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Up until now, the social distancing has been an ad hoc, emergent new custom. As of tonight it's official - the county announced a "shelter-in-place" order, effective tonight. The quarantine is here for real.

My (former) team had a nice little social check-in via video conference. Jerome, Luis, Michael, Michael, Kurt, and me.

I started taking my temperature in the evening (under the tongue) to get a baseline, assuming almost all of us will get sick eventually.

3/15 - 96.77°F
3/16 - 95.75

Currently feeling completely healthy.

Current Location: Oakland, California

Oakland is in all but lockdown as "social distancing" has become the norm more-or-less overnight. Everything is cancelled. School is closed. Work is closed. The Vietnamese restaurant around the corner, Monster Pho, has sensibly converted to "to-go only." The financial markets have tanked, and it's easy to imagine that things will get much worse before they get better. On the other hand, it's almost nice to be able to stay home and do nothing while experiencing a complete freedom from FOMO. Everyone is at home.

These days remind me of the days before a hurricane, when everything is still quiet but people have begun to prep, stockpiling supplies and boarding up windows in the calm before the storm. Unfortunately in this case, getting together with all your friends to hole up indoors and consume a lot of alcohol while the storm rages outside is ... contra-indicated. This hurricane party will have to be conducted by video-conference.

Similarly, meeting up with friends has the feel of of a spy movie, where braving contact is an act of resistance, lest the enemy detect our collaboration. The enemy is hidden like spies or radiation, but unfortunately here too we'd better use the phone.

I don't yet know anyone who has been infected, although I do know friends who have coworkers who were confirmed cases. Thus my coronadistance is 2. No one knows how bad this will be. Maybe it will turn out to be no big deal, maybe it will turn out to be like the flu in 1918. I think it's safe to say that this emergency is unprecedented in my lifetime.

An enjoyable, lazy Saturday: Andrea had a "coffee release" party at her house in Alameda - she and two friends have been scheming to start a boutique coffee business called Tetrahedron Coffee. Tetrahedron because it's made up of four friends? Along with the coffee we enjoyed home-made bread and cheese, and then wine in the garden. I <3 Alameda.

In the evening, dinner at Greta sushi and a peek into the new Issues location, back on Piedmont avenue. And some blogging. (I want to resume blogging at

nibot_lab but I can't find the password...) Booked a hotel for a fancy party we're going to at Lake Tahoe in a few weeks.

Meanwhile, it's fire season again, and there's a huge fire at Geyserville, and mandatory evacuations up there.

Are you on Twitter? It has some of the nice properties that Livejournal did - namely that you can find strangers with similar interests and cultivate a little ad hoc online community. My username over there is of course @nibot.

My promotion was successful! Now I'm "level 6" and supposed to manage groups and stuff. More to say but I guess I shouldn't write it here.

I applied for promotion again at work, to "level 6" (I'm a "hardware engineer" despite software being my primary output). The committee met on Thursday to decide promo cases at our company and I expect to hear the result this week, probably on Wednesday. I feel like I have a good shot at it.

Weekend daytrip adventure: "Table Mountain" is an old lava flow near Chico CA that became a volcanic mesa after the surrounding land eroded away. In the springtime the tabletop collects enough rainwater to supply a bunch of small streams and waterfalls, making the place into kind of a backyard-scale Iceland.

Current Location: Oroville, CA

"Remember what you have seen, because everything forgotten returns to the circling winds."

Navajo Wind Chant/quoted by Wm. Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways, at the end.

Who's still here?

CURRENT MISSION

I am in orbit.

ABOUT ME

I'm an engineer at a company that designs, builds, and tests airborne wind turbines -- flying contraptions that generate clean energy. In an earlier life, I worked on gravitational wave detectors, including LIGO, leading to the first detection of gravitational waves -- disturbances from colliding black holes, a billion light years away from earth.

Some things I enjoy: hitchhiking, communal living, math, bicycles, street art, reading (both novels and nonfiction), computer programming, potluck dinners, dogs, geography, the outdoors, photography, science, flying airplanes, watching art films, and learning about history and culture.

PHILOSOPHY

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing
HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I tend to go through phases of hosting and surfing, hosting when I'm settled somewhere and surfing when I'm on the road.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

Couchsurfing in Yosemite national park on a trans-California hitchhiking adventure. Driving across the U.S., couchsurfing every night: in rural Virginia, in Memphis, on a queer commune in rural Tennessee, in Baton rouge, in New Orleans, in snowy Santa Fe and Alamogordo and desert Tucson. Hosting couchsurfers visiting Louisiana and Hannover has been just as delightful. Couchsurfing adds magic to any journey.

