of a complex system's behavior.
As Robert H. MacArthur said, "Every mathematical model is a lie -- but one that
hopefully allows us to glimpse a bit of the truth."
Wirt Atmar
m the Moon.
Unfortunately, I'm old enough to remember it quite well.
Merry Christmas & Happy Hanukkah,
Wirt Atmar
December 24, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Not-So-Lonely Planet
By OLIVER MORTON
San Francisco
THEY came for the Moon, and for the
J. Bot. 67. 246-55. Larrea tridentata. Growth rates. Oldest clones may be c.
11,700 years. Growth, Zygophyllaceae
Wirt Atmar
ant or animal
life on this planet has allowed temperature to so dominate, although there are a
great number of other environmental sex determinates in other plants and
animals, but almost all of those alternatives actually make some good sense
ecologically.
Wirt Atmar
eved to have occurred in the
Carboniferous (~340 Ma), making chromosomal sex determination older in the
mammal-like reptiles than in the dinosaurs, but making both forms of sex
determination quite old.
Wirt Atmar
hat the bear study was not the result of an
earmark, but occurred as a legitimate allocation of resources of the agencies
conducting the study. However, he's apparently not going to let these few facts
get in the way of one of his standard jokes.
Wirt Atmar
er a day's worth of
use. I too would now recommend 2GB of memory, especially given how little it
costs nowadays.
Wirt Atmar
ears to be no, it will be abandoned,
regardless of how much investment has been put into up to this point, or how
much "good" it appears that it might do.
Wirt Atmar
e viewable either using QuickTime, RealPlayer or QCShow (which is
Windows-only).
Wirt Atmar
cient in their use of
energy, particularly for summertime airconditioning, and any attribute that
lessens overall power consumption is only to the good.
Wirt Atmar
eople are working on reducing
the heat island effects of modern cities. One of the easiest ways to accomplish
this occurs by simply changing the materials used for roofing, including
creating rooftop gardens:
http://www.epa.gov/hiri/strategies/greenroofs.html
...but other, far less expensive "cool roofing" solutions are available as well
without going to the bother of creating rooftop gardens.
Wirt Atmar
images/river_bridge.jpg
On the other hand, go to Google Images and type in "Los Angeles River."
Angelinos revel in seeing who can take the ugliest photograph of the river.
In either case, the disconnectance between the river and its peripheral
habitats, which really don't exist any longer, will be obvious.
Wirt Atmar
, but as the
water streams away from the pool, it cools and is populated by a differentially
temperature-optimized species of cyanobacteria, forming surprisingly thick
microbial mats.
Wirt Atmar
n.shtml
Be sure to pay attention to the various "causes of speciation" when you get to
that section.
Wirt Atmar
art from scratch. It built on the
complexity that previously existed. But for a time, in the absence of
competition, it was allowed to explore a great variety of biotypes before
competition set in again once more slowed evolution to a halt.
Wirt Atmar
tion is cleverer than you are," now appears on
more engineering PowerPoint slides than it does on those of biochemists, the
audience for whom he originally meant the comment.
Wirt Atmar
age in the
various biomes of North America" in order to predict the future.
That may have sounded like literary hyperbole, but it wasn't. I found this 1970
newspaper cartoon on Oak Ridge National Laboratory's webpage last night that
says the same thing:
http://daac.ornl.gov/NPP/html_docs/IBP_toon.html
Ecology has retreated from this vision nowadays, but it's certain to retry this
level of prediction again some time in the future, but in a more mature fashion.
Wirt Atmar
ife that we've discovered here reflected in those alien ecologies
as well.
However, saying all of this is a long ways from my initial posting, where I
wanted to emphasize David Anderson's original point. We only advance our
understanding when we work to segregrate the "truth" (in small letters) from an
array of *plausible hypotheses*, not the trivial, obviously untrue "null
hypotheses" that have become common in ecological research nowadays. We learn
nothing of mechanism or process when we do the latter.
Wirt Atmar
ive
enterprise, not some form of mindless after-the-fact exercise in number
crunching.
Although expressed in a different format, David Anderson is saying the same
thing as Richard Feynman, and I very much congratulate him for it.
Wirt Atmar
-based, fossil-fuel economy. It's only a matter of imagination and
engineering.
The changeover away from cheap petroleum-based fuels will be expensive (as
Hamlet also said, "Aye, there's the rub"), but it's certainly not impossible,
and if necessary, it can occur with astounding speed, without any loss of
creature comforts or the imposition of great economic hardship.
