[FRIAM] Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools
GIS being a hot topic, I thought I'd pass this along: This just shipped: Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools http://tinyurl.com/6kuzy2 Book website: http://desktopgisbook.com/ Author's blog: http://spatialgalaxy.net/ .. which is a good companion to last years: GIS for Web Developers: Adding 'Where' to Your Web Applications http://tinyurl.com/6q3vvc Book website: http://www.pragprog.com/titles/sdgis/gis-for-web-developers Author's website: http://www.davisworld.org/ -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come
Glen, >From a whole systems view 'peak oil' is part of 'peak everything'. 'Peak everything' is also synonymous with 'diminishing returns', or 'natural complications' or 'limits of development'. I think with the present collapse there is now more time to worry about global warming, sort of, and certainly less money. Thinking about whether growing as fast as we possibly can until we run into something to stop us means running into what will stop us as hard as we possibly can, may be more important. The phenomenon of natural limits is really about how our economic system as a whole can substitute nearly anything for nearly anything, and so... equalizes the resource pressures on everything. That's a very telling principle when you learn how to apply it. That's why the increasing difficulty of finding new core resources; food, fuel, water, space of every kind, is happening simultaneously. The problem with limits is *never* (well 'almost' never) the quantity. It's really the complications and the resulting increases in unit costs, their declining material ROI's. You can always find more resources for more effort, but there is a price level where there is no profit in it. You can cross that unexpectedly, say due to unexpected new complications, and trigger market flight. If you look at the commodities curve, for example, you see we first had a 20% per year increase in raw material costs for food and energy, for the past 6 years, and now have a collapse. You could ask why the physical system didn't respond to create supply to lower the price. There was some 'sticking point' and then the speculators jumped in because the needed increasing supplies were not materializing. Maybe the whole system reached the point where the physical complications reduced the total physical return on investment too far. http://www.synapse9.com/issues/92-08Commodities2-sm.pdf or .jpg That idea is not proved by the graph, just suggested. What is provable is that persistent declining ROI's (like how much water the effort to get water uses) as we now see for all resources will eventually cross the whole system profitability thresholds. Whether people see them coming or can explain it is not the first question. You just 'half answer' it at first, asking whether the kind of effect we should see fits the general picture of what we are seeing. Phil Henshaw > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of glen e. p. ropella > Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 2:36 PM > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come > > Thus spake Jochen Fromm circa 10/26/2008 07:25 AM: > > http://blog.cas-group.net/2008/10/the-true-crisis-is-still-to-come/ > > I'm currently reading "The Deep Hot Biosphere" and Gold presents a > pretty persuasive argument that the hydrocarbons (oil, methane, coal, > ...) we burn for energy are not (mostly) fossil fuels. I'm still too > ignorant to have my own opinion on whether the hydrocarbons are > [a]biogenic. > > But I wonder how you guys think abiogenic origins of hydrocarbons would > affect "peak oil"? On the one hand, if oil is percolating up from deep > sources, although still finite, the estimates of the total amount of > oil > we can exploit would rise significantly. (And much of the peak oil > problem would be solvable through new technologies for getting at the > oil.) But on the other hand, our burn rate, being exponential, will > eventually outpace production rates, despite advances in extraction > technology. > > Does that mean that the peak oil argument is essentially unchanged > regardless of whether the hydrocarbons are primordial or biogenic? > > (I know it's reductionist of me... I'll say a few Hail Marys in penance > ... but I'd like to separate the peak oil issue from the global climate > change issue and focus solely on peak oil and the origins of oil... for > now, anyway.) > > -- > glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com > > > > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Grappa Wireless Internet
On Oct 26, 2008, at 3:18 PM, Steve Smith wrote: Robert Holmes wrote: Charming people but their internet service sucks. My connection from them is currently running at about 300K instead of the 1.5M I'm paying for ($70 per month). I'm on a similar Motorola 600Mhz System run by the San Ildefonso corporation Tewacom.com and have a similar experience (paying $60/ month). My service varies from 0-1.5M with ~.3M typical. I get almost total dropouts for minutes at a time. They continue to insist that my service is symmetric but it is rare that I get more than 50% of download on upload. I use: http://speakeasy.net/speedtest/ most of the time. If there is something inherently limited in these systems, I'd like to understand it. I don't like pestering people trying to do their job (TewaCom or Grappa) but I also like getting consistent, expected performance. Out in La Canada Wireless land, we are blessed with a core of volunteers who keep the wireless system running. You get DSL to 12MPBS performance depending on the calls on