rainy season?

hi all,

it's been pouring buckets over the last four days or so... you just get used to feeling damp most of the time. i used to hate umbrellas, i hated carrying them, i hated walking on the sidewalk when everyone had them, but i think i've finally come around. this is more of a necessity here than other places i've lived in the past though, so it should come as no surprise to me. you all know the experience of standing on a porch in a summer thunderstorm and seeing spouts of rain sheet off the roof of the porch? ...here you get the same effect even though you're just standing under a small umbrella; water pours down all around you in a thin veil, reminiscent of a small garden fountain. people ride their bikes with umbrellas in hand, and in some cases you can see two people on one bike both holding umbrellas. i saw this just last night, and was kicking myself for not having my camera with me, since the image looked like something right out of a shigeki kuroda etching.

at this point, i only have five more weeks here in taipei and i am really trying to make the most of it. i've been thinking so much about my work that last night's dream was more a continuation of my research than a respite from it... one that you awake from with a start and unexpectedly blurt out, "synformal-axial-surface!". such is grad-school though... right?

it looks like the weather might improve for a couple of days... that last system is blowing out to sea and the air behind it looks pretty dry, maybe that will add to my motivation a little.

~t

highschool correspondence

hey all,

several things in the past weeks have had me thinking back to my old highschool, "acs"... 'the alternative community school' in ithaca, ny. i randomly decided to send a quick email to a bunch of the teachers who taught me while i was there, just saying hi, and what i'm doing now, and thanks for helping get me here in the first place. one of those teachers, who was responsible for getting me into my first academic conference in new mexico when i was about 14, responded with the question of what turned my interests to geology in the first place... my response is below.


"I think originally it was an excuse to study something that would allow me to spend lots of time exploring mountains... but in college that excuse quickly grew into a genuine interest and curiosity about the processes that move and change our planet. There are so many fields within the broad subject of geology that picking one I really enjoyed (and seemed to have a knack for) wasn't that hard... after some trial and error of course. Structural geology basically studies the geometry of brittle deformation in the earth's shallow rocks (the first ten kilometers or so, above the depth at which rock begins to behave as a ductile material) and Neotectonics/Kinematics is the study of the evolution of that deformation through time.... or 'how mountains are made'.

My real fascination with this field is the thought of just how impermanent things like mountains and oceans are. There is a quote somewhere that goes something like, "Societies exist on the whim of Geology" (though the actual quote is much more elegant... I can't seem to find the original...) which is essentially true. Our world is ever-changing, mountains rise and fall and oceans shift, and it seems so unlikely to observers like ourselves who live and die in a geologic blink of an eye. Tectonics as a whole, has only been around as a science for something like 40 years, so it is still very young, and exciting advances in techniques, technology and understanding are still happening.

Perhaps that explanation is a little melodramatic, so to lighten it up a little; sticking with geology really HAS allowed me to spend lots of time hiking and climbing in mountains from Argentina to Taiwan, which of course was the whole point all along!"

~t

night lilies

~t

saturday

...was interesting. got up at a reasonable time, and grabbed my cameras and tripod and caught the train to danshui. shot some pictures around the market area, and the sea-walk... a small temple squeezed between two apartment buildings. went back to the little open air cafe overlooking the bay and had an espresso while i took a few more random shots off the balcony. i also recognized a name when the owner said it to one of the other people there.... "mani". when i got here, (taipei i mean) i started checking online for information about the area. i ran across a post about tian-mu on 43places.com by mani, (i recommend the site by the way... it has a lot of good information about travel destinations all over the planet) who also recommended danshui and the cafe i went to. it's funny to run into someone you only know about from an internet posting online... it lends some sense of humanity to the impersonal atmosphere of the web.

i also went up to yangmingshan park later that night to see the blossoms. during this time of the month, there is supposed to be a brilliant display of cherry and azalea flowers. the trees and bushes are lit at night and the other big attraction are the cala lilies, which are planted along the ponds in the park. the only problem with the attraction is that so many people from the city make their way up the mountain that it turns into a huge traffic jam, and the actual display of blossoms leaves something to be desired. ...the flowering trees along the lake in central park (nyc) are more impressive.

we'll see how the 35mm shots i took turn out. in the meantime, i'll post a pic of one of the lilies at night.



~t

hazing

no, not the drunken frat-boy kind. the humidity here in taipei is something else.

today is ultra-hazy... it's not particularly hot, or muggy, but the air is thick and the haze looks more like grey smoke than the result of suspended water particles. it feels like sound is somewhat deadened, energy is absorbed, and everyone is just a little slow. the sun doesn't really shine, in fact the greyness is uniform enough that there isn't even really a bright glow from any quadrant of the sky... just a mild light that is simply present.

i know, it sounds a little depressing... it's not particularly, just kind of lends a little blase-je-ne-se-quois overtone to the day. i do feel a little stifled in my office. working in the same small area with 5 other people who have all grown up used to high temperatures and suffocating humidity can give one pause when approaching the air-conditioning unit with thoughts of the frozen peaks of the rockies in mind. that is to say, i don't want to make waves by turning the a.c. on to its maximum setting and bringing the whole office down to my comfort range; i think everyone else in here would be wearing down coats. honestly i think it's pretty funny that they even sell down coats in taiwan.

needless to say i'm looking forward to the dry, thin air of colorado, clear skies and crystal mountain streams. my summer is going to kick ass.

~t

visa versus...

ugh.

i've spent the better part of the day traipsing about the city trying to get an extension on my visa so that i can stay until may. when my visa was issued, they gave me a standard 90 day visitor's visa... they also told me (and this is the 'they' that they talk about when they talk about 'them') that once i got here, i could just go the bureau of consular affairs and get a stamp that gave me an extension. well... not quite. it turns out that i have a "personal" visa, different from a work or student visa, and they won't extend my visa without changing my visa type. this requires some official paperwork to say that i'm a student or i'm employed or some other such thing. this would be fine except i don't have any kind of paperwork like that, since it was easier for me to come here without any (my university makes you jump through a ton of hoops if you officially go abroad for study).

thankfully, there is an easy, albeit not super convenient, loop-hole in the system. if i leave the country within the 90 days and return, my stay gets extended another 90 days from the day i re-enter the country, since it's considered a new visit. thankfully my visa does allow multiple entries so it looks like i'll be taking a short trip sometime very soon. apparently this is very common.... and even locals who have foreign passports use this option in order to live here without official papers. students and professionals alike just take a weekend trip every three months and there is no problem.

more as the story develops... and sorry for the double posting earlier... i took down the duplicate so unless you check daily you probably have no idea what i'm talking about.

~t

still pluggin away

sitting at my desk today.. trying to figure out the best way to run smoothing algoritms over my data... finally just realizing that i should just keep all the inherent noise and use my eyes and better judgement to filter stuff mentally. also need to get my notes and data from the field trip this weekend in digital form. anyway, in between short bouts of productivity, i've started getting my website together again... i have the rough site together, and i'll post it up to my webspace on the cu boulder servers soon, as a preliminary step to getting my own domain registered and hosted. as soon as the page is accessible i'll put a link here to it. i've been trying to put together a small collection of images that i have on my laptop here... most of my stuff (including my resume) are still on my desktop at home... so it'll be sometime this summer before i can put that stuff up.

taking it easy tonight... going home now. before i go though, i'll post one of the pics i took in colorado before i left... this one is going up on the site.