Wirt Atmar
ry effort should be mustered to mitigate its effects. But it is not the
greatest threat that mankind has ever created for life on this planet.
Wirt Atmar
AICS Research, Inc
University Park, NM 88003-4691 USA
(575) 524-9800
(575) 526-4700 fax
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://aics-research.com/research/~atmar.html
f the fire
just north of Los Angeles in four hours and the thousand-mile plume of smoke
over the Pacific that's resulting from the fires:
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/socal_wildfires_oct07.html
Wirt Atmar
AICS Research, Inc
University Park, NM 88003-4691 USA
(575) 524-980
acts." -GB Trudeau
See:
http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2007/db070114.gif
Wirt Atmar
AICS Research, Inc
University Park, NM 88003-4691 USA
(575) 524-9800
(575) 526-4700 fax
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://aics-research.com/research/
erv.umd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0704C&L=ECOLOG-L&D=0&I=-3&P=9879
That posting in turn refers to Chris Merchant's webpage at:
http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/chris/
which has the material (and more now) that you are looking for.
Wirt Atmar
AICS Research, Inc.
University Park
citation indices. Nonetheless, papers appearing in the journal have been read
into the Congressional Record several times now. For a general overview of their
tactics, see:
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2005/jul/policy/pt_congress.html
Wirt Atmar
usiness, "mutations happen," and some
errors slip through the most intense selective processes.
Wirt Atmar
t
advertisement for HR&W's book, which I obviously have no financial interest
otherwise.
To view the chapter, you will need to download and install our (Windows-only)
player:
http://www.aics-research.com/qcshow/playerhome.html
Quick instructions on using the player occur just below the downloading
instructions.
Wirt Atmar
ve ever been hired by today's standards,
while the last 33% (slides 64-88) is a natural history quiz that Rick put
together, musically accompanied by David Hillis (UT Austin) and his lab band,
PhyloZydeco. Dan Simberloff gave the introduction.
Wirt Atmar
cattle, "Assume a spherical cow..." It may sound foolish, but
to some great degree, how you calculate the volume depends on the necessary
accuracy you require in your answer.
Wirt Atmar
there is no reason for you to ever
step foot in a library ever again. All of the astronomical literature is now
on-line, searchable and freely accessible to anyone, regardless of where in the
world you are, and it obviously represents a tremendous resource.
This is of course all that any of us want for ecology as well. But, as the
opinions above express, some sense of authoritative approval seems still
eminently requisite.
Wirt Atmar
6 years.
Actually, I think it is the Department of Energy that has recently taken the
lead on switchgrass:
http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/switgrs.html
although the US Department of Agriculture has been working on the grass for
quite some time now:
http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/bioen98/vogel.html
Wirt Atmar
uot; will
possess a usable lifetime between "charges" of days instead of hours. They're
already being produced for military applications:
http://www.ultracellpower.com/assets/pdf/Ultracell_General_data.pdf
although these particular fuel cells run off of methanol rather than hydrogen
directly.
Wirt Atmar
dall, E.O. Wilson, Bono, Al Gore, Richard
Dawkins and Bjorn Lomborg.
Wirt Atmar
ion of
Victorian England, of smelting, iron bridges and railroads. The second was the
informational industrial revolution associated with computers. The third will be
the "efficiency industrial revolution," and "greentech" has become a primary
buzzword nowadays among Bay Area investment firms.
Wirt Atmar
led
> cars certainly are not), we are already 20 years late
> in starting a complete conversion to a new way of
> doing things
There is a Chinese proverb that says, "The best time to plant a tree is one
hundred years ago. The next best time is today."
Wirt Atmar
w. Making that number
become 200,000 or 2 million is not difficult, given the proper economic
environment.
Wirt Atmar
iday.com/pages/2004/May/hour2_052104.html
His contact information is:
http://www.law.uga.edu/academics/profiles/larson.html
Surprisingly, his day job is as a law professor, but don't let that dissuade
you. He has several books on Amazon.com and he has won the Pulitzer Prize for
his writing.
Wirt Atmar
Natalia writes:
> I need to buy some satellite imagines and I would like to know if any of you
> knows a webpage where I can purchased them.
Most satellite images are now free. If you don't have Google Earth installed,
you should. From there you can locate and print images of almost any scale to
icle in this week's NY Times "Science
Times" that's actually more informative (and more entertaining) than the
original paper. I've included a copy of the article below.
