The Wonderful World of Bromeliads

Bromeliads are a family of non-native plants that grow very well in Hawaiian gardens and don’t spread out into nature. They are very colorful, their leaves come in many patterns, and they bloom in many different ways. The pineapple is a bromeliad. They seem to bloom at the end of summer, after the first autumn rains. Here are three from our garden right now.

A good place to see an impressive collection of different bromeliads is at the gardens of the Kauai Hindu Monastery.

Try Slow

People who have grown up in Hawaii usually speak a local dialect simply called pidgin here. I think of it as a sort of Creole that mixes the languages spoken by the many ethnic communities on the islands and takes some grammatical shortcuts. Most people also speak perfectly normal English, which they will use with anyone who does not seem local. Non-Hawaiian born residents usually pick up some pidgin phrases and intonations as they start to fit into the local lifestyle. After two years here, I still wouldn’t dare to use the little pidgin I know for fear of getting it wrong and still sounding like a mainlander.

Anyways, some pidgin is understandable in context, such as the bumper sticker that reads: “Try Wait.” The following sign makes me think you can use “try” in may different ways to suggest an action. It’s also an attention grabbing sign because of the Gothic lettering instead of the usual hand- or spray-painted sign:

I wonder if pidgin will survive now that there is less ethnic immigration to bring new words and more mainland TV idioms spread among school-age kids.

Weekly Sunrise Photo

At least I’m trying to publish one every week, and Monday was cooperating:

The Internet Was Invented in Hawaii

I usually don’t talk about computers, but I can’t pass up this little tidbit of computational history.

To be more accurate, the ALOHA protocol for packet switching was invented at the University of Hawaii and successfully applied in the ALOHAnet, a precursor to Ethernet on which the Internet runs. It’s actually a simple packet protocol with a high collision rate, which is therefore rather inefficient (18% throughput max), but still close to the best you can do in certain cases such as Wi-Fi. From the Wikipedia article:

Norm Abramson was a professor of engineering at Stanford, but was also an avid surfer. After visiting Hawaii in 1969, he inquired at the University of Hawaii if they were interested in hiring a professor of engineering. He joined the staff in 1970 and started working on a radio-based data communications system to connect the Hawaiian islands together, with funding from Larry Roberts.

By late 1970 the system was already in use, the world’s first wireless packet-switched network. Abramson then managed to get an IMP from Roberts and connected ALOHAnet to the ARPANET on the mainland in 1972. It was the first time another network was connected to the ARPAnet, although others would soon follow.

And since I assume from the rest of the article that Kauai was connected to that first network, I can talk about it here. I wonder if they called it surfing back then…

And no, I don’t think Al Gore had anything to do with it.

Hawaii Decal

Local Kauaians are usually proud to be Hawaiian, even when they are not ethnically Polynesian. The usual way to show pride in the place you live, regardless of ethnicity, would be to show your flag, However, the Hawaiian flag is really old fashioned and not very Hawaiian looking with it’s horizontal bars and Union Jack:

While the flag is used, you often see a geographical representation of the state instead, in other words, a map. Stylized as it may be, the outline of the islands is still recognizable, especially in Hawaii. I’ve even seen Hawaiian map tatoos. Of course, each island also uses its own outline to further show their local pride. The other day, I saw this window decal on a pickup truck, using a very distorted outline in a clever way: