Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Life, the universe, and everything:

A recent letter that has come, individually, to almost every program officer in the Earth Sciences Division:

"Mr. Filmer:

I have been a Professional Engineer for over thirty years. I have a BS in Civil Engineering from Michigan Technological University and a MS in Civil Engineering from Michigan State University. I have a broad background of experience and a long-standing interest in rocks and geology.
I have spent several years in puzzling over the process of periodic uplift and subsidence of large areas of rocks that has resulted in the formation of sedimentary rock formations. The simple word ¡§uplifted¡¨ is used extensively by scientists but, even though understanding the process is basic to understanding nearly all aspects of geology; though evidence of the process of uplift is abundant on all of the continents; and though uplift has been the subject of considerable research, concern and debate in the geological research community; scientists do not seem to understand the very basis of the phenomenon itself. It is certainly not well-explained by any scientific hypothesis that is related to the subject. ¡§Confusion reigns!¡¨

I have used engineering principles and analysis; principles of physics, hydraulics, thermodynamics, and mechanics of materials; integrative theory; logical deduction; my own investigations and observations; the sifting of extensive existing data and analyses; physical laws; common sense, experience, the process of elimination, and other problem-solving techniques to study the mechanics of the process. As indicated above, the process is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather is closely related to most aspects of geology. Attempting to do geological research without understanding this basic process is much like shooting in the dark and hoping to hit something.
I believe that I can explain well beyond a reasonable doubt how the process has functioned and, because the topics are closely related, why many overthrusts, ¡§out of order¡¨ formations, mountain chains, continental shelves, discontinuities, and islands exist as they do; why the continents are configured as they are; why there are terrestrial features on continental shelves; why there are land fossils in sea-deposited rocks; why there are tropical fossils in polar regions; why there are fossil similarities of cross-Atlantic sediments; why many of the rock formations were deposited in shallow-sea conditions; why some petroleum occurs where it does; why the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge are where they are; why some of the Earth¡¦s basic physical processes are as they are; and the reasons for the differences between oceanic and continental crust.

In addition, I believe I can resolve the questions concerning continental drift beyond a reasonable doubt, especially as it relates to the concepts of the following which need to be revised or put to rest completely:

?« Plate tectonics, wrench tectonics, surge tectonics,
?« Seafloor spreading
?« Lemuria, Atlantis, Hyperborea, The Imperishable Sacred Land
?« Rodinia, Pangaea, Laurasia, Gondwanaland,
?« India¡¦s ¡§flight and movement¡¨ into Tibet, and
?« The ¡§fit¡¨ of Africa and South America.

I am well aware that the above suggests much too broad of a scope for a single research project, but the fact is that the process of uplift and subsidence is such a very basic (but misunderstood) factor in the Earth¡¦s history that all of the above topics are actually very closely related to the process, each in its own way, and as such are an integral part of the explanation of it or it explains them. The pieces fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Also, a large part of the proof of my explanation is the extent to which it embraces the findings of other researchers regarding these topics. I may not have extracted the same conclusions from the basic data they have gathered, but my explanation seems to be in accord with much of previously accumulated data that I have studied and with physical reality and I believe it demonstrates well beyond a reasonable doubt the validity or invalidity of the conclusions they drew from their research as well as my conclusions.
This study has the very probable potential of completely changing long-standing ideas as to the Earth¡¦s history and some of its processes.
Because of its wide-ranging applicability and the close correlation of the above-listed topics, it is expected that the results of this research will revolutionize the present state of knowledge in the field. All who study any aspect of the processes that have affected the Earth from Precambrian times to the present will benefit from this study.

It will shed new light on the basic processes which formed sedimentary rocks and subsequently elevated them which should aid in further discovery of natural resources, including offshore oil and gas, a very important economic activity in the world.

The broader impacts of the study are that it will contribute significant information concerning an obscure period and the substantial increase in knowledge will provide the basis for major revisions in the scientific understanding of prehistorical processes. The study results are multi-disciplinary and will have a profound effect on the research fields of Continental Dynamics, Archaeology and Archaeometry, Geophysics, Hydrologic Sciences, Petrology and Geochemistry, Tectonics, Geography and Regional Sciences, Geomorphology and Land Use Dynamics, Marine Geology and Geophysics, Paleoclimatology, as well as Sedimentary Geology and Paleobiology.

Researchers who are working on a broad range of problems worldwide will benefit directly and measurably from the results. The results of this research will provide future investigators with a solid integrated foundation for further geologic studies rather than a jumble of nebulous, ill-founded hypotheses. This study will provide members of the scientific community with a scientific and structured understanding of their geologic environment that is 99% certain rather than being 90% nebulous. It also will provide an educational resource for students as they study geology such that they can appreciate the relationship among Earth's development, geologic events, and the history of life.

My questions are: I have spent literally thousands of hours researching this subject and puzzling over what I have observed and the meanings of the findings of very reputable researchers attempting to put the puzzle pieces together. Is there any way that the time I have spent on this research can be included in a grant? Can a grant be awarded for a set amount based on attainment of a specific goal (explanation of all of the above-listed
phenomena) rather than being based on time spent after award of the grant?
Considering the knowledge, skill, and ability required to assemble the giant jigsaw puzzle, the great amount of time spent in doing so, and the apparent inability of anyone else being able to do so, would it be reasonable to apply for a grant of $4,000,000 as a flat rate consultant fee? I realize that that is a lot of money for one research project, but on the other hand, a lot more has been spent on unproductive research related to the listed phenomena and this should help your organization avoid spending a lot more on research that is based on a poor foundation.

Thank you for your consideration of this matter.

**Name and address removed for safety reasons**


At $4 million, the solutions to all these quandaries are a bargain. What do you say, fellow taxpayers?

As required, I sent a polite reply outlining the application procedure. He might well have *the answer,* but here at NSF, everyone gets in line. Even Nobel Prize winners.

Now, back to being 90% nebulous.

Monday, November 27, 2006

Mountains of chow mein

The city of Bogotá, Colombia, is built on an ancient lake bed. The sediments forming the bottom of this prehistoric lake form a flat area, or sabana that sits at about 8,600 feet above sea level between large mountain ranges. The city is crammed up against the mountains of the Eastern side of the sabana, and as it has grown, the city has spread out far to the North and South. When my parents arrived there separately in the early 1950's, there were about 300,000 people in the city. Now there are over 8 million.

In some areas of the sabana, mountain tops protrude from the flat plain. The Suba mountain is like a whale's back, humped before submerging again in the millennial ooze of the sabana. The mountain used to have a line of trees running along the top of it that from certain perspectives reminded me of Queequeeg's mohawk (as I pictured it, anyway). Lately it seems to be more encrusted with the barnacles of suburban sprawl.

The most memorable part of the mountains is how different they were from day to night. Daylight showed them fuzzy with eucalyptus and pine trees, slowly merging with the strange vegetation of the high-altitude páramo: strange plants that looked like they belonged in the Devonian era. On our rare walks up there, before it became an act of suicide to wander into the territory of leftist guerillas, we discovered many wonderful waterfalls among the varied rock formations. These thin streams drenched the surrounding blue lichen-encrusted trees with a frigid spray.

The most striking daylight feature of the mountains were their scars. These scars were either fire scars, dark black and spread out over the mountain crests like the ones that dropped cinders into my cradle in 1964, or bright yellow scars at the mountain's base, left by cement plant excavations inexorably gnawing away at the sandstone buttresses in order to build the city below. One only had to look at the scar pattern of the Eastern skyline to know where one was in the city.

By night, the mountains were completely different. The extent of the barrios' reach into the mountains became clear. Thousands upon thousands of clear lightbulbs twinkled in the freezing air, reaching up in sweeping arcs across the slopes. Because the sky was jet-black, the mountains disappeared, and it often looked like a trail of sparks from a firework had been frozen, suspended against the sky. When there were fires, the main impression was that the bright flames were much nearer than reality, and could be quite frightening. My memories of the largest fires, during the early 1960's are probably much contaminated by a series of black and white photographs that my father took of them.


