How A Bedouin Tracker Sees the Desert
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
One night, a sand storm kicked up and started rumbling the tents. We were in temporary tents for guests and not traditional Bedouin tents. I remember looking up at the tent poles, watching them shake. Then in an instant, the tent just disappeared, going from the blackness of the tent to the most intense canvas of stars in the night sky. The wind had plucked the entire tent and threw it across camp.
The next day, I had tea with one of the Bedouin guides. Her eyes were bright blue like the Fremen in Dune. When she found out I grew up in Colorado, she said it's been a childhood dream of her's to visit. I thought at first it was because of the mountains, but then she pulled out a picture she kept with her. It was a large reservoir in the foothills outside of Denver. She dreamed of one day being able to swim in so much fresh water.
Much of Western Civilization is culturally rooted in the mythology of the desert. Its impact is often forgotten but runs surprisingly deep.
> I think you are another of these desert-loving English: Doughty, Stanhope, Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees, there is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing.
I do not say that lightly.
Did they set it up or someone else?
I have had the honor of being on the receiving end of their hospitality twice and it humbled me. I never spent the night with them though.
I have since tried to return the favor
> Her eyes were bright blue like the Fremen in Dune.
Fremen eyes were entirely blue. Even their sclera, the "whites" of their eyes, were blue.
While it is still possible your Bedouin guide had blue sclera, it is vanishingly unlikely to impossible that this was due to melange addiction. But there are plenty of reasons why someone can have blue sclera.
Anything that causes a thinning of the sclera could cause it. Some medications, like steroids, can produce blue sclera. Aging and anemia will also give a blue tint to the whites of the eye.
While it is usually benign, there are a number of rare but serious disorders that can cause blue sclera, such as Marfan Syndrom, Russell Silver Syndrome, Hallermann-Schermann-Streiff Syndrome, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and others. Thus, if the cause is unknown, anyone with blue sclera should see an ophthalmologist.
Too bad we were all too tired to actually spend more time asking questions and learning from them.
I also heard the legend of a person who installed backward soles on their shoes so it would fool the trackers thinking they’re going the other way, but the weight distribution gave this trick away as the tracks looked odd to them.
It's mind blowing that the attention to detail is so high, that they could notice a 1.5cm indentation difference - and not at eye level!
Yes, their trained eye can most likely see far more than any of us.
One thing I learned in neuroscience courses about perception is that one of the measures they take is the lower bound sensitivity of the perceptual system. One of the units is the JND = Just Noticeable Difference, which is well self-descriptive; find the smallest difference between two things that can be noticed. E.g., what is the smallest difference in pressure that is noticeable on a fingertip, tone or volume difference between two sounds, or the smallest size difference noticeable between two objects, etc.?
It turns out that top experts in any skill can have a JND that is about 10x finer than the average person. Moreover, they can not even know it!
I weirdly experienced this myself when I was one of the subjects in a test of discrimination of light brightness levels on a field with subtle differences. As they turned down the brightness in each round (and randomly moved the darker/lighter zones), the dark/light areas were completely obvious to me when everyone else swore that it was absolutely flat/even. I could only chalk it up to a decade of alpine ski racing training that had gotten me to top international racing levels — much of it was racing/training in flat light of cloudy days in snowfields — where we need to discern at high speed even the subtlest variations in shades of white to get critical information about snow conditions or contours. Until that test, I literally had no idea that anything was exceptional about my perceptual ability in this regard (my experience was generally that I wanted to see better), but training obviously drove changes down to the level of tuning the nervous system, even without specific intent to do so.
Science is so cool, and so are those Bedouin trackers!
The second half of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves focuses on physical attributes, but I think it's the internal stuff like this that would be the real evolution paths.
Our other senses aren't so exquisite (it might be interesting to have the "nose of a dog" for awhile, say). But I am so often surprised at what I see.
I once had an experience that gave me just a hit of what it must be like for cats and dogs. My cat had been hit by a skunk, and of course it was after hours in a rural area so it was the next day before we could get the tomato juice to clean him off. While he was still stinky, he mostly hid under a blanket with just his nose sticking out so he could minimize the smell. But he came out to go to his food/water bowl while I was reading a newspaper in a big chair (pre-internet times).
So I couldn't see him and he was walking silently, but the smell was so strong that I could sense his location in full 3D — it was just a wonderous AHA! moment — "so THIS is what it's like for them - they can literally sense in 3D using smell the way we do with sight and hearing...".
I know it was just a hint, as this was just the gains cranked way up on one smell, whereas they get the full-spectrum richness for everything, but, wow, what a revelation! The person's experience must have been truly mind-blowing!
This was one of my favorite tricky things to do for students, because I'd see their entire face light up with the realization once they got it.
All mammals, as far as I know, scatter a bit of material at the front of their step. The foot lands in the substrate, rolls forward, and then gets picked up, and that naturally causes a little bit of material to fall away from the front of the foot and end up at the front of the track. In advanced tracking, you learn to use the material at the front of tracks to determine direction of travel. Most people duck-walk a bit, or have one foot pitched out more than the other, or might make a sudden change of direction, but the material at the front of the track is a pretty reliable indicator for direction of travel.
So one exercise we'll set up is in a sandy or soft substrate, a volunteer will hop into a boxed area, change direction of travel with each step and cover each print with a plastic cone. They jump out, and then a bunch of other plastic cones get scattered into the boxed area. Students start with the first cone, and from that track -- without being able to see any other prints -- they have to determine where the next track is (which cone contains the next print).
So you drill on this a lot until looking for that toe drag becomes reflexive, and then you take them to a set of backwards-walking tracks and see how long it takes them to realize there's no toe drag in the prints -- because the foot is rolling backward from the toes.
