I'm working on something rather sizable; it will not get done today and will all but certainly take me deep into tomorrow. In the meantime, so you still have something to do around here, have a TED talk.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Where Is John Connor? I Require His Genetic Information
A study conducted by the University of Southern California in 2007 attempted to calculate just how much information storage existed in the world at the time. This was done via adding up the information stored on 60 digital and analog media- books, newspapers, computer hard drives, smartphones, magazines, USB drives, CD's, videocassettes, credit card microchips, vinyl long-play records, etc. That study was just released... well, sort of; the full paper is still under embargo at USC.
The amount, as of 2007, turned out to be 295 exabytes of data, only 6% of which was analog. (Not that analog is going away; over the course of the study, which looked at the period since 1986, paper-based capacity, for example, went from 8.7 to 19.4 petabytes.) How big is that? As CNET puts it, "An exabyte is 1,000 petabytes, and a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, and a terabyte is about what you'd get in a desktop PC hard drive these days." So about 295 million current desktop PC's... as of 2007. Another statistic showed that storage capacity was growing by 23% per year.
Some other numbers:
*Broadcast information in 2007 amounted to 1.9 zettabytes. A zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes.
*To do, by hand, all the computing that the world's general-purpose computers do in one second would take you from here to the Big Bang. 2,200 times over.
*Every day, if you're average, you take in the equivalent of 174 newspapers, and spit out six back.
*Digital capacity overtook analog in 2002.
*All of the stored information amounts to under 1% of the information stored in a single human being's DNA. Of course, given the previous statistic, you shouldn't get too smug about it. Plus, you and the world aren't adding very much information on a net basis. That remains something of a constant. The computers are gaining ground, and momentum, every day.
The man who led the study, Martin Hilbert, shows some rather esoteric statistics involving homing pigeons and grains of sand, but you get the idea.
The next question that Hilbert wants to look at: how much of this information is actually of use. "What's the value of watching a silly cat video versus reading an overpriced book?"
The amount, as of 2007, turned out to be 295 exabytes of data, only 6% of which was analog. (Not that analog is going away; over the course of the study, which looked at the period since 1986, paper-based capacity, for example, went from 8.7 to 19.4 petabytes.) How big is that? As CNET puts it, "An exabyte is 1,000 petabytes, and a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, and a terabyte is about what you'd get in a desktop PC hard drive these days." So about 295 million current desktop PC's... as of 2007. Another statistic showed that storage capacity was growing by 23% per year.
Some other numbers:
*Broadcast information in 2007 amounted to 1.9 zettabytes. A zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes.
*To do, by hand, all the computing that the world's general-purpose computers do in one second would take you from here to the Big Bang. 2,200 times over.
*Every day, if you're average, you take in the equivalent of 174 newspapers, and spit out six back.
*Digital capacity overtook analog in 2002.
*All of the stored information amounts to under 1% of the information stored in a single human being's DNA. Of course, given the previous statistic, you shouldn't get too smug about it. Plus, you and the world aren't adding very much information on a net basis. That remains something of a constant. The computers are gaining ground, and momentum, every day.
The man who led the study, Martin Hilbert, shows some rather esoteric statistics involving homing pigeons and grains of sand, but you get the idea.
The next question that Hilbert wants to look at: how much of this information is actually of use. "What's the value of watching a silly cat video versus reading an overpriced book?"
Friday, February 11, 2011
Rapid-Fire Book Club, Save The Store Edition
One of my local bookstores, Book World- or 'Watertown Booksellers', if you go by the big sign out front- is slated to shut down on the 25th. This is apparently the decision of a guy in the Appleton home office, VP of Store Operations Antoine Tines. When I went in today to kill off a gift certificate I got for Christmas, I was handed his contact information, in hopes of making him reconsider.