Wirt Atmar
=
March 8, 2007
In Lice, Clues to Human Origin and Atti
any longer.
The address for the document is:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/consrv:@field([EMAIL
PROTECTED](amrvgvg39
)):@@@$REF$
or
http://tinyurl.com/29kjnv
Wirt Atmar
These numbers permeate the developing world and will only tend to excerbate
the differences between the "have" and "have not" peoples of the world,
creating further tensions, they will also simultaneously put enormous pressures
on
some of the most important biodiversity "hotspots" remaining.
Wirt Atmar
ake all of this come to fruitition, but it will happen.
Wirt Atmar
low temperatures in the
fuel
cells of the service propulsion stage, where it produced not only electricity
but drinking water as well.
Burning any other, more complex molecule only adds a mix of polluting
combustion products to the atmosphere. With hydrogen, the only "pollutant" is
water.
Wirt Atmar
ponsibility.
Einstein once said, "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your
sources."
Wirt Atmar
gdala, and we're getting a bit of a
handle on which cells are involved. We're not yet down to the gene level, but
I'd
bet my bottom dollar there's going to be a little pathway of genes in here
that's mediating this process.
-- http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ridley03/ridley_p5.html
Wirt Atmar
Stan asks:
> Why do we have the disconnect between possession of reptiles versus birds?
It's probably not irrelevant to know that the Greek, Latin and English words,
"herpeton", "serpens", and "creepy" all mean the same thing and are derived
from one another.
Wirt Atmar
road on the
berm.
"In Smuggler's Gulch, that big dirt berm they are building to support the
fences and 150- foot wide roadway across the canyon is likely to erode away,
eventually wiping out a significant portion of the Tijuana Estuary," Peugh
says.
"The sad thing is, we can attempt to seal the border now, and some year not
long from now we may not need border protection at all. But by then, it will be
too late."
Contact reporter Stephanie Innes at 573-4134 or at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Wirt Atmar
xican gray wolf.
The fence will certainly be the antithesis of the conservation corridors that
have been so forcefully advocated in the past.
Wirt Atmar
these cats and thus hasten their extinctions, along with other
large
mammals.
I would think that this a valid concern, and one that should be raised during
this political season.
Wirt Atmar
tional subjects,
with the next series emphasizing evolutionary genomics.
Wirt Atmar
I forgot to include the URLs I had intended. My apololgies:
http://www.knaw.nl/heinekenprizes/prizes_env.html
http://www.knaw.nl/cfdata/news/pressrelease_detail.cfm?nieuws__id=423
Wirt Atmar
is quite an honor, and I am truly tickled for
him.
Wirt Atmar
http://aics-research.com/research/esa-shannon.pdf
The original title was, "A profoundly repeated pattern. (Comments on the
death of Claude Shannon and the intimate relationship of information to life),"
but the title was trimmed in publication.
Wirt Atmar
ot;
I personally feel the same way. In any universe that I would build, there
would be no death, no aging, no sickness or war. The only rub is that I have no
idea how such a world could either come into being or how it could be
maintained. In Darwin's alternate universe of death and famine, we
unfortunately have a
simple, easy-to-understand mechanism, one that does eventually builds the
most exalted objects which we are capable of conceiving, the production of the
higher animals.
Wirt Atmar
d, where "we should expect lies and
deceit,"
not only would the germline very rapidly senesce due to relicative entropy,
it would be even more radically corrupted by the female selecting "for" some
relatively narrow trait that could be easily counterfeited. But if the purpose
of the contest were to exaggerately expose and expurgate error from the
germline by eliminating its defect bearers from the germline, the phyletic
lineage
becomes, after a fashion, immortal.
Wirt Atmar
ery rapidly converge.
If you get these qualities wrong, you're offered every opportunity to quite
completely misunderstand the evolutionary process, which is arguably a more
serious consequence for engineers than biologists.
Wirt Atmar
dified allele and HIV would be reduced
to a childhood disease.
Wirt Atmar
beled one of his
sections in
the "Origin of Species," "Extinction caused by natural selection." You can
read the section on-line at:
http://www.bartleby.com/11/4006.html
Wirt Atmar
ariation existed in the population at the time of the
catastrophe.
Wirt Atmar
erating code for both the older PPC- and
newer
Intel-based Macs), but that still hasn't happened yet.
The best that I can say in regard to the question of the lectures running on
the Mac is: have patience.
Wirt Atmar
of Venus can be attributed to nothing more than the
chance placement of Venus just a little closer to the Sun than Earth is.
