The Flowers of Spring

And when I'm not thinking about all that, I think about flowers:

At work

Making and drinking coffee was just about my favorite part of my old job.  Most of the things I didn't like about that job are gone, and the coffee part's gotten a lot better, too.  Certainly it doesn't get much fresher than this:



I've made of this coffeeshop my office, and spend half a day here whenever Felix is in school:

But what, you ask, am I doing here?  I'm working on an idea.  I am trying to figure out what might sit at the juncture of two burgeoning fields, self-measurement and participatory sensing.  And, having done so, I want to figure out how to make of that my work.

But what, you ask, the heck am I talking about?  This article in the New York Times, just out, explains the first term nicely.  In a nutshell, the superphones we're all carrying in our pockets are capable of measuring in excruciating detail our second-by-second movements, as well as recording a great deal about our activities and environments.  With their help, or that of more specialized instruments, it has become at least theoretically practical (and, to some at least, it is already desirable) to harvest and analyze a lot of hard data about ourselves with the avowed purpose of understanding and perhaps even improving our beings and lives.  Then there's participatory sensing, whereby those affected by a phenomenon are involved in measuring it, the idea being that better, more relevant, and more fine-grained data about that phenomenon may thereby be obtained.  Related.  Important.  Wide open.

But where, you ask, did this all come from?  It started in Amsterdam, soon after I moved to the Saxenburgerstraat, when I realized that me and all of the rest of the yuppies who were rapidly gentrifying that area of Oud-West between the Vondelpark and the Overtoom were allowing the presence of the one to blind us to the effects of the other:  while enjoying our views of that strip of green, we were all breathing the pollution coming from the strip of gray on the other side.  But how much pollution?  And how to make it clear to all of those yuppies, child-toting potential activists every one, that they were paying hundreds of thousands of euros to raise their offspring next to the air pollution equivalent of the A10?

Air pollution measurement, like much centralized data gathering, is typically done using a limited set of high-quality but expensive sensors placed at a limited number of locations for a limited period of time.  The data so generated is of high quality, but for a wide-spread, continuously variable phenomenon such as air pollution it is laughably incomplete:  we don't know in detail, in real-time, over the entire area of concern, and for an indefinite period, the pollution levels we are trying to measure.  And we certainly don't know exactly how polluted is the air going into each of our lungs.  I don't, and you don't, and because we don't it is altogether too easy to treat this as a non-localized problem in aggregate--in this area average life expectancy is diminished by so and so years, overall incidence of lung cancer is increased by X%--rather than my problem--where I live and work and play I encounter air pollution that results in my life being cut short by so and so many years, my chance of developing lung cancer being increased by X%.  And so we sit on our dakterras (that is, if we ever get it built) enjoying our view of the Vondelpark and giving nary a thought to the noxious air blowing over us from the traffic-snarled Overtoom, when we should be downstairs writing infuriated letters to our stadsdeel, or picketing Nuon, or otherwise being activists and protecting ourselves, our children, and our investments.

I want to motivate people appropriately.  I want to do this by enabling them in learning what their personal micro-environments are made up of.  I want to remind them that the aggregate issue is always composed of individuals, one of whom is you.  It's not enough to know that you are part of the problem/solution, you need to know exactly which part.  And with current technology you can.  And, using this same technology and at the same time, you can also help those who are already working on these problems by providing them with a lot of extra data of a type they are not otherwise in a position to collect.

That's what I think about here, at work, as I drink my coffee.  That, and how to make of this paying work that let's me stay here, drinking this coffee, forever.  Your input--criticism, ideas, consulting contracts--is, as always, very welcome.

Tomatoes

"Try, try again," that was our motto in growing tomatoes at Ons Buiten.  Every year the same story:  plant the seedlings, stake them, give them our best compost, rejoice in their growth, water them through the occasional dry stretch, watch them swell up like balloons when the monsoon arrived--July one year, August the next--swell up, split, fall, and rot.

Depressing.

But now we face a waterless summer, all but guaranteed.  And so:  try, try again.

Felix's first regular chore:  watering the tomatoes.  Wish us luck.

More Mooi

Stop me if you're getting bored.

I thought not.  Taken on (or on our way to) Kehoe Beach this past weekend, one of many such stretches on the coastline near our house.  Last shot is of a whale vertebra the size of Felix's entire body.

ID Photo Project

If you're reading this then you should probably be a part of our ID Photo Project.  We've been doing this for years, namely collecting official ID photos from all of our friends and relations, gluing them to magnets, and sticking them on our refrigerator.  We also take official ID photos of ourselves each year (had to, for our Dutch visas, continue to do so now, for the Project), and post them likewise.

I'm tempted to show the ID photos we now have here, but you never know how these things might get used, so I'll resist.  But trust me, it's neato, and besides, you always get more ID photos from a session than you need for whatever application drove you to get them in the first place.  So:  please find an ID photo of yourself--old, new, doesn't matter--and send it to us.  If nothing else it'll let me know you're reading....

Camping

'Tis the season, which is to say the rain has mostly stopped, so we've been camping, or rather I have:  one does not sleep on an air mattress in Talia's condition.

First trip, two weekends ago, was with Dan.  We camped at Stillwater Cove on the coast north of Fort Ross.  Fantastic.



We snuck off again the following Friday, but this time the kids came with.  Camped at Dillon Beach, much closer to home, in Marin.  Just as fun, though the food--chicken dogs and marshmallows for dinner, pancakes wrapped around marshmallows for breakfast--left something to be desired.  Kids loved it all of course.

Bearing up with Baby

Talia, right before Felix's birth:

 

Me, likewise:

Whoo hoo!  Were we ready then? More urgently, are we ready now?

And urgent it is:  Talia, at her penultimate doctor's visit a few days ago, was informed that the baby is now predicted to arrive a week early, namely 24 April. I wouldn't have put much stock in this had Talia herself not also commented that "the baby is ready."  She said this in the exact tones of the possessed child in "Poltergeist," as though channeling the baby--or rather, "The Baby"--itself.

Although I don't think she meant to scare me, I nevertheless leaped into action and immediately start turning the house upside down in search of her Camelbak water system, the one absolute requirement for intensive work of this kind (or so I am instructed).  So far it eludes me, and neither you nor Talia are surprised, though you, at least, have not sweetly threatened to go out and buy another one if it doesn't turn up very soon, and I thank you for your confidence in me.

More successfully, we have sorted through four giant boxes of baby clothes which, if nothing else, served as a helpful, even exciting, reminder of just how tiny, and soft, newborns are.  We have located all of the pram parts, disinfected them where necessary, and aside from inflating the tires we are ready to roll.  This week:  further preparation of hospital bags (now resident in the station wagon) and start to get more specific with Felix about our plan to suddenly abandon him--possibly while he's at school, possibly while he's asleep, possibly in the middle of the day--while we go get the baby out; as you may imagine, it's not an altogether easy thing to explain.

The crib to be borrowed should arrive tomorrow and I made room for it today.  We are discussing announcements with printers.  And yes, we have chosen names.

Ready?  You bet we're not.

Big Fruit

It may have struck you as odd that I have blogged so little about food.  (If you are wondering why this might be odd then you probably don't know me well enough to be reading this, and besides, The Gallery of Transport Loss is much more enjoyable.)  It has not been for lack of things to say.  I am back in America, and have wasted no time in gorging on all that I have missed in my years abroad:  ham, as you may recall, but also Reubens, burritos, sushi, BBQ chips, proper Chinese food, and above all pizza, about which more another time.

But today I write about none of these things, but rather about an apple.  Oddly enough, this apple I have never before seen in America, nor anywhere else except, once, in Japan.  Odd, too, because apples are not a type of fruit that typically interests me (having grown up in an orchard I've had my fill).  But this apple, this apple I say, is really special.  It is the Pacific Rose, a New Zealand variant grown under tightly restricted (commercially speaking) conditions in Washington State, and now, though perhaps only temporarily, available.  We love it, for its crispness, its wonderfully fine grain, its delicious flavor, and, not least, because it is as big as Felix's head (not that that stops him):

Nor should it stop you:  if you are in America then search them out.  If in Europe you may be out of luck, though I am very curious to hear if anyone can find it over there.

And while we are on the topic of oversize fruit, how about these:

Texas beauties, available continuously thanks to the miracle of refrigeration and the Costco distribution system.