If you live in the area and you'd like to help- and I'd appreciate it if you did; Watertown is a literary wasteland in its absence- his e-mail is atines@bookworldstores.com, the phone number is (920) 830-7897, the fax- people still send faxes?- is (920) 830-3857, and the address to write in is:
Book World Home Office
1000 S. Lynndale Dr.
Appleton, WI 54914
That done, in addition to a commemorative Super Bowl Champion Packers Sports Illustrated, we have:
*2011 World Almanac (replaces the 2008 edition currently on my shelf)
*Simmons, Bill- The Book of Basketball (yep, this is his reader)
If you live in the area and you'd like to help- and I'd appreciate it if you did; Watertown is a literary wasteland in its absence- his e-mail is atines@bookworldstores.com, the phone number is (920) 830-7897, the fax- people still send faxes?- is (920) 830-3857, and the address to write in is:
Book World Home Office
1000 S. Lynndale Dr.
Appleton, WI 54914
That done, in addition to a commemorative Super Bowl Champion Packers Sports Illustrated, we have:
*2011 World Almanac (replaces the 2008 edition currently on my shelf)
*Simmons, Bill- The Book of Basketball (yep, this is his reader)
Mubarak Is Gone
Hosni Mubarak has stepped down as president of Egypt a little over a half hour ago, handing power to the military. He is currently thought to be in Sharm el-Sheikh, in the south; no word on whether he'll be staying there or hopping the border.
Any questions about what happens next seem unimportant to the crowd in Cairo. They'll figure all those questions out later. Right now, they're just rejoicing in the fact that Mubarak is out.
Any questions about what happens next seem unimportant to the crowd in Cairo. They'll figure all those questions out later. Right now, they're just rejoicing in the fact that Mubarak is out.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Books VS. E-Books: Fight!
Husna Haq of the Christian Science Monitor put out this article detailing "5 signs that e-books are here to stay," three of which are various themes on 'look how popular they are'.
I haven't heard anyone say that they weren't.
Granted, I for one have expressed a preference for the physical object, way back when I first introduced the Rapid-Fire Book Club. But the advantages of the e-book are so clear- the small size, the portability, the amount of reading material that can be packed into it, the lower cost of producing the product, the speed with which one can obtain a book that they've just heard about or the latest bestseller- that its usefulness is undeniable. I welcome its presence. Anything that gets people reading, or reading more.
But the physical books aren't going away either. Books and e-books can coexist peacefully, which has rather escaped the bulk of people who've written on the topic; most have suggested or implied some sort of existential fight to the death.
So here, in response, are five reasons books aren't going away:
1. Books can be broken and still be readable.
If you drop a steak knife on an e-book, and it pierces and hits the wrong piece of circuitry, you can't read it anymore. You've got a doorstop on your hands. If you drop that same steak knife on a book, you've got a little hole in each individual page. You can still read what's on that page, or worst-case, read around it and make out what the busted part said. You can do a lot of damage to that book and still read it. Even if you tear the book apart page-by-page, with enough work you can put the pages back in order, and still read the book.
2. Pre-existing infrastructure.
Even if you were to not publish one more physical book, you've still got just gobs of them laying around, and not many people are inclined to destroy them. Nor are they going to be subject to some sort of obsolescence-related cancellation of service. You won't open a book anytime soon and see 'This book's service period has expired. Thank you for understanding.'
3. The Internet has a backlog.
Despite the enormous potential of making reading material available online, with this, with Google Books, there are still titles that are going to slip through the net, books you for one reason or another simply cannot obtain in electronic form. You can't flip a switch and make 'books' online. You have to individually introduce each individual book to an online audience. Considering the sheer amount of titles that have been put out over the course of history, that's a task that will take time to complete, if it is ever completed at all.
How much time? You gamers out there, think back to all the times you've tried to achieve hundred-percent completion. Especially think back to those last frustrating percentage points. Now imagine that in real life, on a global scale, over hundreds, maybe thousands of years, and nobody's around to tell you when you've reached 100%. Good luck.
4. Ease of searching.
Oh, yes. Ease of searching. If you know going in what book you're going after, the e-book, Amazon, anything online is perfect. Type in the name, boom, there it is. And here are a couple related books as well.
There's a caveat, though. You have to know exactly what you want, and if you want a certain category, you can only view a limited number of books at a time- ten on a page, perhaps. And they're bound to only be the most popular in whatever category you're looking at.
But popular books and good books aren't the same thing. If you walk into a bookstore, it is a visual no online source can match. Dozens, hundreds of books, maybe even thousands in the right place within one glance. As many as you can handle, popular, obscure, books you've never heard of, books you never knew you wanted until that exact moment, and the only way they're not related is if the staff has been spectacularly incompetent.
5. Intangibles.
As was stated last March, there's a certain mojo that a book has that an e-book simply cannot replicate. There's more of the feeling that the book is a book, as opposed to a glorified online article. There's more gravitas to it. There's the experience of being in the bookstore itself- the slow-paced meandering along the shelves, the browsing, all the knowledge and literature around you being enlightening yet humbling simply by being abundant in close proximity.
