as humans stabilize niches against disturbance, characteristic changes in species abundance and guild specialization may be expected. using two model guild strategies for exploiting disturbance (fire and flood), i aim to characterize the effect of disturbance supression. negotiation of abiotic and intra-guild constraints are the primary mechanisms of ecological prosperity that are considered.
Labels
27 October 2009
thesis take 7 part 2
thesis topic take 7
these relationships to disturbance are mediated by nutrient and organism cycling, yielding causal, fitness-driven mechanisms of species abundance in woody plants. woody plants provide a fundamental, irreplacable ecosystem service of energy production. driven by intra-guild competition and abiotic limitations such as water, nitrogen, and phosporus, many woody plants have adapted to exploit a priori disturbance, or to drive new disturbance.
contrary to contemporary memes, many terrestrial ecosystems have been subject forceful stabilization as a result of human activity. humans supression of fire and flooding has ecological consequences, especially for woody plan
24 October 2009
16 October 2009
bonus pic - tincture making
the herb is soaked for some time, and then packed into the cut bottle with a coffee filter below and above, not too tight, not too loose, then alcohol is poured on top, and it seeps through and carries the goodness away with it. the cap on the bottom is screwed just so, such that one or two drops a second leave one bottle asnd enter the other.
this particular batch is pretty bitter. the color tells me that it more-or-less worked as advertised. one outstanding question is whether "waste" of alcohol or plant matter by using excess of each is preferable. tincture-making is a fine line between the two. depends on the plant (and the booze), i suppose...
baseline
it floats!
my new favorite toy
scales how i love thee
more sugar == more alcohol
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prickly pear wine from the student ghetto
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30 August 2009
of a few things large and many things small
sure, planets have colided. asteroids caused massive turnover in earth species composition. nonetheless, where did life come from? the smallest of units, testing a galaxy of possibilities, some succeeding, some aggregating.
the little things. we dream grand dreams of galaxies, of control. seen from a plane, humans' works are not vast. none but our roads and our lights warrant note. points and lines.
ozone hole; global warming; oxygen atmosphere: consequences of small units, people and plants and refridgerators, units repeated to vast proportions over time, an inflation of individually insignificant individuals that, together over time, effects nontrivial change.
this is the law of history as well as ecology. the pyramids, slaves. democracy with it's masses, intel's chips.
small isn't trivial.
07 August 2009
classroom economics experiments
as an added capitalist spin, savings might be used to buy a stand or "manufacturing plant", and employees are hired from the participants. finally, adding or removing money from the system, a bank with a savings rate...
23 July 2009
A view of the Hudson
Safely on the train
A last look @ Williamsburg
Some of our luggage
22 July 2009
Happy Hour
I didn't take this picture
Rush hour
Rachael's Hypothesis
Subways don't kill people
Ok, i'm a big fat train dork. Sense of power, hint of danger as the beast rushes up with a gust of air, smell of electric motors and oil, the subterranean labyrinth. I'd definitely rather live here than in the Mall of America in some post-apocalyptic future? Seen "Dark Days"? If not, it will in all likelyhood forever change the way you see subway tunnels. Oh, and there's a book from the late 80s or early 90s, "Slake's something"...
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Trash
Years ago (2004?) i was wandering through Central Park, up towards Harlem i think, and i discovered the Park's composting facilities. It was a 5 year old's dream, a leaf pile the size of a castle (albeit shredded and rapidly decomposing), french drain-style aeration pipes threaded throughout. It was spring, cold still, with the last crocuses and the first daffodils blooming, and there was a great quantity of microbially-warmed air pouring forth from this mountain of leaves. It totally changed the way i saw Central Park *and* composting.
A counting clock
Not Square
Hiding from the sun
Looking Uptown
The Daylilies of Stuyvesant Square @ 15th st & Perlman
Williamsburg Coffeehouse Bathroom
8am train out of Penn Station tomorrow, so no late night tonight. Still jet/sleep-schedule-lagged...
Picked up a 6 pack of Dogfish Head 60min IPA last night for $13, warm 12pk of pbr for $9 on Bedford St. Cold pbr was a dollar more. Strangely enough, i saw 12pks of warm natural light for $6.50 today in RiteAid. What? Beer that fell off the back of the truck? This is Brooklyn, after all. $0.50 a beer even for the cheapest of packaged corporate swill seems a little odd.
21 July 2009
Alive if damp at Laguardia
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Houston Airport Smokers Lounge
It amazes me that the city of choice for NASA mission control and a major hub airport is so perpetually overcast. Air like peanut butter, with some hot, dirty mopwater mixed in for good measure.