One drive in the mountains spelled the end of Chinese food for me for several decades. Very early on, perhaps still in the 1960's, I was alone with my father on a drive down to the town of Villavicencio. Villavo, as it is known, is only a few tens of miles from Bogotá. By air, anyway. By land, in our old green Jeep Willy's, it was several hundred miles over some of the most fantastic landscape imaginable. Tiny whitewashed towns clung stolidly to green cliffs, and townspeople would glare over their tables covered in empty brown bottles of Bavaria beer at the passing cars. Between the clouds below, one might spot the towns on the other side of the valley, which could only be got to by going back to Bogotá and taking a different route, or by braving side roads that more often than not petered out into boulder strewn horse-trails.

The approach to Villavo and its cursed Chinese restaurant is still spectacular. After hours of winding around on cut-backs and only being able to see a few miles across the valley, the Western front of the Andes is amazingly abrupt. One single curve, and suddenly there is an expanse of flat land far below spreading out as far as the eye can see. It was my first sight of the llanos, or the plains. This was the "wild West" of Colombia, where there were still whole new economies waiting to be developed: cocaine and petroleum. But in those days it was still the land of the cattle ranchers, beautiful harp music, and my first taste of chow mein.

I don't remember the name of the restaurant, but I do remember it was pretty typical of the region: fluorescent lamps hung with bare wires from the steel beams holding up the Eternit tile ceiling, casting their blue light on high-gloss paint walls, and onto a dull green, white and red tile floor. Formica and aluminium tables were surrounded by spindly chairs covered in red plastic. A calendar with a see-through Jesus, posters for Marlboro and more Bavaria beer were on the wall, along with an inevitable Chinese character or two for "health" or "prosperity."

What is permanently etched into my mind is the taste of the pepper I bit into that day. Some fiery combination of vinegar and capsicum was lurking in an innocent green sliver, and my throat went into paroxysms very early on into the meal. Typical of a young eater's response, I refused to touch anything else on the plate. I don't remember the details, but I do remember my father's annoyance, and attempts to get me to try something else.

I did not eat Chinese food again for many, many years. Exactly when I started again is lost - it was a non-event compared to the pepper incident. I have been back to Villavicencio several times since then, and I always look for Chinese restaurants in which to eat, in order to finally reconquer the town.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Ug-lee:

A mere pinprick in my gargantuan ego, delivered by a silly face comparison website:



Wayne Knight... Wayne Knight??! Aiee.

...I will crawl back under the bed now, and contemplate the fact that my glasses and twisted nose make me map onto these folks.

My only redemption will be to see if the site can match a celebrity in their database with a photo they do not have... a test of the Feynman licence-plate type.

Seeing Kalashnikov reminds me of a friend I had who was always challenging me, testing my trivia. He once asked: "Do you know what MiG stands for?" and I was very lucky to be able to answer "Anastas' and Mikhail's last names" - as in Mikoyan and Gurevitch, the aircraft designers. But it is only lately that I found out that I was actually wrong. Anastas Mikoyan was the politician, and it was his brother, Artem, who co-founded the MiG design bureau. But my answer served its purpose, and shut my tormentor up for a day or two.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

The Feta-Brie model:

I discovered today, in a moment of extraordinary curiosity, that compressed air does not remove feta cheese very well from between the keys of a computer keyboard.

Note-To-Self: "Do not bring brie tomorrow. Eat lunch away from the desk."

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Basura, lixo, trash:

I received my first phishing attempt in Spanish today.

And yes, it had the typical signs of a phish: grammatical errors, non-native phrasing, sent to a list address, etc. etc.

It was for customers of a large Spanish firm, Banco Santander, and the links all showed the .es top domain (Spain), but the actual href pointed to .im which is the Isle of Man.

Which is, credibly, a banking haven, but also one of those sought after domains like .tv (Tuvalu), and commercially available to anyone wishing to pay for the privilege of being Manx.

DSC02352.JPG

Monday, August 28, 2006

Klepsydra:

The clock and electricity are two large factors in mankind's severing of Nature's umbilical cord.

The clock meant we no longer watched the sky to tell time, and electricity meant we no longer paid attention to whether it was light out or not.

Sunday, August 06, 2006

...not the Transmilenio

Old friends 3

From second grade until I left for Canada in 1974, I went to a school in Bogotá called The English School. Like most schools in Colombia, public or private, it had a uniform, and I wore a pair of brown pants, brown shoes, and a white shirt under a light brown sweater. Even today, putting on that colour combination makes me sweat.

The school was in the middle of nowhere. Since Bogotá was laid out mostly North-South in those days, distance from civilization was measured in terms of what street you were on. The pastureland began more or less at the Calle Cien or 100th Street, a street that had been laid out to form a beltway around a city that knew no diet. The school itself was on Calle 177, at the then-distant third bridge over the main road out of Bogotá to the North of the country, the Autopista del Norte.

We rode buses to get out there - buses of legend, of the old Bogotá, before the government decreed that all buses had to be painted according to the colors of the company they belonged to. Each company had rumours attached to it, and the buses lived up to them. Bus Number One was with the Flota Macarena, and the bright orange Ford often flashed by us on the Autopista, the cheerful driver flashing an enormous smiling set of teeth at us from under his hedge of a mustache. The Flota Macarena was known for fast driving and poor brakes, but we all desperately wanted to be on Bus Number One, because they always got there first. Even of it was off the edge of a cliff.

I can't fail to mention Bus Number Seven. My bus. A dark blue relic of the 1940's, its enormous vertical radiator was a series of chrome bars perched between two blue, hulking mudguards. A set of beady headlamps were perched on top of the mudguards. I think it was leased from the Rapido Pensilvania company, but it was far, far from rapid. By the time Bus Number Seven had accelerated enough to get out over the hump at the main gate of the school, Bus Number One had already made it back to the Second Bridge. No matter how much we egged the driver on, he maintained a steady plod homewards, never varying from his spot, steadfastly blocking all traffic by persisting in travel in the fast lane. On those rare days when Bus Number One was delayed, and left after us, they would soon catch up, and usually undertake us on the shoulder, scattering dust, gravel, and occasional unfortunate pedestrians.

Once, during a trip that my parents took to Curaçao or Trinidad, I stayed with my godparents, the Biagis. This meant that I travelled on a different bus to school - I don't think it was Bus Number One, because I remember being on a green Expreso Bolivariano. The best part was that this bus would stop during its rounds for a fruit hurling fight with another bus. The buses would line up, down would come the windows, and broadsides of apples, oranges, mangoes, uchuvas and mamoncillos would be exchanged. I don't even remember whether the other bus belonged to the same school or if it was perhaps part of the American school, the Nueva Granada, or the German school, the Andino. What is certain is that the parents of both busloads were proud of their children's fruit consumption, not being aware that it was in fact ending up either on the side of a bus or squashed in the tarmac.

The school itself was in the middle of farmland, and what was left of the millenial Bogotá swamp, the humedales. I too often fell or was thrown into the chambas or ditches, got stuck in the deep ooze between the waist high tufts of wild kikuyo grass during cross country runs. I even saw several calves born in the field across from the third grade classrooms. Favorite games in those times were to take enormous chizas, or beetle larvae, and chase girls around the sandy playground, or to wage organized war with the thousands of eucalyptus acorns that fell from the trees lining the chambas.

Many years later, I drove on Calle 177 again and stopped at the gate of the English School. I stood and peered through the locked gate. It was an almost completely different place - gone were the blue and white vertically striped prefab huts that served as classrooms, replaced by a large brick and glass multi-storey structure. The school was surrounded by housing developments that reached out to Calle 200 and well beyond. The old house that had served as the administration building was only slightly visible through a whole set of suddenly-grown-up trees.

The only thing that seemed to remain was the front parking lot, full of buses of all different colours, ready to burst forth, full of children, some of whom undoubtedly had saved some fruit from their cafeteria lunches.

Saturday, August 05, 2006

The Wisdom of the Young:

Every once in a while, someone young knocks you for a loop with what they say.

