Bike Trails Improve Property Values

It turns out people are willing to pay a premium to live near bike trails (nine thousand smackaroos to be within a thousand feet). That is to say, if someone builds a bike trail near your house while you're living in it, when you sell, you get more money. Trails and open space = increased property values.

Mountain Lion and Housecat Not Best Buddies

Needless to say, while San Diego is having the most awesome weather evar - that is, cold and foggy and marine layery, I can't run much because my big test is next week. Yeah. You read that right. I said that. San Diego's sun and warm weather suck. San Francisco is better. What are you gonna do about it?

Now that I'm finished perfunctorily insulting San Diego, enjoy this amazing set of photos of a housecat being visited by his cousin the mountain lion (through a sliding glass window. Not gory.)

Coyotes in Rose Canyon

It's not a surprise to many people that there are coyotes there, but what's interesting is they seem to be there, or at least be noisy, at the same times of year. This is the third mid-October in a row that I've noticed there were a lot - a lot - at night in Rose, as revealed by their responses to a passing siren. I have yet to hear them at any other time. Maybe the bunnies are extra juicy in UTC in October.

Broad Daylight Robberies in UTC - Near Rose Canyon Along La Jolla Colony Drive

It's worth mentioning that there were two robberies reported on Saturday, in broad daylight at two and three in the afternoon, next to Rose Canyon near I-5. This is at the southwestern corner of what most would call the UTC area of San Diego. They were reported as being on Rosenda and Porte La Paz, so it may be that the robberies happened on those streets, or just near them, along the path next to La Jolla Colony Drive next to Rose Canyon. Either way it's worth knowing if you use that path or Rose Canyon.

You can sign up for SDPD's automatic emails here, and find out every crime reported within a mile of your front door, on a daily basis.

Continuing Decline of SoCal Fisheries

If you like to eat or catch fish from the California coast, read this. If you've ever read Mancur Olson's Tragedy of the Commons paper, also read it.

Councilwoman Lightner's Office Responds RE Air Show

If you live in UTC, in 24 hours you won't need this reminder, but the Miramar Air Show starts tomorrow, and goes until Sunday. They're already doing practice runs. I loved watching these as a kid, when my dad (who was a Naval officer) took me to an airstrip to watch the planes - and that's key - it was at an airstrip, not over top of our houses - and he wouldn't have been happy if it was. Along with many other people, I don't love having them fly fast and at low altitude all day long over my house. The government never bothered to ask our consent for this. It would seem important to do so, after two deadly air show crashes, not to mention one deadly non-air show crash right here in Rose Canyon that took an entire family.

I wrote to Mayor Sanders (who hasn't responded) and to Councilmember Lightner, whose office did respond. They've asked the base officials to address the events of the last couple weeks as they pertain to us here in San Diego. I also just now emailed the University City Community Association to find out if this discussion is ongoing; I'm probably not the first person who's had these concerns.

Moving the Miramar Air Show inland to the desert would be a huge improvement, not just in safety and noise. Imagine the tailgating! Merchants able to set up in one place and sell food! Camping over night and beer! Best of all, no risk to non-consenting property owners. Let's not wait for a tragedy to occur to go through the moral motions. Let's do something now.

Tiger Sharks Eating a Whale Carcass

In Queensland (where else). For tigers those are some bigguns.

Sub-Two-Hour Marathon in 2038

Inspired by Patrick Makau Musyoki's new marathon record in Berlin yesterday, I looked for trends in the marathon world records for each decade going back a century. I only included the fastest time in each decade. I expected a plateau like this, but I didn't expect it to be so neatly logarithmic. Explanation of the graph: the Y-axis times are in seconds, so 10,800 is a 3 hour race and 7,200 is a 2 hour race. The horizontal red line is a two-hour marathon, the vertical dark line is 2038, and the light gray prediction line is the trend for future marathons. (Note that the prediction line on the graph is for illustration only - the numbers come from the best-fit equation printed on the graph.)

Look at that R. That's a damn good fit. Marathon records are a very logarithmic phenomenon.

A whole crop of articles commented over the last year on statistically improbable sprinter Usain Bolt, who is ahead-of-trend by thirty years. In the same vein, looking at the marathon plot, we shouldn't expect a male human to break two hours in the marathon until 2038. And it's reasonably assumed that the incremental improvements we see in these times is a result of (decreasing marginal) improvements in training, nutrition, and running equipment. Therefore, if this record is broken significantly ahead of that (you can decide how to calculate standard deviations if you want to define exactly what "significantly" means) then I predict one or more of the following will have happened:

- A genuine new mutation and a recruitment sifting system that can deliver the talent to the field, as is presumably the case with Bolt in short distance (someone sequence this guy already);

- New technology allows undetectable doping, either to increase blood oxygen carrying capacity, muscular oxygen efficiency, or muscle strength;

- Deliberate breeding has occurred by nation states with long-term views and an overbearing need for international prestige (China, we're looking at you, and here's why);

- Most interesting possibility: a population of humans still mostly reproductively isolated and thusfar not competing in marathons, and that has gene variants which benefit them in this event. (Tarahumara, we're looking at you now).



Intrade doesn't have a market for this prediction. But they should.

2 Days, 2 Airshow Crashes, Here Comes Miramar Air Show

[Note: On Facebook? Look for "Move the san Diego Air Show Way Inland".]

Miramar Air Show is next month. There's no problem with an air show. What there is a problem with is the government placing risks on the people that live nearby without their consent. Those risks are real. A plane crashed next to Rose Canyon three years ago, killing four on the ground - not during the airshow, but it shows that it can happen.

