Via Timothy Chow blogging at Terence Tao’s blog, I learned about outofprintmath, a kind of survey site for people to express their desire to have out of print math books brought back into print. One of the classic texts of information theory by Csiszár and Körner has been out of print for a while. Many grad students have been frustrated its unavailability (even the library copy is often checked out nearly permanently). There are (illegal) ways around this, but a photocopied book is just not the same as a real one you can take to a cafe and read.

Bobak (I think) has added Csiszár and Körner to outofprintmath. It’s number 51. Go vote!

I filed my thesis today. It was ok.

The next N posts will be about ISIT 2008 (which is where I am right now). Alex Dimakis will hopefully be guest blogging as well, so that’s something to look forward to!

As a quick comment — the exchange rate is very painful right now, as an American.

A. Doig, Fewer academics could be the answer to insufficient grants, Nature 453, 978 (19 June 2008). One’s first reaction is “of course!” Seems a bit too back of the envelope. Why not do a cycles of fear analysis?

Peter Greenaway takes on Da Vinci.

A scholarly article on being in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

Michael Mitzenmacher notices the absurdity of the correspondence rules for the Transactions on Information Theory. Of course, they are doing away with correspondences entirely, so eventually it should be less of a problem.

Patterns for designing a reputation system — this has been a little topic of discussion in the office recently.

This comic made me want to go and read up on my philosophy of probability. For discussion : what concepts are being articulated by the two characters?

Denali National Park and Preserve is a huge national park, somewhere around 6 million acres. Although some hiking is allowed in the park, there aren’t a lot of trails, so a lot of people take these tour buses along the central road through the park. Our bus driver/naturalist had a voice that reminded me of old filmstrip documentaries we would watch in grade school. A little soporific. We took an 8 hour trip, and we saw Dall sheep, caribou, grizzly bears, moose, a fox, hares, ptarmigans, owls, magpies, and other denizens of the woods, taiga, and tundra. The park was founded to save the Dall sheep, a kind of wild sheep that lives way up on the crests of mountains. We saw lots of them from a distance, with lambs prancing about. My simple camera wasn’t up to taking photos of most of the wildlife, but I managed to get a few (somewhat fuzzy) snaps.

Willow Ptarmigan:

Very fuzzy owl chicks:

Arctic ground squirrel. These guys are basically posing for you. They are total hams.

Of course, a grizzly bear. This bear ended up meandering over to a rest area where we were stopped, so we had to get on to the bus and head out before he got there. Here’s a bear behind:

And here’s the front:

There was also flora. In particular, the yellow Shrubby Cinquefoil (or Tundra Rose) and white Mountain Aven. The real summer hasn’t hit yet, so the tundra flowers are not quite out yet:

Of course, the real scene-stealer is the scenery out here in Alaska. At some places in the park the scenery looked almost painted:

Later on we took a short hike to Horseshoe Lake, which reflected the blue sky quite nicely:

Finally, the train back to Anchorage passes over Hurricane Gulch, which is a pretty impressive overpass from which you can view a creek feeding into the Chulitna River:

The next stop was Talkeetna, which is apparently the town on which the TV show Northern Exposure was based (it’s a great show, in case you haven’t seen it). Talkeetna has the best views of the south side of Denali, which is the Dena’ina name for Mt. McKinley. From left to right, the peaks are Foraker, Hunter, and Denali:

The next day we managed to get a good shot of the peak of Denali, which is 70% of the time obscured by clouds:

We also saw some pretty purple flowers known as lupins:

One thing about summer in Alaska is the length of the days. The sun rose at 4:30 AM and set at 11:42 PM. I stayed up to try and catch the peaks at sunset. Of course, the cloud cover was heavy, but the colors were gorgeous. Some of it sort of came out in my little point-and-shoot’s image:

The Kenai Fjords National Park is mostly inaccessible by land — there’s not much in the way of hiking, and a lot of it is occupied by the Harding Icefield, which is a gigantic sheet of ice out of which several glaciers flow. To see the park you need to take a boat into the fjords. We went around the Aialik peninsula to see the Aialik Glacier. We saw lots of Steller sea lions, bald eagles, tufted and horned puffins, harbor seals, a black bear or two, mountain goats, porpoises, and other birds whose names I forget. The sea otters kept their distance so it was hard to see them up close. The ocean was a bit choppy so most of my photos came out a bit blurry, but I managed to snap a shot of some Steller sea lions hauled out on a rock:

The most impressive sight was the Aialik Glacier itself. The glacier is one mile across, but the photo from a distance makes it seem quite small:

Ice constantly breaks off (”calves”) from the glacier, making the water surrounding it kind of like a melting slushie:

What you do is pull up as close as you can to the glacier while still being safe and watch the front of it to see the ice calve. Huge chunks break off with a creaking groan, crack, and splash. I managed to get one shot of a large section of glacier calving:

Interestingly, the internet in my hotel is provided by Meraki, which was speadheading an urban mesh network in San Francisco. On Wednesday we took the train from Anchorage to Seward, named for the US Secretary of State who pushed for the purchase of Alaska from the Russians for the sum of $7.2 million. The train ride is very scenic and we passed some beautiful mountains, the Turnagain Arm (named by the navigationally frustrated Captain Cook), and a beautifully clear lake:

In Seward we checked out the Sea Life Center, which had some puffins:

Today we went on a day long tour via boat of the Kenai Fjords National Park and saw the Aialik Peninsula and Aialik Glacier. I haven’t gotten the photos from there yet but if any turned out nicely I’ll post ‘em.

Sorry for the blog being down (not that anyone except for Adam noticed) — I forgot to renew my domain name. All that seems to be fixed now.

I’m in Anchorage, AK right now. The sun rises here at around 4:30 and sets at around 11:30 these days, so it’s still pretty bright out. Fortunately, the hotel has heavy drapes to block out the near-midnight sun. I may later spruce up this post with some photos.

Today I went to the Alaska Native Heritage Center, which is a museum on the edge of town dedicated to the native cultures of Alaska. I knew pretty much nothing going in, so the Center was an informative experience in terms of cultural awareness and ethnographic practice. The museum splits the native peoples of Alaska into five groups based on their mode of life (which in turn is tied to geography). From South to North the divisions are Eyak/Tlingit/Haida/Tsimshian, Aleut/Alutiiq, Athabascan, Yup’ik/Cup’ik, and Inupiaq/St. Lawrence Island Yupik. The divisions are not along linguistic lines. For example, the Yupik on St. Lawrence Island speak a language similar to that of the Yup’ik on the west coast, but their hunting practices and homes are more similar to the Inupiaq, who live in the far north.

What was interesting to me was the huge heterogeneity in the lifestyles across these different groups. From a position of ignorance informed by pop culture representations of “Eskimos” one is tempted to think of all native Alaskans as one group that goes and hunts seals and polar bears. In the south, wood is plentiful and the climate is more temperate, so permanent houses, totem poles, and other constructions are possible. Farther north and west, the only wood available is driftwood, and entire homes were built out of driftwood (and whale bones, I learned). In colder regions the houses were sunk into the ground to preserve heat, and entrances were built via tunnels into the permafrost. Similarly, the geographic distribution of animals informed diet, seasonal movement patterns, and other cultural practices.

Unfortunately, the museum doesn’t really make the comparison across native groups to visitors, which is where the ethnography and politics of native cultural preservation come into play. The kind of reductive analysis I noodled about with in the previous paragraph may run counter to the aims of the center. By drawing distinctions between ethnic groups one can understand how different cultural practices emerge, but drawing boundaries hinders solidarity across peoples. There is also a tension between the effort to preserve or modify traditional practices for the present day and the museum’s efforts to display cultural artifacts. Finally, the museum often does not display full-size versions of many of its artifacts such as boats and oil lamps, or the sample houses that were part of the outdoor section of the museum. The docents and guides had to explain this miniaturization to the guests, and it felt a little uncomfortable, as though in order to explain their culture they had to shrink it.

Finally, I thought the whole language aspect got short shrift in the presentation of the materials. I saw reference grammars and dictionaries in the bookstore, but how are language preservation efforts working? An acquaintance of mine at Berkeley works on language preservation/reintroduction, so maybe it’s just something I have heard about.

Later on we went to the History and Art Museum, which has a more linear timeline of the history and prehistory of Alaska, along with some more modern exhibits which belie the museum’s relationship to its funders. One is on the great things that oil has brought to Alaska (paid for by the oil companies). Another is the benefits of Alaska Native Regional Corporations. Finally (and most appropriately for me), there was a little section paid for by telecoms on the history of communications technology in Alaska. Plenty to think about in terms of who pays for museums, how history is written, and all that jazz.

All in all, both museums were definitely worthwhile — I wouldn’t have had this much to think and write about otherwise.