Barack's in ... & Ski trips

First of all I'd like to say GO BARACK! I thought his speech was fairly appropriate. I only wish that, at the end, instead of just saying "God bless America" he would've said "God bless America, bless all the other nations in the world, and bless the planet itself."

Did two trips last weekend. One was with my buddy Peter up to Marmot Pass in the SE Olympic mtns. Stayed Friday night at a little motel in Quilcene. Took off at 0530 and got on the trail at 0700. Hit snow so couldn't drive to TH. Had to stop 4 miles short (4!) of the TH. Hopped on skis and rounded the first corner... then took skis off and trekked along bare road for a mile or so. Snow was off and on until somewhat higher elevations. Dammit. From the formal TH to the Pass is 5 miles. 9 miles up. Whew. But we pulled it off. Pete was committed to doing an ass-kicking trip. He got his wish. Beautiful views from up top. Returned to vehicle at 1730. I was quite blistered by the end of the day. Pete was snowshoeing and used his hiking boots so had an easier time in the bare spots. But skis saved me some energy for significant stretches, so was about equally difficult i guess.

This pic shows the remnant debris from a big avalanche coming down Buckhorn mountain. As you see it's quite melted down now tho.


Here's a pic looking down the valley we'd just hiked up. Beautiful clear view of Cascades on this fairly cold day. Glacier peak visible at left in distance.


A pic of me at the top looking west from the Pass.


A pic of Pete, exhausted, at the Pass.


The other trip was one that Orli organized. We snowshoed/skied in a fairly popular area up near Snoqualmie Pass. Slava (the postdoc i work with) and Ci came along with several of Orli's other friends. The trip was short but sweet. It was pretty socked in so we couldn't enjoy much scenery, but it was nice to get out. And at least this trail was totally snow covered. Wow. Had 4 dogs along with us. One little-bitty dog was running around harassing the bigger dogs (2 golden retrievers and a siberian husky). Fortunately the big dogs were not hungry and did not eat the little dog as a snack. My blistered feet were plenty happy to keep it down to a 3 hr round trip.

Here's a shot of me and Ci.


Here's an artsy picture of Orli.

plasma school

Down at UCLA, I enjoyed another 6-day plasma science winter school. (I previously attended in 2007.) Plasma science is mysterious, but when you couple good theory (pencil and paper work) with the enormous computing power that's we're developing. We covered several topics, listed below, but the funnest was probably the astrophysics.
* Learned something about how magnetic field is generated on large scales -- earth's magnetic field; galaxies' magnetic fields; magnetic fields in the universe in general.
* Learned some new stuff about turbulence and associated heat transfer in both astrophysics and in fusion devices.
* Learned more about shocks in fluids and in plasmas.

It's hard to convey how neat some of the computer simulations were, but here is a picture of one of the sims. The full sized movies (which I can't round up online right now) and images were more impressive.

Here's a picture of the aftermath of Tycho's supernova, the shell of which is a plasma shock wave:

Here are some pictures of the crab nebula. It has a pulsar at its core. Image in optical spectrum on left. Infrared (?) taken by Hubble on right.

Now the Crab nebula in xray:

Met lots of cool people. The U Wisc Madison crew was especially fun. We went out one night and ended up hanging out at one of the plasma labs where we drank a few beers and some British guys showed us how to play cricket -- the game seems quite strange to me.

Had an afternoon off on Wednesday. Went down to the beach to enjoy the 70 deg weather. I jogged from Santa Monica to Venice and back. At sunset, I took this photo of Ci using some rings. I'd never seen this kind of set of rings before. Some kids were doing some spectacular acrobatics on them...

Note the ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier in the background. It was fun to ride that.

One evening Ci and I went to the nice outdoor track at UCLA. I ran a mile in 5:53. I was shooting for 6 min. I incorrectly calculated that I needed to run four laps at 1:20 per lap. Because I aimed for this pace (which would've given me a 5:20 mile), I managed to average 1:28 per lap... :) Then I did a 100 meter sprint to see how slow I am. On the first try, I set a new world record at 9.5 sec. Then we realized I hadn't run quite far enough. My time was 13.7 sec. Not bad.

At sunset that eve, I didn't see it, but some people saw a "green flash" at sunset. On my flight home, I looked for the flash, but evidently conditions weren't right. I did get this cool pic tho:

UT Christmas

My 2 week break in UT was wonderful. Skied my legs to jello at Solitude two days -- one with my dad and the other with an old college pal, Manolakis. Mano and I relished cutting lines in the slopes that could be seen easily from the lift.

Mano at Solitude catching a snowflake.

Happy thoughts before a fabulous powder run at Solitude:

We did numerous x-country ski tours. In SLC, we skied up Milcreek where we could take our pack of 3 wild dogs (well, really 2 wild dogs plus Howie who is most certainly not wild, but rather a dangerously accurate licker). In Roosevelt, we skied a few different places. Twice to an old oil drill site where there is a drill pipe sticking up, hence the name "stickey-up".

The white bird droppings on top of the drill pipe stickey-up really topped off this wonderful picture of Tim:


Steve and I did an ass kicker backcountry trip to a secret stash of bristlecone pine trees which live to near 5000 yrs old.

Me with a young bristlecone pine:

I really enjoyed using my new AT (alpine touring) ski setup for all of the skiing. Excellent performance. Garmont boots, Shuksan skis, Dynafit bindings.

I tried to fatten myself up on all the wonderful food my mom provided. We played a couple of games of chess, both of which were action packed. I whooped everyone's ass at scrabble (probably a holdover of skills from my spelling bee days) a couple of times.

My dad in his holiday best: