Level 1 June
4 Jul 2020
This month started in Charleston where I went climbing with Elliott. As I write this I’m going to the Heaphy Track tomorrow morning. We chose to delay for a day due to weather.
The number of active cases in NZ is now 21 but that is a misleading number; all of these cases are in quarantine “at the border”, i.e. found in returning New Zealanders in managed self-isolation. The number of known active cases in the community is 0 which has been a stable number for a while. As Victoria state in Australia shows, though, cases do seem to be capable of escaping at the border, perhaps through a cigarette lighter. But things are good here for now.
About sabbaticals
15 Jun 2020
tl;dr: Sabbaticals are not an unpaid vacation but rather a chance to focus on longer-term scholarly projects.
Sabbaticals are an awesome feature of the academic job. I feel like they are often misunderstood by the world in general. This description is specifically about how sabbaticals work at the University of Waterloo; many North American universities are similar but not identical.
The normal distribution of work for tenure-track and tenured faculty members at the University of Waterloo is 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% service. In my department, Electrical and Computer Engineering, 40% teaching means 3 one-semester courses per year: typically one term with 2 courses, one with 1 course, and one with no courses. For regular faculty members, service involves sitting on and chairing university committees (internal service), as well as participating in a research community by reviewing papers and being on committees (external service).
May, moving down the levels
3 Jun 2020
It’s astonishing how quickly things have returned to almost-normal in this country. Since May 14 (3 weeks ago already!), we’ve been in Alert Level 2, where most things are open. Physical distancing, capacity controls and mandatory contact tracing remain for now, although there will be another decision next Monday, June 8. The number of known active cases is 1 and the last positive reported case was on May 22.
Haircuts
I had been planning to wait a few more days, but I was walking down the street and noticed a barber open with no line, so I’ve had reasonable hair since May 17. The Onward deadline was with too much hair, but the OOPSLA deadline had the right amount of hair. Very important when spending hours at the computer. Looking through the records, it looks like I feel like I need a haircut after 6 weeks and then wait another 2 weeks to actually get one: Sept 5, Nov 5, Jan 7, Mar 3, May 17. The 10-week interval was excessive.
A Locked-down April
1 May 2020
I’m writing this on April 30, a day after we were originally scheduled to leave Wellington. But that was no surprise to month-ago me.
Most of April has been under NZ Alert Level 4, although we’ve been in Alert Level 3 for a couple of days now. We’ve been in Wellington since March 20 and not in a car between March 25 and April 29, which is some sort of record for me. Usually I can go a week without a car ride, but 4.5 weeks is something. Also my last haircut was March 3, which is also a record. It looks like The Warehouse has a 2 week shipping time for clippers, so I’ll be going a bit longer still.
Leverage deadlines for action
28 Apr 2020
This week’s tip is kind of a meta-tip. When you want someone (possibly yourself) to do something, set a deadline for it. Marketing experts know this. This is why there are “limited time offers”. People have intentions of doing something. But if they can do it anytime, sometimes they never do the thing.
The deadline for the survey is Wednesday, though I guess I could have been more explicit about that.
Moderate multi-pitch in New Zealand, March 11, 2020
21 Apr 2020
On our previous trip to the South Island we stayed around Wanaka cragging and hiking. Although the Darrens were still washed out during our visit, The Remarkables feature some multipitch climbing. In particular, our borrowed Queenstown guidebook listed a dozen climbs above Lake Alta (aka Dimrill Dale). We’d go to Lake Alta and then up to Double Cone and find a moderate climb. To Lake Alta Alpine starts are well advised but difficult, especially after riverboarding the previous day, having dinner in Queenstown with Waterloo students on exchange, and getting back to our Frankton airbnb at 9pm.
An Exciting Trip to Mount Taranaki, March 17-18, 2020
14 Apr 2020
Almost as if anticipating a lockdown, we had planned back-to-back-to-back trips for the middle of March. We’d just barely gotten back from Queenstown on Thursday, March 12 (but that’s another story), and had scheduled 4 days to climb Mount Taranaki, which I’d seen from the plane on the way in to Wellington back on January 1, 3 months and so long ago. Events would catch up to us and prevent our subsequent trip to Melbourne. At least we didn’t have to do a visa run anymore.
Be aware of boundary conditions
14 Apr 2020
This week’s observation is about boundary conditions. As programmers you have surely run into off-by-one errors. They’re hard to avoid! Somehow New Zealand systemically seems to fudge the issue, as you can see on this sign on Kapiti Island restricting access to the tower. Perhaps one can parse this as being “if you put eight plus one people on the tower it will fall down”, but that’s not consistent with the top display. (As an engineering exercise, you can also think about the safety factors built into the tower’s design).
Munging NZ COVID stats
8 Apr 2020
I wanted to know two things about the NZ COVID counts, which are released by the government at
Here’s the result of my data analysis as of April 9.
- How many cases had a big delay between return-to-NZ date and report date? (about 5%; up to three weeks)
To calculate this, I just added a calculation to the Google sheet:
A2-MAX(I2, H2)
and did standard analyses on the numbers. I manually fixed cases where the date reported was before the date arrived; in those cases it looks like the month was incorrectly entered.
Be an expert tool user
7 Apr 2020
This week’s tip is about tools. I’ve attached a picture of a replica of the ice axe that Sir Edmund Hillary used on his first ascent of Mount Everest. This was at the North Egmont Visitor Centre at the base of Mount Taranaki, a prominent cone-shaped ex-volcano in New Zealand. Sir Edmund’s original ice axe is in a museum in Auckland, and one can buy replicas of it on the Internet. [1]
