One of the things I miss most about Chile is the ability to walk and take public transportation almost anywhere. People probably arranged the system from necessity. I didn’t have a car, and most of the people I knew didn’t either. I didn’t drive for over two years and as my return date approached, I was itching to get back into the driver’s seat. I realized quickly that I had to be in the driver’s seat, or at least in a car; the area where I live is in Utah is just built for driving. Sure, there’s a supermarket just two miles away, but you have to brave a four-lane road without a sidewalk to get there. In one of those ironic twists, I realized shortly after I got back to my car that I didn’t want it.

Both schools are just a few blocks from the same highway, it’s just 2200 miles between them.

Fortunately I just drove the leg from Salt Lake City to Berkeley this time. My dad and I spent all day Wednesday and Thursday morning on the road. Now I’m unpacking and getting set up in my new home.

Seriously. This is as far as you should go.

When I went to see The Dark Knight—fantastic film, by the way—there was one part that stood out for me. Early in the movie Bruce Wayne and Alfred are planning an operation where Batman needs to board a flying plane from the ground. Alfred suggests a program that the CIA has been working on called Skyhook. After an action sequence, Batman uses this Skyhook apparatus, and given all the other far-fetched technology in the movie, you might think that Skyhook is imaginary too. It’s not. In fact, it’s old school.

My grandfather was a navigator aboard this MC-130E during the Vietnam War.

I know this through something of a coincidence. A few weeks ago I was visiting my grandfather in Massachusetts for his 80th birthday. We got to talking and he showed me some pictures from his days in the Air Force. During the Vietnam War, my grandfather served as a navigator aboard the MC-130, a modified version of the cargo plane. One of the pictures he showed me depicted the plane with a strange, Y-shaped protrusion from the front nose. When I asked about it, he explained the Fulton Recovery System, which sounded to me like something from a movie. Using this system, which is also called Skyhook, a person on the ground wears a harness which is connected by a nylon cable to a giant balloon hanging the in sky. The MC-130E flies into the cable, the V-shaped fork catches it, and the person on the ground shoots into the sky. The plane’s crew then opens the rear cargo bay door and retrieve the person dangling in the distance using a winch.

Although the maneuver sounds dangerous, it was actually quite safe. Robert Fulton invented the system in the 1950’s and in the dozens of years it was in use there were only 1 recorded fatality.

Time Magazine actually has an article in their archives from December 1964 describing the Fulton system.

This frame from The Dark Knight shows an aircraft about to pickup Batman with the same V-shaped fork as the MC-130E. © 2008 Warner Bros. Pictures

The Batmobile, Batman’s armor, and his other gadgets may be from a time in the future, but his Skyhook liftoff is over 40 years old.

This is my first step towards fixing that, or at least the writing portion. I’m making a commitment to write something for my site at least once a week for the foreseeable future. My goal is to make it more than just an account of what I’m doing; I’d like it to be about things that I think are interesting and that I’m thinking about. There’s no point in posting boring material just for the sake of meeting a deadline.

There is only one prison in Belize. It is filled with about 1300 inmates; Belize’s population is 300,000.

I visited the Mayan ruins at Caracól.

Belize doesn’t have any highway patrol police officers, so instead their highways have speed bumps. I’m not sure if I believe this one completely, but that’s what our driver said. And we did stop every 10 minutes or so for a speed bump, so maybe it’s legit.

Leaf cutter ants are fascinating. They march along the jungle floor, 50 feet up a tree, and come back with nickel-sized swatches of leaves.

Scorpions have to be one of the most sinister looking things out there. And I think you should double the sinister factor when you find one crawling on your bed. Anyway, I tried to capture it so that I could release it outside, but the trapping process lead to the accidental amputation of some important scorpion appendages.

Related to the previous point, it takes ants less than 6 hours to discover and complete devour a four-inch-long scorpion.

Underwater photography is much more difficult than I expected. It’s essentially like sports photography, except you’re holding your breath. I got a few good shots, but I found that movies were a better way to capture being underwater. It is fun to be able to submerge your camera in water, though.

Sea turtles have amazing jaws. In general you don’t hear much underwater, but I could hear crunching as I watched a turtle devour lobsters. If you turn up your speakers, you can too.

Before we left I was a bit disappointed to learn that English is the official language of Belize (Belize was part of British Honduras before its independence in 1982) because I wanted some Spanish practice. I was pleased to run into many Spanish-speakers; about 50% of the population speaks Spanish as a first language.

I think life is basically R-rated, and movies have a lot to say about it, though there’s certainly a difference between, say, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and Blood Diamond. I’ve been looking for some opportunities to practice making info-graphics, so I thought I’d whip up a chart of Oscar nominees for best picture and their MPAA ratings. Even if the winners are disputed, as a group these movies are among the best made, so I thought it would be interesting to show them grouped by rating. I only covered the last 10 years, though it might be interesting to go back as far as ratings data will allow when I have more time.

In the last decade, 29 of the nominated films were rated R (58%), 19 were PG-13 (38%), and 2 were PG (4%). Of the winners, 6 were rated R and 4 were PG-13.

You can download a PDF copy of my chart or the original data. My sources were the Wikipedia listing of nominees and the IMDB entry for each movie.

I actually wrote about it here at the time, but I can’t be sure that I conveyed the intense rage the situation provoked. Around February, probably the hottest month of the Chilean summer, there ceased to be any distinction between ants outside and ants inside. Our floors were covered with ants and there was no obvious solution. If ants are streaming into your house, forming a black river across your floor, or counter, or whatever, then your task is simple: find what’s at the end of the ant stream, probably an open jar of Smuckers or a torn bag of sugar, remove it, and destroy the ants. Our ants, however, were wandering aimlessly through the kitchen, living room, and bathroom. When the ants are aimless, that’s when you know you’re screwed. You could sweep them all up—they’d form a pile of dirt that moved—and throw them out of the house, but their cousins, or college roommates, or great-grandkids would be back half an hour later.

