A Crippling Calm?

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On a backpacking trip to the Pecos Wilderness in the 70’s, my Dad and I stopped to chat with a wilderness ranger. We swapped stories of course, and he told us about a hiker who had taken off his boots and socks for an afternoon nap. While the hiker slept, the shade moved, and when he woke, the high-altitude sun had burned his feet so severely that he could not hike back out. The ranger had helped evacuate him.

So you can imagine my horror when I read this on the back of a package of Tazo Calm Herbal Infusion …

A single cup of Tazo Calm has been known to have the same effect as sitting for 45 minutes in a mountain meadow on a sunny day with your shoes off.

No thank you. I prefer to be able to walk after I drink a cup of tea.

7th Grade Reading

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I’ve been having a fun time sharing books with my 7th grade son.

In 8th grade, I was a library aide. It was at the lunch period, so I’d shelve all the books returned that morning (all of them, because the one I had returned before school was usually on the bottom of the pile), go to lunch between rushes when the line was short, then come back to the library to choose a book and start reading. I’d finish it that night and return it the next morning before school.

As a result, I have a very good grounding in juvenile literature (through 1970, I’m catching up), and I was ready when my son reached 7th grade. Luckily, he’s a team guy and likes having other people recommend books. I’ve been re-reading some and hunting down new ones.

As you can see by the list below, I want to make sure he has a good grounding in the classics.

Ralph 124C 41+, Hugo Gernsback. Michael loved this book, even though it was written nearly a hundred years ago and that shows in the style and vocabulary. Gernsback was totally caught up in the wonders of the year 2660 and that somehow connected. I have a soft spot for visions of the future written in the past, and this one is from 1911, so it is even more fun. It is mostly a travelogue of the future, but there is enough plot to keep it moving.

Be sure to get the edition from the Bison Books Frontiers of Imagination series because it has the cool illustrations. Sigh, that web site is a disaster, but the books are really nice. If they could reissue the catalog of Sam Moskowitz’s Hyperion Press, I wouldn’t care if they wrote their whole site in PDF.

Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Robert Heinlein. You think that all those SF juveniles are the same, then you find one that is just better. This one has it all — tinkering engineers, good aliens, bad aliens, a prison on Pluto, a galactic tribunal on the worthiness of the human race, and a strong female character who’s good at math. Michael ate it up, but found the 1950’s small town scenes somewhat stranger than being imprisoned on Pluto. Maybe we should go watch a bunch of The Andy Griffith Show or Happy Days episodes to get a proper grounding in 50’s stereotypes. Or maybe not.

Space Cadet, Robert Heinlein. You’d probably pass this one up because of the title, but you’d be wrong. Yes, a lot of the plot is predictable, but it there is something interesting going on besides the regular academy and coming-of-age stuff. The Space Patrol is in charge of a global deterrent, orbiting nuclear weapons. The folk on the ground are so used to peace that even talking about the bombs is impolite. Could we make a lasting peace out of Mutually Assured Destruction? What kind of guardians would we need to make that work? The chill of the cold war spawns a bit of hope.

Heinlein’s Space Patrol has a lot in common with Doc Smith’s Galactic Patrol, but without the all-knowning Arisians to keep them on course. This time, it is all up to the humans.

Of course, Ender’s Game is the best space cadet novel of all time, but I think it is a lot stronger if you know which direction a space cadet story is supposed to go. There are always a couple of cadets who don’t make the grade because they aren’t moral enough, but we don’t expect them to be psychopaths. Space Cadet stands on its own, but if you haven’t read Ender’s Game, you now have another reason to read Heinlein first.

So Yesterday, by Scott Westerfeld. Set the time machine for today! The main character is a Cool Hunter on the watch for emerging fashions. He blows apart a marketing session by inviting an Innovator, a girl who starts fashions instead of following them. Then someone disappears and fashion gets deadly.

I really like how the plot charges ahead while peeling back the facade of marketing and fashion. The language has a now, post-modern shine (is post-modern already passé?) decorated with brand names. Even the cool hunting protagonist is nearly a brand name, Hunter Braque. He makes an aside early on about mentioning brands when he avoids saying “Google” because it is just too common.

