I was walking to the Noteflight office this morning, a walk which meanders through Cambridge’s various ideas of upscale, downscale and industrial-scale before terminating in a neighborhood one could describe as biotech chic. It’s ironic that what we call the “life sciences” seem to require, for their successful pursuit, a sterile environment purged of all life. This notion seems to have leaked outward from their labs and glove boxes into the architecture, which is designed to convey that same sterility.  I much prefer the industrial stretch of my walk, right at the boundary of bio-land and the residential neighborhood preceding it.  In this area, a disused auto repair shop looks exactly like what it is, lying just outside the zone in which it would have been cleaned up to reflect its rows of newly minted  equipment inside.

On that walk today, I met an urban raspberry.  Like the auto repair shop, it looked exactly like what it was. I ate it, looking at the cracked and broken windows of the buildings around me. A perfect moment unfolded on my tongue, fading half a block later.

This was our room in the first B&B we stayed in.  It is nestled in a canyon the tiny West Marin town of Inverness, just south of the Point Reyes Peninsula.  The room was exotically situated, perched on top of a spiral staircase and accessible via the top from a long wooden bridge.  Mist is burning off the bridge in this picture because the entire structure was covered in rime ice when we woke up.

This looks all cool ‘n’ everything, and the structure was neat, but the place was very sketchily decorated on the inside considering its high cost (faded blue shag carpet does not belong in a B&B that costs over $200 a night), and the breakfast cook was kind of grumpy and weird.  The owners were not to be seen — other people manage the place.  To get to the bathroom in the night required a trip across the icy, slippery wooden bridge, which made the whole tower shake.

Not that this mattered.  The area is beautiful and we spent all our Inverness days in the outdoors.

The Point Reyes peninsula casually jutting out into the Pacific, hoping to trip up a ship or two.  Peninsulas these days are so ill-mannered.

This one traveled some 300+ miles north on the Pacific Plate to get to its current location, sliding along the San Andreas Fault.  It took its original rocks and plants with it — never leave home without your ancestral flora and fauna!

This looks like some kind of vegetable that Benoit Mandelbrot’s mom probably made him eat until he invented fractal geometry.  It’s a type of cauliflower that we picked up at a neat organic grocery in Point Reyes Station.  It tasted exactly like… cauliflower.  Fresh cauliflower, though!

We saw a lot of little orange salamanders walking around.

On the last day of our trip we took a spectacular hike through the northern reaches of the Marin Headlands, just south of Muir Beach.  The fog and light were spectacular:

Not much more to say about this!

This treatment applies to looping statements like while, do and for (since every loop has a conditional that either continues or leaves the loop), to the conditional operator ?: (which is essentially an if statement), and to compound conditions combined with || and && (the individual conditions are tracked separately, since some conditions cause others to be skipped). A function also counts as a “branch”, since one certainly wants to track whether a function was called or not.

Branch coverage also means that conditionals which occur on the same line will be counted separately, since they are distinguished by column number as well as line number. The source view currently shows the branch counts as colored superscript notations within the lines.

Finally, branch coverage reports also give one a simple complexity metric: what are the most complex parts of your code? Look for functions with a high branch count! Of course, one can calculate complexity in much more sophisticated ways, but it’s a start.

I’m hoping to get this release out there in the next few weeks.

The trip was organized by Western Spirit, a bike expedition company about which I have only great things to say. On this trip, we stayed in local inns and lodges rather than camping.

