DIY Climate Models

According to this American Scientist piece by Brian Hayes, there are a wealth of climate models available as public code, with different levels of complexity.  Some are designed to be pedagogical, others are professional scale.  Compiling one seems like it would be fun and probably cheaper than setting up a new aquarium.

See also http://bit-player.org/extras/climate/

The simple simulator above, with greenhouse effect halved.  The cold temperatures
are due to not just that change but the increased albedo caused by the year round
snow cover.

Things to Do: Sodium Triacetate

Take a supersaturated solution of sodium triacetate.  Add fingers.  Watch crystals of the trihydrate form around your fingers.

The Jet Sex

The Jet Sex

Per LGM, an excellent account of flight attendants and labor & gender issues around their employment.  The quote that adds it to my "to read" list is:

The supervisor handbook for American Airlines stated, “The first fundamental is appearance. A stewardess must be attractive. We can sometimes pretend a person is attractive, if we admire them for some other reason. This should be avoided."

I'm a rock, I'm a rock, I'm a rock

There's a better video of an octopus pretending to be a rock out there somewhere, but this is pretty damn amazing of overall camouflage ability:

 

Too Many Words About Piketty

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Tackling wealth and inequality, this was one of the best selling and least read books of the summer. Not that I'm mocking anyone here, I kept putting it down and took perhaps 5 months to finish and another month to get motivated to write this review (which is itself open to criticisms based on length).

It's a strange book to be a best seller. It's got three sections which basically consist of an idea, some data, and a policy pitch. More on the idea and policy pitch below, but the data section is interminable. The detail is something I respect on some level but if you're not the sort to read about national income level comparisons between different states and time periods already, I think you could do with perhaps three charts and a comment along the lines that "Similar trends were seen by most nations. Most other factors were minor."

Oh, also it's not really focused on inequality.

Watership Down

This wasn't in our household as a kid so I read if with no nostalgia factor.  In fact, I knew so little about it that I assumed there was water and ships involved.  As well as rabbits, which I somehow knew.  Maybe all the rabbits got on a boat and had whacky adventures or something?  Well, no, and the title is definitely *not* referring to something capsizing.

My unbiased, cynical opinion for those who read it when they were 12 and have fond memories: You are 100% correct.  This is just a great adventure book, written by someone who is clearly fond of adventures, humans and rabbits all at once.  (Could be nicer to dogs & cats though.) You get camraderie and perseverance and watch characters grow into roles thrust upon them by circumstance.  Hazel, not the strongest or the smartest, becomes such a great leader in such a plausible way that I was totally unsurprised to find that any number of people are willing to give you management lessons based on the book.  The chapter where Bigwig stands his ground is worth the price of admission on its own--it's the most thrilling performance by an underdog in a literary fight since Enkidu went 15 rounds against Gilgamesh and drew a majority draw.  Could have used more female rabbits, and one good joke gets used twice, but those are perhaps the only mis-steps I saw.

Bottom line: Read this book if you haven't, get it for your kids if there's not a copy in the house.

The Year Civilization Collapsed

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The late Bronze Age had a remarkable trading network established¹--ships were sailing hundreds of miles to move goods around different polities the eastern and central Mediterranean, including pottery, fabrics, copper and tin. The was the age of the palaces and kings that Odysseus would have lived in and that gave rise to tales of the Trojan War.

Around 1177 BC, the Sea Peoples descended out of nowhere (or maybe Sardinia and Sicily) and looted cities across the region, hitting places so quickly that pleas for help were written but messengers didn't have time to leave the city with them. Ramesses II of Egypt was able to defend his state, but every where else succumbed and absent trade civilizations withered.

Except not quite. Cline says that recent archaeology suggests cities' destruction might span a century from perhaps 1200 to 1130 BC. And some of the destruction was by earthquakes, probably, and when there was violence it's not clear whether it was internal or external and when it was external often we can only speculate as to whether it might have been the Sea Peoples. There was a collapse but the causes (all of the above, plus drought and climate change) can best be summarized as "it was complicated." Cline eschews sensationalism and I ended up reading it as a history late Bronze Age. Except for chapter 4 (which was for me an overly-detailed catalog of layers of destruction and rebuilding in various cities) an enjoyable account.


¹In an unnecessary attempt to make things relevant, this is compared to our current interconnected world. At one point Cline loses track of the metaphor and refers to this as the first "truly global" trade network in the world, which is a slight bit of hyperbole for an area that sort of covers places touching the southeastern periphery of today's EU.