Most often, they are amusing like the following from A, my son (and which I will preserve until my toast on your wedding day...):

  • April 1999: (on the toilet) "Oh no! My bottom has a hole in it! I need a band-aid!"
  • June 1999: after I explained how hot & cold water mix to get warm water: "You know, I just don't believe it."
  • April 2000: (we had been listening to an NPR show on about Taiwan): "Why is China red? Is Taiwan blue? How about yellow? Is there a yellow China?"
  • August 2000: (on waking at night) "They were nice bears!" -- referring to nightmares. Then we understood the aversion to sleeping with a teddy bear...
  • December 2000: (referring to Christmas): "Bye, hamburger" -- it took us a while to figure out that this was 'Bah, humbug.'
  • April 2001: "Superman comes from the planet Crouton. Crouton is a food, too. Did you know that?"
  • June 2001: the dreaded "...whatever, Dad."
  • June 2001: "I'll sit across from you so you can see my shining face."

However, some are not funny at all, and are quite deep. Here are two:

1. Driving around on a very cold and cloudy day in Bogotá, the younger brother of one of my best friends, aged about five or six at the time, said: "Esas no son nubes de lluvia; son nubes de entierro." Now it doesn't come out quite as nicely in English, but what he said was: "Those aren't rainclouds; they're burial clouds." ...The whole car was silent for about five minutes.

2. Not really something someone said, but something written: I was busily raking up leaves one dreary fall day when I noticed a bright pink piece of paper blowing across the yard. I picked it up to find that it was a fluorescent Post-It with some child's writing on it:

As I grow oldder and oldder
The days grow shortter and shortter
And my parents work longger and longger.


I simply sat down in the grass and cried. I still have the piece of paper as a reminder to take care, and I often wish I read it every day.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Oh dear... Sunk again:

For all their crowing in the new TV ads, the Apple Mac OSX system does have its problems. Or as Apple would rather I phrase that, the user can easily cause complex problems.

Consider this pair of messages. After a great deal of editing I tried resetting the .Mac synchronization for my Address Book data file, and got the following error:



Fair enough, but the message advises me to do exactly what I was already doing - trying to reset the remote database with the data on my machine. Not to be worried by such messages, I tried again, and I got the following warning:



"Ah, that's better," I thought, "at least this is a warning, rather than an error."

I edited away again, until ALL of the addresses disappeared in a flash. Everything. The only cards left were the default Apple card and my own card. Repeat above process (errors and warnings given again), and vwolah, time to shut down and start again.

...and indeed, all my data was back (albeit duplicated). Now this machine will synchronize, but none of my others will. Humph.

I strongly advise against using this multi-platform synchronization strategy. You will lose data, guaranteed. Middle initials. URLs. And oddly, telephone numbers.

Saturday, July 29, 2006

A Tour of Law:

Cyclist Floyd Landis, during Thursday night's conference call from an undisclosed location in Europe, referring to his drug test results showing high levels of testosterone after winning the Tour de France:

"I would like to be assumed innocent until proven guilty, since that's the way we do things in America."

Oh, please. This is exactly the kind of thing people hate about us Americans. Ignorance about where we are in the world, ignorance about history, and ignorance about our own country.

FLOYD:
  • You were in France when you said that, not America
  • Only 49 states assume innocence
  • The exception is Louisiana; why?
  • Because they follow the Napoleonic code - their legal tradition is French
  • ergo...
...you better hope that backup vial of pee exonerates you.

Sheesh. Ask Cheryl Crow about roadies. She knows.

Monday, July 24, 2006

You're all fired:

When I finally got a job after graduate school, it was after many months of struggling. Naïvely, I had simply sent out resumé after resumé, and made cold calls each day after searching the want ads in EOS, Nature, Science, The Economist, Chronicle of Higher Ed, etc. etc. etc.

The job offer was as a result of one of those friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend deals. My friend Mike knew Martin, who worked for something called the Universities Space Research Association, or USRA. Martin did a lot of work on managing the UARS satellite for NASA Headquarters, which was nearby (but on the other side of the railroad tracks). Martin was able to convince Lisa, an official at NASA, to have lunch with me. She and I talked about many things, but all I can recall clearly is that she asked me to produce a piece of writing for her, and that I had the good sense not to order a beer with lunch. She picked out one of the themes from our conversation as the topic for the paper: Colombia.

What resulted was my piece on Pablo Escobar, The Cathedral at Envigado, which I have posted previously. Some time after my sending it to her, she let me know that the folks at NASA HQ would like to talk to me, and we set up a visit.

I remember visiting with Lisa and with another person who has ended up tangled in the warp and weft of my life, Dixon B. While apparently my writing about Colombia's woes with drugs was enough to convince Lisa that I might be worth some consideration, it was the fact that I owned a NeXT computer that impressed Dixon. More on my computer selection prowess (or lack of) in another post.

In the end, USRA brought me on as a Visiting Scientist, and I worked for Lisa on international and social science issues and for Dixon on data system issues, including intellectual property. You might think this was a strange assignment for someone with a degree in marine geophysics, but as I have gained experience in the job market, I have learned that your degree specialization in widgetry is really only of marginal importance unless your job ends up being "design widgets."

One of my first assignments was to deliver news that eventually resulted in the firing of several hundred people. I didn't need a degree to do that, but I did need courage. A lot of the people this was to affect had just been hired, so I couldn't help feeling strange about it. I travelled out to the mid-West and told the managers of a program that they were to be cut from $55 million per year to $18 million.

In the end, they had to fire most of their graduate students, programmers, and junior researchers. People just like me, recently starting out in their careers - the interesting part was that the program itself was not bad. Their problem was their history - they had been rammed down NASA's throat by the local Congressman, and for their first few years, had produced not much more than shiny pamphlets.

In fact, Martin's predecessor had lost his job over a comment he made at a press conference a while before, where he was asked if NASA considered this particular program to be "Congressional pork." He thought he was being sufficiently delicate by replying that NASA preferred to think of it as "finely sliced Danish ham," but he was on the street the very next day, looking for another job.

By the time I came along, a new director had put this program on track, and it was well on the way to producing a lot of very interesting information. But the damage had been done, and there were a lot of axes being ground in Washington. The Congressman had just died, and NASA jumped at the opportunity to get the spending under control.

"Hello, my name is Paul. You are all fired."

Monday, July 17, 2006

Bandung tsunami

This just in, an animation done by the Institute of Technology in Bandung, on the Indonesion island hit by today's tsunami:

The 2006 West Java tsunami Animation

This was produced within 2-1/2 hours of the actual event based on reports from wave height and runup at Pangandaran, so we can expect some refinement as more data on the source mechanism and actual crest heights and runups are reported.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

The Beautiful Game:

Credit: SPIEGEL
This is Physics Professor Metin Tolan, of the University of Dortmund. Dr. Tolan gives lectures about the physics of football to packed audiences, where he explains how banana kicks work, and often spins off about the impossibility of certain things in film (such as James Bond magnetically undoing zippers, or certain aspects of Star Trek).

Lately, he has been on dozens of interviews for news shows all over the world. He has done a statistical calculation with some interesting results, especially during this football-crazed time, and epecially for his football-crazed nation.

It turns out that Bessel functions are a good fit to professional football (soccer) scoring statistics, and Tolan has used them to calculate the odds for the current World Cup teams. After analyzing thousands of games, it seems that the scoring rate of national teams is not particularly dependent on who is on the field, who is the coach, or several other factors one might think are important (ssshhh, don't tell the players, agents or fans). As Kim Allen points out in his blog on Tolan, "In a single sweep, he dismisses the entire field of sports psychology." Apparently, the two major contributors to scoring rate are nationality and whether you are playing at home or not.

Tolan carried out two calulations: one to get the odds of winning for each team at this particular World Cup, and one to match the performance of the German team over time. His match to Germany's past and predicted performance is obviously what is catching the attention of the Germans, as in this graph of the function:

Credit: SPIEGEL and Metin TolanWhere blue is the actual placing of the team over all the past World Cups, and red is the result of the WM-Formal model in this crude graphic of Germany's team placement over time. I have several issues with this whole approach (as does Tolan himself, he admits freely), but of course the press brushes off these cautions. "Physics ensures the Cup is ours!"

The interesting part for me was that he had approximated each team as a Poisson emitter (kind of like a radioactive element). Without the home team advantage, Germanium has only a 10.69% chance of winning, while Brazilium is the favourite, with a 15.56% chance. Now, the home team advantage is somewhere between 1 and 2 goals per game, which increases Germany's chances to 33.18% if the advantage is one goal, and to a whopping 56.39% chance if the advantage is an unlikely 2 goals per game. Those are betting odds!