The trip started out in the town of Creel, a full days’ drive south of the border starting from El Paso, Texas. Creel lies at an elevation of almost 8,000 feet, and it snowed heavily on the morning our trip started! The storm cleared out fast, but temperatures stayed near the freezing point that day and it was very blustery. The landscape around Creel is dry but forested; lots of medium-size pine trees, a mixture of pinon and a local type of ponderosa. There are lots of odd-looking eroded rock towers and hoodoos everywhere you look. This shot is from El Valle De Monjes (”Valley of The Monks”):

The next day we rode down into the true Copper Canyon system on a dirt road. Riding on dirt roads is normally not very interesting, but the scenery and the length of the descent made this one a blast. Our first views from the top looked like this:

Along the way we encountered some burros…

…more great scenery…

…and spooky silver mines:

You may note the locals’ attempt to prevent Darwin-Award-type scenarios: the spray painted legends “NO ENTRE ES PELIGROSO” and a game attempt at translation: “TIS MINE IS VERY DAGEROUS DON’T…”. Believe it or not, the day before we arrived in the canyon, an American tourist went into that very mine and fell through some rotten floorboards into a mine shaft. He had to be rescued, but luckily survived with only a few scratches and a story that he might or might not want to share. (His traveling companions told me about the episode at our hotel.) You can see one of my fellow riders in the mine in the above photo; I was yelling at him to get out of there.

At the bottom of the canyon we reached the remote but lively town of Batopilas. At 1,500 feet, the weather was balmy and fragrant; orange trees and flowers were growing everywhere. It had a beautiful town plaza with a finely decorated gazebo:

We stayed in Batopilas for 3 nights, traveling around the canyon. Then we rode back up out of it (or as far out of it as we could manage in 5 hours — the van was traveling behind us and scooping us up at whatever point they encountered us on the way up and out). I didn’t make it to the top, but I did manage to climb for 4 1/2 hours straight, probably going up about 4,500-5,000 feet in the process, which was a big achievement for me.

Back at the top, we stayed at a rustic lodge in the tiny hamlet of Cusarare, populated mostly by the local Tarahumara tribe. The Tarahumara (or Raramuri, to use their name for themselves) are known for their long-distance running skills. They also are very artistic. Some of their signature crafts involve baskets woven out of pine needles (these are remarkably sturdy!). Here is a photo of the inside of the Cusarare Mission, built in the 1700s and recently restored and repainted:

There are lots more photos and stories to tell, but this is about as much as I have time for right now, so I thought I’d get it out there to share. I’ll tell myself a fib right now that I’ll get around to blogging some more about it later…

Before leaving San Francisco for home in Cambridge, I stopped at the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero to pick up a few gifts for home. Among them was a small muffin-sized package of delicious, creamy Mount Tam cheese from Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes, CA, a favorite of my wife’s. I stashed it in my shoulder bag before catching the BART train to the airport.

Arriving at SFO I pleasantly breezed through the metal detector on my way to the gate and waited for my bag and laptop to come through the X-ray machine. The pleasant breezing sensation then came to an abrupt halt, as did the X-ray conveyor belt. My bag went back and forth through the machine several times.

“Can I please open your bag, sir?” a TSA contractor asked me. Her shoulder insignia read “Centurion Security Services, S.A.F.E.S.K.I.E.S.” emblazoned on a ferocious eagle-and-flag backdrop. I wondered what on earth the super-sized acronym could possibly stand for.

“No problem.” I’m not inclined to be overly protective of my bags’ privacy in these sad police-state times we live in. I assumed that the shape or size of something in my bag reminded someone of a sample X-ray they dimly remembered from the TSA X-ray Analysis training seminar. I didn’t want my behavior to remind someone of something they saw in some other TSA seminar, such as that fascinating Strip-Search Profiling Criteria class they took. I put my shoes back on and waited while, after several rummages, the cheese emerged. Much examination and discussion took place as the cheese was passed around and looked at from many angles. It received several prods and squeezes.

“We’ll run your bag through again, sir.”

“No problem,” I said. I was thinking, “Good, they’ve determined it’s merely a cheese, and once my bag scans OK, I’m out of here.”

The bag went back, came through again. But my cheese was not freed. Without further consultation with me, my TSA handler escorted my cheese to a holding area where several other TSA types were lurking. (I wanted to write, “She frogmarched my cheese to a holding area,” because it sounds so much better, but two people are required to frogmarch a cheese and there was only one of her.) There was much more discussion and cheese-prodding. My handler came back sans fromage, as they say at French security checkpoints.