~t

lesson time

hey all...

so i'm back from the field, safe and sound, despite sitting on the back of a scooter and riding all over the peikang-hsi valley and puli basin. found some cool outcrops and decided that when i finally draft a cross section through this area, the areas where the shui-chang-liu and pai-leng formations are deformed by intense folding will just be shown as squiggley lines... the real pattern of deformation is totally confusing to me. the one thing that is very clear to me is that these rocks have really been through the wringer. actually, an old style laundry wringer is a fairly effective analog for what happens to the deeper rocks of the chinese continental margin as they are accreted into the critical wedge of the taiwanese orogen. sorry for all the lingo, if you don't understand it, google it, that's my best suggestion. in so many words, the westward motion of the pacific-sea-plate is cramming the entire island of taiwan up onto the chinese continental margin. as these rocks are fed into the orogen (read: mountain range) they are over-ridden by the weight of the entire island. the rocks get crunched and rolled and smooshed, sort of like feeding a flat towel into a wringer, and letting it just pile up on the other side. once enough of the overlying rocks have been stripped away by the amazing erosive power of typhoon's rains, the "munched" rock finally reaches the surface. this 'exhumation' of material occurs because surface material is stripped away and more rock has been placed underneath the island... essentially cycling material from deep underground up towards the surface. picture putting the same towel through the same wringer, but then wring out another towel, and let it pile up underneath the previous one. repeat for a while until you have a really big pile of towels and you start taking the dryest ones off the top, though you continue to add towels to the bottom of the pile... eventually you'll see your favorite beach towel you wrung out half an hour ago because you're working your way down through the pile. the cool thing is that the pile never gets any bigger once you start taking the towels off the top... this is referred to as 'steady-state tectonics' (well, not when you're talking about towels, but you get the idea).

another process that happens, on a smaller scale, is 'flexural slip faulting'. this is specific to folds (especially cylindrical ones), so i'll try to keep the analog simple. as i mentioned before, rocks fold. it seems odd at first, but under the right circumstances, rocks will fold just like cotton towels. a better analog however, is a book. folding is most easily understood when talking about sedimentary rocks. you can fold any kind of rock, but only sedimentary rocks start out in thin flat layers, like the pages of a book... parallel planes resting against each other. quickly, a fault is basically when rock breaks. flexural slip faulting is specifically the kind of fracture that happens parallel to bedding (the pages) when folding occurs. all of you have picked up a phone book and bent it in half... or at least rolled up a magazine. it's all the same thing, what you notice when you do this is that the open edge of the book sort of splays out... the edges of the page are no longer even with each other. the ones on the inside of the fold stick out further than the outside cover... pages (or beds) which are all the same width are being forced to conform to different radii... and as this happens, the pages rub against each other. if you glued every page in a phone book together (which is a classic prank, by the way) you essentially end up with a big piece of wood, which bends about as easily (interestingly enough) as a big piece of wood. when you fold rocks, the beds can break along their interfaces, and slide along each other... this is the easiest way to accomodate the shearing created by folding. some pics are here to help illustrate this... the fold: this is what folded rocks can look like. this is a pretty tight fold for beds this thick... thin beds are easier to fold and thick ones tend to have a larger fold radius... think about the difference between folding a magazine and one of those nearly-indestructible cardboard baby's books. the book: the two covers are the same size. when the book is bent, the inside cover has a tighter radius, and sticks out further. look at the triangle. the short leg is the thickness of the bed. the long leg is the total bed-parallel slip of the unit (book). the angle between the hypotenuse and the short leg is the shear-angle. the blue plane is the axial plane. the rock wall: this is a bed. the exposed surface is in fact a flexural slip fault plane. it is practically polished from the sliding, and exhibits excellent "slickensides"... kinematic indicators that show the direction of sliding. these can be used to reconstruct the stress-field responsible for creating the fold and can also record multiple episodes of slip in different directions. btw, the two people in the pic are ling-ho and po-no (thanks guys!), two of the students who help me with field work here. the close up of a slickenside: just that... the best slicks often form in recrystalized mineral deposits left by thermal fluids that flow along the fracture plane of the fault.

ok.... enough lesson for now... geez that was kind of long. anyway, i hope that satisfies the technical info request i got a little while ago... maybe i'll post something about the actual geologic history of the at some point too...









~t

night lights

'nuther quick post here.... i'm leaving taipei in about half an hour to go back to my field area. i could really use a weekend away from the city. it'll be sunny and warm in puli, and i'll be spending a few days riding a motorcycle up and down the peikang-hsi ("-hsi" is mandarin for river) and taking measurements of the rock column and structural orientations.

there is a huge bike expo in taipei for the weekend, so i went to check it out yesterday afternoon... just to ogle and covet and drool. i spent about 4 hours walking around the expo hall, fondling all the newest gadgets and bike frames, and wishing i had the funding necessary to walk away with some of the nicest italian road bikes. for those who don't know, it's not that hard to spec a top-of-the-line racing bike out at about 11-12 grand.

i also took a few shots of 101 and a neighboring building as i was leaving... taipei has a lot of stunning buildings that are lit up at night. various schemes are used to illuminate the buildings, and seeing them at night completely changes your perception of the design compared to viewing them during daylight hours. i've been planning a sort of night-tour of some of the better buildings sometime when we have a clear night so that i can take some good images. i'll have to shoot with film too, since the gain in my digital camera sort of blows up the grain of the image... if i can find a tripod to borrow that will help. anyway, here are a couple of the shots....






~t

everybody's famous

my friend conor recently gave up a position at "city" magazine, based in nyc, to pursue other employment options in tokyo... but before moving back to the land of cool suits, sushi and mayonnaise restaurants, the magazine used him in a fashion shoot layout in the most recent issue. I managed to find a copy of city at the big 'page-one' bookstore in taipei101 last night, so i thought i'd throw this pic up... hopefully no-one complains about copyright!

it's pretty cool to see pics of your friends in magazines...



~t

fire dragon fruit

interesting little tidbit of distracting information for you...

i was just emailing a very good friend of mine about how i almost got run over by a scooter and a bus the other day, nearly simultaneously. i spouted about how this was a function of shear population density in taipei, which approaches ten thousand souls per square kilometer in the city center. that's 1X10^6/km^2. i went on in this email about how i wanted to take my bike to wyoming or utah or some such place for a week when i get back to the states, in order to "decompress"... to wander the wide open ranges of the american west, where you can get lost for days and never see another human.

this got me thinking: what is it to have an innate need for space? americans (and please excuse the gross generalization.. of course i mean yankee yahoos from the good ol' yoo-ess-of-ay) tend to have what's commonly known as a well defined sense of "personal space"... a sort of invisible buffer zone or "comfort zone" that occupies an area roughly 50-60cm in diameter within which we reside. This kind of information has even been documented by various authors, and can be found online if you know what you're looking for. it's commonly made fun of in the states, through things like comedy sketches of "close-talkers" and advertisements for real estate. is this need for space, this sense of being entitled to our own chunk of the universe, a result of how we live in and interact with our surroundings from birth?

my point is, take a look at cultural norms with respect to 'personal space', and the living conditions each culture endures in their home-country. Taiwan for instance: thirty-six-thousand square kilometers total land area and 23 million people. that's ~ ((2.3X10^7)people/(3.6X10^4)km^2) = 6.4X10^2 people/km^2, or 640 people per square kilometer. that's including a large amount of uninhabitable (and all but inaccessible) land like mountain peaks and river valleys. compare to Colorado... not even the entire US, but just one state. CO: only 4 million people for two-hundred-seventy-thousand square kilometers. again: ~ ((4X10^6)people/(2.7X10^5)km^2) = 16 people/km^2. that's a huge difference. it's the difference between 1,562 square meters per person vs. 62,500 square meters per person. a factor of 40.

with the shear abundance of open space available to people living in the states, it's no wonder we've acquired a taste for freedom of movement and uninhibited views. i can't say i don't miss being able to look out from my front porch at home and see 40 miles north along the frontrange of the rocky mountains... it makes the view from my balcony here of the apartment building across the alley pale in comparison (i suppose, really, there is no comparison), but it's all relative. so, in closing, i'd like to say to all my fellow yankees who whine incessantly about not having a big enough front yard or a clear enough view of their 50 acre property, suck it up and be happy you even have access to that kind of open space.

as for the title of this little post, check out the pics... this fruit is sort of like a mild tasting kiwi. it's good, but the aesthetic appeal is greater than the culinary.




~t

dust

hmmm...

suddenly feeling pretty insignificant, after browsing the image and movie archives at noaa's website for space weather. sxi and trace imagery is pretty awesome... and it certainly puts your role in the universe into perspective. i especially like the movie of venus crossing in front of our view of the sun... like a little chunk of flotsam floating by in an ocean. again, i feel the day beginning to draw to a close, and i haven't really done squat. i have a meeting to plan my next trip into the field in a little while, so hopefully i can at least feel like i've achieved something today.