Why not move the airshow out to the desert? Imagine the opportunity for merchants to set up in one central spot that we don't have when it's done over San Diego. Then you could tailgate out there and make a day of it, drink beer, drive around off-road if you want, go home at the end of the day or camp out. It would be a great time. Win-win for everyone!

Join the group on Facebook, and write the Mayor and your Councilmember.

Beer-Lovers: Help a Developing Economy, Try Cassava Beer

Support micro-brewers in the brand-new country of South Sudan!



How we get their beer I don't know, but I bet here in San Diego a) lots of us would try it and b) someone knows how to do the importing.

How Times Change; Sobering

I just read Encounters with an Angry God, by Carobeth Laird. It details her time with John Harrington, an interesting character who did a huge amount of work cataloguing the then-dying (and now dead) languages of Southern California. Sobering to think that, in some cases, native languages vanished in the space of a century and he was the only person to write them down before they were gone. Laird's account of the man is interesting but is to be viewed with some suspicion, since after all they were divorced. (If this were fiction we would assume "unreliable narrator".)


A pre-Kerouac California road trip. And Harrington was documenting more than his partying.

The book's best value is probably as an artifact preserving what life was like in California a century ago, and this is why I'm mentioning it in my outdoors blog. In 1915 the travails of crossing Tejon Pass were still considerable, and even by car, a trip from San Diego to what is now the Grape Vine was not undertaken lightly. To this day our knowledge of the language of the people that lived there is so scant that we're not even sure what language family it was in. We think it was Uto-Aztecan, i.e. related to Aztec, Paiute, Luiseño and Shoshone.

Can you imagine if two centuries from now, somebody finds your drivers license in some rubble and dusts it off and says, "What language is this?" And all anyone can say is "I don't know. It looks like it's related to Finnish. Or maybe German." How times change.

Possible Snakebite Death at Mission Trails

Not confirmed, but be careful out there! Here's the story. Below is a video from The Running Fat Guy so you know what a rattler sounds like, if you've never heard one. Here's how to avoid getting bitten.

Controversy About USC TV Show

FOX has canceled a show that "mocks" USC students who didn't know anything about football.

A clip from it is below. But I'm confused. I'm not tone deaf to the ethnic basis of people's reactions to it, but seriously: how is this clip mocking the students? These folks are clearly interested enough in learning and working hard and building a future and saving money and having good credit (unlike many sports fans) that they couldn't be bothered to care about a bunch of idiots in colored pajamas chasing a ball around like cats. If you go to USC, you should be proud to be in school with these guys and gals (or even better, to be one of them.) The only guy being mocked in this video as far as I can tell is the dude in the tie who's implying that stuff is important. Who probably has a lot of debt and struggled for C's in all his science classes. Way to create value there bud.

The Sound of Mountain Lions Mating

Yikes! In Rawah Wilderness in northern Colorado, courtesy Jeff (who was there with his son):



He told me he actually saw them and they went on like this for a half hour.

Sunset During Long Run, Labor Day Weekend

Monday it rained in Southern California, which some of us actually like. There was even a little thunder. The air smelled great and the sunset was superb. It was an excellent day for a 16-miler. Pictures taken looking WNW toward the ocean across Torrey Preserve.

Neat Bits from Medical Journal Article about Crocodile Attacks

From an article in Wilderness and Environmental Medicine (Caldicott DG, Croser D, Manolis C, Webb G, Britton A., "Crocodile attack in Australia: an analysis of its incidence and review of the pathology and management of crocodilian attacks in general." Wilderness Environ Med. 2005 Fall;16(3):143-59.)

Crocodilian hemoglobin has 12 unique bicarbonate binding sites, allowing far more oxygen to be released from the molecule for a given oxygen tension than from the human equivalent. A hybrid human-crocodilian hemoglobin (Hb-Scuba) has been developed and has potential as a synthetic hemoglobin.


In the only reported Australian series to date,77 cause of death was attributed to either decapitation or truncal transection (Figure 2). It should be assumed that massive blood loss90 and drowning are the cause of death in a large number of crocodilian attacks. Assessing the actual cause of death can be complicated by the fact that bodies are sometimes not found, have been eaten, or are decomposed to an extent that makes cause of death difficult to ascertain. Mercifully, death appears to be swift, with little or no bruising seen on postmortem examination.


The power and size of some animals are such that, if not lethal in the first instance, injuries can be as severe as those seen in major road trauma or in the military arena.

Shark Sighting Near Children's Pool, La Jolla

Great whites eat seals. That's why it's not good to swim where the seals are. So it's surprising that it's taken this long for a shark sighting at Children's Pool.

One local expert says this shark was big enough to do some damage, he thinks the harbor seals near the Children's Pool may have attracted the shark to shore, and have surfers now keeping an eye out for fins...It was around two Wednesday afternoon that lifeguards say four boogie boarders spotted a 12 inch dorsal fin poking out of the water. What does a 12 inch dorsal fin mean to you?, we asked shark expert Doctor Jeffrey B. Graham, and he responded "well it means a shark at least, 10 feet long".

Join Friends of Palomar Mountain State Park

A group of citizens is forming to preserve Palomar Mountain State Park in the face of its imminent closure. Join and become part of the solution! Direct link here; More information here.


From wildrecovery.org

Solution to Keep Tomales Bay State Park Open - Blocked

I have a neat story about Tomales Bay S.P. (most people who've been there do). It's right next to Inverness and Point Reyes National Park, about an hour north of San Francisco on the rugged Marin County coast. My girlfriend and I had begun a tradition of going to parks on Superbowl Sundays when people were inside. So we went kayaking at Tomales Bay. And within 20 minutes of putting in what did we see, but a healthy-sized bobcat on some rocks at the water's edge, staring down into the depths. When we rowed over to get a closer look at him he was in no hurry to scramble back up the cliff either; he just looked up and glared at us with those yellow eyes as if to say, Hey, I'm fishin', and you're botherin' me. I think a place like that is worth preserving and keeping open so other people can enjoy it.

