atlas(t)

the connected states of america

via Bernice Yeung, an interactive map of how connected via cell phone the US is, by county.

Click on a county to see which other counties it connects with most. Then explore the site to look at the beautiful and cool visuals and vids they made from analyzing aggregated cell phone data.

I'm so glad they got the memo about science can also be beautiful.

the silent evolution

awesome. This artificial reef was created by artist Jason deCaires Taylor in Mexico out of environmentally friendly materials. It comprises 400 sculptures cast from members of the local community.

I saw this and thought: now that's some reparative terraforming! It's one of the less grandiose things we can do to reverse the damage we've done to our biosphere (although I think it's plenty grandiose as it is) but it hits a lot of buttons.

First of all: who doesn't love a reef? There are already schools of colorful, curious-looking fish taking in the sights. And seaweed hanging off the cement people's faces.  Who doesn't love a reef?

Secondly: it's an invasive/noninvasive project. I mean, yeah, the guy did just plunk down tons of concrete into the ocean where no concrete was before. The fish might find that invasive, particularly during installation. But no one is actually seeding chemicals or changing the terrain, or blocking the sunlight or anything. Just dumping concrete.

And then there's that whole aesthetic issue: i.e. the non-issue until you ask yourself why. Why isn't terraforming aesthetic? I mean, if all the stuff discussed during the conference is really as science fictional and underfunded as all that, why can't they play around with more aesthetic attempts at a fix?

I love that the figures are looking around in wonder at the fish surrounding them. It's cheesy, but effective. I can't wait to see what they look like a few years from now, wreathed in kraut and crusted with molluscs.

This could very well get me to learn to dive.

liveblogging: emerging terraformations: kim stanley robinson

and finally ...

Intro Kim Stanley Robinson
one of most eminent sf writers: Mars trilogy; Science and Capital trilogy; Galileo's Dreams. Changes his genres all the time.

Kim Stanley Robinson
Quick history of geoengineering and terraforming as words. Begin with science fiction. not unusual. Many modern sciences being as notions in fiction. Sf since Shelley has represented the thought as fact. Among the best entertainment that we have and also one of our best tools for understanding the future. ppl who don't read sf are often spectacularly behind the curve on what ppl have been thinking about the future. immense vertical reach from sublime to ridiculous.

Begins with Verne, Invasion of the Sea. Explains the premise. Basic dichotomy in sf: Verne and Wells. Verne is technical guy, Wells is a utopian writer, better society. Many "goods" of 20th cent. were accomplished by people steeped in Wells' ideas. His ideas came out of Bellamy, the Fabians, the utopian tradition, not original. Trying to put Vernian technological innovations into the social moment.

Jack Williamson 1938 invented word "terraforming." 50 year career. Just a notion until Sagan and Viking results from Mars. Detailed discussions of terraforming came when we got a great candidate for it in Mars. They had Mars, Venus, adn Earth for comparative planetology.

Terraforming: taking a dead planet and making it livable for human beings. Joke that they're terraforming Earth is bitter. The hubris of geoengineering is that it's being overemphasized by analogies to a bomb, etc. This has gone wrong in the past. It's being suggested in a way of creating homeostasis. James Hansen diagram of CO² levels. Scary image. Where the impetus for geoengineering comes from. Also 2002 Greenland ice core. Quick climate change, warm wet climate to cold dry climate in 3 years. "Abrupt Climate Change." Tipping points. Human industrial processes could be inserted at a point to be tipping point.

Go to Sept 2009 paper from Royal Society, graph of proposed methods of CO² reduction and solar radiation managment, you can download for free brings you right up to speed.

Couple of odd features as complications: Global dimming. Aerosols (black carbon) in atmosphere causing 4% less sunlight. Can't fully be explained. As air gets cleaner, global dimming is less. Things we can do to create goods that cut across other things. Unintentional? Cross cuts of effects.

Ocean acidification. Solar management doesn't reduce CO². A lot of it ends up in oceans. Acidification has been measured, we've done something significant to it. Creatures at bottom of food chain have carbonate shells, could go extinct. That layer could be filled by other creatures that can handle the carbon. But this needs to be studied. We get a third of our food from oceans. If bottom of food pyramid disappears, we're screwed. If this happens, there will be hoarding, which will cause our food supply chain to collapse. You can't deacidify oceans. Chalk cliffs of England couldn't do it, not enough. Royal society has said that there's no geoengineering method that will fix this. We HAVE to do carbon emissions reduction.

