pa

because there appears to be confusion in some quarters, i am actually back in philadelphia, and trying to get masses of work done. also, justin is in town, and i'm trying to prove to him that there is actually good food to be had in america, so blogging may be a little scarce for a bit. seattle in 10 days, and then we may be back in business shortly after.

hava nagila

so this has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but i learned on this trip that the bat mitzah song that everyone knows the tune but not the words to is hava nagila (let us rejoice), which led to me to possibly the most awesome youtube video i've ever had the pleasure to watch.

san pedro, belize

have been mulling over what to say here for a little while, and honestly, there isn't much. we spent three days lolling on the beach and drinking rum punch and doing a fat lot of nothing, much of which can be summarised in one picture:



and really, that is all.

somewhere in the san ignacio cayo

so what's more fun than seeing temples used for human sacrifice? caves used for human sacrifice, of course. on monday, we joined a little group of 8* to head to the actun tunichil muknal, or "cave of the stone sepulcher**", discovered in 1992 by people who truly had balls of titanium, as you will see in a moment.

as i commented to the brother, this was ecotourism at its best, and possibly one of the only tourist attractions i've been to so far with no gift shop. that's really saying something, if you think about it. even the killing fields had a gift shop. back when i was doing my study abroad in beaufort, i took a class on ecotourism and sustainable development, and have since been dying to see whether praxis and theory really do converge, or if like so many other things the whole operation is already fatcats and neon signs. well, it seems like for once my cynicism was unwarranted -- our guide made a huge deal about taking only photographs/leaving only footprints, down to forbidding us from using sunscreen because of the dangers of it washing downstream into water used for crops and human consumption. my one small beef was that mayatour, the outfit that we used, was a little more of a large-scale operation than i thought it would be. still, all the guides were local, and do seem to be benefiting from the deal -- our guide was an active part of the academic community doing fieldwork in the caves, and had pretty much doctoral-level knowledge on what the heck was going on.

in the jungle

cave entrance. this picture really doesn't do justice to it. the water going into the cave is an almost surreal shade of blue, cold and deep.

so they warn you (a little bit) before hand that going in isn't really your typical tourist piece-of-cake, and you're like, ya sure, and then they're right. the cameras all go in a waterproof bag while you traverse the 0.5km to the dry chamber, which is something of a pity -- the wet chambers were eerie but spectacular, strangely alive as the scant light from the headlamps caught minerals sprinkled like glitter over the rocks and formations. the water level fluctuates by season, and at its deepest was chest high, sometimes very suddenly. narrow openings we could barely get through led into chambers 50 feet tall. it took a good hour, possibly more to navigate the 500 meters (although to be fair we did stop a fair amount for the guide to talk about everything from stalactite formation to mayan mythology). apparently the maya used to walk into this pitch blackness -- believing they were entering the underworld -- by the light of a single lit torch, something i can imagine was the very definition of No Fun At All.

rock formations in the dry chamber

oh, yea, and as i said in the beginning, human sacrifice:

spot the skull. creepy.

very creepy. also, overexposed, in more than one sense. wokka wokka.

anyway, next time you feel like you hate your job or your life, feel glad that at least you weren't brought into the "underworld" at the age of 11 to have your head bashed in.

one last pic and i'm out:



oh, 2 more things:

1. for the wikitravel page that we created like nerds, go here.

2. the brother's take on the experience.

* a yiddish woman from israel and her daughter who lives in manhattan(?), a strapping guy born in england and now residing in charlotte, NC, his girlfriend, and a middle-aged european couple who said more or less nothing at all.
** seriously, there was a mayan transliteration of 'sepulcher'?

Petén, Guatemala

tikal is an archaeological site about a 90-minute drive from the belizean border, and one of the most well-preserved and excavated of the mayan cities. getting there was an experience in and of itself, in that there wasn't much of a road to speak of most of the way, to say nothing of the strange helplessness one always feels when surrounded by third-world poverty.

View from the van

the thing about the mayan ruins is that of course you've seen them a million times in books and cartoons and whatnot, so you think you know what to expect in shape and form and size, but still, you get there and it's like: oh, they do exist, and here i am among temples that were built 16 centuries ago, and no amount of exposure to any kind of representation ever diminishes that.

Yea, they're big.

Chak, the rain god

Two curious things:
1) The temples all used to be red (they were painted with a dye made from hematite). Never knew that.
2) The courtyards were all stuccoed so that rain water could accumulate and drain into reservoirs. Never knew that either.

