Our first guest speaker got me thinking more and more about the invisible factors at play in an ecosystem, especially the cycle of water through an ecosystem. My awareness of water systems began when I was living at my grandma's house and we had visitors from the watershed council to look at features of the land that could be affecting water distribution, most notably invasive water-hogging weeds. There are a multitude of factors that need to be taken into consideration when examining a water system; invasive weeds are merely one issue that arises when trying to understand and control the flow of water in an ecosystem. Certainly one of the most important factors - and one of the most visible in Oregon - is the level of precipitation. However, what happens to the water after it falls is equally important, and substantially more difficult to understand.
I, myself am not very familiar with all of the issues surrounding the watershed in this area. However, I do know about some of the invasive weeds in this area. In my experience, the most common are tansy weed, canadian thistle, scotch broom, and more recently, false brome. Some of these look pretty innocuous but they actually divert a lot of the water from the rest of the ecosystem, which is a problem even in a state like Oregon. Here are some links with photos and information about a few invasive species in Oregon:
http://extension.oregonstate.edu/news/story.php?S_No=973&storyType=garde
http://www.oregon.gov/ODA/PLANT/WEEDS/profile_tansyragwort.shtml
http://www.oregon.gov/ODA/PLANT/WEEDS/profile_canadathistle.shtml
http://www.oregon.gov/ODA/PLANT/WEEDS/profile_scotchbroom.shtml
While expecting that humans can change the course of nature is ultimately futile, it is always good to spread knowledge of things like invasive species so that we might see some improvement in the ecosystem if awareness of the issue spreads to enough people.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
Division of Labor
I've recently started reading Daniel Quinn's The Story of B again after taking a break from it for several months. For those of you who aren't familiar with him, Daniel Quinn is a modern-day philosopher/writer who tells the human story with a neat anthropological twist and manages to put everything right into perspective. One of the most salient themes in his books -which all lend to the same philosophy, though in different ways - is the point at which humans stopped being hunter-gatherers and began sedentary communities. He says that this was the point at which society began, because it was the point at which humans moved away from a dynamic hunter-gathering lifestyle, and towards a societal lifestyle in which everyone has one specific job that they always do in order to make society work more efficiently.
This is what Quinn calls "division of labor", which is exactly what it sounds like: a group of humans dividing up jobs on an individual basis. For the first time in history, humans were supposed to do one thing while depending on others to do their specific job. Human society is, undoubtedly, one of the most complex hierarchical systems the world has ever seen, and I find it interesting to see not only how it works, but just how it is that such a system came together in the way it did. Daniel Quinn gives a wonderful historical account of humanity from our hunter-gathering days all the way up to modern-day metropolitan societies. Like many fabricated systems, modern society is designed for maximum profit/output, and not necessarily to be sustainable. Quinn argues that this is due to the fact that by dividing up labor we are essentially making ourselves inept at all but one (or a few) things and making the system more fragile as a whole.
If you're interested in reading some of his books, I would highly recommend Ishmael. It's an easy read and is in my top three favorite books of all time.
This is what Quinn calls "division of labor", which is exactly what it sounds like: a group of humans dividing up jobs on an individual basis. For the first time in history, humans were supposed to do one thing while depending on others to do their specific job. Human society is, undoubtedly, one of the most complex hierarchical systems the world has ever seen, and I find it interesting to see not only how it works, but just how it is that such a system came together in the way it did. Daniel Quinn gives a wonderful historical account of humanity from our hunter-gathering days all the way up to modern-day metropolitan societies. Like many fabricated systems, modern society is designed for maximum profit/output, and not necessarily to be sustainable. Quinn argues that this is due to the fact that by dividing up labor we are essentially making ourselves inept at all but one (or a few) things and making the system more fragile as a whole.
If you're interested in reading some of his books, I would highly recommend Ishmael. It's an easy read and is in my top three favorite books of all time.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Alternative Number Systems
This past Thanksgiving, my uncle was visiting from Alaska and we had a long conversation about how a computer works. He is a really, really smart person and used to hand-wrap copper-coiled RAM back when that was the only form of memory. Anyway, he really understands computers, and since I really don't understand how the lower levels of hierarchical computer systems actually function. Most people actually have no idea how a computer works; what goes on inside is complete magic. I asked him to teach me binary and it was a very eye-opening look at just how a computer processes things. Binary's really just a way of expressing numbers that drastically cuts down on the number of characters used, since it only employs two characters and most numbers can be expressed with only four digits. It is then possible to program a computer to recognize certain strings of these number values and interpret them as letter values, which then allows one to create words and therefore programming languages, which then allows one to create operating systems, for which someone can write a program, and so on and so on. It is fascinating to me how one of the most important systems in our daily lives rests on a foundation of two numbers. This is the perfect example of a hierarchical systems: a computer is just a system composed of smaller systems composed of even smaller systems which are ultimately composed of binary code.
