2023 – Page 2 – Ryan's Journal

Tales from Canterbury

Posted from Canterbury, England at 1:14 am, August 18th, 2023

Just another day in England having a pint in a pub built in 1370 and roaming around in a 1000 year old cathedral. Yesterday started with a stroll outside of town to see St. Martin’s church, reportedly the oldest English-speaking church in the world (“built before 597”). It was early in the morning so the church was closed, but it’s got an atmospheric graveyard around it that I shared with only one other person, an old British fellow who probably expected to be alone while he did his morning tai-chi.

From there it was back to Canterbury Cathedral, where I asked one of the volunteers about the shiny black stones used for building many of the walls on the grounds. He didn’t know, but unbeknownst to me he apparently activated the Canterbury volunteer network bat signal, and from that point onwards any time a volunteer saw me they asked if I was the gentleman who wanted to know about the stones (they are flint, which is one of the few hard building stones found in the local chalk deposits). I ended up chatting with a lot of elderly British folks on this visit.

Thursday was the choir’s one day off, so a group decided they wanted to go punting, which is British for “ride on a boat”. The river here is crystal clear – the chalk formations act as a massive filter – and four of us took an hour ride, gondola-style, through a small nature reserve and under ancient tunnels in the city; life could clearly be worse.

After a bit more roaming about on the city’s ancient Roman walls and through the narrow streets, we finished the day at the Parrot, a pub located in a building that was built in 1370. In America that building would be some sort of national monument, but in England it’s simply a good place to get a pint and some sticky toffee pudding.

Canterbury Cathedral.

Unimpressed Swans

Posted from London, England at 1:36 am, August 17th, 2023

Today was the last day in London, and the plan was to visit the British Natural History Museum, but first, the walk there led through Hyde Park, which has become one of my favorite places in the city over the past few days. On this particular morning a couple dozen swans were lounging next to the lake, and they couldn’t be bothered to move for any of the bikers or joggers going by; you could easily get within a foot of a giant bird and it wouldn’t so much as look sideways at you. I liked these swans.

While I’m generally a fan of natural history, with so little time and so much to choose from the British Natural History Museum might not have made the cut were it not for the incredible architecture. The entry hall of this building was amazing, with mosaic floors, different plants painted on the ceiling, high arches, dramatic staircases, nature-themed sculptures, and stained glass windows. AND there’s a friggin’ blue whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling! I was a fan and spent a lot of time roaming about this entry hall to see it from every possible angle. While the rest of the exhibits were interesting, the architecture was far and away the highlight.

From there it was off to meet Audrey and the rest of the choir folks in Canterbury, and this one is another cathedral that I really like. It was built in 1077, and visitors are free to roam almost everywhere, so I went down to the crypts, to the ruins of the monastery out back, and all over the interior of the cathedral. The choir sang Evensong, and unlike any church I’ve ever been at before, the congregation sits in a gallery on either side of the choir, so you hear the singers from only a few feet away. I went to bed tired last night after another quite memorable day.

Amazing architecture AND a whale? I want to live here.

Henges and Baths

Posted from London, England at 12:23 am, August 16th, 2023

Yesterday’s adventure was a day trip out of London to visit Stonehenge, Bath and “a secret place”. I’m not normally a fan of group trips, but there are limited options if you want to see Stonehenge, so I picked a 15 person bus that was ranked well on Tripadvisor and hoped for the best. The guide was actually great, she left us alone to roam at the destinations, and having a small bus meant we could take backroads instead of the highway, which was amazingly scenic.

I’d visited Stonehenge in 1997 when it was a pull-off next to the highway and you simply got off of the motorway, parked in a dirt parking lot, walked a bit, and then admired the stones from a few feet away, kept back by a small rope barrier. Things have changed dramatically since then, with the highway relocated, the paths around the stones much farther back, and 1000x the number of people. It was still a really neat place to go; it combines history and engineering, two of my favorite topics, while also giving a druid vibe that I fully support.

Following the visit with the stones we were off to Bath, a city that still feels very much like it must have in the 1600s. I didn’t actually visit the “bath” that gives the town its name – I saw it in 1997, and rather than being a Roman bath it’s actually a Victorian estimation of what a Roman bath might look like – but did roam all over, admiring some truly impressive stone buildings. Our guide did a short walking tour where she shared how the waters from the hot spring were renowned for having “magical” healing properties and how Queen Anne swore that after drinking the water she felt revitalized, but today scientists believe that long ago many people suffered from anemia, so a shot of mineral-rich hot spring water would have simply given them the iron they were lacking and thus a massive energy boost.

For our last stop we were sworn to secrecy on its location, but it was one of England’s best preserved old villages, with rules in place to prevent any alteration of buildings. Doors and ceilings were low, there wasn’t a single beam or roof that wasn’t warped or sagging, the church was ancient, and one of the pubs dated back to the 1300s. I had a pint at a pub that was “only” a few hundred years old before we returned to the bus for our trip home. All in all, spending the day seeing ancient wonders and historical villages made for one of the better Tuesdays a person could have.

The world’s most famous henge.

Pulteney Bridge in Bath.

Undergrounds and Overgrounds

Posted from London, England at 12:03 am, August 15th, 2023

The days have been very full so far on this trip, which hasn’t left much time to process photos, but hopefully a few will be ready for upcoming entries. Sadly, on a day that saw visits to Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London, the photos are still on my camera and I’ve not had a chance to look at them yet.

Audrey left for Canterbury yesterday, and after seeing her off to the train station I made my way to Westminster Abbey, only to see a sign at the end of a long queue stating that tickets for the day were sold out. Never one to miss a Gothic Cathedral, I discovered that purchasing a single day London Pass got me in without a ticket, and thanks to the miracle that is the internet I was in the door a short time later. The grand cathedrals always put me in awe, obviously from their historical and cultural significance, but mostly from their engineering; these things were built hundreds of years before Columbus sailed in a time where they didn’t have steam engines, much less electricity or other modern machinery. The stone was carved by hand, it was lifted hundreds of feet in the air by hand, and the craftsmanship was so good that 800 years later it’s still standing solid, all from a time when people were being burned alive for witchcraft and books had to be copied by hand.

From Westminster I made a visit to the Tower of London. I was in England once before in 1997, and we visited the Tower, but it was an incredibly short visit, and I honestly don’t remember much aside from the fact that we skipped the Crown Jewels due to the line. This time I had several hours and made sure to see the Crown Jewels, but maybe because I’m an American I came away thinking that it was all a bit silly; it’s hard enough to take politicians seriously these days, so trying to imagine Kevin McCarthy or Joe Biden with a scepter in his hand or a fuzzy crown on his head? It’s obviously neat to see the world’s largest diamond and so many other precious objects, but I couldn’t help thinking how odd it is in today’s world to still have so much wealth tied up in jewelry, golden serving plates, and other showpieces. What I did love about the Tower was the history, and (again) the engineering. They built a massive stone fortress a thousand years ago with fifteen foot thick walls, rising 100 feet into the air, and did it all using just brute strength and ingenuity, and I spent a lot of time roaming around looking at walls, doors, beams, and everything else that has stood on this site since it was built in the 1080s.

The day ended with an adventure on the subway, otherwise known as the Tube, otherwise known as the Underground, where I ironically had to take a line named “Overground”, I assume because it was mostly above-ground. After (mostly) successfully navigating two subway transfers and a bus trip I met a friend for drinks and Indian food, as well as much laughter, before again (mostly) successfully navigating the public transit system back to Victoria station and the hotel.

Mausoleums and Beatles

Posted from London, England at 1:55 pm, August 13th, 2023

After avoiding saturated fat for months I expected that I would need to relax my diet during this trip, but I was not prepared for the “English Breakfast Bap”, which is apparently a fried egg, two massive sausages, and three strips of bacon on a Brioche bun. It was tasty, and so far I haven’t had a heart attack, but we’ll see how tomorrow goes.