Interests
adventure, ant hill cooperative inc, avoiding my homework, being a scientist, bicycling, biking around town, cities, the center for land use interpretation, co-ops, coffee shops, cooking, cooking with my roommates, critical mass, eating, eating yummy food, electronics projects, functional differential geometry, flying airplanes and gliders, hiking, hot springs, hot tubs, physics, postcards, public transportation, reading, scheme, seismology, skinnydipping, structure and interpretation of classical mechanics, snuggling, starting a housing co-op, swimming, tag sales, thinking about physics, travel, travelling the world, watching david lynch films, writing, yummy food.

Music, Movies, and Books
films
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Searching for Sugar Man
The Flat
Y Tu Mamá También
Mulholland Drive - David Lynch
Chinatown - Roman Polanski
Pulp Fiction - Quentin Tarantino
Mitt Liv Som Hund (My Life as a Dog)

fiction
All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt
Norwegian Wood - Murakami
Heart of Darkness
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Catcher in the Rye

non-fiction
Irons in the Fire - John McPhee
The Control of Nature - John McPhee
The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson
In the Garden of Beasts - Erik Larson
Roadside Geology of Louisiana

technical
Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics

music
indie-pop
old-time americana (bluegrass)

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done
Hiked up Mt. Sinai by starlight during the Perseid meteor shower,
worked in Alaska for a summer. One of the best summers ever!

Hello Couchsurfers!

I live in one of the more colorful neighborhoods of Hannover, Linden-Nord, a Stadtteil that's full of students and immigrants. My apartment is just two blocks away from Limmerstrasse, the main street (with trams, bicycles, and pedestrians, but no cars) through the neighborhood, full of cheap good restaurants and cafes and a continuous traffic of life. My place is also just a block away from a big park and the river Leine, and is walking distance to the university.

I have a small dog (you can just make her out in the couch photo!) who will be very excited to meet you.

I started working on my glider rating when I moved to Germany, what 2011 or so, hoping to finish in one summer season. Well here we are seven-ish years later.

Hoping to solo tomorrow and knock out the last three of the required ten solo flights before the checkride. Even more so, hoping to solo in the Schweizer 1-26, a single-seater.

Tempted to make a trip out to Marfa TX, where Burt Compton offers free glider checkrides in the winter months.

Quick three-day trip to the Moon. We drove down on Monday and spent some time at the Base, preparing to prepare the Vehicle. On Tuesday we did the full dry-run with the Vehicle on its launch-pad, checking all its sensors and putting it through its paces. But the Lunar Weather was not right for launch, so we deorbited.

We took the long way home, visited hot springs in Long Valley Caldera, Hot Creek (swimming forbidden now), and up into Yosemite National Park, where we swam in Tenaya Lake, and drank directly from the soda spring at Tuolumne meadows. The photo here is somewhere near the Hot Creek geological site, on the Long Valley Caldera - a little bit of Iceland in California.

Hey, I got promoted! On 4/20 my boss took me aside and told me the news. This week I should get the official letter. And salary increase!

"Control of LiveJournal as a blogging platform has been transferred to SUP Media LLC, a legal entity based in the Russian Federation," says a post on

news, with only 15 comments.

»The properly skeptical reader may have detected a peculiar assumption in our demonstration of viscosity: the fluid must stick to the walls of the [container] rather than simply slide along the walls.

Now fluid certainly does stick to itself. If one tiny portion of a fluid moves, it tends to carry other bits of fluid with it—the magnitude of that tendency is precisely what viscosity is about. Less obviously, fluids stick to solids quite as well as they stick to themselves. As nearly as we can tell from the very best measurements, the velocity of a fluid at the interface with the solid is always just the same as the solid. This last statement expresses something called the "no-slip condition"—fluids do not slip with respect to adjacent solids. …

[A] peculiarity of this no-slip condition is that the nature of the solid surface makes very little difference. If water is flowing over a solid without an air-water interface to complicate matters, the no-slip condition holds whether the solid is hydrophilic or hydrophobic, rough or smooth, greasy or clean. The nature of the solid surface matters only when we have a liquid-gas interface present as well—in short, where surface tension becomes a factor."

The no-slip condition has a number of important ramifications. In particular, it means that any time a fluid flows across a solid, a velocity gradient is present. … In practice, the no-slip condition explains (in part) why dust and grime accumulate on fan blades, why pipes (including blood vessels) encounter trouble from accumulation of deposits rather than from wearing thin, and why a bit of suspended rock is needed in water for the latter to become effectively errosive. … Alternatively, just consider why dishcloths and mops are so much more effective for cleaning than any mere rinse.«

Vogel, Life in Moving Fluids, page 21.

Listening to the Lumineers and baking a cake.

* post brought to you by afternoon-coffee induced insomnia

things that happened recently:

- saw simone giertz and mary roach at nerd nite east bay. they are amazing. with maria, and co-workers sophie and onath.

