No — its not the two umbrellas I left in the balcony overnight to dry that, come sunrise, had been blown into the sea. Nor the dwindling population of digestive enzymes in my stomach from eating daily multi-course lunches and dinners and frequent trips to the 24/7 cafe. Not the electrons bumped to lower energy orbits from snapping over a thousand photos in the last week. And certainly not sleep, given the amount of food-induced or hiking-induced afternoon naps recently taken.

Sunset in Alaska

Vacations are part no-moment-to-waste sightseeing, and part peaceful-mental-relaxation. This cruise, while madly fun and entertaining, has been too much of the former and too few of the latter. What’s missing is moments of relaxation. The deep breaths as stillness overcomes you, as you pause, your muscles slacken, and your mind quiets.

A friend, who first introduced me to the concept of trigger-happy photo-tourism, also advised, paraphrasing clumsily here, that “sometimes, you can capture the moment with a photo, but other times you must put down the camera and just enjoy the moment.” A New York Times article recently noted that tourists to the Louvre rarely paused more than a few seconds at each work of art, more interested in checking it off on some list than savoring and ‘experiencing’ the work. I fell into that trap, and rarely heeded my friend’s advice, happily snapping away at mushrooms, beaches, crabs, mountains — really, my eyes roamed the landscape not for scenery to experience, but for images to capture.

I say this not with any regret, but with resolve to veer my vacation more towards relaxation and less towards sight-seeing. The old ladies aboard this cruise got it right when, while I was by the pool trying to get a good camera angle on the Hubbard Glacier, they were simply sipping some tea

Tracy's King Crab Shack in Juneau, AK

My family ordered three King Crab legs, some Crab Cakes, and one Alaskan Crab Roll.

King Crab Leg, Crab Cakes, and Alaskan Crab Roll (not shown).

Instead of boiling the King Crab, Tracy carefully steams her crabs to retain all the flavor, and serves it simple with melted butter and a salted roll. She keeps her crab supplier a secret, but always delivers high-quality fresh crabs without any heavy processing. This trip so far, I’ve eaten crab legs from high-end restaurants to cruise ships to hole-in-the-walls, and her shack is the absolute best.

King Crab Leg. Aka Food Bliss.

The consistency of the crab meat, and the sweet natural flavor, renders me speechless (but still able to type this blog, thankfully). Whereas restaurants give you fancy instruments to crack the crab legs, Tracy’s solution is elegant.  She uses scissors to make a cut along the length of the leg. To access the lumps of crab meat, one just has to open the leg like opening a book, as shown in the above photo. Why can’t restaurants make it so easy!? I ate so much, I skipped on the entree of our five-course dinner on the cruise ship a few hours later.

Alaskan Crab Roll -- coleslaw on top, crab meat lumps on bottom, deliciousness all around.

The Alaskan crab roll — a roll with generous heaps of crab meat topped with lots of cole slaw (she claims its an East Coast thing, really?) — was equally delicious.

We wolfed down this afternoon snack turned meal (after ordering the first King Crab, we promptly ordered more) on newspaper-dried benches under a plastic tarp cover in the windy rain, reminiscent of ducking under plastic overhangs in Taipei to eat noodles. Instead of eating Dan Dan Noodles with a chopstick however, I was busy forking out fresh crab meat from an exposed King Crab leg and dipping it in melted butter. Bliss!

If one ever travels to Juneau, I highly recommend this crab shack, tucked in an alleyway behind the Public Library. The downside with all the quality is that it isn’t cheap. One King Crab leg (about 12 ounces) costs $14, and I could easily have eaten 2-3 legs if I hadn’t held back to save for dinner (and save my wallet).

Whittier is at such a high elevation, that if you had a room on the tenth floor, your window would be the first layer of clouds. There is no sky; the port is surrounded by a panoramic wall of mountains, with a canopy of thick clouds. The clouds are so low, as if some heavenly hand had pushed downward, that the mountaintops are completely engulfed, and we are sealed in completely. Its at once both majestic and claustrophobic.

View from Whittier, AK

Fog permeates the quiet port. I imagine that, any second, a pirate ship’s cannon blast will pierce the silence, and a Johnny Depp character will leads a throng of crooked-tooth pirates to raid this sleepy port for vittles.

From Whitter, AK we left on a day cruise of glaciers in Prince William Sound. Besides Glaciers Galore, we also happened upon a small raft of otters.

