About 30,000 visitors step onto its shores every year, making it one of the least-visited national parks. It consists of five islands of varying sizes, and we stayed on one of the larger ones. There were a few dozen other campers we saw, but the vast majority of people on the boat were day-trippers.

View Channel Islands National Park Trip in a larger map

We “set sail” at 8 am with Island Packers, who were fantastically efficient and a pleasure to travel with despite their apparent monopoly on service out to the islands. Upon landing, the campers were required to get a brief orientation from the live-in park ranger describing their pack-in pack-out policy and the fact that we should never leave zippers exposed as the island’s ravens have learned to unzip backpacks.

With wetsuits rented from Ventura Dive and Sport, plunged into the icy waters (ok, they’re not icy, but they’re pretty frigid compared to the warm Red Sea). The kelp beds were amazing, stretching below beyond visibility and then tangling at the surface, creating an enormous labyrinth of giant leaves. Their bases covered in sea urchins eating away at the tendrils. On the second day we saw a couple of stingrays, and a school of fish thousands strong trolling the area. I had hoped to swim and play with the local sea lions, but they weren’t particularly interested in us apparently.

While not freezing in the water, we hiked the many trails, perching atop the various cliffs overlooking the many harbors. And when not hiking, we ate and watched the chihuahua-sized island foxes looking for food and fending off the comparably-sized ravens.

It was a fun excursion, and I hope to go back for more diving and exploration of the islands. During the year they see countless whales and dolphins, and organize dive trips. Oddly enough, I found out about it two years ago from an in-flight magazine on my way to a KAUST orientation meetup. Chalk one up to the in-flight magazine!

I must admit, at times, looking down at the bright blue water, and ships coming into harbor, I felt a little bit like a pirate.

The first week was a little rocky, but mostly because I was unfamiliar with my neighborhood and wasn’t sure where people went to do their grocery shopping, to eat, grab a drink and so forth. By Monday of the following week, I knew my commute to work like the back of my hand, blending in among the real New Yorkers with the disaffected forward-looking stare that says, “I just want to get where I’m going, pal.”

When I first arrived, I was on a red-eye flight and got in around 9. I had contemplated taking a taxi to my place, both wanting to have ridden in a New York City Yellowcab and not wanting to deal with public transit, but when I got there I felt like I ought to hit the ground running. Riding on the bus, I examined the faces and demeanors of all those around me, wondering to myself which best embodied the New Yorker. On the bus, off the bus, transfer to another bus in Harlem. The name of the neighborhood brought to mind poverty and violence, and frankly, as a wet-behind-the-ears exhausted-and-irritable honkey with luggage, I had no idea what to expect. Getting off the bus and walking to the transfer, I passed the undeniable odor of marijuana, urine, drunk and irate homeless people and so forth. Bear in mind this was about 10 am on a Sunday. But while waiting, I realized something sort of magical about the city — no one cares. If you don’t get in anyone’s way or make yourself particularly noticeable, but just wear that look of just wanting to get where you’re going, no one will notice you’re there.

I had imagined that it would be a city of all kinds (which, it really is) but also a city of all kinds of rude. This was a major misconception. Though most citizens would not return a “hello” from a stranger on the street, most will help with directions when asked and apologize when they bump into you. I had hoped that at some point during the summer I would accidentally bump into someone who would then call back at me “hey, I’m walkin’ here!” This seems unlikely to happen at this point.

There are some stereotypes that are true to TV life. Attractive, busy and exasperated professional women are in abundance, a la Liz Lemon of 30 Rock, for example. There is a certain level of dress that seems to be expected here, even on the street. Most men wear shirts and resort to jeans as their most casual and most women, at least this time of year, wear dresses, though I think that might be because of how outrageously hot it can get.

The New Yorker’s hatred of tourists is a uniting factor, and something that I began to understand almost immediately. It can be easy to get distracted by the enormous buildings, and visual stimuli, but most inhabitants pass these things every day and are just on their way to work, or dinner, or a friend’s. I’m gaining a sense of what parts of the city to avoid for this reason – it’s very frustrating to get stuck behind a slow-walking tourist who’s aloofness makes him meander windingly down the sidewalk, impossible to pass. Times Square is a death trap — three blocks of fanny-pack-wearing fathers trying to decide what to see next, keep track of lagging children and generally getting in everyone’s way. But, let the tourists have Times Square.

Don’t take too long here. A friend who shall remain nameless visited me here, and used to the slower-paced life in Boulder, CO, she pondered what she wanted from a pizza place only after we had gotten to the front of the line. On another occasion, she flip-flopped on her order. To be fair, these places weren’t extremely busy, but it brought to light the fact that there’s an expectation here that you have been to a place before, know exactly what you want, and can complete your transaction in less than a minute. In some ways, this is a charm that I like; there are many places to eat here, but I’ve quickly developed preferences and can walk into my favorite pizza place and make my order like a regular.