And Tolan, like any competent statistician, has an interest in gambling. He not only deals with World Cup football, but he looks at things like card shuffling machines for weaknesses. He says his money is on Germany - but then he also knows his emotions are involved, and those tend to cloud any results from beautiful formulae. ...he has also lost bets too, losing a favourite football uniform from a Bavarian football team to a friend.

And those formulas on the chalkboard behind him? Real - but probably only because Spiegel took the photo on Tolan's home turf. There are some other efforts to get real math out into public view - the current CBS show Numb3rs, where my old statistics prof Gary Lorden serves as a consultant to ensure the references to math in the script and on the chalkboards in that show are correct. Gary also had an interest in gambling - enough to be blacklisted at every major casino in Vegas for his successful counting schemes, based on... math.

OK, I've got my lucky Brasil #9 Ronaldo jersey on (four stars only, from before the 2002 WC win), and I'm bouncing up and down waiting for the kick-off whistle. And I've got my bets backed up by a formula. Hope I don't lose that whole dollar...

Theme spotted in Toni Feder's Physics Today 26 June article, and supplemented by:
(...and you thought the James Bond link was going to be video, and not just a German podcast. Heh.)

Friday, June 09, 2006

Can't see the Forest:

Thanks to Grant Hutchinson's Flickr page, I found this nice Java app that maps out website trees. You type in an URL, and watch the tree grow. Fascinating.

http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/

Here's this blog's (::dura:mater::'s) map:



What do the colors mean?

blue: links (a tags)
red: tables (table, tr, td tags)
green: divs
violet: images (img tags)
yellow: forms (form, input, textarea, select, option tags)
orange: block formatting (br, p, blockquote tags)
black: root (html tag)
gray: all other tags

My only wish is that one could point and click to get info about a particular node ("what is this one?").

So this got me thinking about all the fuss that is made over simplifying agency web-sites in the US government, and this was a chance to put a certina sub-set to the test.

See if you can guess which one is which. Match the numbers in the list with the letters for the trees. Do they match your impression of organization at the relevant organization?
  1. National Science Foundation (NSF)
  2. Department of Defense (DOD)
  3. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
  4. National Institutes of Health (NIH)
  5. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
  6. State Department
  7. Energy (DOE)
  8. NASA
  9. Geological Survey (USGS)
  10. The White House


A:

B:

C:

D:

E:

F:

G:

H:

I:

J:

No, there's no answer key - that's what that link up top is for...

There are some definite surprises (I, for example), and some obvious ones (G, at least for me it was).

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Lost World:

...or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle takes out his looking glass, and investigates the Guyana Highlands of South America.

I was lucky enough to complete one of my lifetime quests last week. I got to see Angel Falls. And I want to go and do it again, this time on foot, from the top. This post is a series of pictures that will focus in on this remnant of an ancient landscape.

The first diagram here shows South America, as seen by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). Color indicates height, as on most maps. Shading is controlled by radar reflectance, a rather complicated topic I will leave for another post. The red box is the area blown up in the next map.

If you click on the picture itself, you will go to an index page where you can download the full resolution picture (a whopping 7.8Mb JPEG, 7,200x10,886 pixels).

The next picture focuses on the Guyana Highlands area outlined in red above - a set of enormous mesas that rise 2,000 to 3,000 feet above the savannas of Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil. The mesas, known as tepuis, were formed over hundreds of millions of years as rivers cut into a thick layer of pink quartzite sandstone, itself as old as the Precambrian. The contrast between the dark green mantle covering the tepui tops, the sheer pink and black cliffs, and the lighter green to brown savannas is stunning. Most of the higher tepuis in this image have never been visited by a human. They are almost impossible to get to, even by helicopter. There are very few places left on Earth like that. The red circle outlines Auyán Tepui, from which Angel Falls ...fall.

Again, if you click on the picture itself, you will go to an index page where you can download the full resolution picture (1,900x1,070 pixels), which includes a version of the best known topography before SRTM was flown.

Now we switch to Google Earth for the next inwards zoom, and focus on the Auyán Tepui area itself. You can match the heart-shaped area in the center of this picture to the shape seen in the above radar picture to orient yourself. The red circle here indicates the central canyon through the tepui, cut by innumerable waterfalls that line the canyon walls. The red rectangle outlines the next zoom, into the Canaima area where flights land.

If you click on this picture, you will get a larger version without the red markings.

In this picture of the Canaima area, the red circle outlines a tepui I will come back to below. The red rectangle is an area that I photographed obliquely from the air, shown below.

Again, if you click on this picture, you will get a larger version, without the red markings.

In the aerial photo below, looking roughly West, you should be able to match up the channels of the Carrao River with the "tines" visible in the center-top of the red rectangle area. You can just make out the Canaima (CAJ/SVCN) landing strip in the oblique aerial photo, and the strip is quite clear in the center-left border area of the rectangle in the Google Earth photo. The landing strip was crushed gravel - FOD city, which made for a noisy landing and take-off.

Above the fallsAnd clicking on this picture will take you to my Flickr page for it...

This next photo was taken from the Western shore of the Canaima Lagoon (actually still part of the Carrao River) at the "elbow" to the left of the tines, looking North-East towards the red-circled tepui I referred to above (this is called Karavaina Tepui). If you look carefully, you can see that there are lower, sloping tepuis to the left and right in this picture, which can also be made out as triangluar blocks in the Google Earth picture above (they are known as the Nonoy and Topuchi Tepuis). The waterfalls here were spectacular, even for being the end of the dry season. There is enough space behind them for multiple groups of fat tourists. The water is quite red from the tannins, and the "beaches" in the area are distinctly pink from the rose quartzite.

Guillermo Cubillos
This next picture is an aerial photo of Karavaina Tepui, typical of one of the lower tepui structures - sheer walls surrounded by a debris pile, with a relatively, but not completely flat, top. Taller tepuis will have double or triple stacks of these cliff-debris combinations. Most of the tepuis have extremely rough, or karstic terrain on their tops - highly dissolved rock full of caves and pits. This leads to some amazing places for caving, but the truly marvelous oddity is that this type of terrain usually occurs in calcareous stone like limestone. These layers have been here for so long (longer than almost anywhere else on Earth) that water has been able to perform its erosive magic even through quartz sandstone. This landscape has escaped the violence of tectonics and lain still since before the dinosaurs were a twinkle in Nature's eye. The isolation from the surrounding territory has also allowed the tepui tops to develop their own peculiar ecosystems - some of them have their own specific species of plants, frogs, etc. Here's a nice intro with some depth to it...

Tepui
But this isolation might also be the ecosystems' undoing - as global warming occurs, species usually adapt by moving upslope, following the isotherms. On a tepui, there is literally nowhere to go. However, I note that given the length of time these structures have been here - this type of thing has happened before. Here's a group that has just started looking at this issue - I plan to meet one of them later this year in Beijing. It is this 'splendid isolation' that led many biologists in the late 1870's (just after Darwin's "Origin of the Species" and "Descent of Man" were published) to speculate that the tepuis might harbour species long extinct elsewhere - perhaps even dinosaurs. An expedition in 1882 led by Everard Im Thurn finally ascended to the 9,000 foot summit of Roraima Tepui, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle supposedly attended one of the lectures the expedition gave on their return, and his book "The Lost World" was (probably) the result. From there, Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg moved all this mythology northwards and onto Pacific islands off the coast of Costa Rica.

From Canaima we flew in a 15-seater high wing into the canyon of Auyán Tepui, sandwiched from below by fog, and above by low stratus clouds that covered the top of the tepui. All we could see was the sides of the canyon, which were lined with waterfall after waterfall, spilling the rains that fall on the moister tops into the drier valleys below. The pilot announced that they were not sure it was clear enough to see the falls themselves, and an audible groan cut through the drone of the engines. But my wish was strong enough to part the clouds, and suddenly there it was. For a few seconds we showed our plane's belly as the pilot put us into a very tight turn inside the canyon, and both sides of the aisle had seen the unimaginably slow drops of water falling 3,212 feet -- much like Jimmy Angel and his crew did in 1933.

