blog.thoughtwax.com

Some photos on Flickr. Also, bonus sets of pilgrimages to Industrial Light & Magic and the Long Now Foundation.

Driving in New Zealand takes a bit of getting used to. For a start, other than the sparse network of state highways that link the main towns, there are no real roads. Sometimes it’s possible you’ll have to drive a long, roundabout route to get to a destination that’s geographically quite nearby (Milford Sound and Queenstown, for example, are about 70km apart as the crow flies, which translates into a 286km drive).

Along with this, after a couple of days driving you realise that it’s useful to double the amount of time that you might have naturally alloted to get through that long drive. A road may look like a straight line of the map, but the more remote stretches are probably going to be creeping up and down the side of a mountain range, or winding along a narrow coast road or cliff face. All of which is great, that’s why you’re there after all, and you can also take for granted that the views are going to be astonishing. But vast — vast — areas of the country are unserviced, so if there’s somewhere in particular that you really want to go, you might have no choice but to go offroad, or at least onto dirt roads.

Head north from Wairoa towards Lake Waikaremoana and the sealed asphalt quickly gives way to a dirt road. The road is generally clear and dry, and wide enough for two cars to pass comfortably, and the surface is covered with a packed gravel dirt. The thing that makes the roads so difficult to drive on though, is the corrugated surface. Across the width of the road, perpendicular to the direction the road is traveling, are small waves in the surface, like tiny regular speedbumps about an inch tall, right next to each other. The pattern doesn’t seem to change at different stages, remaining consistent for dozens of kilometers of dirt road. And apparently this happens everywhere.

Image: Washboard road study, University of Cambridge.

Although it’s a commonly known phenomenon, nobody in our van seemed to know what causes the corrugation. We ventured a few guesses (it was a long journey), but none seemed entirely plausible:

• The force of the tyres on the road causes a pattern to emerge. At first this seemed like the most likely explanation: the vehicles that drive on the road create the corrugation. The forward motion of the tyres, according to this theory, caused dirt to be propelled backwards from underneath them, and this dirt somehow settled into tiny rows that were compounded the more they were driven on and packed into hard ridges. Although this at first seemed to be the simplest explanation, it didn’t hold up well under scrutiny: How did the dirt begin to settle in that pattern, and remain regular despite all of the different sized vehicles that drove on it at different speeds? If it was caused by the tyres alone, why was the corrugation uniformly deep across the width of the road and not just under the main tyre tracks? And although certainly not impossible, this hypothesis seemed to rely quite heavily on some sort of magical emergent behaviour in the dirt. Particle physics was mentioned. It didn’t add up.
• Wind erosion somehow leaves ripples on the road surface. Much like the above scenario, except that the force acting on the road surface was the wind, not tyres, thus sidestepping the problems of tyre tracks and variation of force. The most compelling argument made in favour of this was the comparison to the ripples that you might see on the surface of a sandy desert or dune, which are probably made by the wind. This pattern also seems to be made by the water’s edge on a beach, although the shoreline ebbs back and forth and probably exerts a lot more force than the wind, so I’m not really sure if this is comparable. One problem with this was that the grooves were always perpendicular to the road, which was not at all straight, so the variable direction of the wind would need to have no bearing on the pattern (which is obviously influenced by the direction of the road) for this to work. All in all, though, this somehow seemed like the most plausible explanation to me.
• The way that the rough road was originally created was imperfect. Only mentioned here to complete the set — I don’t think anyone really believed this to be the explanation. But anyone who has seen tar being spread behind a truck before it has been steamrolled flat can imagine the gloopy way that the base material might have settled and hardened into grooves.

Consensus eluded us. Vague guesswork and wild conjecture had failed to deliver the goods yet again. Research time!

Luckily most of the legwork on this one had already been done by one Keith B. Mather of the University of Melbourne, as published in the January 1963 issue of Scientific American. Mather created a controlled laboratory apparatus that allowed him to test the effects of a tyre on a dust road in a number of simulated environments (here’s a video of a similar experiment carried out just last year in the University of Toronto), and cracked it:

It’s based on the fact that you can never make a road perfectly smooth. There will always be tiny little bumps. Once his wheel got up to about 6-7 kph, it would bounce up when it hit a tiny bump. As the wheel came down and hit the sand, it would spray sand both forwards and sideways off the track, leaving behind a little crater. This crater would then be the valley of a corrugation. As the wheel came up out of the valley, it would jump into the air again, and so the pattern of valley-and-mountain would repeat itself.

