Sorry everyone...

Sorry for the lack of posting. I've been having some blogger issues, but the main problem is a sudden drying of the wellspring of creativity. I've got plenty of things to talk about, but lately the time and inclination to actually post about them has dwindled. I'm not gone. Blogging has simply never been my priority, and the higher rated things are taking up more time than usual. I haven't forgotten about you all though. I'll be back, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Blogger troubles

I am having trouble with Blogger eating my posts. We'll hopefully be back up and running shortly.

DAB 2.0

All I can say is wow. I had a fantastic time throughout, and I hope everyone else had as much fun as I did. I'll have a more full account later, but real life has me swamped at the moment. Too many things I should have been doing this weekend instead of the blogmeet. Oh well. Worth it.

And We're Back

There was an outbreak of real life there, but I think it's safely contained now.

I've had a few things percolating, but, unfortunately, none of them are quite coalescing into workable posts.

So, it's another hodge podge!

United States Ambassador to Libya murdered by angry crowd. I find this depressing on a huge number of levels, not least of which is that this sort of headline is becoming all too familiar. Add to that the highly unlikely nature of any retaliatory action against this blatant act of war, and it's just... gah.

The other thing that really irks me is our involvement in putting in place the very system whose constituents are now rampaging about murdering our diplomats. I said it then, and I say it now. We have/had NO business interfering in Libya, much less on the side of the rebels. (Nor anywhere else in the "Arab Spring", for that matter.)

Another September 11th has rolled around, and the recognizance has, predictably, decreased dramatically. As with December 7, 1942, time is balm for many wounds, and the nation has collectively moved on.

While I would say that the time for grief is past, I would absolutely not say that the time has come to forget, and, though it is not a very Christian thing of me to say, the time has not come for forgiveness either.

One of the posts I'm working on concerns this. I wanted to have it up for the 11th, but life got in the way.

My rhetoric class has actually been my most interesting course so far this year. I am rather fond of argument and analysis of the same (as some of you may have figured out by now) and it's a fun subject. There is absolutely no career in it I would care for of course, so that's the catch. I like engineering and biology more in any case.

I got a package of joy from the Fed-Ex truck. I am actually starting to get on the point where the dwarf seahorse project is becoming a reality. It is exciting. Pictures will come in due course.

Technology is fantastic.

The Dallas Area Blogmeet/shoot is this Saturday/Sunday. I am ridiculously excited. I don't know if you can still sign up to join us, but head over to BobS to find out.

On Sunday I heard an absolutely fantastic talk by Jeffery Holland, an apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I'll link to it once I find the transcript. It's good from a secular or religious perspective.

On that note, I am right now actively exploring my faith, and am shortly going to be baptized into the LDS church. I'm probably not going to talk about matters of faith particularly often or in depth, and I won't be using this space for proselytizing. All I ask is that you all remain respectful. I've never had a problem with an abusive or even rude commenter, and I hope to keep up that record as long as possible.

Thinking about the history of medicine, I have to wonder what the next huge leap will be. Penicillin and other antibiotics were one, and vaccines another (there are lots, of course.) The thing that strikes me though is that the people from before the discovery could never have predicted it. (As is true of any innovation, but the medical ones are particularly interesting to me right now.)

Firefly is a fantastic series, and anyone with access to Netflix should watch it. It doesn't take long.

I think that's enough brain flow for a while.

Political Ethics.... Right

Long time readers will perhaps remember at one point last year I decided to run a weekly feature on political ethics. Similarly, they may also remember that I stopped doing those fairly quickly.

Quite simply, I bit off more than I could chew. Questions of political ethics are exceedingly complicated, in the nature of politics. Political ideals are impossible, as the people in power are still people, and as such have interests of their own, potentially contrary to their political duties. While honorable politicians have, and potentially still do, existed, they are, unfortunately, the minority.

Similarly, the double bind, or lesser of two evils, situation is exceptionally common in political work, and even the most honorable of politicians may find themselves torn between competing ideals.