My favorite things about New York couldn’t be experienced in a vacation here. When I first moved in, for example, I was so pleased with the view from my place. Not that it’s particularly incredible (I live on the Upper East Side and I don’t know what sort of reputation the neighborhood holds as far as views), but I like it all the same. I look out my window and I see dozens of different buildings that I would call skyscrapers, all designed differently, peppered with garden terraces and charming signs of age. The jagged horizon is somehow enchanting, and my curtains always stay open. At night the neighboring buildings provide a soft and diffuse light, and different patterns of lit windows.

I love walking down certain streets and being able to see down the avenues, the tiny separations between giant buildings. Properly positioned, you can sometimes see a mile or so before a hill obstructs the view. It reminds me of a project I saw to create a horizonless map of Manhattan.

The last few hours of sunlight in the day are perfect. People talk about the Colorado sky, or the sunsets we have, but I’ve never seen light quality quite like this. It’s a beautiful golden warmth every day without fail. It makes me want to curl up and take a nap, or stretch out on the lawn and enjoy the end of the day. In the park, this deliciousness is only compounded by the reservoirs, the heavy trees and residents playing frisbee, picnicking and taking walks along the paths. It’s a beautiful time, and there’s an odd sense of community to it. I’ve often wondered if such a place existed, where there isn’t any one group that’s out and enjoying the place, or even a tight-knit group of neighbors. But there is a dense packing of total strangers who can come to the same place and enjoy the grass and the outdoors.

Almost most of all, I love Central Park. I was excited when I found my place because it’s a mere three cross-town blocks from Central Park. I bike around there almost every day, and it’s almost always a treat. There are hordes of runners, cyclists, rollerbladers and even a few cross-country skiers. As a cyclist, you have to keep a watchful eye on the bipeds you’re passing as they sometimes have a tendency to step out in front of you. We largely ignore crosswalks, and only the few cars on the road observe them. There are some sections that are filled with horse-drawn carriages, bikeshaws and more adventurous tourists who decided to rent a bike and ride around the park, but you make do. Sometimes it’s actually quite a thrill to be riding as fast as you can and dodging these obstacles and having a little friendly battle with other riders. This, too, is a nice feature about riding here — no matter what your level, you can always find an equivalent cyclist for a little friendly competition and motivation.

Biking in the city is also a pretty big rush. In the morning hours, most of the usually-busy roads are ghost-towns, but seventh avenue at 7 in the evening is a sea of taxis. I was riding down one day to Penn Station in the evening, catching a train out to Long Island to see a friend. A bicyclist will make it down there faster than a taxi, but it’s not for the faint of heart. Sprint, breaks, sprint, dodge pedestrian, coast, zip between cars, breaks, sprint. There are no bike lanes, but rather only the spaces between cars. The upside of this game of Frogger is that you can zip out between any two lanes where there’s space. I’m not quite sure how cab drivers feel about us, but I imagine that if nothing else, they’re quite used to people with a death-wish.

Had I never spent more than several weeks here, I never would have discovered what I love about the city. These are the things one does and notices not when trying to visit the Met or Times Square or the Empire State Building, but only when you’ve enough time to be alright with not packing every waking hour or weekend with a trip to somewhere new and exciting. This is the meandering life, and enjoying it.

Thus, it occurred to me recently – if you’re a woman driver in Saudi, you get arrested and then who knows what else. If you’re a woman driver in the US, you get a discount on your car insurance.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I know for my personally it was because I wanted to be able to be a better dive buddy. (In PADI and all diving certifications you’re supposed to dive with a buddy for both safety and fun.) Although we always take appropriate precautions when diving, it can still be a dangerous sport. We all feel like learning CPR and how to operate an AED were easy steps to mitigate some of this risk.

During dive training, we have to practice some emergency maneuvers, but I always had this lingering curiosity about whether or not it would come back to you naturally during an emergency situation. Once while diving, my friend Noah took off his tank and regulator and swam over to our friend Luca and signaled that he was out of air, asking to use his alternate air source. While it’s a simple act to share your air, seeing another diver pop up needing air would be quite a surprise.

That said, I realized after the course that we were at least better prepared for unforeseen accidents than we were when we started.

Had I been stranded on a deserted island six months ago, this would have absolutely been me. Well, and without goggles, it would still be me, but that’s neither here nor there.

As I live in Saudi Arabia, activities can be… sparse. There’s cycling and sports, but for the most part it’s too hot to do anything until the evening. In January I first joined some of my friends on a dive trip of theirs – I was only snorkeling, but they assured me there would be plenty to see. Growing up a good 1500km from a large saline body of water, my experience had been rather limited. When I finally got ready, and put my head under water, my head popped back up about half a second later, shouting to my friends, “Holy crap! There’s fish everywhere!”

My friends just sort of looked back at me as if to say, “yeah… about that – that’s why we come.”

From that point on, I’ve been hooked. I have since gotten dive-certified, and gone a few trips. Few things are better than getting to explore a world unseen by most people, sometimes seeing reefs so random and remote that it’s unlikely that people have even been there at all. On every boat trip, we pass uncountably many shallow reef patches, that extend for kilometers – they really are sprawling, massive underwater cities.

