Surfing the Luminiferous Ether

(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.

(This is part 4 in the Athens series. See parts one, two, and three.)

One of the hidden gems in my trip to Athens was the Kerameikos, which is at the edge of ancient Athens. The old city wall runs through the site. This photo here shows a footpath just outside the inner city wall.

The city wall was an important demarcation point. According to ancient Athenian custom, the dead were buried outside the city. In addition to the major markers for the rich and famous, the ancient burial grounds have many smaller cylindrical tomb markers for the less well-off.

Within the historical site of the Keremeikos, the major structure is the Pompeion, an old temple. It’s best seen from the street above (the modern street level is a few meters above the level of the ancient ruins).

The Pompeion is set at an angle to the modern city streets, which surprised me. In many cases, modern streets evolved from ancient layouts. Once I made it down into the archeological site, I realized the reason for the precise layout of the Pompeion. Early in the day, the shadows showed me that the Pompeion was perfectly aligned with the rising sun:

Wandering around the historical site, you will move in and out of the ancient boundary of Athens. One of the major features in the site is a path that goes from the main gate at the Kerameikos to Plato’s Academy, which was located outside the city walls. I followed the foot path to the edge of the site, and wondered how many students had taken the path from ancient Athens to the academy over the centuries.

(This is the third post about my trip to Athens. Read part 1 and part 2.)

Although the top of the Acropolis was the first stop, it is a much larger site than just the well-known temples on the top. At the base of the Acropolis next to the footpath up to the entry gate is the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. Although it originally had a wooden roof, all that remains is the restored stone seating and front wall, shown here with the Parthenon in the background:

The seating area is quite steeply sloped. Towards the top, the seating is high enough that it has a view of Athens. With the position that Athens occupies today as a cradle of western culture, it is hard to imagine that it was a fairly small town throughout much of “modern” European history (to pick a date, from 1650 until today). Many of the buildings in Athens were built in the post-war period, which leads to interesting contrasts between the older structures and the more modern buildings shown in the background here:

A brief walk from the Odeon is the oldest theater in Athens. The Dionysis Theater is dedicated to the god of plays and wine, and hosted drama competitions. As the “original” prototype of a theater in Greece, the structure is possibly the oldest theater everywhere, and the template for every theater I’ve ever been to. Originally, seating was probably wooden benches, but stone benches were put in during the Roman period:

Front-row seats had backs, though, to be quite honest, they are not very comfortable.

The stage itself is a simple affair. Seats are built in a semi-circle around a half-circle stage:

Not far from the Acropolis is the massive Temple of Olympian Zeus. Building the temple was a multi-generational project that took over 600 years. Athenian democrats apparently considered it a flight of hubris to build on such a scale. Hadrian, the Roman emperor, suffered no such illusions, and finally completed the temple. After the fall of the Roman empire, such a high-quality cache of stone was rare, and the temple was plundered for other building works. Several substantial columns remain, as seen here in this view looking towards the Acropolis. (Note the huge crane in the background, which I’ll return to.)

Looking from the west, all that remains is the approximately dozen columns. The collapsed column in the foreground fell in a storm in 1852.

In the background of the first picture, there is a massive crane at the Acropolis. Due to the danger of such a large construction machine, several footpaths on the slope of the Acropolis are closed. The crane is transferring objects from the small Acropolis museum at the top to the new Acropolis museum being built at the foot of the fortress that I described in part 2. Here’s a closer look at the crane, from the wall at the south edge:

(This is the second post about my trip to Athens. Part 1 is here.)

My first stop in Athens was the Acropolis. Before my trip, I’d dreamed of visiting the Parthenon for well over a decade. My family doctor grew up in Athens, and her descriptions of growing up in the shadows of history planted the initial seed. Photos and paintings in my art history class in college sealed the deal.

When I finally made it this February, I was in awe of being present at the “original” building. Echoes of the Parthenon are everywhere in Western society. Nearly every bank built prior to the 1950s owes at least some of its architectural structure to the Athenian ideals, as do many government buildings and museums. Standing in front of the Parthenon, you realize that somebody had to invent the style, even if it is quite old. Furthermore, the the Athenian society that built the Parthenon gave us much more than architecture. I greatly appreciate the right to vote for my leaders, even if the choices may not always be that attractive.

The Acropolis dominates the Athenian skyline, which is convenient in such a walkable city. It is hard to get lost when you have such a handy reference point.

Many travelers think of jet lag as mainly a curse. In a magnificent city like Athens, I consider jet lag to be partly a benefit. Waking up before dawn gives you a chance to explore a quiet city and photograph during the magical light of sunrise. (I did find that when I would leave my hotel at 5:30 am, there were often crowds of clubbers heading home. Athenian streets were much quieter around 6 am.) Arising early also helps beat the crowds. I arrived at the Acropolis when it opened, and until around 9:15 in the morning, there were less than a dozen tourists exploring the site.