Angel Falls/Salto AngelI sat happily on the way home, smiling as I gazed out over the "Great Savanna," and the slowly hazier air as we flew back North into the "real" world.

Additonal Links:

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Martian Dust Devils:



I found this animated GIF the other day while trying to locate stuff for my son about Mars.

It reminded me that I had had a conversation a few months ago with an old friend from grad school, Nilton Rennó, about his research work, and he told me he was busy working on the electrical properties of small eddies like these dust devils. It turns out that these things generate very intense electrical fields, and that this potential makes a large amount of dust jump off the surface, to be carried away and up into the air. His take was that these small phenomena contribute a lot more to suspended aerosols than we currently take into account.

From the NASA Phoenix mission page that has a description of his work:

Recently, Renno and his collaborators found evidence of large electric fields and non-thermal microwave emission by Martian dust devils and dust storms (Renno et al. 2003). They also showed that convective plumes and vortices play a very important role in the Earth?s aerosol budget (Renno et al. 2004, Koch and Renno 2004). Indeed, graduate student Jacquelin Koch recently showed that convective plumes and vortices are responsible for more than 20% of the terrestrial aerosol budget. In addition, Renno and his collaborators have been studying the electrification of terrestrial and Martian dust devils and storms and their effects on dust lifting and atmospheric chemistry. They have already shown that, on Mars dust electrification leads to the formation of large quantities of H2O2, a powerful oxidant. This has important implications for the chemistry of the martian soil and perhaps even to its hydrological cycle.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

What are you lookin' at?



A candid view into a bizarre ritual?

An experiment with a clipper gone wrong?

No, just a mid-process picture of a haircut in progress that had an eerie look to it. While I have had the temerity to go out in public with no hair at all, I have not gone out in public like this. At least not until publishing this picture, which for all intents and purposes, is like going out in public. Who knows what photos of us lurk in cyberspace?

One of the first principles in security clearance is full disclosure. Admit it all, and no one will have a hold on you. As long as everyone knows, no one can embarrass you into giving up the codes to the football. So here goes: I'm ugly. There you have it. The truth is out, and it has made me free.

Free to part crowds with a black look and a determined pace. Free to stop traffic. Free to scatter panhandlers and prostitutes as I prowl dark city streets.

Now where did I park the damned Batmobile?

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Mil ojos, mil piernas:

A reader just asked me a question about why eye dominance exists.

A good question, and I have not found an explanation yet. But then, I only looked for five minutes, and thought about it for four.

One possible reason might be that it's really, really, really hard to get eyes to be the same strength, and so one will dominate no matter what (or that humans will come up with a sensitive enough test to tell the difference).

The real question is why would dominance evolve, and what advantage does it confer?

That led me to wonder (out of non-posting guilt) about the crab question again, and then on to a new quandary:

If dominance is a feature of bilateral creatures, does it exist in crabs? Do they have a dominant leg? Or legs? Is it by pairs? What about centipedes (one leg pair per segment), and millipedes (two leg pairs per segment)?

"Oh no! Another set of unanswered questions on the blog!"

While fretting about that, I completely forgot to add this link, which does away with the whole dominance and 3-D vision correlation. You can perceive a 3-D effect with only one eye in what Jim Gasperini did ages ago with two-image GIFs (although it does seem more real with two eyes open).

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Urban thirst:

I went to a talk today by Kirk Johnson, a paleontologist with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

He was talking about their outreach program, which you have probably seen if you have travelled through Denver International lately. Just before the TSA clearance area, there is an exhibit covering the fossils that were dug up while DIA was being built - this is one of the paintings there by artist Jan Vriesen:


Kirk had an interesting point about Denver - most of the water for the city is brought there by tunnel from the West side of the continental divide, since Denver is in the rain shadow. However, most of the new developments are not fed by this system, and are drawing up groundwater from fossil aquifers like the Arapahoe.


The development pictured here, Highlands Ranch, is the largest development in the United States. It draws water from the Arapahoe, which it is lowering by 20 feet a year. There are about 600 feet of water in the aquifer. As Kirk put it, 'about one mortgage's worth.' Great long-range planning, eh? This will be a ghost town within our lifetimes.

Kirk has been able to establish nature trails in many of these developments because they are fossil rich - even having large specimens like Triceratops, which make for nice educational walks. As you might imagine, the developers have constantly vetoed any mention of water.

Colorado has been very wet in its past - much of Kirk and Jan's work together has been to produce a set of paintings that depict the Denver area through time. Here it is about 300 million years ago, during the (eerie) Pennsylvanian:


And here it is 85 million years ago, during the Cretaceous, when it was part of a vast inland sea:


You can see more of Jan's work at the Ancient Colorado exhibit at the Colorado Convention Center. These slides are up for a brief period as Mac Slides - if you have a .Mac subscription, you can view them as a screen saver if you subscribe to my public slide show.

Monday, May 01, 2006

Seeds from Isla Sorna:

Today's quandary -

E-mail from a highly respected medical center that wants to start a project on protein/peptide sequencing of various samples, all from previously unsequenced species. All results would be compared with the publicly available sequences to determine the relatedness to what has already been done (several hundred species), and then contributed to this same dataset so that other groups doing this sort of thing can compare with these sequences (building a library).

The catch? The samples are from a dinosaur. A T. Rex. You know, the fellow from Jurassic Park.

As I have posted before, the organic material is there in their thighbones - yes, somewhat degraded, but it is there. Note that this is not genetic sequencing - we are one level of abstraction away from the dino-DNA since these are proteins. However, this will be good enough to give a numerical level of confidence in saying T. Rex is more like a chicken than a crocodile (or otherwise).

So, readers, do I start the ball rolling on this, eventually leading to the destruction of downtown San Diego by a rampaging dinosaur?

Sunday, April 30, 2006

Swiss Tsunamis:

Land-locked countries are not immune from tsunamis - Switzerland and Austria had enormous losses because their citizens vacation in vulnerable spots - this is an example of where wealth makes you more vulnerable.

Friday, April 21, 2006

Canadiana:

I am in Canada this week, in Toronto and Ottawa, which have brought back a flood of memories.



I was in Toronto for less than 24 hours (of which I spent a great deal trapped in traffic on the Gardiner Expressway...), but I did manage to snap a few photos from the airplane and cab windows.

Here's a bunch of things Canadian. What can you spot? (click on the photo for a larger version)

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Blow the house down:

If you follow climate news, you will have heard some noise about increases in the number and intensity of hurricanes. If you follow these things closely, you will have heard that there is discussion of whether the increase in intensity is due to climate change. If you really pay attention to detail, you will have heard that there are some who believe that the increase in storm strength is a cyclical thing, and not due to climate change at all.

I went to a talk by Kerry Emanuel today. Kerry is a professor at MIT, where he does all sorts of number crunching on hurricane data, and high-falutin' theorizing on the genesis, growth, and decay of tropical cyclones. I realized as I walked into the room that in my seven years at MIT as a grad student and post-doc in the same building as Kerry, I had never seen him, even though I had several friends who were students of his.

Kerry is firmly in the camp that believes the increases in storm strength are due to climate change - specifically from the warming of the sea surface. But he's interested in more than simply that - he wants to know how the energy budget of the ocean-atmosphere system works today, and how it worked in the distant past.