A few weeks ago, I got to go on a truly fantastic trip. The Marine Science department at KAUST tags and studies whale sharks, and every so often they take along “tourists.” We saw between 5 and 7 unique sharks, the longest of which was about 6.5m (20 feet), though apparently they can grow to be over 12m (40 feet). Roll clip:

How this worked is we had two boats (one filled with researchers and one filled with us tourists), and if either boat spotted something, they’d sound the horn, and everyone jumped in. As such, we would all sit on the edge of the boat, fins on, masks ready – just in and out of the water all day. Once in, the sharks tended to swim pretty fast – they seem to be barely exerting themselves and we’re swimming as fast as we can. And, if they don’t care to outrun us and want to get away, they dive beyond our reaches.

On this same trip we saw a lonely sea turtle, about the size of a dinner plate. We all hopped in the water and had turns getting our pictures taken with him. Honestly, I felt a little weird about picking him up, but he really did not seem to mind it. It does violate a widely-followed rule among responsible divers – touch nothing (unless you really know what it is and that it’s not going to damage you or it).

We also saw a “pod” of three dolphins; they often appear briefly on these boat trips, but usually scurry off pretty quickly in our experience. On this occasion, though, as we were already set up to be hopping in and out of the water at a moment’s notice, we did try to swim with them. They mostly stayed about 6m below us, and were much more difficult to keep up with than the whale sharks. That said, fortune favored the persistent, and after about 15 minutes of some of my hardest swimming, I managed to spot them and get within about 2m (6 feet) of them as they surfaced. One was badly scarred across his back, but the other two were untouched. They came up for a quick drink of air, descended a few meters, did a somersault underwater and then looked at me as if to say, “Oh, you can’t do that, can you?”

It’s hard to take in the incredible gravity and beauty of the sights, let alone when swimming as fast as you can and perpetually out of breath. I’m glad I got the chance, and I hope to see more aquatic life, but there is definitely a reason it’s remote. Consider this: in hiking, the highest I’ve been is just over 14,000 feet, but the limits of recreational diving is a mere 40m (130 feet) and that requires even more specialized training. Consider, too, the Mariana Trench – which is less accessible: the deep sea or space?

Since the opening of the KAUST beach, we’ve explored much of the reef, sometimes to the dismay of the coast guard. We take precautions – never going alone, bringing a dive flag, and knowing our limits. Floating along in the warm water, seeing thousands of fishes, swimming around is enough to make anyone want to play Jacques Cousteau.

‘What,’ I wondered, ‘could possibly be the fascination?’

Growing up in Colorado, playing around on the beach meant going to Boulder Reservoir, which isn’t much more than an enormous swimming pool. Just not much remarkable about it. The only real beaches I had been to until now were in San Francisco and Japan, and the novelty wore off pretty quickly.

This last weekend, I decided that I ought to give it a try, and not being certified for diving I went snorkeling with my friends. We drove to a private beach (which was a treat in itself – men and women can mix, and music plays over the loudspeakers. These are things I’ve learned to not take for granted), rented gear and got in the water. On the dock, I was excited when I saw a small coral growing in the shallows. It couldn’t have been more than 10 centimeters in diameter but thinking about exploring the beach for more such treasures was enticing.

We waded out and put on our flippers, and then our masks. I dipped my head down, ready to explore, and instantly my head popped right back out of the water. “Guys! Guys!” I shouted to my friends. “There’s a freakin’ million fish here!” They chuckled knowingly, and I realized this is what they came for.

I just could not get in the water fast enough. There were so many fish I had never seen except for in aquariums, brightly colored, quick, and just stunning. Thousands of them from deep blues to iridescent purples, all swarming around beautifully-colored coral and anemones. All told, I spent about four hours tooling around the reef, examining fish at the cleaning station, clownfish in their anemones and predators lurking near the surface.

On leaving I instantly felt like a tree-hugging hippie, and felt a need to protect the ocean. Ok, sure, it was a bit short-lived and I feel like someone who’s hopped on a bandwagon, but it’s an incredible world down there. You see shadows off in the “distance” (though it’s usually only 30 feet away) shimmering and swimming around. Floating in the sea, weightless, above the sheer cliff faces of 20, 30 or 40 feet is a unique sensation. I tried to compare it to hiking and climbing mountains, but it occurred to me that unless I learn to base jump, I will never see that kind of geographical structure from the same relative perspective – hovering above it.

Between dives (well, my friends were diving while I was snorkeling) we’d pull out a book of Red Sea fish and try to find all the ones we’d seen. The camaraderie of stories of dives past and fish seen was nearly as satisfying as the experience of being in the water like that.

I’m exploring getting certified (either through PADI or BSAC – we have both available here) so that I can join my friends on deeper adventures, but in the mean time I’m going snorkeling as often as I can. Forgive the pun, but I think I’m hooked.

The younger monkeys are pretty playful, climbing ropes and poles, and rough-housing with one another. The adult monkeys seem more interested in eating the food provided to them, a mix of barley and other grains. There seemed to be some areas used mostly by families (these were inaccessible to human visitors) and others that seemed to be dominated by younger bachelors. Fights would break out from time to time, but nothing too serious.

