Merry Christmas from Frozen Maine

Marine biologists have to work around the tides. The plus side of that is that we rarely have to be in the field for more than about 4 hours at a stretch. The minus side is that we often have to be in the field really early in the morning or late in the evening, or over weekends or holidays. This year the late fall offered no opportunities to access our seaweed experiment in Lubec, Maine... except for December 22nd - 24th. If we missed the chance, we wouldn't have another one for months, and the whole huge, multi-year experiment would be ruined. So I rescheduled Christmas with my family for later, and rallied a Jewish colleague (Michael Hutson) to help me do the seaweed stuff. It turned out to be a pretty fantastic adventure. We were successful in our scientific objectives, and being in an unusual place at an unusual time we witnessed some special things, documented in Michael's photos.

Frosted seaweeds.

Frozen mist and waterspouts over the Bay of Fundy,

Enjoying the view.

Ready to rock, in our "Mustang" survival suits.

More photos.

Daisy Hasselhoof?

I went windsurfing with my GoPro camera this afternoon, but apparently I didn't mash mash the shutter button hard enough with my gloves, because I filmed exactly nothing. D'oh! Actually, that may be a good thing for you blog readers, because I'll take the opportunity to post a video more entertaining than any I might have produced myself. From the windsurfing magazine website, here is a speedsailing session on the English seashore:

MOOsters of speed from k4 fins on Vimeo.

This is the first time I have ever:

A) Seen a windsurfer do chop-hops, jibes, and freestyle on a speedboard.
B) Seen a cow windsurf.

The sailing venue looks cool, too, with that uber-flat water. But I wonder if the speedsters ever mess up and smack into the rock retaining wall. Yikes!

Was my last session my last session?

When it gets into November in New England you'd better treasure your each and every windsurfing session. You never know which one is going to be your last for the season. I might have had mine about a week ago. It had been blowing hard from the SW all day, but had slowed down a bit by the time I got out of work and got to Josh Angulo's garage to pick up a board. On his recommendation I took an Angulo Magnum 84 slalom board with a 50 cm fin, and I rigged up my camless 8.0 Aerotech FreeSpeed sail. That was just the ticket for a well-powered blast across the flat water along the Nahant Causeway. It was a short sesh, ended by dusk around the same time it would have been ended anyway by my cramping gloved forearms. I'll be OK if it was my last session for 2011, but dang, it would sure be great to get just one more. Here's a video not from the session I just described, but from one a few weeks earlier that I never got around to posting. Nothing too extreme, but I think it fits pretty well with the music and stuff. Enjoy.

Hanger On

Part of my job is to do quarterly surveys of 450 seaweed plots, from the Boston area up to Northern Maine. The fall survey has taken a long time, because my usual grad student helpers have been very busy with other things, like TA'ing, studying, and working on their own labor intensive projects. As it gets later in the season it gets harder and harder to work, with shorter day lengths less likely to coincide with the low tides we need for the seaweed plots to be exposed. By some miracle, though, the cold of winter has been holding off. Last week near Pemaquid, Maine, we saw a wild rose still with green leaves and a bloom.

There are only 50 more plots to survey, but they're all on a very low-lying ledge at our Northermost site in Lubec, Maine, and it looks like the only tide that will be low enough for us to get to them will be on Christmas. Fortunately, I'm not very religious, my folks are amenable to a rescheduled holiday, and we have a Jewish lab technician who may be able to help. It will be a weird Christmas.

Does this look like anything to you?

Apparently I have inherited my father's gift for finding messages from supernatural beings in my cast-off undergarments. Dad was recently blessed with an image of The Virgin Mary in his briefs, and this morning I encountered the sinister visage of Satan in my undershirt. Evil is afoot!

View From the Office

Some days it's pretty nice to be a marine biologist, especially mild sunny fall days spent working in the rocky intertidal zone.

Uncloseted Video Game Geekiness

I’ve had an off-again on-again romance with video games. As a little kid I was scared of them, so I missed the classic ‘80s era. But as an adolescent in the early ‘90s I followed my friends Erik and Erik to the dark side. My first “system” was a Super Nintendo. I remember playing all sorts of different games on it, from Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country to Super Metroid and SimCity, but the games I got most hooked on were RPGs (role-playing games) like The Legend of Zelda, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy VI. I played some games on my folks’ computer, too, the most notable being a 3D first-person perspective shooter called “Doom,” which my parents and sister hated.

