One of these days.
Today I received two letters. One was the DTE energy bill. It had two pamphlets: one advertising a payment restructuring plan for heavily overdue accounts going into the winter season; one advertising their wind energy premium option. The second letter was from a local credit union, advertising their lack of integration with the world financial system.
I’m entering the frantic final weeks of my thesis preparation. I may be posting to the blog less as a consequence.
A while ago I was contacted by someone who was considering spending some time in Reserva Los Cedros in Ecuador, asking what my general opinions of that place might be. I made the website for the reserve and they found my email there. I finally got back to them today, and in case it might be useful for others thinking of spending some time up there, here’s what I thought to say.
Hey Jody, sorry for the long wait,
OK, Los Cedros.
What it isn’t: professional. There is no managed tourist program or sophisticated conservation apparatus at reserva Los Cedros. It’s really just a whole lot of cloud forest sitting on a mountain top. Occasionally some scientists go there, but that’s not especially common as far as I can tell. The guy who runs it is a crotchety old coot.
What it is: a whole bunch of cloud forest sitting on a mountain top. And if there’s anything better than that, it would be a whole bunch of cloud forest sitting on a mountain top without a bunch of smarmy professionals running the show. My experience with Ecaudor is that professionalism has a hard ceiling, and that the best thing that can happen there is for people not to screw things up too much. Conservation is mostly a matter of deliberate inaction. In that sense, Los Cedros is a conservation machine.
It’s also a treefort paradise. You can do practically whatever pleases you, live how you wish to live. They’ll probably expect you to cut some trail and tend the garden and if there are any active science programs going maybe you can census some monkeys or some orchids but I haven’t heard that there are any such programs at the moment. Ask Jose (crotchety old coot), he’ll know. It’s a lot of swinging in hammocks and watching the toucans break from canopy to canopy through the cloud mist and listening to the howler monkeys and occasionally trekking out for a dunk under the cascada. If I went back I’d probably try to repair the water line to the old middle house and set up my homestead there. And I probably could, it’s a very do-you-own-thing scenario.
One major variable is: who else will be there at the same time? There’s no guessing what other “volunteers” will be around, and it makes a difference. I’ve spoken with people who were practically alone for their entire stay, which could be lonely or marvelous depending on your inclinations. When I was there there was good little crew and we had a fine time.
Last time I was up was 3 (?) years ago and nothing much had changed since 2001 when I first went, which suited me fine. Some people would hate the experience as pointless and vague. Whenever I get too busy, I imagine a month in the cloud forest.
As for the cloud forest itself: I’ve spent a couple months in the jungle basin doing science stuff, and it is incredible. But the cloud forest has 80% of the biological incredibleness of the jungle (which is to say, more than I can imagine, even having been there), and %10 of the discomfort, and much better views into the canopy and into the valleys. It’s a mind blower.
If all of that doesn’t sound like your kind of thing, do not go at all. It’s not a standard tourist activity. Nor is there any shame in not wishing to be bored and listless after walking 6 hours through the mud uphill. If that does sound like your kind of thing, I highly recommend it. I wish I was there now.
H
No, seriously. Well, sort of seriously.
“At last, Acme has conquered topological and engineering frontiers to manufacture genuine glass Klein Bottles. These are the finest closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifolds sold anywhere in our three spatial dimensions.”
They have hats, too.
Over at change.gov, Obama antes up to Britain on its greenhouse emissions agenda:
“Implement an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050.”
There’s a few problems with cap and trade approaches, but the big one is setting the cap at meaningful level, in the face of enormous financial and political pressure, not to mention scientific uncertainty. But 80% is probably something like right.
Treeplanters have a saying: “How do you plant 2000 trees a day? Plant 1000 by lunch.” 2050 is an easy target, in a sense, but it’s completely right to be thinking long term. Now, we have to start setting aggressive mid and near term targets so we can get there. And them enforce them. And defend them against push-back when the enforcement starts. But hey, this can happen. 1000 by lunch people, let’s get on it.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Obama “swept” the election, and “recolored the electoral map”. It’s true he did well in the electoral college configuration. The electoral college dominates our picture of US elections because, strategically, it’s the only thing that counts. But it’s meaningless as a measure of people’s political values, except as a very dim surrogate of actual vote tallies.
The electoral college system typically has the effect of magnifying small differences, as is the case this time around. How much did Obama really win by? Around 6%. Granted, US presidential races are historically tight; Reagan’s 1980 “landslide” was less than 10%. But before we decide that we’re a changed nation it’s worth considering that out of every 20 voters, 11 chose Obama and 9 chose McCain. That’s very, very close.
