. When that was decided I wrote to a couple of colleagues from the S20 meeting two years back and they graciously agreed to host me even though one of them is physically not here. That is how I ended up at INPE which does a lot of fun things in technology and science. Gave a seminar there on handling time series (not to mention the scramble to do a short remote presentation for the RAPID review).

Of the fields is a strange name. Its biggest claim to fame is a huge airforce base which is unlike any airforce base in US or almost anywhere. It seems mostly docile. But the city does have many parks and also a very large reserve right in the middle of today's city confirming to the name of fields. Kudos to them to have kept it that way.

Because the fields (I mean parks) are in Brazil, there are birds. And because Brazil is in the tropics, they are colorful. You here parakeets all the time almost exactly like in Pasadena. They are so colorful, that a subvariety had to be called plain parakeet. Otherwise normally the names are like red cheeked, blue tongued, yellow vented and so on.

Got to go around a couple of parks and saw several avian species. Thousands of km away from amazon (this is a biig country) and yet the trees are tall and the canopy is thick making it difficult for those illiterate in south american birds to identify many. Merlin puts its hands up early saying it can identify only 57% sounds here and asking if I can help. Good luck with that.

The colors on the Toucan are solid in all senses of the word. It sat on a  Juçara palm (Euterpe edulis) and gobbled its fruit in one go. At the Vicentina park there were Turkeys and Thrashes too. The Thrashes were like the Towhees of Pasadena. 

Toco Toucan on a Juçara palm

                                                       

The Roberto Burle Marx park flouted a greater variety owing to its water bodies. Kingfishers, Herons, Teals etc. but also few new species for me. A Hornero, and even a (Masked Water) Tyrant. I need to find out what kind of tyranny it does. Seemed rather docile to me. There is that word again. And speaking of it, did see a few Capybara that are described as the most relaxed rodents. They are pig sized herbivores, weigh over 50 kg, and just sit there ignoring everyone around. Fun life.

Does this look like a Tyrant?

A really relaxed rodent

Have been enjoying north eastern delicacies including what was like a samosa, but looked like a karanji. People are the same everywhere.

Is it a Samosa? A Karanji?

On to Rio.

Heidelberg, Germany

Staying near Bismarkplatz at one end of the old city and attending Astroinformatics 2018 at HITS on top of the mountain beyond the castle has meant a lot of walking. But the views are great. Seen here is a view of the city from the castle, and another of the Neckar river from the old bridge.

Bikes for rent in big cities

Many large (and several small) cities have bike racks with programs allowing you to rent the bikes with your credit card, or some special prepaid card, or, as recently done in Pasadena, by associating them with the local public transport system. It has not been clear to me how well the program works (or does not) in different cities. In Berkeley for instance there are some near the bottom of the hill, and some at the top. Would people always use them to just go downhill? That would ensure that the program goes downhill too, unless they are transported back frequently using a carrier.

Or what when the city streets are crowded and it is hot? I am presently in Santiago, Chile for a LSST meeting. The two conditions - crowded and hot - definitely apply to Santiago. As I walked from my AirBnB to the faculty of Engineering for the meeting, I noticed such a bike-rack with 20 spots, and no bike in sight. It was 8:30 AM, and if you wanted a single bike you could not get it. Was the program abandoned? Were the bikes stolen?

After a longish day, I returned at 6(.37) PM and found that now there were a few bikes there. It wasn't all that bad then. At least some people were using the program. Then, like the locals, I went out for dinner late. When I returned at 11(.42) PM, 17 of the spots now had bikes. Clearly the program is a success. If anything, they need more bikes. Though the roads are crowded, like most civilized cities there are some bike lanes and people clearly take advantage of it. One of my colleagues at the faculty of Medicine mentioned that she bikes to work as well.

Go Santiago. Ride.

   

The bike rack. The building on the left is where I stayed. 13th floor, lovely views.

Olympic National Park

18 Aug. 2015: National Park #28: Olympic National Park, Washington

The remote and secluded Olympic National Park. It was so as we had been to Seattle a few times but not gone to these Westerly remote parts. It was almost so until we got to the Hurricane Ridge where we were almost suddenly confronted by a full parking lot. AT&T did not care. It started announcing that it will now charge us at international rates for calling to the US.

While not in Canada, the park boundaries are indeed rather interesting. 101 goes on three sides of it and you are in and out of the park several times. Besides the ridge, did the Hoh river trail. A rather dry summer has meant that the rainforest is not its usual majesty. But under the tall spruce trees and by the river it is still wondrously cool. 

