I’m leaving town today, heading for Canada. Once I’m across the border my phone pretty quickly ceases to work, little traitor that it is. I’ll be in Ontario for a couple of days, where I won’t have internet, but my folk’s landline is 519-986-1834. After that I’ll be in BC, where I will have access to email most days, I think.

Last Thursday was the final episode of It’s Hot in Here before we broke it up for summer. It was really starting to get good. At least it sounded like it was from my perch at the engineer’s station. JJ and Sarah (”Gina” and “Gwen”, perhaps we can abandon the random pseudonyms for the fall season) did really great work. And the faculty we’ve approached so far for interviews have been enthusiastic and hugely fun to have on and have had just super interesting things to say. Was I nervous about giving up an hour of my radio show so a couple of academics could experiment with talk radio? Yes. But I figured it would make my life easier filling up 2 hours of good music rather having to stretch for three every week, and making my life easier is what’s important.

Turned out they were really on to something. It’s Hot in Here will probably surface a couple of times during the late summer, at random moments when least expected, and then will have a steady slot all fall. The wcbn execs have been very supportive, and maybe I’ll even get real engineer training! Sarah (Gwen) may not always be around, but we’re hoping she’ll at least be a frequent guest-host, and JJ and I are definitely in.

I actually, really and truly recommend that you listen to the last few episodes. Because I think they are interesting. Not too shabby environmental talk radio. I think.

From the log of the space station crew:

5 JAN 2001: Finished the 2nd disk of “2010″. Something strange about watching a movie about a space expedition when you’re actually on a space expedition.

Oh they so watched 2010 just so they could breezily make that comment.

Woke up to find this elegant little conceptualization in my inbox. It’s from Jim Lyons, who is one of the alpha boffins on the ridiculously helpful netlogo-users discussion group. While I was preparing my hangover, apparently Jim was preparing something for me to peer at through it.

(I stuck an online version here if you want to see it go. I recommend slowing it down a little.)

Simple Chaos
Posted by: “Jim Lyons”
This simple model exhibits chaotic behavior with very little code.

Each turtle moves towards the centroid of the others, accelerating at a
rate inversely proportional to its distance from that point — except
when the distance is below a certain small threshhold, it just coasts.

As you watch the turtles wander erratically, remember that the code
they are executing is entirely deterministic — randomness is used only
to set their starting positions. Even so, very slight differences at
the beginning produce very different outcomes, the defining
characteristic of chaotic systems.

It is really quite entertaining, and is fun with more than 3 turtles,
too. (It even works with only two turtles.)

Paste this code into the Procedures of a new NetLogo 4 model. In the
Interface, make setup and go buttons and set View Updates to On Ticks.
Enjoy!

Jim Lyons

————-
turtles-own [ vx vy ] ; x and y components of velocity

to setup ;by observer
clear-all
ask patches [ set pcolor sky + 3 ]
create-ordered-turtles 3
[ set shape “circle” jump 1 + random-float .1 ]
end

to go ;by observer, forever
foreach sort turtles [ ask ? ; this keeps order same
[ setxy (xcor + vx) (ycor + vy) ; update position
; find centroid of others
let $x mean [xcor] of other turtles
let $y mean [ycor] of other turtles
let $d distancexy $x $y
if $d > .02 ; apply acceleration if not too close
[ facexy $x $y ; so dx and dy yield components
set vx .9 * vx + .01 * dx / $d
set vy .9 * vy + .01 * dy / $d
]
]]
display
end

“But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of shipping ye.”
“Well sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.”
–Herman Melville, Moby Dick

To review:

My first three seasons as a planter were pre-blog-era. In 2002 I finally broke away from planting, to have a serious job. Which I quit in 2003, in part to go planting. Which was a re-learning experience. I remember writing about that in the sandwich and milkshake and internet place in Burns Lake. That was a good season, which ended on a note of bathos. The 2004 season was announced here by way of some statistical calculation.

“This is probably the last hurrah for huge the planter. It should be worthy.”

Just a terse entry filed before I began many months of backpack wandering in 2005. 2006 got a detailed announcement.

“After that, I may actually be done. I’ve hinted at it in past seasons, but I say it a lot less than some planters, and when I do say it, I mean it. I think this really is it for me.”

So then I retired to become, finally, a graduate student (oxymoron). And dutifully did no planting in 2007. And felt very smug about it.

So this must be the inevitable announcement of my descent into the 2008 planting season.

“Come away, fellow sailors, your anchors be weighing,
Time and tide will admit no delaying
Take a bouzy short leave of your nymphs on the shore,
And silence their mourning with vows of returning,
but never intending to visit them more,
no never intending to visit them more.”
– First Sailor, Dido and Aenas

At least not for a couple of months.

The prospects are good. I’m getting weird-old-guy old to be a planter, but weird old guys have always been a reliable trope in planting camps. Especially around BC. And come to think of it, have often done well for themselves. Unlike last time out, it’s going to be truly short season, approximately 30 working days. The gag is: I don’t know who I’m going to be working for. Not the name of the company anyway. I’ve hired directly on with my crewboss, Tobias Meis, whose history as a treeplanter has paralled mine for many seasons. About a 100kms of which in fact ran almost exactly parallel and roughly 2.5 meters apart. This will be his first season crewbossing. I honestly know not what company he’s hired on for, but I gather he’s worked for them before with good results. I trust him, and I’m really enjoying this not-knowing gag. I do know we’ll be working out of Creston, in the pocket of the Kootenay Valley, and spending our working days in the foothills which surround that town. There are whispers of 17 cent straight plant, although I can only assume those last 7 cents have something to do with the vertical angle they pitch the clearcuts on around there. My thighs pre-ache in hysterical anticipation. We’ll be basing out of the Valley View Hotel, at least until they jack the rates for tourist season, if you’d like to come and visit our crew. I’m told it has a view of the mountains, as well as the valley. We’ll have kitchenettes. And a porch. Imagine that!

It really is a long way to come from tenting out in bush-plane isolation camps in the muskeg desolation of northern Alberta to kicking it on the foothill porches of southern BC.

I mentioned a while ago how I’ve been feeling robbed of my hard-earned memories of planting. That’s true. I’m looking to this season now like it’s something frighteningly novel. And it probably will be. It’s never like the first time, but it’s always the first time. There’s a warped piece of me that’s peremptorily disappointed to be doing only 30 days. I assume that piece of me thinks that, the treeplanting experience being accumulative, you don’t get the full character of the thing unless you stay on into the dog days of the summer. Perhaps that part of me forgets that the reason the planting experience grows in intensity is that misery is intense and additive, and treeplanting is fundamentally miserable. As more and more lines get penciled in to the planting record in the tent at night, the dread certainty grows stronger that nothing will change tomorrow but it will have to be suffered through anyway. Get over it, piece of myself. I’ll just have to milk out as much misery as I can before July.

So is this at least likely to be the last of my treeplanting starts? I’ll be graduating mid-winter with a terribly interesting but not exceptionally marketable degree. So no, no breezy claims about this being the last big push of my planter-centric identity. Who the hell knows?

I’ll be heading up to Ontario to visit hearth and kin for a few days, then flying into Victoria on the 30th. There’s a “late thaw in the mountains” (and apparently everywhere else) which is substantially delaying our original contract start date. I’ll wait for the clearcuts to de-ice in Victoria with my friends there, and maybe do a little side-tripping or side-jobs, if I can find either. Then it’s on to Creston and horrible horrible glory. Currently estimated day for putting shovel in earth: the 12th of May.