View from the top of tallest temple

anyway, in sum, i give you longfellow's the builders, which i've quoted a verse of before. i was blown away, and you have to have been there to really get why, so poetry i guess is the next best thing:

All are architects of Fate,
Working in these walls of Time;
Some with massive deeds and great,
Some with ornaments of rhyme.

Nothing useless is, or low;
Each thing in its place is best;
And what seems but idle show
Strengthens and supports the rest.

For the structure that we raise,
Time is with materials filled;
Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build.

Truly shape and fashion these;
Leave no yawning gaps between;
Think not, because no man sees,
Such things will remain unseen.

In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods see everywhere.

Let us do our work as well,
Both the unseen and the seen;
Make the house, where Gods may dwell,
Beautiful, entire, and clean.

Else our lives are incomplete,
Standing in these walls of Time,
Broken stairways, where the feet
Stumble as they seek to climb.

Build to-day, then, strong and sure,
With a firm and ample base;
And ascending and secure
Shall to-morrow find its place.

Thus alone can we attain
To those turrets, where the eye
Sees the world as one vast plain,
And one boundless reach of sky.

the road to guatemala

we did end up crossing the border into guatemala, but not without a little trepidation, due in no small part to a full-page text box in frommer's explaining how tourists have experienced hold-ups, and robberies, and death. this is obviously especially bad in guatemala city which has travel advisories up the wazoo, but apparently even the road from san ignacio into eastern guatemala was not a lot of fun either up to a few years ago.

anyway, this particular post is not about how we got there in one piece (see the brother for his treatment on that,) but rather about the economics of highway banditry. see, it would appear that, left to the free market as it were, highway robbery on the way to a tourist attraction is a weird form of a tragedy of the commons. if everyone operating along that road just got robbed/raped/killed, it wouldn't be too long before the government and/or various states would put out a severe travel advisory, thus shutting down all tourism to the region and closing off that source of income forever. on the other hand, there's no particular reason why any one bandit should curtail his activities out of that fear.

we puzzled a little while over why that scenario did not come to pass prior to the government increasing its presence in the area, and decided that it must not obtain due to gangs fighting amongst themselves for the right to rob, thus establishing a monopoly/oligopoly of robbing and preventing the over-robbing that would lead to complete shutdown. alternatively, the bad guys have figured out the principle of dunbar's number and managed to appropriately split the territory into small enough groups to ensure an optimal solution.

in conclusion:
a) there is definitely a paper in here somewhere.
b) no, we didn't get robbed.

while we're linking all over the place

minz and i have a doctor who moment

san ignacio, belize

san ignacio is some 2.5 hours drive west of belize city along roads of variable and sometimes dubious quality. along the way: cows, horses, slash and burn, the capital (belmopan), and a whole lot of nothing. very nearly missed a bus because of a miscommunication cum fubar, jumping on in the nick of time only to find that the only remaining seat was a spare tyre right at the back of the vehicle. the only real consolation was chalking it up to cultural experience, and we suffered sore asses for about half the journey before finally procuring a seat and polishing off an L.A. times sunday crossword in record time (SOCLE: a plain square block higher than a plinth, serving as a pedestal for sculpture, a vase, or a column).

while belize city was sleepy and half-deserted, san ignacio seems to have quite a bit more life; in its center, a cluster of hotels and hostels, some restaurants and mini-marts, a few agencies selling tours to the ruins and caves, and, mysteriously, a large branch of Courts, just in case you feel like buying an ottoman to take home as a souvenir. i have complained before about tijuana; this is nothing at all like that. it feels like a small town trying to be something more. it feels like a community dealing with the fact that progress inevitably marches in only one direction, and instead of either fighting it or embracing it, has tried to deal with it entirely on its own terms. i will have something more to say on ecotourism when i write about going to the caves, but i'll foreshadow that discussion a little bit by saying that the people of san ignacio are trying -- successfully, it seems -- to accept that they are a tourist destination without purposively trying to be one. there's internet access but no souvenir shop. you can't always get what you want, and no, the customer is not always right because you're not a consumer, you're a visitor. and surprisingly, it's a very refreshing role to play, a role both humbling and ennobling.