Here's Tomales Bay:



If you live in California and love the outdoors, you already know that many of our state parks are going to be closed (see here and here. These parks are one of the reasons many of us choose to live in California.

There's an unfortunate narrative in open space discussions, which constantly tries to portray public lands and private ownership as opposing forces. This is just about exactly bass ackwards, but it persists because there are vested interests on both sides of the discussion. Private landowners often (in fact, usually) benefit from adjacent open space; and public lands benefit from partnerships with private ranchers or concessionaires. Win-win.

And that's exactly what's being proposed now in Tomales Bay S.P., and what has been discussed for many others. Tomales Bay Oyster Company has approached Tomales Bay S.P. with a deal: give us a few tables in the park where our customers can eat oysters - we won't even sell them there, we're just asking for a place for customers to sit and eat them. In exchange, Tomales Bay Oyster Co. will pay for the upkeep, open and close the gate - in short, the stuff the state can't afford to do anymore. Similar solutions have been discussed for Annadel State Park in Petaluma, and I wish they were available for San Diego's own Palomar and San Pascual, which are also on the chopping block. If the deal up in Tomales Bay goes through, the park stays open for us Californians and gets maintained, a local company gets to expand its business - win-win, right?

Unfortunately, other local interests have allowed dogmatism to get in the way of keeping the parks open, and they've asked the park not to accept this deal. Doing this is at this point is the same as saying you want the parks to close.

So let's look at our options:

1) Close the park, prevent public access, and allow the infrastructure
to decay, to be re-opened - when? On what plan?

2) Keep the park open at zero cost to the state, in exchange for some tables and probably a little more traffic. And not even any product sales inside the park.


Am I the only person who can't understand why everyone isn't enthusiastically signing up for #2?

By all means, look at the additional visitors and the impact, but don't let that delay implementing this deal to keep the park open. The damage to the park system will be greater if the park closes, not to mention to us outdoorsy taxpayers who want to enjoy the parks. At least in this case, no one who even pretends to want to preserve the parks should be obstructing this solution. It's very frustrating. It's really just plain knee-jerk dogmatism that is blocking a solution immediately at hand.

(If you haven't already written your Rep and Senator, do so - links and template letter here. Both Fletcher and Davis wrote me back. And thanks to Thurston for the pointer.)

Mountain Lions in Connecticut?

One was hit and killed by a car last month. Interesting summary of DNA detective work here, showing how this animal is related to others in the Black Hills and elsewhere. I had earlier predicted that mountain lions would be reestablished in my home state of Pennsylvania by 2025. Now that this has happened I realize I have to more clearly define what I mean by "reestablished". I wouldn't count this one because it's still debatable whether it was caught and released.


Pretty soon there will be PA mountain lions made out of more than just stone.

So: "reestablished" means once there is good mountain lion documentation of two separate animals in Pennsylvania. Physical specimen for DNA evidence is best, but video is fine too as long as there's some way to be sure there are two different animals. Of course if it happens twice in a surrounding state it's just a matter of time, and PA is prime mountain lion country, so probably not much time at that. There's already one in Indiana.

So, even with my definition of "reestablished", would anyone bet against this? On one hand I like that a wilderness animal is returning to my home state's ecosystem; on the other hand I kind of like going for a run in the PA woods because I know nothing is going to jump out at me, unlike in CA.

Google Map of Closed State Parks

Seeing it this way drives it home:


View State Park Closures in a larger map

San Diego River Foundation

Last weekend I found myself at the OB Fair and met some very nice young ladies from the San Diego River Foundation. They gave me a cool map of the watershed, running all the way from Cleveland National Forest to where the river meets the Pacific between Ocean and Mission Beach! They were so nice I told them I'd give them a plug - so you should check them out - there are lots of trails along the river and they're doing a great job helping to preserve open space.


Photo from San Diego Natural History Museum Website.

New Awesomest Blog - Science Based Running

Excellent! Visit them here. Maybe they'll start complaining about Art Devany in my stead.

Woman Visiting All Soon-To-Be-Closed CA State Parks

Read her blog here and subscribe.


Castle Crags, one of the ones on the list.

"The Hypocrisy of Lebron James Hatred"

What a great article this is. The Lebron James story has really provided a great window into the psychology of professional sports fans. More really fun, vicious stuff here specifically about Lebron James; more here about how we impose narrative on sports stories (both during the game and after) where there is none.

La Jolla Children's Pool Seal Legal Updates

Two going the right direction:

- Seal disturbance ticket thrown out

- The seal rope at the beach is being kept down

Angeles National Forest - Annoying Road Closure Near Chantry Flat

Yesterday I drove all the way up to Angeles National Forest from San Diego to start a hike from Chantry Flats, my new favorite spot in the whole National Forest, only to be blocked at the top of Santa Anita Avenue by a sign that said ROAD CLOSED. There was a car that had hit a very large tree branch stuck there, and a bunch of kids standing around with the driver; they told me the road was blocked off for brush clearing. Given the nature of the vehicular mishap (the driver was okay), I had to wonder if this was coincidence. I don't know - but it would have been nice to know what was going on. Emergencies happen and sometimes the Forest needs to close roads, but as it was all I knew was that I'd just driven 2.5 hours, to get turned around by an unannounced closure of unknown purpose. Suck!


