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◌  Cloudless imagery

14 May 2013


We just launched this. Everything down to regional zoom levels – about 500 m/px resolution – is what we were working on.

◌  Placeholding

9 April 2013


I am pleasantly busy at MapBox. DC does not feel like home, but it’s not as harsh as I’d worried. Lately I’ve been miniblogging a bit over here and microblogging over here.

◌  Moved

26 March 2013


◌  Politicizing Sandy

30 October 2012


(The environment: previously on Env.)


In the last few days, Hurricane Sandy has killed at least 78 people – now, as I come back on a fact-checking pass, 82.

Here’s Bangladesh, home of 160,000,000 people:

This picture is about 750 km (450 mi) on a side. Bangladesh is the area of New York State. It has the highest population density of any country except micronations like Singapore and the Vatican.

Notice there is no patchwork logging texture like most of the developed world has from space. Bangladesh’s only remaining lowland forests of any size are the Sundarbans, a dark green mangrove swamp on the coast. Except some foothills around the edges, the country is almost entirely a dense network of villages between fields and ponds. More than two thirds of its people – roughly the equivalent of the entire population of Japan or Mexico – live outside cities. If you pull it up on Google Maps, you’ll see many ponds have been squared off as surrounding farm plots crowded at their edges over centuries.

Notice the braided rivers. These are the members of the Ganges river system. Rivers can only flow in that kind of pattern on flat land. The land is flat because it is mostly the delta of the Ganges. Soil from the mountain range at the top of the frame, the Himalaya, washes down the rivers and has slowly built a bay into a huge bench along the Indian Ocean. About a third of Bangladesh is below 10 meters. The Sundarbans are legally protected partly because they buffer storm surges: when a cyclone makes landfall, the seawater it pushes is slowed by the manifold roots. This was learned the hard way.

Notice two cities – lichen-like gray patches. The one in the lower center of the frame is Dhaka (Dacca); 15 million people live there, or a little less than twice as many as in the five boroughs of New York City. To its southwest, not far from the water, is Kolkata (Calcutta), just over the border in India, with a population of about 14.5 million. Both of them are roughly half below 10 meters.

The border with India is winding and sometimes contentious. One of the main disagreements is sharing the water of the Ganges. The Ganges depends on the monsoons and snowfall in the Himalaya. The area is politically complex. To the west, India, a nuclear-armed democracy, plays a difficult set of roles in the world and is not always friendly. To the north, past the tiny Himalayan countries, is China, a nuclear-armed single-party state and rival of India. To the east is Myanmar, a terribly oppressive dictatorship. Bangladesh would soon find itself in trouble if many of its people, even a small proportion like ten million, spilled across any of its borders. As I write this, I see that the UN High Commission on Refugees has in fact just asked Bangladesh to open its borders to people leaving Myanmar.

Bangladesh’s Human Development Index is comparable to that of Cambodia or Angola, two countries that suffered generation-long episodes of violence near the end of the last century, but Bangladesh has been basically at peace since the year-long war of independence in 1971. It is simply very poor. It’s getting richer, but it’s very poor. The nation cannot afford to, say, take the approach of the Netherlands and wall out the ocean, even if that were possible in a country of rivers. Now, for all its challenges, Bangladesh has well-chosen strategies to deal with them. It is not powerless and it is not a lost cause. But it is 160,000,000 people living under a threat that, so far, only increases.

Climate change is slippery for many reasons. One is that it’s hard to explain what warming actually means. If everywhere on Earth were a few degrees warmer and nothing else changed, we would be fine. But warming puts more energy in the climate, which is not a linear equation. We only know the basics of the system: for example, how greenhousing works. We don’t have good models even of extremely important things like monsoons, so climate change is rolling dice we can’t see. We do know we are in for rising sea levels and more energetic tropical cyclones. Part of the rich world has just been reminded what that means.

I am politicizing. I am using these dead people in the Caribbean and the Eastern Seaboard, who cannot speak for themselves, and these 160,000,000 living Bangladeshis, who can speak for themselves, to make my own point. I’m doing it because I think the point is sound and important.

Climate change is hard for many reasons. Wisely did Al Gore call it an inconvenient truth, because this is how many people have dealt with it: by arguing that it isn’t happening because if it were it would be too hard to fix. By too hard to fix, they mean we would need an intergovernmental system to stop it. They don’t like intergovernmental systems because they violate the principle of subsidiarity – that power should be held at the lowest level possible to do its work. But the proper locality for dealing with atmosphere-driven climate change is in fact the planet. This is hard for people who see a world with dragons in the oceans. In a more mapped and encircled world, we have different tools and different risks. 2012’s dragons are not the unknowability of spaces, but of systems. They are the probabilities of fires, floods, famines, and refugees.

We should rarely try to predict the whole world’s future – to plan as if we have any idea what politics will be like in 50 years. I think of Feynman saying it is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. This suggests that we should be very cautious about setting up regulatory systems that might be abused by the powerful of decades and centuries to come: frameworks that start with excellent ideas but slowly turn to covering force and scouring out difference. This is a point that we hear loudly from the right about carbon taxes, but I don’t think it’s partisan at root; for example, we hear it from the left against many international trade and finance institutions. I agree in some instances and not others. We have to weigh it, in this case, against another kind of freedom for the future: a hospitable world of fed people who are where they want to be.

It’s no good talking about the climate tipping point. The climate is a thing in motion and it never stays on any path. Maybe we are too late to avoid millions of refugees; maybe we have another five years. Maybe we will thread a gap in the dragons by chance; maybe the only one out there will take us. It doesn’t help to worry, because we know what we can do and that sooner is better.

I remember what a friend quoted to me just after a certain political celebration four years ago, from William Morris’s Dream of John Ball:

I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

Everything will change. The climate, our response, and my response to our response will be different in twenty years. It will never be solved. People will still die of one thing or another. There will be politics, valid and not, and wildfires, preventable and not. We have no cause to imagine that there’s an easy way to keep billions of humans healthy on a healthy planet. But we can free their hands. We can be, in Salk’s phrase, good ancestors.


There are many scenarios. The one I like best is where large groups of well-informed people, openly and as consensually as possible, accepting differences of motivation and style, build climate stewardship into the economic systems of our species.

I won’t leave you with an act now! message. I would rather you didn’t think of this as an external goal, but as something you bring everywhere – to work, in public – the way you might carry any other serious ethical commitment. The right time to start politicizing the climate is whenever you do it.

◌  Great Slave Lake

23 October 2012


what it says

A foretaste of a project I’m working on in my spare time.

◌  Pussy Riot’s closing statements

15 August 2012


I’m not a Russia-watcher and don’t have enough context for this; I can’t take a stance with any depth. Mostly I have to believe what I read in the papers. But as criticism of some slippery problems in contemporary politics, and as rhetoric, the closing statements from Pussy Riot are wonderful to me.

◌  A microconfluence

6 August 2012


The Degree Confluence Project pleases me. People take photos of the intersections of the lines of integer latitude and longitude, and slowly it becomes a worldwide sampling of land use. Unfortunately, all the confluences near me have already been ground-truthed. Therefore, I introduce the microconfluence:

I figure 00 following the target digits (or 99 on the previous) is good enough to count. The phone in the photo is nominally 1.16 meters (3′ 9¾″) ENE of 45.54°, −122.67°, but it’s more accurate to say it’s somewhere in the error zone of the consumer GPS chip.

◌  1 reason why listicles get clicks

17 July 2012


Today I enjoyed Jory John’s satire of stupid list articles. Unless your information hygeine is unusually rigorous, you will have skimmed over the titles of several such listicles already today. I saw some at the bottom of the page when I read an article in The Onion, for example.

There are many theories about why this form is so popular as click-bait. One is that they’re easy to research (or steal); I think this must be true. Another is that they provide a kind of micro-habit–forming series of small dopamine bumps, and I believe this too. But I think there’s something else going on as well: they have useful titles.

Titles are hard. Most writers, I think, want titles that work well for people discussing a piece after the fact. This is often a colorful figure from the text: off the top of my head, The Hedgehog and the Fox, What Are People For?, and Encounters with the Archdruid. If you know the writers, each of these is interesting because you know they can pay it off, and sure enough, after you’ve read the texts, the titles are apt. But if you don’t know the writers, and the titles appear in a sea of other titles all trying to be interesting, they tell you nothing.

Listicles have titles that tell you what they’re about. It’s a strict convention of the form. It’s true of very few other titles, even among link-bait. Mostly they’re colorful, like the belles lettres examples above, or shallowly provocative, or an unedifying play on some popular phrase or famous title – or something else besides telling you exactly what you’ll be reading.

It does not follow that everything that you want people to read should have a completely straightforward title. But I do think it’s a useful reminder that, when introducing something to strangers, it’s useful to say what it is.



Archives

25 June 2012 · Two talks about data

24 June 2012 · Bookmarked searches

20 June 2012 · Tracks by time of year

28 May 2012 · Memorial Day

22 May 2012 · Making smart

7 April 2012 · My career

5 March 2012 · Washington shoreline photos

3 March 2012 · Three serious things

25 December 2011 · On rainbows

13 November 2011 · Carl Sagan as the hero on the beach

9 November 2011 · The time we met a train-track builder

2 June 2011 · The time the BBC cited me to myself

9 March 2011 · A BBC interview with a Liberian “battle commander” in Côte d’Ivoire

18 January 2011 · The Kimbrel rainbow function

16 October 2010 · Modis USA1 averages

24 September 2010 · Notes on photography

21 August 2010 · Kepler 4b

26 July 2010 · Trek in the Park

26 June 2010 · 2009 weather data

18 June 2010 · Plus my bicycle too

18 June 2010 · Everybody is full of discipline and there is no noise

1 June 2010 · June

25 May 2010 · Think about Facebook: An angry reverie on software

7 April 2010 · Selling prints

3 March 2010 · Achewood

4 February 2010 · Kim outside Sushi Land

15 January 2010 · Arctic average

24 December 2009 · Xmas at home

28 November 2009 · Camilla and Java on Thanksgiving

6 November 2009 · Khromax

26 October 2009 · Please Do Not Fight at the Parlour

24 October 2009 · “The First Long Train Journey”

24 October 2009 · More summer film

23 October 2009 · Mom wincing at sunset

23 October 2009 · Sheep heart

23 October 2009 · Camilla v. sandwich

20 October 2009 · Port Townsend update

18 October 2009 · packing

9 October 2009 · Early October

6 October 2009 · Dust devils from Husband Hill

22 September 2009 · Photoblog

11 September 2009 · Shell functions for the AGL 3080 and my points database

10 September 2009 · Music tips

10 September 2009 · Early fall around the property

6 September 2009 · Fall beach

3 September 2009 · GPS sky

26 August 2009 · AGL 3080 notes

22 August 2009 · Sam

20 August 2009 · Fonts

16 August 2009 · Lichen and jacket

14 August 2009 · Rhombus!

13 August 2009 · Hiroshige as a photographer

11 August 2009 · Sunshowers

10 August 2009 · “Amerika”

10 August 2009 · A little Hiroshige

10 August 2009 · Cabaret Night

8 August 2009 · Summer guests

8 August 2009 · Apollo 13 photos

7 August 2009 · Che shirt alternatives

3 August 2009 · Java fetching in the surf

2 August 2009 · “Infinite Jest”

2 August 2009 · Kayaking

30 July 2009 · The Pacific Northwest today

29 July 2009 · Beach, dusk, late July

28 July 2009 · Butchering a sheep

27 July 2009 · The trip up

20 July 2009 · Wedding photos

20 July 2009 · Zack and Marina

19 July 2009 · Pre-wedding

15 July 2009 · WWII-era OWI photos

11 July 2009 · Sketch J No. 3

11 July 2009 · Three years ago

6 July 2009 · Pan Dynamic

5 July 2009 · Fireworks

1 July 2009 · “The Master of Go”

30 June 2009 · Haircut 2009-06

27 June 2009 · Downtown from Fremont Bridge at sunset

25 June 2009 · Sexy macros of Adam

22 June 2009 · Visitors

22 June 2009 · 4421 photos

21 June 2009 · Coast trip

15 June 2009 · Autotraced roadsides

13 June 2009 · United 173 and the casual workplace

11 June 2009 · Mississippi-ish

11 June 2009 · At the Black Cat

10 June 2009 · On Julie and Peter’s rural v. city

10 June 2009 · Ryan and Patrick react to the Cheesus

5 June 2009 · Ryan and Patrick

2 June 2009 · In Portland

16 May 2009 · Douglas-fir cone at dusk

14 May 2009 · Mosquitos

12 May 2009 · A shark with fair warning

8 May 2009 · Camilla on the beach

7 May 2009 · Spring animals

30 April 2009 · Trivium

26 April 2009 · We live in the future

14 April 2009 · Pullum v. Strunk and White

7 April 2009 · Java tows Camilla

6 April 2009 · Portland track

4 April 2009 · Driving through Seattle

1 April 2009 · Got Phở

30 March 2009 · Film from winter 2009

29 March 2009 · Buzz

26 March 2009 · Walking around Northeast today

26 March 2009 · Late March

19 March 2009 · PDX shopping list

18 March 2009 · Karadžić

17 March 2009 · “How To Think About Science”

8 March 2009 · 3538 photos

7 March 2009 · Some animals

6 March 2009 · Gravity in Nodebox

5 March 2009 · Simulism

5 March 2009 · Machine ethics

28 February 2009 · Sunny winter beach

28 February 2009 · Ugly Clojure

24 February 2009 · Time and myth

23 February 2009 · Pacific Kino Garden

21 February 2009 · I am my own Lorite

18 February 2009 · “Gentlemen of the Road”

16 February 2009 · Note dump

15 February 2009 · South Florida pseudohorizons

13 February 2009 · Some people I know

10 February 2009 · Foggy path

10 February 2009 · Some good podcasts

9 February 2009 · Future fire

8 February 2009 · Throat singing

7 February 2009 · To write here

2 February 2009 · Memory: inland BC

1 February 2009 · Jim’s infrared-proof goggles

1 February 2009 · Cheap tomography

30 January 2009 · Seawater

30 January 2009 · “Kad vas molim”

29 January 2009 · My lousy tripod, 2005(?)–2009

29 January 2009 · To do

27 January 2009 · “Ten Years in a Long Sleeved Shirt”

27 January 2009 · GPS data ideas

26 January 2009 · Three other things

25 January 2009 · SQL for a low year

24 January 2009 · Three things

24 January 2009 · Atom

24 January 2009 · Dizzy stuff

23 January 2009 · Fog

23 January 2009 · Island coverage

21 January 2009 · Arabesques on the complex plane

8 January 2009 · All the sandy beaches

7 January 2009 · Not war and war: politics and environmentalism

7 January 2009 · It’s already begun