Surfing the Luminiferous Ether

I often travel with a tripod because it is absolutely necessary to capture stunning night images, like the night shot from Victoria Peak in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, tripods usually feel like they’re in a gray area as far as airport security goes. Most countries have a catch-all category where “anything that’s not on the list that the screener says is a threat to security can be stopped.”

I recently attended a Trusted Computing Group meeting in Nice, France. When I wasn’t working, the food was astounding and the photography was simply amazing. Provence is blessed with some of the best light I’ve ever seen, and colors pop like nowhere else I have visited.

Unfortunately, when it came time to leave Nice, the airport security screener decided that my tripod represented a threat to French aviation security and required that I check my bag of photographic equipment. I was surprised by this because I have visited a dozen airports in Europe in the past year, all of which have allowed my tripod in cabin luggage. I had a bit of heartburn checking my camera equipment just before the bag cut-off, knowing that I would have to fetch it at baggage claim at Heathrow (if it even arrived).

When I returned home, I wrote a letter to the Nice airport requesting clarification on whether my photographic equipment was allowed. I mailed my letter just after the July 4 holiday. For good measure, I sent a similar letter to the Nice convention and visitor’s group. One of the main draws to Provence is the scenery, and clamping down on serious photography could potentially affect tourism.

Much to my amazement, I received a letter back from the airport today:

The key paragraph of the letter is the second to last one, which reads (in the original French):

Suite à votre lettre, nous avons réuni les services compétents de l’Etat, et il a été décidé d’assouplir ces mesures. Nous allons donc demander aux agents de Sûreté de ne plus retire les trépieds d’appareil photos. Vous pourrez donc emporter votre trépied en cabine lors de votre prochain voyage à partir de l’aéroport Nice Côte d’Azur.

My rough translation of this is:

After your letter, we have met with the relevant government officials, and have decided to change our security measures. We will ask that security agents no longer stop tripods and photographic equipment. On your next trip from the Nice Côte d’Azur airport, you may take your tripod in your cabin luggage.

A few thoughts on the letter I received:

• My response appears to be personal and is in no way a form letter. It directly addresses my comments on the security experience and the questions I asked.
• I received a response in less than three weeks, which included the French national holiday and two trans-Atlantic mail deliveries. I don’t think I’ve ever received a response to a complaint from a government body in the U.S. in just three weeks.
• French airport officials have changed their policies based on traveler feedback! (And a foreign traveler, no less.) I can think of at least one airport security agency that doesn’t care what travelers think.
• I once wrote to the Transportation Security Administration because I had a question on whether my rugged internal-frame backpack would be allowed on airplanes. I began my letter with a statement to the effect of “I have a question about whether an item that is not mentioned on the TSA’s lists…” The response was to send me the same list that I had written about, and indeed, the list about which I was seeking clarification.
• When can I go back to Nice?

Sven Mesecke arranged for his employer, Buffalo, to sponsor the social event. Sven showed up with his daughter Abby, proving that we start working on developing wireless engineers young!

Our even was held at Stubbs’s Bar-B-Q, and featured some of the live music that Austin is famous for. I haven’t gone to that many concerts, so it was a bit of an eye-opening experience to be in the room with the enthusiasm and energy of the bands. Young Abby introduced the first band of the night, The Ginn Sisters:

Following a break, Guy Forsyth took the stage. Due to the heat, I had to flee the crowded area downstairs for the relative cool of the less crowded upper floor:

Throughout the evening, people were playing pool. I’m sure that the pool table was attractive in part because it was located inside the air-conditioned area. Here’s Dave Stephenson preparing to break:

It was an awesome event. My only problem was that a meeting the next morning was of interest, and 8:30 am in Austin is 6:30 am for an out-of-state Californian. I had to leave before the second set was done just to get to bed at a reasonable hour.

I have not sat down to formally add up how long I have spent in various countries, but I know that if I did so, the United Kingdom would come out on top. My first visit to the UK was over fifteen years ago, and in 1999 I spent three separate months on assignment on the outskirts of London near Heathrow. In spite of all of the time I have spent in the UK, though, I have never been to Stonehenge. On my recent trip, I decided to take advantage of my rental car and see the place.

On reflection, I think I was lucky and slipped between two waves of tour buses. As I arrived, a great number of people were leaving the site, and it stayed relatively uncrowded for the duration of my visit. Many of my photos show the crowds; the one below of the main circle is an exception.

English Heritage, the government body that manages Stonehenge, provides free audio guide instead of erecting interpretive signs that clutter the landscape. While generally well done, the audio guide has one particular difficulty versus signs, which is that the ravens that gather at Stonehenge make a great deal of noise. (At the reduced resolution of the photo below, the ravens are not visible as much more than specks, though.)