Icehouse Canyon, where I ended up. Still manages to make this NorCal boy homesick. From the Rambles in the Brambles blog.

I ended up hitting over to Icehouse Canyon instead and still had a nice hike, but Angeles NF is starting to seem pretty opaque in its closures (first the confusion and delay in releasing information and maps covering the fire-restricted area, and then this personal snafu.) Dan Simpson, whose SoCal hiking website is an amazing resource, also passed along this link with scheduled closures - if you hike in Angeles, bookmark it to avoid the same irritation.

Solutions Discussed to Keep State Parks Open

In Petaluma, a group met next to Annadel State Park (one of the parks on the chopping block) and floated the option of a partnership between parks and private non-profits. There are already lots of private organizations operating in parks in California, and if this keeps the parks open (and relatively inexpensive to use) it's the best option anyone has suggested.


In Hendy Woods State Park, one of the parks slated to be closed.

A point of criticism for the media in general: these articles rarely say what it would mean to "close" the parks. I have a lot of respect for journalists who knock on politicians' doors and ask hard questions, and even saying that they asked but didn't get an answer would be an improvement for most of these articles (there's no discussion of what "closed" means in this one either.)

If you want to write your representatives, I included the text of the letter I sent here. Notably, if you live in northern San Diego, then both your state senator and representative (Christine Kehoe and Nathan Fletcher) are running for mayor of San Diego. Make it clear to them that how they vote on the parks issue will affect whether you vote for them for mayor.

Sponsor a Student in Guatemala to Conserve Natural Resources

Want to help save the rainforest AND educate kids?

The Peten is the northeastern part of Guatemala, a mostly-flat rainforest that contains many of the famous ancient Mayan city-states, and an amazing amount of biodiversity.

The Volunteer Peten School of Natural Resources desperately needs your help to sponsor students. Volunteer Peten is a growing NGO that is making an obvious, undeniable difference, by giving kids a shot at a real education, improving the economy, and preserving the natural environment of the country. I've seen what they've done and they were even nice enough to let me teach these kids some chemistry, even if it was only 10 minutes-worth. AND sponsoring a student is only $350. Isn't that like a weekend trip in California? A couple days at Disneyland? If you're up for it, instead of donating you can even volunteer yourself! (You can talk to previous volunteers by email too.)

Meet the kids here.

Horny Toad

I finally saw one of these critters and yes, I'm very excited about it. I actually keep a list of varmints I haven't yet seen in the wild and this was one of them. Taken about 2pm yesterday on Chiquito Trail in the Trabuco unit of Cleveland National Forest, on the way up about halfway between the lower creek and Chiquito Falls. He was digging a hole right on the side of the trail. He wasn't that shy; once he got into the brush he just stared back at the trail. I briefly considered trying to catch him to get him to squirt blood out of his eyes but it would have been wrong to harass the little dude just to get him to do a trick.

Note, if you want to do this hike, best directions and video from at Frank's CA-hiking.com - link in this article.

Paleo Workouts: Running and Lifting Outside

"No no, let's move him this way. I've been neglecting my delts this week."

Move Naturally (MovNat) seems to be kind of a hybrid of middle-distance running and high-impact gym-type workouts. More importantly, it looks fun. I might try this. The idea that
is probably a useful vehicle for thinking about fitness, but it has holes, and people aren't consistent iin the way they think about it. Case in point, the subject of this very article talks about eating paleo but then gets inspired by the Tarahumara of Mexico. News flash: the Tarahumara are about as non-paleo-diet as you can get! They get HUGE portions of their calories from corn.

Still, this is the first time I've been intrigued by a trendy work-out philosophy. Because you can do it outside. And it's fun. And it would also seem to correct the deficiencies decried in lifting-oriented exercise (by endurance types) as well as in endurance exercise (by lifting types).

Previous entries on the paleo/lifting vs running debate:

- Paleo Running in Kenya and Mexico Highlands

- Paleolithic humans did eat grains - #1, #2, #3, #4

- The endurance vs. lifting jihad, in paleo terms: #1 and #2

Do Not Ever Eat Jolokia Peppers

No matter how much people named Garron pressure you, do not ever put these in your mouth. They are bad. For your family, be stronger than I was. Jeff Gordon from Tap Hunter was in evidence and he wisely spared his palate the ravages of uber-capsaicin. You, too, have a long life ahead of you. Don't throw it away so carelessly.

[Added later: Razib Khan is very brave to admit his capsaicin problem. My friend isn't nearly this much of a freak.]

Which leads to greater pain? It is a mystery.

Fine, The UCSD Snake Exists

Previously I had dismissed the existence of the "snake path" at Geisel Library on the UCSD campus, despite the insistence of others that it was real. I had gone to the library specifically to look for it. Not finding it, I declared, "The snake does not exist." Reminiscent of Einstein's dismissal of the ether, or Buddha and the Atman.*

But:



This will come to no surprise to any student at UCSD who uses their sense to form a model about the external universe. Apparently this does not include me. I discovered it while running up the trail, and didn't notice anything amiss until I thought to myself "well why are these tiles making this big forking kind of shape? Oh."

Well there's a lesson in how expectations affect the perception of reality! I thought the "snake path" was only a path that looked metaphorically like a snake; I thought in the woods preserved north of the library, that there would be some twisting trail that when viewed just so, would look like a snake, so I squinted out the window trying to force those rough-hewn dirt tracks in the canyon to come together into some kind of a snake-shape. I didn't know that these literal-minded philistines in San Diego meant there is an actual, obvious snake made out of tiles coming up the east side of the hill the library is on. That's B.S. Things should always be metaphorical. So really you can't blame me for missing it.

*always skip these parts if you're not high

Why Isn't Meb Keflezighi Better Known?