Japan is known for their natural hot springs, and the monkeys take full advantage. The day I was there, it was about 3 degrees Celsius, and the water was pretty tempting.

You can get pretty close to these brazen animals, but do not touch. Occasionally they will grab onto you, but I only saw one instance of this; a group of us were watching a couple monkeys playing and banging against a sign, when an attention-starved lad came up and tugged on one man’s coat to get his attention. Still, they’re pretty aloof to our presence for the most part, and will walk and eat within a few feet of you.

I kept thinking of them as terrestrial Ewoks, or furry seven-year-old human children, but the opposable toes are kind of unnerving. They often appear so human that it’s hard to remember that they’re still very wild.

They cry and scream at one another, but these noises serve as low-priority warnings more than anything else.

If you even get a chance to visit, take full advantage. Best US$5 I spent in Japan. More photos on flickr.

It turned out that a few KAUSTicans were on the same flight as me, and we had a good time talking shop while waiting for flights. Good guys – I look forward to hanging out with them at the conference.

It wasn’t until I stepped off the plane and saw that my travel companions didn’t look to be immediately at ease in this country that I realized that Japan is almost a second home. Outside of the US, it’s the country in which I’ve spent the most time, though Japanese is not my strongest second language. Still, I was able to pick up right where I left off in terms of daily life without missing a beat – it’s a different city, but the people and places are recognizable.

Glad to be back, Japan.

Rain like cords was falling in Saudi Arabia. The streets were wet, and excited, I ran to get my camera and started taking pictures. I threw some clothes on, and ran around campus to try to document what I believe to be a very rare event here. I called several of my friends to make sure they were awake and witnessing this.

The rain let up about 7:30, and soaked and I tired I headed back to my building to get some sleep when I encountered several other students who also wanted to just feel the rain on their faces. We walked around campus to see it wet, but ended up surveying the damage. Students had ceilings collapse, water running out of light fixtures, flooding in their apartments – the list goes on.

A sunken area of campus had turned into a lake (based on what it’s like when it’s dry, it must be 4 meters deep in some places), and some roads had become impassable rivers. Encountering a couple of students on motorcycles unsure if they should try to cross, I was reminded of Oregon trail. In the end, they forded the river.

Tyler and I moved on, the water now thigh-high in the middle of the road. Cars’ mufflers were bubbling through the water, and one had to worry about the wake of passing cars. The womens’ residence was evacuated, and many families packed their kids in the car and left in search of higher ground. The timing was sweet and sour – it was the last day before break and school got cancelled on account of rain, but most students were leaving the country for the week, and some will return to find unlivable and extensively damaged homes.

Rains like these are extremely rare in the area, and so I understand the lack of preparation. I don’t understand the shoddy craftsmanship of the homes, but that’s a running issue. Tonight’s Thanksgiving dinner will be a reflective one for certain. One exasperated student, waking to water pouring on him, household wiring fried and water running down the stairs like a waterfall felt that this was the last straw. He seemed to be set on the decision to return home at the earliest possible time.

It seems he’s not alone, and the school is expecting a non-negligible portion of the students to not return after winter break, though some are talking about not returning from Eid break at the end of next week. I hope for all our sakes and for the sake of the school, that the administration can refocus, get their act together and get their sometimes incredible mismanagement under control. We all came because we wanted to see KAUST succeed, and we hope it still can.

That said, I would like to offer praise and criticism; the response from emergency services was what I’d expect in a modern country. Water tankers were on the streets, pumping out massive amounts of water, within four hours of the rain. The fire department helped evacuate a number of families, and each student was actually contacted by phone to make sure he had a livable apartment for the time being – those who did not were moved to safe lodgings. My criticism is this – why are not all of our other, very real concerns and problems not pursued with the same tenacity and efficiency. Why did it take a small disaster for KAUST to shine?

I took some more photos as well.

No longer. And as of right now, I don’t have any intention of using anything but git for personal development.

Last week, I held lecture for parallel programming and I talked about using subversion for versioning, and I began to suspect that something was horribly wrong. Questions started springing up – where does the repository live? Am I calling svnadmin on my own machine? Where do I check out the repository? Though there are answers to these questions, for many things, such a model just doesn’t make sense.

If I’m working on a project that I’m not syncing between several computers, but I just want to have different stable versions and to try different crazy ideas using branches. It mitigates the cost of reverting drastic changes to code.

Use Case: You’re showing someone your code, and want to show off a neat feature you’ve made, or a problem you’re encountering, something about the project, invariably you’ve run into a problem where it doesn’t compile at the moment. You type furiously, trying to find and undo the most recent changes, but to no avail – there is no hope of getting it to compile in the 5 minutes you have someone’s attention. Enter version control. Revert to the last working copy and victory is yours.

In fact, just today I was asked if I could pull up some code I had been working on to show to a professor. Unfortunately at the moment it wasn’t compiling but was able to switch versions in 20 seconds and show off some very recent work from earlier in the day, thus saving face.