I can't imagine why they hated it.

I didn’t play a whole lot of video games after Doom, because highschool homework and stuff kept me too busy, and because the rapid advance of game technology had outpaced our old family computer. (It was a 33 Mhz 486.) In college I hardly played at all, except for one major relapse for the RPG “Final Fantasy 7.” (I had recently broken up with a long-distance sweetheart, and obsessing over the immersive quest of the game was a much-needed distraction from obsessing over the breakup.) Grad school was mostly gameless for me, other than a few goofy social games like Guitar Hero. The exception was a cheesy vintage RPG called “Phantasy Star IV” that I discovered on a disk of old Sega games that came with my then-girlfriend’s console system. I got instantly addicted to that one, and could concentrate on little else until I finished it, much to then-girlfriend’s chagrin. When I lived in Florida after grad school I played zero video games because I couldn’t fit them in with my busy windsurfing schedule.

The upshot is that, despite a promising start, my video gaming career has floundered. I’ve basically missed the last 15 years of video game evolution. It’s a bummer, because during those years video games have become much more sophisticated and “gaming” has earned more widespread respect and inclusion in popular culture. On the spectrum of coolness, gamers are now closer to rock and roll heroes than they are to stamp collectors. Though I’ve never succeeded at coolness, and I care about it less now than ever, I’ve secretly wanted to try some of the new games to see what all the fuss is about. So I was delighted to find out that my girlfriend is, in addition to being gorgeous, intelligent and athletic, a video game expert. And she has been willing to hold my hand as I attempt to apply my primitive and rusty 1990s skills to her overwhelming and complex 2010s games.

The first new game that I tried at her house was “Borderlands” on the Xbox 360 console system. It’s a first-person shooter like Doom, combined with addictive role-playing game elements like quests and experience points that “Level Up” your character. (Leveling Up increases your digital persona’s strength and abilities in the same way that working out, studying, or practicing a sport increases your real-life abilities, except that Leveling Up occurs faster with less effort and the gains that your character makes will never atrophy [although your body and social life may atrophy if you do too much virtual Leveling Up and not enough real life Leveling Up].) I had a hard time figuring out Borderlands initially because the controls are much more complicated than in Doom. You have to aim your gun with one toggle button while moving your body with another toggle button, and there are a bunch of other buttons that you need to duck, jump, strafe, open boxes, pick up items, reload your gun, switch guns, talk to swarthy merchants, etc. I have a tendency to panic when attacked and shoot my feet while stumbling in circle, but I’m slowly figuring things out. The most fun I’ve had so far in Borderlands has been playing the game in two-person mode, teaming up with my sweetheart. She saves my life a lot, and every once in a while I return the favor by blasting an alien beast that’s sneaking up behind her.

Soloing Borderlands

The other modern game I’ve been messing with is an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) called World of Warcraft. That’s the one that I think I would get dangerously addicted to if I had a computer powerful enough to play it at my own house. (Thank goodness I don’t.) Like the name implies, W.O.W. is a whole 3D virtual world of castles, magic and dragons, and it’s populated by thousands of internet-connected players as well as computer-controlled monsters and NPCs (“Non Player Characters” like townspeople and guards). Actually, since there are millions of people who play the game, there are numerous copies of the virtual world on different servers so that no one world gets overpopulated. The players on one server won’t meet those on another server, so if you want to play with your friends you have to make sure you create your characters on the same server, or pay real money to the video game company to move your existing characters.

Whew. Ok. To start playing W.O.W. you have to design and name your player character, picking from eight cool “races” like human, elf, goblin, troll, etc., and several “classes” like warrior or shaman that dictate what kind of abilities you will have. You also pick the character’s sex, skin and eye color, hairdo, and various other physical features that you may or may not be able to pick for yourself in real life. You can’t pick your character’s body type, though. You have to be either big and buff if you’re a male, or slim and busty if you’re a female. My character, Jimbonereus, is from the “Tauren” race of buffalo people who live in teepees and have totem poles. His class is “hunter,” which means that he can shoot bad guys from a distance and sic his vicious pet on them, but he’s not so good in a close-up fight and he can’t cast good spells or use beefy shields and armor.