Binary works by using four columns. The first on the right represents the "1" column, the second one to the left represents "2", the third over represents "4", and so on; the columns are twice the value of the previous column. In these four columns, you can either insert a 0 or a 1, depending on whether or not you want to express the number represented by that column.
Here's an example:
I want to express the number 7 in binary. I have to get the values of the columns to add up to seven, which would require me to add 1+2+4 since those are the only values represented by the columns that will add up to seven.
0111
(0x8)+(1x4)+(1x2)+(1x1)=7
Here's a pretty good article that explains how it works in more detail. It also has a brief explanation of Hexadecimal, which is another alternative system of expressing numbers that employs letters as well. It is most commonly used for setting color values for web pages, since these colors are expressed with Hexadecimal.
http://www.swansontec.com/binary.html
Binary works by using four columns. The first on the right represents the "1" column, the second one to the left represents "2", the third over represents "4", and so on; the columns are twice the value of the previous column. In these four columns, you can either insert a 0 or a 1, depending on whether or not you want to express the number represented by that column.
Here's an example:
I want to express the number 7 in binary. I have to get the values of the columns to add up to seven, which would require me to add 1+2+4 since those are the only values represented by the columns that will add up to seven.
0111
(0x8)+(1x4)+(1x2)+(1x1)=7
Here's a pretty good article that explains how it works in more detail. It also has a brief explanation of Hexadecimal, which is another alternative system of expressing numbers that employs letters as well. It is most commonly used for setting color values for web pages, since these colors are expressed with Hexadecimal.
http://www.swansontec.com/binary.html
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Critical Questions
Here are the questions that came up while I was reading chapter 1:
Critical Questions:
Should we understand the scope of interconnected systems as a large, infinite system, or is there a massive, superordinate system that encompasses it all?
Is the focus of studying systems to further our understanding of the world or for more practical purposes such as improving the efficiency of systems?
Is there a system to everything? In other words, is all chaos organized in some way and do chaos and disorder even really exist?
How do we go about expressing systems that are so large and complex that diagrams will actually confound, not help our understanding of the system?
Is it always better to perceive things as parts of a larger system or are there circumstances where it is more practical, useful, or easier to perceive something on a more basic level?
Critical Questions:
Should we understand the scope of interconnected systems as a large, infinite system, or is there a massive, superordinate system that encompasses it all?
Is the focus of studying systems to further our understanding of the world or for more practical purposes such as improving the efficiency of systems?
Is there a system to everything? In other words, is all chaos organized in some way and do chaos and disorder even really exist?
How do we go about expressing systems that are so large and complex that diagrams will actually confound, not help our understanding of the system?
Is it always better to perceive things as parts of a larger system or are there circumstances where it is more practical, useful, or easier to perceive something on a more basic level?
First Blog Entry
Hello Everyone!
In thinking about seeing large systems as interconnected parts functioning together or seeing smaller parts as a larger system, I thought back to the Portuguese Man of War - a type of jellyfish native to Australia and Hawaii though found in many different parts of the world. The Man of War is not a single organism, but is a colony of smaller organisms called zooids which all work together as one unit, which appears like a single animal to us. Here is the wikipedia article; there's a lot of great information on it about this fascinating creature. I also recommend following the the link to the page on zooids and reading more about colonial organisms in nature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Man_o%27_War
See you all on Monday!
-J.J.
In thinking about seeing large systems as interconnected parts functioning together or seeing smaller parts as a larger system, I thought back to the Portuguese Man of War - a type of jellyfish native to Australia and Hawaii though found in many different parts of the world. The Man of War is not a single organism, but is a colony of smaller organisms called zooids which all work together as one unit, which appears like a single animal to us. Here is the wikipedia article; there's a lot of great information on it about this fascinating creature. I also recommend following the the link to the page on zooids and reading more about colonial organisms in nature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Man_o%27_War
See you all on Monday!
-J.J.
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