It’s good this book is short, because both my son and my wife had to finish it in one sitting. Westerfeld writes longer stuff, too. He has a trilogy on another set of themes that hit home with teens. Uglies, Pretties, and Specials is set in a future where everyone is forced to get surgery and mods to be pretty and happy at age 16. Well, almost everyone. What did they give up to be pretty and happy? Was it worth it? What would you choose?

The King in the Window, by Adam Gopnik. This one isn’t science fiction. Well, there is some weird quantum physics stuff at the end, but that is more fantasy than SF. It is there for narrative effect not intellectual effect (but that is a different blog post). The wonderful part about this book is the feel of Paris and the presence of the past in the present. Racine, Molière, and Richelieu (still adjusting his mayonnaise) are here, and Versailles really is a portal to a different world. Unlike the other books on this list, this book is more about place and character than plot. The plot is fine, but what I remember is Paris, the dinner with Mrs. Pearson, the clochards, and all the windows.

I think the first half of the book was more satisfying and that it loses itself a bit when the American startup guy enters the story. Maybe New York authors just can’t write convincing Silicon Valley stereotypes. But that is a nit on a fun story with a nice bit of depth. My son didn’t see anything wrong with it. For me, catching myself reflected in the café window isn’t quite the same anymore.

When Worlds Collide, by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer. When a book gives away the ending in the title, you know the authors are betting everything on the ride. Imagine a mystery titled “The Butler Did It”. This edition combines When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide. That’s the sequel, but I bet you figured that out. This is another early SF novel, but from 1932 this time. That is a long twenty years from 1911 — world war, depression, and an influenza pandemic. In When Worlds Collide the destruction is not limited to govenrments, economies, or populations, the entire Earth is destroyed and it is done with convincing detail: huge tides, monster storms blotting out the sun, mass panic, and a final desperate dash to another planet. Once there, the meteorological and geological scares are over, but the sociological and political problems are just as serious.

Progressive Reranking

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Occasionally, people want to rescore search results and rerank them after they are returned from the search engine. The usual answer is that it is very slow because you need to fetch the full list of results, score them, then sort by the new score.

You don’t really want to rerank the full list. If your search engine is returning very useful results at the end of the list, you have big problems, bigger than you can fix with reranking. The normal case is that you are moving some results up and down a few positions, and users will only look at the first ten results. So let’s look at how to do that efficiently.

A Pull Model for Search Results

The Ultraseek XPA Java library has classes to combine results from multiple engines and rerank them by global tf.idf scores. This class can be used for other kinds of reranking. You can use write your own code, of course, but I’ll use the XPA classes for this example.

CompositeSearchable (and CompositeSearchResultList) reads results into a priority queue, ordered by score. When client code requests a result from CompositeSearchable, that is removed from the queue, added to a “frozen” list of scored results, the PQ is replenished with one new result, that result is scored and inserted into the queue (positioned according to its score), then the requested result is returned.

The frozen list allows downstream searchables to treat the already accessed portion of the search results as read-only and unchanging.

This is a lot faster than it would seem, because the next result is usually already locally cached in the local UltraseekServer class because it was part of the chunk of results requested from the server.

If a CompositeSearchable is merging results from different sources, the replacement result always comes from the same source as the one moved to the frozen list. If all the good results are from one collection, this replacement policy guarantees that they will all be shown.

Applying Score Adjustments

Assume we have a score for each document that represents a priori goodness. Perhaps it is a measure of how long it would take monkeys to type that document (MonkeyRank). This score ranges from 0..1 with 1 meaning good.

SearchResult already has a document quality measure which matches this, with a range of -1.0..+1.0. We can use the default result scorer, but replace (or modify) Ultraseek’s document quality with our own MonkeyRank.

We do this with SearchResultWrapper, which delegates all methods to a wrapped SearchResult. We’ll scale the MonkeyRank value to a range of -0.2..+0.2. This is a bit more powerful than the Ultraseek quality score, which goes from -0.16..+0.15.

class MonkeySearchResult extends SearchResultWrapper {
public float getQuality() {
float mr = MonkeyRank.getRank(baseResult.getURL());
float scaledMR = (mr * 0.4) - 0.2;
return scaledMR + baseResult.getQuality();
}
}

Then we make a MonkeyResultScorer class. It wraps the search result, then uses DefaultResultScorer.

class MonkeyResultScorer implements ResultScorer {
public float score(SearchResult sr, SearchResultList srl) {
return CompositeSearchable.RESULT_SCORER.score(
new MonkeySearchResult(sr),
srl);
}
}

The only thing left is to figure out the maximum number of rank positions that a score boost can move a result up the list. That determines the read-ahead level. We only care about movement to a more relevant rank (earlier in the list). Pushing results down the list is much easier.