The town

we checked into marta's guest house -- v. comfy rooms, and then took a rather bumpy cab ride out to the botanical gardens for a little hike. pictures!





next up: the economics of banditry, and the brother and i both give our takes on some mayan ruins we visited, so don't forget to hit that link for another (probably funnier) perspective.

belize city, belize

so yeah, as i said, crossover. the brother and i in a foreign country together. etc. am in belize now blogging from a highly dubious connection which may go at any moment, so pictures, as always, will come later. also, you have probably already missed part I from your slovenliness, so please go here to learn about why you should not get drunk and start beatboxing on a plane.

it's apparently not tourist season, which is what we wanted, but also means that a lot of places in the city are (more) deserted (than usual) and pretty scary after dark, which comes sooner than you think. on the way to dinner, we encountered george the coconut seller, a wiry dark-skinned fellow standing opposite the MIRAB, and had a conversation that started as one might expect (when did you get into town? how long are you here for? what are you going to do?). then quickly devolved into: obama may be better than bush, but he's still only one motherfucker*, and one motherfucker can't change the world; there is a higher power, whether you call him god, allah or whatever, names are merely a culture construction, all religions are one, and so forth. the sun began to set, and we chatted, and got a free coconut each from george, who took his time hacking each one open in between bouts of his epistemological soliloquies. afterwards, the brother commented that his philosophy was somewhat rastafarian, but a quick wikicheck shows that most of those dudes believe in a named God: jah, so i guess in the words of madness, george was one step beyond.

the coconuts weren't very good, though.

* we too, got addressed this way mulitple times; the brother and i figured that it's just a term of endearment.

View from Martha's Guest House

The city from across the bay

To the lighthouse

>

Food stalls (mostly closed). Bought tacos from one and didn't die!

now that the brother and i have both gone to a home game that the phillies have lost, i'm prepared to start accepting payment from diehard fans who want the lim family to stay away from their ballpark.

(don't tell them i'll do it for free. i really hate baseball.)

speaking of the brother, the two of us will be going on a little jaunt together for the first time since, i dunno, ever, which means (and make sure you follow the directions!) our first blog crossover. now you have to read MORE WORDS than ever before. mwahaha. ha.

*goes to pack*

gest

minzhi informs me that, as i suspected, i am an ignoramus, and quite possibly Past my Prime as well.

lazed around in the morning playing online bridge with justin, finished the nyt crossword in 3:50 (yes!), then went to meet thomas at mizu for lunch. tom finished his major areas only to be dropped right into matlab hell by his advisor, so i'm thankful that mine often forgets that i exist. he's also trying to sell an out-of-tune grand piano for $550, cash-and-carry, so if you're in the market, act now!

am consciously taking time off because i was in the lab the entire weekend grading exams. never thought much about this when i was an undergrad, but grading errors on final exams don't get picked up because students generally don't get to see their scripts, and i'm 100% sure that there are at least a couple of errors (probably clerical) somewhere in the monstrous stack of 237 papers on my desk. i suppose it's just ill fortune if that happens to be you; you know what they say about Time and Chance. also, dear BBB, thanks for not giving me any money this semester to hire graders/proctors. you guys are a******s.

incid: ran a reliability analysis on the midterm/final grades. r = .372, p < .001, fwiw.

i'm not sure how i got through this much of my adult life without reading any muriel spark: the prime of miss jean brodie was the most wonderful book i've read in a long time, (possibly because i was imagining evans reading it out loud most of the way through). bits to quote: too many, but here's just one of them, for my own pleasure:

This was the first winter of the two years that this class spent with Miss Brodie. It had turned nineteen-thirty-one. Miss Brodie had already selected her favorites, or rather those whom she could trust; or rather those whose parents she could trust not to lodge complaints about the more advanced and seditious aspects of her educational policy, these parents being either too enlightened to complain, or too unenlightened, or too awed by their good fortune in getting their girls' education at endowed rates, or too trusting to question the value of what their daughters were learning at this school of sound reputation. Miss Brodie's special girls were taken home to tea and bidden not to tell the others, they were taken into her confidence, they understood her private life and her feud with the headmistress and the allies of the headmistress. They learned what troubles in her career Miss Brodie encountered on their behalf, "It is for the sake of you girls - my influence, now, in the years of my prime.'

has anyone seen maggie smith in the 1969 version? i'm a little scared to netflix it in case i get taken in the rapture 5 minutes in.



in other news: mauled by both the saturday and sunday crossword this week. don't know why i've never before seen the word GEST (def: a deed or exploit). zao ju, anyone?

the final talk in the neuroethics series this year was given by robert sawyer, who read a bit from his book, and talked about consciousness, penrose and hammeroff's wacky microtubules theory and how flash forward (starring john cho!) has been ordered to series, and may possibly be awesome, unless it's like lost, in which case it won't. if you have to choose one of those links to go to, do quantum consciousness; it's worth it. not the world's biggest sci-fi fan here, but i think i'm persuaded enough to read www:wake, and possibly calculating god. book reports shortly.