Raft of otters in Prince William Sound

[on the Celebrity Millenium Cruise -- posting via satellite wireless]

At the lodge, elderly couples abound — a wrinkly old man wearing a red hunter’s hat calmly smoking a pipe in the cold mountain air with his wife of fifty years; a group of white-haired folks wearing green bingo visors passing the night playing cards in the wooden main lodge; an old couple tightly holding hot chocolate walking back to their cabin in the early morning. Their movement slow not from the atrophy of their muscles, but with the measured patience of a mind existing without regard for the passage of time.

The highlight of this lodge is the main lobby, where a vaulted ceiling houses several panes of glass, with a view of the mountains.

Rustic lodge with view of Mt. McKinley

In the early morning, I walked in to a curious sight. In the main lobby, behind the glass panel was arranged row after row of chairs with desks, all facing outward to the mountains. A movie projected on the glass perhaps? A lecture about forestry? A theater with no stage? No. I watched as couple after couple of the elderly arrived, holding cups of coffee, and silently sat down. There they sat, for at least an hour, quietly savoring the coffee aroma and enjoying the motionless mountains as if intently watching a movie.

I marveled at their absolute stillness and wondered what their minds were thinking. Sifting through their personal Pensieve for that perfect memory of their childhood to relive? Dreaming of hiking across the plains, or hang-gliding through the valleys? Or perhaps they really sit for the whole hour absorbed in the scenery, their thinking suspended as their emotional and visual circuits are overcharged.

Curious, I gingerly walked down and sat in one the chairs. The Experience slowly set in on me. I slowly became transfixed by the zen scene of hovering clouds atop mountains. Too slowly, it turns out, as within a few minutes I yawned, and the spell was broken. My eyes darted back to my Macbook Pro, which I’d been multi-tasking on prior. My mind screamed in immense boredom: stand up! stand up! do something! blog! take photos! gchat!

Glancing to my left and right, the elderly gentlemen flanking me were still staring intently forward, their eyes serene behind the swirling steam of their hot tea. Sighing, I returned to my laptop. Something about being elderly, having already contemplated, and made peace with, the passing of their lives, that imbues them with a quality much desired.

Gravity seems lessened; the mountains have unearthly angles, and the trees are too needley and tall. Even light behaves differently. Rays of light behave unnaturally, imparting the water with a plastic sheen as it refracts. A dark oily substance — which I later found out to be mudflats — invades the water like a plague infecting cellular tissue. What is this place?

This anticipation of my future desire to view the photos I capture begs the question: why do we enjoy vast open visuals? Why are we attracted to visual scenes with dimensions of depth and breadth?

I am no expert on visual aesthetics, and am without access to google onboard my flight. In the spirit of speculation however, let me postulate a few theories.

The ‘To Stay Alive’ Theory

Perhaps our visual greediness for space hearkens back to our natural desire for freedom and movement. Accordingly with our impulse to survive, we are repulsed by claustrophobic environments, and hence seek the opposite — open space, which is synonymous with freedom of movement if a predator were to approach. Many grazing animals have eyes on the sides of the head, thus to provide >180 degree vision so to easily spot predators. Thus, their depth perception is constructed from only monocular cues (shadow, light reflections, etc.). After all, who cares if a tiger is 10 meters or 12 meters away? — You Run.

Predators, on the other hand, have forward-facing eyes that provide higher fidelity depth perception to accurately gauge pounces (Darwin will not look kindly upon you missing your target by 2 meters and sinking your claws into nothing but dirt). Ironic that the visual system that allows me to enjoy the textures on the earth from 10,000 feet originally evolved to hunt game.

This theory is plausible, albeit an unromantic explanation if a future date, sharing a picnic lunch in the Shenandoah Mountains, were to ask me this same question.

The ‘Change, Yes We Can’ Theory

Or, perhaps I enjoy scenes with great depth, breadth, and feature, simply because I enjoy change, and as a city-dweller, mountainous landscapes are rarely seen. At the micro-level, our retina is literally primed for change. The rods and cones that populate our retina can only detect changes in luminescence. Partly to generate this ‘change’, our eye constantly makes short terse movements, called saccades, about 50 times a second, even when you staring lovestruck at your future soulmate. In fact, some adventurous researchers back in the 70′s injected their eye muscles with a paralyzing toxin to temporarily stop these saccades, such that their eye was staring straight ahead. After a few seconds they saw nothing but gray.

At the macro-level, the neurons in our brains are constantly strengthening new connections with new experiences. Our visual system — how we see, identify, and catalog objects in the world — is constantly changing with every stimuli. Because optimizing our neural connections, and ‘learning’ new visual scenes, is of evolutionary interest, we naturally enjoy something out-of-the-ordinary.

Although like the previous theory, the explanation is eventually sourced in a Darwinian desire for fitness, here the emphasis is on ‘learning’, and not physically staying alive. Slightly less unromantic, but again not altogether appealing.

