Grad School

I now know where I'm going to grad school this fall.
I got accepted to the following degree programs:
University of California at Berkeley - Masters in Urban Planning
London School of Economics - Masters in Regional Science (Geography)
University of Wisconsin at Madison - Masters in Geography
Pennsylvania State University at University Park - Masters in Geography
University of California at Santa Barbara - Masters in Geography


They all would have made great choices. LSE was certainly a thrilling idea. Who wouldn't want to live in the thriving heart of London and go to a school with the most international student body in the world? And Berkeley has always had a place in my heart. I grew up in its back yard. I come from a three generation Berkeley family, and my cousin and sister are both studying there right now.

But in the end I decided that Penn State was the best choice for me. For one thing, they're the only school that offered me funding. And offer me funding, they did. Free tution, and a teaching assistanceship with a healthy stipend which should more than cover all my living expenses. I decided that I really want to pursue a higher degree in geography. I have loved geography since I was a child. I didn't get to study it at Harvard because Harvard, like so many other universities, did away with the department in the 50s. This is my chance to follow what is really a lifelong passion. And what's more, I'll get to help teach it too. Having been a substitute teacher for most of this year, I think that is something I am capable of.
Penn State's geography department is one of the best in its field. And it has tons of money, which is why I, along everyone else in the department, get full funding. That's nice because there's no competition between students for grants and fellowships. I've talked to several students there and it seems like a very cool place to be, with lots of interaction and comradery.
Penn State is in unimaginatively-named town of State College, which is dead smack in the middle of the state, surrounded by farmland, Amish people, parks, forests, and the Allegheny Mountains. It will no doubt be a big change from my former environs of San Francisco and Boston. But I like change. And as a geographer, I need to understand all different types of landscapes and environments. Besides, I'll be so busy studying and teaching, I probably won't mind the fact that I live in such a small town.
And if I have an unbearable urge to walk down a real city street, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York are not too far away.

Generation gaps

I think about the sixties a lot. I think I tend to glamorize the sixties in my mind. I wish I'd been alive then. But then on the other hand, I'm somewhat glad I wasn't because then I would be my parents' age now. Today, I can look back on the sixties, appreciate it for what it was, listen to its music, see its films, carry on its ideas which are worth carrying on, and set aside those which are clearly outdated. And I still have many decades to look forward to ahead of me.

And when I put the sixties in perspective, they really didn't last that long. If I had been a sophomore in high school when the Beatles first became popular in America, then the Beatles would already have broken up by now. Wow! Can you believe that the entire length of the Beatles well-known career lasted a mere seven years, from 1963-1970 (1969, really, as "Let It Be" came out after the band officially disbanded). If you measure time in units of the popular career of the Beatles, then I've already been alive for more than three "Beatleses". The Beatles were kind of a catalyst in the formative years of so many of my parents' generation. I can totally imagine being an impressionable high school freshman right when the Beatles hit it big.

As a substitute teacher this past year I've seen children in all stages of development - from 2nd grade to 12th grade. They seem so small, so innocent, so cute. Then I remember that when I was their age I thought I bore the weight of the world on my shoulders. I took on an immense variety of problems in my mind, and sometimes I overwhelmed myself. At times I could be precocious, opinionated, overzealous, frightened, and over-emotionally-stimulated. Perhaps maturity is recognizing that, yes, the world is a flawed place, but that life goes on. The Beatles nailed it in 1970, along with the nail in their own coffin. That was the year of "Let It Be" and "All Things Must Pass". The Beatles themselves were just babies when they made it big. George was just 20 years old. Paul was 21. By the time they broke up they had revolutionized music as the world knew it and they were still under 30. What must it have felt like when they broke up? Like the end of an era. And it was. As I said, had I been in high school when they Beatles debuted, I would be my current age now when they broke up. Their break up would have coincided with my graduation from college - my symbolic entering into the world for the first time as an "adult". The Beatles were youth, creativity, passion, and experimentation. Now it's the 70s.