~t

homesick?

hmmm...

not really 'homesick' per-se, but today is probably the one time I've felt something approaching homesickness. I spent about an hour today, in one of the local bikeshops, ogling and coveting all the shiny aluminum and glossy carbon fiber and feeling very, very deprived of my own bikes back home. ...so, when I say home-sick, what I'm really saying is 'bike-sick', 'trail-sick', 'open-road-and-wind-in-my-face-sick'. I realize that I haven't even ridden a bike in two months... and it's starting to get to me. I was thinking about bringing one of my bikes with me when I left colorado in january, but i decided it would be too much of a pain in the ass. now, in retrospect, i realize that carrying my bike 40 miles to the airport, strapped to my back while crawling through broken glass, would have been worth the effort and pain if it meant i could have my bike with me now. i know, it sounds ridiculous, but damn! ...i really just want to ride. strolling through the shop today, and especially looking at the italian and german framesets displayed on the wall, i just couldn't help but fantasize about taking one of those out on a ride. if i can reserve one boyish, childish, or otherwise immature right, it would be (and often is) the right to dream about biking.... that is of course, when i'm not dreaming about flying spaceships.

the thing i really miss is the smell and sunlight of colorado. in my head, i can see riding my hardtail through the winding singletrack at walker ranch... the sun filtered through the ponderosa pines and the smell of the sage that lines the sides of the trail filling my nose. ...or i can see myself on my full-suspension railing through the corners on the descent off the top of white ranch, through high brush and silver-green grass, with the perfect panorama of denver and the golden plains of eastern colorado forming the backdrop. i could go on and on, describing each scenario that runs through my head... visions of rides to come and memories of epic rides past, but that would take pages and pages and probably be an incredibly boring read to just about everybody.

anyway, that's what's on my mind today... I haven't really done anything productive in several days and that's probably bugging me the most. I really need to get out of the city for a few days and get refocused on my research. more bloggin' soon, maybe a pic or two...

~t

that picture

i really like the picture below... by the way. not to toot my own horn, but i just like the spontaneity of it, the man turning his focus to the storefront as he's walking past... pausing for a moment as two people on a scooter blur by in the foreground, separate from the pedestrian, but somehow a part of the same scene...

~t

betel burgers

hey all,

the weather has been straight crap for the last few days, pouring rain, cold, clammy... in a word: gross. yesterday was a national holiday, 2/28, which remembers the murders of nearly 30,000 taiwanese by the kmt government in 1947. all sparked by a single arrest, the public spoke out against the then corrupt and repressive kuomintang chinese nationalist party... the kmt's response was swift and severe, targeting people of visible importance: doctors, scholars, community leaders.

although this is a very dark day in the taiwanese history, i haven't really noticed much display of it's recognition... some people burning prayer papers in tin buckets on the streets, and little more. i suppose perhaps people here don't feel the pinch quite as much as they used to, and perhaps that has started breeding apathy, much like the effect the social and economic prosperity of the united states has had with it's own populace. for some crazy reason i ate lunch at a mcdonalds today... uchh. walking down the streets, it's surprising to me sometimes how many familiar institutions there are here... starbucks, 7-11, kfc, mcdonalds, mister donut, the list goes on. even if the name or brand is different, the role of the institution is the same. the more i talk to people here, especially the younger generation and most especially the young women, i get a clearer image of just how much this crushing influx of western cultural ideals has begun to rift apart certain aspects of life. one of the most common problems i hear from women here is the frustration they feel with their family over their own independance. it is very much the chinese cultural (or traditional) standpoint that young women should do as they're told, and should make a point of asking their family what they should do when faced with a potential decision. it's not quite so black and white as all that, there are certain levels of subtlety and quiet conformity that are naturally assumed to be understood. I've even met people who's family's have talked of arranged marriages, which seems incredible to me. the conflict occurs when these educated and ever more globally-aware young people decide to follow their own direction and make a stand for themselves... it seems the older generation has very little concept of this desire to be autonomous, and they are confused and confounded by it, seeing it as rebelious and quite unpalatable.

i say if western culture has had any positive influence on the east, great... but i wish those influences could be brought about without the aide of mcdonalds; i feel like i've eaten a pound of greasy clay.



~t

ode to chris

hello chris,

yes you, frequent skimmer of the blogosphere,
while you are surfing from your office, i am here
tracking all who visit my site so that i can see
little strings of numbers in your address: i.p.
yours is: 128.138.152.179
you surf with mozilla to check sites: activethrust is mine
your screen resolution is 1680 X 1050
visitor statistic tracking is something quite nifty
sorry to have ditched you in colorado, that wonderful land
with a temporary stand-in roomate who is apparently quite bland
if i am smart and manage to return without getting bird-flu from a duck
i promise that upon my return we will throw another awesome beer-luck!

ok, so i wasn't super sneaky in finding out who exactly was looking at this blog almost as much as my mom, but i did have the help of the cu geology department sys-admin in confirming the ip address for me, as well as office mates who confirmed his actions... btw chris, joya says get back to work. all in all though, i can't blame anyone for using my blog as an excuse to procrastinate... i spend more time working on this than most people spend reading it.

i think i'm getting over this dumb cold. yeah, definitely a cold, not allergy. i got a lot of much needed sleep this weekend, something like 14 to 15 hours a day. i hate being sick in other countries, mostly because it's so damn hard to get the drugs you're used to. i went to a pharmacy here to try to find something like nyquil or just a general 'cold medicine', and when i described what my symptoms were, the pharmacist kept pulling out all these perscription allergy medications. 'no no no, not zyrtec, no not allegra, no thanks'. i ended up just going home and popping a couple of advils. i was also talked into taking propolis by my roomate... wow that stuff is n-a-s-t-y ! it tastes pretty much like what it is: the distilled essence of bee's puke. seriously. actually propolis in it's raw form is a brown waxy substance bees use to seal their combs... it is an extremely potent anti-microbial agent, which has been extensively researched as a usable anti-bacterial treatment. a couple dropper-fulls of that right down the gullet a day make a big difference. the taste does send you reeling for a minute...

back to work on this monday afternoon... getting some slope-maps done and some curvature analysis... all in the quest to find these somewhat elusive axial surfaces. i almost forgot that i've had a request for some 'interesting geologic information' about the island by some of the local bloggers... so perhaps i'll try to post some of that soon.

anyway, i'll leave you with a couple pics... one is just of a part of my room... thought some folks would like to know i'm doing quite well in tian-mu, and have just about every creature-comfort i could wish for. the other is just of the sea-walk in dan-shui by the coast.


~t

fanta-lactic-tastic

wednesday afternoon...

i seem to have come down with a bit of a head cold... ugh. sneezy, wheezy what a bummer. it doesn't help that it's about 80 degrees outside now... it's beautiful weather, yesterday was super clear (which happens all of about 3 times a year here) but it's so hard to enjoy experienced through the haze of illness-induced-spaciness. it's a little odd to consider that during the entire weekend it poured buckets of rain and was only about 50 degrees. i did make it outside briefly yesterday, to come down to the office but i never made it inside. i walked around gonguan for a little while, had something to eat and tried a new drink i'd never seen before. 'fanta lactic' is a beverage made by fanta, coca-cola's popular european and asian soda line, that also contains some sort of milk product... giving the effect of a sort of vanilla yogurt flavoured soda. better than it sounds, and always interesting to see what other people think is a good enough idea to launch an entire product line around. while i was trying to find some more information about this drink, i ran across soda-blog... worth a looksee. the mosquitos in my room have started coming back, and for the last few nights i've awoken to searing pain when i unwittingly leave an arm exposed above the covers. monday night in particular, i woke up to find 4 separate welts all within 5 inches of each other on the soft underside of my right forearm... throbbing and pulsing enough to wake me from a dream. at that point there's no way i can fall asleep again when i know those little buggers are just waiting for me to stop thrashing around before they descend again to slip a proboscis into my flesh. oh well... just sitting here in the office going over some notes and trying to make some plans to go back down to puli sometime soon, but it's a little hard for me to think about that, i just want to take it easy and get over this stupid cold. ok, i'm heading out... taking my notes and a journal paper and laptop home and doing work from my couch. i can pick up oj and chicken soup on the way.