As for the “recoloring of the map”, well, not really. True, states which voted for Bush one or both of the last elections went to Obama, but there wasn’t much change in the state-level popular vote either. Here’s Andrew Gelman’s analysis:
In sum: whatever the democrat:republican ratio was for a given state last time is pretty much what it was this time. Except for Hawaii. Go Hawaii!
Mark Newman was up through the night of the 4th cranking out fresh versions of his now-famous linearly-coloured and cartogram maps of the election results.
The full-on cartograms are confusing, so let’s look just at the shades-of-purple maps. Here’s what the election looked like (by county) two days ago:
and 4 years and a billion dollars in campaigning ago:
He’s removed outlines from his polygons, for which I give him 2 extra marks on his map. But otherwise the differences are subtle.
I don’t mean to be a buzzkill, and if you read more of Andrew Gelman’s stuff it looks like there really were some interesting demographic shifts. But Obama got on to some pretty lofty rhetoric there, and some of dialogue around his possible presidency and what it meant for America got pretty loft in response. We’re still in the same country here.
It’s also worth noting that despite promising transformative change for the better, Obama’s presidency is likely to be more about navigating bad change (pending world-wide recession), pre-empting future bad change (global climate, uh, change) and cleaning up bad change from administrations past. And he’ll have to do it with reduced resources and reduced international trust. Which is one of the reasons I’m glad that the subtle shifts in political values the country has gone through tipped things the way they did. I suspect Obama may be just about the right guy for the careful, gentle, disciplined, undramatic presidency his bombastic campaign poetry signed him up for.
There are so many things that are good about Barack Obama winning the American presidency. I’m just gonna sit around and enjoy the feeling. My god, remember the day after Bush winning the second time? It isn’t like that this time.
As is often the case, The Onion seems to have the most incisive coverage.
Incidentally, we love you John, but in future please stay the hell away from the presidency.
So the joke around the office is, with 3 back-to-back Conservative administrations in Canada, are Republicans threatening to move to Canada if Obama wins?
The LA Times has an exhaustive list of election night coverage by the television networks:
Where to tune in on election night
For example,
ABC: The trio of Charles Gibson, Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos kick off coverage at 4 p.m., followed by a special edition of “Nightline” at 11:35 p.m.
CBS: Anchor Katie Couric, along with Bob Schieffer and Jeff Greenfield, report on the results beginning at 4 p.m., followed by a live webcast on CBSNews.com at 11 p.m.
My favourite:
Current: Beginning at 4 p.m., the network will deliver a real-time stream of election updates, Digg stories and Twitter posts, along with live music sets by DJ Diplo.
Anchor Diplo, please adjust your tie.
In Seed Magazine’s endorsement of Barack Obama, they make this rather startling claim:
“Far more important is this: Science is a way of governing, not just something to be governed. Science offers a methodology and philosophy rooted in evidence, kept in check by persistent inquiry, and bounded by the constraints of a self-critical and rigorous method. Science is a lens through which we can and should visualize and solve complex problems, organize government and multilateral bodies, establish international alliances, inspire national pride, restore positive feelings about America around the globe, embolden democracy, and ultimately, lead the world. More than anything, what this lens offers the next administration is a limitless capacity to handle all that comes its way, no matter how complex or unanticipated.”
I suppose the “methodology and philosophy” of science (whatever that may be) may serve as a productive metaphor for some aspects of governance. In particular, routine and rigorous assessment of the outcomes of policies and subsequent adjustments of those policies seems like a good idea that roughly corresponds with “the scientific method” of doing things. There is also a tradition of adhering to the observable truth, without regard to personal or institutional consequences, which is expressed to a remarkable, albeit incomplete degree in scientific institutions. Politics could hugely benefit from adopting such a valuation of truth.
But governance is about so much more than facts. It’s about values. It’s all mixed up with equity, and justice, and consent, and consensus, and the lack of consensus, and figuring out just what the hell our goals for our society are anyway. I’m not sure exactly what “science” is, but I’m pretty certain it is not a way of governing human communities. I think it’s strange that the Seed editors would even make such a claim. Robert McNamara for president!
I’ve heard some of these ideas before in broad strokes, but Frank Schaeffer goes into more interesting and compelling and personal depth on the origins of the evangelical right in the U.S. and their interaction with politics than I think I’ve ever heard before. On Chicago NPR’s often-fantastic Worldview for October 30th.
I’ve used Hostgator as a web host for years. They’ve been cheap, nearly 100% reliable, very easy to contact and responsive when they do, and they keep sneakily increasing my allowable storage size and bandwidth without bothering to tell me.
I just went to see what my $10/mo is currently buying me. I learned 2 things:
- My storage space and bandwidth are now apparently unlimited. Seriously. So download those podcasts, by all means.
- Hostgator is now running on wind energy. So download those podcasts, by all means.
