cwal37

Hmm. That's a pretty broad list. I live right outside the Smokies for example, and hike quite a lot in and around the park. Old growth trees are rare enough that individuals get called out in trail guides, let alone the quite unique entire stands that are at least pre-colonization. Maybe I'll try to add some specificity to that section.

Yeah, it feels like one of those immediately neat things that falls apart when you look a little closer. The data behind it is quite easy to work with though, and I think there's some better (more interactive, a bit more control) visualizations someone could come up with.

I used it myself last year when I was wondering about the emissions associated with different diets (specifically I was curious about what was more effective from a reduction standpoint: being a vegetarian at different points of time vs. owning an electric car. Since the disposition of electricity has changed pretty significantly since the early 90s in some places it varied pretty widely [the informal lit review of food-based emissions was quite a mess though]).

It's not quite that simple because the overall impact of an individual compound relies on both its atmospheric residence time and infrared absorption. This article[1] covers the basics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential

It is possible to access many parts of most of these models, however I think it's not as easy as you might imagine to just dive in and improve them. Often, an individual needs a background in a specific scientific field in addition to some software engineering capabilities. Sometimes this means you have mathematicians and physicist pursuing higher degrees in atmospheric science, in other cases an ecologist gains a masters in CS. I think you might be underestimating the programming and numerical chops of people who are involved in making the models run, not everyone is a great programmer, but they do exist within the broad field.

The overarching climate models also typically aren't individual monolithic models, but tend involve various multidisciplinary pieces spanning much of the physical sciences. Also, get ready to work in Fortran. I spent a summer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and met some people there whose work was mostly the uncertainty quantification of outside climate models. My understanding at the time was that the lab specifically does not produce their own model, but rather, acts as an impartial testing ground for the major efforts from other global institutions.

All of that aside, they do have plenty of problems, and people from the outside do come in and make improvements, it's just not necessarily easy to break into. If you wanted something more accessible to start thinking about, you could do worse than the edGCM from Columbia[1].

[1] http://edgcm.columbia.edu/software2/edgcm-climate-modeling/

I see marriage failures or catastrophic divorce rates bandied about a lot in these types of societal decay rants, and it bothers me. The divorce rate has been dropping for decades[1]. A proposed reason for that actually has to do with more equitable opportunities in career, in that women are more free to pursue a career of their choice, and so value systems have realigned to where marriages could be based more on couples being partners, with similar interests and ambitions.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/upshot/how-we-know-the-div...

I wrote up a little survey[1] of the on-the-ground installed energy storage landscape nearly 2.5 years ago now (when I was first learning how to make graphs outside of excel), and really not a whole lot has changed since then in terms of trends. Pumped storage remains the vast bulk of grid-level storage, and while we're still not building any new projects, there has been a fair amount of movement on the permitting front[2] this decade following the relative drought of the 90s and early 2000s. A few new battery projects have come online as well.

I feel like I've been reading about LightSail since I wrote that post (which feels like a lifetime ago, particularly looking at charts made in matlab, which I probably haven't touched in 2 years), and I hope it really does start showing up soon at small commercial sites and eventually with grid-level deployment, deployment of new electrical infrastructure tech is exciting!

[1] http://btus.us/the-state-of-our-energy-storage/

[2] http://www.ferc.gov/industries/hydropower/gen-info/licensing...

That stuck out to me, because those auto-video ads were one of the major reasons I uninstalled the facebook app entirely. Quickly checking some things on my phone while walking down the hall at work, or while some code runs I don't want to accidentally play some loud nonsense, and that happened often enough for me to downgrade my mobile facebook experience back to the browser. I still use facebook, but not the app.

That sort of jives with this anecdote as well:

"When the company redesigned the News Feed in 2013, it looked great on the iMacs in Facebook’s headquarters but made the product harder to use everywhere else."

Most computers aren't macs, let alone iMacs. How could you possibly miss out on testing for even one other thing? It's weirdly close-minded given what facebook is and how it presents itself.

The book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind[1] is relevant here (which I've been reading and thoroughly enjoying recently) if anyone wanted to seek out some longer-form information on this and the topics around human evolution and development. The semantics here are really interesting to me because the book immediately points out that not too long ago there were at least 6 species of human on earth at the same time (going by homo=humans, sapiens is what distinguishes us). That concept had never been so explicitly stated to me before, and I find it really fascinating to unpeel.

[1] http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/0062316095/ref=s9_simh_gw...

If I had to guess she's talking in terms of each individual tank/unit set-up. So, one tank has a capacity or power rating of 500kW (capacity in the sense of the way a utility refers to size/ability of generating units). This link[1] possibly covers some of the confusing terminology here, and why it is that way.

EDIT: Scrolling to the bottom of their homepage[2] explains it, their system components are independent of each other.

[1] https://gigaom.com/2012/01/04/how-to-compare-energy-storage-...

[2] http://www.lightsail.com/

I had to change the title a bit to fit it within the character limit, which led to some personal editorializing of Wired's title, but I wouldn't classify any Pentagon project as rogue, even if they were able to skip a number of bureaucratic hurdles, and I also wouldn't say that remote war was an accident.