My departure was hurried by the arrival of dark clouds blotting out the blue sky. By the time I made it to the car, the rain had picked up and was quite heavy. Even though the rain had held off during my visit, the whole experience was still a fairly cold one. Stonehenge is set slightly above the surrounding terrain, and there is a great deal of wind whipping through the monument.

(This is the tenth and final part in a series about my trip to Athens. See parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine.)

As I walked around the foot of the Acropolis, there was another “aha!” language moment. Monuments and sacred sites around the Acropolis were connected by a foot path called the Peripatos. Its shared root with the English word “peripatetic” was obvious (in part because that adjective was widely used to describe Rudy Perpich, the governor of Minnesota when I attended elementary school).

Off the Peripatos, the Stoa of Eumenes connects the Theater of Dionysis to the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. This photo was taken facing the Odeon.

At night, the Acropolis is lit beautifully, and stands out against the dark sky. Even at night, the brightly lit Acropolis serves as a beacon while walking around the city.

The same night, I took a photo of myself with the Acropolis as a backdrop. Unlike the previous photo, I had to keep the shutter speed down so my image would remain sharp. Exposing the dimly lit far-off background correctly required an extreme case of dragging the shutter. I mounted the camera on a tripod, exposed the photo for six seconds to collect enough light for the background, and used an on-camera flash to expose myself in the foreground.

On my first night in Athens, I walked from my hotel on Syngrou to the Acropolis. Although entry to the Acropolis was closed by the time I finally arrived near the Acropolis, I was able to set up my camera on the Areopagus and capture my exhausted grin after finally making it through the snowstorms.

(This is part 9 in a series about my trip to Athens. See parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight.)

History is inescapable when visiting Athens. (For me, that’s the major attraction.) On my visit, I made sure to save some time for the National Archaeological Museum. As you might expect, it has one of the best collections of treasures from ancient Greece.

Many of the most famous pieces in the museum are massive imposing marble statues. My favorite piece in the museum was not one of them. In the museum’s prehistoric collection, there is a relatively small gallery with artifacts from the Mycenaean civilization, including some tables with writing in the extremely old Linear B script. Linear B was used over three thousand years ago, and most of the writing that survives is everyday topics. If I recall the signs in the museum correctly, these tablets have livestock inventory and property records. Given the small size and fleeting nature of some of the records, these are probably some of the world’s oldest Post-it notes.

One of the major themes of the museum is the changing nature of funerary markers. Several funerary markers in the shape of lions exist, all of which have detailed, flame-shaped manes.

At a dead end in one of the inner rooms was perhaps the greatest treat of the visit, a small sculpture of Athena Parthenos (Athena the virgin). A massive version graced the interior of Parthenon; contemporary accounts indicate the original in the Parthenon used over a ton of gold. Two replicas believed to be faithful survive to this day, and the only complete one is the statue exhibited in the museum.

Details on the copy are incredible, down to the snakes that serve as a belt and the locks of hair that trail down on to the breastplate. (Reflections from nearby windows are unavoidable; as one of the foremost treasures of the museum, this piece is shown only in a protective case.)

In the center of the museum, a sculpture gallery shows off the height of Hellenistic sculptural achievement. I have always been impressed by the ability of sculpture to show movement. One of my favorite pieces in the Louvre is Diana of Versailles, showing the goddess of the hunt in pursuit of her prey. The original idea would have belonged to Greek sculptors, as shown here.

The gallery also has a striking statue of Aphrodite, holding a richly-detailed drapery.

(This is part 8 in a series about my trip to Athens. See parts one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven.)

Contrary to popular belief among people I’ve talked to after returning home from Athens, the tallest point in the city is not the Acropolis. That honor belongs to Λυκαβηττός (Mt. Lycabettus). Lycabettus rises dramaticaly above the rest of the city, as seen here from the Acropolis shortly after moonrise on the evening I arrived:

On the morning of my last day in Athens, I decided to head to the top of Lycabettus for the view. As I left the hotel early, there were still clubbers heading home from the night before, even though daylight was beginning to break. My trip began with a subway ride, but the subway only takes you to the base of Lycabettus. After you alight from the train and get to street level, there are numerous stairs for you to climb. As I looked up one pedestrian street composed entirely of stairs, I certainly felt the resemblance of Athens to my home city of San Francisco.

When I reached the base of Lycabettus, I discovered that the funicular railway doesn’t start running early in the morning. Fortunately, there is a footpath up the side of the hill, so I started climbing. When I reached the top, there was a dramatic reward. This is the view looking south from Lycabettus. The Temple of Olympian Zeus is in the foreground, and the street that runs from the temple towards the upper right is Andrea Syngrou Avenue, one of the major surface streets in Athens. At the right edge of the photo, the imposing building is the New Acropolis museum.