The entry to the Acropolis is through a massive gate, seen here early in the day in a waxing sun:

Naturally, most people who visit the Acropolis do so to see the Parthenon. I have many pictures of the Parthenon, but I think this is my favorite, showing the gleaming marble against the blue sky:

It is not obvious from the picture of the south face just how busy the site is. Even early in the morning, the top of the Acropolis was a busy work site. My contemplative walk was punctuated by the sound of hammers, chisels, cranes, and diamond-tipped saws cutting marble blocks for the immense restoration efforts. At the entrance, the Temple of Athena Nike is being completely restored stone by stone and is now only really appreciated as a sign.

Restoration work is proceeding on the Parthenon itself. Columns are being carefully and painstakingly reconstructed. Missing parts of the columns are being carved to fit with the existing remnants. Most of the work is taking place on the north face. This photo shows the scaffholding supporting the restoration. The lighter colored marble in the columns is the marble that has been carved to complete the column blocks. The tight fit of the restoration pieces is clearly shown by the pieces in the foreground.

My previous experience with photographs did not prepare me for finding a building I liked better than the Parthenon on the Acropolis. I was captivated by the Erechtheion, a temple dedicated to Athena, Poseidon, and Erechthus and the other deities of Athens. Pictures I’ve seen focus on the “porch” structure held up by the Caryatids, but rarely put it in context with the rest of the Erechtheion.

In conjunction with the restoration work on the structures of the Parthenon itself, the New Acropolis Museum is taking shape at base of the Acropolis, replacing a much older museum on the summit. At ten times the size of the old museum, I expect that the New Acropolis Museum will provide a far better environment for exhibiting artifacts and telling the story of the Acropolis. Although it is scheduled to open in 2008, the new museum is open for a few hours every day. Strikingly, it is built on a historical site that is actively being excavated. Glass floors allow museum visitors to look down and see an active archaeological site. In this somewhat self-referential photo, I’m looking down through the floor into the work site.

Tourists are not allowed inside any of the temples, which is not particularly surprising. I had expected they would be restricted to prevent them from being loved to death. Ongoing restoration and construction work is also an ever-present danger. Restoration workers were constantly going in and out, and several large cranes were operating throughout most of my half-day visit.

As I wandered around the site, I tried to imagine what it must be like to be working on the Acropolis. It is one of the foremost historical sites of Western civilization, and a towering monument to Greek culture. For an American, the closest comparison I can think of would be the restoration of the Statue of Liberty in the 1980s.

I was recently on a business trip in Europe on which I was unfortunately stuck using London as one of my main air travel focal points. On the trip, I used three of London’s five main airports (Heathrow, Stansted, and London City); I have now used four of the five airports. The exception is Luton, and my British colleagues tell me that I am not missing anything.

With a weekend day to spare, I decided to use the London Walks guide to occupy my day. Every walking tour I have taken with London Walks has shown me small hidden spots in London, sometimes right under my nose. My Kensington experiences have been negative, confined to the overcrowded and high street dominated by chain stores. As a former British colleague of mine explained once, \"When we talk about having more money than sense, Kensington is one of the first places that springs to mind.\" To attempt to crack the shell of the bland corporate veneer, I decided on the Old Kensington walk.

David, our guide for the walk, is surprisingly, the son of a Wisconsin farmer. When I mentioned that I had attended Grinnell College, he asked if I was still a student. Oh, David, flattery will get you everywhere! (I graduated almost eleven years ago. While I’d like to believe I still look 20, my chosen discipline of engineering really demands that I accept reality.)

The highlights of the walk:

David explained that the people who maintained streetlights or cleaned chimneys (my memory fails me) were also responsible for waking up household residents by using a long pole to knock on their windows. This activity is the origin of the phrase “knocked up,” which apparently in British English has merely the unpleasant connotation of a wake-up call and has nothing to do with the American English connotation.

As we stood on Thackeray Street, David asked us to consider the types of shops (hairdressers and high-end clothiers), and told us to consider the “sheer social muzzle velocity” of the neighborhood, which is distinctly plutocratic. An unimproved 17th or 18th century home sold in the neighborhood recently for ₤1.5 million. Social muzzle velocity is a most excellent phrase that I shall endeavor to use more frequently.

In Kensington Church Walk, we stopped in front of Annie Russell’s hair salon. “How gifted is Annie Russell?” asked David rhetorically, before answering that “she is talented enough to be Elizabeth Taylor’s hairdresser for twelve years.”