~t

long weekend

hey all,

it's been a bit of a long weekend... came into work on saturday until about noon... probably the second time that whole week i'd made it into the office before noon. i went downtown for sushi at a restaurant and then caught the movie "munich" at one of the major theatres in the city. the movie was good, rather i should say,"well done". the movie did a good job of giving the viewer a visceral feeling for what the brutality of the munich olympic hostage crisis and the aftermath was like, but i felt totally shell-shocked after the movie. it took several hours fo me to get over it. it's not just a violent movie ; it is very graphic, and the violence is not movie-esque... not clean, and not overly bloody to the point of being comical... the acts depicted are just brutal and swift and a little too realistic for anyone who's kind of squeamish. went out to a friend's house xizhi and just spent time hanging out. that was basically the whole weekend. it's been a welcome change to going to bars and being surrounded by people. i think i'm getting a bit of a sore throat too, so taking it easy this weekend was a good thing.

not much of a post this time... no witty banter or really insightful observations... maybe next time. i will post a mosaic of some of the grafiti and stickers i've run into recently... the weather's been really gross for a few days too, so i haven't really been taking many pictures.



~t

concrete curves

~t

test

don't want to give away too much... here is a first-run test for an idea i'm working on... sort of urban beautification without all the legal issues that come with what would technically be considered vandalism.

~t

snoopy train

so it's midday wednesday and i'm sitting in my office about to dive into my advisor's responses to the first major update i sent him recently. 'about to dive into' of course means i'm putting it off by posting to my blog instead. i feel like i've been pretty out of the loop for the last few days, neither really being productive at work or at play... just sort of here. it's been a month and a half since i arrived, which means i've only got another two and a half to go... not very long at all. i haven't been running, i definitely haven't been riding my bikes, can't go skiing or ice-climbing (thanks, by the way, to all of my friends in the snowy, icy north who have repeatedly assured me i am missing one of the best ski seasons ever...), so i've been continuing to explore the city here on foot. i'm really looking forward to getting back out into the field sometime soon so i can get some more hands-on work done. i'm still going to bed really late and waking up late. it's kind of annoying, but for some reason i just can't seem to readjust my circadian rhythms.

monday i came to work and sent out my update to colorado. came home early, found amazing grafiti under a freeway overpass along one of the rivers and started to take pictures. camera ran out of battery power. stopped at shilin night market on the way home for a roasted pork sandwich (pork, cabbage, mayo, hot sauce, cheese on a toasted bun) and a few mr. donut donuts to bring back to roomates.

tuesday i got out of bed at 2pm and stayed home, sort of doodling with my data from my couch, but made no real headway. was stumped by my apparent inability to find an elegant way to overcome a simple data incompatibility issue... was too sluggish to brute-force my way through it. went to happy hour at the english pub down the street. ended up staying there for 5 hours.

woke up this morning at a reasonable time. took an unreasonable amount of time to get ready for work. canceled each other out. made my way from the bus into the mrt station at jiantan, and managed to catch the snoopy train. there is one train in the mrt system that breaks the stainless steel style mold of the other trains, it is pink and yellow and covered from front to back in peanuts characters, snoopy, charlie, lucy, the whole gang. have yet to get a picture of it.

have plans to check out a bar/club called carnegies tonight with another american... should be interesting. feel like i need to get some good progress down before i leave the office tonight.

still haven't bought the polaroid... maybe next month? also still considering the fujifilm s3 pro. that may never happen but it's in the back of my mind. as soon as i get new batteries in my fuji, i'll try to post a picture or two of things i've seen recently.

~t

mineral rights

"the meek shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights."

i was going through some of the messages in my inbox in an effort to clear some things out, when i ran across an old message from one of my friends. she's a geology major at cornell, and sent me this url when i was employed as a "real" (i.e. paid, and telling people where to drill) geologist... it's funny just how accurate it is. anyway, check out: geosphere

~t

i love technology

voip is my friend. that's voice-over-internet-protocol for those not into techy-nomenclature. thanks to it, i can talk to friends 8000 miles away gratis. i just paid my monthly car loan payment to my lender in colorado... withdrawing from my bank in new york, all from the comfort of my office in taipei. i use satellite imagery to analyze terrain evolution, as well as to see whether or not it's going to rain tomorrow. i visually record my travels using a 6 million pixel charge-coupled-device sensor (digi-camera) and upload them to a globally accessible data repository called, "the net". where sci-fi used to be considered surreal, it has become sci-real. human ingenuity has long been influenced by dreamers... why "necessity is the mother of invention" is still considered to be a reasonable truth, i can't say. do i "need" to be able to listen to any one of 15000 songs whenever i feel like it? probably not, but i love my ipod just the same... it's a damn cool little widget. do i "need" to have the ability to play video games on my phone while i wait in an airport? nope, but it makes the time go faster... the same goes for being able to wave my wallet over a sensor at the subway station and automatically have the fare deducted from my RFID encoded rail-pass, or being able to locate myself anywhere on the planet's surface to within roughly 10 feet with respect to a geocentric reference frame.

i may not really require any of these things, and i wouldn't necessarily say they make life easier... if anything they greatly increase the volume of information and level of detail one needs to familiarize themselves with (phones used to just have a single crank-wheel), but they do make dealing with this volume and complexity inherent in this era do-able... and those who excel at data-surfing or toggle-jockeying are the ones who are thinking about how convenient it would be if only their food-blender at home had a built-in computer processor and real-time satellite link-up.

... do our cars still run on hydrocarbons?

~t

thank god for meta-data

no, not informative meta-data about satellite tracks or ortho-image projections silly, html meta-data! thanks to that, you can now search for "tarka wilcox" on google and active-thrust is the first hit. there are a ton of other key-words too, so many other words and terms that i believe to be associated with who i am will also (eventually) yield this site in web-searches. as a side note, i'll also just include the little tidbit that this blog has seen over 160 visits in the last month. fyi.

~t

comments

huh...

received an interesting comment today from a fellow blogger(?). the odd punctuation is because i can't really tell what this person does. the comment was bascially just a "been looking around a lot and i like your page" kind of complement, but the user identifies themself as 'sealy memory foam'. check out their page: sealy products. weird. it's sort of like a blog, certainly doesn't seem like a normal corporate product info page. but it sort of does. i can't really figure it out, so you can give it a go if you like. thanks anyway i guess...

still working on site pages. i've actually got a couple of layouts already, and i was considering alternating them, sort of like flavour of the month. anyway i'll give you a little peek at a couple of them here. still haven't chosen a hosting service, so if any of you have suggestions, please leave them here.


~t

vinyl dreams

hi all,

2:14 right now... am that is. been staying up late a lot recently. seem to be very alert during the wee hours, and very much the opposite during the mornings. hmmm. anyway, i am blogging this from my bed, about to lay me down to sleep, and had an odd little thought: what would i look like as a vinyl figurine? some of you may not be aware of the collectible vinyl figurine craze, or really underground movement about to become a widespread craze... but maybe i can rectify that. check out strangeco, or tokidoki for a glimpse of the very large world of designer toys.

~t

photo-strips

hi again...
i've actually been doing work today, and am tired of staring at graphs. i took a break to mess around with some pics for a little while, and what you see to the left is proof of procrastination. anyway, i guess that's a record of what i look like at 26. photo-strip machines are very popular here, although most of them are color and let you insert yourself into some sort of digital beach-body cut-out or other such things. i haven't actually located one that just does the simple old-school style black and whites (not that i've been looking...), and this one to the left was just done with photoshop using pics from my camera. i've been toying with the idea of buying another camera... a polaroid. i miss the instant gratification of polaroids that i remember from childhood: click, whizzzz, picture. they also take really nice pictures. they sort of represent the ultimate ability to capture a moment.

26

no, it's not the new answer to the universe, but it is my new age. realized that i haven't put any pictures up here for a while. i think i was trying to save some of the newer ones for my site, but i haven't really done any new work on that for a few days either. in fact, i just left my laptop at the office for the weekend, and didn't think about it again until this morning. a few of my office-mates are back from vacation now, so it sort of feels more like school than it has for the last couple of weeks... maybe now i can get down to brass tacks... it also helps that i think i've finally and permanently got a solution to my software woes. friday (birthday) night my roomates and i went out for spicy-pot (as opposed to normal hot-pot) and then hit a couple of lounge bars around the city. pretty low-key, especially since the city was still more or less deserted at that point, but still a really good time. i went for a recon-hike yesterday and found a good running trail near my house, and have started getting really used to mosquitos... though i still hate the little f*&#s. i fell really lazy right now, so i'm just going to post a couple snaps from the last week. longshan temple.