Making corrugations is a two-stage process - first the corrugations establish a stable pattern, and then they spread along the road.

Mather saw that the first few corrugations to appear on the “smooth” road were quite shallow, and very close to each other. But as the corrugations got deeper, they gradually moved away from each other, until their height and their distance apart had settled into a stable pattern. Once this stable pattern of corrugations was set up, then the entire pattern of corrugation would migrate down the road in the direction of travel of the wheel. In the Australian Outback, engineers have seen corrugations heading in opposite directions on each side of the road from (say) a cattle grid, with each set heading in the direction of travel of the cars.

Despite this apparent resolution, the details of the matter remains robustly debated and discussed. At the very least though, corrugation is in fact caused by tyres, and and is indeed a result of some mad particle-physics-level emergent property of the dirt. Who knew?

Yesterday on the connecting flight home from Seoul I watched In The Shadow of the Moon, a documentary about the Apollo space missions. Having returned from their long journeys to a strange and wonderful place far away, after splashdown, astronauts would have to spend some time in a small isolation chamber, peering out a small window at their familiar (but now somehow different) home environment, slowly becoming accustomed to their own world again. That’s sort of how I feel today.

I’m working through the decompression period by sifting through photos and putting some online. More reflections on the trip to follow, maybe.

I Googled that phrase — “slow blogging” — and got back a bunch of blog posts of the kind that you’ve probably read or written at some stage. It normally goes something like this:

Apologies for the slow blogging recently, real life got in the way and I’ve just had way too much work going on to be able to concentrate on writing recently. Stay tuned though, I’ve got plans for lots of interesting stuff soon!

Slowness is bad, these post say, but I’ll try to speed up again soon. This is funny, because they represent the exact opposite of what I was searching for, the idea of posting infrequently as a deliberate editorial approach: Slow Blogging.

Without the restrictions of regular media, we pajama-wearers can do whatever we want. For the most part, something is written when it’s ready to be written, and then it’s only as long as it needs to. Some people, like me, have very few things to say, so we say them infrequently.

Other have lots to say. I’ve had to unsubscribe from some good blogs and disconnect from some nice people on Twitter because I was becoming overloaded by their prolific pace. I’m not saying that I don’t appreciate the huge effort that goes into maintaining this frequency, or even that quality necessarily suffers as a result of it. In fact, constantly churning stuff out almost certainly produces a net result of a much higher amount of quality content than sitting around waiting for a stray bolt of inspiration to hit. I’m just surprised that the whole Slow Movement thing hasn’t been more explicitly adopted by the more indolent among us. Or at least offered as an excuse.

Maybe I’m being a selfish online citizen by saying this. Is it alright for others to toil away in the mines daily, providing me with a continuous stream of content, while I happily recline in the hazy meadows of monthly posting? I don’t know. Maybe I’m also stating something that’s already completely obvious (sorry, I’ve got a monthly quota to meet). Anyway, thanks much to all you wonderful people who make the online content that I enjoy daily, and also to those who take their sweet time about it.

There was going to be a point to all of this.

Oh yes. Next week, Paula and I are traveling to New Zealand for a whole month of slowing down. I’m madly excited, but it means that I probably won’t be posting anything here until I get back (apparently many of the places we’ll be going to don’t have FM radio coverage, so I’m assuming that rules out wifi too). But stay tuned. I’ll have loads of interesting stuff from the trip to post when I’m back.

Previously on thoughtwax: Come home and make this place poor again.
See also: Ze Frank on the merits of constantly producing stuff, scads of Slow Movement links on Metafilter, I Can Write 600 Words About Anything.

Paula and I arrived back yesterday afternoon from our week in Morocco. It was my first time visiting a non-Western country. Get ready for some superlatives.

We rented a car and drove north from Agadir airport to the small hippie/surfer village of Taghazout, then to the walled city of Essaouira, east to Marrakesh, and back to Agadir through the Atlas Mountains.

Life moves slow in Taghazout. Most of the fishermen come ashore after a couple of hours in the morning, by which time the day has eased into its usual mix of visiting surfers and local loiterers. Beach soccer is pretty popular.