I came to realize fairly quickly that I just plain don't know enough and am too unqualified to really speak on these things.

I may come back to the topic from time to time (I still want to get through my topic list in some way or another) but making a weekly feature of it isn't feasible. I'm trying to resurrect it in some capacity or another though.

Hey, Nature! Part the second

I touched on this in passing in Hey, Nature!, but I feel it deserves a post of its own.

There's a special breed of arrogance that is endemic to the regulation of nature (and, coincidentally, regulation of most other things, but more on that later.) The science cannot give a full picture, yet regulators and an unfortunately large number of scientists try to make sweeping, grand plans based on incomplete information.

There are two things I want to complain about. First is the arrogance of assuming we can understand a complicated system, and second is the arrogance of assuming we can control that system. The first will be of greater brevity than the second, as I spent most of last post talking about complicated systems.

There are several handy 'insanity tests' that apply here. First off, altered reality testing, being the inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. We can see that as scientists talk about absolute truth, and "settled" science. Any scientist deserving of the title should know the extent of their own ignorance. Those who would regulate do not.

Global warming is an excellent example here. I'm not going to get too much into the actual studies and validity of the claims, because that's a kettle of worms even I'm not crazy enough to open. Head over to Borepatch for that, as he is better informed and better at presenting the information than I am.

Let's just stop and think for a minute about the system. Most claims of global warming are based on a series of computer models. Computers in this day and age are mindbogglingly powerful. (Seriously. Stop for a minute and consider the machine on which you're reading this.) Video games are approaching photo-realism, and mathematical models have come up with answers to age old mathematical puzzles. Silliness like taking the Ackermann function with Graham's number as the arguments is actually computable with modern processing. (I think. Maybe a bad example. That's a really, really big number) Here's the problem. Climate is even bigger.

Quite literally everything that happens on this planet (and on quite a few of our neighbors as well) is capable of altering climate in some manner. While the butterfly effect is rather an extreme case, the fundamental principle is sound. At the very least, every tree, every parking lot, every volcanic bubble, every air conditioner, and every methane spewing cow will have an effect on the system. As you can imagine, tracking all of these variables is essentially impossible.

What you may not imagine is just how difficult even basic tracking is. For instance, one of the most widely quoted studies on global warming disregards a very potent greenhouse gas.  Lest you think this gas is just found in such minor quantities as to be irrelevant, it's water vapor, which, last I checked, is rather a major component of weather and climate.

Computer models have their place, don't get me wrong, but the incredible arrogance needed to take their results as gospel is rather irksome. Like it or not, we have an incomplete understanding of our environment, and we likely always will. Attempts to control that which we do not understand is senseless.

The second insanity test that comes to mind is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. While certain measures have been somewhat effective, they tend to be in the direct interaction of humans and the environment. Entertainingly, hunting regulations (the evil hunting which environmentalists decry, by the way) tend to be among the best regulatory actions, as managed deer herds and stocked fishing lakes tend to be healthier and more robust than their wild counterparts. The distinction with those actions though is in the difference between management and regulation.

Management for the point of this exercise is a reactive process. As problems become apparent, such as a deer herd consisting of too many old deer who are unable to produce as many healthy offspring, the management process will make some change to the HUMAN interaction with the environment to counteract the problem, such as killing off only female deer 7 years or older one year. Reactions with a focus on human action and direct acknowledgement of the changing nature of the environment is management.

Regulation meanwhile is a proactive process. As environmentalists realized that spotted owls in California were dying off due to habitat destruction. The management solution would be to simply stop cutting down quite so many trees, if the survival of the spotted owl was deemed an appropriate thing to work on. Instead, the EPA put spotted owls on the endangered species list, there were bans placed on logging and other habitat destruction, they planted a great deal of new forest, and I believe they killed off some predators as well, though I am uncertain on that.