Now you need to set the read-ahead. If the read-ahead is too small, then some good results will not be re-ranked as high as they should be. If the read-ahead is too big, performance will suffer because you will need to fetch more results from the engine before the first one can be shown.

Here are a few ways to guess at the read-ahead size. You’ll probably need to do these for quite a few queries in order to get good numbers. I’d use the top 100 single-word and top 100 multi-word queries. Those are scored somewhat differently in the engine, and multi-word queries are underrepresented in the top 100. Overall, they are more than half of queries.

  1. Look at the maximum score modification (+/- 0.2) and then at the scoring for result lists. Count how far a document would move if it was scored 0.2 higher and everything above it was scored 0.2 lower. This is the worst case read-ahead value for your data and queries. It will be much too large.
  2. Compare a raw list and a re-ranked list and look at the biggest movements up the list. This will be the typical read-ahead value for your data and queries, probably a much smaller number than the above.
  3. Do either of the above, but only count results that move into the top three slots (“above the fold”) or the top ten slots (first page). This number is more practical, especially for scores based on link-graph data, like PageRank. Those tend to make a big difference for a few documents, thanks to the power-law distribution in the web link graph. Also, if your scoring doesn’t move hits above the fold, it is a waste of time and you don’t need to implement any of this!

Dirty Pages: Popularity Ranking

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A few years ago I was talking with a friend about using access frequency (popularity) as a factor in ranking web pages. He pointed out that this works well for dead trees materials, too.

He used to go to the university library and start down a row of bound math journals. He’d pull one out and look at the non-bound edge. If there was a section where the page edges were dirty, that was a paper that lots of people had read. So he would read it. Then go to the next volume. Going purely by popularity lead him to top papers in areas that he might not have looked at otherwise.

Interestingly, this only works when the materials are shared, like in a library.

A Buddy, The Eleventh Essential

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Scoutmaster Minute for Troop 14, March 27, 2007

You’ve probably heard about the Scout who was lost in the woods in North Carolina recently. He did a pretty good job of taking care of himself, getting water, keeping warm, but he could have done better. What are some of the things you can think of?

[Scouts answered with “stay in camp”, “don’t split up the troop leaving one adult and one Scout in camp”, “take food”.]

Those are good ideas. He did have some Pringles, which helped — those have a lot of calories.

Here is one thing that would have helped [pull a whistle out of my pocket], a whistle, one of the Ten Essentials1. A whistle makes you much easier to find. That would have helped the 200 people who spent four days looking for him.

There is another essential thing, and that is a buddy. We all learn the buddy system for Tenderfoot, because it is so important. He should have had a buddy when he left camp. When you have a buddy, you can make better decisions.

But the buddy system failed at an earlier point. He left camp to go home because his friends weren’t on the trip. He needed a buddy before he left the parking lot. He needed a buddy at the beginning of the trip.

So make sure that you have a buddy. Invite one on every trip. A buddy is the eleventh essential.2

  1. Yes, I know that the BSA calls them the “Outdoor Essentials”. I usually do, too, but that would spoil the punch line.
  2. The previous Scoutmaster Minute I posted was also about buddies, but there have been other topics, including an excellent one on focus by one of our ASMs. On the other hand, we’re working on increasing attendance on outings, so I may continue to touch on buddies, friends, and word-of-mouth.

Back to the 70’s

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I’ve been listening to music from the 1970’s the past week, though it might not be the same as your 70’s music.

Tracy Nelson, Homemade Songs (1978): My favorite tracks are “The Summer of the Silver Comet”, a love song about a locomotive, and “Friends of a Kind”, a hurtin’ song for grown-ups. If you haven’t heard Tracy sing the blues, this is a good place to start. I like Doin’ it my Way (1978) a little better because it’s a smaller production and because “Time is on my Side” and “Down So Low” are so fine, but that is a vinyl release that is not on CD. Maybe you should check eBay (wow, two copies!) and dust off that turntable.