[Update: he did the half and no one saw anything but his back. 1h2m40s, ahead right from the gun. Congratulations Meb.]

Hometown boy Keflezighi was a silver medalist at the 2004 Olympics, and the first American winner of the NY Marathon in who knows how long. And according to this article in the U-T, the guy can't get a shoe deal? Something's wrong there. I remember how excited I was in 2004 to see an American take the silver. I hope athletic marketers start to realize what an undervalued asset he would be. If you go out to see the start of Rock n' Roll, look for him!

Follow-up on Noyo Redwoods - SUCCESS!

In November of last year I passed along an an appeal from the Save the Redwoods League to help protect the Noyo redwoods. It was marked for harvest and was set to be cut down on April 1st. It turns out that we (the people of California) were successful and dug in to make a difference - the Noyo redwoods now belong to the Save the Redwoods League, where they're safe. Some of the trees even bear marks where they were planned to be cut down - talk about the nick of time. This was done privately, without taxpayer support, which is increasingly how it seems we're going to have to do conservation.

Unfortunately the same is not true of our state parks. Out of the 70 that are being closed, SIXTEEN of them contain redwood forests. California can't afford to lose this resource. They're a symbol of the state. The Redwoods League is working to protect them too - learn more here.

How Do We Understand Sports Events?

From XKCD:

Seriously. Go read the game summaries on ESPN after a baseball series or especially after March Madness games. Somehow the consruction of a cause-effect narrative out of somewhat random events is much more obvious in print than when you just hear it.

It works for end-of-the-day stock market narratives, especially noticeable on the radio. "Profit-taking caused..." "...on investor anxiety..." etc.

If basketball is your thing, an interesting article about the bias in how the Lebron James story plays out in the media. Here's another one having fun with all the Cleveland fans boo-hooing last summer when he left.

Best Hike in Cleveland National Forest

Just want to give a shout out to Frank at CA-hiking.com for his quick resonse to my question about a previous hike in the Trabuco Unit of Cleveland National Forest. Start at San Juan Trail across from the candy story on Ortega Highway (74), then across the creek and up up and away on Chiquito Trail to the falls. The area above the falls has easily the nicest riparian woodland I've seen anywhere in this NF. Frank has a trail description and a great video of the falls too:



Many people do this as a car shuttle and come out above the falls at the top instead of returning to the candy store parking lot.

To stay on-message: let's hope Cleveland National Forest doesn't get closed down like the state is trying to do to its parks. For those of you fiction-minded outdoorsy types out there, Kim Stanley Robinson predicted back in 1988 that exactly this will happen in his novel The Gold Coast, about an Orange County in 2067 where people are packed in like sardines - including in the by-then-fully-developed former National Forest.

San Jacinto = Lots of Snow as of 25 May 2011

Tried San Jacinto yesterday. Too snowy! It just wasn't fun so I turned around just before Little Round Valley. Someone I know went up the east side from the tram and made it but said it was still damn annoying. At least the waterfalls and creeks are going, and I got some purty pitchers.

It's worth mentioning that San Jacinto isn't one of the 70 state parks that's set to close this year - unless you help stop it.

Sharks and Sherpas

1) Friend Anup sends me an article from Surfer Magazine about some total nutbar in Northern Territory, Australia who rides great white sharks. What's wrong with people.

2) Check out this Outside Magazine feature about a Sherpa former Himalaya-guide, current taxi driver in New York. I've seen someone make the opposite transition when I met a Nepali guy in a mountain village there who had just come back from New York and brought his new American wife with him, so now the circle is complete. I should point out that I disagree with this Sherpa guy strenuously on the value of Oregon pinot noir but aside from that seems like an interesting dude.

We're Losing Our Best State Parks

Gone.


Gone.


Gone.


Gone.

If melodrama is ever appropriate, it's appropriate now. Jerry Brown has proposed a list of state parks to close, which is being discussed as a done-deal. Many of the state's gems are on it. This seems to have become an annual occurrence and I wonder how much longer it can last without actually happening. In the meantime, WRITE THE GOVERNOR AND YOUR SENATOR AND REPRESENTATIVE IF YOU CARE AT ALL. I've put a template at the end of this post. The parks themselves have a website where you can learn more here.

I can't describe how sad this makes me. California is the most beautiful spot on this planet, and we're not taking our responsibility to take care of it for our kids seriously. For many of us, Each of these parks is a reason to live in California. Each of these parks that closes is one less reason to want to live here. If you run across this post please contribute your own list.

You can read the full list at the Union-Tribune or Chronicle articles, but here are the ones that just break my heart. In total there are 70. Maybe it's time to visit the state parks website and plan your summer vacation. Quickly.

San Diego:
- Palomar
- San Pasqual

Bay Area:
- Castle Rock
- Henry W. Coe SP
- Olompali
- Petaluma Adobe
- Portola Redwoods
- Samuel P. Taylor (This is an absolute disaster. How could this happen?!?)
- Tomales Bay

Rural Sonoma and points further north:
- Annadel
- Castle Crags
- Del Norte Coast Redwoods SP (OLD GROWTH REDWOODS! Maybe the Feds could take it over since it's adjacent to national parks.)
- Hendy Woods SP
- Sugarloaf Ridge


It's pretty annoying that the people who write these articles never say what "closed" means. (Come on, Mike Lee at the Union-Tribune and Adam Weintraub at AP!) (UPDATE: Mike Lee at the Union-Tribune was good enough to write me back and said this: "Great question...i'll include that in next version... short answer: putting locks on the gates and doing their best to keep people out... will have irregular patrols. Thanks for the query.")

