![[SONAR display]](sonar.png)
Using echolocation, a SONAR device can build up a blurry picture of an ocean floor and warn of oncoming landmasses.
Wednesday morning, I helped cook breakfast, burning my thumb on the oven and picking up a cool burn scar which would delight those around me well into the coming weeks. The burn was a mistake.
The other mistake I made was to seek out Shelly, the Sound Experience program director. She was the one in charge of coming up with fun activities for the passengers. She was the one who would figure out what we'd do at future evening programs--more improv or whatever. So I made a mistake. I gave her advice. I told her that a bunch of the passengers had made appreciative noises when the crew had played music. A couple of crew members knew how to play guitar; Katherine, the ship's apprentice, was a flautist.
There might have been a tactful, subtle way to talk about music. I didn't find it. I was trying to avoid listening to any more grumbling from the grumblers. That was my mistake.
Then all of the passengers, myself included, went for a walk on Sucia Island.
I'd seen Sucia from the water before, but hadn't had a chance to walk on it. It had beautiful sandstone caves in which immigrant smugglers had cached immigrants. There were peeling madrone trees (which I had previously mis-indentified as manzanita). There were cliffs and ferns and tidepools and a great hike. After the great hike, Indra the cook arranged to ferry a great picnic lunch to us. It was a great morning.
Yet, after this, after all this, the complainers were still complaining.
I'm a little slow. It took me three days to figure out that these complainers and grumblers were going to complain and grumble no matter how things went. When I'm sailing, I try extra hard to get along with people. But these people were not to be gotten along with.
I'd made a mistake, curtailing activities that they might complain about. They'd complain no matter what.
I'd been right to avoid their company. Now I had to think about how to better accomplish this.
Back on the Adventuress, the winds were gentle. There wasn't much to do with the sails, so I had plenty of time to think about how to best avoid my fellow passengers.
My earlier graph of nodes had been simplistic. It wasn't enough to seek out a node that was free of obnoxious people. The obnoxious people would look around until they saw a conversation, and then they would wander over. They were mobile. They could see.
Three-D games like Quake use Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) trees to break up a space into areas. They use the BSP tree to keep track of which areas have line-of-sight to one another. I did an orbit around the deck, figuring out what I could see from where.
Really, there was no place to hide on deck. There was no place to hold a conversation that wouldn't be prone to interruption. There were two important things to consider:
The interruptions were worse than the conversations. I was convinced of this through painful empirical evidence.
The obnoxious people operated by seeking out existing conversations and exploiting them. Okay.
Given these two observations, the only solution I could come up with was to shun conversation. Speak when spoken to, grunt a lot, never appear to have a good time. Don't look like a target--don't look like you're in the middle of a conversation worth joining.
No-one had disturbed me when I'd taken little snoozes, lying back on the roof of the deckhouse. Maybe I could do that some more.
Was I really prepared to go for days shunning contact with with people?
Hadn't I done that on previous vacations? When I'd gone to New Mexico, surely days had gone past where I'd said no more than a couple of grunts. Surely I could last on the Adventuress until the end of the voyage, Saturday afternoon.
It occurred to me that this might be some of the most anti-social behavior I'd exhibited in a long time. But I was past caring. I lay back on the roof of the deckhouse, pulled my cap over my face, and pretended to go to sleep.
I did anchor watch again that night. I was all alone under the sky, looking at the full moon shining onto the clouds. The evening's activities had included a talk by our Sierra Club activity leader. He'd talked to us about the salmon of the Snake River, of the need to write letters in support of the salmon. Lots of people had piped up about the importance of letter-writing campaigns, but no-one had jumped forward to start writing letters. I was past caring. When I got back home, I would write letters. I had given up on this group of people.
It was wonderful to have given up. All I had to do was sulk away from the surly.
Using echolocation, a SONAR device can build up a blurry picture of an ocean floor and warn of oncoming landmasses.
Anyone who has seen a submarine movie is familiar with SONAR navigation. A device on board the ship makes a noise, a ping. The device then measures how long it takes for the ping to come echoing back. From this, the navigator can find out how far away rocks are--or how close another ship is.
SONAR is good at noticing large land masses. It has a more difficult time spotting ships. Ships are small, compared to land masses. When a SONAR ping reflects off of a ship, it's often not clear whether the echo coming back is a ship or just noise in the water.
If Ship A wants to detect Ship B using SONAR, Ship A could spend a long time examining SONAR echoes. Or Ship A could stay silent, not sending out any pings, and hope that Ship B sends out a ping. Ship B's ping will be a lot clearer than a reflected ping would be.
If Ship A wants to detect Ship B without being detected in turn, it has more reason to stay silent. Each of Ship A's pings gives away more information that it brings in.