~t

beautiful!

in stark contrast to the last post, i offer this literary lemon-wedge to cleanse the proverbial palate...

it is absolutely beautiful here today. i don't think i could take a picture that would acurately capture the feeling of the day, so i will attempt it descriptively....

as i somehow figured out the problem i was having with my data analysis, i decided that this little victory was worthy of a reward, so i headed out to get a demitasse of espresso. for once the sun is shining today, through a slight haze that lends a welcoming glow to the air... soft light filters down and there is a light breeze that is just strong enough to bring the scent of all the blooming lilies on campus to your nose from anywhere you stand. it is one of those days that invokes the memory of all the days like it before... spring and late summer days that are not particularly memorable, but are sporadically recalled, like deja-vu. i walked through campus, around the athletics buildings and past the running track, where families and a few solo runners jogged easily. no-one seemed particularly set on breaking any records there... i continued through the center of campus, looping back to my department, and paused at the edge of the plantation fields that form a green buffer from the city along the south-western edge of ntu. there is a wandering board-walk there, along the edge of a pond that is host to many types of floating plants, reeds and lilies, lotus and cat-tails. a fair number of people are out walking, strolling really, taking time to pause at the waters edge and look at the turtles basking in the sun on a log at the far side. i sat down on a stone bench that is just off to the side, under the half-shade of a young tree. so many layers of sound are present in the air, but not like what's usually audible in the city. the normally pervasive and penetrative barrage of sound that greets the ears here is something i generally prefer to filter out with the aid of my ipod... today the hum of the city took backstage to the underlying thrum of crickets and the animated sound of children talking at each other. the splash of water from a nearby fountain as it falls on the surrounding stones, and the chuckle of a couple of grandparents... the sound of a man slurping the last drops of melting ice-cream from the bottom of a cone before crunching into the cone itself. i can sit here for an hour, and do, watching people and birds drift by....

~t

pop-a-squat

hoh-kay,

bit of a rant here, so just bear (down) with me... one of the cultural differences that is impossible to ignore here in taiwan, is the use of the squatter in public restrooms. now, perhaps it is my spoiled anglo-tushie, or some preference for having a bit of a library when i need relief, but i find using a squatter a bit of a pain in the ass (tasteless pun intended). i should also preface this with the fact that i have no problem assuming the squatting position when i'm twenty miles from civilization, or wiping my butt with everything from leaves to stones to snow... i'm proud to say i've used all of those with great success in the past... but doing this in a claustrophobia-enducing cubby, with slick tile floor and absolutely no aiding support, can be a challenge. the 'squatter' for anyone who hasn't figured it out, is the minimalistic alternative to the classic sit-down toilet. in south america you are lucky to find one that is little more than a hole in the ground. here in taiwan they are slightly more refined, being flush-fit recessed porcelain fixtures that flush. the tricky thing about them is that they require a certain amount of flexibility and balance to utilize without incurring tragic consequences. another side effect of the stance required, is that any possibility of relaxing is gone. so, all in all, they are generally an experience to be dealt with as quickly as possible. ah, yes... i almost forgot; there is never (read: never-ever) any sort of tissue paper in the stall... it is strictly b.y.o.t-p... another slight oddity as this necessitates walking through your building with a roll of toilet paper in hand. "hey, tarka... where are you headed?"... ah, usually i might reply, "oh, just going to go get a drink." or some such banal or vague reply. with tp in hand, it is inescapably obvious what one intends to do in the near future....

~t

image mapping

quick one here...

finally got the freaking image map on my website beta to work... now as soon as i get some of the content straightened, i should be ready to launch. been 'reseaching' nightlife spots 'round taipei, looking online for good lounges to try. so far i've found more than a few i'd like to check out, so maybe i'll start getting a few reviews of these in the coming weeks. also been taking a little time to shoot some pics... hoping to put together a few series / triptych type works for the site, as well as maybe for the blog. I'm still happy with the simplicity of this layout, but i may try to spice it up just a little bit at some point. yesterday was nice and sunny... went to danshui again and had a decent cappuccino.... still too much foam though. i'm beginning to think that i'll never find a place as good as gimme... damn, what a funny potential reason for wanting to someday be a professor at cornell university. ha, not really, well maybe... who knows. plenty of time to ponder that.

~t

happy year of the dog!

so..

it is the chinese lunar new year, and the year of the dog is upon us. i spent the day today visiting the sites, and paying homage to buddha at a couple of taipei's more well-known temples. actually, at the temples, you can pray to different, um, deities i guess (i don't actually know what they're considered, whether they are like saints, spirits or gods) for specific things. i visited the one for scholarly pursuits and asked to get my phd within 5 years. regina, one of my roomates here in tian mu, was my guide. i learned a fair amount of new things, and had a good time seeing the sites. one thing that constantly surprises me here is getting pushed around by other people in just about any situation... beit on the streets, in the subway, or... yes.... even praying in a temple. today is basically the one day when anyone who cares is out at the temples, hoping for good health and more wealth. getting into the temple takes about 20 minutes of just being jostled around amongst a throng of temple-goers. i was literally shoved out of the way by about 5 different little old ladies because apparently i was in their way, and they had some important praying to do right away. i have to be honest... i have never, ever, been pushed or even brushed up against in a catholic or christian church. not to be judgmental in any way, but it's just an interesting experience to take part in what i would basically describe as full-contact religion. another interesting thing i've found out today is that i was not actually born during the lunar year of the monkey. in just about any american-chinese restaurant worth its soy-sauce, the paper place-mats will tell you what lunar sign correspondes to your year of birth. 1980, as far as the place-mats are concerned, is the year of the monkey. what the place-mats don't tell you is that the actual lunar year is offset by as much as a few months from the gregorian or western calendar so even if you are born in 1980, but your birthday falls before february 15th, you were actually born in the year of the ram! argh! ... all those years i though i was intelligent and motivated, it turns out im actually emotional and unable to work under pressure... humph. oh well, at least i can take comfort in knowing that a couple of my friends are in the same boat.

~t

global satellite

hey all,

in my quest to find a reliable weather report, or at least a forecast that didn't include steady rain for the next ten days, i ran across the taiwanese central weather bureau's website (here). this is a cool site... it's very basic, no flashy graphics or anything, but they do have visible light satellite imagery of the entire eastern hemisphere, which is very cool. you can actually watch the coriolis effect in action, creating very clear circulation patterns at different latitudes.

so, rain... yah. it rains here a lot. a bunch. basically all the time. mostly in taipei. actually, if you look at the weather maps on the above site, it tends to be really sunny over most of the western part of the island, but somehow the monsoon weather following the jetstream from mainland china just nicks the top of taiwan, shrouding taipei county in clouds and providing us with an almost omnipresent mist. not totally unlike seattle... and with the number of starbucks locations here, it's really pretty easy to imagine you've just gotten lost in seattle's china-town. well, no... not really. i did find a little place down the street from ntu that looks like it might be the best place for a good espresso. i haven't tried it yet, but maybe today, if they're open when i walk by it on my way to the subway. i found it the other night while walking, when i caught a whif of one of my favorite smells... roasting coffee. ithaca (my home town) has a well-known and excellent coffee house called, "gimme!". gimme! is a small company which roasts all it's own coffee in-house, and manages to employ all the best baristas in town. on a clear day in ithaca, i could ride my bike down the street and catch a whif of roasting coffee on the breeze... and know it was time to go get a cup. on these days, you could watch the beans come straight from the roaster, go into the grinder, and be expertly packed for a great ristretto. oh, gimme!, how my heart pines for thee! well, back to the local place... there is a small stand in a back alley, with a quaint but adequate looking roaster, and a nice and well-used italian espresso machine... hopefully the proprietor knows what he's doing...

