Category Archives: in-English

Romanian Wine

12 January 2007

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We have spent the holidays somewhere on the new fringes of the European Union, more precisely in the southeastern corner of Transylvania, Romania, in our old hometowns of Csíkszereda (Miercurea Ciuc) and Sepsiszentgyörgy (Sfantu Gheorghe). Despite numerous inconveniences (like our luggage getting lost in Paris on the way home and having to drive a small Renault on a few inches of fresh snow) it was a worthwhile trip, e.g., after three years of no-see, it is nice to get to know your family and friends again.

Anyway, one of the enjoyable parts of the trip was that we sampled a number of Romanian wines. Not too many, because the average store in Szentgyörgy or Csíkszereda does not carry a big selection of wines. We learned that wines that are cheaper than about 5 dollars (~12-13 new Romanian lei) are usually barely drinkable. However, some of the bottles in the 15-20-30 lei price range are quite nice. The ones labeled Prahova Valley are always reliable; we had several bottles of Merlots and Cabernets. And there are a few Feteasca Neagra-s that are outstanding. Look for “Cramele Halewood S.A.” on the label.

So the good news is that there are a growing number of enjoyable wines for reasonable prices. However, I still do not understand why on earth they label almost every wine with ‘sec’ (dry), ‘demisec’ (half-dry), ‘demiculce’, and ‘dulce’ (sweet). Have you ever seen a Cabernet Sauvignon labeled as ‘sweet wine’? Well, in Romania you can see such monstrous creations almost in any store that sells wine. Don’t event think about trying one of these — they are as bad as the label sounds. Why is it so difficult to grasp that good red wine is not supposed to be sweet?

Sedimentology on Mars: wet or dry gravity flows?

17 December 2006

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Once again, the ‘water on Mars’ subject made it to the headlines: researchers claim that recent gully activity that took place in the last few years (as documented by photographs taken in 1999 and 2005) suggests that watery sediment flows (debris flows) are shaping the planet’s surface as we speak.

The problem is, of course, that it is difficult to keep water liquid in an environment where the temperature is usually way below 0 degrees Celsius and the atmospheric water vapor pressure is also very low. And, as far as I am concerned, the morphology of the gullies and of the associated deposits does not rule out deposition from dry granular flows at all. Of course, several papers have been written on the subject; here is, for example, an opinion from Allan Treiman (2003):

The salient features of the Martian gullies [Malin and Edgett, 2000, 2001] are consistent with their origin as dry flows of eolian sediment: gully deposits are fine granular material (erodable by wind); eolian sediment are available where gullies form; the distribution of gullies are consistent with deposition of sediment from wind; and the orientations of gullies are similarly consistent with wind patterns. Further, it is clear that granular materials can flow as if they were Bingham liquids, and granular flows can produce landforms with all of the geomorphic features of Martian gullies. No known data concerning the gullies (chronological, geomorphic, or geologic) falsify this hypothesis, so it is worth further investigation.

I just find it interesting that, by the time the story reaches the media, all the uncertainties disappear, and the story is unequivocal: watery flows must occur on Mars today, period.

John McPhee on geological language

31 October 2006

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Started reading John McPhee’s tetralogue on geology, Annals of the Former World. Here is a memorable sampling of the thick sediments of geological language (p. 33):

As years went by, such verbal deposits would thicken. Someone developed enough effrontery to call a piece of our earth an epieugeosyncline. There were those who said interfluve when they meant between two streams, and a perfectly good word like mesopotamian would do. A cactolith, according to the American Geological Institute’s Glossary of Geology and Related Sciences, was a “quasi-horizontal chonolith composed of anastomosing ductoliths, whose distal ends curl like a harpolith, thin like a sphenolith, or bulge discordantly like an akmolith or ethmolith.” The same class of people who called one rock serpentine called another jacupirangite. Clinoptilolite, eclogite, migmatite, tincalconite, szaibelyite, pumpellyite. Meyerhofferite. The same class of people who called one rock paracelsian called another despujolsite. Metakirchheimerite, phlogopite, ktzenbuckelite, mboziite, noselite, neighborite, samsonite, pigeonite, muskoxite, pabstite, aenigmatite. Joesmithite.

He could have included turbidite, tsunamite, tempestite, unifite, homogenite, debrite, hyperpycnite, and contourite as well. As if this wasn’t enough, there are sedimentary geologists who suggest introducing new ‘ites’ (PDF link) like gravite and densite.

Bullshite.

Bedforms in Matlab – everything you wanted to know about ripple marks and cross beds

30 September 2006

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David Rubin’s bedform-generating code has been implemented in Matlab (in fact, it has been out there for a while). It is a great learning, teaching, and research tool that can be downloaded as part of an USGS open file report. Strongly recommended to anyone having some interest in sedimentary structures, bedforms, and cool Matlab graphics.