I don't envy the 70s as I do the 60s. But I still find it a fascinating decade. I see the 70s as a dark decade. Gritty, violent, and marked by heightened realism. The 70s are probably the finest decade in American filmmaking. The 70s marked the definitive end of the 60s. The hippie movement hadn't worked. They didn't stop Vietnam. They didn't stop Nixon's election. The Beatles heard about the summer of love in San Francisco, but when they arrived in Haight Ashbury to see it for themselves they were appalled at what they saw - dirty, drug-scarred runaway kids from all over America, in search of something that didn't exist. Then there was the Stones concert in Altamont. It weighs heavily upon me that all this went down in my own back yard, the Bay Area. The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and Jefferson Airplane all lived in my own little Marin suburb of Larkspur. But if you look at Larkspur today you'd have no idea.

How much time is seven years? How much time is a decade? Every decade in the 20th century has a unique tone and feel. Every decade has the makings of an era. I was born in the 80s, the worst decade of them all. Thank God I was too young to realize it. But I was more a child of the 90s. I was seven to seventeen years old in the 90s. I remember how the 90s felt so fresh, so new. "Welcome to the 90s", they used to say. In the 90s we reinvented rock music, saving it from its near-demise in the 80s. In the 90s we had things to say. There was Clinton, who was a schmuck, but things seemed okay for the most part. But somehow the 90s blended into the 00s while I wasn't looking, and just the other day I suddenly realized that the 00s are already more than halfway done! Where have the 00s gone? What will the 00s be remembered for? It's fitting that the 00s are zeros because zero denotes emptiness and that's exactly what this decade feels like. There was Bush. Then there was 9/11. And I was in college, preoccupied, and too busy to consume the pop culture that is now being marketed to a younger generation than mine. 80% of the 00s will have been under Bush. That's a depressing statistic. Kind of like the 80s must have felt under Reagan.

I think it takes at least five years after the conclusion of a decade for that decade's theme to fully emerge. The 90s are only now coalescing into such an entity. And so it will be another ten years before we can make a fair assessment of the current deade. But my hypothesis so far (and I give credit to Karen for helping me come up with this) is that the 00s will not stand apart on their own, but instead will be an amalgam of prior decades. There's something going on in that we suddenly have access to so much archival information on previous decades, and it's all at our fingertips on the internet. Or on DVD (i.e. old television shows). Young people in the sixties rebelled against their parents' generation and listened to rock music. They wouldn't have been caught dead listening to their parents' music. But today, young people listen to not only current music, but their parents' AND grandparents' generation's music! When I was still in college and on the school's internet network I had access to the iTunes libraries of hundreds of my fellow students. I saw firsthand that today's young people listen to EVERYTHING. The typical college student's music library includes dozens of genres spanning several decades' worth of music. Online music sharing may be a thorn in the behind for the RIAA, but it has opened up today's young people to a whole world of music out there, and that is a wonderful thing.

So maybe the 00s don't need to define themselves. There is so much prior cultural output already in the cultural repositories that maybe we could be content simply rediscovering it.

Islands and Sovereignty

I think it's pretty weird that the United States owns and administers a handful of random islands. We've got Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Midway Island, Wake Island, and the US Virgin Islands. What's even stranger is that the administration of these islands is tucked away into the Office of Insular Affairs, just one of many sub-departments of the Department of the Interior. It is on equal footing with the US Geological Survey, the Office of Surface Mining, and the .... The website the United States government operates for these islands, with its cheap, thrown-together, mid-90s look, resembles a school project more than the website of island nations home to thousands of people.