Pere Ubu, The Modern Dance (1978): You’ll either like this or hate it with the first track, guaranteed. This pretty much defines the genre “wife-annoying music” which is why it lives at work. I love it. A friend of mine used that intro as one of his “world’s most annoying ringtones”.

Keith Jarrett, The Köln Concert (1975): This was my music for must-get-done studying in college. There’s something about the piano-killer percussive playing and the sweet melodies that keeps my brain ticking over. I just did my CD replacement buy and I still know exactly where all the moans and groans are even though I hadn’t listened to it for twenty-five years. I only have one reservation about this record — it just seems wrong to have nearly memorized an improvised concert.

Cat Stevens, Catch Bull at Four (1972): You’ve probably heard of this one, since it sold a zillion copies. Most people like the hippie stuff on side 1, but I’m fond of the darker side 2 tracks, especially “18th Avenue” and “House of Freezing Steel”.

Looking at the dates, it is clear that I was exposed to a bunch of new music when I got a DJ shift at KTRU in 1978.

Future of Bibliographic Control

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I went to the Library of Congress open meeting on bibliographic issues a couple of weeks ago. Interesting, but I think they have a long way to go. This meeting was a good stab at understanding users, both searchers and catalogers, but the tricky part is the model and system interface. How to support links and mashups and massive content generation and cataloging? There was some talk about tagging, but the anti-spam algorithms needed for low-trust, low-authority cataloging are far beyond the expertise and budgets of libraries.

The official writeup and lots of notes by Karen Coyle are good places for more thorough coverage.

Bernie Hurley from UC Berkeley gave a talk on issues today with MARC (see Karen’s notes). This was far more interesting than I expected, mostly because it was fact-based. Some tidbits:

  • MARC cataloging is expensive, even when outsourced to India
  • thesis cataloging is different, the subject areas tend to be outside of the established categories
  • MARC has more information than they use (have 175 fields but 2/3 of search is on just 3 and they show a maximum of 27)
  • it does not have the information that is needed for search and faceted browse (from Andrew Pace, NC State)
  • the book height and depth are measured for shelving, but we need the weight and thickness for mailing them (also from Andrew)

The main fields they use are:

  • Author
  • Title
  • Subject keywords
  • Date for sorting
  • LC Classification

Several speakers, both from the podium and the floor, were pinning their hopes on full-text search. I presume that is because they haven’t tried implementing it. I appreciate the optimism, but full-text is Muggle Technology, not magic. Full-text is great for finding the next 20% or 30% of stuff, but most of your good results come from great metadata (including links and attention data). As Dan Clancy (Google Book and Google Scholar) pointed out, book search is much harder than web search precisely because you don’t have as much link data (metadata). No one had any good ideas about how to get access to all that text so it could be indexed. Well, ideas besides Google Book.

Hey, why wasn’t Brewster Kahle invited? Maybe the LoC already knows what he thinks, but a position paper would be handy for the rest of us.

On-line access to content is working OK. The only complaints were about the URL fields in library catalogs. If you don’t know what MARC is, take a moment to look over MARC 856, Electronic Location and Access. It’s a little more complicated than the <a> tag.

The day started with an interesting and dangerous talk by Timothy Burke on the wonders and difficulties of serious research using our current tools (see Karen’s notes). It was mostly about searching techniques, though it wasn’t really explained that way. I would have been happier if he’d started with some terminology from Marcia Bates. The personal view was helpful, but this should be well-understood stuff by now.

The danger is aiming our tool efforts primarily at the expert user. That way lies disaster. There is really only one way to do this and succeed, and that is to follow the Rob Pike architectural rules:

  1. Simple things are simple.
  2. Hard things are possible.
  3. You don’t have to understand the whole system to use part of it.

Once you do this, the fancy tools can be built on top of it. If you design for the fancy stuff, the system will never be simple and it will probably be over-fit to an old problem (like MARC is today).

One other point from Burke’s presentation, universities no longer teach how to do literature search. Each discipline has general techniques and domain-specific ones (think chemical structure search), and this cannot be fobbed off on some other department. Striking out on your own might help avoid the prejudices of the field, but it can also mean missing and reinventing a lot of stuff.