Use Case: You’ve got some crazy idea for an implementation you’d like to try out, but are worried about reverting back all the massive changes you’ll have to make in the code. Worry not! Create a new branch and feel free to change your code in every way you can think of and not lose other branches under development.

Use Case: You’ve got multiple versions of code each implementing the same basic algorithm but with different mechanisms, techniques, etc. and have to turn it in as part of a project. Just archive the whole directory (in a tarball or zip) and the user who unpacks it has access to every version your code has been in. Each branch, each stage of development. And very light-weight to boot.

I can’t speak for others, but I will be using git for the foreseeable future as it’s incredibly easy to use and alleviates many of the problems I encounter regularly with development.

You could change the text of the screen saver, and its font, color, etc. This, I was sure, was awesome.

I was in the fifth grade at this point, and several weeks later my parents were meeting with their accountant in the kitchen. I saw mysterious black box in front of the man that turned out to be a laptop. He was staring at it intently, but from where I was I could see nothing on the screen – viewing angles just weren’t what they are today. I slinked around and tried to catch a glimpse, but I was noticed and my parents remarked on my curiosity saying that I had never seen one before. Slightly embarrassed, I scurried off as children do.

By the time I was in high school, I had learned about Napster, and torrents, and had learned a small amount about the hardware. I bought my first hard drive (120 GB) for about US$100, and though it’s large compared to the 16MB disks of yore, looking back it still seems ridiculously tiny.

I eventually started playing with C++ my junior year, helped out by my friend Michael’s mother, Katja. She was a programmer (and perhaps she still is) at Ball Aerospace, and she helped me to install Cygwin and get a compiler running. At last, I could actually compile and run the code I had been reading about in the books I had picked up from the local library.

I was constantly aware of the differences between my programs and those of the system, an obvious difference in quality and found it easy to lose interest because of the lack of a GUI. All the same, the power was obvious, and it was then that I first became interested in mathematical curiosities like prime numbers and Fibonacci.

When I left for school, I imagined that I might end up in computer science, but I initially registered as an electrical engineer. When I found myself taking more CS courses than EE, I switched and embraced it. Still, I can’t help but wonder about nature vs. nurture and what along the way (besides the obvious) pushed me in that direction. Either way, I do not regret my career choice, and I can’t think of anything else I’d be so regularly inspired to work on.

Fed up with the disappearing devices, my friend Tyler and I set out on a mission. We went into Jeddah, bought a webcam and using the popular (thank to Iain for the link) Linux package motion, we set up a hidden motion-detecting spy cam in our office. We have a Linux box sitting near our desk (we’ve locked it to the floor), and so we hid the camera, trained on the place where most of disappearances had taken place.

A test shot of Tyler as we're setting it up.

What motion does is that every time it detects the picture it sees changing, it takes pictures for five seconds (or until the motion stops – which ever takes longer). It’s supposed to be able to encode a video with ffmpeg on the fly, but as it wasn’t working right for us, we decided to just go ahead and throw it into a script. I wrote a short bash script that just took all the photos, archived them and then generated a video (when dealing with the tens of thousands of photos generated in an average day and night I learned about xargs). It also provides triggers for when motion is captured (for example, if you’d like to update Twitter (via Lifehacker) you can do this with curl).

One night, when bored and filled with anger about the situation, I decided to check the feed and found footage of someone clear-as-day breaking into my cabinet. I first saw it about 20 minutes after the fact, but I was sure the guy was still there. I called Tyler and we quickly deliberated (after getting the opinions of a couple officemates) and we decided to wait until the morning and talk to the security officer.

Looking for goodies. The man's face is not visible in this shot nor is this frame alone incriminating. In the context of the video, you can see him gain entry, begin rummaging and removing items.

We spent some time with them the next morning, giving them footage and printing key frames, and then they said they’d look into it. They assured us they would not involve the local authorities if they didn’t have to (the penalty for such crimes in Saudi Arabia can be quite stiff) and would take care of it discreetly. That night, they arrested four people and recovered a number of electronic devices. They held them as evidence for a bit, but today, I was given back my camera and iPhone (the only really big-ticket items I had stolen).

I am extremely relieved to have these back, especially my camera as I had been wanting to take photos of trips, events, etc. in its absence. Our next step was going to have off-site storage in case the bandits took off with our computer, but it would seem it wasn’t necessary.

Motion: 1, Thieves: 0

Of course, this was not a solo effort by any means. Some system admins and colleagues in the office park offered input, and the evidence wouldn’t have left our webcam if not for the security staff. Thanks, guys.

This year, after seeing a post about “Movember” (Movember = Mustache + November) on The Art of Manliness, Tyler and I decided enough was enough. It was time to grow beards for charity.

We’re busy students, and we can’t be training to run marathons for testicular cancer, so why not turn something we already do on a daily basis into something useful. Plus, we won’t have to waste time shaving.

A shave on October 31st will be my last for a month. The trick is to push on through past the “pedo-stache” stage and into the manly beard stage. I’ve grown a beard before, but was displeased with it and enough time has passed that it’s time to test the waters again, for, how can one truly know one’s beard without having one?