And then the fantastic Ruby beach. Water recedes at low tide on this flat beach allowing one access to areas normally under water. The ample drift wood on the shores is fun to jump around on, and the rocks jutting out of the ocean provide even more photo-targets.

Some of the Spruces at one point had tumors (galls) so huge that they warranted their own name: burls.

The town of Forks where we stayed has divided its 3500 residents into 3500 businesses all to do with twilight. Bella did this here, and Edward did that there and so on and on and on ...  Fills one with pathos. Will juxtaposing the church with their celebrated high-school help?

All that crawls

 

20 May 2015: If you have not been at a Crawfish Boil, you have to try it. This Cajun celebratory cuisine is so curious. The Crawfish are not fish. They are spiny lobsters, and are boiled with corn, potatoes, and perhaps onions and seasoning and then eaten by hand (peel the crust to get to the flesh). And oh, you are not supposed to eat the dead ones. They are dead when you eat them, but if they were dead before being boiled, their tails are supposed to be straight. I had a few to remind me of the experience from a decade back. The locals can, and do, eat a few pounds.

The occasion was indeed celebratory. This was the meeting dinner at LSU, Baton Rogue, for Arlo Landolt's 80th year, over 55 of them dedicated to defining and observing standard stars (spanning 2300 nights allocated at observatories). Many names encountered while calibrating data were present in flesh. History and lots of discussion on filter systems and standard stars.

After the dinner got to climb to the top of the Astronomy building which houses the Landolt Observatory. The lunar crescent was our target. Here is wishing many more years to Arlo ...

Fantastic and Fabulous

16 Jan 2015: Seen in a bookstore (MediaMart) at the Indira Gandhi International airport at New Delhi as I was getting ready to take off finishing my trip to India. The only way I can interpret "non-fiction" here is by assuming that they meant "fantasy".

I had to go to a few places for meetings, and in the background various religion-related events were unfolding. A meeting took me to Tezpur, my first trip to the North-East. Visited Kamakhya temple where the temple opens everyday  with a sacrifice of an animal (yes, even today). Later in New Delhi stopped by the National Museum which has a reproduction of Ashoka's edicts - from the third century BC - carved on rock-face, with one of them saying: do not sacrifice animals.

Watched PK in Nagpur and many people (Hindus) who have not seen the movie tried to get it banned (as it hurt their religious sentiments - the movie of course only mocks money making). In Delhi as I was heading to the airport, I heard that a tenth of a million disciples of MSG ("Messenger Of God") descended there in support of the movie. The censor board had denied permission to it on some grounds. And now the censor board chief has quit because someone is going over her head and giving it permission to be released. In solidarity with the Censor Board chief other team members are resigning as well.

I write this sitting at the CDG airport (Paris), and it was not far from here that the massacre over a picture happened. Whether Charlie Hebdo should have printed another cartoon is a question being asked by many. New York Times has refused to republish the cartoon, but it is their issue yesterday (international edition) that had a piece by David Carr which rightly says: "News and commentary of all sorts frequently causes pain to its subjects and the audience, but it is precisely the unruly and the offensive that require protection. No one is safe from the slings and arrows of unfettered speech: an image of Christ immersed in artist's urine, Sinead O'Connor  ripping a photo of the Pope in half, Eminem fantasizing in rhyme about killing his lover - all of it is intended to offend. But each is worthy in its own way of being defended."

If we want freedom of speech and expression, we need to practice the extreme at least once in a while. Otherwise it will stay so only in theory. Violent reactions as in Paris or as on the Bhandarkar institute in Pune a few years ago cannot be justified under any circumstances.

Cattle of Kaziranga

Sat., December 20, 2014

Unicorns are supposed to be majestic. It is downright funny when you see one rolling in mud. There are over 2000 of the Rhinoceros unicornis (Greater one-horned Rhinoceros, or the Indian Rhinoceros) in the Kaziranga National Park of Assam. Once the mud-bath is done they are spanking shining again (well, they do let the mud cake and then rub it off - all this is done to keep them insect free, as well as reduce sun-burns). That number 2000 accounts for ~70% from the entire world. This fifth-largest land-animal has made a great comeback. Lets hope it stays that way.

Rhinos are also territorial. They mark points along the perimeter with their dung, and they repeatedly visit that spot for the ritual. The volume and area is naturally large and the land fertile. Jungle folks often plant pumpkin seeds there for a bumper crop. Lovely flower fields too crop up. One of the elephants I rode on was kind enough to pick some of those flowers and pass thos one to the riders.