got the last percy book in the mail today, actually surprising myself because I had pre-ordered it a long time ago. "better than deathly hallows" is the standard I'm holding it to.

kryptos

was reading a wired.com article today about kryptos, a sculpture by james sanborn that sits in one of the courtyards in CIA headquarters, made more famous by the execrable dan brown book that shall not be named. the sculpture contains a four-part cipher, of which three parts have been solved; one remains uncracked after 17 years. so yes, this is where my geek quotient bursts through the roof and keeps right on going, but i find the whole deal fascinating and terribly romantic, especially since the first three messages have been quite lovely. particularly:

message #3, paraphrased from the diary of howard carter, discoverer of king tut's tomb:

Slowly, desparatly (sic.) slowly, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner. And then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. The hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker, but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. x Can you see anything? q

(the answer to which is: 'yes, wonderful things', thought to be a clue to decrypting the final piece of the code)

while recrunching some data, i starting meditating a little bit more on why the puzzle should appeal to me so, and i figure that one of the reasons is this: it's incredibly complex, and brilliant minds working on it for the better part of two decades have not yielded a solution, but unlike the other gordian puzzles of nature scientists work on, this one has a solution that a living somebody knows. so if our faith is that in Nature there is an answer, kryptos is our deliverance story, the sure sign, noah's rainbow, the parable that reaffirms our faith in the Truth being Out There.

and, for interest, the unsolved section:

?OBKR
UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO
TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP
VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR

abd

yes, i do have the privilege of writing a dissertation. it seems almost masochistic to celebrate this fact, but such is the human condition.

the defense itself began somewhat unpropitiously. i had originally booked a room in the psychology building for the meeting, as is the custom, but geoff's needing to call in threw a spanner in the works as it's almost impossible to get cell phone reception in the lousy place. on wednesday, my committee chair had suggested her office, which i originally thought was rather a good idea -- if one is to go through these antediluvian customs to get a phd, one may as well go the whole hog, and isn't this how they did it in the old days? none of this conference room crap, certainly. in any case, when i got there, there was no one to be found, and only after several minutes of dashing up and down stairs did i finally locate my chair, who was in the pantry reading my papers for the first time. o, to have tenure. we kind of said fumbling, awkward things to each other for a bit, and then she said that her office was kind of a mess, should we hold the defense in the pantry, to which i had nothing in particular to say -- frankly, she could have suggested the verandah, or vaduz, liechtenstein as the venue at that point and i would have acquiesced. i left her with coffee and cake to finish the perusal of the manuscripts which i had just spent the better part of nine months working on, and went to find sympathy from daniel, or the other housemate, or whoever i could find. who i eventually did find is committee member #1 from my master's thesis defense (different committee), who gaily started telling me stories about the people who failed out of her program when she was a phd candidate, and what a total misery that experience was*. so that was quite the morale booster. i went back upstairs, and people were filing into the pantry for a birthday party, so that rather nixed that idea, and we went back to my chair's office carrying coffee and cake and trailing packets of sweet 'n' low all the way down the stairs. there was no flat surface in the room not covered with paper, and then the advisor showed up, and i couldn't find a place to sit, and then i got kicked out of the room anyway because what's more delightful than being talked about behind your back. i went outside, and sat on the stairs, and discovered that the walls of the ccn are so thin that i could hear everything that was being said anyway. norah the student receptionist was there, and said 'that was quick', and i said that it had only just started, and she offered to put on some music so that i didn't have to listen to myself being talked about, and we had radiohead for a while as she ate her gyro and i tried to keep my heart in my chest. i got called back in. geoff was on the line. questions, most of them actually pretty easy -- in fact, the biggest problem was that geoff's line was rather bad, and half the time i think i was answering the questions that i wanted to rather than those that were actually being asked. fun bits: citing studies in my answers as i went along. terribly nerdy, but i still think it's cool as hell. it was over quick, and as i said, it was good news, and then the advisor and the chair sat and gossiped about university politics for an hour.

so, one more thing to go at penn, the big 'D' word, but before that, lots and lots of BYOBs in the summer, and a few trips, and hopefully not dying of swine flu or the like. speaking of which, if swine flu is a concern for you or your family, get the facts here: www.doihaveswineflu.org


* when alyson was defending her master's thesis, at the bit where one gets kicked out into the hallway, she was sitting there stewing with anxiety when dr. goldstein, one of the clinical supervisors in our program and kindliest man ever, came lumbering down the hallway, asked her what was going on, then sat down, gave her a hug, and said that everything was going to be all right. boys need hugs too!