Following the cholesterol-with-a-side-of-grease for breakfast I walked the two miles to the British Museum, a place with so many impressive artifacts that it could easily be split into a dozen separate museums. Luckily I had read a suggestion to book an off-hours tour, so I entered with a group of about twelve other people an hour before opening and we had the Egyptian galleries to ourselves before the mobs descended. From there much time was spent battling through tour groups in the midst of archaeological treasures, but entering a room to discover the impressive statues that once adorned the Parthenon, or seeing the remnants of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, made it much easier to ignore the hordes shoving their way past.

After five hours at the museum fatigue was setting in, so I rambled home through St. James’s Park (no pigeon friends this time), past the guards in the fuzzy hats at Buckingham Palace, then rested for a bit before taking off for our next adventure. Audrey’s friend Brian Kehew is apparently in London at the same time as us, and while Abbey Road studios isn’t open for tours, they do open for lectures two weekends every year and have called in Brian and his friend Kevin to give those lectures since they wrote the definitive book on the Beatles’ time at Abbey Road. So yet again following our “never say no when Brian calls, because it will be awesome” rule, we met at Abbey Road at 5pm and were ushered through the locked gates with about 100 other Beatles fans to hear Brian and Kevin give a 90 minute lecture on the history of the studios from Studio 2, which is the studio in which the Beatles recorded almost all of their music. I hadn’t planned on visiting Abbey Road, but sitting in the room where so many great songs were born, and hearing the inside scoop on how it happened from a friend of ours, will be a very cool memory.

Jolly Olde Adventures

Posted from London, England at 11:50 am, August 12th, 2023

2023’s big adventure is underway. We left Los Angeles at 5pm yesterday, slept for somewhere between 3 and 7 minutes during the 10.5 hour flight, and arrived in England where we proceeded to roam all over Central London. In a city known for its history, culture, architectural & religious monuments, and impressive museums, the day’s highlights were a flock of overly-enthusiastic pigeons in St. James’s Park. In my defense I’m hitting the British Museum first thing tomorrow morning, and we arrived at Westminster Abbey too late to go inside, but that being said, the birds were a lot of fun today.

Many more adventures should follow over the coming three weeks.

A creature of questionable intelligence, with a fearless bird friend on his shoulder.

Goodbye 2013

Posted from Culver City, California at 4:38 pm, February 20th, 2023

The server that used to run mountaininterval.org, as well as a few other sites, was coming up on its tenth birthday, so it seemed like a good time to move on from 2013 and upgrade to a new machine. I think I migrated everything over successfully, but if anyone has issues logging in, leaving comments, or anything else please let me know.

15 Years of Bad Predictions

Posted from Culver City, California at 11:12 pm, January 23rd, 2023

For reasons that are now lost to history, back in 2009 I thought it might be fun to make some predictions about the coming year. That initial post started a string of fifteen straight years of making ill-informed and usually incorrect guesses about what was to transpire over the upcoming twelve months. While the journal hasn’t seen a ton of posts over the past few years, the tradition of bad predictions has lived on, so without further ado, here’s a list of 15 things that probably won’t happen in 2023.

SpaceX is going to have several spectacular failed launch attempts of its new Starship rocket, but will get the vehicle to orbit.

With the caveat that in a few years they will almost certainly be launching and landing the world’s largest and most powerful rocket regularly, Starship is a brand new vehicle using a lot of unproven technologies, and Elon Musk is known to push the boundaries, so I think this year they will have a few spectacular failures. If it has a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly anywhere near the launchpad they will need to spend months rebuilding the launch infrastructure, so a single failure could result in six months of delays before they can try again.
Apple is going to launch a new VR headset, but despite a ton of initial press it won’t catch on with consumers.