- i saw the glorious strandbeests at the exploratorium, and also saw adam savage (of mythbusters fame) in person, as he demoed a strandbeest-inspired creation. (with ben berry, and we ran into paula, and rosanne and justin)

- with maria, and nicholas and diane, and a guy from chaos who chose for himself the american-name "Hemingway", to the "arroyo seco", an entirely misnamed Shangri-La of swimming holes in the viscinity of Gilroy in the Ventana Wilderness, a place of much mystery and intrigue, to which we must return.

- conor came to visit, my former co-postdoc from hannover. i took him to the mission, we ate delicious mexican food at taqueria can-cun. we washed it down with beer on the ferry back to alameda, then joined my housemate's birthday party. on sunday I lead a hike up mount tam, where we stopped at the west point inn for a pancake breakfast two miles in.

- oh yeah also I went to munich, austria, and slovenia. maybe I should tell you about that? favorite thing: the eisbachwelle. and beautiful lake bled, and swimming in the adriatic at piran (slovenia).

- at my work yesterday we had an hour-long fitness class. only six people showed up, but it was super fun, and now I hurt everywhere.

upcoming:

- going to a burlesque cabaret circus thing tomorrow, here in Alameda in a circus tent on the taxiway.

- And then this weekend, with my co-workers I'm going camping out in the Sacramento river delta, on Tim Anderson's land, which is a sort of beautiful swampy junkyard, and we will swim in the river and maybe take a boat to visit Ephemerisle.

- bryce and robin's wedding, near eugene oregon, in august. and then my uncle mike and andrea, at their house out in the high desert near lake tahoe (loyalton ca).

One thing about the Bay Area is that, despite having this big bay right here, there aren't that many places that are very appealing to go swimming on a hot summer day -- the bay itself, with its muddy shore, mostly seems too icky.

I found an article in a Marin newspaper where the author helpfully includes a list of skinny-dipping locales, some of which sound like great swimming holes:

>>The law [against skinny-dipping] isn't being enforced at the better-known nudie spots, which include Little Beach; Red Rock Beach, south of Stinson Beach; Hagmier Pond, near Dogtown; and Bass Lake, a swimming hole accessible by the Palomarin Trail, or some of the lesser-known spots, including the Inkwell, near Samuel P. Taylor State Park; RCA Beach, near Bolinas; and Sculptured and Limantour beaches in Point Reyes National Seashore.

And, oddly, skinny-dipping and nudity at the main bathing area at Muir Beach would be technically legal because it's National Park Service land, governed by federal law, Berberian says.<<

* http://www.yelp.com/biz/bass-lake-bolinas
* http://www.yelp.com/biz/rca-beach-bolinas
* http://www.yelp.com/biz/sculptured-beach-point-reyes-station
* http://www.yelp.com/biz/limantour-beach-point-reyes-station
* http://www.yelp.com/biz/phoenix-lake-ross
* http://www.yelp.com/biz/the-inkwells-lagunitas

The inkwells, in particular, look like a perfect summer swimming hole. Dogs are allowed too!

* Weekend trip to Sacramento.
* Visit fam in Davis, by airplane if possible.
* Drawbridge.

* Pancakes on Mt. Tam.
* Hike with the Cal Alpine Club on Mt. Tam.
* Infiltrate the Tourist Club.
* Find the tree nets on Mt. Tam.

* Visit the Core of Engineers' Bay Model.
* Swim in various swimming holes.
* Meet Wes Modes.

* Essex.
* Fort Awesome.
* Swim in the Aqua Delta pool again.
* Ephemerisle.
* Delta adventure.

* Blue Sky Sustainable Living Cntr.
* Kayaking in the delta.
* Kayaking somewhere bioluminescent.

Today in my job at Google: eight hour wilderness first aid training.

I believe this is somewhat unusual.

Hey, I won a prize! The "Breakthrough Prize" -- which I had never heard of before, but which is being touted as some kind of new Nobel Prize -- was just awarded to the three inventors of LIGO and the 1000 authors of the discovery paper. My share of the prize is approx $2000.

I want to donate it... Who would be a worthy and impactful recipient? Something about STEM education.

Current Location: Alameda, CA

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nibot

http://web.pas.rochester.edu/~tobin/

March 2020

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Mitt liv som Tobin

Experiments in Nomadicity

Recent Entries

Shelter in place

Everything is cancelled

Tetrahedron coffee

Tobo Promo II ✓

Tobo Promo II

Weekend adventure: Table Mountain

on keeping a notebook (heat-moon)

roll call

couchsurfing profile (for the archive)

slow progress towards glider rating

July 26 Lunar Orbit

tobo promo ✓

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Why dust collects on fan blades

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coffee insomnia

skinny-dip marin!

todo

wilderness

prize

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March 2020

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