For your reading enjoyment, I bring you three very short stories about my recent trip to Montana.  Advice, drama, awkward layouts — it’s all here!

Yes Virginia, It’s Snowy in the Mountains

“A beautiful area, but it’s under 100 inches of snow right now,” said the ranger, crushing our hopes.  The six of us had been planning to backpack in the Jewel Basin in Flathead National Forest, but we weren’t equipped to deal with so much snow.  Turns out that snow lingers in the northern Rockies well into July.  Late May was a bit early.  The solution: nearby Firefighter Mountain. No snow there; just a confusing network of unmapped forest roads and dense pine forest.  Later, that resulted in a cellphone appeal to a higher-resolution map, which led to two discoveries: Google Maps uses the WGS-84 datum instead of the NAD-27 datum, and Terraserver-USA snaps lat/long coordinates in a way that makes it nearly useless.

Take that, Planet Earth!

The glaciers in Glacier National Park are melting.  At the present rate, they will cease to exist by 2030.  It is then with some irony that I made my trip to Glacier NP by first flying from California to Minnesota and then driving from Minnesota to Montana.  Why?  The RV and my friends were in Minnesota.  The drive revealed something else: Montana is a huuuuge state, and an enormous part of it is empty grazing land.  The upside is that western Montana has plenty of beautiful mountains, and opportunities for solitude abound.  Total distance traveled on the trip: about 5400 miles.

The Woods

Recent fire places an eerie imprint on a forest.  Having found mixed success hiking at Flathead NF and Glacier NP, we set out backpacking in nearby Lewis and Clark NF.  Our path brought us through thick forests, muddy trails, and open meadows.  It also led us through a recently burned stand of pines.  Unlike in Glacier and Flathead, we saw no moose nor bear.  All was quiet.  The trees stood as black limbless spikes.  The undergrowth was replaced by a blanket of short green grass.  The only animal was a large owl, hunting for nonexistent prey.  After crossing Pike Creek, we were greeted with an even stranger sight: endless unburned trees, completely devoid of undergrowth and ground clutter.  In every direction, as far as one could see — nothing but dense, healthy pine trees in a carpet of green grass.  Like something from a horror film.  Spooky, yet strangely calming all the same.

I didn’t think it would be too much to ask.  All I wanted was a print of a photo I took of my sister and me last Christmas (click to enlarge):

My sister and me (Source image)

In normal situations, I would have ordered prints from Adorama in New York.  They have always produced outstanding results, but they are far away, and I didn’t feel like paying $2.95 for shipping $0.50 worth of photos.  Instead, I went local.

There are many local shops that print digital photos.  I decided to go to the Target in San Mateo due to its proximity to an ice arena.  I dropped off my images, played some ice hockey, and the picked up the prints.

Decent, except too bright and really blurry (Target in San Mateo)

At first glance, they looked OK.  It was clear that Target had brightened the image against my wishes — maybe an extra half-stop or so.

Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, the registration (the alignment of the colors) was clearly off, resulting in a blurry print:

Really poor registration (Target in San Mateo)

Everything is aligned (Source image)

Specifically, the red channel is off by almost a half-millimeter compared to the green and blue channels.

Disappointed, I went to a different store.  The next one I tried was the Long’s Drugs in Redwood City.  The result there?  Well, Long’s had also brightened the image against my wishes, but at least the result was sharp:

Holy green cast, Batman!

Wow, that’s some crap color.  There was a strong green cast, which you can see by comparing the color calibration card I had printed there against the reference:

No, it isn’t your monitor or my scanner — the print really is that green (Long’s RWC)

Reference card

Ug.  Next stop?  The Long’s Drugs in Palo Alto on University Avenue.  Let’s see how they did:

Too bright, but otherwise decent (Long’s on University in PA)

Success!  Or at least, close enough.  Like everybody else, they lightened the image against my wishes (I made sure not to select any of the image “enhancement” options while uploading my images), but at least the prints came out sharp and with good color. The blue channel is actually slightly off, but the human eye is relatively insensitive to errors in the blue channel, so that isn’t too noticeable.