VR headsets seem (to me) like a cool idea that I would never want to actually own, but I’m also getting to the “you kids stay off of my lawn” stage of life, so maybe I’m missing something. I think augmented reality glasses will be a thing soon – imagine driving and having directions appear on your glasses, or going to a party and not having to worry about forgetting everyone’s name – but a clunky VR box to wear around so that you can experience a TRON-like view of the Grand Canyon from your living room? It seems fun once, but not something people will want to spend $1500 on.
The Ukraine war will end by summer, with Russia ceding all claims to Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, in exchange for some sort of face-saving gesture like a promise that Ukraine won’t join NATO.

Everyone has been inspired by Ukraine’s defense against a much larger foe, but Russia continues to do incredible damage to Ukraine despite slowly losing this war. Putin needs a way to save face, and Ukraine needs Russia to stop raining destruction down upon them, so once Ukraine has retaken its territory I think that both sides will be highly motivated to negotiate an end to hostilities.
Ford will be responsible for 30% of all US EV sales by the end of the year.

As of Q3, Ford had 7.2% of EV sales, but they are massively ramping up production of the F-150, Mach-E, and Ford Transit van, all of which have enormous demand. Ford is going to be able to sell as many EVs as they can build, and all indications are that they will be able to build a lot.
The US will default on its debt for the first time in history.

This is a prediction that I hope doesn’t come true, but in its early days the current Republican House majority has let its far right members drive the agenda, with the supposed moderates doing nothing to stop them. As a result, I think Democrats will refuse to make concessions for agreeing to pay the country’s bills, Republicans will be unwilling to back down, and markets will panic as the US finds itself facing default. My 401k is not excited about this prospect, so again, I hope this prediction is very, very wrong.
Tesla will begin deliveries of its new Cybertruck by June 2023, but they won’t offer the truck for the $39,900 that was initially announced, and won’t sell a model that costs less than $50,000 in 2023.

Tesla has a history of announcing prices for vehicles that don’t materialize; for example the Model 3 was supposed to cost $35,000 when it was announced, but the cheapest version of the vehicle today is $43,990, and that’s after a recent $3,000 price drop. While they will claim that a $39,900 Cybertruck is coming some day, I’m betting we definitely won’t see that price in 2023, and probably won’t see it in the future.
Donald Trump will drop out of the 2024 Presidential Race before the end of the year.

Republican politicians have blamed Trump for losses in the past three elections, and polls seem to indicate that Republican voters want someone new. Meanwhile, there is an argument to be made that Trump is primarily running to fund his legal troubles or to benefit his own businesses, and with money not flowing as fast these days he may seek out other options for addressing his financial difficulties. With the current Justice Department understandably reticent to set a precedent by prosecuting a former President, it seems possible that a deal may be offered to end some of the legal cases against him in exchange for him getting out of the political spotlight, and with pressure coming from the Right as well it could lead to an early exit from the Presidential race.
Layoffs will continue in the technology sector in 2023, but there won’t be a broad recession.

Statistics indicate that about 200,000 jobs have been cut in the technology sector during the most recent round of retrenchment, but as a tech worker I actually think that this was overdue. COVID made remote work the norm, allowing a massive number of people to change jobs, and for the technology sector in particular this led to gigantic salary increases as companies struggled to keep existing employees and replace lost employees. Today a lot of tech companies have people on the payroll at huge cost, and as a result it seems likely there will be significant cost-cutting going on in tech, while other industries will be able to continue as normal.
At least two of the following three things will happen in the NFL: Tom Brady will retire (for real this time), Aaron Rodgers will retire, and Jimmy Garoppolo will join the New York Jets.

While I’m usually bad at predictions, I’m particularly bad at predicting the NFL, but the only reason Rodgers and Brady have to continue playing is that they want to win Super Bowls, and neither Tampa Bay nor Green Bay are favorites to win the Super Bowl next year. Meanwhile, San Francisco can’t afford to keep Jimmy Garoppolo, and the Jets think they are a quarterback away from going to the Super Bowl.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny will be a flop, earning less than the $317 million that the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull made.