Click Jimbonereus to see his "profile" on the WOW website. It will change occasionally as he goes on new quests and finds cute new outfits and stuff.

My sweetheart recommended that I be a hunter because it’s an easy class for casual “P.V.E.” playing. PVE stands for player-versus-environment, which is where you’re tromping around the wilderness going on little quests and killing the computer-controlled monsters. The other kind of play is PVP, where you battle other human-controlled characters, and you get your butt kicked if you’re not a serious gamer. I’ve never done any PVP, but I have done some five-person cooperative PVE adventures with other human-controlled characters. (The game has some repeatable dungeon adventures that are specially-designed for five people at a time, so you queue up to do a certain dungeon and are grouped with four strangers who have requested to do the same dungeon.) The first time I tried a tough dungeon, the four other people in my group voted to kick me out because I kept falling in the water and getting behind. But I practiced my jumping and made it through OK the next time around. I even got some special loot for my contributions that time. There are many little rewards like that in the game to keep you addicted. No matter what cool stuff your character does or gets, there’s always another quest or another power item that you NEED, so you keep playing.

As a scientist and an introspective-type person, I’m fascinated by how strongly these kinds of games can capture our focus. It’s like there’s some hard-wired circuitry in our brains that gives us a sense of excitement and fulfillment when we pursue a gratifying quest and amass some kind of wealth, experience, or power. And RPG videogames are designed to tickle that circuitry to the maximum extent. If only real life could instill the same desire for obsessive pursuit of advancement. Perhaps it can?

Cold Hands

The toughest things for me about windsurfing in cold weather are: 1) keeping my hands warm, which requires thick gloves, and 2) keeping my forearms from cramping, which requires thin or no gloves. Friday evening it was sunny and about 47 degrees in Nahant, so I decided to go with no gloves. My hands got quite cold and numb, but not past the point of working. The nasty part was after the session when I was walking my gear back to the van and the blood started returning to my hands. That part always hurts a lot. It was a mellow side-shore wavesailing session with buddies, though, so it was worth it. Here's the video.

John "Badass" Coelho

Shortly after I moved to Massachusetts last year I met a couple of really good wavesailors who were "dialed" at Nahant, my local launch. One of the dudes was named John Coelho. At first I didn't know his last name, so I just put him in my phone as "John Badass." Last weekend he proved that he deserved the name when he was one of only two windsurfers to successfully challenge the humongous waves and icy temperatures left in the wake of our freak October snowstorm. (The other victor was pro sailor Josh Angulo, though, truth be told, Angulo didn't get out there until the afternoon when things had mellowed out.) Here are some shots of Mr. Badass. I think they were taken by Jay Turcot, but I'm not sure.

Note the snow on the grass in the background.

Well done, John. Maybe next time I'll join you... Or maybe not. :)

Dishonorable Intentions: The Best Romance I've Ever Read

A while back I posted a poll to determine the extent to which readers of this blog were also readers of romance novels. Of those who answered the poll, 100% of the women and 24% of the men had read at least one romance. I was among the 76% of unenlightened men... until now.

Indeed, I just finished reading "Dishonorable Intentions," by Katherine Ivy, aka Lady Notorious, aka my charming, talented girlfriend, Rhonda. It wasn't the first time I had read her stuff- I had also seen her short story, "Love's Consequence" in the anthology "Modern Magic: Tales of Fantasy & Horror," and I had read the not-yet-published fantasy novel that she wrote for her master's thesis. Both of those blew me away, so I had high expectations for the romance novel. Rhonda tried to lower those expectations by explaining that "Dishonorable Intentions" was a different genre, and that it had been her first effort at writing, completed as a just-to-see-if-she-could-do-it "practice novel" while she was an undergraduate geology major. It turned out that Rhonda's warnings were unnecessary, because I found Dishonorable Intentions to have the same fast-pace, ingeniously-constructed plot, and badass-yet-realistically-characterized heroes that drew me into her other writings.