“Sir, how much does your cheese weigh?”

“I don’t know.”

“There is a rule that you cannot bring liquids or gels over three ounces past the TSA checkpoint.”

“I know that, but this cheese is not a gel. It is just a soft cheese.” Inwardly I wondered if cheese was in fact a gel, technically speaking. It didn’t really matter, though. These people were not about to engage in arguments about whether cheese was a gel, a sol, a colloidal emulsion, or any other hair-splitting nonsense employed by classic strip-search candidates.

“It’s the consistency, sir. It is creamy. It is a creamy cheese. Also, there is no weight on the label.” (I breathed a sigh of relief and silently thanked Cowgirl Creamery’s label designer for this lapse of specificity.) “We’re going to have to weigh it.”

The action shifted back to the bevy of cheese-handlers. They seemed indecisive. No scale appeared to be handy as they passed the cheese among themselves, looking concerned and non-plussed. I was gearing up and considering my options. I was just deciding that it would be an appropriate bureaucratic revenge to assert my right to take home exactly three ounces of cheese when the group apparently gave up. My handler returned, cheese in hand.

“Sir, please come over here with me.” We went over to one of those explosive-analysis units. I unconsciously put my bag down on its metal surface. “NO!!! DO NOT put that bag there, sir!” I removed it, but I was relieved. I could feel a lecture coming on, which meant that the cheese might soon be free after being duly reprimanded for its creaminess.

She pointed to the TSA rules posted on the unit. “Sir, our rules clearly state that passengers may only take three ounces or less of gels or liquids in a clear transparent bag. This cheese is a gel consistency, but you do not have a transparent bag.”

“It’s true that I don’t have a bag. But, ma’am, I think you can understand why I might not have realized that cheese would be considered a gel by the TSA.”

“If you had checked the TSA website, you would have known that you needed a bag.” I did not argue about whether I could have checked the TSA website. My cheese was now in one of those WW II POW escape movies. It had escaped the cellblock via a clever plot, but still had to don the stolen SS uniform and make it past the guards at the perimeter fence. “Here is a bag,” said my handler. She produced a small Ziploc, placed the cheese inside, sealed it tightly, but did not return it yet. There was a long, pregnant pause as the searchlights swept the ground, looking for escapees. “When you go through the checkpoint, this is the kind of bag you must place it in.”

“Yes, ma’am. I will do that in the future.” She gave me the cheese and, reunited, the cheese and I left for Gate A6. It’s been kind of a bonding experience, to the tell the truth. I may hold onto that Mount Tam as a souvenir, at least until the smell becomes a bit strong. Or until my wife eats it. Whichever is sooner.

I’ve put together a small photo album with a few of my favorite pictures from the trip. I’m not going to embed them all in this post, but here’s one emblematic building by the architect Gaudi:

There’s a lot I don’t know about Gaudi, but when I experience his work close-up I see a mixture of iconoclasm and daring coupled with tremendous patience, craft and respect for his materials. And this kind of spirit seems to be present a lot in the city in some form or other. It’s an exciting social nexus where people seem to rush around, shop like mad and party until late at night (just try eating dinner before 9 pm), but at the same time attention is paid to the details of civic life. Things seem to work in Barcelona, and work well.

There’s a great variety to the look of the city. It includes broad avenues with spacious Parisian-style intersections, lined with graceful stucco apartments sporting fantastic wrought-iron balconies. It also has medieval warrens of narrow Gothic alleys, mad modernista Art Deco storefronts, and of course some drab blocky buildings. In most places there are many delightful details and touches: someone cared how something looked. And like my hometown, Chicago, there’s a willingness to be playful with civic art and architecture. Playfulness counts for a lot in my book.