That's also something the Internet can't replicate, not really. We all know how large the Internet is, but you're only looking at one or two glimpses of it at a time. You get the Internet in little bite-sized chunks.
Now walk into a large bookstore. The scale hits you like a ton of bricks. You can look straight ahead and see just how much reading material is in there. You hear references, once in a while, to obtaining the content of 'the entire Internet' somehow. You don't hear similar references about someone reading everything in a bookstore or everything in a library, despite there being much less overall content in a bookstore or library. People are much more aware of the likelihood, or lack thereof, of absorbing the entire content of a bookstore or library, than they are about doing the same with the Internet. It just seems larger.
But for another audience of potential readers, bite-size is the right size. And that's the primary factor: the two types of books attract two different kinds of people. Again to use video games as a proxy, you've got one hardcore crowd that wants Halo and Call of Duty, and another more casual crowd that prefers Peggle and Wii Sports. They both like games. Just not the same kind of games. In the same sense, both the book and e-book people like books; they just have different preferences as to hoe they want to have them. And others like having both: get the books, but when the bookshelf gets overrun, put the overage on the e-book.
In other words, they coexist.
I haven't heard anyone say that they weren't.
Granted, I for one have expressed a preference for the physical object, way back when I first introduced the Rapid-Fire Book Club. But the advantages of the e-book are so clear- the small size, the portability, the amount of reading material that can be packed into it, the lower cost of producing the product, the speed with which one can obtain a book that they've just heard about or the latest bestseller- that its usefulness is undeniable. I welcome its presence. Anything that gets people reading, or reading more.
But the physical books aren't going away either. Books and e-books can coexist peacefully, which has rather escaped the bulk of people who've written on the topic; most have suggested or implied some sort of existential fight to the death.
So here, in response, are five reasons books aren't going away:
1. Books can be broken and still be readable.
If you drop a steak knife on an e-book, and it pierces and hits the wrong piece of circuitry, you can't read it anymore. You've got a doorstop on your hands. If you drop that same steak knife on a book, you've got a little hole in each individual page. You can still read what's on that page, or worst-case, read around it and make out what the busted part said. You can do a lot of damage to that book and still read it. Even if you tear the book apart page-by-page, with enough work you can put the pages back in order, and still read the book.
2. Pre-existing infrastructure.
Even if you were to not publish one more physical book, you've still got just gobs of them laying around, and not many people are inclined to destroy them. Nor are they going to be subject to some sort of obsolescence-related cancellation of service. You won't open a book anytime soon and see 'This book's service period has expired. Thank you for understanding.'
3. The Internet has a backlog.
Despite the enormous potential of making reading material available online, with this, with Google Books, there are still titles that are going to slip through the net, books you for one reason or another simply cannot obtain in electronic form. You can't flip a switch and make 'books' online. You have to individually introduce each individual book to an online audience. Considering the sheer amount of titles that have been put out over the course of history, that's a task that will take time to complete, if it is ever completed at all.
How much time? You gamers out there, think back to all the times you've tried to achieve hundred-percent completion. Especially think back to those last frustrating percentage points. Now imagine that in real life, on a global scale, over hundreds, maybe thousands of years, and nobody's around to tell you when you've reached 100%. Good luck.
4. Ease of searching.
Oh, yes. Ease of searching. If you know going in what book you're going after, the e-book, Amazon, anything online is perfect. Type in the name, boom, there it is. And here are a couple related books as well.
There's a caveat, though. You have to know exactly what you want, and if you want a certain category, you can only view a limited number of books at a time- ten on a page, perhaps. And they're bound to only be the most popular in whatever category you're looking at.
But popular books and good books aren't the same thing. If you walk into a bookstore, it is a visual no online source can match. Dozens, hundreds of books, maybe even thousands in the right place within one glance. As many as you can handle, popular, obscure, books you've never heard of, books you never knew you wanted until that exact moment, and the only way they're not related is if the staff has been spectacularly incompetent.
5. Intangibles.
As was stated last March, there's a certain mojo that a book has that an e-book simply cannot replicate. There's more of the feeling that the book is a book, as opposed to a glorified online article. There's more gravitas to it. There's the experience of being in the bookstore itself- the slow-paced meandering along the shelves, the browsing, all the knowledge and literature around you being enlightening yet humbling simply by being abundant in close proximity.
