Week 2 Summary

Time it takes to bike to work: 30 minutes with a tailwind, 55 minutes with a headwind
Number of falls off of bike: 1.5
Number of bruises resulting from falls off bike: 5

Kilos of chocolate consumed: 1.4 (uh oh)
Cups of tea consumed: 0
Caffeine in consumed chocolate in cups-of-tea-equivalent: 25

Strongest earthquake: 4.6, with ~10-second duration
Response to strongest earthquake: "Hmm... I wonder if this will get stronger.  Should I get out of bed?"


Hours spent coding a statistical model in R: 5
Hours it would have taken in MatLab: 1.5
Motivation to keep using R (scale of 1-10): -1e12

The Squeeze Theorem

If you haven't heard me talk about the navigational applications of the Squeeze Theorem before, you've been missing out.  (Hey watch it, I can see your eye-rolls!)

For those of you who didn't take, or don't remember, first-year calculus, the Squeeze Theorem is a mathematical nicety that helps you if, say, you need to know what value a function (a particular type of equation) will have as a variable on which it depends goes to infinity (i.e., as you take the limit).  If you're lucky, you don't need the Squeeze Theorem, and you can calculate the limit directly.  But if you can't perform that calculation, you might be in luck if you know that your function is bounded (i.e., always bigger than one thing, and smaller than another thing) by two other functions that go to the same limit.  That is to say, your function of interest gets "squeezed" to its limit by the bounding functions.  Ta-da!

All right, that whole paragraph was utterly useless (and probably not mathematically accurate).  But the Squeeze Theorem, that most glorious concept, is not!  Because, you see, the Squeeze Theorem is vitally important to everyday life -- specifically, to finding your way around in strange places.

Consider the following:

• You are Holly.
• You want chocolate.
• Chocolate occurs in discrete patches.  For example, in Ghirardelli Square, at the tip of the San Francisco peninsula.
• Therefore, if you head generally North while in the city (creating your own wandering function as you do), and do not swim across any bays or oceans (your bounding functions), you shall reach chocolate.

I've used the Squeeze Theorem to find chocolate, and also to burn it off (it worked remarkably well during long marathon-training runs in Boston, which, like any decent city, has a river to aid in bounded navigation).  And my friend Adam has reported that it works rather nicely in Minnesota, where the land is so flat that you can see your boundaries for miles (never mind that those boundaries happen to be ten miles apart).

And, wonder of all wonders, it turns out that Canterbury plans are the perfect for some Squeezing.  Allow me to present photographic evidence:

Imagine you are biking along a perfectly anonymous road.  You are surrounded by cropland, and it's very flat (i.e., the plains of Canterbury).

Perfectly Anonymous Road

 You might think you are lost.  But no!  Simply look left, then right!

To your left, some power lines (which are a useful North-South
bound once you get the hang of the place), but more importantly,
the Southern Alps!

To your right, the Canterbury hills!

Now securely bounded, you know you are traveling Southward!  Don't ask me how far apart the hills and the mountains are... that's why I've memorized road names. :)

Above Water

When I left California, it was in the midst of the driest winter in twenty years -- so dry that when my friend Luke and I went to Yosemite last December, every single road was open.  (On my previous trip there, Dad and I arrived in May to find most of the roads still closed.)

I wrote about the state of Californian affairs in my weekly Seeing Green column (water has, so far, been making an annual appearance, as it also graced my first-ever piece for the Stanford Daily), and then hopped on a plane to New Zealand, where I've been enjoying plenty of clouds and the occasional bout of precipitation.

Though I greet any kind of overcast weather with unabated delight (ever since a summer in Juneau, I've preferred clouds to sunshine), I was particularly ecstatic to go for a run in the rain during my first week in Christchurch because, as my landlords had just informed me, this is the dry season here in New Zealand.  Although the place seems unbelievably wet compared to California, at this time of year, water restrictions are tightened.  This is especially true in the wake of infrastructure-damaging earthquakes, which have compromised water delivery in the metropolitan area.

I've never been the best at conserving water -- I don't drink very much of it, but I sure do take long showers.  I'm trying to get better, though, especially after experience with a shower timer in Death Valley and military-style showers shipboard a few years ago.

To my great delight, I also received the following set of great tips from a Seeing Green reader:

1. Collect rainwater in buckets for outdoor use.  My landlords do this!  But note that such things are not permitted in all areas.  For example, Colorado residents need permits to capture their own runoff, because the legal system there believes that rainfall belongs to the downstream recipient.
2. Flush toilets with shower water.  (Did you know that if you pour a bucket of water rapidly into a toilet, it will flush?  This is a great trick Dad told me about when I was little, just in case...)
3. Xeriscape (i.e., plant drought-tolerant ornamentals; landscape to eliminate the need for supplementary water).  Very important in dry places like California.  Plus, the best plant choices tend to be natives.
4. Capture the first, cold wash of shower water in a bucket.  This is my absolute personal favorite.  I have to confess, even with the shower timer, I never flip the hourglass until the water is tolerably warm.  Now, I have a way to partially alleviate my guilt!