Some points from the presentation Kerry Emanuel made here at NSF:

  • Early April is a global minimum for hurricanes
  • 10% of the global total occur in the North Atlantic, but they get 90% of the press coverage
  • Hurricanes do not form within a few degrees of the Equator because they need Coriolis forces - they also need warm sea water (Quizlet alert...)
  • There are generally no cyclones in the South Atlantic because the water is just slightly too cold except in a narrow strip off Brazil. The first recorded hurricane there, Catarina, only just classified as a hurricane before it went onshore
  • Hurricanes are basically Carnot heat engines - they are driven by the difference between sea surface temperature and the atmospheric temperature, and are therefore directly related to the greenhouse effect
  • Insurance losses vary roughly as the cube of maximum wind speed (that is why this number is predicted)
  • Over 50% of all damage in the US was caused by the 5 great storms prior to Katrina (I researched these numbers, they are not Kerry?s):
    • Andrew, 1992 ($20.3 billion, 2006 dollars: $28.9 billion*)
    • Charley, 2004 ($6.7 billion, 2006 dollars: $7.1 billion)
    • Hugo, 1989 ($6.2 billion, 2006 dollars: $6.6 billion)
    • Ivan, 2004 ($6 billion, 2006 dollars: $6.4 billion)
    • Frances, 2004 ($4.4 billion, 2006 dollars: $4.7 billion)

  • Katrina itself is equal to all those together, with insured losses estimated at $40-60 billion, and total losses at over $200 billion
  • The next five in the list are:
    • Georges, 1998 ($3.27 billion, 2006 dollars: $4.0 billion)
    • Jeanne, 2004 ($3.24 billion, 2006 dollars: $3.43 billion)
    • Opal, 1995 ($2.5 billion, 2006 dollars: $3.3 billion)
    • Iniki, 1992 ($2.09 billion, 2006 dollars: $2.98 billion)
    • Floyd, 1999 ($2.1 billion, 2006 dollars: $2.52 billion)

  • This list does not include damages outside the US, or from the other known Category 5 hurricanes:
    • Labor Day storm, 1935
    • un-named storm, 1947
    • Dog, 1950
    • Camille, 1969
    • David, 1979
    • Gilbert, 1988
    • Mitch, 1998
    • Isabel, 2003

  • [I note as an aside that insurance losses are not a good index for increases in storm strength, even after correction for inflation. They do not account for increases in population in vulnerable areas.]
  • Over 90% of the damage has been caused by category 3 storms or greater (and there have been only 30 of these since 1870, causing statistical problems for insurance)
  • We can get a good count for the North Atlantic back to the 1870s because the ship traffic was so dense
  • The annual global total of cyclones has been 90+/-10 since 1970 (when we first had continuous global coverage) -- for statistical purposes, this frequency is constant, and we have no evidence that the number of storms is increasing
  • The argument about a trend (and from there, about natural cycles in hurricanes) is based on an extremely limited dataset that is not statistically significant
  • The resulting pattern of storm numbers has no recognizable trend, but it is a very good match to sea surface temperature, which is also well known over that period
  • There will be no quiet decades (hurricane-wise) in our lifetimes (but there will be quiet years from ENSO or volcanic activity)
  • "Global warming" means different things over the oceans ? heating in the high and medium latitudes, but cooling in the tropics. If sea surface temperature increases, this makes for a stronger Carnot cycle.
  • The argument about solar variability is still constrained mostly by measurement problems
  • 50 million years ago, during the Eocene, the tropics were a few degrees warmer, and the higher latitudes were about 15C warmer. Climate models cannot replicate this temperature distribution without hurricanes to transport the required heat

The take-home is that while the frequency of storms has not increased noticeably, the number of strong storms has. This has great implications for coastal development and insurance.

*: Constant dollar values calculated with the Bureau of Labor Statistic?s handy Inflation Calculator. Base figures are from the Insurance Information Institute.

Monday, March 27, 2006

Awoo:

It has struck me that the majority of pets owned today are actually in solitary confinement. Most of them come from social structures that are usually composed of many individuals in nature: packs of dogs, clowders(?) of cats.

We disappoint our pets every day, closing the door on their questioning faces, and condemning them to an unknown and unknowable period of solitary confinement.

Unless of course, you have multiple pets. This was the major driver for me to have two dogs, and to now have three cats (not simultaneously). At least they have each other while the humans are away, doing whatever it is that humans do.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

There's something different... did you cut your hair?

No, I changed skin. Templates, actually.

Why? Not because I disliked the last template, but because it had become unwieldy and unpredictable. I wanted my blog posts to have a clean, uniform look, and my previous style sheet obviously had serious problems which I did not have the time or skills to solve. There were serious differences depending on whether the page was viewed with a Mac or a PC, and differences between browsers. I also wanted to manage search tools and do comment moderation all from the same site, rather than having to log in to many different places for each function. This is a simple, clean start with a nice look that matches the previous colour scheme fairly well. I'm not sure, but it looks like it might have an imbedded format for PDA browsing.

So, out with the bathwater it all went. Well, not all, since you will still see iconic elements from Newton that I included in this new template. I'm sure I will be tinkering with this template as well to make it a little different from all the other versions of it in the blogosphere. That picture at the top, for a start (but that seems to be quite an involved process). All that tweaking will probably make for some of the same problems and mess up the PDA browsing ease. Sigh.

There were several consequences to the change, the main one of concern to readers being that your previous comments are "gone." I'm working on that, but transferring comments from enetation to blogger will probably be a tedious, one-by-one process (not to mention that I have lost my enetation password and userID). Luckily, you are a shy lot, and haven't said much. "No, you just don't spark conversation" was the quietly mumbled reply I distinctly heard despite your best efforts at hiding it behind your hands...

The other change is having blogger host the searches rather than Atomz. Atomz has the nice feature that it gives statistics on the searches done each month, and e-mails them to me. It does (did?) have a flaw in that it had trouble indexing archives. I have not been impressed so far with blogger's search, but perhaps it takes a while for the index bot to crawl my site. We shall see - Atomz may yet reappear (legally, since blogger does allow use of external tools).

I got rid of the list of books, and I'm still not happy with how the blogroll looks. It is just not clean. Ditto for the propaganda icons. I may ditch them and simply have text links to clean it all up - but I have no idea how to handle the hit counter for now.

I will leave that for other late nights. This change all happened yesterday lunch, and most of last night.

Now it's time for a kip, before my lunch break is gone.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Quizlet 2:

El Niño years have twice the average precipitation, and La Niña years have one quarter of the average precipitation. If all years are either El Niño or La Niña (i.e. no neutral years), how often does El Niño occur?

What if you allow neutral years?


Answer to Quizlet 1: Northbound, port-side

Seeing something setting means you are looking West. If it is rotating counter-clockwise, then you are rotating clockwise. Facing West + rotating clockwise means Northbound. If you are Northbound and looking West, you must be on the left (port) side of the aircraft.

Saturday, March 18, 2006

Eyes front!

I often hear discussions about eyes as indicators of the principal direction of locomotion. It makes sense for creatures to have their eyes primarily perpendicular to that axis.

So how do crabs fit into this? I know their eyestalks are highly manouverable, but it still reduces their separation and therefore 3-D perception if they are always moving obliquely...

Perhaps there are some predator-prey pressures at work here? Do they only need highly accurate 3-D when they are right over their food?

I will have to investigate next month, when the appropriate folks come to visit me...

Friday, March 17, 2006

Pendulous condensates:

No, it's not the subject line from junk mail, but an obscure reference to an atmospheric condition.

A friend sent me this link to a set of spectacular photographs of mammatus clouds - which are the best I have seen.

Within the same week, I read this news release from the Geological Society of America, talking about a new form of ash plume over an Ecuadorean volcano. Although the article does not explicitly say it, they are describing volcanic mammatus.

I would bet there are some slight differences in the dominant wavelengths because of density differences between regular cloud and an ash-steam mix, but the "hundreds of meters" wavelength looks about right for the Nebraska photos.

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Quizlet 1:

Out my plane window, Orion is slowly rotating counterclockwise as it sets. What direction am I flying, and what side of the airplane am I on?

I'll post the answer when I put up the next quizlet.

Sunday, February 12, 2006

One continent to go:

Someday I will get to the ice, but for now, this will do:

Visited Countries


Get your own create your own Visited Countries Map
Somewhat misleading because a week in Moscow does not really mean I wandered all of the Russian Far East...

I have a list of overnight stays in cities on my Newton server. If it is running, it's here.

Hiram Bingham, for dinner:

Downloaded Google Earth for Mac, and fired it up with... "Macchu Picchu."

What comes up? No, not the last refuge of the Incas, but a restaurant. Feh.

That told me exactly what I wanted to know, and I nearly threw the App in the trash. I wish Keyhole had never disappeared into the maw of Googledom, and become the dumbed-down Google Earth.

Curmudgeon back on duty.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Esther Greenwood, I hear ye:

"...how all the little successes I'd totted up at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts of Madison Avenue..."