That's also something the Internet can't replicate, not really. We all know how large the Internet is, but you're only looking at one or two glimpses of it at a time. You get the Internet in little bite-sized chunks.
Now walk into a large bookstore. The scale hits you like a ton of bricks. You can look straight ahead and see just how much reading material is in there. You hear references, once in a while, to obtaining the content of 'the entire Internet' somehow. You don't hear similar references about someone reading everything in a bookstore or everything in a library, despite there being much less overall content in a bookstore or library. People are much more aware of the likelihood, or lack thereof, of absorbing the entire content of a bookstore or library, than they are about doing the same with the Internet. It just seems larger.
But for another audience of potential readers, bite-size is the right size. And that's the primary factor: the two types of books attract two different kinds of people. Again to use video games as a proxy, you've got one hardcore crowd that wants Halo and Call of Duty, and another more casual crowd that prefers Peggle and Wii Sports. They both like games. Just not the same kind of games. In the same sense, both the book and e-book people like books; they just have different preferences as to hoe they want to have them. And others like having both: get the books, but when the bookshelf gets overrun, put the overage on the e-book.
In other words, they coexist.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
The Man From Porlock
One of the things that makes humans unique- one of the most crucial, certainly one of the most beautiful- is our ability to be inspired. Our ability to, in reaction to some sort of stimulus, create in our heads a new idea, a new thought, a new way to express oneself. It may be in direct reaction to something you see or experience, coming immediately. It may come in time, after the stimulus gels with the other things going on in your mind. It may come in a dream, utterly out of the blue. It may come out of the blue entirely; every once in a while no stimulus is even needed.
Many of our advances have come in a slow grind, through hard work and hard research, blood, sweat and toil. This is not that. This is when an idea hits you like a lightning bolt, fully or mostly formed.
In ancient times, this was said to be the work of beings called muses. (In Christianity, this is the purpose of the Holy Spirit, just in case you were wondering what exactly that guy did all day besides be something of a third wheel to the Father and Son, like the 1992 Dream Team including Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, John Stockton... and Christian Laettner. Who, for the record, was chosen over Shaquille O'Neal.) Even today, we use the term 'muse' to refer to whatever the stimulus is when something like this happens. Whatever inspires you, that's your muse.
This is Step 1.
Anyone who's had this happen- and hopefully that's just about everyone- has probably experienced, though not quite thought much about outside of the act, Step 2: recording that inspiration. An idea that you come across through the slow grind, while difficult to obtain, is by the time you get what you need fairly well ground into your head. An out-of-nowhere visit from a muse, however, is fleeting and fragile. There is as of yet nothing in your head for that inspiration to hang onto. Once it leaves the forefront of your mind, there is every chance that the idea will recede right back into the depths from whence it came, never to return. Even if you can recall it, it is not easy, and what you dig back up might look nothing like the idea that originally struck you.
And any idea that hopes to make an impact on the world around you cannot make that impact until and unless it survives the journey from your mind into said world.
This is why some people, upon being hit with an idea out of the blue, are gripped with a sudden urge to get the idea recorded somewhere, anywhere, while they still have it, and keep it at the forefront of their minds at all costs until they can. Write it down. Turn on a tape recorder. Turn on a webcam. Blog it. Something. Anything, quickly, before the idea is gone forever. In fact, this is the recommended thing to do; this Michigan State course syllabus, for example, says not to worry if the idea doesn't sound pitch-perfect. You have an idea. Unless the idea is utterly abhorrent, don't worry if it's not perfect. You can give it closer analysis later. That's Step 3. You're still on Step 2: get the idea down.
Some of your more creative types don't even wait for a free moment. They just abruptly cut themselves loose from whatever it is they're doing, sleep included, and get it down somewhere.
Once a place to record the idea has been found, the idea must still be actually recorded. And because you're not out of the woods until that has happened, this part of the process can easily become all-consuming. No external stimuli. The world is shut out. There is only a pen, paper, and a semi-frantic scramble to indulge whatever has gripped the mind of the inspired.
And it's not enough sometimes to get some of the idea down and come back later. Though when an idea for a blog post comes up at work, due to limited break time, I've gotten a sort of system down where I get down what I can, make it to a point where I can leave off and, through what I've written down, be reminded of what I'm supposed to write at the next opportunity. By writing down a certain part of a thought, I can remind myself of the rest of that thought. That might not work for you, though, and it doesn't always work out for me. For some people, they either record everything, or risk losing their inspiration halfway through the recording process.