the pipe at a given time. However, I've never seen anything above 3MBPS and suffer pauses if not dropouts upon occasion. As best I can tell, radio systems suffer two inherent drawbacks: first, they are shared pipes so performance degrades with use. Second, they share their channels with other radio-based systems including your neighbor's home wireless network. That seems to create packet drops and degrade performance significantly. Thus, in LCWA's network the line-of-sight to my radio server crosses a heavily congested area with a number of units on the same channel as LCWA and I get lots of packet drops. Other users who don't have the interference don't have the drops and enjoy blazingly fast speeds. The problem can even sabotage the network. I have friends on LCWA in the Madrid area. A while back there was an unidentified radio source in their area that brought their connection down after a few minutes. It went away when LCWA moved its signal. (This is from memory so don't quote me on the particulars but it's pointed in the general direction.) Bottom line: LCWA's volunteers get plenty of exercise figuring out where the interference is coming from. That assumes the member has the right equipment and it's properly configured in the first place. -d- Also because of the location of their radio towers (Santa Fe ski basin) their service gets even worse during the winter. Last winter they ended up giving everyone a rebate on one month's fee, though personally I'd have rather have the up-time than the cash. I'm one mile from the TewaCom Xmitter and I get little if any weather-related problems, but do seem to find dropouts and I seem to need to reboot the 600Mhz modem somewhere between several times over a few days to only once in a month. As soon as my contact expires, I'm transfering to Qwest, who have just started offering DSL in my neighbourhood. I switched from 1.5M (nominally down) Satellite WildBlue (56k up) which was *never* down but averaged .5M down and .05 up with lots of lag. WildBlue also had monthly quotas (not sliding) which did not support iTunes-class downloads on a regular basis. Previously I was on dialup which I rarely got higher than 28K connection with effective speeds of maybe 50% of that. I think Wireless on this scale makes most sense only when there are no other choices. If DSL or Cable come available, I think they are a better answer. Robert On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 4:10 PM, peter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: http://grappawireless.com/about.html Anyone in the group have any experience or comments on these guys ( : ( : pete -- Peter Baston IDEAS www.ideapete.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Topic: My other computers're at Amazon - 11:30, Oct 29, 624 Agua Fria
A nice talk by Roger on Wednesday: -- Topic: My other computers're at Amazon - 11:30, Oct 29, 624 Agua Fria conference room. A short presentation on how to get an AWS account, pick an image, start an instance, configure it, run it, recover the results, and take it down again. If someone could bring a headless NetLogo behavior lab project, then we could run it as an example. We're going to stick to the basics. Discussion continuing at El Tesoro over lunch. -- rec -- ___ Wedtech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/wedtech_redfish.com -- --- -. . ..-. .. ... - .-- --- ..-. .. ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.redfish.com 624 Agua Fria Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501 mobile: (505)577-5828 office: (505)995-0206 london: +44 (0) 20 7993 4769 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Fwd: sfx This Week: Whiskey & Water, Fritos & Music
Paul, Kim & Rich have been very patient as we've rescheduled this event a couple of times. It's going to be worth the wait, so please come Wednesday night. -d- Begin forwarded message: From: Don Begley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: October 27, 2008 12:37:10 PM MDT To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: sfx This Week: Whiskey & Water, Fritos & Music Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This week @ sfX: Wednesday, October 29 @ 6:00pm Whiskey's for Drinking Friday, October 31 @ 7:00pm Max Music Joins Frito Friday All programs at Santa Fe Complex · 632 Agua Fria · Parking via Romero St. For more information, call 505/216.7562 or visit sfcomplex.org Support sfX Help achieve our vision of a community studio by donating, volunteering or joining sfX. Click the PayPal link below to make a financial contribution to sfX. Click here to learn more about joining or volunteering. Keep current on events and projects at Santa Fe Complex: Whiskey's for Drinking (Finally) Wednesday, October 29 6:00 pm After delays for presidential debates and visiting lecturers, sfComplex practitioners Kim Sorvig and Paul Paryski are joined by RiverSource's Rich Schrader for the second Santa Fe Complex blender on water issues. Sorvig and Paryski will present a broad analytic perspective of New Mexico's limited water resources and how they are managed--or, perhaps, mismanaged. Schrader will explore online portfolios for citizen-stewards to tell stories of place, health, and restoration of ecological function and form. Click here for more information. Max Music Joins Frito Friday Friday, October 31, 6:00 pm Frito Friday steps into electronic experimentation with music, coding and fun. Food is provided, donations are appreciated. It's a great way to unwind from the week at our weekly casual get together. SFMax Users Group Begins Interactive music finds a home at Santa Fe Complex with SFMax: a Max/ MSP users group for