Islands are the perfect theoretical sovereign entities. They alone among the earth's landmasses can truly defend their territoriality and spatial integrity. And yet, the majority of the world's islands are still owned and administered by foreign governments. And they are, for the most part, loathe to have it any other way. The US islands' economies are nearly entirely dependent on US military installations. Britain and France's islands only survive with massive subsidies. Islands probably pose more of a burden on their home countries than their strategic value is worth. Most islands today are about the least sustainable places on earth. They have the least diversified economies, usually dependent entirely on tourism, or the mining of one resource, such as phosphates. Nauru's economy was 98% phosphates. But the phosphates are going to be depleted before this year is over. What is Nauru to do now? They've dug up their island for phosphates. There's nowhere left to grow food. Before their "discovery" by the colonial powers in the Age of Exploration, these islands must have been self-sufficient, mustn't they have? Well, no, not really. Demographic scientists have shown that, before ever coming into contact with outsiders, the population of the Cape Verde Islands fluctuated wildly from generation to generation, its people vulnerable to dramatic variations in food supply, famine, and disease. The residents of Easter Island cut down all their trees in order to build statues and in the ensuing crisis over depleted resources descended into anarchy and warfare and nearly killed each other. Medium-size tropical islands have probably had much more stable populations over the years because their steady climates produce year-round reliable sources of food.

The twelve independent island nations of the Pacific Ocean all belong to a consortium that operates the University of the South Pacific, probably the most geographically dispersed school on earth (with campuses on each of the twelve islands). There are only twelve nations on earth with no university. I think they are all European microstates: Monaco, San Marino, The Vatican, and Liechtenstein.

Habitation in Mountains

Human habitation of mountains. Over the course of human history, when and where have humans lived in mountains, and why?
PROS:
• In India, people seek refuge from oppressive heat in the hills.
• In Europe, the Middle East, and Roman Empire, people built fortified cities on top of mountains for defense against raiders and barbarians.
• People in the Himalayas believed the gods lived in the mountains and built monasteries high up for spiritual reasons.
• Slopes provide the best soil and drainage for the growing of wine grapes.
• Slopes also lend themselves toward tea and coffee production.
• Mountain passes are strategic locations in long-distance trade routes and could be lucrative for occupiers levying tolls on through-traffic.
• High areas are safer from flooding
• Machu Pichu - ?
• Today, residential property values are often highest in hills (Hollywood Hills, Santa Monica Mountains, San Francisco, Marin County, Oakland Hills, Hong Kong) because of the panoramic views

And yet, throughout history, major population centers have been in lowlying river valleys and coastal plains because water is essential for transportation and agriculture. Do mountain people depend on valley people and coastal people for survival?

What technologies have transformed the way we inhabit mountains? How much more expensive is it to develop mountainous areas than non-mountainous areas (roads, railroads, utilities, structures)? When did mountains because socioeconomically prestigious?

What is the most complex terrain that humans can build on? Some homes in the Bay Area are built on slopes steeper than 45°. Complexity of terrain is determined by more than just slope; fragmentation (fractalization of ridgelines) is also important. Is every square foot of land theoretically developeable? If Yosemite Valley were to be completely privatized and developed, what would the development look like?

Supermarket Geography

In your average grocery store today it's taken for granted that one can find food items imported from all around the world. However, most imported food items are imported for a specific reason - soy sauce from Asia because that's where soy sauce is made, olive oil from Italy because of its reputation, grapes from Chile because they're all that's available during the off season. When it comes to most items in the grocery store there isn't a lot of choice between competing international brands. There aren't more than one or two brands of soy sauce or grapes. Maybe there are three or four olive oils, at the most. In the cereal aisle, sure there are hudreds of choices, but none of them are international, and the vast majority are made in one of only two locations, by Kellogs or General Mills. However, there are a handful of grocery items of which there is a great deal of choice, and for which the product origin is geographically dispersed around the world. These are, namely, alcohol. At any store with a well-stocked liquor section you can find microbrews from all over the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Australia, and even Asia. Wines from America, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, and, increasingly, from places you wouldn't expect, like Texas or Arizona. A connoisseur would tell you that every single wine and beer is different, and that much is to be attributed to slight variations in soil type, climate, angle of the slope, size of the vineyards, age of the vines, direction of the slope, etc. But most consumers aren't connoisseurs. I find it fascinating that makers of alcoholic beverages have been able to market their products to such widespread and diverse consumer markets. The fact that you can walk into nearly any bar in the land and order a Corona from Mexico, a Heineken from Holland, or a Sam Adams from Massachusetts is, frankly, amazing. Who could say the same about any other type of food product? The marketing image of brands of alcohol is intrinsically intertwined with a specific place. The way we market, distribute, and consume alcohol is incredibly inefficient. Traditionally, each settlement received the bulk of its food from its immediate hinterland. With technological improvements in transportation, preservation, and processing that hinterland has greatly expanded in reach. But it hasn't disappeared. Rarely can you find milk that comes from more than 100 miles away. Most supermarkets receive their dairy products, breads, and other perishables from nearby distribution centers. Americans still get American breakfast cereals, and Europeans get mostly European breakfast cereals. Produce generally stays within the same continent, or hemisphere. Americans get their winter produce from Central America whereas Europeans get theirs from the Mediterranean and Africa. It simply makes the most economic sense to consume foods that grow as close as possible to their market. How did the alcohol market transcend this economic rationale? Bottled wine and beer are heavy and take up a lot of space. They are expensive to transport. And yet what we have are wines and beers from all over the country and the world being shiped all over the country and the world. This business is incredibly resource- and transportation-intensive.