The net effect of this was, indeed, a resurgence in the population of spotted owls, to the point where there are actually too many of them. A non-native species of predatory owl has moved into the areas, and are preying on the spotted owls, as well as on everything else in the area. The solution to this has been to shoot the invading owls. This does not seem an ideal situation to me. By attempting to fix, not just manage, the environment ended up far more disrupted than it otherwise had been.

The best example of this is in the National Parks. Reading their history, particularly in the early days, is like a laundry list of failed practices. Wolves in Yellowstone were completely extirpated, then reintroduced, with massive chaos both times. Attempts to control the environment failed miserably, and pretty consistently made things worse.

It's hard to conceptualize on that sort of scale though, so let's take a smaller approach.

As I have established already, I am an amateur aquarist. I am staring at my 6 gallon nano-reef right now, and I spent a good bit of the evening planning out a species tank for dwarf seahorses. I am still distinctly an amateur, but there are some things I can say about the hobby.

One of the hardest things for people new to the hobby to get into their heads is that it is better for a tank to be stable at less than ideal conditions than to be constantly fluctuating closer to ideal values. The aquarium industry has supplements and equipment and testing material for pretty much every aspect of water chemistry you would care to know, and it would be very easy to spend thousands of dollars on maintenance stuff. For really advanced stuff, some of that can be useful, and it can be useful to correct for the unexpected chemical upsets in your system.

For most people's purposes though, screwing with your water chemistry will stress your inhabitants and kill things. I have known people who were so irritated at their pH being .2 outside of ideal that they spent loads of money to get the balancers and buffers, only for the abrupt change in pH to kill half their tank. Heck, I've done similar things myself (though thankfully not with my reef.)

Quite simply, apart from those things that are necessary by the aquarium's nature as a closed system (energy in, waste out) there are fairly few things that really should be fiddled with, and most of them (strontium, magnesium, calcium and the like) are included in the salt mixes people in the hobby use. It can be frustrating to see that despite your best efforts, your calcium levels are a little out of spec, but it's most often something that is truly well enough left on its own.

The thing to understand is that despite the fact that we as keepers can control most everything that goes into and comes out of our tanks, we do not control the tanks. They are living systems, and it is our job as keepers to maintain equilibrium, rather than create the ideal. Striving for perfection is impossible, and the damage done in the effort is potentially catastrophic.

I just spent perhaps more money than I should have on a new setup. I will be keeping dwarf seahorses, hippocampus zosterae, in a species only setup. Seahorses are generally considered to be difficult to expert only critters to keep, because of both their delicate nature and their specialized diets. They are native to estuaries and grass flats around florida. This is, correspondingly, their ideal environment.

For people who live on the Florida coast, this is a simple thing to recreate, as, well, you don't actually have to replicate anything, as the original is at your disposal. At some point, I want to live in a coastal location and put together a tank in this manner.

For now, though, I am sitting in Texas. Quite simply, I am incapable of replicating precisely Floridian water conditions, and even if I cared to, the water wouldn't keep if I were to order the water directly from Florida. We can, however, get a stable system that is close enough to the ideal for the creatures to thrive.

This is basically the point that I'd make for everything. Close enough in these matters really is good enough. There are too many unknowns to make perfection possible, and considering that the system is imperfect to begin with, it's just silly to try for it. Change is the way of things, and we are not separable from the world in which we live. The distinctions of artificial and natural are, well.... artificial.

Pride is considered a deadly sin for a reason. Environmentalists on the whole really need to take a step back and look at the big picture, and I mean the REALLY big picture. This planet will spin on long after we're gone. Thinking we have the capacity to threaten that is... arrogant. Thinking we can act without changing it is similarly arrogant. Nature has an interesting habit of swatting arrogance, and I'd rather not get swatted, myself.

Content Notice

Hey, Nature! part two is going up hopefully sometime this afternoon or tomorrow. Come back and check then.

 (I've been making the effort to keep something new up and going for my readers, so stay tuned. I've actually got things worth saying now. Maybe.)