Everyone wants to see another good Indiana Jones movie, but the last one featured a terrible plot and CGI monkeys, and there doesn’t seem to be any good reason why they’re making another movie. Let’s hope they go out with a bang, but it’s been 42 years since Raiders of the Lost Ark came out; if you want a franchise to last that long, follow the lead of James Bond and get a fresh cast and creative crew.
Joe Biden will announce that he is running for a second term, and no major Democrat aside from (maybe) Bernie Sanders will announce that they are running against him.

Biden quietly accomplished a ton during his first two years, and while there are serious concerns about his age, I’m not sure if the Democrats have an obviously better option to put on the ballot for 2024.
Kathleen Kennedy will be removed as the head of Lucasfilm.

As an unabashed Star Wars fan I’m impressed by the new Mandalorian and Andor Star Wars shows, but have been massively disappointed by most of the new films and most of their other shows. Kennedy doesn’t seem to be a fan of Star Wars, and the franchise is too valuable to Disney to not have someone better at the helm. Were I betting man, Dave Filoni or Jon Favreau would be my picks to steer the ship moving forward.
Twitter will see declining revenue and user engagement under Elon Musk, but no viable competitor will emerge by the end of the year.

Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter has seemed to me to be a clinic in how not to run a business. He has alienated advertisers, fired employees without understanding their role, and fundamentally misunderstood that Twitter isn’t a technology company as much as it is a moderated community of users. That being said, there isn’t yet a viable competitor, and none seems to be on the horizon, so he’ll have a while yet to figure things out.
Athing Mu of the USA will break the 40 year old world record in the women’s 800m.

Athing Mu has been unbeatable since she was a high schooler in New Jersey. Last year she caught COVID and it affected her season, but this year I think she’ll come back with a vengeance and is capable of breaking one of track and field’s oldest world records.
2023 will see two “quiet” supersonic planes successfully flying over our heads.

NASA is planning to fly their X-59 plane in 2023, and expects the plane to have a sonic “thump” that is only 1/1000th as loud as the sonic boom of existing supersonic planes. Meanwhile Boom Aerospace should be flying their XB-1 plane by mid-year. As Boeing’s long-delayed 777-X proves, there are no guarantees with test aircraft, but just as SpaceX revolutionized access to space over the past decade, I think we’re on the verge of seeing supersonic passenger travel return to the skies.

And there they are. Fifteen predictions for the fifteenth year of making predictions, and based on history most of these will be laughably incorrect twelve months from now. Still, it’s a fun little exercise, and I’ll see everyone at the start of 2024 to recount how awful this year’s prognostications actually were.

2022 Predictions Recap

Posted from Culver City, California at 9:58 am, January 8th, 2023

Here’s the recap of my annual exercise in public embarrassment, otherwise known as the predictions about the coming year. The original 2022 predictions were written twelve months ago in January, during the halcyon days in which Tom Brady was still retired and Elon Musk hadn’t yet decided to purchase Twitter and ~~burn it to the ground~~ lead the company to newfound glory.

Democrats will keep the Senate, gaining between 1-3 seats.

CORRECT. I’m off to an unexpectedly strong start. Democrats picked up Pennsylvania and held on in Georgia (decisively winning the “vampire vs werewolf” demographic), thus increasing their majority by one seat from 50 to 51.
Republicans will regain the House, gaining 20-30 seats.

WRONG. Republicans did win the House, but to everyone’s surprise they netted only nine additional seats. Since it took fifteen votes for the normally-routine task of electing a Speaker, I’m debating converting my 401k to canned goods before the markets have to face the fallout from likely government shutdowns and debt ceiling defaults over the next two years.
SpaceX will have a successful orbital test of their new Starship vehicle, but won’t successfully land the vehicle by the end of the year.

WRONG. SpaceX was blasting its new rocket into the sky seemingly every week back in 2021, but despite getting clearance from the FAA for an orbital test, they didn’t attempt a single launch in 2022. Hopefully 2023 will be the year that sees this game-changing rocket usher us into the Star Trek future we’ve been waiting for since the Apollo program ended.
A viable Facebook competitor is finally going to emerge.