Ouch. That phrase of Sylvia Plath's from The Bell Jar hit hard when I read it today (she died on this day in 1963). It wasn't simply a phrase, it was a sentence. She might as well have written 'graduate school' rather than 'college,' and written 'Pennsylvania Avenue' rather than 'Madison Avenue.'

Over ten years ago, when I was interviewing the first time in this area, the phrase that stuck with me was drawn from its quiver by an elderly gentleman at IDA. He leaned over his desk, pointed at my eager young face and said: "PhD's like you are a dime-a-dozen in this town, and I've got a thousand dollars in my pocket. You don't add anything here." I think I only got my breath back when I was back sitting in my all-paid convenience suite hotel.

The worst interview I ever had, however, was with Oracle. Because of it, I will never knowingly spend my own money or participate in a decision that involves their products. MIT used to set up series of interviews for its students on campus, and a steady stream of spiky haired students with stiff shoes, store-creased shirts, and navy blue polyester sports jackets (some with the label still on the sleeve) would parade in and out of a the concrete interview room while the HR types from 3M, Ford Motors, Dupont & Nemours, and Biogen, would sort through the cookie-cutter engineers.

I had signed up for a series of interviews with all kinds of different companies, and I had done a lot of work with fairly powerful computers on my thesis, so I figured I had a pretty good head for how to tackle a computing problem and design code to approach it. No, I did not have a degree in Computer Science, but I did not expect abuse at the hands of an interviewer. After all, I had just "totted up" a Doctorate in Geophysics.

Perhaps it was late in the day. Perhaps the previous computer science clone interviewee had abused the Oracle interviewer. But after I greeted the interviewer and sat down after there was no reply, the man snapped: "Resumé!" I realized I was in trouble because he immediately started snorting as he read it. Then he looked over my shoulder and said to the secretary: "Why are you wasting my time with this kind of crap?" He looked at me and spat: "Interview over."

I didn't even bother to spar with him, as I had done when I went to interview with McKinsey & Co. in New York, where I felt I had held my own against their "ultra-slick marble and plate-glass fronts." That Oracle interviewer had told me everything I needed to know his company. To this day, I carry and trust that feeling, even though good friends have gone to Oracle, enjoyed it, and done well.

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Drawn, Verbal and Physical Missiles:

Listening to all the stories about the uproar in the muslim world over the publishing in September of cartoons blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad (BBUH), I thought that the Wahabbis must be rubbing their hands in glee. Very unifying indeed. But also distressing, since the non-muslim world's view of all muslims as violent extremists is simply reinforced.

I will be interested to see how long it takes the Danes and later Europeans to turn their dismay over the reaction into anger with the US for "causing all this." Sigh - the Athenians of the modern world, we.

Watching the Federal budget rollout this week also reminded me that terrorism, especially with a new strike within the US, could cause us to spend ourselves into oblivion, much as the Reagan administration did to the USSR by promoting the Strategic Defense Initiative. I am sure this has not gone unnoticed in the tea-laden discussions of Waziristan.

Friday, February 03, 2006

Electric Pie:

A colleague in the Computer and Information Sciences Directorate passed me a link for a paper about a pie-shaped menu system that was very interesting. The article looks like a class project of some sort (since there is no information on publication). I followed the trail, and found the following link for a Mac application that I have found very useful.


The fundamental application is QuickSilver, and the specific implementation (or plug-in) that the paper is referring to is Constellation.

The basic idea is to minimize transitioning the user's hands between the mouse and keyboard, and to maximize the automation of repeated processes. QuickSilver is a text driven application that automatically chooses items from your computer based on your keystrokes, and then offers a set of common actions for that item. Constellation takes these common sets of actions and can present a graphical pie-shaped menu that uses icons and text to identify the actions. The interesting contrast here is that while QuickSilver keeps your fingers on the keyboard, Constellation keeps your hand on the mouse. QuickSilver is also able to bind specific actions to triggers. For example, I can e-mail any file (text, photo, application), simply by click-and-dragging the item to the lower left corner, and a pie menu of possible destinations appears. When this is combined with photos of people or company logos, recognition is much faster.


I have combined this with MightyMouse so that I get a pie menu from the active application with a single button click. Nice.

Good setup instructions here.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

She's gone:

Metro finally got to replacing the independence air poster:


But none of the others changed, which blows the "replace them all on the same cycle" theory. Metro is simply about a month behind the times...

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Lost and Found:

The internet, and its associated tools like Google, are now the PTM--public technical means--for the obtention of intelligence.

There are presumably also significant National Technical Means that use the internet. It's like a whole new dimension for intelligence opened up during the nineties. Of course, ELINT predated the internet (or even MILNET, for that matter), but the internet's connectivity, in combination with the tracks users leave, has proved a goldmine for intelligence gathering.

The convergence of personal electronics will bring some interesting developments. Being able to combine telephone, GPS, personal directories, and wireless communications will mean that we will be able to query our PDA to find the whereabouts of someone, and also get a quick brief on an approaching acquaintance. Our PDAs will be able to pre-negotiate any necessary interactions. Just imagine: "Hey Frank, good to see you - it's been 43 months since I saw you last in Kuala Lumpur. Say, you owe me 45,000 yen, don't you? I know you did well on your last Apple stock sale..."

Yes, a bit creepy.

A few days ago I was able to use Google and a directory service to track down a person I had last seen in South America over twenty-five years ago. I was blown away when I got the message that they were in fact the person I was looking for, and it made me think about setting up a list of lost persons. Since one activity we all do (but don't confess to) is Google ourselves, I can only hope for some hits off this method.

If you're not on the list, I either know where you are, can't remember your name, or (horrors) don't want to hear from you.

Here goes (with last known locations):

From Bogotá, mostly from The English School, Bogotá Sports Club, or Camp Catay:
  • Justin and Louise Abel (UK)
  • Judith Bridger FOUND
  • Robert FOUND and Vivian Capurro (UK/Mexico)
  • Mariana Cerna (Colombia)
  • Matthew Coombs (UK)
  • Susan England (UK)
  • Josie Fernández (Costa Rica)
  • Alexandra Getz (Colombia) FOUND
  • Leslie & John-Paul Gouffray FOUND
  • Anja Huikeshoven (UK)
  • Amanda Kohring (USA)
  • Ricky Leizgold (USA)
  • Monica Mannheim (Germany)
  • Anna Marklund (Sweden)
  • Magda Miller (NZ)
  • John & Peter FOUND Orrock (UK)
  • Fiona Paterson (France)
  • Peter Tom Petersen (Norway)
  • Jamie Pigg (UK)
  • George & Patrick Raikes (Colombia)
  • Humberto Rodríguez (Colombia)
  • Julie Rushin (RSA)
  • Daniel Sarmiento (Colombia)
  • Monica Savdie (Colombia)
  • André Smith (Colombia)
  • Bob Stewart (UK)
  • William Swan (Ireland)
  • Janice Tester (Colombia)
  • Derek, David & Nina Tibble (Colombia)
  • Ray Youngblood (USA)
  • David Walker (UK)
  • Jamshid "Jammie" ??