Continental staff is a rather moribund crew. Our 1.5 hr layover has magically extended itself an hour - its shaping up to be a long day, what with impromptu going away party and all. Still, if we get there i'll be happy.
Traveling with green machine, trying to download MTA subway maps. I forgot my credit card sized MTA map at home. Alas. I *did* remember my passport, which is still valid ('til 2016, which makes me wonder what the world will look like then...).
Cool-looking Brooklyn couchsurfers and a big bag of homemade snacks for the airport wait 'til then. Not Texas, here we come!
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25 June 2009
What my violin really sound (and look) like
19 June 2009
Lattice magic - top-to-bottom plotting order in xyplot
From R-help: Hi, Using library(lattice), is there any way to tell xyplot to plot panels top to bottom, then left to right (i.e. panels are appended vertically, then horizontally). as.table changes the plot direction from left-to-right then top-to-bottom, to right-to-left then bottom- to-top, but that's not quite what I want to do. Thanks Yan
Deepayan says:
> tmp.tr3 <- xyplot(y ~ x | a, data=tmp, as.table=TRUE)Another high level option is to change the rule determining how packets are chosen for a given panel in the layout.
print(tmp.tr3, packet.panel = function(layout, row, column, ...) { layout <- layout[c(2, 1, 3)] packet.panel.default(layout = layout, row = column, column = row, ...) })This effectively transposes the layout, which (along with as.table=TRUE) is what you want.
-Deepayan
15 June 2009
Obfuscated SQL
--here's the magic: v_sourcedat --matches source files to datums create or replace view v_sourcedat as select unit_id||well_num as well, datum_m, gw.sn, source from v_loggerdat wd, ( SELECT tmp.sn, min(tmp."time")::date AS start, tmp.source FROM tmp_gwdata tmp GROUP BY tmp.source, tmp.sn) gw where gw.sn = wd.sn::int and gw.source not in (select source from v_sourcetowell) union select unit_id||well_num as well, datum_m, gwo.sn, source from v_loggerdat wd, (select * from v_sourcetowell) gwo where gwo.well = wd.unit_id||well_num order by well; -- using v_sourcedat, as above -- the final data create or replace view v_gwdata_4hr as SELECT datum.well, datum.sn, gw."time", gw.dtw::numeric(10,4) - datum.datum_m::numeric(10,4) AS dtw, gw.dtwsd, gw.temp, gw.tempsd FROM v_sourcedat datum JOIN gwdata_4hr gw using (source) WHERE gw.temp <> 3::numeric AND gw.dtw > (-0.5) AND gw.dtw < 4.5 AND gw."time" < '2010-01-01 00:00:00'::timestamp without time zone ORDER BY datum.well, datum.sn, gw."time";
12 June 2009
flying standby
A brief list of miraculous events proceed:
1. Megan graciously and unexpectedly offers to drop me off at the god-aweful hour of 5am.
2. My alarm fails to wake me at the even more god-aweful hour of 4:30, but a gate-change triggers a call from Southwest at 5:20am. I'm obviously late.
3. There's leftovers in BAM's fridge, and megan spots me a V8.
4. At security, i'm shuttled into the pilot/express line. I fly through security despite an irrationally long 5:40am "normal" line.
5. I don't feel like a total zombie...
6. Pressure-induced condensation vortex from turbelence in the streamline off the wing during descent braking.
7. belgian waffle with real butter
8. getting on the plane from denver to baltimore.
it's shaping up to be areally nice day. i'm sure i'll keel over eventually, in a safe place...