Dishonorable Intentions takes place in England during the "Regency" period of the early 19th century. The Regency was a rich and ritzy time for the nobility, and it was less uptight than the subsequent Victorian period, so it was the perfect setting for juicy romances. The romance of Dishonorable Intentions is made juicier still by intertwining with a crime mystery; the perilous hunt to recover a lost fortune in the form of a giant sapphire called "The Eye of the Storm." Intense drama develops as gorgeous, intelligent, great-spirited young Arabella battles to save her family and preserve her independence while winning the love and healing the heart of the handsome and virtuous but cynical and much-maligned noble Gabriel.

I must admit that before reading the book I doubted that I would be able to sympathize with characters from the upper crust of English society. I figured the nobles of "le bon ton" would just be tiptoeing around from mansion to carriage to ballroom, snootily obsessing over superficial concerns. In fact, some of the background characters in Dishonorable Intentions WERE a lot like my fluffy stereotypes, but the heroes Arabella and Gabriel had personal strengths and values that ripped right through the bullshit parts of their world. Those qualities made them very appealing, both to each other and to me as a 21st century reader.

I shouldn't give away too much of the story. If you want to read the book yourself you can download it from Amazon at this link. It's only like $5, so you really can't lose. If you don't have an e-reader device like a Kindle then you can do like I did and download Adobe Digital Editions (for free) so you can read it on your computer.

PS- Here's the novelist paddleboarding at Nahant last week. (Swoon!)

Some Pictures from Horseneck

Dang, I missed a good windsurfing opportunity today in a last-minute rush to finish a grant application. Oh, well. I'm still stoked from the memories of Sunday at Horseneck Beach. Below are a few of Lady Notorious' pictures of the event. I've divided them into three sections. The first section is "getting out." These pictures show the drama and danger of getting from the shore to the relative safety beyond the breaking waves. The second section is "riding waves." These pictures show people doing cool, playful turns while riding a wave back towards the beach. The third section is "being a badass." It is mostly dedicated to Josh Angulo, who as a world champion wavesailor is in a whole 'nuther league from the rest of us.

GETTING OUT

This is me with my dorky helmet, watching Matt Allen battle his way through the whitewater and wondering if I'll have better or worse luck than him.

Here, Eric Doremus ventures into the surf for the first time in his life. I admire the man's bravery for trying it on a rough day like this. My own first samplings of ocean waves were in much more benign conditions. Eric made it out successfully on at least one of several tries, though he ended up breaking a mast later in the day. He'll be back.

It's a pileup of sailors heading in and out at the same time. That's me in the upper left with the red and clear sail.

Two young teenage guys, Graham and Manish, both managed to get out. These kids are really good at doing "freestyle" tricks in flatter water, so I reckon it's just a matter of time before they're doing equally impressive tricks in the waves.

One of the toughest things about getting out is that you have to do it all over again after every time you catch and ride a wave towards the beach. Here a veteran sailor makes an effortless looking jibe in the whitewater zone and points his board once more into the onslaught of waves.

Here's the way Josh Angulo gets out through the waves. He does it with POWER.

RIDING WAVES

It's tricky to pick "the right wave" to ride, but I think I got a good one in this picture.

You can't see my board in this one, but you can see my spray. I'm trying to do a bottom turn to head downwind and back up into the wave face.

This is more of a top turn, where I've hit the upper part of the wave and I'm coming back down.

Here i'm not doing anything, but the guy in the foreground is doing a "backside" wave ride. That means his back is to the wave and he is heading upwind. When the wind is blowing roughly parallel to shore like it was this day you can do either frontside (downwind) or backside (upwind) moves on the wave. I illustrate the different terms in this post.

Here I've just turned on a small wave and I'm going backside.

In this one I'm awkwardly going frontside on the wave, and Angulo is looking at me and cringing, probably.

BEING A BADASS

One of the more advanced waveriding moves is "hitting the lip." You build up speed doing a frontside waveride, then at just the right moment you do a sharp S turn into the breaking section of the wave. Angulo had a ton of awesome hits this day, but he probably has ton of awesome hits every day he sails in the waves.

Here's my turn to try to be cool. The first of these pictures is a normal jump, but in the second one I'm trying to do a backloop. I need to try harder because I only got about 2/3 of the way around on this one.