Does it mean the land just won't be manned or maintained, but the state will maintain possession of the land, and members of the public enter at their own risk? (Not great, but the best outcome if they're ("closed".)

Or does it mean that five years from now the redwoods will be gone and there will be condos there?

In one case in the last couple years (Fort Ross) the state convinced Russia to shoulder some of the burden of keeping it open. At the time Schwarzenegger billed this as a positive development, but I don't know about you; having to beg for money from Russia to keep a park operating doesn't seem like it should be a point of pride.

Whatever happens, these lands must be preserved as open space.

Today, for the first time, I considered raising my future children somewhere besides California.

Here's the one I'm sending. Cut and paste and modify if it helps you. I have already dropped this in the mail to my senator and assembly member. Look up your state legislator here).
=============

Address
Number

Dear []:

I am deeply saddened by Governor Brown's proposal to close 70 state parks. This is an abject disaster.

One of the reasons I chose to move to California to live and work and raise a family, despite the high cost of living and challenged educational infrastructure, is the state's amazing park system. Each park that closes tips that equation in the wrong direction, for me and many, many other voters and taxpayers. For the first time today I imagined taking my California-funded medical degree, and raising my family outside the state. There is a point beyond which living in California no longer represents a good deal for the taxpayer, and we're approaching it.

Regardless of the eventual solution for these lands - that is, whether they remain state parks, or are administered by another entity or in another way - they absolutely must be protected from development, preferably in a way that keeps them open to the public. Even if this means making them state-owned use-at-your-own-risk zones, that's certainly better than redwoods being cut down to build condos. Otherwise California will become New Jersey, and the flow of high-earning in-migrants from elsewhere in the country will stop. It bears mentioning that growth has already slowed substantially in the past decade.

Please do the right thing and do not support this aspect of the proposed budget. Cutting these parks won't put California in the black. It will also be noticed by the many voters in your district who are organized and who value open space and parks.

Sincerely,



[Name]

Marian Bear Canyon Looking PRETTY Good

If you noticed the beaches and canyons and creeks look pretty good today, there's a reason: today was the creek-to-bay cleanup, and an army of volunteers was out this morning, making them look good. Did you volunteer? Why the heck not? It was actually a lot of fun! It was also a pretty good feeling to contribute the conservation of Marian Bear which is a canyon that I run in all the time.

Above and below: before and after pictures of Marian Bear today. Well okay not really, but we did make it purtier by taking trash out and it was fun. Image sources UMN Library and Socaltrails.com resp.

I also have to give San Diego credit where credit is due: in the past I've kvetched about trash in the canyons, but to be honest there wasn't a huge amount. It's great to see people taking care of their resources. Still there's always room for improvement and I'm glad I got to take part. I was glad to see the UVA Alumni group out there, and some folks from the Surfrider Foundation. It's much harder to get people willing to help inland and in the canyons then along the coast, so if you volunteer, you can make an even bigger difference by volunteering at an inland site.

Want to help in the future? I'm sure there will be chances before then but Coastal Cleanup Day is September 17, 2011. I'm putting it on my calendar now.

Follow BoonDOCS Medicine on Twitter

If you're on Twitter (and why the heck wouldn't you be, you throwback reactionary Luddite counterrevolutionary)* then you should follow @boonDOCSwildmed. This is the Twitter feed for BoonDOCS Medicine, the Outdoor Channel show where I just joined the writing team.


The BoonDOCS Medicine logo, which if you haven't noticed is cool.

I've long wanted to know more about practical medicine in the backcountry, and now that I'm in med school I damn well should - so here's my opportunity to contribute to people's knowledge while also building my own. I'm pretty excited about it. I'll be writing the tweets and most blog posts for May so if you have any ideas about what we should cover, please don't hesitate to let me know. And make sure to follow @boonDOCSwildmed!

*This is what's called "the fervor of the newly converted"

Poison Oak - Different Species in Sierras and Coast?

[Added later. Says Dan Simpson from Dan's Hiking pages: "A single species of poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) can take on variety of appearances...part of its malevolence!"]

Ever noticed that poison oak in the Sierras doesn't look like the poison oak along the coast? It doesn't. I've long thought about this and today a link in Sequoia NP's Twitter feed prompted me to post this comparison:


Sierra poison oak at top, coastal on the bottom (images from NPS photo site and Yoga Slackers resp.) Different, huh? Though it's not to scale, you can tell how the Sierra variant has larger leaves that are much less rounded, much more like their namesake oak leaves. Coastal P.O. is really just small bumpy ovals. This difference may be relevant. Why? For one thing, do the oils from each necessarily induce cross-reactions? Is one worse than the other? It's possible they're the same species, but they look different when grown in cooler, more extreme seasonal conditions - or that there's an actual genetic difference, and we're looking at different species or subspecies that have long been incorrectly classified. I hate poison oak with the obvious motivation of personal experience, so if I can spare one other person (maybe you!) the nightmare of contact dermatitis, I'll be happy.

Note that the Sequoia NP folks said it's found up to 5,000' elevation. Up in the Bay Area we usually assume a cut-off of 4,000', and then further north, somewhere between Portland and Seattle the grow-line drops to sea level and you don't see it anymore. It also survives just fine in the desert (I've seen it in the Mojave) as long as it can grow in a shaded canyon near a water source.

I was surprised not to find any literature on these variants, but what's both frustrating and exciting is that you can't assume someone has properly studied plants like this. That's how it often goes: common organisms described centuries ago, if they don't cause disease or have an economic impact, don't get grant money dedicated to them. Consequently there are basic discoveries waiting under our noses even though we think science has already swept out all this space. So what's going on, West Coast naturalists? Help us out!