It can happen to the best. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as he claimed, was struck with the entirety of the poem Kubla Khan in 1797, reportedly in an opium haze. Not a recommended source of inspiration, but hey, it worked for him. As he told it, upon waking from the haze, he immediately set about composing the poem, intended at 200-300 lines, but only 30 lines in, he got a knock on the door from "a man from Porlock". The two talked for an hour, after which he resumed writing. But in that hour, he'd lost it. He scrambled to reconstruct the poem, but petered out at 54 lines. The rest was simply gone. When reading Kubla Khan, the first 30 lines and the last 24 seem disconnected from each other. The man from Porlock isn't a universally believed explanation- theories range from it being an excuse for the two halves of the poem being so different from each other to the possibility that he got stuck, with the inspiration not even waiting the hour to abandon him.
Whatever happened, lines 37-47, coming after the break, read like so:
This reads to a lot of people like Coleridge raging against the heavens, trying to recall lost inspiration, almost pleading for it to return. If he could only remember the rest of that poem, he'd put together the best damn writing you ever saw.
The 1954 movie On The Waterfront put it another way: "I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody." Which is one of the most frustrating, exasperating thoughts a person can have.
Don't let that thought happen to you.
Many of our advances have come in a slow grind, through hard work and hard research, blood, sweat and toil. This is not that. This is when an idea hits you like a lightning bolt, fully or mostly formed.
In ancient times, this was said to be the work of beings called muses. (In Christianity, this is the purpose of the Holy Spirit, just in case you were wondering what exactly that guy did all day besides be something of a third wheel to the Father and Son, like the 1992 Dream Team including Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, John Stockton... and Christian Laettner. Who, for the record, was chosen over Shaquille O'Neal.) Even today, we use the term 'muse' to refer to whatever the stimulus is when something like this happens. Whatever inspires you, that's your muse.
This is Step 1.
Anyone who's had this happen- and hopefully that's just about everyone- has probably experienced, though not quite thought much about outside of the act, Step 2: recording that inspiration. An idea that you come across through the slow grind, while difficult to obtain, is by the time you get what you need fairly well ground into your head. An out-of-nowhere visit from a muse, however, is fleeting and fragile. There is as of yet nothing in your head for that inspiration to hang onto. Once it leaves the forefront of your mind, there is every chance that the idea will recede right back into the depths from whence it came, never to return. Even if you can recall it, it is not easy, and what you dig back up might look nothing like the idea that originally struck you.
And any idea that hopes to make an impact on the world around you cannot make that impact until and unless it survives the journey from your mind into said world.
This is why some people, upon being hit with an idea out of the blue, are gripped with a sudden urge to get the idea recorded somewhere, anywhere, while they still have it, and keep it at the forefront of their minds at all costs until they can. Write it down. Turn on a tape recorder. Turn on a webcam. Blog it. Something. Anything, quickly, before the idea is gone forever. In fact, this is the recommended thing to do; this Michigan State course syllabus, for example, says not to worry if the idea doesn't sound pitch-perfect. You have an idea. Unless the idea is utterly abhorrent, don't worry if it's not perfect. You can give it closer analysis later. That's Step 3. You're still on Step 2: get the idea down.
Some of your more creative types don't even wait for a free moment. They just abruptly cut themselves loose from whatever it is they're doing, sleep included, and get it down somewhere.
Once a place to record the idea has been found, the idea must still be actually recorded. And because you're not out of the woods until that has happened, this part of the process can easily become all-consuming. No external stimuli. The world is shut out. There is only a pen, paper, and a semi-frantic scramble to indulge whatever has gripped the mind of the inspired.
And it's not enough sometimes to get some of the idea down and come back later. Though when an idea for a blog post comes up at work, due to limited break time, I've gotten a sort of system down where I get down what I can, make it to a point where I can leave off and, through what I've written down, be reminded of what I'm supposed to write at the next opportunity. By writing down a certain part of a thought, I can remind myself of the rest of that thought. That might not work for you, though, and it doesn't always work out for me. For some people, they either record everything, or risk losing their inspiration halfway through the recording process.
