Hiking

On Sunday I went on the Graduate Student Council hiking (bushwalking, for my Australian audience) trip in the White Mountains, New Hampshire. I was in the group climbing Mt Liberty and Mt Flume: the two are quite close together and because we were ahead of schedule we were able to climb both.

It was a much easier walk than Half Dome, although still quite reasonable: approximately 16 km return, with 900m of elevation gain. It was very nice to have a walk, and a very pleasant group of people to walk with: we found a comfortable common pace and had interesting conversation. I was interested to find out that of the six people who chose that group (we had a group leader, but he was assigned to our group, the most difficult, because he wasn't at the meeting where routes were assigned!), five have done some research in polymer science. Even at MIT I don't think 83% of people have done polymer research, so I'm not sure if there's a real correlation there. My guess is that there's some exceedingly minor real correlation - perhaps that polymer science is relatively applied compared with the other research going on at MIT, and more applied scientists are more likely to like difficult hikes. Almost all of the effect, though, would be random chance: it's easy to notice an unusual correlation if you don't know beforehand what the correlation will be. If someone had told me on Saturday that polymer scientists liked long hikes, then Sunday would have been good evidence for that proposition.

Feynman was a particular advocate for people remembering that the first notice of an effect can't be used as an argument that it is real, if you didn't know what you were looking for before you found it (and there's the possibility that it arose by chance).

The day was relatively cool. It was cold (we Australians were shivering, although it was a long way from freezing), windy and foggy, and even a little rainy at one stage, at the top of the mountains but overall very comfortable for most of the way. The fog did mean that we didn't get any spectacular views from the mountaintops: when you've seen some fog, you've seen it all.

At the end of the day, while waiting for the bus carrying the other groups to return, we had a look at the basin. It's quite a spectacular rock formation: it reminds one of the amazing power of water.

I'm afraid I don't have any photos at this stage, but I will post some if I happen to get hold of them.

On the way home we had dinner in Plymouth, a small New Hampshire town. It actually felt like it could be a country town in Australia, which is not something I often say about US towns (San Diego feels like Australia, but that's the only other I've visited so far).