July 15, 2009

I am not sure my flight plan home could have been less conveniently planned. I had put a bunch of thought into a good itinerary, but by the time our travel agency got around to buying the ticket, the itinerary had devolved to absurdity. There was actually a leg from Houston to Dallas and I had to collect my bag, go through customs and re-enter the airport not once, but twice, during tight layovers. But the airlines over preformed. My low expectations[1] of Caribbean airlines were vastly exceeded and Continental was consistently early. I am not sure why I tend to select anything but Continental when given the choice. They have fine on-time arrival rates, good service, comfortable seats, never seem to be full, play multiple free movies, and still serve food. I don’t travel to the southeast much anymore, but they have definitely moved up my list.

The highlight of the trip home was flying over the Caribbean islands. The pilot went out of his way to pass over the islands and I had a window. The calcareous depositional environment was exceptionally clear. I feel like I understand limestone a lot better now. And it was pretty. I can see why people vacation here.

Let me wrap up with a couple random thoughts and stories to round out the day.

We found this sign that could be a sound entry to the FAIL blog.

And Mark took this picture of a bird cage on one of the light poles. It seemed like an odd place to keep a pet, unless it was a public pet or mascot. We remained confused until we went to Kester’s friend’s house for dinner Friday night and he had 2 similar birds in similar cages. Apparently these are competition birds. They have sing offs. They pit the birds against each other and compete them on a number of criteria (# number of chirps, length of song, volume). There is even a kind of morose ‘sudden death’ component. Apparently it is not uncommon for one of the competing birds to simply drop dead of exertion. As I began to understand I said, ‘Oh, it is a song bird competition.’ Our hosts found this very funny. Apparently it is far more serious than my pithy description made it sound.

I have spent most of my down time preparing for the class and exploring Georgetown with Mark, but I have worked through several biodiversity lectures provided to me by an Ecology and Evolution prof from UCD. The professor specializes in South American rain forests, so it has been cool to be learning about the unparalleled biodiversity (and the causal mechanics) of this biome from such a proximal position (even if I didn’t get to the forest itself).

Mark and Nazeem (the student I got to know the best and just a really smart guy) got in a little good natured debate about where driving was more dangerous – Guyana or the US. They both happened to know the annual auto death numbers from their countries, but when they did the math as a percentage of population size, the automobile death rates were nearly identical. We reasoned that the more chaotic driving system in Guyana probably produced more accidents but there were far fewer fatalities since velocities were so much lower.[2]

I have decided that I feel so uncomfortable walking with traffic because there is a very tight social contract in Guyanese culture that I have not bought into. In our system, we demonstrate that we are not going to hit someone by staying far away from them. But in Georgetown, where streets are narrow and cars share the road with horses, bikes and pedestrians, space is a premium. So the optimize the use of space with a tight social contract of trust. The pedestrians have the assurance of said social contract that, though the cars may get close, they will not be hit. Two cars can essentially play chicken in a passing maneuver that would be prosecutable in the states, because everyone agrees to swerve at the last minute. In a sense, there is something kind of beautiful about this. If we re-cast ‘chaotic driving’ as ‘a high level of social trust and cohesion’ it puts things in a little different perspective.

The picture in my room is of a big pile of sand in a river. This seems odd…for anyone but me. Since computing the amount of sediment a river can move is the one thing I am supposed to be an expert in, it seemed oddly appropriate. Mark had a waterfall.

I lost a coffee bet to Mark. The bet was: Could you fit 2 Mississippi’s into an Idaho?[3] It turns out you can fit 1.8 Mississippi’s in an Idaho. I owe Mark coffee.

Well, thanks for coming with me on these two trips. The chance of future work is there but is a little remote, so I am going to retire the blog here. But of course, I have still not been to the waterfall or the wild life sanctuary.[4] The legendary golden frog still eludes me. And, it is rare to work on a flooding problem that has recently displaced a third of a nation’s population. I think there is a lot of good work to be done and adventure to be had, so you never know. More significantly, this was my first deployment with the CMEP team, who do disaster readiness for our allies (or those we would like to be our allies) all over the world (and I think it went very well), so other opportunities are not outside of the realm of possibility.

The keys to HEC keeping me long term boil down to 1) do I get to do cool research type work that no one has ever done, 2) do I get to live near a major college campus and make a tangible contribution to a effective and contextualized college ministry and 3) do I continue to get to be involved in work overseas where creative water problem solving could dramatically improve the quality of life for some in the two-thirds world (usually far more so than state side work on well established water infrastructure). So far, it looks like we may be in Davis for a while, counter-intuitively, because I get to spend so much time away from Davis. And, it needs to be said, that my wife is pretty remarkable for affording me these opportunities when we have two children under the age of two.

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[1] Based on previous experience.
[2] I related this to someone recently who replied, yeah, but what is their rate per mile. This gave me pause, but I’m not sure we should get computational credit for being such an auto-centric culture. Living war away from work and play simply increases our risk even if our vehicles are safer.
[3] Guyana is approximately the size of Idaho, which is how the conversation started.
[4] I decided not to tack time onto the end of my trips in part because of the inflexibility of our travel agency and in part because it was extremely heroic of my wife to let me go in the first place, so I wanted to keep my absence as short as possible.