The real treat, however, is the view of the Acropolis itself just after sunrise:

This post begins with a simple observation: airline baggage handlers are hard on luggage. For all that I joke about letting a friend stow away in a bag on a neat trip, I would never subject them to the handling I can only imagine checked luggage undergoing.

My main checked bag is a Victorinox rolling case that I acquired at REI almost three years ago before my first trip to Australia. Since then, I have traveled a lot. My back of the envelope calculation is that the bag has flown with me on around 250,000 miles of flights, and it has suffered at the hands of the airlines. Part of the reason that I chose Victorinox was the Carry with Confidence guarantee, which covers damage from airline mishandling (or is that regular airline handling?).

At this point, less than three years into the bag’s service with me, it has several major problems. First, the handle split. While I can work around this by holding the split handle closed, it does require somewhat more force than is necessary and is quite tiring over long distances. Also, as you can see in the photo below, the soft rubber grip has detached from the handle and flops around so that it no longer provides cushioning.

Second, the zipper that holds the expansion frame in place had a couple of zipper teeth fail, and it’s impossible to unzip. I think the problem here is that the expansion zipper is on a corner of the bag, and it got bashed in the bowels of an airport bag handling system.

Around the handle well, there’s a small plastic rim that protects the edge of the fabric. It’s shattered off on my bag, leaving the fabric loose, where it can easily be caught in the bag handling machines in the future.

Finally, there’s also a jam on the main zipper. The jam occurs on a corner, so I assume that some machine decided to bite off the corners of some of the zipper teeth. It is not possible to drag a slider through the jam, even though the zipper is designed to be self-healing.

On the same flight where the main zipper developed a jam, one of the sliders completely detached from one of the two zipper tracks:

Fortunately for me, REI sells quality equipment. The Victorinox guarantee covers aggressively bad airline handling and hungry airport luggage transport systems. (Interestingly, it applies to my Werks Traveler 2.0 bag, but not its 3.0 successor.) Immediately after checking in to the hotel, I pulled out my camera, took the pictures that appear in this post, and contacted Victorinox by e-mail. They responded with a return authorization number within an hour, and I sent the bag back to them for repair. They received the bag this morning; I’ll blog about any further updates.

What I’ve learned from this experience is that there’s a huge range among manufacturers on warranty service. Any manufacturer can offer a lifetime warranty, but the key is what they exclude and how easy it is to take advantage of their services. Victorinox was very easy to deal with by e-mail, and I had a return authorization before I returned to the USA. My main carry-on bag is a Travelpro that I purchased ten years ago. It has held up fairly well, and it also has a “lifetime warranty.” Unlike Victorinox, claiming service requires my original purchase receipt and, in case I might have retained my original receipt, the pieces of paper enclosed with the bag when it was new! When I replace it, probably later this year, I will be buying from a company that actually lets me use its guarantee.

(This is part 7 in a series about my trip to Athens. See parts one, two, three, four, five, and six.)

As I was wandering around the old areas of Athens, I stumbled across the entrance to Hadrian’s Library. All that remains of the library itself is part of the wall that flanked the entry to the library, though the ornate Corinthian columns are well preserved.

On the library site, a succession of churches was built after the Roman Empire split. The earliest church was called the Tetraconch Church because it consisted of four semicircles around the altar. Only a few parts remain in the ruin, including this archway and set of three columns:

More strikingly, a part of the Tetraconch Church’s floor mosaic remains. (Note how the ropes at the right-hand side block foot traffic to protect the mosaic.)

(This is part 6 in a series about my trip to Athens. See parts one, two, three, four, and five.)

Towards the end of my trip in Athens, I started used the beautiful Athens metro to get around. As a word of warning, if you decide to use the metro to get around, be sure to allow time to see the displays and read the signs. Riding the Athens metro is like visiting a museum that happens to have subway tracks through it.

I was fortunate enough to be staying close enough to the historic areas of the Akropolis and the Plaka that I was on foot for the first few days. To see some of the attractions that were farther afield, I had to use the subway.

When you enter the subway, the first thing you notice is that it’s beautiful. Most of the time, the subway is just a way to get around. To be fair, some subway systems are more attractive than others; it is unsurprising that the distinctive art nouveau style of Paris Métropolitain comes to mind. The Athens metro has no advertisements, and even though it has been open for eight years, it is still amazingly clean.

Building the Athens metro was a difficult proposition because of the layers of history in the ground in Athens. Due to the need to protect the antiquities discovered when building the metro, the Greek Ministry of Culture was a key partner in the project. Preservation of artifacts discovered during construction meant that completion was slow as archaeologists did painstaking preservation work.

