planetwater

• cool photographs: "Hydrology: Visions in Ice" – http://ke-we.net/lb #
• LATimes: "Karachi 'water mafia' leaves Pakistanis parched and broke"http://ke-we.net/la #
• Does changing #climate affect the way how #storms form? http://bit.ly/boCk2V #
• The story of #bottled #water: manufactured demand – animation at storyofstuff.org: http://bit.ly/cm4PBJ #

• Thomas Axworthy, #Walkerton #Ontario to World Leaders: http://ke-we.net/g5 (via @WaterMattersAB) #
• Statistics in science: "Odds Are, It's Wrong" http://bit.ly/dhcDA9 (via @modernscientist) #
• RT @counternotions: A Stochastic Model for Picking Winners in the NCAA Tournament http://bit.ly/a9A8HN #Bracketonia (via @modernscientist) #
• #Google searches for #groundwater have decreased in recent years while news references have increased. http://bit.ly/dwzfZH (via @cbdawson) #

I just read through a wonderful book. Wonderful refers to both its content as to the way it is made, designed, and illustrated. The book is called “Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan“

The book is about the Edo Period, which is a period in Japan’s history when ‘the mentality of the time found meaning and satisfaction in a life in which the individual took just enough from the world, and no more’. This is a fascinating approach, and as the author points out, difficult to judge for any of us who has never lived in a mostly self-sustaining society.

we will need to learn again what it means to use ‘just enough’, and to allow our choices to be guided by a deeper appreciation of the limits of the world we have been bequeathed as well as a determination to leave future generations with better possibilities than what we have given ourselves.

A central element necessary for this self-sustainability was the concept of re-use. The book is full of descriptions of how everything was used over and over again, and if something was not good for anything at all anymore, it was used to be burned for heat. The book illustrates clearly, how the concept of re-use propagated through design decisions for every little detail: the architecture of houses, the surroundings of houses, the planning of the city, how water is used, how food is used including how most people were vegetarians, or how manure was a precious resource and was collected in cities to be used as fertilizer on farm land. This went so far, that people with many children hat to pay less rent, because they provided so much fertilizer.

The movie “Plastic Planet”, about which I blogged, demonstrated clearly that our current society doesn’t re-use many things at all, and pointed out clearly that very soon we people on planet earth have to re-learn how to re-use things very quickly. From the view of “society”, there is also a relation to an article in the german paper TAZ, entitled “Ungleichheit zersetzt Gesellschaften“, which presents a study that showed that people live happier in countries with more equal opportunities, such as Japan (sic!)

Preserving water in traditional Japan

Here is the interesting part which is especially related to this blog: The people in Edo-Period Japan had realized that especially the resource clean water is very critical for their self-sustainability. Methods and designs for preserving water appeared in every facet of daily life:

• it was known that forests plays a critical role for storing water that is released over summer from glaciers at the high mountains. Hence forests determine the availability of water during the summer months. Hence they need to and were protected;
• for the cities, water sources such as rivers and ponds were protected for drinking water supply, and the people realized that people far away need to make sakrifices for source water protection in order to facilitate supply in cities via aqueducts;
• water in these aqueducts was mostly kept flowing by gravity, which required very sophisticated design — and allowed flowing water in all parts of the city 24/7, almost a luxury and unknown to european cities of the time.

Here is another review of “Just Enough”.

• Treasure trove of water videos: lectures by Gleick,Biswas,Graf,Rabalais, Sedlak,et al. http://bit.ly/ajcTtQ (via @WaterWired) #
• @USGSNews We had a "100-year #flood quot; two years in a row. How can that be? http://bit.ly/bB35M5 #flooding #statistics (via @JeremiahOsGo) #
• A musical/video remix featuring Sagan, Feynman, and deGrasse Tyson: "We are all connected" http://post.ly/T3yC (via @presentationzen) #
• Aquifers rising in Winnipeg – http://ke-we.net/es #
• #Obama appointed Ed Tufte to the team of inspectors who track how stimulus funds are spent – http://bit.ly/cc40CD #data #visualization #
• Wired: The ’70s Photos That Made Us Want to Save Earth http://bit.ly/9BeTkD #
• #Chances of an apple being half red, half green http://twitpic.com/17v52v http://bit.ly/aWtAiJ #statistics #

click here

This post is for everybody who uses python on Mac OS 10.6 together with some “scientific” goodness such as numpy, scipy, matplotlib.

I installed MacPorts today, and it’s all there.

No problem whatsoever.

I tried individual packages with easy_install before, I tried Fink before. Both options were painful. MacPorts is reasonably well up to date, and works just fine, so far, knock on wood.

Homepage

I mentioned a little while ago that Steve Strogatz’s has started a series of posts on numbers. By now, Steve has published six sequels. Every one of his posts explains in a very understandable manner either seemingly simple or seemingly complex issues related to numbers. They are very joyful and entertaining reads.

• “From Fish to Infinity” — what are numbers, counting, great Seseame Street video

• “Rock Groups” — odd numbers can form L-shapes

  

  uneven numbers can form L-Shapes

• “The Enemy of My Enemy” — making peace with negative numbers

• “Division and Its Discontents” — fun with fractions, decimals and numbers like 0.12122122212222…

around here Steve moves from grade school arithmetic to high school math

• “The Joy of X” — “…in the end they all boil down to just two activities — solving for x and working with formulas.” … and always check for the units!
• “Finding Your Roots” — the square root of -1; complex numbers have all the properties as real numbers [...], but they are better than real numbers, because they always have roots; a flip of 180 degrees can happen by multiplying twice with i or by multiplying with -1, so ; fractals

Update Saturday; March 13, 2010:

Seedmagazine just published an interview with Steven Strogatz. The occasion of the interview was a book recently published by Strogatz: The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned about Life While Corresponding about Math

• Krugman: "globally, this is shaping up as the warmest winter on record" – sceptics point out: lots of snow in NE USA – http://ke-we.net/9m #
• crowdsourcing urban infrastructure using iPhone in Boston http://ke-we.net/93 #
• harvest geothermal energy from water that is pumped out of subway systems anyway (NYC): http://ke-we.net/92#more-5201 #

website

Theme: Sustaining our environment under changing conditions: quantitative methodological challenges

Conference technical topics include:

Air quality monitoring and assessment Indicators of environmental change Environmental data quality assessments Monitoring and modeling of environmental systems Environmental sustainability assessments Environmental standards Environmental vulnerability and risk assessments Space-time modeling of environmental data Spatio-Temporal analysis of human health Spatio-Temporal modeling of extremes Statistics in Paleoclimate Outreach of environmental statistics Valuation of ecosystem services Water quality monitoring and assessment