Musings
Downtown South Charleston, West Virginia: where the locals let their Great Danes do what they do best right there on the lawn…and walk away. Pheww-www. Gross. But true….
…an Indian Mound…. First, add two sets of steps spiraling up the flanks. Then, add a circular walkway on the top. After all, it’s a circular mound (now anyway). Then add a bench facing directly up the main street that’s perpendicular to the river. Then, since many bench-occupiers are piglets (some with lipstick), add not one but two trash containers.
Finally, stand back and admire your municipal pi__-marks.
Posted at 9:42 PM |
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Tune in your imagination: this is the house you call home. It’s maybe 1890. From your front porch you see the hustle and bustle surrounding the town wharf of Wellsburg, West Virginia, and watch the boat traffic move up and down the Ohio River. The doctor’s house is across the side street. Your family is wealthy.
Now, things in Wellsburg? Not so bustling. The commercial wharf is gone, replaced by a well-tended narrow park and docking for pleasure craft, which mostly seems to be used by fisherfolk. The economic downturn hit here a generation ago, and the current situation is sharpening the agony. Fishing is a wise plan….
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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Seagull trying to make his/her private ecosystem work in his/her favor….
For those who doubt the systemic nature of ecology and food webs:
Botulism, for example, is killing tens of thousands of birds around the Great Lakes. Studies indicate that two invasive species triggered the outbreak. The quagga mussel, introduced from Ukraine, filters the water for food, making it clearer. The sunlight that penetrates the lakes allows algae to bloom, and dead algae trigger an explosion of oxygen-consuming bacteria. As the oxygen level drops, the botulism-causing bacteria can multiply. The quagga mussels take up the bacteria, and they in turn are eaten by another invasive species: a fish known as the round goby. When birds eat round gobies, they become infected and die.**
I compose this while listening to a podcast of Terry Gross talking to Thomas Friedman, who always approaches his analyses knowing that he is looking at a complex interconnected system. Right now he’s railing about McCain and others advocating for drilling, which means continued reliance on oil, and continuation of this hazardous relationship with oil-producing countries (often not our geopolitical friends, like Russia, Venezuela, much of the Middle East), rather than opting for solar and wind energy, which would be more economically secure….
Sorry for not continuing this rant, but I need to go back to considering complex sociopolitical systems that functioned in the recent past, when nation-states formed at various places around the globe….
* OR: Don’t eat the round gobies.
** From Carl Zimmer’s article “Friendly Invaders” in yesterday’s NYTimes.
Posted at 12:39 PM |
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Under the hands of exquisite craftsmen, our shower is returning….
New vocab: petabyte. Abbrevation is PB (no J). I thought a terabyte was immense, but a petabyte is 1K terabytes. This tacks onto a scale that starts with a bit, and 8 bits make a byte. Etc. Here’s a great explanation from Wikipedia, and you can see that there are named orders of magnitude MUCH larger than the petabyte.
Access to petabytes of data means analysis must take a different form to accomodate the sheer quantities of information. Writes Chris Anderson in Wired earlier this summer:
At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later.
So, here’s how this ramifies into science and the realm of academia:
The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses. These models, for the most part, are systems visualized in the minds of scientists. The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years.
Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.
But faced with massive data, this approach to science—hypothesize, model, test—is becoming obsolete.
So, this is the paradigm shift Anderson envisions:
There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.
In other words, we used to employ models because data were lacking or we only had samples. Now, Anderson, says, we actually have closer to the universe of data, hence there no longer is a need for a model to guestimate the gaps.
I confess, I’m still trying to figure out how I might operationalize this (or archaeologists who are smarter than me might)…. Ideas?
Posted at 1:49 PM |
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You don’t suppose there’s one of these tucked in the garden somewhere, do you?
You’d think that a famous hunk of built environment like the Château de Versailles would have a well-documented architectural history. But, no.
Apparently the existing buildings supplanted an earlier Louis XIII structure described as a hunting lodge, of which we have limited knowledge.
Luckily, archaeologists recently got a peek under the paving of the Royal Courtyard next to the main building before construction of an underground service area.
They were only able to open a narrow trench, yet still found a sunken roadway, an arc of a foundation of a modest circular tower, linear wall foundations, and a later basin (to water horses? for a fountain? I couldn’t tell from this report). Maps and pictures here.
Once again, archaeology tells us more than history!
Posted at 12:38 PM |
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This is the closest I’ll be getting to the Beijing Olympics—the Olympia Building downtown at Five Points!
Apparently this is a new yet retro Coke sign, installed several years ago to mimic one that had been several blocks away and removed in 1981. Fun facts about the sign: more than a mile of red neon and around 4.75 miles of wiring.
Posted at 4:07 PM |
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Not surprisingly, the Chinese designers have incorporated considerable symbolism into myriad aspects of the Olympic 2008 experience.
I was tickled to hear that one side of the medals has a flat ring of jade built into it, also representing escalating values, just like the metal component (whiter jade is “richer”, and darker is of lesser value). The discs mimic a form called bi that has been used in what is now China since the Neolithic. In later periods, the bi is associated with heaven, but the early meanings remain a mystery. Jade is often a symbol of elevated social rank, and of elevated moral quality.
Speaking of which, do you think those female Chinese gymnasts are all sixteen years old? Some look rather young to me, but then hours spent honing gymnastic skills seem to promote pedomorphism (neoteny) in youngsters.
Posted at 6:10 PM |
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Today’s big excitement….
Every once in a while I come across a succinct comment that ties into something I’ve been thinking about, as happened this morning when I found a link to a transcript of a 2005 lecture by Patrick V. Kirch, and took a look at it. Writes Kirch:
Any compelling theory of change will need to attend to both ultimate and proximate causations, to long-term context and process, and to short-term dynamism and agency.*
Data and research questions are interlinked. Duh.
I’m interested in, most generally, the evolution of political economies or sociopolitical change and continuity. Kirch is right. To assess change, you have to look at data from a range of temporal scales, and thus causation over that same range. This means issues such as demography, subsistence including production and market/exchange, and ideology all are in play.
Over time, trends toward increasing population (even at the slow scale of multiple generations) mean that subsistence strategies (including the production of non-subsistence goods) must intensify. And that right there is what I keep coming back to. The evolution of political economy is tied to strategies for intensification, in the broadest sense. And intensification often involves centralization…and we’re off!
* From the published version of a 2005 lecture (pg. 37) at BYU by Patrick V. Kirch, an archaeologist at UC Berkeley who works in Hawai’i and across the Pacific.
Posted at 4:16 PM |
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What a stately ballcourt!
In 2003 we made a grand tour of the Yucatan, and this was the day (yes, 27 July) we visited Ek’Balam (various spellings). Fantastic site! Signs said the architecture dates to the Late—and Terminal—Classic (with a few Postclassic embellishments), although my archaeological resources indicate occupation began in the Middle Formative. I loved exploring this ruined civic-ceremonial precinct!
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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This stuff covers our floor in strategic places.
We got a quick rain shower right after we ducked into the groc store, so we made a run for the car upon exiting. What fun!
I finished the first editing run-through of the China diss* (not mine). Finally!
Ergo, the liquor cabinet beckons! 😉
* Among other things, this means I have a slightly less hazy idea of the Yangshao and the Longshan periods of the Neolithic, detailed in this cool table. I also learned that the Chinese language doesn’t have plurals. If I have it right….
Posted at 4:59 PM |
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