Marine Protected Nation

Obama plans to extend the marine reserve around the Pacific Remote Islands Area out to the 200 nautical mile limit of the US’s jurisdiction, doubling global marine reserves:

If we ignore these problems, if we drain our oceans of their resources, we won’t just be squandering one of humanity’s greatest treasures, we will be cutting off one of the worlds major sources of food and economic growth,” he said.

“This is incredibly significant and shows global leadership from the US on this issue” said Karen Sack from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“There is an amazing array of biodiversity around these islands, there are sea mount systems with a lot of deep sea species, all types of marine mammals.”

Living from the outside in

I seem to live my life from the outside in. Is that weird for an introvert to say? There are so many aspect of what I do that go the other way: my work and ideas and beliefs seem to come from an inner source. But living works differently. Being in the world is something I find myself doing– Heidegger would say, I’m thrown into it.

When it comes to what I want to do in the world, I begin at the furthest point: the distant future, the world as a whole, science and necessity. Here I apply my values and my ideas and my work, to come closer in. I want to help build an biocentric future, so I read and develop skills. But when it comes to applying those skills, I work on what’s at hand. I organize everything my time around doing things– digging into technical issues and finding problems that need solving. In that, I work with people, constantly. I don’t choose those people, but I do love them. They’re the people at hand. I organize projects with them, and get inspired by them, and attend endless meetings for them.

All of which, as an introvert, can seem like a huge waste of time. I find my time hemmed in by meetings, sapped by emails, dispersed to coordination.

I was chatting with a friend– let’s call her Polecat– about people who do everything with other people. I didn’t realize she was talking partly about me. It’s another way of living one’s live from the outside in: as a character said in Waking Life, “The advantage to meeting others in the meantime is that one of them may present you to yourself.”

Fort Flagler Eleusinian Mysteries

I’ve been getting very interested in the Eleusinian Mysteries, collecting materials, trying to stumble across hints that would let me pierce the secrecy around them. But the most curious thing I’ve found is an recreation of them… at the tiny Washington State park (Fort Flagler) that Bethany lives next to. Tongue in cheek, these are from the 2012 event notice:

– Parade to the sea to prepare yourself for the journey
– Rejoice at the wedding feast of Persephone and Hades
– Walk the ancient paths between the worlds… …emerge forever changed!

CABINET OF CURIOSITES | aquarian tabernacle church’s spring mysteries festival

Siderea’s Recipe for Blogging

It's seems like I look for this post of siderea's about once a year, and I always wish more people would link to it.  So here it is, [soc/anthro] The Recipe, Or What you don’t know about LJ/DW:

There’s a recipe. It’s a recipe for maximally useful-for-engendering-virtual-community-LJ/DW-style. I’m not sure I have it exactly down yet — this is the alpha version — but I’m pretty sure that, contrary to a lot of LJ/DW users think, it goes something like this:

Recommended Minimum Weekly Posts by Type:
0.5 diary entry
3 pointers
0.5 bleg
0.25 op ed

SSA and NINO

NINO 3 is a measure of El Niño/La Niña (ENSO) intensity. It’s often said that ENSO has a period of 3-7 years. Why is it so hard to identify a single period? This is a job for SSA!

ninoscree

The scree plot shows that there are a ton of significant eigenvectors– this is a very complicated signal– but I want to focus on the first four, which are a shade more significant than the rest. They come in two pairs, which for SSA means that they represent two sinusoids. Here are the eigenvectors.

ninovects

How well do these two capture the ENSO signal?

ninossar

Not great, but it gets most of the ups and downs. Just not the peaks.

So what are the periods of these two? The first two are at 5.8 years, and the second two at 3.5 years. To note: those are relatively prime, so the two frequencies are always going to be going in and out of sync. So it’s not so much that ENSO has a clear frequency (it doesn’t), nor that that frequency is 3-7 years (because what would that mean anyway). It has two main frequencies, like a dial tone.

A Foundation for Environment Science

A team of us students in the sustainable development program are trying to revamp our core science course. For a group of mathematically sophisticated, intellectually bold, and cutting-edge-research-focused people, our current “introduction” to science is far too lax and disorganized. We want to put it on surer ground.

The class needs to go into quite a few topics; minimally, it needs to include climate, hydrology, ecology, and public health. Disasters, energy, rocks and soils, and agriculture would be nice too.

The goal of the class is to prepare us to struggle through any sequence of PhD-level classes in a science of our choice, and to let us engage academic papers written by, well, anyone. The first response that we got from the Earth Institute post-docs, when we asked their advice, was that a class like this is impossible. But then, we’ve been doing exactly that with far worse for years.

We decided that we should start the first class with Thermodynamics, as a foundation for the rest. I’m in charge of writing up the topics for that day.  I think there are a few other pieces that are similarly foundational to all environmental science: dimensionality, stocks and flows, equilibria, industrial ecology, and path-dependence.  I’m not sure how it all fits together, but here’s what I’ve got so far.

Dimensionality

  • Pi-Products

Thermodynamics

  • Foundations
    • Forms of Energy
    • Principle of least action
    • Lagrangian Dynamics
    • Noether’s Theorem
    • Path-dependent derivative
  • First Law
    • Energy Conservation
    • Thermal energy and temperature
    • Thermal energy transfer
    • Temperature and phase changes
  • Second Law
    • Entropy
    • Equilibrium
    • Irreversibility
    • Fundamental Equation and its derivatives
    • Legendre Transforms
  • Terminology:
    • system, boundary, environment, primitive properties, derived properties, thermometric temperature, event interaction, adiabatic, diathermal, phase, restraint, thermodynamic processes, path and state
    • open, closed and isolated system
  • Topics to leave out:
    • Enthalpy, work, 3rd law of thermo

Stocks and Flows

  • Industrial Ecology
  • Emergy

Old Bottles, Part 1

I inherited an old bottle collection from my father– a man who loved reading into things, things that came in bottles, and being the intellectual on a construction site. There’s not much to document about them, but I’m going to put down some of what there is.

DSC_0036

From the back, here’s all I know about them:

Left: no words
Right: E. R. Durkee & Co, Salad Dressing, New York
Center: Dr. Price’s Delicious Flavoring Extracts
Right: From Horne’s Pharmacy Cor. 24th and Union, Los Angeles, CA
Left: Klingite Fabric Adhesive, dries transparent for tents, awnings, auto-tops, tarpaulins, leather jackets, canvas, upholstery, etc.
Center: no words
Right: no words
Left: Gebhardt Eagle, Chili Powder
Right: [ink bottle?]
Left: [perfume bottle?]

Chasing Fish

For the EI retreat recently, for one of three short videos I generated for my presentation, I converted my code for the “Distributed Fishery Commons”, an simple ABM, to 2-D. Each dot in the video is a virtual boat, fishing down a path in its wake. The boats never directly interact, other than to not fish at the same location. They just move to where they see the most fish, and the result is an intricate dance or bouncing around. Take a look:

Science 2.0

Science is constantly changing– we’re generating new data and developing new models faster than we can understand how they should all fit together.

My tool, the Distributed Meta-Analysis System, is ready to go, and I want to write more about it. But I also want to point people to two other interesting projects that seem to be trying to make science work better:

The Open Science Framework is trying to get people to make their data and papers and science, in general, available for all.

Curate Science is trying to solve the replication problem, encourage people to post their replication results and identifying needs.

For me, this is also about what might be called “Evolutionary Modeling”: modeling as a social and ongoing endeavor, involving many groups and combining their results in institutional ways. Science 2.0 is coming.

Sustainability, Engineering, and Philosophy