Movember @ KAUST has a few rules:

There are varying levels of moustached/bearded-ness.

Level 0: the Supporter. This means you support our cause, but are otherwise shaving regularly.

Level 1: the Sophisticate. You allow the growth of the facial hair, but still trim it into a neat moustache or beard.

Level 2: the Chuck Norris. Very minimal shaving. You are allowed to trim if there is unevenness, and do basic styling, but otherwise the amount of growth is way over the usual. Should be a complete beard and moustache if possible.

Level 3: the Castaway. No shaving or facial grooming allowed. Let your facial hair grow wild and free. Wilson! Wilson!

The rules for the month are that, in order to participate, you must increase at least one level from your current growth.

Unfortunately, there aren’t that many ladies on campus to impress with your manliness. On the bright side, though, in Saudi your glorious beard will be more acceptable than in many western countries. And, being graduate students, you certainly won’t be persecuted at work for an “unkempt” appearance.

But its not all about having fun and looking manly, we want some good to come from this event. Find friends and relatives willing to pledge money for your Movember month. Have them pledge a donation to one of the below listed mens-health related charities.

We’re still finalizing our chosen charity, but it looks at this point as if it will be Everyman, a group that helps to fund the Institution of Cancer Research.

UPDATE: We’ve settled on that group, and please feel free to donate!

Good luck, and good growing.

For example, to encourage people to recycle bottles and cans more, a group turned a recycling receptacle into a “Whack-A-Mole” game of sorts. Or mounting giant piano keys (like in the movie Big) on stairs to encourage people to walk up the stairs rather than use the adjacent escalator. The site provides a lot of great videos and statistics:

I’ve mentioned Luis von Ahn before (incidentally he’s the man behind CAPTCHAs – the distorted text websites sometimes ask you to type in). His area of research is human computation, which generally takes the form of turning a repetitive or boring task into a really truly enjoyable game. Sure, it’s advice one’s mother has given them a hundred times, but how many times have you washed the floor with scrub-brush-shoes like in Pipi Longstocking? It’s non-trivial to turn something into a game, but still not a new idea, strictly speaking.

Not only is making monotonous tasks fun a great motivator, but many indicate that play is important. I’ve been watching a lot of TED Talks lately for our upcoming TEDx event, and these Fun Theory projects remind me of one I watched recently:

I left the United States on August 16th making it almost two months of living out of a suitcase, sleeping in eight different beds in various places and cohabitating with a number of people. It’s far from perfect, but to have a home that will remain the same is enough for now. About half of the possessions I brought with me had not left my suitcase for those two months.

I’m moving furniture around and cleaning this weekend, but I’m very excited to nest. This may very well be where I live for the next several years of my life.

I’d post pictures, but the camera I got this summer (a Nikon D60) was stolen this week. My backpack and headphones preceded it in disappearing, and so my friend Tyler and I will be setting up a hidden spy camera in our office to hopefully get some of our belongings back or at least catch some nefarious individuals as security staff has been less than helpful.

Why are manhole covers round?

I was reading an interesting piece recently about survivor bias. It was a book (I’ll try to find it again in the library) talking about building strong companies and they presented a criticism of other such books: that they only tell you what strong companies do. It’s equally important to understand the reason for failure among companies that flounder. They gave a very tangible and compelling example:

During World War II, the Royal Air Force would send planes out on missions and some would return home and some would not. They noticed that of those that made it back, bullet holes were concentrated on certain regions (like the wings and rear gunner positions). Seeing as reinforcing against bullets was costly and also added a lot of weight to the planes, they came up with a perfectly-reasonable-sounding idea – let’s just reinforce the areas that seem to get hit most. They followed through with this inspired idea but found that they did not see any improvement in the rate of planes that returned home.

What they should have done, as this book points out, is to reinforce the places that didn’t seem to get hit on the planes that return. That’s because that’s precisely where the planes that didn’t make it back were hit, and they were seeing a sort of negative filter of the weakest points on the aircraft. Survivor bias – a systematic skewing of data based on patterns in groups from which you gather your data. In some sense, talking about what’s great about successful companies is committing the same mistake.

I am a big believe in `lessons-learned.’ After a project, it’s good to reflect on it, and think about what you’d change. What worked well, and equally importantly, what did not. Similarly, I encourage people to report negative results in their work, as they are sometimes just as useful.

In terms of ensuring failure, I’ve been taking note of a lot of things in the management of this project (the instantiation of this school) that I would change. If you want to make your life more difficult, here are some things you might try:

1. Keep No Real Records – What we see when we go to the housing office is a couple of guys sitting at a solitary computer and a man with a cell phone and sticky notes sitting at a table. We tell this guy what’s wrong with our apartments, or what we’d like to know, and so forth, and he writes this down on a sticky note. I’ve been asked over a dozen time for my email address by the housing office alone, and I’ve had to explain to them as many times that I don’t have a cell phone. And yet, when developments occur, they try to contact me by phone.