My personal economist-on-twitter of choice to tune into around fed and other news is Justin Wolfers[1]. Your mileage may vary, but he's certainly willing to express an opinion in what I consider a pretty clear manner (not to say he isn't opinionated, I just find his prognostications and commentary generally compelling).

[1] https://twitter.com/JustinWolfers

I was actually thinking about this yesterday when the first draft of a graph I was making looked nifty, so I removed the numbers and saved a clean copy[1]. There are plenty of issues data-wise: the colors repeat, lines appear and disappear for no reason, without numbers of labels you can't draw much of anything from it, but I found it to be inherently pretty despite the failure to communicate much of anything effectively. I had to tweak it quite a bit[2] to get across the information I wanted, and it definitely loses most of the visual appeal (at least to me, I also accidentally have 2015 in the legend on that revision despite not having 2015 data on the graph).

That's not to say you can't mingle art and information, I just think it's much more difficult than producing either on its own.

[1] https://twitter.com/CWal37/status/676810362918977536

[2] https://twitter.com/CWal37/status/676848722173698050

This quote really jumped out at me as almost a caricature of the disconnect between Silicon Valley internet/communication disruption and "disruption" in something like medical services.

"While Draper isn’t a board member or official adviser, he says he sees Holmes frequently. He’s puzzled by Theranos’s troubles and wasn’t aware the company isn’t currently using its famed nanotainer for anything but a herpes test. The idea of pausing the relentless push forward to wait for fusty government approvals doesn’t seem to make sense to one of the investors in Twitter and Skype. “So they’re going to have to go through each one of those tests before they can even use the nanotainer?” he says, sounding horrified. “You can run tests; you just say they are not FDA-approved,” Draper continues, referring to the nanotainer. “If that’s not the way it’s happening, I’m definitely going to give Elizabeth a call about this.” He pauses the interview to pull out his phone. “I would think they can still use the nanotainer and just have some wording,” he says, typing out a text message to Holmes. “I would think you just put a little warning label on the thing and say the FDA has not agreed to the accuracy of these things.”"

Oh cool, I was out there for a summer in grad school making Sankey diagrams and working on some conceptual stuff for cities research. I definitely miss the bay area. Haha, I figured at the very least you'd be in contact with some people here, lots of climate stuff going on.

ORNL? Maybe we could get lunch sometime, I've been curious about the computational climate stuff since I got here.

For not being a citizen you have some strong opinions about his alignment being "nonsense." Basically, republicans have utilized the increasingly deregulated campaign financing (via Super PACs) to a much later extent than Democrats. The key figure on this page[1] is on the unlimited donations category, which largely comes from the rich, old or not. I think this article[2] describing the upwards redistribution of wealth by the right might also surprise you.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/electio...

[2] http://www.vox.com/2015/11/2/9656398/republican-welfare-stat...

EDIT: Also, even more to the point, it's been a conservative court than has unspooled campaign finance regulation to the point where Lessig felt obligated to step in.

Not modern doesn't have to mean difficult to parse, it depends on your personal outlook. You can also download individually customized csv files if you want, which my original link led to. csv and txt files seem eminently reasonable to me when dealing with a huge historical cache of data that's being put out by a public institution for free.

Um, maybe to use it in an commercial setting? I've literally no idea what you're talking about as I've never come across that before. I've always just pulled down the station stuff I need by hand (since you can get all the station's data at once), or by some lightly mechanized webscraping. Your comment sounded significantly more chill than what it seems like you might need.

It wouldn't be terribly difficult to mechanize this and get all the data at once, but I thought you wanted to occasionally see how much it rained, not build a service out of this.

Does this page[1] not contain what you need?

[1] http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ushcn_daily/

Hey buddy, I use this resource[1] all the time (and they're actually housed into the building next to me here at work). It's the long-term climate records from monitoring stations across the country, the United States Historical Climatology Network, and you can get daily data going back over a hundred years in some cases.

For example, I've used it to crank out random temperature histograms in the past[2], and even plotted some long-term averages to decide on temperature and precipitation ranges when going on camping trips. It's really useful if you're willing to work with the data a tiny bit. You're getting csv files, so it's not terrible to work with in any way via Python or R, or whichever data-friendly language/tool you want to use.

[1] http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/ushcn_map_interface.ht...

[2] http://btus.us/decadal-histograms-of-monthly-yosemite-temper...

"But if this offseason is any indication, max players are the bargains once again. Forgive me for sounding like a bad Internet headline — but you are not going to believe how underpaid Kawhi Leonard is, despite his new max contract. The same salary cap spike that’s made this free-agency period so wacky is shifting what the league’s players are worth yet again."[1]

[1]http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/kawhi-leonard-like-all-t...

If you're interested in LiDAR data from the United states, you should have a look at this wikipedia page and its corresponding links[0]. Most states have some kind of data freely available from the most recent survey, although it's neither uniform or always clear in terms of how to access it. The structure of the program allowed individual states to tackle their won territory differently in both surveying and data dissemination, so there's no easy and official central repo as far as I understand.

I was in grad school at Indiana and working at the geological survey while they were finalizing some of the state's pieces of this, and it was really fascinating to see some of the early products some of the people in the geography and geology departments were producing. I mucked around a bit with it myself, but never really produced anything useful. I can speak to finding the data fairly easy to acquire and quite comprehensive at the time, uncertain if that's changed, but might be a decent starting point[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lidar_Dataset_(United...

[1] http://gis.iu.edu/datasetInfo/statewide/in_2011.php

The opening, if you don't feel like clicking through, but want the gist:

"They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns. And in an economy that has minted billionaires in a dizzying array of industries, most made their fortunes in just two: finance and energy.

Now they are deploying their vast wealth in the political arena, providing almost half of all the seed money raised to support Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found. Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago."

I hope you noticed your quote specifically says correlated.

Also, you're presenting an argument that has actually been looked at for decades in the literature, which would be evident from a leisurely google scholar search of terms such as: climate change, CO2, respiration, net ecosystem production, terrestrial vegetation, food supply, etc.

I've attempted to grab some links to papers that seem to be publicly available. [5] is a review from the Royal Society, and [3] is straight out of Science if you care about credentials.

2001. [1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2486.2001....

1994. [2] http://ecoethics.net/cyprus-institute.us/PDF/Rosensweig-Food...

2006. [3] http://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/26790/PDF

2004. [4] http://www.preventionweb.net/files/1090_foodproduction.pdf

2005. [5] http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/360/14...

Have you happened across this[1] (which ars sums up here[3]) in your comprehensive research on the topic? It's almost entirely about exactly what seems to be your big sticking point, that we're bad at measuring temperature, and the results aren't worthwhile as a result. This is something that absolutely consumes the scientists and technicians involved in taking these measurements, because they know it's going to catch heat no matter what.

Here's a fairly comprehensive post[2] with numerous links to publications and explanations. Satellite vs. surface is mentioned explicitly near the bottom.

[1]http://www.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1469

[2] http://www.skepticalscience.com/surface-temperature-measurem...

[3] http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/06/updated-noaa-temperat...

Since you brought up the Sankey diagrams I'll piggyback on you to mention that I spent a summer at LLNL and got to meet the team/person that produces these. I was also given the program they currently use (it's java, still have it somewhere. . .), and tasked to look into applying it to city flows. I have a couple of the results here[1] (my boxes are off in terms of size, but the flow widths should be correct). I still love those diagrams although I haven't touched them in 3 years. It's a fantastic way to visualize a ton of information. The trick is really just finding appropriate data.

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/23215983@N02/sets/721576342348...

The really hilarious thing is that this article is entirely about traditional breeding. Genetic engineering or modification isn't mentioned even once. Your bias is kind of amusing in how reactionary it is.

It really is that easy. I did some very simple splicing in a genetic engineering lab in undergrad with soybeans, and while there was less DNA (which we extracted for PCR), the process was still mostly centrifuging and alcohol.

Here's another source on the strawberry thing[1].

[1] http://genetics.thetech.org/online-exhibits/do-it-yourself-s...

That's the sort of thing that sounds like you're closing the loop, but has some serious flaws the deeper you go. First off, where is that water coming from? You mention desert, so is it an incredibly saline salt lake or briny fossil aquifers? If you're pumping out mass quantities of fossil water, be prepared for an eventual end, and localized subsidence, depending on the depth/structure of the formation.

Then there's the salt. Salt's actually kind of on the downslope in terms of its use in de-icing. You're literally salting the earth around roadways. Places that see a lot of snow and have a lot of waterways (from personal experience, like Northern Wisconsin and the UP), actually use sand instead. You expect there to be snow on the roads for a number of months regardless, so you're just offering some traction. Certain places in the Northeast are the same as far as I'm aware. Here's a resource on road salt from New Hampshire[1]. Pickle brine[2] and beet juice[3] are also beginning to get some play. Not to say the rock salt market couldn't absorb some additional supply, but I don't know where the limit is if we're talking mass desalinization.

[1] http://des.nh.gov/organization/divisions/water/wmb/was/salt-...

[2] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/02/140204-melt-...

[3] http://time.com/5761/salt-shortage-triggers-beet-juice-chees...

This is really interesting, and seems like a great opportunity for people in a position to take advantage of it. Particularly the ability to work remotely. An 8-week relocation could have been a major sticking pint for many groups.

If I wasn't tied down at my job for the foreseeable future I would jump at this chance to go hard on an idea out of my "future/dream projects" design docs folder that I only get to sporadically put time towards.

Does Colorado[1] really look like such a great place to grow crops? Particularly in the context of what we're talking about here, water availability, snowpack changes, etc. Also, Colorado via Drought Monitor[3].

Iowa[2] for comparison.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Colorado/@38.9252672,-105....

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Iowa/@41.9383166,-93.38979...

[3] http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Home/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?...