I should add that further confusing the nomenclature, a) other western states (non-coastal ones) use the term "poison ivy" for what appears to be the same plant as "Sierra poison oak", and b) true poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) and poison oak do in fact overlap in their ranges - I have encountered this in Austin, Texas as well as Moab, Utah. Sure, as a rule it makes sense not to touch plants with the word "poison" in the name, but it seems clear that we still have a lot to learn about the plants literally growing in our back yards.

Cool Gadget For Keys and Money While You're On Trail

At Boing Boing I ran across this awesome gadget. Hate leaving your key in a magnet under your car body where thieves know everyone leaves them, but you're afraid you'll lose it while you're hiking/climbing/etc.? How about a combination lock you can install in your trailer hitch?



I hate worrying about mundane security stuff when I'm trying to bask in the glorious oneness of nature so this is pretty cool. You can get one at Amazon.

Welcome, BoonDOCS Medicine Visitors!

If you're visiting from BoonDOCS Medicine, welcome! I'm grateful to Dr. K. for selecting me to contribute to the site and show and I hope you stay a while to check out my personal blog here - operative word personal. So, usual disclaimer stuff: because it's my personal blog, anything you see on here is my own personal opinion and doesn't reflect anything to do with BoonDOCS Medicine, the Outdoor Channel, UCSD School of Medicine, yada yada or anyone else besides my own bad self. What it WILL reflect is cool stuff that I dig, like trail running and related stuff in San Diego, San Francisco and Pennsylvania, and conservation and safety topics in general.

To those of you who were already reading my blog, let me announce that I'm lucky enough to now be able to write for a wilderness medicine show on the Outdoor Channel called BoonDOCS medicine. Right now I'm starting out blogging and tweeting and eventually (if time commitments allow) would like to move on to contributing to the show. Here's my totally BS bio for your amusement.

Do you have ideas for wilderness medicine topics you'd like to see on the show? Leave a comment! Because if you just email me, I'll steal it and not credit you. No seriously, comment so then other people will start thinking too. I want to know what's important to folks!

Off-Line Until End of June

Dearest readers, I must again sign-off, this time until late June, so I can focus on more pressing issues. Until then: stay safe, enjoy the outdoors, and protect open space and individual property rights! Unless you read this within a few hours of my posting it, I will have already updated the previous post about BCS rankings with the 2010 season stats, as promised previously.

Some College Football Teams Get Unreasonably Good Pre-Season Ratings, So Bowls Make More Money

Note: similar effect has been found in basketball, with refs showing various biases including toward the home team and the losing team, both of which increase profitability. Read on for an analysis of college football asking the same question but with different metrics.

On the heels of my previous speculation about path-dependency in BCS college football rankings, I was recently discussing the not-infrequently-heard assertion that some teams (and some entire conferences) seem to get overly generous preseason rankings in the BCS polls - most famously, Notre Dame. (And if you're a Notre Dame fan, please stop making my blog dirty with your eyes right now, thank you.) I freely admit to being an outsider so while I hope I can provide a new perspective, it also means this may have been done. Still, so far as I know no one has actually run the numbers. My prediction before I started crunching was that schools with historically strong "legacy" programs (even if they aren't so strong any more) would get overly gentle pre-season ratings (e.g. Notre Dame) and also that certain conferences would get an advantage, in particular the Big 12 and SEC. (Skip ahead to "THE BOTTOM LINE" if you don't care about the individual team numbers.)

Before I commence BCS bashing, I would be remiss not to link to all the excellent Onion headlines about the BCS over the last few years: "Coaches Thought BCS Computer Would At Least Make a Noise When Boise State Lost", and then comparing to March Madness, "Cheering Fans, Thrilling Tournament Disgust BCS Officials"; also see "BCS Picture Made Clearer by Pretending Certain Teams Don't Exist", and a 2001 Space Odyssey reference for the win, "Lip-Reading BCS Computer Kills Officials Who Want to Shut It Down". It's curious that any discussion of the BCS rankings usually connects to a discussion of the bowl system (why is this? Keep reading.) Having mentioned that, can you imagine an NFL or MLB or NCAA basketball official suggesting changing to a bowl system in those sports? They'd be laughed out of their organization.

Back to the cold hard math. How, statistically, can we tell who's getting an unfair break? Easy. For each team that's been ranked in the Top 25 in the coaches' poll at the beginning or end of a season, look at the average movement between preseason and the end of the bowls. Same for conferences. This is how it shakes out for all teams in the rankings at the beginning or end of 2006 through 2010 seasons:

Team	Post Minus Pre Rank Diff
Boise State	8.4
BYU	5.2
TCU	4.8
Stanford	4.4
Oklahoma State	4.2
Boston College	3.2
Utah	3.2
Arkansas	3.0
Alabama	2.8
Hawaii	2.8
Missouri	2.8
Nevada	2.6
Michigan State	2.4
Oregon	2.4
Georgia Tech	1.8
Texas A&M	1.8
Wake Forest	1.8
Oregon State	1.4
Illinois	1.2
Texas Tech	1.2
UCF	1.2
Arizona State	1.0
Kansas	1.0
Pittsburgh	0.8
South Carolina	0.8
Maryland	0.4
North Carolina State	0.2
Arizona	0.0
Ball State	0.0
Cincinnati	0.0
Connecticut	0.0
Northwestern	0.0
Rutgers	0.0
USF	0.0
Virginia	0.0
Fresno State	-0.2
Wisconsin	-0.2
Ohio State	-0.6
Tennessee	-0.6
Auburn	-1.0
Mississippi	-1.2
Louisville	-1.6
UCLA	-1.6
LSU	-2.0
Virginia Tech	-2.0
Michigan	-2.2
Notre Dame	-2.2
Clemson	-2.8
Iowa	-2.8
North Carolina	-2.8
Miami (Fla.)	-3.4
Nebraska	-3.6
Penn State	-3.6
West Virginia	-3.6
Oklahoma	-3.8
Florida State	-4.8
Florida	-5.4
USC	-6.2
Cal	-6.8
Georgia	-7.2
Texas	-9.4

*Note: this system counts un-ranked as 26, and of course un-ranked (and no-conference or small-conference) teams do break into or drop out of the rankings all the time, so it's a non-zero sum game, hence at the conference level most (or even all) of the teams can in principle either win or lose on average.