   It’s an endless game of “telephone” where over successive conveyances of information, the message becomes utter garbage. My friend Ben has had his dishwasher checked 4 times by housing maintenance, but it’s his washing machine that’s broken. At the point of collection, make widely-accessible notes of the issues. Better yet would be to allow students to describe in writing their problems directly. (This is especially important when accents are often so thick as to be unintelligible.) It’s almost as if there were dozens of commercial and free tools out there.

2. Don’t Use Your Products – I swear that our toilet paper dispensers were designed by people who don’t use toilet paper, and our faucets by people who don’t use water faucets. With respect to the faucets, the area of activation for the soap dispenser is a superset of the area of activation for the water, meaning you can’t get access to water to rinse your hands without having more soap applied. There are more examples, I’m sure.
3. Foster Resentment – Treat your clients like incompetents and infantilize them at every step. When they ask for assistance, give it to them in the most inconvenient way possible.
   I’ve been moved twice since on campus, and each time they’ve given me a 30-minute window from the time I bring up the problem. I have since learned to pack all my belongings in about 15 minutes, but it’s not how I’d like to be treated. Our campus recently hosted 60+ leaders of various nations as part of the inauguration and other VIPs totaling 3,500. There was no room made for the student body one tenth that size. I was sure that the reason for this was the security concerns, until the night of the event they realized they wouldn’t fill the space and sent out buses to campus to round up random people to stand in for the event. It sends a clear message about who this event was for. Even now, some of us have been moved into the maid’s quarters of houses on campus; these serve as a bedroom – 30 square feet all to yourself.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into a rant, but I meant rather to illustrate some organizational observations. Tying this back to the picture at the top, it’s a question commonly asked at interviews (from PhD programs to Microsoft) – why are manhole covers round? It’s because otherwise hard hats would have to be a lot harder. If it’s square (like this one on KAUST campus), the 100+ pound plate can fall down the manhole itself.

That said, there have been issues. Birthing pains. And there were bound to be some. Anyone who writes code knows that nothing compiles the first time around, and even when it does, it rarely works exactly as planned. Early adopters know that a product is a brilliant idea in principle but there may still be design flaws in the implementation.

Last night saw the inauguration of the school. The king came to the school (along with 3,500 of his closest friends – leaders from various countries, nobel laureates, distinguished guests) and there was a very long and involved ceremony. Given the guest list, I understand that there are security concerns and not everyone can attend, but the initial plan for the ceremony did not include students. Or much of the faculty. Upon learning of this, a petition went around, was signed, and we are told eventually reached the king himself and he extended an invitation to one student per country. These students were then included on stage during a reading of poetry to the king.

I find it very symbolic that these students were then not guests, but performers. Perhaps it’s ego-centric or self-involved to think that it’s the students and faculty who make the school the school, but they’ve been telling us this from the beginning. Why then, did we watch on TV an event that was happening on campus? And as far as the security concerns go, we all submitted to background checks, and “police clearances” and the extensive medical tests. Oh the medical tests! I literally gave more blood samples and stool samples for getting my visa than I have in the rest of my life. We’re academics – not zealots or crazy and dangerous people.

I imagine that it’s different in a monarchy. I realized in watching the festivities, that the people presenting and speaking at the event were proffering a gift, or a thanks. A promise to the king that they hoped and prayed he would find pleasant as a man with absolute power in the land. I tried to imagine an analog in the United States and I couldn’t think of one. There are ceremonies like this stateside, but they are displays of gratitude without the fear or reverence.

KAUST has to walk a fine line – the Saudi general population sometimes feels as though this is too free or too liberal a place while many of the people who constitute the school feel it’s too restrictive. That’s in part because we were promised that there would be no segregation when we got here, and there is. We were promised that there would be no dress code, and though it’s not always strictly enforced, there is one. We were promised we would have unfettered access to the internet (we were incredulous, but that’s what they said up until we got here), but many legitimate things are censored. I understand that there is a tight-rope walk in play here, but at the same time, it’s hard to ask people to stay and work in the name of the king when there is greener grass elsewhere.

I stay and will stay because I believe in the dream. I laud King Abdullah for his insight and inspiration. It’s with certain implementation issues that I take exception.

I have been asking for two weeks whether or not my permanent residence is ready. I look forward to making this campus my home, but while we’re living out of suitcases for the last six weeks, it’s impossible to be settled. And despite asking and asking the people they’ve told us to ask, no one can tell me if my home is ready for me. The people who will be my next-door neighbors once I move in… they have been living there since the beginning. Sure there may be a problem with my apartment only, but why can no one tell me?

Things are getting better (we’re getting put in touch more directly with the people in charge of housing, IT, and other issues), but there’s still a ways to go. Perhaps with this inauguration over, things will clear up more, but I feel it’s been very trying and a lot to ask of students. And more than students, it has been a lot to ask of the families of students and faculty that have joined them here. Some professors haven’t been able to live in a house with their wives and children under the same roof because their homes aren’t ready.

The coverage of the school that we see is all roses and sunshine. And by and large, I agree – it’s very impressive and I very much look forward to working here. But I take that coverage as a slight. I find the KAUST Inauguration Twitter feed particularly revealing.