I also saw some premature target lock-on. For example, converting subject headings to strings of standalone “subject keywords” is a lot of work, and is primarily useful for faceted browsing. Faceted browsing is good, but it is only one approach. We may be using facets because they are the best we can do with the HTML-based web apps of the past five years. Is it right for five years from now, when the conversion is done or did we just blow a wad of cash on another dead technology?

Finally, I should have asked Andrew Pace how much NC State spent on Endeca.

A side note — Google did a poor job of hosting this event. We had to park a half-mile away, there were no power strips for laptops, I couldn’t get back on the GoogleGuest net after 10AM, we had a “mini kitchen” instead of the usual wide array of free munchies (dang!), and lunch was “here’s a map of the area”. No one stood up to say “let me know if there are any problems”. A few people got power by unplugging the massage chair. Worst of all, the committee was ushered off to the Google Cafeteria, so there was no way to talk with any of them over lunch. Why have an open meeting if you aren’t going to eat together? That was golden time with users, and it was squandered.

Templates and Website Design

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John Gruber posts about templates and design on his excellent blog, Daring Fireball. He talks about specific blogservers, but the point is true for any serious website.

I started the visual design with a blank sheet of paper, and then moved on to an empty Photoshop file. I designed the markup starting with an empty XHTML 1.0 skeleton in BBEdit. I designed the URLs on pen and paper, trying to maximize clarity and structure while minimizing cruft and length.

On the other hand, anyone who’s designed a software library is well aware that 90% of their customer’s shipping code has some chunk that was written by loading up the sample program in an editor. When I was working on ORBlite, it was pretty easy to tell who had used my sample code and not replaced the default log message (“Oops, an error occurred.”).

So, I disagree with John a bit. He makes the right qualifications for his recommendations (“… for anyone attempting to establish their own unique brand”), but that is a tiny fraction of websites, though a larger fraction of traffic.

There are plenty of websites that should be usable, attractive, and functional (utilitas, venustas, firmitas) without a ground up design. Said differently, the default templates need to be excellent, with a set of base styles broad enough to serve as useful starting points for various tastes. Even those tastes that design MySpace pages.

As John says at the close of the article, “If you start with nothing, you’re forced to think about everything.” For a designer, that’s great. For the rest of us, not so good. For good or ill, most templates aren’t that far from “nothing”.

To be specific, I’d like one, just one, template for Movable Type 3.x that has a fluid width.

A Fatter Long Tail? Nope.

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Chris Anderson posted a really nice illustration a couple of months ago in Visualizing the Rise of the Long Tail. He shows three photos of mountain ranges that cover the same peaks but viewed from a different distances.

This would be a nice metaphor, but the underlying idea is wrong. On the other hand, the pictures are really pretty, so let’s take a look.

I’ve got a few Canon lens brochures somewhere in the garage with similar series of shots demonstrating the perspective of wide angle, normal, and telephoto lenses. Hmm, looking more closely these aren’t different perspectives at all, they are a cheap PhotoShop hack — they just stretch the aspect ratio and re-crop a single photo. Hmm, sounds more like PowerPoint-mind than real perspective, eh?

Anyway, here they are:

The idea behind this visualization is that the long, thin tail is going to get thicker (but stay long, I guess).

Unfortunately, the tail cannot simultaneously be a Zipf distribution (“long”) and be fat. The basic point of that shape is that the tail is both long and thin. If it gets fat it isn’t Zipf anymore. Since every popularity-based empirical distribution is Zipf, betting on that to change is a good way to lose money. The long tail is not going to rise until human nature changes.

Since that visualization is guaranteed to be wrong for overall web traffic, can it be reused for some other idea? It is a neat visual after all. I hate to waste those.

Instead, think of the top one as aggregate traffic and the bottom one as an individual’s traffic. The individual may spend a lot of time with local interests, things that aren’t every going to be a big hit (the fat head of the curve). The middle illustration shows groups of people. The students at Rice University will have some things in common that are not shared by the general public (or even faculty), so they share some “foothill” interests. This probably represents both local (Montrose-area Houston) and preference (ironic humor) interests. Pity, that.

When you add together traffic from related individuals, you see the group interests. When you add together traffic from a random sample (or lots of groups), you see the mainstream, the now-familiar long tail.