06 June 2009
Postgresql Poetry? Aggregate median with PL/R
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION median(vals numeric[]) RETURNS float AS ' median(vals) ' LANGUAGE 'plr' STRICT; CREATE AGGREGATE median (numeric) ( sfunc = array_append, stype = numeric[], initcond = '{}', finalfunc = median ); --And usage select sn, median(dtwm), count(dtwm), date_trunc('day', timestamp) as day from gwdata where timestamp < '2003-01-01' group by sn, day limit 5; -- sn | median | count | day -----+--------+-------+------------------------ -- 5526 | 1.59 | 24 | 2002-12-26 00:00:00-07 -- 5539 | 1.7605 | 24 | 2002-02-27 00:00:00-07 -- 5522 | 0.737 | 24 | 2001-10-03 00:00:00-07 -- 5517 | 0.96 | 24 | 2001-11-05 00:00:00-07 -- 5513 | 1.3855 | 24 | 2001-09-07 00:00:00-07 -- Time: 247.126 ms -- Here's the PL/Perl median() function. -- Much less straightforwards, included for historical interest BEGIN { strict->import(); } my ($tname,$cname) = @_; my $SQL = "SELECT count($cname) AS t FROM $tname"; my $rc = spi_exec_query($SQL); my $total = $rc->{rows}[0]{'t'}; $total < offset =" ($total-1)/2;" sql = "SELECT $cname AS median FROM $tname ORDER BY $cname OFFSET $offset LIMIT 1" sql = "SELECT avg($cname) AS median FROM (SELECT $cname FROM $tname ORDER BY $cname OFFSET $offset LIMIT 2 ) AS foo" rc =" spi_exec_query($SQL);">{rows}[0]{median};
01 June 2009
Dear google - "a driver is not registered for the url sdbc:postgresql"
25 May 2009
If only it were that simple... Enforced upgrade from feisty to jaunty
22 May 2009
Exploits in Brute Repetition - RODBC and Postgresql and Postgis and UnixODBC and Ubuntu
19 May 2009
Adventures in R Recursion
12 May 2009
the trigonometry of seeing and being seen (and watching it all happen)
at a distance, it's harder to know whether he's checking you out or reading your shirt. when 2 people are in close conversation, it's trivial to tell that they're "gazing into each other's eyes".
basic trigonometry shows that the farther the distance, the less the angle. further, to watch a watcher watching is even trickier - i'm uncertain of the angle between watcher, watched, and me, let alone where their eyes point.
all of this makes it devilishly hard to tell if someone's checking someone other than you out (and which part) if they're sufficiently far away from either. yet two people from afar notice quickly if they're checking each other out - i know where i am in space.
try it. i bet the best you can tell is whether someone's looking at you or not...
24 April 2009
grading tests is good for something
bloodflow takes a while to catch up with thought. i do the same thing over & over for 5 minutes, and im in the groove.
fMRI tells me so.
same thing for an hour and im toast. i reckon it's some combination of glucose supply and metabolic waste. ah, the likitations of the flesh.
06 April 2009
fieldwork
26 March 2009
A delicate operation
23 March 2009
Getting out of town, getting blown around
18 March 2009
the most exciting part of my spring break
in an interview, the famous evolutionary biologist remarked that patience is necessary for science (manipulative paraphrase, that). paint me red and call me a scientist in training. patience and repitition are by no means my strong points!
17 March 2009
waiting for a sandwich
its the little breaks in life, waiting in line, for laundry, short enough to pause but not long enough to do anything useful, that sends these strange little missives out into the ether...
and yes, the lack of cut-and-paste on this phone is truly a sorrow.
12 February 2009
darwin continued - see previous post first!
"choice" men, for their part, can gain from this arrangement if they can detect fertile women.... or they can lose, unless they guard the "old lady" from the "wolves". my quotes.
the cost-benefit matrix is pretty simple - all women benefit from one caregiver and one or more hunks, same person or different. some men benefit from caring for one female, some from sleeping with many and caring for one or none, and some take care of others' kids!
Darwin's are examples of theories so clearly articulated as to be self-evident to the receptive listener (though he provided heaps of evidence in support thereof). Here too i see sense. The bar is the microcosm, & experiment bears it out. My fave - fertile fems prefer smell of symmetric males.
11 February 2009
Darwin Day Dr. Thornberg and the evolution of human female sexuality
Jumping ahead, humans are the only known species in which females don't advertise fertility, In fact, it seems they hide it.
What better place to observe female fertility concealment and mate guarding by males than at a bar.
Xiph.org -- Ogg's ugly step-child lives on
05 February 2009
sleep cont
Superifially, i feel more relaxed. I'm still not "thirsty" for sleep, 6 or 7 hours seems to do me, which is a bit surprising. This morning, though, the dreams. I was in a hurricane in coastal alaska. Don't ask me how... Not scary, more like thrilling, watching the waves build. Then the eye came over, and i ran out into the sudden clear, giddy. I've always wanted to see the eye of a hurricane.
I feel refreshed. The sun's out. I'm glad that, so it seems, the worst is over.
On Seasons and Sleep
That quote from one of my bosses. I tend to concur. In the runOup to the winter solstice, i found myself with an insatiable hunger for sleep. 9 to 10 solid hours, day after day. It was magical & comforting & confusing all at once. I could weather a single night of 5 hours of sleep once a week perhaps, and then i had to hibernate. Any less sleep & i soon became a zombie, walking brain-dead.