WRONG. I feel like I’ve been predicting this one for years, and for years it hasn’t happened. There are some obvious challenges – any new social network is pointless unless it has a lot of users, so barrier to entry is massive – but Facebook is distracted with selling virtual real estate to cartoon characters when the world really just needs a social network that can effectively help people find dates, jobs, and plumbers.
Median home prices will decline 5-10 percent by the end of the year.

WRONG. Median home prices ended 2021 at $423,600, and despite the mortgage rates climbing from 3% to 7% in 2022, average home prices still increased to $454,900 as of Q3. With only one out of five correct, the 2022 predictions are obviously not going well thus far.
President Biden’s Build Back Better bill will pass in some form this year.

NAILED IT. Joe Manchin made things dicey for a while, but once they tricked him by changing the name to the Inflation Reduction Act, the House & Senate couldn’t move fast enough to pass this thing before the election. The engineer in me is excited to see legislation that speeds up the transition to batteries, wind and solar, while the environmentalist in me is looking forward to seeing a future that hopefully has a few unmelted glaciers in it.
Tesla will face lawsuits or otherwise be forced to issue refunds for its delays in delivering on its “full self driving” package.

CORRECT. A class action lawsuit was filed in September. Elon Musk has been making yearly promises that full self driving is “only a year away” every year since 2014, so as much as I admire Tesla’s engineering, it seems only fair to start sending out refunds to people who didn’t realize that when Elon said “one year away” he was using Jupiter years and not Earth years.
COVID will fade into the background and life will return to normal once the Omicron wave subsides.

CORRECT. In retrospect this prediction seems relatively obvious, but after nearly three years of masks and lockdowns it has been a nice return to normalcy to be able to visit friends or travel on an airplane without feeling like a character in a post-apocalypic disaster movie.
Amazon is going to announce a shipping service to compete with UPS and Fedex.

WRONG. This seems like it could be an easy profit center for Amazon, but I’m a programmer, not a businessman, so I’ll defer to the people that actually know what they’re doing to explain why a company that is already delivering to the same places as UPS each day couldn’t also make money shipping private parcels.
There will be monster trades for at least two of these three: Aaron Rodgers, Russell Wilson and Derek Carr. I’ll also predict that Deshaun Watson is going to stay unemployed and that the Browns are sticking with Baker.

WRONG. At least I got Russell Wilson correct? When I wrote these predictions last year, Tom Brady was still retired, and I had no idea that the Browns wanted to make a younger version of Bill Cosby the face of their franchise. As someone recently wrote in the Washington Post, I’m not going to stop watching football, but I probably should.
The Ford F-150 Lightning will run away with Motortrend’s 2022 Truck of the Year award.

CORRECT. Not only did it win, but it won unanimously. I’m really impressed with Ford’s electrification efforts so far, and the current F-150 was built on a platform that is still optimized for gas powered vehicles. When they eventually switch their manufacturing to a new platform that is optimized for electric Ford is going to give Tesla a run for their money.
This year will finally see major progress in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

WRONG. Not only didn’t this happen, but Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected for a sixth term, so the prospects of a peaceful resolution anytime soon appear grim. Sometimes I don’t understand the humans.
At least three more major newspapers will follow the Chicago Sun Times and become non-profits.

WRONG. As far as I can tell not even a single newspaper took the non-profit route this year. Does anyone reading this journal have a spare hundred million to throw at the LA Times or other newspapers? The death of local news is going to be something that historians are writing about fifty years from now.
Video game streaming will become a major selling point of streaming services like Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Apple TV.

WRONG. The fact that this prediction didn’t come true surprises me greatly. There are rumors that Amazon is spending a billion dollars on the Lord of the Rings series, surely they could get a better return on investment by putting Wii Golf and Doom on Fire TV sticks?
The Browns will win the AFC North and will win at least 11 regular season games.

WRONG. I am never making another prediction about the Browns again.

Final score: 5/15, which surprisingly is an above-average result. 2023 will mark the fifteenth year of making incorrect guesses about the future; those predictions should be online in the next couple of weeks.

mountaininterval.org - Ryan's Journal

Year: 2023