The food is truly great (especially if you like seafood), but I recommend getting away from the main drags and finding somewhere a little less geared to tourist tastes. I have to mention one fabulous dinner we had, at a restaurant called Passadis Del Pep. We heard about it from a friend who used to live in Barcelona and got its address on the web, but had some trouble finding it. We finally located it purely by address — there is no sign out front, just an anonymous doorway with no restaurant visible inside. You have to have faith that something is there and just keep walking further into the building. Eventually we wound up in a wonderfully intimate and friendly space with sort of a cellar-bistro look. There was no menu; the waiter simply started bringing food to the table. Eight small and intense courses of local seafood later (I think there were three different varieties of shrimp, each with its own distinct preparation and taste), we barely managed to get out of our chairs and leave. One of the best meals ever! Not for people who don’t like looking at the faces of the animals they’re eating, though.

I have to give the Barcelona Metro some props on their user interface (and on the fact that the trains run very frequently). On some of the lines, there’s a little linear map over each door showing the stations on that particular route. On one side of the car, the map runs in one direction, while on the other side of the car, the map runs oppositely — that is, it’s flipped horizontally. They apparently went to this trouble so that the map’s orientation would always match the train’s direction of travel. On some other lines, the same linear map has an indicator light set in each station. As the train approaches a station, the light for that station blinks. After the train leaves that station, the light remains on (so you can see where the train has been, as opposed to where it’s going). Good design there!

People were exceedingly friendly and there were no logistical problems on the trip. The city seems safe even in its less inviting regions. The prevailing language is Catalan, not Spanish — but everyone speaks some Spanish, and most people speak some English.

I’ve always wanted to go to Barcelona. It took me decades, but I’m glad I finally made it.

Altogether I logged 1,660 access points during the train journey, one of which was named “Jesus”. The naming of wireless routers should rightly occupy an odd little niche in social anthropology. When you look at this many access point names, a couple of points become clear. People name these things with an awareness that the names are publicly visible. At the same time, these names belong to private spaces, and a lot of the names have private significance. A wireless name is a little like a button with a personalized slogan, only you can’t see the person wearing it.

As a rough jump-start to this discipline, here’s an organized digest of some of the access points that I rolled past:

Home Sweet Home

• Jimmy's Place
• Kobes-Castle
• rejectbarn
• rockpile
• HoMe
• homey
• DAWGHOUSE

Shout-outs

• CATS_bklyn
• Harrison Represent Yo (near Harrison, NY)
• OakHill_Boomerang

Network Sweet Network

• Mi Gente Network
• YupNet
• Ken's Extreme Network

Screen Names/Handles

• lillamb
• Fruity
• kittyup
• katburki
• spoiledone
• toughguy
• SirKnight
• Sweetness
• Geek06583_Clark

Cultural References

• Hogwarts Quidditch Pitch
• Napoleon Dyno
• Night Rider
• Me van a Matar por las Mujeres

Cryptic

• ManTown
• Sitivity
• apSSIDiointerpol
• Deshmukh (I had thought this could be Klingon, but a reader pointed out that it’s a common Hindi surname. Possibly the network owner is bilingual in Klingon and Hindi.)
• Numbers

I miss…

• Texas
• Florida
• Sonoma
• phoenixarizona
• dakotaboy1
• riven (some people spent a lot of time there)

We Want Your Business

• Pay3$@javajoes
• H@rv3yguns (why the hacker orthography?)
• Holiday inn Bridgeport (also could be read as the very unlikely concept, “Holiday in Bridgeport”)

We Don’t Want Your Business

• Dont Touch This Router
• Mine
• Not For You
• BuyYourOwn (amazingly, this network was not encrypted)
• fuck you

Islands In The Crowd

• redsox (at the western end of Connecticut)
• yankees (at the eastern end of Rhode Island)

At some point I realized the way to go was episodic: whenever I feel up to it, to simply pick some fragment of the trip, any fragment, and work with those images and those memories.

Part The First: The Church Of Cartesian Space, describing our visit to Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in Pie Town, New Mexico.

Pie Town

“Why is Pie Town called Pie Town?”