It can happen to the best. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as he claimed, was struck with the entirety of the poem Kubla Khan in 1797, reportedly in an opium haze. Not a recommended source of inspiration, but hey, it worked for him. As he told it, upon waking from the haze, he immediately set about composing the poem, intended at 200-300 lines, but only 30 lines in, he got a knock on the door from "a man from Porlock". The two talked for an hour, after which he resumed writing. But in that hour, he'd lost it. He scrambled to reconstruct the poem, but petered out at 54 lines. The rest was simply gone. When reading Kubla Khan, the first 30 lines and the last 24 seem disconnected from each other. The man from Porlock isn't a universally believed explanation- theories range from it being an excuse for the two halves of the poem being so different from each other to the possibility that he got stuck, with the inspiration not even waiting the hour to abandon him.
Whatever happened, lines 37-47, coming after the break, read like so:
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
This reads to a lot of people like Coleridge raging against the heavens, trying to recall lost inspiration, almost pleading for it to return. If he could only remember the rest of that poem, he'd put together the best damn writing you ever saw.
The 1954 movie On The Waterfront put it another way: "I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody." Which is one of the most frustrating, exasperating thoughts a person can have.
Don't let that thought happen to you.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Above The Tree Line
When you think of Mont Ventoux--
...what?
...Well, you are now. Go with it.
Mont Ventoux, when AND IF you think of it, you know as one of the more storied climbs in the Tour de France.
...Yes, the Tour de France has characteristics beyond that of so many people doping that we've just about come all the way back around to a level playing field again. Stop interrupting.
The climb has gained notoriety over the years as one of the most difficult, downright brutal ascents in France, despite an elevation of only 6,263 feet, with no trees to provide shade, winds that blow riders all over the road, and the knowledge in the back of every cyclist's mind that the climb has in the past taken a life. In the 1967 Tour, Tom Simpson of the United Kingdom rode himself to exhaustion, collapsing and dying one kilometer from the summit. His last words were "Put me back on my bike." A memorial stands where he fell.
...what now? Oh, fine, let me go look. ....yes, he had amphetamines on him when he died. Shut up already.
In any case, there is more to this mountain than a bike race. This peak, while brutal to bikes, does not pose a great deal of challenge to straight climbers, though the lack of trees might necessitate carrying a decent amount of water. Mont Ventoux, because of that ease to ascend without a bike, is therefore about as good a mountain as any to be considered the birthplace of mountaineering.
To be sure, mountains have been climbed since time immemorial. But before 1336, it was done purely out of necessity- migration, military maneuvers, some sort of religious purpose. Mountains were not climbed merely to be climbed. However, on April 26, the Italian poet Petrarch, alongside his brother and a pair of servants, became the first to do it for fun. As he wrote after his climb, in 'The Ascent of Mont Ventoux', he states right off the bat, "To-day I made the ascent of the highest mountain in this region, which is not improperly called Ventosum. My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer." Certainly he was not doing it to be first to the peak. Petrarch himself met someone who had, many years before, gotten to the top, but while the exact reason is not stated in the text, Petrarch's predecessor certainly did not have fun...
"We found an old shepherd in one of the mountain dales, who tried, at great length, to dissuade us from the ascent, saying that some fifty years before he had, in the same ardour of youth, reached the summit, but had gotten for his pains nothing except fatigue and regret, and clothes and body torn by the rocks and briars."
Petrarch was no expert climber. The easiest way to get up mountains is generally to find a ridge- the high road, basically- and follow that. By taking the high road, you are, obviously, climbing from a higher position, making for a flatter incline. Petrarch's brother followed this guideline, but Petrarch describes in the text how he instead elected to take valley routes, which is fine at the start of an ascent, but you have to cover the same amount of vertical either way, and a valley route just makes you do the vertical all at once at the end. Petrarch made this mistake several times, picking routes that in fact descended at some points.
"Suffice it to say that, much to my vexation and my brother's amusement, I made this same mistake three times or more during a few hours."
He did, of course, eventually reach the summit, and there, staring out into the distance, is where Petrarch cemented Mont Ventoux's place in the climbing world, not as a challenge, not as a feat, but as a pilgrimage:
"At first, owing to the unaccustomed quality of the air and the effect of the great sweep of view spread out before me, I stood like one dazed. I beheld the clouds under our feet, and what I had read of Athos and Olympus seemed less incredible as I myself witnessed the same things from a mountain of less fame. I turned my eyes toward Italy, whither my heart most inclined. The Alps, rugged and snow-capped, seemed to rise close by, although they were really at a great distance; the very same Alps through which that fierce enemy of the Roman name once made his way, bursting the rocks, if we may believe the report, by the application of vinegar. I sighed, I must confess, for the skies of Italy, which I beheld rather with my mind than with my eyes. An inexpressible longing came over me to see once more my friend and my country. At the same time I reproached myself for this double weakness, springing, as it did, from a soul not yet steeled to manly resistance."