On the one hand, it’s hard to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I would a smaller and less problematic gift horse. They’ve given us t-shirts and messenger bags and thumb drives, but I want a web page with the bus schedule on it. They’ve given us apartments with 10 chairs and granite countertops, but I want a reliable internet connection. I don’t need or want the flash – I want the tools I need to do the work and research for which I came to this institution. Access to a printer that works has gone a long way. More paper for it, however, would be much appreciated. All these great whiteboards everywhere in the office area where I do my work are awesome! There are the whiteboards where interesting and important discussions will will take place. Markers would help. I don’t need a doorman at the entrance to every building. I need someone to fix my washing machine.

It’s not as though there aren’t resources enough – it’s as though the pieces are there but they’re not clicking. We have the money to actually have books in the library, but somewhere along the lines, the people in charge of ordering books neglected to do so, and so the staff is driving to Jeddah on a daily basis, buying books at what is essentially Borders, and driving them back here. I’m sure there’s a repository of paper and markers somewhere on campus, for the life of any of us, no one can tell us where that is. There is a symposium today that’s going to be very inspiring and filled with impressive people that I’ve been looking forward to for two weeks. We had to RSVP a week and a half in advance, but I haven’t been told what time it starts or where. And yet no fewer than 6 people have come by my desk to check whether or not my lamp works. My lamp works. My phone and internet connection don’t.

In order to get onto the compound, we have to present student IDs. Presumably, then, people walking into academic buildings carrying a backpack are students and are allowed to be there and are trusted. But I have to sign in at a security desk if I go in the main entrance to my building, and occasionally have my bag searched.

This has grown longer than I intended, but the thing I hope to have impressed upon you is this: I’m grateful to the king. Very grateful, and I wish I knew how best to convey my gratitude. That said, I wish we could get to work, manage ourselves as competent and trusted colleagues. We very much want to build this community and start making our homes here. To the administration: please allow us to do so.

I think it’s better to ask an obvious question than to pridefully miss an answer. Why not learn something? Wherever you are, you’ve gotten there or been put there, and have no responsibility to do anything other than what you can. Richard Feynman talks about this at great length and was often relieved of performance anxiety by that comforting thought. When he was first appointed as a professor he doubted his qualification. He doubted himself when he presented a lecture to Einstein and Fermi, but learned to trust in the opinions of those who had put him where he was. It’s why we have letters of recommendation – so-and-so thinks you are qualified or have a legitimate interest in getting to where you’re going based on where you’ve been.

That said, not only do you not have an obligation to do anything more than you can, but you’re obligation is to more or less act as you have in the past. Not to stifle growth or change, but the person you’ve been is the person that the powers that be have selected.

I was watching a TED Talk by Oliver Sacks when he said something that caught my ear. He’s describing these visual hallucinations that some blind patients experience, and the person to first describe these symptoms was Charles Bonnett. Bonnett didn’t himself experience them himself but his grandfather did. In describing the circumstance under which Bonnett’s grandfather conveyed the experience to him, he said that he’d come up and say that he saw this or that.

I think more often than not, when someone comes up to me and tells me that he or she saw something, it’s to tell me what’s going on in the world – in the community, in school, at work. It’s rarely meant to describe the experience itself and even when it does, it’s usually meant to include a certain amount of focus on the event. But were a blind person experiencing what have been described as more movie-like than dream-like hallucinations… were he or she to tell me about the visions, the news or informative element is gone. It’s not something seen on the street or at home, but something experienced.

Among my friends, I feel very comfortable posing hypotheticals or talking about feelings or sensations I encounter. And getting to the point of what I find so enchanting about some of my favorite people is that it’s perfectly acceptable to experiment with different storytelling formats, mediums and so forth. If I went up to my friends and proposed an experiential experiment or experimental format, it would be more or less accepted, I think. Without (if at all possible) sounding self-aggrandizing, we’re willing to share more openly our feelings about the world – from a tangent I followed when I heard a word the other day to how the light on a particular tree made me feel. That’s of course not to say that we live in this world all the time.

As children, we make mistakes about how things work (mechanically and socially) and have misconceptions. After a certain point we feel a need to display a proper front or avoid mistakes and while largely this is pragmatic, it has a regrettable consequence: we cease to experiment.

I’ve been trying to take to heart a feeling that by and large, nothing is sacred. The house I will live in for the next year, my time, my situation, and the situation of others. Perhaps the world is more flexible than we realize, and we might try something new or embrace habits that might be considered weird. A concrete example or two is in order.

My friends and I are not affectionate people. Rather, by some peoples’ reckoning, we are not affectionate people. I’ve hugged my best male friends – men I’ve known for nearly a decade – probably half a dozen times. The tactile atmosphere here is vastly different – people I’ve just met will take my arm or take my hand or drape an arm around the shoulder. And why shouldn’t they? It serves to instill a sense of belonging and acceptance, perhaps better than words might. Sure some people have deep-seated personal space issues or simply prefer not to be touched, but I was surprised to find that despite physically being mostly an island back home I did find it endearing to embrace and be embraced.

Tomorrow!