Really, all of these are different Zipf distributions, but I think the mountains are pretty, so I’ll stick with those. Maybe the groups should focus on different peaks.

A website tailored to a group should be mainly thinking about the bottom two illustrations. Your visitors will spend a lot of time in the foothills, and that is the ground you need to cover in detail. Community libraries have known this for a long time — their acquisition policy is tuned to local tastes. Paying attention to your customers is great, but don’t pretend that Zipf will bend to your business model.

That Web 2.0 Video

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By now, you’ve probably seen Michael Wesch‘s Web 2.0 video. Normally sober people are linking it and the designated cheerleaders are loving it. Me, I’m kinda disappointed. I expect some critical thinking from professors, not just a valentine to the latest buzzword.

The beginning of the vid is OK, basically defining terms and some exposition, with decent visual storytelling. The initial bit about digital text being non-linear isn’t convincing, since it is described in a linear medium, and the “writing as animation” trick was done so much better in “Why Man Creates” by Saul Bass in 1968.

Then we get a tour of RSS readers and blog posting, though I expect that part only makes sense to people who already understand it.

Around 2:55, we see, “Who will organize all this data? We will. You will.” Well, I don’t need Web 2.0 to give me more unorganized data. Not a real step forward. The great benefit of blogs and Wikipedia is the return of the human editor. I can subscribe to an organizer that I trust. I don’t have to organize it myself.

Right around 3:20, it starts quoting Wired and goes off the rails with rampant anthropomorphism. Four fragments are butted together to read, “When we post or tag pictures […] we are teaching the machine […] Each time we forge a link […] we teach it an idea.” Wow. That is some heavy-duty mythology, something I’d expect an anthro prof to analyze, not parrot.

Let’s get this straight. We don’t “teach the machine” and it doesn’t “learn”. We write and link. People write programs to read the text and images and links and to make measurements from them. People write algorithms to pull some information out of those measurements, information useful to other people. The people learn. The people teach each other. The machines are machines and the people are people.

Finally, the vid ends up with “We’ll need to rethink love/family/ourselves.” Really. I think not. I’ve been on the Internet for nearly twenty-five years, I was IM’ing my girlfriend in 1984, and I’ve needed to rethink each of those words, but not because of mail(1) or Usenet or Mosaic or Movable Type. It was because of people that I love and that love me.

The Buddy System

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Scoutmaster Minute for Troop 14, February 13, 2007

You know the buddy system, right? You learned that for Tenderfoot. Stick together in groups of two or three for safety.

Today, I heard about a group of seven buddies in Minnesota. They started Scouts together and made a promise that they would stick with it and get Eagle together. Last week, they did that.

Having a buddy for your big goals, or small ones, really helps. Right now, several of you are working on the first aid merit badge. Don’t just go to the class, go with a buddy. Work together, help each other, and make a deal that you are both going to finish the badge.

Get a buddy. Get it done.

The seven new Eagle Scouts are from Troop 224, Lake Elmo, Minnesota. Well done, Scouts.

Weisse Streifen, grüner Rand

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A Christmas present from my in-laws was a new car radio for my fifteen year old Miata, with personal installation by my father in law who is far more skilled around cars than I am. Now I can listen to my iPod on my slightly longer commute.

Today it was Autobahn by Kraftwerk. Even keeping under the speed limit (easy in the rain), my time in the car wasn’t quite long enough for the full 22:40 song, I parked at just over 19 minutes. Maybe I’ll fast forward over the beginning on the way home.

The commute is just about right for those classic full-album-side compositions. Now I need to hunt down Fare Forward Voyagers by John Fahey and maybe some 18 minute art rock masterpieces. Or I could just get more Bevis Frond.

Stoves for Boy Scouts

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Another blogging Scoutmaster has posted some questions and ideas about stoves for Boy Scouts. Note: I linked to the February archive since the individual posts don’t seem to be linkable, so go there and scroll down to “Stoves for Scouts” and “Stove Feedback”. They are deciding between propane stoves and white gas stoves, two options that weren’t even on the table for our troop, so I’m a bit surprised.

We don’t use white gas stoves with boys. The stoves are finicky, require regular maintenance, and can have dangerous flare-ups if mistreated or misused. But the major reason is that we don’t want the temptation of white gas being available for starting campfires, because it will be used. That is just too dangerous, besides being against BSA policy on fuels and stoves.