Also on Kensington Church Walk, there is a famous low wall, shown in the photos below. The late Princess of Wales lived in the neighborhood, and both William and Harry amused themselves walking on the wall. (During the course of the tour and taking the photographs below, I think a half-dozen children came to walk on the wall.) One resident of the building behind the wall dislikes this practice, and has instigated the planting of unpleasant plants along the wall to discourage children from walking on it. David is opposed to this idea, and partway through the tour, he saw a neighborhood resident and said, “I’ve got the metaphor: barbed wire wall!”

St. Mary Abbots church is a short walk from the tube station. To enter the church from the high street, you walk through a small cloister:

Two of the windows on the St. Mary Abbots chapel are labeled with the “ancient lights” sign seen in the photo below. England has an old law that says owners with unobstructed light can protect the level of light received through a window light by putting up a sign like the one below. New developments cannot block light through the windows. The legal doctrine of the right to illumination has not been adopted in the United States as a general principle, but some narrow exceptions do exist, mainly for solar energy. For example, the California Solar Shade Control Act protects investments in rooftop solar panels by ensuring that they retain unobstructed access to the sun. In England, the legal doctrine goes back to the days when sunlight was precious. Windows which have had continuous access to light for 20 years can advertise the fact with a sign reading “ancient lights,” which then protects the sunlight on the window against future obstructions.

Our tour ended near Kensington Palace. In the days when it was a working palace, the building in the photo below was used as barracks for the royal guards unit. It has now been converted into flats. On a previous tour, one of David’s customers had visited one of the exclusive flats. They are small, with no closets (17th century soldiers didn’t need much storage space). At the time of the report, the flats rented for ₤10,000 per week, which is about $87,000 per month at current exchange rates. For the price, you do get some cachet. As part of the palace grounds, the landlord is the Crown. The building itself is pretty nondescript:

Higher class accomodations in Kensington have period details, like this old-style bell pull to announce yourself at the door, rather than the modern doorbell buttons we are now generally accustomed to:

As the tour group broke up, David jokingly described London Walks as “a social security program for unemployed actors.” It shows. Most of the London Walks guides have impeccable timing, flawless delivery, sly humor, and have big voices that easily carry out to the edges of large groups. Combine this with all the knowledge about the hidden back streets, and London Walks is living proof of Dr. Johnson’s famous maxim that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”

In February of this year, I was in Athens for an IEEE ad hoc meeting. I have wanted to visit Athens for well more than a decade, and it was worth the wait. In a way, I’m glad that I made the trip after I bought a good camera and had some time to get used to it because I got much better results than if I were learning the camera on the trip.

Naturally, getting to Athens was not without a hitch, since I was transferring at one of the world’s worst airports, London Heathrow. (It could, however, be worse.) When I checked in, I received boarding passes for all three segments of my trip. After arriving in London, I checked the monitors, and found out that the London-Athens flight had been cancelled. Upon checking with customer service at the airline, I was told that the flight had been cancelled because of a snowstorm that had shut down the Athens airport.

My arrival in Athens was delayed by a day. By the time I arrived, the snow was melting quite rapidly, though I did get a few pictures of this unusual occurrence.

First stop, the Acropolis. Really, is there an alternative? At the foot of the Acropolis, approaching from the south, there was snow by the curb of the street, with the sun shining brightly on the Parthenon above:

Getting closer, you could peek through the gates of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, where some of the stones were still covered with a thin layer of snow:

When walking around, I felt an unexpectedly dumbstruck trying to read signs. Unlike, say, China or Japan, where I don’t expect to read anything except the Romanization on the street signs, I do know the Greek alphabet well enough to try reading the larger Greek signs most of the time. (I know the Greek alphabet from studying physics, not the language.) On-the-fly transliteration helped only to the extent that the word was close to a form that had been adopted into English directly, or words that were adopted in English through an intermediate language like Latin. It is hard to describe the feeling I got when I started to look for the “Εξοδος” on an exit sign rather than the “exit,” or when I realized the derivation of “agoraphobia” while looking at the open space of the Ancient Agora:

There is also a much smaller agora built by the Romans, also built around a central courtyard:

As I sort through pictures from the trip, I’ll be posting the best ones.

Earlier this month, I was speaking at the JANET(UK) Networkshop 36 conference. Unfortunately, getting there involved the new Heathrow airport, a slight snowstorm, and Terminal 5. After having lived through it, I’m not sure whether the “snowstorm” or Terminal 5 was worse.

When we landed, snow had halted most of the ground activities at Heathrow. Our captain said that it was as bad as he had ever seen the snow, and he noted that Heathrow does not have a lot of snow handling equipment. As a result, nothing was moving and our plane had to sit for a while.

We are not talking about a huge amount of snow. Chris Hessing, the chair of the Open1X Project, was traveling with me. Chris is from Utah. I think he put it best when he said, “If the grass is poking up through the snow, it doesn’t count.” Here’s a view out the airplane window:

It was cold out. Here’s the tail of a Jet Airways plane. On the dark blue tail, you can clearly see the internal frame melting the snow along the structural elements.

