The numbers say a lot:

• 1600 miles driven
• 37 gallons of gasoline burned
• 24 miles hiked
• 4400 feet climbed
• All in 86 hours

What the numbers don’t tell you is that I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to the Grand Canyon.

Spring is the right time to visit the south rim of the canyon. Everything is open, the temperature is pleasant, and the crowds are relatively small.

I’ve always heard that photos don’t do the Grand Canyon justice, and I’d have to agree. What’s more, I found it difficult to appreciate just how BIG the Canyon was until I backpacked down into it. The 4400 feet between the rim and the river become much more daunting when you’re at the bottom.

Some of the photos from my trip may make it to my Flickr stream, but most of the rest will stay in a separate gallery, which includes a number of captions that say more about my trip.

I visited Yosemite today and was struck by the beauty of the environment and the awesome size of the natural wonders.  Still, it could not compare with the beauty of the spring landscape on the drive back to Stanford.

With just a couple of hours until sunset and some thin clouds covering the sky, the world was bathed in a surreal glow.  All of the greenery seemed somehow more vibrant.  All of the roads seemed more perfectly in harmony with the terrain they traversed.  The trees fit with the fields, placed where they belonged, still in the calm air.

The drive from about Big Oak Flat, CA to Knights Ferry, CA was one of, if not the most, beautiful I have ever experienced.  I was taken by what met my eyes.  I felt an immense peace with the world.

I was torn between stopping and photographing it or continuing on, but I finally decided that I had better take some shots.  I felt that what I was seeing was one of those special moments, when everything aligns in a way that might happen once a lifetime, and I knew I would never again have that opportunity.

With the window closing, I focused on a single tree in the distance.  I took some photos and continued on.  A few minutes later, the sun broke through the clouds, sank lower in the sky, and the moment was lost but to my memory and my camera.

Well, lost but to me and the handful of other people that I saw hastily parked on the side of the road, cameras in hand, snapping photos.

Tomorrow: I begin my drive to the Grand Canyon for several days of backpacking.

(NOTE: If you don’t want to ruin what I am about to mention for yourself, don’t research it.  Stated more clearly, watch it first, THEN look it up on Wikipedia/IMDb.)

Primer.  It’s confusing.  It’s technical.  It’s good.

In a development that I think was inevitable, the New York Times published an article about hacking pacemakers from afar. Of course, “afar” in this case means a few inches, but it’s the principle of the matter that counts.

This article is laughable for a number of reasons:

First, we in the medical industry are well-aware of these “vulnerabilities” and have been for years. Older devices didn’t have the processing power to implement a meaningful encryption scheme. When your main processor is an 8-bit microcontroller running at a few hundred kilohertz, and your power budget is low enough to ensure operation from a primary-cell battery for several years, there isn’t a lot of headroom to address an impractical security threat.

Second, the attack requires extreme proximity to be functional. All older implanted devices incorporating telemetry do so using H-field communications; Maxwell tells us that these magnetic fields decay by the cube of the distance, as opposed to the square of the distance for E-fields. The signals are so weak that we had trouble making reliable connections from inches away, and we designed the things. It is possible to make receivers that can pick up the signal from much farther away (meters), but sending commands back to the implanted device still requires extreme proximity due to the design of the implanted receiver. Cutting-edge devices that use E-field telemetry in the MICS band (and thus a range measured in meters instead of centimeters) have much-improved security.

Third, the comments by Boston Scientific that they have “mitigated these risks” are misleading at best. Any sufficiently determined attacker can break any practical system. Plus, their older (and widely used) H-field devices are just as vulnerable as Medtronic’s older H-field devices.

That awkward phase in life has begun.  Not well publicized, it caught me off guard.

I don’t know how to address my friends.

Do I still use the nicknames/monikers/last names from undergrad for my friends from that era?  Do I just use first names for everybody?

For some indeterminate reason, I have always referred to some friends by their first names, so those situations are at least unambiguous.  Unfortunately, a large number of people remain in a problematic zone.

A similar problem is how I address myself, particularly in informal situations.  Do I use just my first name?  Do I use just my last name, which is how I was commonly identified in years past?

Among friends, neither issue is all that important.  Still, I don’t want to appear out of touch, like a middle-aged person still using the slang from his adolescence.