I remember seeing this double rainbow over I-80 when my dad and I were driving back to college before my senior year. While I was organizing some old digital photos I found this shot and I was surprised by how vibrant the color was. The pavement is as black as I remember it, the sky as deep blue. I made a global levels adjustment in Photoshop, but I didn’t do anything special to highlight the rainbows. Thought you might enjoy the shot.

If you want to see the original, I put together a side-by-side comparison. It might look like I pumped up the blues, but the original has a yellow color cast.

I took this picture about a month ago but I haven’t gotten around to posting it. It struck me as a funny juxtaposition between Small Town America and Big City, U.S.A. While it might be unfair to compare the front page of the Post to the B section of the Standard Examiner, another moose did make an appearance on the front page two weeks ago. I don’t have a shot of that so you’ll have to take my word for it.

If you missed 2003, this chart is a reference to a song by Kelis, “Milkshake,” which spent several weeks at the top of the charts. In that song, Kelis sings:

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
And they’re like
It’s better than yours,
Damn right it’s better than yours,
I can teach you,
But I have to charge

If you have only a vague idea what this milkshake might be, you can check Urban Dictionary, which tells us that milkshake means, “A girl’s body and the way she carries it.” Once you know all that, the chart is funny, no?

I thought so, as did several hundred other people, many of whom have decided to try their hand at making their own song charts. Now there’s a Flickr group dedicated to graphs and charts representing songs. In three weeks the group has accumulated 475 members and over 750 song charts. These are a few of my favorites.

I think part of the humor comes from the excessive chartjunk used to represent extremely simple data. There’s also the sometimes-hilarious a-ha! moment when you get the chart you’re looking at. I played around with a few ideas and made a handful of song charts to contribute.

• Since You Went Away…
• I Know It Might Be wrong
• Effect of His Song on My Life
• Reasons To Pick Up Phone
• He’s Got Hoes
• We Can Leave Your Friends Behind
• When all you got is…

Hope you enjoy at least one of these—I covered 80s pop, 90s hip-hop, rap and rock from the 2000s, plus some Three Dog Night. I’ve been told that some of the references are obscure, especially the chart representing Men Without Hats’s hit “Safety Dance.” Let me know if you make a chart of your own.

Some of the specimins I found were so entirely whimsical or strange that it was hard not to be charmed by them. Here are three of my favorites:

Men on pipes and tightropes This piece has probably the best placement of any I’ve seen.

An international outlaw. So, uh, where is he?

I love you umbrellas. I’m not sure why I like this one so much, but there’s something charming about the non sequitur replacement of “you” with a picture of an umbrella.

You can check out the rest of the graffiti photos I took over at Flickr (or in a slideshow!) Much of the graffiti expresses political messages, some of which may be particularly offensive to Americans. But I figure that if you’re not offended or shocked on a regular basis, then you’re living an insular life and you don’t really know what people around the world think. That said, take these photos with a grain of salt.

One of the scholarship eligibility forms I had to fill out was a bizarre “Personal Attributes” checklist. Here is a selection of the more interesting boxes on the 43-item list. I assume there is some scholarship, somewhere that corresponds with each item. Check all that apply to you.

• Adopted
• Against the Death Penalty
• Bilingual
• Birth mother who has placed a child for adoption
• Bisexual
• Cancer, Siblings Diagnosed With
• Clinically Overweight
• Farm, Raised On
• Feminist
• From Small Town <25,000 Population
• Gay / Lesbian
• Height: Women, 5’10” or above; Men 6’2” or above
• Last Name Van Valkenburg
• Mobile Home Park Resident
• Orphan (Parentless)
• Parent of Multiples (Twins, Triplets, etc.)
• Parent, Student With Dependent Child(ren)
• Refugee
• September 11, Affected By Tragedy
• Student, One of Multiples (Twins, Triplets, etc.)
• Transgender
• Transplant Recipient
• Undocumented Immigrant
• Vegetarian

I’m sure I’ll be able to pay for school through a combination of loans and fellowships, but I can’t shake the feelings that I’d be in a better place if I were a 6’4” transgendered feminist vegetarian triplet from a mobile home park in a small town farming community who was affected by September 11. Well, a better place in financial aid terms at least.

… there appeared to be an inverse relationship on the trail between wealth and backpack size. Big rollers in the park traveled with tiny packs and rented what they needed at waypoints, everything from tents to stoves. Unsurprisingly, our packs were large.

I believe I have found another supporting data point for my inverse relationship hypothesis. The other day I was flipping idly through an REI Adventures catalogue filled with exotic travel packages when I found a trip to Torres del Paine. The sales pitch fits the high-roller profile:

So you have me, traveling Torres del Paine with a third of my body weight on my back (about 48 pounds) for about $300 including airfare, and other people carrying “only daypacks” for $3,650. Sounds about right.

• 6 T-shirts
• 2 polo shirts
• 2 pairs of jeans
• 5 sweaters
• 5 pairs of shoes: Chaco sandals, sneakers, black dress shoes, slippers, and hiking boots
• 2 belts
• 1 raincoat

At the time having eight shirts seemed very few. After awhile, though, I forgot that eight wasn’t very many; I just wore whatever I found in the closet that was (mostly) clean. Some way into this transformation my friend Kate wrote once to ask, “Do you have any other shirts besides that red one?” Well, yeah, I said defensively. Though when I looked at the photos I shared online, I can see how she might have thought that.