Global warming opens up new shipping routes

We all know global warming is happening. The Arctic ice sheets are literally thawing and breaking up before our eyes. Climatologists and glaciologists are predicting it's only a matter of decades before the polar ice caps melt, raising ocean levels significantly. Of course this will wreck havoc upon the earth's low-lying coast plains. However, one positive effect will be on global shipping routes. The melting of the ice caps will finally open up the long-sought-after Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean, connecting European ships to Asian ports along the Great Circle Route (that currently flown by airplanes), cutting off thousands of miles currently spent detouring south to the Panama Canal, around the Cape of Good Hope, or Cape Horn. From Western and Northern Europe, ships will skim the northern coast of Canada and Alaska en route to Japan, Korea, and China. The Russian coast, too, will open up new shipping lanes.

If India were in North America (a map exploration)

India is a big country. And when you're traveling by train, or bus, it sure feels big. But how big is it really? When you look at a world map, India really doesn't look that big after all, at least comparatively speaking. It's a lot smaller than even the lower 48 United States, and yet it has more than four times as many people than then United States. It often just feels so big because the transportation infrastructure is not as developed and it takes so much time to go from place to place.

I decided to see how big India really was by putting it in a comparative frame of reference. So, with the help of Google Earth, I superimposed a map of India onto familiar territory: North America. Because India and North America are at different latitudes, I had to correct for the curvature of the earth, so I created a set of coordinate points for every extremity along India's borders, and superimposed those onto North America.

Here's what it would look like if the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent were located at the Tijuana-San Diego border:
India's westernmost point would fall in the Pacific Ocean 80 miles west of Washington State. Its easternmost point would fall in the middle of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. Its northernmost point would be at the border of Albert Province and the Northwest Territories in Canada. Delhi would be in the Rocky Mountains near Jasper, Alberta. Bombay would be in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. Calcutta would be near Miles City, Montana. Goa would be in Plumas County, California (north of Lake Tahoe). And Bangalore would be in the desert of southern Nevada.

I tried another superimposition. This time imagine that the southern tip of India is at the southern tip of Texas, where it meets Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico.
India's westernmost point would fall in near I-80 in Wyoming. Its easternmost point would fall in Deep River, Ontario. Its northernmost point would be in the northeast corner of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. Delhi would be in in southeast North Dakota. Bombay would be in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Calcutta would be near Indianapolis. Goa would be near Lubbock, Texas. And Bangalore would be near Waco, Texas.