The sun started coming back, the weather became mild, and the semester started. That last one, i'm sure, affected me most in the short-term. The sudden rush of people, ideas, and deadlines was pure overstimulation. For days at a time, i was awake at night, restless. I lay in bed, closed my eyes, and opened them a few hours later. It's not that i was "trying" to go to sleep, There was simply little sleep to be had, and little rest in the sleep that came.
I started to fall apart a bit.
I started on St. john's wort tincture last sunday. Frsh stuff, made in town.
t
03 February 2009
What i use, and how
25 January 2009
Tech Withdrawal and the Ebay Wall of Shame
12 January 2009
why i'm nocturnal
then i wake up one day relatively early & leave my cave relatively early in order to accomplish some grand & useful task in pursuit of the higher good, something that involves a business establishment that closes @ 5pm, or requires sunlight.
the onslaught, the horror! where did all these people come from, and where are they going?!
today i checked the groundwater wells down by the river. i can't do it after sunset, not at all. trust me. i tried. it's much warmer in the day, too, &very peaceful and pretty.
getting there is murder, tho.
i go to winnings for coffee and breakfast. its packed. people are talking to me. i'm talking back. why?! i just want to eat and read the paper.
next, bumper-to-bumper traffic on the one ways. where are so my folks going @ 3pm? interstate construction.
ick.
09 January 2009
The best/worst sunset in town
This intersection of Lomas and 12th gives one of the best views of the mountains in downtown. Too bad its framed by powerlines and 6 lanes of rush-hour traffic and fumes.
Somehow my mind and my eye are very good at picking out and focusing on the wonder of the sunset-peach-colored mountains and bits of cloud in the distance. I'd linger, but the fumes of ABQ's numerous beaters, and the frantic pace of the intersection, are harder to ignore. Instead, i snap a picture and trot away down quiet, house-lined 12th which, pleasant as it is, lacks the view.
This pic looks nothing like what i saw.
Human eyes are mechanical and informational wonders (see new years post!), functioning in a wider range of lighting than any camera, and responding faster. Cell cameras are the opposite...
google text
example: text "w zipcode" to 46645, and get this ( for 9 jan 2009):
Weather: Albuquerque, NM 87106 42F, Cloudy Wind: N 19 mph Hum: 42% Fri: 25F-54F, Mostly Sunny Sat: 22F-47F, Mostly Sunny Sun: 25F-47F, Clear"w", of course, stands for weather. "d" is define, etc. exactly what "etc." is, though, can be ambiguous.
i send two msgs, "help" and "info" and get useful summaries on how to use the system in response (the wonders of self-describing software!), and i learn that a search for "current movie city" should give me local showtimes.
unless, of course, the current movie is a particular oliver stone flick named "w."
it's an great question - how much is the software expected to infer from context, and how much contextual info is the user expected to provide? personally, with a specialized interface like txtmsg where brevity is a virtue, i really like the "keyword query" model, where the keyword can be abbrev to a single letter.
google, if you're listening use m for movie! 20-some letters await good context assignments...
07 January 2009
Real Good Food - Que Huong Vietnaemese
Just across the street from Talin, hark! Vietnamese with tons of neon beer signs and lots of cars parked in a small lot. Bingo!
Big, exciting menu. Cheap as all get-out, fast service, *strong tea*, and really good hot noodle soup.
No take out menu. Just a business vard that says "the best vietnamese food in town". So far, i agree...
262-0575
05 January 2009
Vintage Cookbooks from Internet Archive
An Lutheran-American Xmas Eve
a family, holding a hand-lettered sign, on a sidewalk by a stoplight amidst a TN big-box Xmas wonderland. i walk past, across a fast food parking lot, the only other pedestrian on Xmas eve, as a warm, light mist falls. traffic in the fading light. all parties feign nonchalance.
Xmas: putative season of humility. Our gifts are surely never given to impress, to inflate our own imagined goodness! So plump with self-satisfaction that we easily and unironically ignore our last nagging inclinations towards largess and contrition.
And the Xmas carols! Written for leaner, darker times? These songs, out of childhood, now echos and simulcrums of hope. The Culture of Now, superbowl and starbucks and more than 100 million cars in 50 states, already has its own answers, priced to move for the holiday season.
My pride helps me safely scoff.
- In Cynic am i cloaked;
- Untouchable;
- Judging but unJudgeable:
Rising above it all... (and whatever is it?) Is this why we drink and smoke and fuck? Our culture, historically lacking in uncommercialized transpersonal alternatives. Like fish into a cave. we've slowly blinded to the strength of our self-affirmations. Tag,we're it.