We have used white gas backpacking stoves with our Venture Patrol (older, more responsible Scouts), on high adventure trips, and when snow camping. These are personal stoves, nearly all MSR stoves.

Traditional propane cartridges are just too heavy for backpacking. We take several backpacking trips each year, so we would need separate car camping and backpacking stoves.

In the past, we’ve used the Campingaz stoves, but they are tall and tippy with the large pots used for patrols (as are many backpacking stoves) and don’t really work below freezing, which meant we used white gas stoves when snow camping. We were down to only three stoves, thanks to lost stoves and lost parts, so it was time for new equipment.

We ended up with a pretty tough list of requirements, listed here.

  1. Cartridge fuel
  2. Readily-available fuel
  3. Easy to operate
  4. Rugged and reliable
  5. Stable with large pots
  6. Light enough for backpacking
  7. Affordable, we want two stoves per patrol

Amazingly, there is a stove that meets all these and has a few extra advantages. We chose the Coleman Exponent Xpert stove. Luckily, we didn’t have “non-silly name” as a requirement. Warning, Coleman has several stoves with similar names. The one I’m talking about is a four-legged stove that takes PowerMax cartridges.

Let’s check this out against our requirements.

  1. Cartridge fuel: yes.
  2. Readily-available fuel: yes, the PowerMax cartridges are even stocked at Philmont!
  3. Easy to operate: mostly, it needs to run at low power for the first 30 seconds to heat the generator, after that it is very simple.
  4. Rugged and reliable: I know of two other troops who’ve been using this stove for three years with success.
  5. Stable with large pots: adequate, with four legs and about a six-inch spread.
  6. Light enough for backpacking: not super-light at 13.5 oz., but the same weight as white gas MSR stoves.
  7. Affordable: yes, street price is around $50, Coleman’s price through their non-profit purchase program is $37.90, though we used a half-off sale at Amazon for our order.

These stoves even do a few things that weren’t on our list.

  • They work well below freezing, because of the liquid feed for fuel (thus the generator and warm-up time).
  • The cartridges are recyclable, because they can be punctured with the included “green key”. Might want to tie that “green key” to something so it doesn’t get lost, though.
  • Lots of heat output, which helps for larger pots.
  • Remote fuel canister allows safe use of a windscreen.
  • A Sharpie will write on the canister and not rub off, so fuel can be marked with patrol names.

We might use white gas backpacking stoves for a 50-Miler with no resupply. The weight of cartridges can add up for long trips. I really can’t think of any other Scout outing where our new stoves would not be the right choice. Well, maybe a Venture Patrol “Ten Pound Challenge” ultralight outing.

Backpack Gear Test has multiple reviews of this stove’s three-legged brother. The owner review is especially comprehensive. The only common negatives from those reviews are: weight, can be difficult to attach the canister, and the O-ring seals occasionally come off with the canister. Even the lightweight purists seem to like this stove for winter use.

Thanks to Troop 151, Georgtown, TX and Troop 5, Palo Alto, CA for recommending these stoves.

Update: The Complete Walker IV has a lot more info about this stove, back when it was called Peak 1 Xpert instead of Exponent Xpert. The aluminum Powermax cartridges have a better fuel to weight ratio than other cartridges, and seem to be about 50% more fuel-efficient. Chip Rawlins reports using one 300g cartridge per person on a one week trip, so it might work just fine for a 50 Miler.

Further Update: After a couple of outings, these are working well. The push, twist, and latch motion requires pushing kinda hard and the latch isn’t a sharp snap, so the boys have some trouble with getting the cartridges on. Also, if you read a review that says it the stove burns funny for the first minute or so, you’ve found someone who didn’t read the directions. You need to run it on low for 30 seconds to heat up the generator.

VisitorVille: Little People in Your Website

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This is a weird approach to website stats. VisitorVille displays your website stats as people getting off the bus, walking around, and going into buildings. It looks almost as exciting as playing Zoo Tycoon. But kinda neat.

I wonder how it shows site search, maybe someone taking a helicopter to another part of the city? I want a jetpack!

The client is Windows-only, so I guess I won’t be trying the demo. Too bad.