Nevertheless, everything had ground to a halt because of the snow. Several hours later, most airlines other than British Airways had recovered. BA blamed the snow, cancelled lots of flights, and blamed the weather. To deal with the crowd of people who needed to be rebooked, BA called in extra service staff. For example, here’s one of the major service desks at Terminal 5, dealing effectively with the wave of cancellations that occurred at 11 am:

I did try to speak to the person at the desk, and he told me that my problem could only be handled landside. BA computers cannot automatically rebook passengers on to the next flight, which meant that huge crowds were going landside to get rebooked, waiting in lines, going back through security, and getting cancelled again. By the end of the day, anecdotal evidence suggested that their lines were best measured in hours, with estimates as high as six hours.

The whole experience was awful. I did finally talk BA into a hotel room for the night after the second cancellation of the day. They had resumed operations the next morning, and I was on an early flight to Glasgow. However, in line for security, I overheard other passengers talking about how the computer system for luggage handling had crashed again.

I wrote more about my experience on FlyerTalk in this thread

To answer the most frequently asked question, my luggage arrived without any problems. Although T5 has been notorious for lost luggage, I did not have any problem. My best guess is that I checked in for my flight in San Francisco with American Airlines, so entering my baggage record into BA’s computers didn’t need to use the T5 luggage system.

On Wednesday, I read that the problems at BA had actually made Heathrow better for other passengers. With fewer BA jets trying to get on to the runways, the other airlines had an easier time getting out on schedule.

The bottom line is that if you want me to go somewhere in Europe, you had better have a plan that doesn’t involve British Airways. I was quite glad to hear that American is expanding code share services with both Iberia and SN Brussels, which should allow me to avoid Heathrow in the future.

January’s IEEE 802.11 working group meeting was held in Taipei. Towards the end of my time in Taipei, I wandered through the grounds of the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall. In a small area with a statue of Dr. Sun, there was a neat view of Taipei 101, shrouded in the heavy wet fog around the city at the time.

One of my favorite things to do with my camera is just to go wandering. On my January trip to Hong Kong, I stumbled across the Graham Street Market, which is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) in Hong Kong. Out of everything I saw, there were two scenes that particularly struck me.

The first was at a seafood shop. As typical for the Guangdong region, much of what’s on sale is alive and kept in polystyrene water containers. If you look closely at the photo below, you can see the aeration tubes. What really struck me about the photo, though, is the smile on the face of the woman helping a customer.

(As an aside, one of the reasons why I was shooting in black and white is because it doesn’t require me to color balance. Street market vendors use all kinds of lights, each of which has a slightly different color cast. Tungsten lamps are orange, fluorescent lamps have a sickly greenish cast, and the energy-efficient metal halide lamps that light streets the world over spread a yellowish light. Provided there is enough contrast, switching to black-and-white means that I don’t need to deal with the horrid color clash from all the lighting.)

The second scene, which I didn’t capture as well as I would have liked, illustrates the captivity of traffic to pedestrians. Only a small fraction of Hong Kong residents own cars because the government taxes automobiles very heavily and the transit system is possibly the best in the world. The street market is actually a street. As I wandered around, I noticed that trucks were making deliveries, but they sometimes had to move very slowly through single-lane streets that were choked with pedestrian traffic. At one point, I noticed a car moving slowly through the pedestrian crowd. It wasn’t just any car, either. I love the contrast of the immaculately polished white Bentley moving through a crowd of pedestrians.

In January, the IEEE 802.11 working group met in Taipei. The week before, I hosted a meeting for Task Group U in Hong Kong, a city that everybody should visit for its unique blend of traditional Chinese and Western culture.

I’ve been going to Hong Kong for over 15 years, though there was a gap of more than ten years between my first and second visits. In that time, one of the most notable changes is an unfortunate side effect of the rapid economic development in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and the entire Pearl River Delta region. Air pollution has become much more prevalent, to the point where it can often be hard to see across the beautiful harbor.

After the meeting one night, I took one of the Star Ferry’s Harbour Cruises with some of my fellow attendees. As we passed by the Central district, I noticed flashes of light coming from up high on Victoria Peak. At this point, I am so accustomed to the seemingly permanent haze that it took me a while to realize that the flashes were tourist cameras going off on the peak.

As the boat docked, I debated whether to head to the peak at 10 pm, since I was quite tired. My companions provided the needed encouragement, and I’m glad I went. By the time I made it up, many of the buildings had turned off their colorful night lights but it was still the best view I’ve ever had of the harbor:

I later spoke with my colleagues who live in Hong Kong, and they told me that a night so clear almost never happens. I feel very fortunate that I happened to be in the city at the time.