In pain, we suddenly question our inalienable rightness, our moral superiority. Recessions breed innovation; depressions are lulls in which listeners hear troubadours above the Now Culture Roar. Even then it lies, hungry, in wait.
Wine & Communion Wafers: to me the taste, give or take, of roman/spanish/dutch/german/english pillage and war, & the ovens of imperial entitlement. It sounds ridiculous until i try to "eat and drink - this is the body and blood of the lord god, given for you" with a stright face. No one else is laughing. A touch of evil, not unlike bitters, is useful in treating ethical constipation and moral flatulence:- a hint of naked envy;
- a dram of guiltless gluttony;
- an ounce of unapologetic lust;
- a pinch of piracy?
My favorite part of church is that we don't clap for each other.
03 January 2009
OLPC: Why Sugar Sucks - A Really Long List
olpc's "sugar" operating system takes the cake for the most unresponsive OS ever, and that's saying a lot! this is a pic of me trying to open an activity bundle, an ".xo" file. As i type this, nothing has changed. ctlr-alt-f2-ing over to a real, honest-to-god terminal shows me that unzip has eaten my XO's rather limited AMD GEODE processor for now. WTF?
Steps to cause users great software discomfort:
1. Use redhat's fedora core, and alter it almost beyond recognition - the result is "sugar", an awkward operaring system that steals valuable devel time from the OSS world.
2. insist that every previously-written piece of software must be "sugarized" to work with XO. Generate buzz and intial devel activity that result in lots of orphaned software projs.
3. write a new browser. nevermind many decent ones already exist.
4. Refuse to play nice with anyone, or admit mistakes *ever*
I've been trying to use sugar for about a year now. It's still terrible. It's more terrible than i can summarize in the requisite 1000 characters of an MMS, so i now continue my diatribe from the green machine itself.
Other things i hate:
* No man pages - the most flagrant sign that "it just plays linux on TV"
* No swap, since it has a flash "hard drive" that would be degraded by swap's frequent writing. Too bad linux on 256MB ram *really* needs swap. Eric's performance hacks, especially the incredible compcache greatly alleviate this evil (keep an eye on compcache - changing the nature of linux computing!). Still, it's non-trivial to permanently enable compcache. Another example of "it just plays linux on TV"
* No mp3 capability by default; installation must be done via commandline. I'm no fan of mp3. I used ogg for years before i finally admitted defeat. We're stuck in an mp3 world. As such. the XO is a victim of idealogical zealotry.
* Battery life - claims of 10-12 hours were a major selling point for me. A year later. sugar's best power saving features are still *experimental*, for god's sake! 3.5 hours today from full charge, 1/3 of that with backlight off, reading by sunllight.
* No hibernate, nor the possibility of it. On my thinkpad, i can press a button and suspend my machine to disk, leave it my backpack for weeks, and get my in-use desktop back with the press of a button. With OLPC's emphasis on power, i thought the XO could at least match this feat.
Nope. At best, it goes sleep. Leave it asleep on the shelf for a month or two, and the battery gets so dead that it WON'T CHARGE. A special EC program (batman.fth) must be used to flash the battery. All this requires an easily-obtained developer's key. What's secure about requiring this key???
* Ebook reading still not functional. Flipping through pdfs is painfully slow. Hit the wrong button and *surprise* you're at the end of the book, you've lost your place, and it will take 5 or 10 minutes to get back.
Overall, the XO's software sucks. Bad.
The hardware is amazing. I've put the keyboard under running water. It's 3 pounds, had a nice handle, and a small powerwart. I can read the screen in DAYLIGHT!
So what's a geek to do? Buy a 16gb SDHC sandisk extreme II (15mb/s) card ($40 at writing) and install ubuntu. That's what i'm doing.
eye trauma;
orbital fracture:
file under things not to do on new year's eve.
after 2 days of seeing double (vertical displacement) a sore left eye, and numbness on that side of my nose, i started to wonder if a doctor might have some wisdom. it was fri the 2nd of this new year, not a holiday per se, so i should be able to schedule some non-emergency visit, right?
wrong on all accounts. another case of "go ask google". after talking to a very nice soul @ NewMexNurseHotline (24/7/365&free!), calling the still-closed UNM student health center, & pres. hospital, the emer room was still my only official option.
30 min of google later, i have found my symptoms and causes described exactly. the eyeball rests in an orb of fragile bones that tend to crack before the eyeball pops under sudden pressure (lucky for us... im not sure popped eyeballs heal so gracefully). unless severe, it heals itself.
so i scheduled an eye exam for next week. i need new glasses anyway. oh, and here's my self-diagnosis.