Problems with geoengineering:

• Moral hazard: if we know we have a solution, we won't reduce. Well actually, that's not the usual response. If they're really thinking about doing this, then we're really in trouble.
• Hubris: humans shouldn't be trying to do something to Mother Earth. It's okay for us to trash Earth but we can't fix it. Intellectual incoherence in this argument. Comes from Frankenstein and Dr. Faustus. The laws of untintended consequences (not actually a law. A fancy way of saying "shit happens.") Murphy's law in action. like a lot of common sense, only good at certain scales.
• Elitism: don't want elites making decisions. Fear of arrogant elites wrecking commons. Fear of government. Reign of Thatcher moment, gov't as problem and not solution. Bitching about government is a way of stabbing ourselves in the back. Keynesian economy, forces are seen as in opposition. Zero-sum game. Two forms of human organization that resemble each other. Biz is residual feudalism, Gov't is remnant of power system. Geoengineering falls into a political battle attacked for what it represents not what it does. Gov and Biz as Manichean opposites.

Royal Society definition of geo engineering: A deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth's climate system to address global warming.

Anything we do affects climate. Population is a climate control issue. Population stabilization is a powerful geoengineering method. Then you've pulled the string on the fabric of culture. China's one-child policy is a geo-engineering method. Thailand and Indonesia massively expanded rights of women. Justice is geoengineering. Stretching the definition? Need to look at methods that are immediately applicable. Pull a more humanist approach into geoengineering, about improving people's lives.

Landscape: methods of land use less carbon intensive. Green revolution food productivity. Decarbonize agriculture and increase health of topsoil. Return of wetlands. Assisted migration: moving plants into a new zone before they go extinct. Discrepancy between rich and poor is bad for environment. Rich consume too much, poor are cutting down forests. Richest and poorest are having the hardest impact on environment. Reducing this discrepancy is geoengineering.

Economics is geoengineering. Our economics are not properly calibrated to long term survival on the planet. two ways to talk about it:
False pricing. We have never charged ourselves properly. Everything costs a lot less than it should because we have shifted off costs to future generations. Charge less for something than it costs to make it = predatory dumping. Who are we predating on? Generations of the future. Can't defend themselves. Imagine them as little babies underfeet, imagine us beating them, that's what we're doing. Imagine each generation as equal to us in economic value. We've systemically undervalued future generations. Geoengineering: properly pricing things. Post-capitalism.

A portion of this population will call that a tax. Immediately thrown back into framework of our economy. Political opposition, intense avoidance of economical environmentalism. Pro-carbon party. Will always be controversy. Biz won't like it b/c it's not profitable. Paradigm buster. We claim to have an economy that can put a price on everything. There are religious fundamentalists who won't like it: thinking about Earth as a planet in a secular, scientific world view. Global changes will never be visible to individual senses. With the exception of ice. (My note: that's not true. Increasingly hot summers and warm winters are really easy to perceive.) You have to trust science to believe it. Science is often attacked as a stand-in for government, as atheist thing. Culture of anti-intellectualism and anti-science. Discrepancies and incoherences involved. Should be much more effort made to show that sciences are conciliate, you can't cherry-pick. It will always be resisted and controversial b/c it requires a trust of science.

How bad does it have to get before we can pull ourselves together to do it? Food crisis? Polar ice cap pulling away and Washington D.C. flooding. Desperate people do desperate things? What is desperate? Is insurance desperate? Is CPR desperate? Is geoengineering desperate? The CPR moment is desperate, but the action is meticulous and calm. The response is not desperate, but the situation is.

Sokoloff diagrams show that we have to try everything that's ever been put on the table. Is it okay to bring it up? You bring up science as a paradigm. Government as a community. Bring up the idea that we're on a planet, global managers. Climate change is a metonymy for environmental destruction. Imagining climate change fixed is easy, but all the other factors are in play. Let's talk about the total picture and how desperate we are. Santa Cruz cliff houses cantilevered over the ocean, cliff is eroding, beams are eroding. We're adding beams, but we should also have plans for moving the whole house back. There might be one strong beam that will give us one extra generation to solve the whole problem. Is that a silver bullet? Positive: value of discussing geoengineering.