~t

russian minimal beats

heya,

finally moved out of the visiting and adjunct professor's room and into one of the grad-student offices here at ntu. nice to be in a more normal room, and specifically one that i haven't slept in before... ah well. now of course comes the hard part... actually sitting down and doing work. not that it's all that hard, it's just easy not to do. for instance, in this particular moment i find myself listening to an internet radio station (deepmix.ru, quite possibly the best source for eurasian deep-house and minimal beats on the entire web) and blogging away to my hearts content. mapping axial surfaces right now seems so... so.... i dunno, actually it sounds kind of interesting... i think as soon as im done with this post i'll get into it a bit.

on a different note (and in an attempt to return to my original stream of thought before thinking about work) i wanted to bring up an issue pertaining to foreigners that i've been mulling over in my head for a little while. there seems to be a sort of unspoken rule among foreigners here, that you generally avoid one another in public places and pretend like the others aren't there. in part, i think this may be due to the fact that taiwan (like many places in asia as i'm told) is such a mono-culture that any foreigner sticks out like a sore thumb. it seems like most foreign people who are actually living here would like to kind of blend as much as possible, to sort of slip under the radar. i feel like this a little... mostly because i sense it is nearly impossible to do so, and attracting stares (or more often sideways glances that are stolen when possible, since direct eye-contact with strangers here is something to be avoided) is a new experience for me. so, when i see another white person (and i've been avoiding the term 'white' so far, but that's what i really mean) in a crowd there's a sort of, "i don't see you and you don't see me, and we'll just keep right on walking like it's no big thing" reaction. in my case this is mostly because what's really running through my head is more like, "holy crap, it's a white person! who are you and what are you doing here?! ...are you just visiting or do you actually live here?". it's just an automatic reaction to seeing someone who obviously seems out of place, sort of like the old sesame street game of,"which one of these things doesn't belong here". i haven't fully figured it out yet, and probably won't until i actually stop someone on the street and ask if they've experienced a similar thing. now, this is not a universal thing. i've run across small groups of people who are quite obviously tourists... and gotten a few smiles from them.


i guess they can't be expected to know about the rules yet...

~t

umbrellas

hey all,

today was a lazy sunday, though not really as cool as a lazy sunday in the eyes of Parnell and Samborn. if you don't know what i'm talking about, check out this link.

i got up late and wandered out of my apartment around 1:30 or so... in search of the "local" ikea store. it was a futile effort. despite having directions from the internet and descriptions of where to go from my roomates (both local taiwanese), i couldn't find the store to save my life. in the course of this quest, i hailed a bus to my aid. actually i waited for like 25 minutes for the 685 to come while i waited in the rain. when it finally did come, (and i'm pretty sure this would only happen here in taipei) the bus driver didn't even stop... he merely slowed down and opened the door. now... i'm not sure if it was just this particular driver, if he was in a particular mood, or if he just looked at some young able-bodied lad and said to himself, "yeah, i think he can make the jump onto a moving bus" or what, but indeed, that's exactly what i did.

that, by far, was the most interesting thing that happened to me today. after i got onto the bus, i went to the east dexing road stop, got off, located the mcdonalds landmark, and totally failed to find the ikea which was supposed to be somewhere right around there. anyway, i decided to cut my losses and wander around a bit more, to further familiarize myself with my surroundings. i walked down zhong-cheng ave for many blocks, eventually intersecting with zhong-shan, which i followed over the river and down to shilin mrt station. long story short i walked a long way, never found the ikea, and ended up just taking the bus home.

yesterday was also spent walking around.... actually walking about 4 miles in the rain, to the coast at danshui. i made it out to the fisherman's pier by nightfall, where it was sheeting rain and blowing enough to make me cringe as the water dripped from my hair and down the back of my neck. i continued out onto the pier, where couples and groups of teens braved the blowing rain for some unknown reason. giving into the fact that i was already soaking wet, i decided to revel in the sensation of coldness... something i naturally associate with this time of year, yet haven't felt here since my arrival. for some reason, many public promenades here, including the fisherman's wharf, are paved with tile... glazed, ceramic, slippery-as-shit tile. normally i would view this as insane. however, on this dark and stormy night, i took the childish initiative to turn this otherwise potentially harmful surface covering to my advantage, and using my playful mood, i recalled a favorite pastime of mine that was introduced to me by my dad. for lack of a better name, i'll call it 'sidewalk-skiing'. now, sidewalk-skiing is typically done when a classic new england snow-fall of about 1/2" has just occured. the idea is to run down a sidewalk and then suddenly assume the pose of a surfer, sliding as far as possible down the sidewalk, leaving two parallel skid-marks behind you. ...anyway, i've discovered that the tile sidewalks here are an ideal spot for this sort of childish activity. i had a blast out on the pier, got a few awkward glances from folks out there, and then called it a night and came home. the real reason i bring this up is that while i was walking through danshui on my way out to the pier, i snapped the following pic of a young couple walking through a cobble back-alley.


~t

sadsack

~t

stats

hey, they work!

15 visitors to the blog yesterday. at least one person from ensr was checking it out (yes i can see your ip addresses and resolve the server you're accessing the web from), my mom of course (tampabay server), and even someone in malaysia, among others. sweet! i'll give another report in about a month or so. in other news, the chinese new year is about to get under way, and although taipei seems its normal bustling self tonight, i'm assured by my colleagues here that next week it will resemble a ghost town, tumble weeds and all. (well, ok, maybe no tumble weeds, but you get the idea...)

i'm also working on a new website. it's been a while since my last site went down, and i've been thinking about relaunching it for a while, but i think it will be a little different this time around. i've been running across some really cool pages on the net recently, most are very minimal, yet striking in their simplicity of design. ...it seems most have also been the property of young, female graphic designers in various cities across the world. 'halfstar' and 'ruido' by eva in madrid, and 'wallflower' by camilla in norway stand out among some of the better ones. 'the cardboard box' by kirsten in canada is also decent, especially for a 16 year old. so anyway, hopefully 'activethrust.com' will be launched sometime in the near future, and will act as a pared-down showcase for some of my better photography that doesn't really fit into any posts here (though content will be extremely limited for several months, since most of my existing work is on my server at home, which i took offline before i left for taiwan), as well as a place for my resume and a blog-portal (to here). if any of you have any good ideas for something to add to my site, please let me know... i'm listening.

~t

mosquitozzzzzz

friggin' annoying, worthless creatures. they hum in your ear at night, suck your blood, leave you covered in itchy welts, spread pestulence, and generally do absolutely nothing for humankind, animalkind, or the rest of the natural world. in short, they suck.

... and that's all i have to say about that.

big brother is watching

not to be ominous or anything... no actually i've just been messing with some options here on the blogger.com domain, and i've added the ability for readers (all readers) to leave comments about my posts. comments are public and can be read by anyone who wants to see them... just click the comments link at the bottom of a post to leave or view comments. also, out of curiousity, i added an invisible web-stats counter to the page so i can track the sort of site-traffic this blog is generating. i'm getting more and more emails from people just saying "btw, i've been reading your blog" or "btw, that was a funny story you posted". I'm beginning to wonder just how many people actually see this thing. not that it'd (which after looking "it'd" up, appears to be a real contraction in the english language, meaning either "it would" or "it had"... but "that'd" is not a recognized contraction.) change anything about the way i post.

'nother pic ('nother, by the way is also an officially recognized abbreviation of "another") too.

...my place in tian-mu...

~t

envi-ous

jeez... it took me about three days of futzing with this silly unix version of envi to figure out how to get a simple topographic profile. envi ("environment for visual imaging") is the software i use to look at the digital elevation models that are a central part of my research. by choosing topographic profiles in specific areas and orientations, i can analyse the resulting curves by first and second derivative (slope and curvature) to extract information about the geometry and kinematics of the controlling structures. in a nut shell, that is the numerical type aspect of my phd. a very simple and powerful tool to tie down kinematic models of structural evolution in active orogens, and something that hasn't ever really been applied to this type of work before. well, now begins the totally mind-numbing process of picking, extracting, re-calculating, plotting, repicking and mapping these things. ugh. and who knows... the resulting axial surface map may look like crap. that would suck.

in other news, i think i might take some time tomorrow to go check out danshui. danshui is the section of taipei (really more of a suburb) that is out on the taiwan straight. there's an area like fisherman's wharf in san fran, and some cool little cafes and stuff, or so i hear. looking forward to it, but first i should probably get a little bit of work done. i'll post a couple random pics here, from walking around the other night.