There are a few other giveaway clues for backwards walking too that get into the finer details of pressure points and the mechanics of movement, but toe drag is the easy one.
Like think of all that you do with a computer, all that magic. Dude Stanford CS department in CS106A Mehran Sahami says it's the closest thing to magic. And witchcraft also...eh. Like typing on Dvorak is magic, like the raw speed, the comfort, the freedom of thought stedda the sad fad qwerty.
Nobody tell it about "not".
Two accusations in this case.
that's having full 1Gbps fiber connectivity, but instead choosing a 56kbps dial-up modem instead.
Go no further than the fastest typist, the fastest typist achieved a higher typing rate on dvorak than qwerty, by a huge amount. Barbara Blackburn. That's the maximum, that's statistically significant. And I am statistically significant in my own right, I type about 10,000 words worth of essays a day, like nothing, need to delete 90% of it because it's too radioactive. Too much hot shit. You see, if you go to http://fgemm.com, the tip of the iceberg.
Dvorak vs qwerty has been named by eg Peter Thiel in Zero to One as an example of when superior technology (don't argue with me there) cannot displace an incumbent. But that was before! I have used the incompatibility to my favor, I switch the plastic keycaps on my computers and people look at it and don't touch. It's awesome! So we end up saying, I tell you what to do on your computer, you do it.
Because now it's pure software (almost, not when restarting the computer), so the limitation (by all means present on physical typewriters) is gone. I love dvorak, I can type endlessly without RSI, emacs and most apps work better now, because the best letters have the best position, so the keys are easier.
May I inquire who you are? ycombinete is not a real popular baby name according to the US Census. Like Yvonne? Are you trying to claim authority by using a fake name? You know that is a felony in Chile and America.
I actually owned the domain name qwertqwert.com pointing at a qwerty to dvorak translator, so any dvorak user could use dvorak on any computer without painful typing. I wanted it for myself. Got it to work, in fact...I think. So many successful projects not sure how high a fraction of them were successful.
Over the horizon, we could see dust, then as the dust got closer, we could see a huge herd of camel headed straight for us. So we stayed put, ought to be interesting.
Probably about 300 camels. With two Bedu kids driving them. The oldest maybe 15 or 16 or so. The other probably about 14 years old. They stopped to gawk at us, just as we were gawking at them.
"How many camels do you have," we asked. They shrugged. "Where are you coming from?" we asked. They pointed behind them. "Where are you going?" They pointed in front of them. Then the oldest urged his mount forward, and we watched them disappear over the desert horizon.
Syria was one of the most interesting places in the world to visit before it came to its present heartbreaking condition.
I have followed maps over the years showing the expansion of Israeli claims and for that reason, it is unlikely to me that Bedouin people living on land where their people lived for generations, will not be affected by the expansion of Israel's territorial claims.
I am not an authority on the subject by any measure and welcome any corrections.
In general, the history of mankind doesn't favor indigenous people, regardless of how well they know their home environment. This is why so much historical knowledge is lost to later generations.
Fortunately, the Muslims went to great length to preserve the history and culture, even as globalization etches away at it. There's a reason we take great pride in how our religion and traditions have been preserved (all by the Grace of God of course).
All cultures should be as diligent about preserving their histories and traditions. Too much is lost when traditions are allowed to fade. By knowing each other's cultures we will better understand how connected we all are.
Their own history you mean. In Muslim majority countries, pre-islamic history is commercially exploited at best (Egypt), neglected as usual (Turkey) or destroyed at worst (Iraq, Afghanistan).
I relate differently to the built environment than most modern Americans who go from house to car to office to car to home again. My habits are different. My understanding is different.
It's hard to explain to people whose experience is so different from mine.
Architecture used to be by default passive solar design. It was vernacular architecture typically. And we've mostly list that context of building buildings oriented to their physical context.
It's a problem, one most modern people seem blind to.
I grew up spending most of my time outside and as a result I can appreciate the difference between a night spent under the stars and a night spent in your own comfortable home. I tend to linger outside and to gravitate outside if I visit someone else. There's a lot going on and it keeps me connected to things that are important to me.
Modernity does make you blind to many things simply because there is no opportunity for exposure to them and there are too many distractions, many of which you can carry in a pocket or wear on a wrist. Stepping away from can keep you grounded though.
I just came off three days of participation in this search†.
Depending on the area, terrain, environment, and situation, tracking to either directly locate the subject or narrow the search area can be a crucial task leading to the resolution of an incident.
† https://www.noozhawk.com/article/search_for_hiker_missing_on...
https://keyt.com/news/santa-barbara-s-county/2022/09/07/sear...
https://www.noozhawk.com/article/body_of_missing_hiker_found...
https://keyt.com/news/santa-barbara-s-county/2022/09/08/tim-...
There's some story I read, can't remember where, where a visitor asks an old man "who knows more - the wolf or the old man?"
The guy thought a long time and finally said, "The same. They both know the same."
> "Walidie sees himself as an envoy of Bedouin traditions, including tracking. He aspires to educate new generations of “desert children,” to “wean them off iPhones, acquaint them with the natural environment of the desert, and teach them how to preserve it.”"
I grew up in a house on about five acres in the country, and spent a lot of time outdoors reading. I grew to know the area, the types of animals that lived there, where they tended to move and where they stopped, and learned to recognize the individual animals. Animal behavior alone can tell you quite a bit - have you ever been in the woods and suddenly felt a little uneasy? That's probably because you unconsciously noticed that the background noise changed. Birds and small animals got quiet around you because of the presence of a predator.
I can't even really describe what changes about it, but it changes. It's nothing obvious like suddenly everything gets quiet or loud. It's subtle, but unmistakable.
Thanks so much for sharing it!