Interview by Colin Milburn (??)

C: proposes theme: can literature be a technology of geoengineering? Social functionality of literature in the world. Goes off on a very nerdy explanation of golden age of sf. Talk about your history with sf, discovery of, and sense of self within.
K: grew up in Orange County. Started out as orchards, which got torn out at a rate of 5 acres a day during his childhood. Had a future shock moment. Systematic child reader, alphabetically. Got to Verne in high school. Were just being translated. Went to sf and went alphabetically, started with Asimov. Tokenized him. Found another sf writer that was great and thought it must all be great. At that point was an English major at UCSD. Early 70s new wave was saying future would be complex and screwed up and there would be no simple engineering solutions. Golden age sf is poor at modeling real science. A lot of people are recommended this stuff and never come back. Scientists don't read sf anymore, or any fiction, cut themselves off. But also humanists who don't know any science. (Risk assessment or exponential scale, for example.) Sf is the bridge between two cultures.

C: What writers were you reading that were addressing these issues?
K: 70s environmentalism began to intrude. Werner Stand on Zanzibar. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, Delany, Gene Wolfe. Anything between 1965 and 1975. Moment when genre and culture collide. There have also been times since then that sf is the best way to describe the culture that we live in. Started in the 50s with Philip K. Dick and Damon Knight. JG Ballard's inner landscape is expressed in environmental disasters. The world falling apart is a story that needs to be told over and over.

C: C.P. Snow are we still in this situation of two cultures that can't talk to each other?
K: Still problematic, sees misunderstandings all the time. Unnatural divide between progressives who have an anti-science bias. Science is praxis in a Marxist sense. Designed to create power over illness, reduction in suffering, more comfort in the world at large. "Medicine still at the heart of it. Science is a utopian politics that is poorly theorized by scientists themselves and by the humanists who live with them." Scientists are being blamed for everything. Scientists have a gun to their heads, and the guy with the gun is an economic system that is a remnant of feudalism. Warped utopian effort, warped by money power, military etc. Nailing his flag to the idea of science as an ... etc.

C: Missed it
K: Scientists want science to be clean and pure and not part of the grubby world around it. Hostility on both sides.

C. You never shy away from making bold arguments from humanities. Is there an unfamiliarity of the tools that you use?
K: No nature of the claims. Blah blah blah about Royal Society. Need to add humanist education into science, and would offer intellectual tools etc. I'm checked out, a bit exhausted now. He's talking about the math of ecology. Soft sciences wanting to be able to quantify everything.

The conversation turns to specifics about specific books. Losing me here. Of course, I'm just tired, too, after five solid hours of live-blogging. My shoulders are insanely tight and so are my hands.

Check back in when he starts talking about the Antarctic Artists and Writers program.

census of marine life

they're almost done. In one year, they'll be releasing the results of a decade-long survey of ocean species called The Census of Marine Life. The LA Times just did an article about this amazing project (with nifty photos):

The scientists set three goals. First, they would build a global registry of every marine life form, worms to walruses, as a baseline for research and public policy. Second, they would map where each species lives and travels to better understand its habitat. Lastly, they would assess the relative abundance of each organism -- past, present and future.

Most marine biologists are specialists who work alone or in small groups. The census has changed that. About 2,000 scientists in 80 countries have joined forces in the largest collaboration in the history of ocean science. ...

"This was a field in need of a revolution," said Ann Bucklin, who heads the marine sciences department at the University of Connecticut. "It has opened up global oceanography."

By next year, the online database will contain photos, DNA codes and websites for at least 230,000 unique species, including more than 16,000 fish, scientists said. ...

The list would be longer, but researchers used DNA analysis to cut more than 50,000 "aliases" -- different names for the same creature -- from the species list. The worst case of multiple identity was a breadcrumb sponge, Halichondria panacea, which had 56 names around the world. Now it will have one.

The whole project cost $650,000,000 (yes, that's millyuns.) I love the scope of the project alone. And the fact that it's (aptly) being compared to mapping the human genome. I love that this brings together my two original obsessions: taxonomy and mapping. But you know (you know) what I love the most. That's right, the actual maps.

The one above is an interactive map of the projects they're running. Click on the dots to get an incomprehensible overview.