That reminds me of something else: it would be nice to have a Matlab version running on Intel Macs. I hope Mathworks will keep its promises and have something ready by early 2007. Having to reboot the iMac in Windows XP is an acceptable solution, but I could live without it [although even Windows XP looks OK on this kind of hardware 🙂 ].

New books, websites, and videos on disbelief

30 September 2006

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It is good to see that two books that talk about disbelief and attack religion are among the top sellers on amazon.com. One of them is “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris; he is a PhD student in neuroscience at Stanford whose first book (The end of faith) was also about – and against – religion. I have read that one and enjoyed it.

The second book, “The God Delusion“, was written by Richard Dawkins, who would probably be the head of the Church of Atheists and Agnostics if there was such a thing and if atheism was religion. [Needless to say, it is not]. I have ordered it and looking forward to read it. If it is ‘preaching to the converted’, fine with me. After all, there are very few intellectuals out there who have the courage to ‘preach’ to those inclined to think that there are no gods, no santas, no angels, and no teapots in orbit around Jupiter. Dawkins also has a new website and foundation set up: http://www.richarddawkins.net/.

Also, it is worth checking out Google Video for films on atheism. The two-part series called “The root of all evil?” by Dawkins is there. I also found Jonathan Miller‘s “Atheism – A Rough History of Disbelief“. It is a very enjoyable documentary. You can find all three episodes at Google Video if you do a search.

Georeferencing photos on a Mac

20 August 2006

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Not long ago I managed to georeference some of my photos using GPS measurements. Before I forget how I did this, here are some notes on the process. The key piece of software is GPSPhotoLinker, written by Jeffrey Early. After downloading and installing this nice little program, the next step is to get the GPS tracks from the GPS unit. For some reason, GPSPhotoLinker did not do this for me; so I downloaded GPSBabel, connected my Garmin Vista Cx to the iMac, and saved the tracks in GPX format. [GPSBabel is the same utility that is used inside GPSPhotoLinker]. I tried to open the GPX file in GPSPhotoLinker, but it did not work. The problem was that some of the tracks on the GPS unit were actually saved — and saving tracks on a Garmin GPS unit (and maybe on other units as well, I don’t know) results in losing the time stamp from each datapoint. GPSPhotoLinker apparently is not able to just ignore this part of the GPX file; the only solution was that I manually deleted all the saved tracks from the GPX file. After that, everything went pretty smoothly. GPSPhotoLinker finds the GPS points that are the closest in time to the time stamp of the photograph and writes the latitude and longitude into the EXIF header of the jpeg file. You can choose between ‘snapping’ photo locations to the nearest GPS datapoint or to interpolate between two points to find the best estimate for the place where the photo was taken. It is important, of course, to record a fairly large number of GPS points when you are taking the pictures.

Once I had the photos tagged with the geographic coordinates, I had two options to display them in the context of a map: either relying on Smugmug, the photo-hosting web service that I use, or on a cool iPhoto plugin called iPhotoToGoogleEarth. With Smugmug, both Google Maps and Google Earth can be used to look at the photos; the drawback is that the displayed pictures are small and you have to go go back to the Smugmug page to see the photos in a reasonable size. The iPhoto plugin generates a kmz file that can be opened with Google Earth and includes all the photos in a reasonable size, that, of course, can be adjusted by the user). The advantage is that you do not have to leave Google Earth in order to look at the photos.

Here is my first try at doing the gereferencing, as shown by Smugmug in Google Maps. It is not a bad idea after all to have a GPS unit handy when you are traveling and taking photos.

PS. In addition to the saved tracks, the other thing that GPSPhotoLinker does not like in the GPX file is the part of the header that refers to the geographic bounds of the file, e.g., “bounds minlat=”-51.725563835″ minlon =”-98.491744157″ maxlat=”43.777740654″ maxlon=”131.500083692″”. You have to delete that in order for GPSPhotoLinker to read the file.

PS 2. There is always more to learn. I thought that the ideal workflow for georeferencing photos would be to (1) do the tagging in GPSPhotoLinker, (2) import the photos to iPhoto, (3) export the ones I want to post on the web, and (4) put them on Smugmug. It turns out this does not work well; all the photos I took in California (and were correctly labeled by GPSPhotolinker) ended up in Kamchatka. The point is that the georeferencing must be done (or redone) after the photos are exported from iPhoto.

Limited or no usability

19 June 2006

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A few weeks ago we decided to buy an iMac in addition (or, as a replacement) to our four-year old Windows laptop. Clearly, my opinion is biased because, after making an investment like this it is much more difficult to see the disadvantages. Clearly, my preference for MacOS X is also influenced by the fact that it is cool to own a Mac.