And so it is that, to this day, when not occupied by the Tour de France, Mont Ventoux is occupied by climbers that, if they so choose, can follow Petrarch's exact route, GR4.
And not all of them are on steroids.
...what?
...Well, you are now. Go with it.
Mont Ventoux, when AND IF you think of it, you know as one of the more storied climbs in the Tour de France.
...Yes, the Tour de France has characteristics beyond that of so many people doping that we've just about come all the way back around to a level playing field again. Stop interrupting.
The climb has gained notoriety over the years as one of the most difficult, downright brutal ascents in France, despite an elevation of only 6,263 feet, with no trees to provide shade, winds that blow riders all over the road, and the knowledge in the back of every cyclist's mind that the climb has in the past taken a life. In the 1967 Tour, Tom Simpson of the United Kingdom rode himself to exhaustion, collapsing and dying one kilometer from the summit. His last words were "Put me back on my bike." A memorial stands where he fell.
...what now? Oh, fine, let me go look. ....yes, he had amphetamines on him when he died. Shut up already.
In any case, there is more to this mountain than a bike race. This peak, while brutal to bikes, does not pose a great deal of challenge to straight climbers, though the lack of trees might necessitate carrying a decent amount of water. Mont Ventoux, because of that ease to ascend without a bike, is therefore about as good a mountain as any to be considered the birthplace of mountaineering.
To be sure, mountains have been climbed since time immemorial. But before 1336, it was done purely out of necessity- migration, military maneuvers, some sort of religious purpose. Mountains were not climbed merely to be climbed. However, on April 26, the Italian poet Petrarch, alongside his brother and a pair of servants, became the first to do it for fun. As he wrote after his climb, in 'The Ascent of Mont Ventoux', he states right off the bat, "To-day I made the ascent of the highest mountain in this region, which is not improperly called Ventosum. My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer." Certainly he was not doing it to be first to the peak. Petrarch himself met someone who had, many years before, gotten to the top, but while the exact reason is not stated in the text, Petrarch's predecessor certainly did not have fun...
"We found an old shepherd in one of the mountain dales, who tried, at great length, to dissuade us from the ascent, saying that some fifty years before he had, in the same ardour of youth, reached the summit, but had gotten for his pains nothing except fatigue and regret, and clothes and body torn by the rocks and briars."
Petrarch was no expert climber. The easiest way to get up mountains is generally to find a ridge- the high road, basically- and follow that. By taking the high road, you are, obviously, climbing from a higher position, making for a flatter incline. Petrarch's brother followed this guideline, but Petrarch describes in the text how he instead elected to take valley routes, which is fine at the start of an ascent, but you have to cover the same amount of vertical either way, and a valley route just makes you do the vertical all at once at the end. Petrarch made this mistake several times, picking routes that in fact descended at some points.
"Suffice it to say that, much to my vexation and my brother's amusement, I made this same mistake three times or more during a few hours."
He did, of course, eventually reach the summit, and there, staring out into the distance, is where Petrarch cemented Mont Ventoux's place in the climbing world, not as a challenge, not as a feat, but as a pilgrimage:
"At first, owing to the unaccustomed quality of the air and the effect of the great sweep of view spread out before me, I stood like one dazed. I beheld the clouds under our feet, and what I had read of Athos and Olympus seemed less incredible as I myself witnessed the same things from a mountain of less fame. I turned my eyes toward Italy, whither my heart most inclined. The Alps, rugged and snow-capped, seemed to rise close by, although they were really at a great distance; the very same Alps through which that fierce enemy of the Roman name once made his way, bursting the rocks, if we may believe the report, by the application of vinegar. I sighed, I must confess, for the skies of Italy, which I beheld rather with my mind than with my eyes. An inexpressible longing came over me to see once more my friend and my country. At the same time I reproached myself for this double weakness, springing, as it did, from a soul not yet steeled to manly resistance."
And so it is that, to this day, when not occupied by the Tour de France, Mont Ventoux is occupied by climbers that, if they so choose, can follow Petrarch's exact route, GR4.
And not all of them are on steroids.
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