Here's one of the cooler maps. Created by satellite tagging 47 white sharks, they discovered an area of concentrated activity between Hawaii and Baja they call the "White Shark Cafe." Awesome. Unless you're a surfer.

There are also a number of super depressing ones like this one, which tracks the "relative abundance of marine life by human cultural period," and another one which shows concentrations of life in the ocean in 1960 and 1990. But you knew there couldn't be a marine-life census without a save-the-whales mentality, didn't you?

But this brings me right back to one of my originary questions: what is this obsession with quantifying and charting everything? I mean, I know what it is: it's useful; it's necessary. We can't do science, we can't understand ourselves or the world without numbers and measuring and diagrams and charts. And maps. And that's part of it. But there's also the intuitive obsession, the part that just loves binding the world in the lines drawn on a piece of paper. Not needs to, loves to. It's what we drool over in these blogs.

And the lines aren't the same as the artist's lines, although we draw them quite beautifully, often. The lines aren't there for their own sake, but for their relationship to something in the real world: a number of actual creatures, a route of actual migration of actual creatures, an area of concentration of scaly, cold, swishy bodies. And yet we love the lines more than we love the slimy, cold bodies; as much as we love what they mean.

the real perspective on the solar system - with music

um ... was the music the selling point?

Speaking of perspective, which we have been for the past week or so, here's some real perspective on size.

Okay, it's a theme. Let's get some perspective before we go back to map animations. Or before I get bored with vid-mining YouTube.

3d animation of solar system

kewl.

Speaking of perspective, it takes a while to realize that those teeny rocks whipping around the sun every few seconds are Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. The night sky never made me feel small, but this one just did.

map animation xi

cool looking, but illegibly small and incomprehensibly presented. The explanation, which should have been voice-overed, at least, is that this is a mapping of the celestial bodies the Hubble telescope has documented. But it's so small, it's hard to really see what's going on.

soaring over mars

well, I really haven't checked in on the NASA Mars missions sites in a while (something like three years.) Part of the problem is that the massive amounts of data the rovers are collecting (yes! they're still active!) take a while to sort through, and even then, the globally significant implications (Yes! there was water on Mars! Yes! There was rainfall! Yes! There's still localized magnetic fields on Mars!) are few and far between. And slow in coming.

Of course, my main, perhaps my only, interest in Mars is for my nobble (seven years and counting I've been working on that thing.) So I'm looking for very specific information, and I get bored and wander away fast if I don't get it.

So I've been missing this sort of coolness (see above.)

Anyhoo, I just talked about this with someone a few days ago. Perspectives on what Mars looks like have improved enormously with the rover missions and the reconnaisance orbiter missions. Before then, all you had was basically a satellite view, and a dog's eye view from the previous rover. The dog's eye view of a dog with a very short leash.

Neither of these perspectives is a human one. Our elevation from the ground, or our shape or wiring, is such that we don't look down, or feel a closeness to the dirt and rocks under our feet. We're always stretching up and up to get a higher view. And the first thing we do in terra incognita is to go find a hill or promontory and get on top of it, so we can see around better. The human perspective is one of constantly changing perspective, five feet off the ground, but off an extremely variable and quick-changing ground. The human perspective is the one that fills the gap between the dog's eye view and the satellite view.

The current rovers are much taller (man's eye view) and can go much farther, and have lasted much longer. So there have been many opportunities to change that perspective. And the reconnaisance orbiter has come far lower into the Martian atmosphere than intended, and of course far lower than any previous orbiters have done. So much so that the orbiter's images have been almost at fighter-jet-eye-view. That's close to the range of human perspective.

But. There's still a gap between the rover's perspective and the orbiter's perspective. They're filling that gap with clever science and CGI. But the CGI isn't Pixar enough (even Pixar isn't Pixar enough) to read as "realistically" as a photograph. Nor should it. So the human perspective on Mars is still missing.

The end of the video above demonstrates exactly what I mean. (Starting at about 3:30.)

Happy Birthday, Schiaparelli!

in honor of Mars mapper Giovanni Schiaparelli, Google has released a new version of Google Earth with wicked Mars stuff on it. The vid will explain every lovely thing.

You know I'm peeing my pants, right?

geography seasons

a little boring, but useful.