Let me again recommend David Grinspoon's talk on the geological & atmospheric
history of Venus:
http://aics-research.com/lotw/lotw20060619.html
If you're not familiar with the story, it is jaw-dropping science.
Wirt Atmar
stage for discussions about
global atmospheric stabilities.
The lectures are available at:
http://aics-research.com/lotw/
Wirt Atmar
The Evolutionary Biology Lecture of the Week for June 5, 2006 is now
available at:
http://aics-research.com/lotw/
The talks center primarily around evolutionary biology, in all of its
aspects: cosmology, astronomy, planetology, geology, astrobiology, ecology,
ethology,
biogeography, phyl
or-prey population cycles, competitive
exclusions,
niche partitioning, species-area curves, nestedness, and so on.
Ecology studies the grand patterns of life, not the minutia, and those grand
patterns should be common throughout the universe.
Wirt Atmar
===
The E
fessional-level. But because this is a
children's lecture, it is also an excellent introduction to the field.
Wirt Atmar
==
The Evolutionary Biology Lecture of the Week for May 22, 2006 is now
available at:
http://aics-research.com/lotw/
The ta
Ladies and Gentlemen:
The Evolutionary Biology Lecture of the Week for May 15, 2006 is now
available at:
http://aics-research.com/lotw/
The talks center primarily around evolutionary biology, in all of its
aspects: cosmology, astronomy, planetology, geology, astrobiology, ecology,
etholo
this week's lecture.
In this lecture, Eugenie Scott not only succinctly outlines the scientific
questions surrounding Intelligent Design, but also the philosophies of its
fellow travelers and supporters, very few of which, as you will see, readily
agree
with one another.
=
Wirt Atmar
, I am still a little reluctant to endorse that interpretation simply
because the original question asked: "What is the probability that all three
will be clustered within a circle of one-half meter radius?" It's the "all
three" part of the question that gives me pause.
Wirt Atmar
P(one seed) = pi * (0.5 r)^2 / pi * r^2 = 1/4
The probablility that all three seeds would fall into the smaller area is
thus:
P(all seeds) = 1/4 * 1/4 * 1/4 = 0.015625
or about 1.6%.
Wirt Atmar
indicating that the
occasional catastrophe appears necessary not only as a diversity pump but as a
complexity pump as well.
Wirt Atmar
ents are
nonetheless alarming. But without being an optimist, change for the better
probably isn't possible.
=
Wirt Atmar
gs Go Right Here?" and "Looking for Life
Elsewhere."
Wirt Atmar
ted either.
An introduction to Reta's talk is presented below.
Wirt Atmar
===
March 13, 2006
Looking for Life in All The Wrong Places
Cassini and Huygens at the Saturn System
Reta Beebe, New Mexico State University
54 min. (requires QCShow Player)
In our
hrough model after model, but in the end
understanding nothing more about the system under study than you had before you
began. While in the end, all models must be accurately predictive of the world
they claim to mimic, there is an extraordinary qualitative difference between
those equations that been determined to accurately represent the subtle physics
of the universe and those that have been devised by "automated discovery"
mechanisms.
Wirt Atmar
entirely possible that the optimization surface is a simple bowl
however with a single point of global optimality. If that's so, and the true
costs of additional complexity are accurately represented in the second term,
then you would always choose the lowest absolute value.
Wirt Atmar
o choice,
and that such choice will only occur once they become prosperous. While I
agree that the causations of their resource destruction may be highly varied
and
complex, in the aggregate, the trend seems simple and clear.
Wirt Atmar
et, our primary enemies should be ignorance, poverty
and disease -- as evident in the NASA photograph above.
Wirt Atmar
===
["The Urbanization of Nebraska"]
HOME ECONOMICS: Personal Accounts; Nebraska's Nostalgia Trap
By RICHARD DOOLING (NYT) 7
eters.
Actually, it does.
1 CFS-Day = 1 cubic ft/sec * 86,400 sec/day * 1 day = 86,400 cubic ft
Wirt Atmar
the original context for the phrase
and that it has no antecedents.
Wirt Atmar
acy if it were possible for us to leave the
center of North America in a state somewhat similar to its pre-human occupation.
Wirt Atmar
mes from
the great philosopher, Woody Allen, who said, 'Civilization is at a crossroads.
One road leads to misery and devastation, the other to total destruction. We
must choose wisely.' And there is a lot more to that statement than you might
think."
Wirt Atmar
81 matches
Mail list logo