~t

audition

ha,

so... i did end up going to that audition, which wasn't so much an audition, but more like a screen-test. basically they took my picture a few times, had me walk from one side to the other and do some funny thing, acting like one of the light-screens was a door that was locked... they mentioned "space-man", and "star-ship"... so i'm guessing this was an airlock that i wanted to get into but couldn't. someone else told me that this was supposed to be an add for the national telephone company, so i have no idea what they were really looking for. tv adds here are bizarre and totally over the top anyway, and half the time you have no idea what they're selling. i totally felt like bill murray in lost in translation... five minutes of chinese dialog followed by, "walk to here".... except i'm not spending my free time here hanging out with scarlet johannson.

here's a pic i snapped of the guy they had in the studio right before me. i think i'd rather be behind the camera anyway...


~t

odd yet hilarious

ok,

just a quick afternoon post here... procrastinating yet again when i should be compiling notes and doing some dem-analysis... something that's never happened to me just occured while i was walking back from lunch.

i was crossing under the main street in front of the campus (via the handy tunnels that are necessary given the insane/suicidal tendencies of drivers in taipei), when a casting agent for a local production company approached me and asked if i'd be interested in auditioning for a tv commercial! she said (really a direct quote), "we need a foreigner to play the space-man."

- no shit -

anyway, talk about random. she gave me her card and told me where the audition was... and also said that if i got the gig the pay would be about $750 US for 12 hours of work. so it's completely out of the blue, but just zany enough to potentially motivate me to check it out... i haven't made up my mind yet. check back sometime late tomorrow to see what i decide.

~t

sake-soaked

phew! back in taipei again after a good week in the field. it seems like a lot has happened since i put the picture of lane86 up... some really good, and some sad.

i learned upon my return that two people i grew up around had passed away. Fathers of friends and friends of my father both, i have vivid memories of cross country skiing through hemlock woods and over open fields with them, sun shining down through sparkling spindrift as dogs run back and forth through the snow. Alan and Steve, you are missed by many.

on a lighter note, lots of good things happened too... first off i managed to find a really nice apartment to rent. this is a huge (unfathomably enormous) improvement over the foreign student dormitory here on the ntu campus. my new place is in tian-mu, which is sort of like the hoboken of taipei. it's pretty far from campus, about a half an hour via public transit, and probably more like 45 minutes by car, since you'd have to drive directly through the middle of the city, from south to north. i'm up on a hill, on the third floor of the building... with my own bathroom and my own balcony. ...not to mention wireless internet, laundry (with a dryer!) and, oh yeah, hot water (unlike the dorm).

i also got to visit my field site! puli basin is located in central western taiwan, tucked up in the foothills of the central range. the area is anomalously low, topographically, when compared to the surrounding areas, and no one seems to really know why. structurally, it is also somewhat complex, with several different modes of deformation occuring at different times throughout its history. the kinematics are very poorly understood, and have really just been guessed at thus far, which means i get to spend the next several years trying to wrap my head around it in order to come up with some passable hypothesis for why puli exists. i look forward to it. puli itself (the "city") is an interesting phenomenon... surrounded by rice paddies and areca-nut palms (which people here refer to as betel-nut palms, even though betel is a vine and has no nuts to speak of. i guess this is because the areca nut is wrapped in a betel leaf and chewed like tobacco, a particularly disgusting combination which turns your saliva bright red... evidenced by the omnipresent red splotches of spit on the ground everywhere in taiwan). the town is sort of the gateway to the central range, where one can find beautiful mountain resorts with stunning vistas and hot springs. puli has also exploded in the last 20 years or so, from a quiet, peaceful agricultural hamlet into the loudly cacophonous and dusty quasi-urban center it is today. mom-and-pop hardware stores and humble buddhist temples compete with kentucky fried chicken and the north face for attention. in fact, puli is the site of the largest new buddhist temple in all of taiwan, chung-tai temple, a 45 story creation of glass and stone with an impossibly large golden spire. i'm not sure if i'll go to hell for this (or maybe be reincarnated as a cockroach), but i guess, "bigger is buddhist" could be an appropriate slogan for the temple.

as for soaking in sake... that is in reference to last night. as an end-of-the-year gesture, prof yue-gau chen took all of his students, past present and foreign, to dinner at a japanese resaurant and hot spring north of taipei city. the hot springs were hot (so i'm told, since i still have this stupid patch of nasty road-rash on my hip... which is slowly but surely getting better thank-you-very-much), and the food was plentiful. sushi here is just way better than anything in the states for some reason. rich soups and sushi and roasted ribs and lobsters galore. fresh fruit and hot tea flowed almost as freely as the hot sake. small decanters of hot sake were replenished as fast as they were drained, and there was always an extra cup around. toasts were made constantly through the meal to exclamations of "gam-bai!" (dry-cup), and we all got to witness yue-gau's wonderful singing voice (really!) during multiple karaoke performances. the night ended when we ran over our reserved time slot, and one of the students (these are all graduate students mind you...) passed out from indulging a little too much. that was a scene. cabs were called, and a limp body was literally carried out of the restaurant by two people... he was manuevered into a cab, taken back out (that cabbie refused to take him), and positioned in a different one. it must have been obvious that both brian and i were somewhat shocked, since more than one person explained to us that this was perfectly normal, and par for the course. well, that dinner marks the end of the semester, and the end of the chinese lunar year.

anyway, i think it's time for me to get back to work since this post has become incredibly long. i'll add a couple of pictures here at the end, of spiders and palms in puli, and street-butchers and subway cars here in taipei.


~t

Lane 86

asahi-savory savior

hey all,

even though no work was accomplished today, this second day in taipei, it's not at all a loss. brian and i met up with shao-yi (one of yue-gau's students) at noon to go for lunch. afterward we wandered the campus here a little bit. after that, brian and i took off on our own to explore a bit, working our way north from ntu up to the chiang-kai-sheck memorial and the 2-28 peace park. after hitting the park we wandered over to the taipei central station and caught the mrt red/green line metro back to ntu. i make it sound like this all took 20 minutes, but in truth this was about a 5 hour ordeal... and i am thoroughly pooped. tonight, after getting my blanket and pillow from "my dorm" (a place i am desperately attempting to extricate myself from) and returning to the office here, i spent a while online checking out the taipei-craigslist postings for sublets. i found one that looks particularly enticing, and emailed those folks right away. hopefully that pans out soon and i wont need to spend too many more nights here on the floor of the office... an alternative which believe it or not is infinitely more appealing to me that spending any more time at all in the dorm. last night in fact, i went to this dorm with illusions of deep-sleep in my head. i laid down in the bed (literally a 20"wide bamboo mat... quite a harsh difference from my premium name-brand queen-size-pillow-top mattress at home) to find that i touched the ends of the bed (two walls) with my head and feet simultaneously. a mere two hours later, my roomate showed up and proceeded to clickety-click-click check email, surf the web and play video-games on his computer until finally, around 4 am, i got up and left. i cited "jet-lag" as the reason i was wide awake, and stated i was going to the office to get some work done. instead, i went to the office and passed out on the couch... though a couple hours later i woke up freezing my ass off because i was just wearing my leather jacket, and there's no central heat in this building... which as a side note is about as well sealed against the elements as an open-sided straw hut.

ok.


with that off my chest, im confident that i'll be able to find a perfectly agreeable place to live for several months very soon, and that should utterly change my outlook on life here. in the meantime, im late to meet up with brian to find a bar to pass some time on this lovely (raining, cold, wet and windy) evening... hence the asahi reference.

till the next time...
~t

back in taipei

sigh

jet lag is a bitch, especially when the weather is gray and wet and everybody around you seems a little too busy to deal with you. apparently this is finals week for the national taiwan university, and so far today has been sitting around our interim office amidst a pile of luggage. brian and i went to starbucks earlier in an attempt to stay conscious, but without any real input from our peers here, today has been more or less a total loss. true, it's only 1pm while im writing this (10pm denver-time), but it doesn't look like the rest of the day will be much different than the morning. an even stream of caffeine seems to have no effect either.

so, my first post upon arrival here in taipei is a little bit of a downer, but i have plenty of confidence that with a little more sleep and perhaps some sunshine tomorrow, things will start to look up.

~t

safe and sound

albeit half an hour later (thanks to the fact that silvermine subs is open 'till 3am) i am home. safe and sound... well... relatively sound. 'night yall, and happy new year!!

