Flame and I went to see A Dangerous Method, the Freud and Jung movie yesterday. It’s quite good, but don’t go expecting to learn more about Freud, Jung, or their relationship.

The movie turns on Jung’s relationship with Sabina Spielrein. We see her therapy, her tangled relationship with Jung, bits from their BDSM affairs. Everything except for the development of her ideas on psychotherapy.

After all the movie time spent developing that, there’s precious left to explore Jung and Freud’s relationship, much less their ideas. What emerges is a kind of false friendship, where Jung first uses Freud as a reluctant sounding-board and maintains the relationship of hollow lip service.

The strongest character in the movie is Otto Gross, on screen about 20 minutes. He philosophizes, seduces, psychoanalyzes, fucks, and leaves. In his wake, we are told he had a lasting impact on Jung, but we have to take their word for it.

For all that, the movie is well-constructed, intelligent, and engaging. Go see it, but look elsewhere for the psychology.

An interesting question came up in class last semester, with a few different forms. Answer any you choose.

• As a researcher, how would you spend $10,000 in the pursuit of your questions?
• In the interest of sustainable development, how would you spend $10 million?
• In the interest of sustainable development, how would you spend $10 billion?

How many of the richest people in the US have a combined wealth equal to that of the 120 million people in the bottom 40% of the US? Two.

December was lost down the gullet of school. I did manage to go to the enormous AGU conference (“What do 16000 earth scientists look like? This is what 16000 earth science posters look like!”) with a Poster on the Himalayas, and write two papers on Optimal Slash-and-Burn Farming. And I started work on a plan to build a spaceship (plan, model) and built a spinner for risk experiments. But I am so exhausted from the whole thing. I wasn’t done with grading until New Years Eve, so I’ve just started recovering.

I want to write a rant on how school makes people stupid, because there seems to be no way to not come out of it a mess.

While I’ve been away, the semester has been rushing over me like a crashing wave. I can’t claim to be keeping up, but I haven’t fallen behind yet. I have lots of fun projects to show: this one is from NYC’s huge Halloween parade. Flame was the 1%, and I was the 99%. My props were protest signs that she made, and she was covered in these, my OWS bills:

Depending on how you count them, there are 11 changes on the front and 3 on the back (one of which is the gaping hole, which when we printed them, we filled with percentages from 2 – 99). You can print your own, six to a sheet with these two documents.

Modifying these takes a lot of time, and I welcome you to help make it better. Download the Gimp files for the front and the back and let me know!

It’s not sticking yet, but it’s sure coming down!

Flame and I held a really fun wine and cheese party a while back. For it, we gave everyone a score card for rating and remembering the cups and curds that they liked. Here it is, for anyone who wants to reuse or recycle it!

Download as a PDF or Excel.

In response to the frequently asked questions: The penises are for whether the cheese is erect or flaccid. The chemicals on the wine sheet are alcohol (well, a hydroxyl group) to denote fortified wines, and carbon dioxide for sparkling wines.

What is a framework for? For something as ill-defined as Sustainable Development, there are limitless approaches, paradigms, and techniques. There are also, unbeknownst to me until recently, “frameworks”. The frameworks aim to structure the understanding of the entire field, and while they speak kindly of each other, I suspect that they’re in a kind tug-of-war over the heart of SD.

On the right is the Inclusive Wealth approach, driven by some overeager microeconomists. The goal is to monetize (or at least valuate) the whole of our world’s benefits– ecosystem services, biodiversity, future generations. The proponents say that it helps us understand and communicate the worth of things, so we can protect them. foundational reading

On the left is Elinor Ostrom’s Social-Ecological Systems Framework, an explicit attempt to make all the categories of stuff-to-think-about for any situation where people hit the environment. It’s all inspired by work on common pool resources, but it’s slowly clawing its way out. foundational reading

I don’t want to take the time now to critique, but I think there are strengths of each that the other lacks, and they’re both missing out on a big swath of the world in the middle, too small for Inclusive Wealth and too big for SES.

Academic has a certain magic that lets it consume one’s life beyond recognition. This semester, I only have three classes, plus research and teaching, and yet somehow the day ends later every day.

I got my top choice for teaching, and I love it, but I don’t know if it’s worth the effort sometimes. The class is Environmental Science, which I took last year, my first exposure to much of the field. But now, weekly I’m putting together big recitation-section lectures, and I just finished the grading the two inches of paper that made their first assignment.

My classes for credit each have their charms. Geophysical Inverse Theory has already proved useful, and takes place on the beautiful Lamont campus.
Environmental and Resource Economics is usually good for a shot of ideas and a bottle of math.
Sustainability Science has half good discussions, half bad discussions, and half aimless commentary.

In other news, my work on flooding from glacial melt got accepted for a poster session at the huge AGU conference in San Francisco, in December. My program should have some money to send me there.

I participated in “Data without Borders” last weekend, which was lots of fun. My team was pretty serious, the food was plentiful, and the people nice and interesting.

Now I need to sleep. Elinor Ostrom is lecturing Sustainability Science tomorrow!

From NYT today, Henry George in 1877 said, “No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.”

FDR, from Mark Fiore’s most recent video:

“We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer. We need the courage of the young.”

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.”

“Liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than its democratic state itself.”

“Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.”

I want to make a new parody bill for OWS (with normal $1 bill elements replaced with fat cats, military-industrial symbols, snoozing american dream, and surveillance cameras). Anyone have ideas for it?

Come to Zuccotti Park tomorrow (Friday) at 6am to save the Occupy Wall Street movement! Bloomberg has ordered police to clear the park at 7am, and not come back. I’ll be there– call me to meet up!