I always assume there was a catastrophe. Something happened. A hurricane leveled the forest. A fire leveled the city due to lack of water. There was a riot. An economic bubble swept over the landscape. The troops came home and a swarm of babies appeared. The system you are gazing at, which seems [...]
The big (10 foot) pipe that brings Boston it’s water has suffered a break and we have all been instructed to boil our water. I see on the MWRA web site that they deliver 167 million gallons of water to 2.5 million residents a day. That comes out to 66.8 gallons per person per day. Of course [...]
The library of congress has an wonderful collection of photographs taken at sardine packing plants. Thus I came to learn the word cartoner. Which was once a person, but is now a machine. Today comes news that the last such cannery in the US is shutting down, along with a few pictures. This all resonates [...]
Thursday, February 18, 2010
One of the things that puzzles me about the vast literature on organizational dynamics, self control, will power, etc. etc. is that it seems to ignore an important reality about actual work. In my experience work comes in two flavors – everything is going just fine v.s. stuck. In the first mode you think [...]
Thursday, January 14, 2010
I gather that my mother in law once bought a case of dog food only to have the dog die. We recently bought a big bag of bird seed and now the birds have disappeared. I was watching a talk about “grit”, which I think the rest of us would call perseverance. And the [...]
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
I continue to be a fan of the cartograms at world mapper. And I see they now have regional and national maps. For example here is one where the grid squares are proportional to the population across the Caribbean. And another for population in the US. Lots of thought provoking maps. (with luck this will be the first [...]
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
This map shows the risk of earthquakes for areas in the Caribbean. And this is the same map showing Haiti more closely And this map shows where the first earthquake struck, and the following map shows one of the aftershocks. The capital city Port-a-Prince is labeled on the second map. Those are ‘shake maps’, estimates of [...]
This passionate posting over at Daily Kos caught my attention. So I’m trying to understand the fundamentals a bit more and ignore the passion. The first image shows a warm current of ocean water sweeping up the west coast of Greenland. The posting suggests this is tied up in the recent snows in England and makes [...]
I gather that the term ‘Assumption of Generality’ is used in behavioral psychology to highlight the presumption that if our experiments observe a pattern of behavior in one species we are likely to observe that pattern in other species. For example here is a typcial behaviorist experimental setup. You put a pigeon in a cage [...]
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