Maybe Ship A is a submarine in hostile waters. Maybe Ship A wants to avoid giving away its position to any nearby Ship B. Ship A should stay underwater, shouldn't send out any pings.
How does the submarine captain know when it's safe to surface? How does the submarine captain know when he's evaded all of the enemy ships? If he doesn't risk a ping, he might never know.
Thursday, my plan worked perfectly. It was more than perfect--it was imperfect. We took a hike on Stewart Island. At the goal of our hike, there was a picnic lunch. The sun was shining, I was full, and I soon genuinely fell asleep.
I woke up when it was time to go. Most of the passengers had already gone. It was me, one other passenger, and four of the crew.
I still didn't talk. This wasn't so much a policy decision. Really, my brains had been cooked out in the sun. I was getting dizzy on the walk back. I ate a bunch of apples for water. I dribbled water over my head. Finally, I took a knife to the sleeves of my shirt, transforming it from a long-sleeve to a short-sleeve.
Once I'd had a chance to cool off a bit, this shirt destruction struck me as being somewhat extreme behavior. This trip was causing me to grow in new and unexpected directions.
Back on the ship, we got underway. There was almost no wind, we were motoring instead of sailing and duties were light. It was around this time that Nancy sat down next to me and started talking to me.
Under normal circumstances, Nancy was exactly the kind of person who you'd want to start talking to you. She was smart, funny, and lively; she was probably my favoritest person on the whole ship. Maybe, I thought, just maybe I should go ahead and enjoy this.
Within a minute, one of the more obnoxious passengers had sat down between Nancy and me. Through a combination of deafness and stubbornness, she hijacked the conversation. A few seconds later, I looked around. The conversation-hijacker was still talking, but Nancy had left.
The hijacker kept talking. I stared really hard at the water and grunted occasionally. I was seeing a lot in that water. The wisdom of the ages. Yep. Eventually, the conversation hijacker went away.
When one of the other passengers sat down and started talking with me about computer operating systems--even that didn't cheer me up. I thought about another Nancy. Specifically, I thought about my cousin Nancy, back in Seattle. She was a good conversationalist. Her husband, Cedric, was another. I would be visiting them after finishing sailing. And they had a house with locks on the doors. We could talk there and no obnoxious people would be able to get in and disturb us. I think I smiled.
The jargon of the internet has adopted the word "ping". In SONAR, a ping is a sound that radiates out and echoes back from everything. An internet ping goes from one machine to another and back again. The pinger can measure how long these pings take. It's useful for guessing at the network speed between two sites.
The pinged machine has to do some work to listen for pings and send them back to their originators. It's not much work, but if a lot of pings all came in at the same time, it might bog down the pinged machine, so that it didn't have time to handle other tasks.
Sometimes hackers will deliberately overwhelm a machine with pings. They probably won't overwhelm the machine, but they make sure that it won't be able to do other things. If the machine is, say, serving up web pages that a hacker disagrees with, the hacker might want to keep the machine busy responding to pings.
I'm not sure if there's a parallel there to the conversation hijackers I encountered in my tour group. But that's how I thought about it.
I sat in on a class on the local bird life; I kept quiet. I realized that I was enjoying hearing about birds. I reminded myself that I was, for the most part, enjoying this voyage. I just had to avoid certain passengers, even if it meant avoiding everybody.
I pretended to take a nap. I helped out fixing dinner, talking a bit with people I liked, looking busy when others loomed. I ate dinner quietly.
Thursday night, we were anchored in Blind Bay.
There was a class on celestial navigation. Crew and passengers gathered in the main cabin. The shape of the main cabin's floor and walls was a bowl, the inside curvature of the hull. It was a natural theater, warm with the heat of bodies gathered close.
Jon, the first mate, talked about the principles behind celestial navigation. This was a refresher course, but I did learn a couple of things--about the kamal, an early Middle Eastern star-inclination measuring device. I learned that moonrise/set is about an hour later each day. Which, when you think about the length of the sidereal month, makes a lot of sense.
Jon talked about some of the practicalities of celestial navigation. If you're close to a coast, and there are hills or mountains nearby, you might not know exactly when sunset and sunrise occur. That's too bad, if you don't have a clock. If you don't have a clock, then sunrise and sunset can be great aids to navigation--you can figure out what time they're to occur, and they're dark enough such that you might be able to see the light of another planet and figure out what longitude you're at. Of course, if you're on a coast, maybe you already know what longitude you're at. If you have a good map.
The passengers were packed in cheek by jowl. Yet the atmosphere was cozy. I found myself smiling around, feeling a sense of fellowship. I liked most of these people. And during this lecture, the obnoxious people had shut up. I get along with most people just fine, I thought, and I can even get along with unpleasant people as long as they aren't being unpleasant right then.
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