another outdoor adventure

But first you may notice my blog is changing in style and appearance. I decided to upgrade to the new blog WYSIWYG editor but now I lost all my javascript customizations and I haven't had time to edit them back in. So you will have to deal with it for a bit.

Anyhow back to the topic on hand.

It was event number three for my organized adventure outings this year. This time 12 of us headed to the Ventana wilderness for a 2 day backpacking trip. First we car camped overnight at Pfeiffer big sur state park on friday but I realized that my peeps weren't really reading my evites when the later car showed up at 9pm expecting me to have food for them because they had read my food related email saying fried chicken for dinner. There was a mad scramble for ramen then. doh. Well I learned my lesson. These people read emails carefully.

As you can imagine 12 people and 2 dogs take a while to get started on a trip so we didn't get hiking the next day until 10 am. Also 12 people take up a lot of space on the trail. All the other backpackers stared at our big group in awe and I think someone muttered under his breath "dude, did you guys all come on a bus?" Maybe he was thinking the asian bus. I was quite impressed with how we all stayed together. No big separation in speed so we could all chat together. It was really relaxing.

The not so relaxing part came at the end when we got to our campsite destination and we were told we would have to cross the river. This was ok with the folks who read my evite and had brought tevas or sandals. But those poor folks who didn't had to suffer through 50 degree water in barefeet which hurt quite a bit. I was really wobbly as well and was uber happy to make it successfully to the other side. The rest of the day was spent sunbathing in the creek and then we had the added spice of D and A deciding to go swimming in the 50 degree water (they are crazy!) and A even pretended to fetch a stick which we threw to him.

The return home was mostly downhill thank god but I think we were all pretty calorie deprived. I overheard the back of the group talking about an optimal dating algorithm on how to find the most optimal mate for yourself. Of course then I heard someone throw in log(N) where N = number of people you date (these were CS people of course). But turns out this is a real algorithm though B now thinks he can come up with a better one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SultansDowryProblem.html

The problem is given a pool of N people where every person has an optimal rating of being a good partner for you, you need to find the best strategy to find the person that is your most optimal partner. yes this is a math problem. we're geeks. anyhow, the best strategy is to actually wait until you have dated a certain number of people in this group (X). Once X is past, then you choose the person that is most optimal after that (compared to your past dating history). Then a bunch of math happens and they determine that in a pool of 100 people, X should be 37.

That's a lot of dating. Someone needs to try this on match.com!