The ‘Romantic’ Theory

This is what I would say, if prodded in the Shenandoah Mountains. Let’s dispense with talk of neurons and rods, of stimuli and saccades, and get to the heart of it (pun intended). Our imagination is strongest when we can visualize it within what we currently see. I realized this at work one day, when I found it much easier to daydream about soaring through the mountains when I was actually looking at my desktop photo of the Swiss mountains. The cognitive load of having to envision an environment first makes imagining so much harder.

Thus, looking at breathtaking landscapes cues our innate imaginative self to begin fanciful forays into the fantasy world. The breadth and depth of the scene provides the physical space with which our mind plays. When our fovea, the super high-resolution part of our retina, follows the smooth curves of desert sand dunes, we imagine riding camel-back, solitary and solemnly, across those Arabian dunes. When I focus on the wisps of clouds passing below my airplane, I imagine flying among them, feeling the puffiness breeze by my face. It is this engagement of imagination, whether consciously or subconsciously, that heightens the visual scene.

So there you have it, three not neccessarily exclusive theories of varying stripes, all stated with far more certainty than the author believes is due. Any truth to these theories, concoted by the author who is slightly intoxicated by the lower air pressure in an airplane cabin, should not be assumed, but only imagined.

I volunteer at the Insect Zoo at the Natural History Museum. One of my duties involves manning the Butterfly Pavilion, an enclosed space with live butterflies that visitors are invited to walk through. Watching little kids wondrously marvel at the patterned explosion of color is a welcome respite from my day job planning nuclear war strategy (just kidding) at RAND.

In particular, the Menelaus Blue Morpho (Morpho menelaus) always draws gasps when it unfolds its blue iridescent wings and glides through the air. Always an unexpected sight, as the outside of the Morpho’s wings are dark brown. Many a photographer have been observed sitting in the 90F 80% humidity pavilion for up to an hour, patiently waiting to catch a glimpse of the Morpho with its wings open.

The iridescent coloring of the Morpho (and other butterflies) is sourced not in some pigmentation, but in the carefully manipulation of light by nano-sized photonic structures. (click below to read the rest of this entry)

A butterfly’s wings are composed of tiny scales. In fact, butterflies belong to the order Lepidopetra, which is derived from Ancient Greek for ‘scales’ and ‘wings.’ The Morpho’s scales, shown below, radiate a blue sheen, although in reality they are multiple layers of semi-transparent scales covering a brown underlying tissue (no blue!).

Close-up of Morpho wing scales (From Sea Moon)

The surface of each scale is a careful scaffolding of tiny three-dimensional structures. Just as soap bubbles iridesce colors despite being transparent, light ways bouncing off these structures are refracted in varying angles by the layers of semi-transparent scales. The spacing and thickness of nano-scale structures controls the wavelength of light, and thus the colors, that reaches your eyes.

Because your viewing angle changes the wavelength you see, the blueish hue of the Morpho flickers with every slight movement of the wing, explaining the gasps of onlookers viewing a Morpho in flight. Incredibly, a group at Georgia Tech manufactured an Aluminum Oxide (alumna) copy of the intricate three-dimensional design of the Blue Morpho, shown below.

Scanning electron microscope image of the structure on the surface of each scale. Image courtesy of Zhong Lin Wang.

Because the color of a butterfly’s wing is purely a function of the spacing between the tubular microstructures (i.e. interference effects) in the above images, the group found that varying the thickness of the structures changed the color of the wings from blue to green to yellow to red to violet.

Light microscope photos of different butterfly colors created by varying the thickness of the structures. Image Courtesy of Zhong Lin Wang.

From a physical viewpoint, the interference and diffraction effects of these regular spaced structures  selectively cancel certain colors through wavelength interference, refracting a narrow wavelength band. Despite understanding the photonics, I still find it amazing that the color of butterfly wings is purely a function of the physical spacing and thickness between semi-transparent objects. This is radically different from pigmentation, where materials statically absorb light and reflect only certain wavelengths.

Perhaps more amazing is that butterflies have evolved these precise photonic structures to take advantage of the wave nature of light, that we humans have yet to fully understand.

Upon discovering this a few weeks ago, I sometimes escape here to work. Something about working here, among air and stone and light, listening to the stirring melody of Ennio Morricone’s Gabriel’s Oboe, reminds me of my undergraduate years perfecting essays in the Carl Icahn atrium back in Princeton. A far cry from the confines of my cubicle, the courtyard brings a sense of peace and productivity long lost from my college years. This is one of the reasons I love DC so much… the quantity and quality of public spaces in our capital is so inviting.

Link: Kogod Courtyard named an ‘Architectural Wonder’