Whatever the reasons are, the bottomline is that working on a Mac is so much more pleasant that doing or trying to do exactly the same things on a PC. Yes, in most cases it is possible to do exactly the same things on PCs as well. If you enjoy downloading updates. If you enjoy learning about DHCP, ports, DNS, etc. If you enjoy restarting your computer three times in a row. I do not enjoy to do any of these things. That’s why I like my new iMac.

To be more precise, after getting the iMac we kind of forgot about the Windows machine. We only noticed recently that it is having problems connecting to the internet (through the same wireless router that both Macs are happily using ever since we told them to do so). A warning appears that says something about “limited or no connectivity”. If I try to “repair” the connection, it keeps thinking for a while and theen it says that it could not fix it. What’s next? I go online (on the Mac, of course), and do a search on “limited or no connectivity”. Lots of results, one is more obscure and useless than the other. After trying several of the suggested tricks, I just give up.

So we just spent at least a few hours trying to fix this — with no success. The PC has still “limited or no connectivity” — in other words, it is pretty f%^$#@! useless. I am not saying that I never had any problems with the Mac. But even when I had some, it was fast and enjoyable to fix them. I know it sounds like I have joined a cult, but it does feel like my life has changed since we have the iMac.

PS. To be fair (a couple of weeks later), since then we had comparable problems with the Macs as well, so it is unlikely that it was a Windows XP issue. Still, I love the new iMac 🙂 .

PS2. Finally, it works. I replaced the Linksys router with an Airport Extreme base station and set it to share the IP address that it receives from the cable modem between the other machines. I have to admit however that it was *not* easy to set it up the right way; with the default settings, we could only connect one computer at a time and it took ages for us to hit upon the right combination of settings. I contacted Earthlink for help, but the advice I received was pretty close to useless.

No such thing as thinking without thinking

17 April 2006

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Nice review of Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Blink‘ in the March/April issue of Skeptical Inquirer. This is a widely popular and well-written book that suggests that quick, unconscious decisions are better than informed but time-consuming deliberations. Here is a good summary by Wesley Cecil of why one should not take this book too seriously:

By the measure of books by New Age mystics or anti-science religious fundamentalists, Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink is not exceptionally irrational. However, due to its popularity and critical acclaim, Blink stands as potentially far more damaging to rational discourse. Replete with errors both logical and factual, it advances an argument hostile to the traditions of reasoned thought: that one can think without thinking. Primarily, Gladwell’s Blink demonstrates that the dangers of not thinking are as prevalent as ever.

Let a thousand academic flowers bloom

11 March 2006

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The ongoing debate about whether there is need for a new university in Cluj that would roughly correspond to the former Bolyai University should consider what we know about higher education systems that work pretty well. Here are, for example, some recommendations from The Economist:

As it happens, we already possess a successful model of how to organise higher education: America’s. That country has almost a monopoly on the world’s best universities (see table 1), but also provides access to higher education for the bulk of those who deserve it. The success of American higher education is not just a result of money (though that helps); it is the result of organisation. American universities are much less dependent on the state than are their competitors abroad. They derive their income from a wide variety of sources, from fee-paying students to nostalgic alumni, from hard-headed businessmen to generous philanthropists. And they come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, from Princeton and Yale to Kalamazoo community college.

This survey will offer two pieces of advice for countries that are trying to create successful higher-education systems, be they newcomers such as India and China or failed old hands such as Germany and Italy. First: diversify your sources of income. The bargain with the state has turned out to be a pact with the devil. Second: let a thousand academic flowers bloom. Universities, including for-profit ones, should have to compete for customers. A sophisticated economy needs a wide variety of universities pursuing a wide variety of missions. These two principles reinforce each other: the more that the state’s role contracts, the more educational variety will flourish.

I especially like that “a sophisticated economy needs a wide variety of universities pursuing a wide variety of missions”. Contrast that with what is going on in Romania. Cluj, the most important cultural center in Transylvania, is almost entirely dominated by a single but huge academic institution, that is, Babes-Bolyai University. There are about 45,500 students at UBB, and it is essentially the only institution in Transylvania that has some real scientific output (that is, publications in ISI journals). Not a lot of scientific output, taking into account the number of faculty, but certainly light-years ahead of any other place pretending to produce science.

So wouldn’t it make sense to diversify a bit the academic picture and re-create an institution that already has some respectable history? The new Bolyai University would not be an institution against the present-day UBB; and it clearly should not be solely focused on local and Hungarian issues. Ideally, it would result in a healthy competition, and it would give a chance to the Hungarian community in Transylvania to have a real center of excellence in research and higher education.

That would be the real multiculturalism. A relatively small but quality-driven institution of higher education is better than a giant degree-machine whose leaders seem to think that just pointing out how many thousands of students study in how many different languages shows how good the institution is. The best universities in the world are famous not for the sheer numbers of their students or faculty, and the number of languages that are used on campus, but for the quality and impact of research and teaching. And by that standard, I am sorry to say, Babes-Bolyai has a long way to go.