Two-Wheeling Around Town

There's something you should know about me: I never stand on my bike pedals.  It's not that I can't: when I'm going at a reasonable clip, I've practiced getting out of my seat to pump the bicycle.  And when I'm crossing an intersection, I can manage a few feeble turnovers to appease the waiting cars.  But I always sit securely back in my seat just as soon as I can.

My inability to pump a bike has led to some entertaining attempts at hill climbing in California, and promises to lead to some interesting experiences here in New Zealand.

Trusty, but thus-far nameless, beautiful steel-frame
I've been enjoying.  Admittedly, needs a racier seat.

How to Get Raccoon-Eyes in Two Hours

I was feeling a bit down after my tour of post-quake Christchurch last Saturday (and after spending $40 -- $40!!!! -- on a pair of hiking socks), so I hopped on a bus out to the coast.  After living for a year literally on the water in Woods Hole, I find nothing so soul-restoring as the ocean.

Perhaps the easiest beach to access by public transportation from the heart of Christchurch (read as: The only beach Holly has yet accessed by public transportation from the heart of Christchurch; any tips Liz?) is out at New Brighton. 

Week 1 Summary

Time it takes to bike to work: 50 minutes
Kilos of chocolate purchased: 2.4 (sale this week!)
Kilos of chocolate consumed: 0.3 (I've been good, I guess!)
Number of earthquakes Holly felt: 4*
Number of earthquakes everyone else felt: 36
Length of first run in the rain in what feels like ten years: 15 minutes
Cups of tea consumed: 3 (all on first day of work)

*I thought I felt 7 yesterday but there were only 3... Overcompensating?

Oh, the Mondays

Some of you (Hal!) may have noticed one stray post claiming to be from the future (a.k.a. 2013) constantly hovering on the top of my blog.  It's not actually from the future -- it's just pretending to be, so that there's a constant introduction to the site for new visitors.

Now for something from the present:  It's Monday here in New Zealand, so while the rest of you have been preparing to watch epic football* games, or going looking for amphibians, or sleeping late, I've loaded up a backpack, hopped on a loaner bicycle, and pedaled 14km (about 8.7 miles) into work to start my day.

Inspired by my Stanford labmate Rachel, and my very dear friend and former roommate Li Ling, I've decided that real scientists bike at least 5 miles to work every day.  (Actually, this new method of transport was really inspired by a scheduling conflict with my landlord, Hugh, with whom I usually carpool in to work at Landcare Research.)

It's quite the pleasant ride -- when you're not worried about getting lost, that is!  I can see myself getting quite accustomed to it over the next few days -- hopefully so accustomed that I remember to stop for pictures to show you all!  All in all, it's just part of the transformation of Holly, from soft-and-lazy desk worker to hard-core field biologist!  (Yeah, we'll see how long this lasts... probably until the first time I encounter a steep slope or a wasp's nest in the field, and run away screaming.)


*A note on sports:  Here in New Zealand, the big ones are cricket and rugby.  My landlords (Hugh and Robyn) are tremendous sports fans, and have been slowly teaching me the rules of cricket.  When rugby season starts next month, I'm sure I'll learn all about that, too!

As most of us know, there's general confusion between Americans and the rest of the world about what "football" means.  I've learned to specify "American football" in most cases, but here in NZ, it's called "gridiron."  All right, that's well and good.  So does "football" mean soccer?  Nope!  Here's the jargon, as best I can map it:

Gridiron -- American Football
Soccer -- Plain old black-and-white ball soccer (but the uncool term for it)
Football -- Used to mean rugby, but slowly coming to mean soccer.  Except that there's some complication Hugh was trying to explain to me about several different kinds of football in Australia and.... oh well.

It feels like a truck going by...

The first time I ever felt an earthquake, I was perhaps five or six years old, in Los Angeles visiting my grandparents.  I remember thinking that a fully-loaded eighteen-wheeler must have driven by the house, a sufficiently frequent occurrence that I wasn't alarmed at all.  That quake didn't do any damage -- nor have any others I've subsequently experienced.

Perhaps for this reason, I'm characteristically oblivious to earthquakes.  Last year, Tad (my Ph.D. advisor) was giving a lecture when suddenly the room fell silent and someone said, "Was that an earthquake?", and the projector began swaying.  As the TA, perched in the back of the room, I hadn't felt a thing.

But here in the Christchurch area, everyone is finely attuned to any movement of the earth.  And so they should be -- a big quake in September, 2010, damaged many buildings in the heart of the city.  The first time I visited New Zealand, three months later, I walked around a Christchurch liberally decorated with caution tape, bracing steel, and a few security fences.  Still, I got a chance to see a beautiful city teeming with life.  I bought the ring that I wear everyday in Cathedral Square, toured the Botanical Gardens, and saw an exhibition in the Arts Centre.

11 December 2010.  On the left, the University of Canterbury's former campus,
now the Arts Centre.  On the right, the Christchurch Cathedral.