For reference, here’s the color calibration print from the PA Long’s:

Good color (Longs on University in PA)

Decent.  Note how the different gamut of the photographic process produces slightly altered colors.  Compare the rendition of red, green, and blue on the Long’s PA card versus the reference card.  That’s a function of the medium, so further improvement would require one to print using a different process, such as dye sublimation.  Not worth the hassle in most cases.

What’s the moral of this story?  If you want high-quality prints from digital files, order them online from a reputable outfit.  If you absolutely must have them printed locally, be prepared to deal with highly variable image quality.

It recently occurred to me that I am now almost exactly the same age as my father was when I was born.  If I were in a similar situation, would I be prepared?  Would I be ready to finish growing up?

Coincidentally, the Atlantic just published a fascinating look at the Grant study, which followed a group of then-Harvard sophomores through their lives (and in some cases, to their deaths).   Some turned out to be men of great note (one was JFK), but others seemed to amount to little and were pained with regret in their later years.

I found a statement by the study’s current administrator in the video that accompanies the article to be particularly relevant.  Near the end, he described the ten years between the ages of 25 and 35 as one of few limitations yet great personal uncertainty.  Would they—the participants of that age worried—ever amount to “a hill of beans”?  It is reassuring, then, that most of the participants had indeed made something of themselves by the end of their fifth decade.

Seems almost like an echo of adolescence, and that turned out O.K., too.

Today is Earth Day!

I thought I’d re-post the results of an analysis I did last year that compared the manufacturing energy needs versus the operating energy needs of a computer.  The upshot: unless you currently hardly ever use your computer, you’ll save more energy by upgrading your current computer (instead of replacing it) than you will by switching it off more often.

Our goal, as it was presented to us, was to save energy by convincing computer users to switch off (or enable power managmenet on) their computers when not in use.  However, we found that the worst offenders — those users with multiple computers switched on almost all of the time — typically were already aware of the energy cost of their actions. They knew about power-saving strategies and behaviors, but they had made conscious decisions that convenience trumped waste for always-on computing.  The light users — those who turned on their computers only occasionally — were already conserving energy, so there was no behavior to change. We went back to the drawing board and started kicking around new ideas.  Eventually, we formed a new hypothesis: perhaps we could save energy not by turning computers off but by reducing their production.  I set out to bring data to the discussion.

Using data from an IEEE article and a CodingHorror post, I found that it takes about 2000 kWh of energy to manufacture a computer and about 193 kWh of electricity to operate that computer continuously for a year.  Moreover, the data show that a computer is typically replaced after 3.0 years of use. I dug deeper.

What if, instead of replacing that computer after 3.0 years, the user were to add more RAM and (assuming it’s a laptop) give it a new battery?  That upgrade should give the computer another year of useful life, a total of 4.0 years, which means that 25% fewer computers would be purchased.  In energy terms, that means that 2000 kWh* 25% = 500 kWh would be saved.  Subtract the 85 kWh that would be required to manufacture the replacement RAM and battery, and there’s a 500 kWh – 85 kWh = 415 kWh savings.  That’s the same amount of energy as it would take to run the computer for 415 kWh / 193 kWh/yr = 2.2 years!

The user would need to go from running his computer 100% of the time to about 25% of the time to save the same amount of energy, which is a change that we found users were unwilling or unable to make. In contrast, we found users to be very receptive to the idea of delaying new computer purchases for a year via upgrading existing machines. The delayed-purchase approach also has the advantage of effecting real savings for both heavy computer users and light computer users.  The users also liked the fact that they would save money and reduce landfill waste by upgrading their existing systems instead of purchasing new ones.  Clearly, delayed purchases are a better energy-savings strategy than promoting power-savings modes to consumers.

A problem with our approach was that it was for a project sponsored by Climate Savers Computing, which receives financial support from major PC manufacturers.  Although the Climate Savers reps at our presentation seemed to like our idea, I imagine the managers might be skittish about recommending actions that would decrease sales for their patrons.

You all probably remember the video we made to advocate upgrading PCs instead of replacing them, but I thought I’d post it again.  Marilyn and Dan are the actors, and I was the director:

All things are born, live a little while, and eventually die.  Countless of these cycles pass us with indifference, but a precious few draw our attention.  For my family, one ended today: Cotton, our 16-year-old maltipoo, died peacefully this morning.

We were lucky to enjoy her cheerful demeanor in our house since the mid 1990s.  She will be missed.