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 speaker [...]
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 posting done via [...]
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 how severe the [...]
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 with [...]
I’m liking these thin skinned vaults. People used to do amazing things with bricks and tiles, and folks at MIT are working to bring it back. In the US we have a lot of amazing tile/masonry buildings via the work of Guastavino. And, have look at these mostly abandoned buildings in Cuba, also via satellite. One contributor [...]
Thursday, October 15, 2009
This is picture of a small portion of my late 19th century house. This is a bit of the unfinished portion of my attic. The shot is taken between two of the rafters.
The half inch thick lumber that forms the roof is shown, along with a few roofing nails that have come thru from the [...]
Mimi posts so I don’t have to: Walk in the Woods.
The mushrooms were excellent. Lots of single mushrooms, so that was fun. That collection of logs covered in mushrooms, those are puffballs. That was the only place we saw a bunch that might have been worth eating; though those were just pass their prime. And, [...]
RNA viruses may well be the ultimate r-selected species. The life cycle of an RNA virus includes a few steps. Infecting the cell, coopting the machinery of the cell, making copies of its self, assemble those copies into viral particles. Then the offspring need to escaping the cell, avoid the immune system, and find a [...]
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