The roads in Morocco are just as interesting as the cities they lead to. The coastal views are spectacular. Indigenous Berber people line the roads, walking, standing or just squatting, watching the traffic go by. Some work in rocky fields or guide donkeys along the roadside, but mostly they sit in the shade alone, apparently for lack of anything else to do. Some wave frantically at the passing cars, smiling and holding up bottles of olive oil for sale.

Closer to the city we passed road painters and small crowds of men putting up giant red national flags, and things generally got busier. It was obvious that there was a frantic cleanup job going on, and when we got into the city we heard that the King of Morocco was arriving the following day. The whole town was buzzing in anticipation, and getting their streets and shop fronts ready.

Inside the walls of Essaouira is a maze of twisty passages (all alike), lined with markets, tea houses, workshops and restaurants, and opening out into squares and ports.

The city is soaked in bright blue.

Each night we stood on the roof terrace of our riad and listened to the final call to prayer of the day echoing out across the city from the mosques as the sun set, and each morning we looked down into the tightly packed living areas.

On to Marrakesh.

Coming from Essaouira, Marrakesh is a hard place to arrive into. After being flagged down by an aggressive motorcycle guide while entering the city and falling for the oldest trick in the Moroccan book (allowing him to guide us through insanely busy streets to his friends guardian de voiture parking area and haggling over price), we found our way to our riad.

Outside of the main tourist areas of Marrakesh you see very few Westerners, the poverty is conspicuous, and the density is overwhelming. The streets are a ballet of people on foot, bicycle and moped avoiding and interacting with each other. The culture of repair and reuse is everywhere. Any of the guys in the food markets and craft souks could teach you a hard lesson in business. It’s a real city, warts and all.

Final leg of the journey. We too took the scenic route back, up and over the snow-capped Atlas Mountains (2100m) and down the small winding road into the desert on the other side. Children on their way home from school thronged around our car if we stopped nearby and wrangled whatever sweets we had out of us, then chased us down the road. Some held up paper signs with “STOP” scrawled on them and shouted “bonjour!” as we passed.

This is a rough edit of the five hundred or so shots we took during the week, far more than I’ve ever taken before, and that was without even trying. We couldn’t help ourselves, it’s certainly the most photogenic place I have ever been to, and the visual offering is only a part of the story. Again more than any place I’ve been to, Morocco is a full sensory experience, and the sounds and smells really are something else. For every photo I took, I wished that I had a microphone with me to record the sounds.

What have I not mentioned? The incredible hospitality and openness of the people there, the amazing food, the beautiful weather… I warned you about the superlatives. The running joke of the week was a gameshow-style ding that would sound every time Paula said “so gorgeous” or I said “amazing”. Ding!

If you can take any more, there are still more photos on my Flickr and on Paula’s.

I’ve been in San Francisco for two weeks now, and I haven’t written a word about it. Even when I have things — loads of amazing, great things — to write about, I don’t write. The reason being, of course, that it’s precisely when you’ve got lots to say that the last thing you want to do is sit in front of a computer and write about it.

So I’m left with the impossible task of writing something vaguely interesting and meaningful that encapsulates the whole experience in one go. But right now I’m feeling slightly wrecked, I’ve had too many inputs and not enough sleep for two weeks now, and I’m feeling a bit fazed. Happy but tired, I believe is how people describe it. I’ve had two lovely weeks of working in the Googleplex and exploring one of the most complete and personable cities I’ve ever been to. Now I’ll be taking a few days off before I go home, staying with Nick and family, with no plan whatsoever.

How do I describe San Francisco? Right now I’m on the shuttle bus back into the city from work, and it’s night. It’s a great route once you’re off the freeway, past the airport on the right, which goes on for miles, and then the city seems slowly to rise up on either side. The road cuts a path right into the city, and now there are are other freeways slicing sideways overhead as we go under them. I like to sit in the middle back seat of buses. You can look straight forward, down the aisle and out the front window. If you try to widen your field of vision from this seat, you can kind of imagine the roof and pillars between the windows disappearing away and then you’re just hurtling down the road — try it.

Now we’re getting into the city and the road gets bumpier… my laptop is kind of shaking all over the place. This is the rough part of town. Signs, people, parked cars, shopfronts. I can’t see the dark purplish sky any more, because the tall buildings and yellow lights have moved in.

Here’s my stop.