In short, India would stretch from Wyoming to Ontario, Manitoba to Texas. That's a little misleading because the India has some strange appendages which stick out in the northeast corner and reach around Bangladesh. The main bulk of India would only stretch from Wyoming to Indiana. But still, that's a fairly sizable chunk of North America. Especially, the distance from Lake Winnipeg (which is pretty far up in Canada) to Texas is a long distance. But the distance from Delhi to the south of India is not so incredibly long. Superimposed from North Dakota to Texas, it's equivalent to the Bible Belt, a straight shot up through America's Middle West, about 24 hours of nonstop driving time. Given that the bulk of India's more than 1 billion people live along the Ganges Valley, an area equivalent to the corridor between North Dakota and Indiana, that's not a lot of space. For a land with so many varied languages and cultures, India really is not as big as people think.

For fun, I also traced my own journey onto this new India-Texas hybrid. My journey in India can be described as a series of day-long and overnight trips by bus or train between two points.

Delhi to Bombay, 22 hours overnight by train.
Equivalent to: southeast North Dakota to Eva, Oklahoma in the Oklahoma Panhandle. A pretty sizable distance, and probably not much shorter than 22 hours if Amtrak were to serve this route.

Bombay to Goa, 12 hours by train.
Equivalent to: Oklahoma Panhandle to 50 miles southwest of Lubbock, Texas. Not really that long. I drove this route last summer working for Let's Go and it only took 6 hours. But the Indian train was slow because it had much topography to deal with.

Goa to Hampi, 12 hours overnight by bus.
Equivalent to: 50 miles southeast of Lubbock, Texas to 50 miles northwest of Fort Worth, Texas. This is the one that really gets me. This was the most uncomfortable ride I experienced in India. 12 miles of bumpy, slow bus that seemed to take forever. Yet the entire trip was less than the distance between two cities in northern Texas.

Hampi to Bangalore, 7 hours overnight by train
Equivalent to: 50 miles northwest of Fort Worth, Texas to 20 miles north of Waco, Texas. I also drove this route last summer in Texas. Took me about 2 hours. Yet it took 7 hours by train in India.

Bangalore to Pondicherry, 10 hours overnight by bus.

"White Trash"

I think the term "white trash" is racist, and not in the way you might think. It is NOT racist against white people. Here's why: by adding the qualifier "white" to the derogative "trash" the person waging the insult is implying that people who are usually considered trash are not white, and that "white trash" are an exception to the rule and need to be differentiated from "regular trash" by indicating that they are white. In other words, it "goes without saying" that those "other" races commit crimes and live in squalor and poverty, but when white people do it, oh no, we must come up with a special word to describe them. Speaking of white trash, have you ever seen the show COPS? I've seen it a few times over the years. Every episode is filmed on location in a different American city. Unfortunately for America, it usually showcases the most godforsaken city landscapes our country has to offer. People still associate crime mostly with "the inner city", that nebulous zone surrounding the central business district where middle class people work during the day but evacuate at night. They long since moved to the suburbs in "white flight" to escape the crime and vice of the inner city. The inner city is the most urban of spaces and I happen to love it, even the dirty, grimy, supposedly crime-ridden parts. Just like the shady characters of classic film noir, I like the shadows, the tall buildings, the noise, the supposed inherent danger. And, while, yes, there is still crime, prostitution, drug dealing, violence in these inner city streets, ironically the majority of crime has dispersed, just like the population, out into the suburbs. COPS is the perfect example. It never takes place in the gritty urban streetscapes of America's big cities. COPS takes place in a world of strip malls, gas stations, and single family homes; it takes place in suburbia! Suburbia is where the hookers, crackheads, meth addicts are. Suburbia is where the domestic violence and robberies and car thefts occur. And it is all spread out at the lowest densities, meaning the cops have much wider beats. They drive around through this hell all night. If all this crime and vice had just stayed in the "real cities", "where it belonged" I think cops' jobs would actually be a lot easier. Real urban space is simply easier to monitor. Everything is closer together. Since densities are higher, there are more people on the streets, more sets of eyes, less space for things to go wrong in. I was then going to make a point about how they only seem to target poor people or just being stupid, and shouldn't cops be out there catching real criminals like the corporate crooks who lie and cheat and swindle. Then I remembered that Michael Moore made the same point when he interviewed the producer of COPS in Bowling for Columbine.