experts, novices and anyone who is curious about merging traditional and contemporary music. Beginning this Friday, October 31 all things MAX will be discussed including: MIDI control, audio processing, video processing (Jitter), interactivity (sensors and device control), Max resources on-line, third party externals and applications (performance, video, installations, etc.). The group will meet every other Friday. Each meeting will feature a presentation by a group member or invited guest followed by Q&A and open discussion. Mark it on your calendar; contact Philip Mantione for more information. Wikipedia has this summary of the Max environment; to learn more about Max, visit the website of Cycling74, the company behind the software. Be Part of the Complex Are you working on a project that fits the complex? Would you like to volunteer to help us with our events or publicity? If so, call us at 505/216.7562. We need to talk . Come Visit Us Santa Fe Complex is located in the Railyard Art District within walking distance of the hotels, restaurants and shops at the plaza downtown. We're housed in two facilities, the project space at 624 Agua Fria and the work space at 632 Agua Fria. The conference area contains meeting rooms and facilities for short- term use associated with on-going sfComplex projects. The project space houses the great room, where we hold events and offer Internet access, working facilities, a coffee lounge and work carrels for laptop users. While there is parking at 624 Agua Fria, the Romero Street parking lot is more conveniently located for the 632 facility. Romero St. is an old-style Santa Fe ox-cart road just east of the 624 driveway. Follow it until it opens up to two lanes and turn hard right into the parking lot for 632. Here's a map to our location, a representative shot showing the Railyard District and a sketchup drawing of the facility at 632. For more information, call 505/216.7562 or click here. Don Begley Managing Director Santa Fe Complex 624 Agua Fria St Santa Fe, NM 87501 Forward email This email was sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] by [EMAIL PROTECTED] Update Profile/Email Address | Instant removal with SafeUnsubscribe | Privacy Policy. Email Marketing by Santa Fe Complex | 624 Agua Fria | Santa Fe | NM | 87501 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come
Hi Glen, Regarding the Thomas Gold book, I have been urged not to take it seriously by geologists I trust. I also do not have the expertise to enable an informed opinion of my own. They seem to suggest, however, that Gold purposely ignores (a lot of) evidence that works in favor of the conventional (post-colonization of land by plants origin) view rather than his own. His thesis apparently was given a hearing in the community for a while some time ago, and when he simply ignored questions about other evidence rather than answering them, the community finally got tired of him. So he did what any of us would do: publish it in a book. We have also had a lot of people through the Institute, and I have seen some up at LANL, to talk about peak oil. Apart from one oil-industry spokesman at a LANL meeting, none of them has expressed a serious reservation about the peak oil extraction rate estimates's being roughly right. The issue being that the energetic costs of extraction (no matter how they come to be priced) become limiting on the value of getting to oil, considerably before even the currently estimated reserves are "fully" exhausted. I have the Gold book, too, and need to read it at some point, because there may still be correct claims about the pervasiveness of bacterial and archaeal life well into the crust, which I would care about for other reasons. Eric FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come
Thus spake Jochen Fromm circa 10/26/2008 07:25 AM: > http://blog.cas-group.net/2008/10/the-true-crisis-is-still-to-come/ I'm currently reading "The Deep Hot Biosphere" and Gold presents a pretty persuasive argument that the hydrocarbons (oil, methane, coal, ...) we burn for energy are not (mostly) fossil fuels. I'm still too ignorant to have my own opinion on whether the hydrocarbons are [a]biogenic. But I wonder how you guys think abiogenic origins of hydrocarbons would affect "peak oil"? On the one hand, if oil is percolating up from deep sources, although still finite, the estimates of the total amount of oil we can exploit would rise significantly. (And much of the peak oil problem would be solvable through new technologies for getting at the oil.) But on the other hand, our burn rate, being exponential, will eventually outpace production rates, despite advances in extraction technology. Does that mean that the peak oil argument is essentially unchanged regardless of whether the hydrocarbons are primordial or biogenic? (I know it's reductionist of me... I'll say a few Hail Marys in penance ... but I'd like to separate the peak oil issue from the global climate change issue and focus solely on peak oil and the origins of oil... for now, anyway.) -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Probability space - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I'm reading through the interesting book on statistical mechanics and computation mentioned earlier on the list: http://n2.nabble.com/Re%3A--WedTech--A-Winter%27s-Read-td1369555.html So I found myself brushing up on probability theory, and was amazed to see what all has gone on since my earlier (like 1960's & 1970's) reading! The most fascinating point is that measures and sigma algebras have crept in as a way to better qualify and understand "events" .. which I always understood to simply be any subset of the sample space, Omega. Nope. For many probability spaces, not all subsets qualify as events. Here are some pointers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_space http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_space http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_(mathematics) I particularly like this from the first reference above: "A probability space is a measure space such that the measure of the whole space is equal to 1." Sweet! This is fascinating .. yet more unification within mathematics. Great fun to see what all's gone on since grad school. Hopefully this will help statistic crawl from its grave of the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem into the light of far more sophisticated, cleaner mathematics. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Subject:Grappa Wireless Internet
Thanks Steve / Robert And everyone who has responded directly It would seem that they are using Motorola Canopy 800 system. In Rio Rancho our company did a bunch of tests with various 802.11 variants and even up to 802.20 Wi-max ( also FOS laser ) and we found some really curious issues with wireless up here in this part of NM such as 1. The faux adobe coatings on the majority of homes had chicken wire over the drywall and exterior coating to bond the plaster. This created a de facto Faraday cage effect and necessitated the use of a receptor booster amplifier as the only means of signal stability ( Best place for signal input device was on the roof structure about 4 feet above the roof clearing the up stand wall ) Attempts to use these buildings as reflectors ( Pool table type ) also fails for similar reasons. ( Different building structures perform better but you have to know that in advance ) 2. Line of site target accuracy issues and echoing was prevalent on all wireless systems except FOS with huge loss of signal ( The signal bends and warps in atmospheric changes ) 3. Weather related issues ( also seasonal ) affected all systems and deteriorated service by some 40 - 60% 4. No company at that time had run pre service due diligence ( In all seasons ) and none had mapped good / average / poor service areas ( Azulstar only tested the signal to truck mounted antennas with good line of site to the service transmitter no more than 1 mile from the central site and not to the customers service point - hence they went out of business when it did not work ) 5. No system could demonstrate good symmetrical performance average was ( performance quoted to actual = Down 60% --- Up 20 - 30% ) 6. Security issues were noted on all systems and interception of both down and up was fairly easy with open source products 7. Multiple issues where noted with signal interference between especially around electrical power high voltage transmission lines ( this rocketed in winter rain and adverse weather conditions and it would seem that the magnetic field of the lines shifts in bad weather and even sunspot type phases ) All the above basically means that the field crews that support wireless must be constantly adjusting the system parameters to make it work an expensive proposition. The added point is that once the issues are understood you can boost the service in huge ways ( Including compression bursts and bit torrent type support ) especially if you are using the system to monitor the system and set realistic goals and know the type of service that the customer really wants. Curious to get comments and further feedback ( : ( : pete Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Grappa Wireless Internet From: Steve Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2008 15:18:43 -0600 To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Robert Holmes wrote: Charming people but their internet service sucks. My connection from them is currently running at about 300K instead of the 1.5M I'm paying for ($70 per month). I'm on a similar Motorola 600Mhz System run by the San Ildefonso corporation Tewacom.com and have a similar experience (paying $60/month). My service varies from 0-1.5M with ~.3M typical. I get almost total dropouts for minutes at a time. They continue to insist that my service is symmetric but it is rare that I get more than 50% of download on upload. I use: http://speakeasy.net/speedtest/ most of the time. If there is something inherently limited in these systems, I'd like to understand it. I don't like pestering people trying to do their job (TewaCom or Grappa) but I also like getting consistent, expected performance. Also because of the location of their radio towers (Santa Fe ski basin) their service gets even worse during the winter. Last winter they ended up giving everyone a rebate on one month's fee, though personally I'd have rather have the up-time than the cash. I'm one mile from the TewaCom Xmitter and I get little if any weather-related problems, but do seem to find dropouts and I seem to need to reboot the 600Mhz modem somewhere between several times over a few days to only once in a month. As soon as my contact expires, I'm transfering to Qwest, who have just started offering DSL in my neighbourhood. I switched from 1.5M (nominally down) Satellite WildBlue (56k up) which was *never* down but averaged .5M down and .05 up with lots of lag. WildBlue also had monthly quotas (not sliding) which did not support iTunes-class downloads on a regular basis. Previously I was on dialup which I rarely got higher than 28K connection with effective speeds of maybe 50% of that. I think Wireless on this scale makes most sense only when there are no other choices. If DSL or Cable come available, I think t