I learned last week (to my surprise) that Texas really is leading the country in wind power. And apparently Hostgator is buying Texas wind renewable energy credits in excess of its actual power consumption. Now, I’m always a little confused how these credits work: it’s not as if there’s a windmill somewhere that has it’s blades chained up and when you buy a credit they let it start turning. But I really really assume that this is genuinely good thing, and that this monitored and enforced and legitimate. In fact, the web site clearly states that it’s impossible to “ensure that only green electrons” reach you, and goes on to explain with box and arrow diagrams how it actually does all work, and I’m just going to admit: I’m confused and I just want to be beleive that I’m buying wind power.
The corporate blog has a post on the subject of the switch to alternative energy which raises some issues with alternative energy credits in web hosting, and promotes their version of project.
I find I am actually quite pleased that hughstimson.org is now (sort of, but possibly in a meaningful sense) wind powered.
Hexes: Mean Shape Index of Juniper canopies north of Strawberry Crater.
Centroids: local R2 of a geographically-weighted regression model linking MSI to modeled accumulated soil water.
Brought to us by the Counter-Intuitive Comparison Institute of North America.
The Big Chart (a video explanation).
“Which is better: a seahorse, or English people?”
This is marvelous. I’m curious where the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge will fall in the final ranking of things.
Cartogram of Mean Shape Index for Juniper patches north of Strawberry Crater.
SPOT is (as far as I can tell) a company that maintains it’s own satellite capability in order to provide a sort of enhanced emergency locator transmitter capacity for hikers and other regular folks. It has the basic functionality of the kind of ELT that planes and arctic canoeists carry — push the big red button and a signal goes out to emergency responders with your gps location. Unlike an ELT it’s designed to be always or often in contact with the satellite network. This enables some somewhat gimmicky tricks: “messaging” (I think there’s actually a button that sends a canned ‘I’m OK’ signal to your parents), and pushing your location to Google Earth, so people can follow your progress on your big trip.
I’m not salivating about the gimmicks, but if you ever do get a long way from people, having access to emergency services is a legitimate consideration. Canada and the US in particular are huge countries, with genuinely vast zones that are a) prime wilderness travel areas and b) totally outside of cell range. Having an ELT is probably overkill if you’re going up to Metcalf Rock on the Bruce Trail, and stepping over all the picnickers along the way. But if you’re contemplating a longer or more remote excursion, especially solo, it could matter. (And I’ve found myself thinking vaguely about the Pacific Crest Trail lately. Not sure where that’s coming from.)
I haven’t gone shopping for an ELT lately, so I don’t know what the costs of the units or the service charges are, but $170 plus $10/month for one of the SPOT devices is probably substantially cheaper. One prime question for either service: where does the emergency signal go? ELTs traditionally broadcast directly to some governmental dispatch headquarters, usually military. They probably didn’t contemplate every weekend warrior having a line in to their little room, so it isn’t surprising that the SPOT does not communicate to the government. Rather they maintain a contract with the pseudo-official “GEOS International Emergency Response Center“. The employees there will decide who is the most appropriate agency to respond to your situation and get in touch with them. That could be a feature or a bug, depending on the quality of said employees and who is willing to pick up the phone when they call. It’s sort of an On-Star service for the crippled and mortally injured. Cross your fingers they don’t go out of business while you’re out.
One thing that SPOT (and GEOS) can do that, as far as know, a standard ELT cannot: sell you $100 000 worth of extraction insurance for $7.95, via Lloyds of London. Or, strangely, $150 if you wait until after initial activation to make the purchase. Rescue cost liability is a very big deal in the remote outdoors scene these days. If that really is the deal it appears to be, that could be a very good deal. If only Lloyds sold lawsuit-liability insurance at those rates, maybe commercial wilderness guides wouldn’t be suffering the way they are.
So does it actually work, mechanically speaking? GPS magazine says they’re well built (!) but lack in gps sensitivity. I’m not sure if that is a deal-breaker, I guess it depends how far you’ve fallen down the box canyon when you break your leg on that Utah overland hike.
update: the consensus of the commenters at GPS Magazine, who have actually used the service, seems to be not recommended. If you think you seriously need an ELT, get yourself a serious ELT I guess. Maybe future iterations will be superior.
‘Just inches away from turning the mountains into a morgue’ — The Times
Some interesting and contrasting representations of personal risk acceptance and liability here.
“If you have one clock … you are peaceful and have no worries,” says Van Baak, fingering a length of cable connecting two of his machines. “If you have two clocks … you start asking, ‘What time is it, really?’”
– Tom Van Baak, in Amateur Time Hackers Play With Atomic Clocks at Home, Quinn Norton
We don’t have anything like this in Canada.