Regardless of why, something is right with the world in that there even can be a place named Pie Town.

“Can one get pie in Pie Town?”

The question seems academic. It hardly affects the importance of visiting a place with this name.

“If one can get pie in Pie Town, is it edible?”

Somehow, this question seems much more important. Inedible pie in Pie Town would amount to a betrayal, an unraveling of the fabric of a tiny universe.

Pie Town is a lonely place perched on top of a lonely place, the latter lonely place being the Continental Divide in Catron County, New Mexico. US 60 is the main highway through Pie Town, and despite its federally maintained status it feels like a back road. We approached by way of back-of-beyond roads, though, snaking a long dusty journey from Grants through gnarled black lava fields, towering sandstone escarpments, then low hills and finally desolate ranches. We followed a turnoff with a sign for Pie Town, but after 30 miles of sign-less dust and gravel we found ourselves no longer believing in it. The name had been a taunt, a come-on, a fiction after all. Then, suddenly, we were there.

I wish to report that despite its apparently desolate character, there is pie in Pie Town, and it is very good pie, more than edible. Two fine establishments offer food and pie, and they appear to be open on complementary schedules, perhaps to afford a better living to the both proprietors. We ate at a hearty lunch at the Pie-O-Neer Cafe, at which I had a green chili cheeseburger, followed by peach pie a la mode, and learned some non-imaginary facts about Pie Town.

The town was named Pie Town by an early entrepreneur who enjoyed baking pies and wanted to entice people to the area to try his wares. In those days, even just-OK pies would have probably attracted a swarm.

Before the Pie-O-Neer and the Daily Pie opened (which was fairly recently), no pie had been available in Pie Town for some time. A sad hand-lettered sign on the only cafe in town is said to have informed the frustrated traveler, “There ain’t no pie for sale in Pie Town no more”. That was that. One imagines a pile of bleached human bones lying nearby in the dust, relics of pie-seekers doomed to a dessert-free death. Theirs was not to reason why. But the pile has since been cleared away, with no reason to be replenished. Pie can be had.

The US Postal Service initially scorned the name “Pie Town”, declining to dignify the community with a post office until they changed their name to something more respectable. The residents would have none of this bureaucratic meddling with their identity. I don’t know if they argued using counterexamples of other towns with post offices and ridiculous names, like Accident, PA, or Why, AZ. But they could have.

Lunch consumed, we drove 22 miles west to Quemado and met our ride who was to drive us to the Lightning Field and leave us there for the night.

The Lightning Field

The Lightning Field is an outdoor artwork, occupying almost 2 square kilometers of high, flat desert ringed by distant mountains and consisting of 400 stainless-steel poles between 9 and 20 feet high in a 25×16 array. It is literally in the middle of nowhere. No man-made structures are visible from it except for a small rustic cabin in which visitors may spend an evening deprived of most amenities except for Environmental Art.

Each pole is tipped with a needle-sharp point, and is reinforced by a carbon-steel insert set into a well-grounded concrete foundation. All the points are leveled to sit at the same height. An imaginary pane of glass would sit perfectly on top of all the points of all the poles in the field. 3 out of 30 lightning storms in the area strike the Lightning Field. But there was no lightning while we were there — it wasn’t thunderstorm season.

Arriving at midday, the view was unimpressive:

I investigated the cast of flamboyant characters populating the field:

Max and I circled the entire field, walking in opposite directions and meeting in the middle of the other side, over a kilometer away. As I walked, I noticed that the poles lined up unexpectedly along many, many different angles. I began to realize that these angles corresponded to lines of sight along the diagonals of rectangles of different ratios: 1×1, 1×2, 2×3, 3×2, and so on. When you walk in a huge grid, even one so lightly delineated, you begin to perceive it from the inside, and these sparse visual alignments begin feel almost like solid objects hanging in space.

At dusk, a low sun illuminated the poles and the magic took full effect.

Who needed lightning?