From Toronto, mostly UCC:
  • Martin Abell (Canada)
  • François Beaubien (Canada)
  • Claude Boudriau (Canada)almost found
  • Andrew Briggs (Canada)
  • Gifford Cochran (CO, USA))almost found
  • Lionel Conacher (Canada)
  • Randy Dalton (Canada)
  • Kevin Daw (USA) FOUND, but lost the e-mail...
  • Helena Flygare (Costa Rica) FOUND
  • Jeff Gascho (Bahamas) FOUND
  • Pietro Guglielmietti (Italy))almost found
  • Lawrence Koppe (Canada)
  • Patrick Kwan (USA)
  • Boris Lebedinsky FOUND
  • Roger Leung (Hong Kong)
  • Stuart Lowe (Canada)
  • Andrew Posselt (CA, USA) FOUND
  • Qasra Sadri (Iran)
  • Matt Sime (Jamaica)
  • Greg Steers (USA)
  • Cannon Sum (Hong Kong)
  • Bob Wilson (Canada)
  • John-Paul Yuen (Hong Kong)


From Pasadena, mostly Caltech:
  • Steve Chin (CA, USA)
  • Jim Labrenz (CA, USA)) FOUND
  • Moose Mussenden (PR, USA)
  • Sean Moriarty (CA, USA)
  • Rich Premont (CA, USA)
  • Gerald Zeininger (CA, USA) FOUND
  • Mike Ammon (CA, USA)


From Boston, mostly MIT & Harvard's Lincolns Inn:
  • Fernando Chamberlain (El Salvador) FOUND
  • Greg & Chantale Chamitoff (TX, USA)
  • Dana Desonie (OR, USA)
  • Pietro Dova FOUND, sort of
  • Gerd Fritsch (Germany)
  • Eduardo Horowitz (Venezuela)
  • Darlene Ketten (MA, USA)
  • Harri & Sirkku Kytömaa (MA, USA)) FOUND
  • Alice & Dan Lawton (IL, USA)
  • Mike Machado FOUND
  • Linda Meinke (MA, USA)
  • Jaime & Monica Posada Castillo (MA, USA)


From Washington DC:
  • Victoria Churchville (DC, USA)
  • Chantale Damas (Brazil, Kenya) FOUND
  • Alison Dawn Jones (VA, USA)
  • John Rogers (DC, USA)
  • Anne Tenney (Germany)
  • Erica Wyman (VA, USA)


From all over the place:
  • Carmen Cadena (ID, USA)
  • Chris & Laureen Davis (MI, USA)
  • Karl & Nancy Decker (Igloo & Kayak) (VA, USA)
  • Guy de Teramond (Costa Rica)
  • Philip Enros (Canada)
  • Valeria and Mauro Fuentealba (Chile)
  • Wally Funk (TX, USA)
  • Lisa Marie Gonzales (CA, USA)
  • Rachel Graham (Belize)
  • Janet & Christer Jansson (Sweden)
  • Tatiana Leon (Costa Rica)
  • Aristides Lorlesse (Panama)
  • Ronnie Lovler (FL, USA)
  • Mohammed Masry (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
  • Jackie Mayi (DC, USA)
  • Natasha Netkach (Moscow, Russia/CA, USA)
  • José Daniel Pabón Caicedo (Colombia)
  • Igor Rudyaev (Moscow, Russia)
  • Lorena San Román (Costa Rica)
  • Jane Ellen Stevens (CA, USA) FOUND


How to get hold of me? Use your PTM! There are links on this page that will lead you to valid e-mail addresses for me, but I don't put them out there for all to see. You need to do some work too!

Friday, January 27, 2006

We have forgotten them:

There were several pieces on the news today about the Challenger tragedy, which occurred twenty years ago tomorrow.

I kept waiting for some link in the story to today's date, which is the anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire in 1967. But there was no mention of Ed White, Gus Grissom or Roger Chafee.

I guess we'll have to wait until next year, when "40 years ago" is more newsworthy than 21.

Monday, January 23, 2006

4 words:

This is a draft of a foreword I am writing with a colleague...
-------
Over the last two decades, governments around the world have acknowledged that changes in the environment affect human activities in ways that are increasingly important. Supplies of essentials--shelter, water and food--can be affected by decadal cycles in climate and disasters that are either more intense, more frequent, affecting more people, or often, all of the above. Governments are acknowledging that the environment is no longer a reliable invariant, resources are not inexhaustible, and we can no longer count on "business-as-usual."

Much financial support has been given to the scientific research community by governments to observe and investigate Earth processes, trends, abrupt events, and disasters. Governments are especially interested in what might be "tipping points," or bifurcations in chaotic systems like the climate. Fundamental scientific inquiry--discovery--will always remain one driver of such studies, however relevancy has become increasingly important. Governments need Science (and here Science is the larger enterprise of the natural and social sciences) to actively contribute towards solutions to the problems caused by the complex, non-linear interactions between the changing environment and our social structures.

Other communities also are becoming focused on this need for integration of Scientific research with the policy process. The international development community is concerned with sustainability of agriculture, water management and desertification issues, as well as urban planning--all topics in which global change is a factor, and for which Science should have significant input. In the non-governmental world, conservation efforts are becoming aware that ignoring climate change may make resource allocation decisions about particular locations and species moot.

National and international donors are also becoming focused on global change. The coming decade of global environmental change research will result in increasing pressure to ensure connections with the decision needs of Governments. Member states of the United Nations are striving to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, which are inextricably linked to closer integration of Scientific information with policy development.

For many scientists and research institutions, this is a new context. It is also a new context for many science funding agencies, which have not previously had to manage the interactions between different areas of science and policy that this approach implies. There are very real needs for scientific input into the policy and research management worlds. There are examples of past successes like the 1987 Montreal Ozone Protocol. However, in retrospect, despite the significant difficulties associated with the science underlying the negotiation of that protocol, the scientific community is well aware that the larger issue of global environmental change is much more complex than the ozone-related subset. Most of the simple Science problems have already been addressed.

The global environmental change science landscape is evolving rapidly. Earth systems science has done well in transitioning to team-based work, within Earth systems science, but it is just starting to tackle team-based work with social scientists, and with non-scientists like policy and media specialists. Other disciplines, like engineering and medicine, have worked in this interactive mode for much longer (centuries in some cases), and will certainly respond to this new challenge effectively. The global environmental change science community and its institutions must adapt to this new mode of collaboration if they are to contribute to a sustainable future.

Future climate-related crises may actually decrease the amount of funding available for global environmental change science. Three factors contribute to this possibility: first, extreme events such as the hurricane-related damages on the Gulf Coast in the United States cause enormous reorganization in government funding structures, and the disciplines able to respond on short (and therefore perceived as relevant) timescales will generally benefit: medical services, social services, reconstruction logistics, et cetera. The ability of Science to provide answers on timescales of hours, days or even weeks is limited--the immediate value of the information currently provided is extremely low. Second, these extreme events are usually geographically restricted compared to many global change issues. Paradoxically, regional and local crises can have greater impact on funding priorities than global ones, even if the local events are exacerbated by global change. A third factor contributing to the possibility that funding will decrease for global environmental change research is that this science is framed within fundamentally different time-scales from those governing political and public interest. Without a concerted effort by the Scientific community at consciousness-raising and education on global environmental change issues, phenomena that occur on decadal timescales (not to mention century, millennial, or beyond) will have little 'traction' in the political and popular world that determines funding.

If Science does not rise to the occasion, it will become irrelevant in the policy decision chain addressing sustainability, and possibly worse, lose ground in funding for basic science.

Ensuring Science's relevance will require increased internal coordination between the natural and social sciences and their governance structures, and ongoing dialogue with important external social actors: the policy sector, business and industry, and labour. These types of stakeholder interactions will require adaptive management, which has fundamental implications for all levels, including the ultimate government funding agencies. Project management (by scientists, by the grantee institutions, as well as by the overseeing granting agencies) will have to allow for flexibility in project objectives, and for changes in the basic metrics used for scientific research and productivity. Budgetary allowances will have to be made to accommodate the increased need for science communications, additional dissemination modes, and interactions specialists.

The historic reluctance of science to engage in this process is, of course, related to the perceived trade-off between Science's long-term credibility and the relatively short half-life of policy interests. A carefully tended dialogue with governments on what is currently "policy relevant," and what the related policy impact indicators are, must be maintained.

This volume explores the interactive frontier between science and policy, and looks at bridges between the two in the context of transformative research carried out in the Americas, primarily under the sponsorship of the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, an international treaty organisation. In spite of the difficulties in organizing new research networks, there are several successes in the included Chapters that demonstrate that the interactions described above between Science and policy can indeed change local and national government policies. Interestingly, one of the Institute's greater achievements has been the formation of a cadre of academic administrators in the region who are now capable of administering multi-institutional, multi-currency, and multi-disciplinary research projects, and who are now pursuing funding from regional development agencies.

The processes of science and policy-making almost always differ from our preconceived notion: rather than being linear processes that lay out a question, analyse it, and propose a solution based on that analysis, they are both complex non-linear iterative processes that deal with multiple, interlinked, and changing questions. Closer cooperation between two such processes cannot be expected to be simple. All actors must learn something about the peculiarities of the other's culture.

We look forward to that conversation.