The conferences look different too. Here are the pre-season vs. post-season average ranking changes for the conferences, calculated the same way:

Team	Post Minus Pre Rank Diff
Mountain West	4.4
WAC	3.67
MAC	0.0
Big East	-0.629
Big 10	-0.725
Big 12	-0.725
SEC	-0.92
ACC	-1.125
Pac 10	-6.80

Mountain West and WAC teams do better than expected, and ACC and Pac 10 do the worst. (I had predicted SEC and Big 12 would be at the lower end, and they were until I added 2010 to the 2006 through 2009 numbers.)

And here's how the distribution of the mis-rankings of individual teams looks for 2006 through 2010:

Are there any characteristics the outliers on the left, i.e. the consistently under-rated teams, have in common? Yes. Many are from newer programs with smaller fan-bases in the less-populated western states. And although it looks basically like a normal distribution, it's worth noting that there's a little cluster at the overrated (right) end of the distribution, but not so much at the unfairly-ranked-to-start-out end. The overrated cluster actually became even more pronounced when I added the '10 season data; that is, this curve got less normal, statistically speaking, which makes that overrated bump harder to explain away as mere incompetence (that is to say, as just random unbiased inaccuracy). Sure, the median postseason-minus-preseason ranking difference is zero, but if the BCS polls knew what they were doing, the individual teams' differences should all be zero - i.e., they would all individually be zero if the polls accurately predicted performance during the season. One objection to this might be summarized as follows: "Well, the coaches (or any other poll) can't possibly be expected to accurately predict the rank of all these teams, because anything can happen during the season." And for those people who say that: YES! THAT'S EXACTLY THE POINT! SO WHY ARE THEY BOTHERING WITH PRE-SEASON RANKINGS AT ALL?


THE BOTTOM LINE

There are teams that consistently get an unfairly high or low ranking at the start of seasons, relative to how they end up performing. And it turns out that there's a single clear explanation for not only this observation, but in fact for several mysteries in college football. Those mysteries are:

1) Why does college football bother with pre-season rankings at all?

2) Why are there certain college football programs that are consistently ranked unfairly low in the preseason, and why are some consistently given an advantage in the preseason?

3) Why there are so damn many bowls?

For crying out loud, I started writing this the Thursday night after New Years when we're all back to work and there were still 4 more bowls to go at that point! Why so many? It's not your imagination; there are more every decade. Again the visual makes it more striking:

The answer for all of these is the same, and to red-blooded American males who know how the world works, it should be obvious: there's money to be made from the bowls, namely $400 million in revenues (and that number is 3 years old). If there's a conflict between identifying an unambiguous champion on one hand and revenues on the other, revenues will win. (Anytime you hear someone grunting about how money misses The True Meaning of The Game and/or If I Have to Explain It You'll Never Understand It, run away. He's either justifying his own irrational spending on his team, or he's trying to sell you something.) So, if you want to maximize how much money the bowls make, you have to load the dice at the start of the season to make it more likely that those bowls will be packed with people wearing the classic school colors of legacy programs - people who spend money - regardless of whether those teams suck that year, or have sucked for many years. Sorry, Boise State, for all your talent and hard work, your fans don't spend enough money at bowl games, and your sparsely-populated part of the country doesn't have enough fans watching the advertising during the game to drive up ratings! Prove that your fans are tcotschke-buying suckers like Notre Dame and Cal fans, and soon you'll get better pre-season rankings!

Suddenly the more byzantine aspects of the BCS ranking and bowl system start to make sense. The rankings are how you can give the bowls some semblance of athletic legitimacy without a play-off system. So if it's all driven by dollars, you ask, then why even worry about seeming legitimate? Because that semblance of fairness is necessary to keep the fans coming - even the die-hard fans of those legacy teams will stop coming once they realize their team is on BCS affirmative action, and they're actually playing in the "We're All Winners!" Bowl. Solution: seed the rankings with big-market teams. That way you can have your cake (a semblance of legitimate athletic competition) and eat it too (profit maximization).

On the other end, have you ever actually heard a good argument for why there's no play-off system? The only attempt I've ever heard is that play-offs would take more time out of the student-athletes' schedules which would damage their academic performance. Yes, I've actually seen people say this with a straight face. Seriously? That's all you got? I guess we must not care about basketball players then, since I've never heard anyone say we should stop March Madness for that reason.

While you're in the mood to read more cynical sports economics, how's this for a quantitative definition of loyalty: price insensitivity relative to win-loss record. In other words, fans who are loyal to their team buy stuff with logos on it and go to games consistently, even when the teams lose, even when the teams always lose year after year. In other words, winning doesn't necessary correlate with sports club income, and the less it correlates with income, the more loyal the fans are. (In all sincerity - is there a better definition than this?) I'm going to measure that at some point but that's a later post.

I recognize that I'm probably not concluding anything that perceptive sports fans haven't figured out a long time ago, but the relationship between sports, business and human psychology is damn interesting.