Many of the artifacts unearthed during construction are on display, and are of uniformly high quality. A guide sign in each station relates the position of the station to where the archeological activities occurred.

It is quite funny to realize that many Athens subway stations have better exhibitions of ancient Greek artifacts than many museums! Here is an excellent example of how the displays are just part of the museum. At the Ακρόπολη (Akropoli) station, there is a large pottery display just beyond the ticket barriers.

When you get down to the platform, the station just gleams. Without advertisements to clutter up the wall, the exhibition continues. On the platform of the Akropoli station, there is a replica of the Parthenon frieze that is currently on display in the British Museum.

In the lobby of the station, another replica, this time of part of the sculptures from the pediment of the Parthenon.

The main transfer point for metro riders is Σύνταγμα (Syntagma, meaning “constitution”), and the station has the largest exhibition. At the lobby level, a wall shows how layers of history accrete over time.

My favorite exhibit was at Ευαγγελισμός (Evangelismos), the station closest to Lycabettus Hill. As I was walking briskly towards the exit, I saw an ancient aqueduct on display. Nearby signs discuss how the aqueduct was built and maintained, and what was learned about the route of the aqueduct building the station.

(This is part 5 in a series about my trip to Athens. See parts one, two, three, and four.)

One of my favorite museums in Athens is the Museum of the Ancient Agora within in the Stoa of Attalos. Within the agora today, the two anchors at the ends of the large open space are the Temple of Hephastios, set up on a hill, and the Stoa of Attalos, a modern 1950s reconstruction of an ancient building. In the language of ancient Greek architecture, a stoa is a covered walkway typically open to the public. Late examples, like the Stoa of Attalos, were usually two stories, with the first story at least partly open to the air. Here’s a view of the portico on the ground level:

Within the stoa, there is a small gem of a museum on the activities in the ancient agora. As the social hub of the Athenian democratic government, the agora would have housed the administration, legal tribunals, religious sites, and the major marketplace of ancient Athens. Artifacts in the museum show just how carefully the Athenian democracy had to manage the flow of its citizens, and the custom-built technology that helped manage the flow.

Artifact #1: the Kleroterion, which was used for sorting and allocating people. In the photo below, there is a fragment of stone with horizontal slots cut into it. When it was in use, the kleroterion pictured would have stood much higher; some evidence exists for versions of this device that were several feet tall. In the foreground of the photo is a collection of identity tokens.

Athenian democracy used randomness to guard against corruption of the jury system. When a jury needed to be assembled, citizens volunteering would hand their tokens to a presiding official. Based on the citizen’s tribe, the token would be placed into one of the columns. When the matrix was full, the randomness came into play.

Along the left side of the kleroterion ran a tube filled with a mixture of black and white balls. One ball was inserted for each row of slots on the kleroterion. When the official extracted a white ball, the people whose tokens appeared in a row were called to jury service. On the other hand, a black ball meant that the people identified by the tokens in a row would be dismissed. By matching the number of white balls to the desired jury pool size, officials could create a pool with the right number of jurors.

Using the kleroterion took advantage of the elegant simplicity of randomness of the ball mixture to draft jury pools. As I stood in front of the display case, I remember watching Flintstones reruns as a child in the days before my family had cable. While working out in my mind how the kleroterion worked, the thought struck me that although the cartoon had depicted many ingenious devices, none of them were as real as this machine from the ancient world.

Artifact #2: Ostrakons. Athenian democracy had a very special type vote that occurred once a year. In the ancient Greek version of Survivor, the citizens could “vote somebody off the island.” Every year, the assembly gathered. Each citizen was allowed to scratch the name of the person they perceived as the greatest threat to the city-state in to a pot shard, or, in the language of ancient Greece, an ostrakon. Provided that 6,000 votes were cast, the person who received the most votes was ostracised, and sent into exile for a decade.

In school, I learned that the secret ballot was invented in Australia in the 1850s to avoid retaliation against voters. I am not sure how secret the ostrakons were, but presumably, the reason for going with a “write-in” vote as opposed to a show of hands was to avoid as much manipulation of the process as possible. (I believe that later manipulation of the process of ostracism resulted in it being dropped in later centuries.)

For fun, feel free to leave a non-anonymous comment with your country and your vote for Public Enemy No. 1.

Across from the Stoa of Attalos on a hill overlooking the agora stands the Temple of Hephaistos, dedicated to the god of metal-working. This photo shows a view looking westward along the southern collonade, away from the agora.

Under the eastern portico, there is a frieze, but no signs explained what it showed.