Because I spent only one day in the city, I admired the iconic Christchurch Cathedral from afar, figuring I'd have plenty of time during later trips to get the inside tour.  Unfortunately, this was not to be.

In February 2011, almost one year ago, Christchurch was rocked by another quake -- this time, in the middle of the day.  This time, 181 people lost their lives, and the Cathedral's tower fell.

Today, the heart of the city is cordoned off for repairs, most -- if not all -- of the buildings are sealed shut, and every doorway still bears the spraypainted marks of the crew that cleared it after the devastating quake.  I felt like a voyeur photographing the city when I returned to it yesterday.  Although commerce is springing back in the form of brightly colored shipping containers-turned-temporary storefronts, the streets are only lightly populated.  Most of us seem to be tourists, taking silent footsteps and saying little, awkwardly pointing cameras at piles of bricks and twisted metal.

Left: Chain-link fences block pedestrians from entering the heart of downtown.
Many of the buildings there are still dangerous, especially since aftershocks are
still being felt every day.  On the right, Summer 2011 ads still mark this storefront.
The spraypaint on the glass marks the building as cleared, by a New Zealand team
four days after the earthquake.

The Shipping Container Mall.  Business must go on -- in this 
case, with typical kiwi flair.  Within this one block, you find
an enclave of commerce in an uber-modern setting.

And yet there is the sense that life is resilient, that it goes on.  I cannot imagine the feelings of the city's citizens, if I, who saw the place only once before, feel so utterly heartbroken by what I saw when I returned.  It seems... wrong... to feel such strong emotion about it, since I am just a visitor here.  I feel like an imposter, with an inappropriately keen sense of empathy.

Home Life in ChCh

Thanks to my amazing Kiwi friend Liz, who is also working on her Ph.D. at Stanford, I've gotten a head-start on some of the common abbreviations and turns of phrase used here in Aotearoa (the Maori word for New Zealand).  For example, "ChCh" is short for Christchurch, "cheers" is pronounced "chiz", and "tea" can mean pretty much any meal, as well as friendly mid-morning and mid-afternoon tea breaks during which we all sit around and chat about life and science, and, as the new kid on the block, I get ragged about American politics.  (I'm going to need to start a glossary pretty soon!)

But before I get bogged down in linguistics, the purpose of this post is to pontificate (OK, Holly, that's enough alliteration for one day) about daily life in New Zealand.  I arrived on Tuesday, January 17, 15-or-so hours after leaving San Francisco on Sunday, January 15.  Wait a minute!  How does 15 hours turn into two days?  Well, New Zealand is both across the Equator, and across the Date Line.  That's right, I'm in a whole new quadrant!

Technically, New Zealand's time zone is GMT+13:00.  But, as I prefer to think of it in relationship to being home in California, I'm a day ahead and three hours behind (or 21 hours ahead, if your brain prefers to compute with double-digits).  If it seems surprising that New Zealand should be only three timezones away (the same amount that Hawaii is during North America's summer), remember that here in New Zealand, we're on daylight savings time, while the United States is not.  So, the time change between California and New Zealand can be five hours (during CA summer and NZ winter), four hours (when no one's on daylight savings), or three hours (right now; NZ summer and CA winter).

But the great thing about the Internet is that time doesn't matter!  Though I have to be careful not to Skype-call Dad (back on the US East Coast) in the evenings here.

Anyway, back on the ground here in NZ... I'm staying with a wonderful (read as: slightly irreverent, incredibly hilarious, and truly warm and generous) couple in Halswell, a suburb of Christchurch (which is the largest city on the South Island -- sometimes shortened to Southland -- of New Zealand).  They've built a beautiful home to their own design, with room for a garden, lots of glass sliding doors to keep the place feeling airy and light, and a couple spare bedrooms for guests.  Since their son just moved to Australia, they had a room free for a tenant -- albeit an orange and black room!

My brilliant orange-and-black bedroom (with baby blue and pink sheets).
The walls not shown are painted black, and the curtains are all black, too!
Since I won't be doing a whole lot of decorating, it's great to have a bright
room to keep the walls occupied, especially since I've been stuck in white-
washed dorm rooms for the past couple of years!

So far, I've really been enjoying my stay, and am starting to feel like one of the family -- as I should, since we're all so casual around here!  (Almost) every day, I find time to go for a run around the neighborhood, and am slowly discovering local gems like a little park frequented by ducks and schoolchildren.  (Because this is New Zealand's summer, most of the kids are off from school until the end of January.)

What a great use for a right-of-way!  (You can see the infra-
structure for the high-voltage lines in the top-left corner.)

A twenty-minute walk (shorter jog, and much shorter bike ride) down the road, there's a shopping centre with banks, a post office, lots of ice cream vendors, and a supermarket.  Luke says one of his favorite things about visiting foreign countries is checking out the different stuff found in the markets, so that's what I did on my first day in town.

Clearly Americans and New Zealanders have very different
taste in their spreads!  But my favorite thing about shopping
here is the chocolate!  It's so much cheaper than in the States.
And naturally, that's why I bought only chocolate on this trip.

So that's home life!  Not too shabby for a graduate student!