~t

new years....

this is perhaps the single most drunken post ever, under the blogger.com domain. i am currently sitting at "mercator" which is the best computer in the colorado geology structural lab, writing this post. it is exactly 2am, and i am happy to admit tonight has been a blast. since i am still three or four blocks away from home, i'll try to post once i arrive safe and sound. new years was great!! fireworks were fun, champaign was great, and i'm sure that once i get home my bed will feel awesome!!!

till then,

~t

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

tonight i have plans to drink the better part of a bottle of veuve clicquot ponsardin brut and set off explosives. well, not actually explosives, but fireworks anyway. left-overs from new hampshire. live free or die!

plans for tonight are fairly free-form... go to someones house, maybe go downtown, then crack the bottle of french brut and light the fuses! i may even bring my camera 'round with me tonight and take some snaps of the action. either way, i'll post at some point tomorrow.

till then,
~t

ouchie ouchie ouchie

heh.

so, here in boulder there is an interesting phenomenon that occurs when high pressure systems move in over the mountains. the jet-stream basically gets pushed right down to the ground surface, creating extreme winds that blow out of the mountains. today we are experiencing just that, with a sustained wind speed of 45 miles per hour, gusting to over 70 miles per hour. i live about one and a half miles, downhill and due east, from the geology department. on days like this, i take the bus into work, but bring my bike with me on the rack they supply on the front of the bus. getting home is a breeze. today was no different, until i hit a bump at over 30mph at precisely the same instant a strong cross-gust caught me off-guard. excuse the profanity here, but i think it is well deserved... i promptly ate shit. before i knew it, i was sliding down the sidewalk (at least it wasn't the road) a lot faster than i would have liked. i destroyed my jacket, ripped the sweatshirt i had underneath it, blew out the side of my full-finger gloves (again, thank god for those) and tore a chunk of leather out of my shoe. unfortunately, when one eats shit in the particular manner that i did (prone and spread-eagle) most normal jackets ride up just far enough to expose the tender skin covering a persons hip-bones. luckily for me, all that skin was removed when i crashed, so i don't have to worry about it any more. unluckily for me, the nerve endings that were exposed are still there... and they are not happy about that at all. hopefully the picture i'm about to post here will not be removed by blogger.com. squeamish people should probably not look. this is perhaps the best patch of road-rash i have ever had, so naturally i want to share it with all of you.

enjoy!!





















~t

bond.... james bond

hiyall,

i'm sitting here on my couch watching the "oo8 days of oo7" james bond marathon on spike tv, slugging grey goose martinis (shaken, not stirred... of course) on this tuesday night, the 27th of december. the particular episode that's on now is moonraker... perhaps the single most sci-fi influenced bond movie ever. though it came out 11 years after kubrick's classic, 2001, a space odyssey, it shares some traits in common, including a few musical nods to the theme of 2001 here and there. there are also nods to spielberg's sci-fi classic, "close encounters of the third kind", also via musical cues. (while i'm thinking of it, the name "spielberg" according to babelfish.com means 'play-mountain', but through my extremely limited understanding of german, it sounds more like, "mountain of crap"). other than that, not much is new. last night i went to the mountain sun brewery with greg, where we had plans to meet up with kelly and a couple of her friends. well, kelly and friends decided to bail, so greg and i were left with the responsibility (if you can call it that) of finishing off the pitcher and three pints we had ordered in anticipation of three additional souls showing up (it was happy hour). to add to the chore (i say chore like it's a bad thing) of finishing this sublime brew 'solos', we had made the decision to order a pitcher of the brewery's "java porter". now... a pitcher of porter is intimidating enough, with its strongly toasted-malt flavour and bitter finish. add to that the fact that the mountain sun adds about 8 oz's of brewed coffee to each pint of java porter and you end up with a strong caffeine buzz mixed with the effects of drinking a pitcher of beer... resulting in a stomach-ache, hangover, and insomnia all at once. awesome!

anyway... today was a recovery day, catching up on lost sleep from last night. in my caffeine fueled insomnia i was extra aware of my impending departure from the u.s., and ultra aware of all the work i have left to do before i leave. certainly not the best way to relax when you're trying to fall asleep.

.......
............
..................


sudden thought, after paying attention to james bond here... apparently all spies, no matter what their nationality, are sex-crazed egomaniacs. not only that, but (fortuituously for the spies) every member of the opposite sex they encounter seem to also be complete nymphos.

so with that deep thought, i leave you, my faithful blog-readers... and bid you good night. by the way, i'm totally going to quit grad-school and join the cia.

~t

xmas eve...

ha! i just checked my mail and voila! ... my entry visa for taiwan has arrived. i was just talking to my friend leah on i.m. about it, and i was saying how it was coming down to the wire, well now i have my visa in-hand, and have nothing to worry about. awesome! this is a great x-mas present. i also got a couple of cards today which is great. i was wandering around the campus today, it was deserted. utterly silent. beautiful day, peaceful to walk around, but just slightly erie since this campus is seemingly never quiet. other than walking around today, i didn't really do anything. i really have just been sleeping for the last couple of days and it's great. i think i'll sleep tomorrow too, unless i decide to motivate and go xc-skiinig up at eldora. that actually sounds like fun so i may go do that. merry christmas to all my friends and family... i hope you're all doing well this night.


~t

squirrels

heyall,

today's been absolutely great so far! got up at about 8, slightly more than slightly hung-over from pasta dinner at my italian friends' house, which of course included more than a few bottles of red wine last night. after banging around a bit, and consuming about a liter of water, i left the house to pick up greg to go ice climbing in boulder canyon. met up with tim and his friend (and stella the dog) at the crag. started out leading a fun w.i.4-ish climb, then free-soloed a cruisable w.i.2 pitch (well... i put in one screw for my mom's sake... hope you appreciate that mom!). after that it was time to get lunch at the mtn sun brew pub (and a pint, of course). ...then home to clean up and ride my bike into the office to play with data and procrastinate by writing this post. although the title of this post has nothing to do with pasta or ice or beer, it does have to do with the picture i snapped yesterday while walking across campus to get my daily dose of caffeine. these fuzzy buggers are all over the place here.


~t

axial surfaces

hey everyone... another quick update: im finally (!) done with my exams and now have some time to really get down to brass tacks. im busily mapping out axial surfaces on some of our taiwanese data and making some cool pictures in the process. unfortunately i cant post them here... for reasons of security, blah blah blah. i think thats mostly bs, but its what i keep getting told by the folks in charge of the data. beyond that im really (really really) glad classes are done. its interesting to realize im really back in school, but at the same time thats an odd thought because im about to take off for four months to do research. go figure. im really looking forward to the summer and next fall, because i can continue to find new people and places here in colorado. in truth im really looking forward to the next five years, because i know (as much as one can) that ill be staying in one town and doing one job, instead of moving all over hell and creation every 9-12 months like i have for the last five years.

anyway, ill be adding another post sooner than later, maybe even with some pics. till then...

~t

tuesday after wust

hello hello,

pic is of the sunset the other day... high cold clouds being lit from behind... looked like towering flames across the sky.

today is tuesday... the tuesday after wust, or western us tectonics for anyone who doesn't know my internal acronym system. after the written final for that class took place on friday, i spent the entire weekend in a state of mental stupor. wandering aimlessly, acting impulsively, and generally not paying attention to anything. i also slept a lot, also whenever i felt like it, and that was great. i think my sleep-debt is finally paid-off.

this week will be mostly just getting paperwork for taiwan finished... i just got my tickets: officially the 4th of january through the 5th of may. i will submit my visa application either this afternoon, or tomorrow morning. my contract for independant study will also be submitted tomorrow. i need to get my phone signed up for international service. need to get a sublet set up if possible. etc, etc.

today also marks the first real snow we've had in boulder this year. there's about an inch on the ground now, and it's really cold out (10F) and windy. yesterday we suffered through 60mph winds all day, and today the cold has settled in. i had the brilliant idea of going fly fishing on saturday, which was foolish considering the creeks are all pretty much frozen solid in the mountains. i guess the season has passed. too cold to bike, too frozen to fish, not enough snow to xc-ski, and i still don't have a board to go ride at one of the ski resorts here. oh well, soon enough i'll be back in tropical taiwan, and thoughts of snow will be put aside.

not much else going on this week... it's agu (american geophysical union) week, the huge conference for earth scientists in san fran... this just means that the majority of the students and faculty in my department are gone this week.... pretty quiet here... maybe a little too quiet....

~t