I just discovered SMBC Theater, the YouTube channel for my new favorite web comic. It’s genius.

Existential Crisis and Dragons from SMBC Theater on Vimeo.

Does anyone have a favorite software for keeping records of their documents? I don’t need anything very complicated, but I think it would need the following minimum features:

* Handles both electronic and physical documents.
* Let’s me specify a hierarchical location for each (e.g. server:directory for electronic and box:folder for physical).
* Adding pictures/scans of documents should be easy.
* Meta-data, notes, and tags, with searches over them.
* Adding new documents with minimal information should be very fast.

I recently had to go through my projects and collect a list of working titles for anything that had reached some kind of draft stage. I’m posting these here for prosperity.

• Multiscale management of the distributed fishery commons
• Inferring spatio-temporal anchoveta stocks using catch series and plankton measurements
• Entropy rates of spatially distributed state machines
• Optimal Slash-and-Burn Farming
• Glaciers and Flooding in Himalayan River Basins
• An Open Model for Climate Behaviors
• Self-Organized Criticality in Marine Ecology and Sustainable Development
• A Tool for Crowd-Sourcing Empirical Meta-Analyses
• Performance of agricultural process models using global data
• Destabilization through crop failures: a mechanism for climate to drive conflict
• System regressions: inferring the structure of interconnected feedbacks
• No heat is an island: population as a driver of the heat island effect
• Emotions, elections, and Hurricane Sandy
• Probabilistic model coupling: an amalgamated approach to modeling
• Planet on a plate: the drivers of food production and consumption decisions and their impacts
• Global Benefits of Marine Protected Areas
• Creating the commons: fisheries and the World Bank
• Path Dependence, Political Competition, and Renewable Energy Policy: A Dynamic Model

Everyone’s heard of the logistic map:

It’s elegant, it’s powerful (a classic for modeling ecosystems, e.g.), and it’s incredibly chaotic. As you change r, its internal frequency doubles, and then redoubles over a shorter span, and then again and again, until it reaches an infinity frequency over a finite distance. So you get beautiful fractal pictures like the following, bursting with internal structure:

But they rarely tell you how you get the picture, or what it means. The closest you get is that these are “asymptotic” values– a meaningless statement for something that never settles down.

So, I made an animation. In it, I just keep adding new points, each with a value of r and an initial value of x, and let them fly.

My Oakland apartment came with a single shelf of rather interesting books, including an anthology of religious texts called “The Sacred Writings of the World’s Great Religions”, by S. E. Frost, 1943.

I’ve gotten quite taken with it. It’s definitely edited for a Christian audience, and I there’s some Orientalism in its choice of “great religions”, but it does a great job of capturing the “good parts” of a number of works I’m familiar with, a nice balance between cutting and providing long-enough passages, and including a lot that I want to read.

I’ll be leaving Oakland in a few weeks, and started going through and collecting digital forms of all the material there, but I realized I was undoing much of the editing that I appreciated about the book. So, I’ve started to transcribe what I’m calling an “Extended Table of Contents“, and put it in dropbox so you can see it while I fill it out.

It’s actually an org-mode file, but you can read it as text, and I’m labeling it a txt so you don’t have to download it to open it. So far, I just have the first part on Hinduism filled out beyond the simple table of contents, and I’ve included links to digital copies through Taoism.

If anyone else has well-edited anthologies that complement this one, I would love to hear them.