Molly just pointed me to a predator-prey type analysis of zombie populations and efficiency at killing and consuming humans.
I think this should become the standard for differential equations and epidemiology courses, rather than foxes and rabbits or something totally lame like that.
After students grasp that, I think you could have them move on to a more complex, pirates/ninjas/zombies/pedestrians ecosystem.
There’s a change in my ways of thinking that occurred because of my experiences with Katrina. I know that it has happened to others as well.
It’s not quite post-traumatic stress disorder, maybe a step below. I notice it in little things. For instance…
I had a safe deposit box in the Chase at the corner of Carrollton and Claiborne (in New Orleans). It was just below shoulder level for me, probably some 5 feet or so above the ground. The water got up to about 3 feet in that area. Contrary to my expectations, the vault was not watertight, or was not closed before the flood (I think it was the former). I never went back into that bank — Chase pulled the boxes from all of their flooded safes and put them in a warehouse, where people could go get their boxes. As soon as I walked in, my eyes went wide.
All of the box units (probably 10 boxes across by 20 or 30 high) had distinct lines on them. Above the lines, the units looked normal. Below, they looked awful. They were dirty and terribly rusted. I had to sign something before accessing my box, acknowledging that I might find… undesirable stuff in my box. Luckily, as I noted above, mine was out of the reach of the flood waters.
When I got a new safe deposit box here in Baltimore, I made sure it was as high as possible. It’s almost entirely irrational. This part of town is high up on a hill, and it’s not ever likely to flood.
But it can’t hurt.
I was already paranoid about offsite and portable backups of computer data before the hurricane. That partly saved my ass, but I’ve noticed that others are now becoming more careful about backups as well.
I don’t want to buy stuff. I moved an average of once every two months from April 2005 to August 2006. I want all of my stuff to fit in a U-Haul van (not a truck, the plumber/carpenter/etc type utility van). Every time I think about buying something, I can’t help but think about the fact that it might disappear due to some disaster or another. Even though my stuff is insured, why go through the bother of acquiring things if I’m just going to have to replace them later?
This is also irrational — massive natural disasters, and even catastrophic house fires do not happen very often to a single person. If this were really a hindrance, I’d work to overcome my irrationality. Since it lines up with my budget and desire for minimalism, I’m not fighting it much. If something gets really inconvenient not to have, I’ll buy it.
There are other things, here and there. As I mentioned in an old post, Katrina gave me a good solid reminder about impermanence. Other Katrina survivors (and I use the term loosely), have you noticed similar tendencies in your own thinking?
I’ve talked in the past about the problem of access to journals. It varies drastically between institutions. Here at JHU, our access is pretty good. However, I’d say it was better, and certainly more convenient, at Washington University in St.Louis. But really, it shouldn’t matter what institution you’re affiliated with. Peer-reviewed research, and especially government funded peer-reviewed research, should be widely and freely available, from the internet, preferably in PDF format.
I’m not saying that anyone has to really give it away. Costs can be shifted around. However, for the sake of scientific review, collaboration, and progress, anyone should be able to access the papers. There’s already an extensive movement toward this standard. The Public Library of Science publishes several open-access journals, and carries out some advocacy of open-access publishing.
This, like the ability of bands to sell and promote their own music without the RIAA, is a threat to the traditional publishing industry. Nature recently published a brief article on the efforts of Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society to counteract open-access promotion with their own PR. They’ve hired an expert on the PR-offensive to advise them in this effort. His advice allegedly includes tidbits like this:
The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as “Public access equals government censorship”. He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review, and “paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles”.
Do you see what’s going on here? Simple, but bald-faced lies, repeated often. Peer review is not at all limited to “traditional publishing models.” PLoS is a great counterexample. Also, public access is not government censorship, especially if taxpayer dollars paid for the research. I’d call that getting what you pay for. The argument is that,
“When any government or funding agency houses and disseminates for public consumption only the work it itself funds, that constitutes a form of selection and self-promotion of that entity’s interests.”
I mean, read that. Should a funding agency pay to disseminate everyone else’s work? Clearly these guys have hired an expert on crafting statements that seem reasonable but are actually quite deceptive and misleading. Based on the quotes from the involved publishers, they’re already drinking the kool-aid, or doing a good job of pretending to do so.
This issue has been covered and extensively discussed on Slashdot.
It occurred to me this past weekend that I use my RSS aggregator like an inbox. I have long since quit categorizing my feeds. Rather, I just view them as a “river of news”, reading them in the order in which they arrive. This isn’t really interesting.
What is is how I process them. As I mentioned in my post on using the Firefox bookmark bar, when I see something I want to read, I drag it into my Action folder. More specifically, I read as if I were processing an inbox:
I suspect my 2+ years of GTD practice led to the unconscious development of this processing strategy. It seems to work pretty well — it allows me to catch up on a lot of items without actually having to read and dwell on all of them.
I’m going to go out for drinks after work, and then who knows what, so I decide to walk rather than bike — I don’t want to have to worry about the bike’s whereabouts. The wind is also 20-25 miles per hour, with gusts of up to 45. I’d rather not be knocked over while riding. Rather than my usual mountain bike shoes with cleats, I lace up my running shoes. My walking shoes live at work, you see.
It’s getting rather cold here, and I’m afraid that combined with the wind, the temperatures might make my ears hurt, so I bring my headband. I put on my jacket, slip my iPod on the pocket, and step out the front door, locking it behind me.
I look south, to the people waiting for the bus along North Avenue, to the KFC that’s still closed at this hour. Morning commuters rush down St.Paul in front of me, mostly cars with the occasional bicyclist interloper. Typically my bike ride takes me up Charles Street, but there’s a clinic there where I’ve gathered that people go for free psychiatric treatment. At this time of the morning, there will be a lot of them on the sidewalk. I decide to walk up St.Paul instead, at least until I get to 25th street, beyond the clinic.
The walk up is uneventful. Once I pass Safeway and reach 25th street, I turn toward Charles. Reaching it, I cross 25th and then continue to head north toward campus.
I hear a loud rumble and the earth shakes.
This has happened to me before. The first time, I thought it was a stampede of people (from where?) or a huge truck coming up the road. However, by this time I know that it’s a train passing underneath the street. When I’m racing down St.Paul on my bicycle, I never have more than a few seconds to look over at it before I’m past, and I should watch traffic anyway. However, today I am on foot, so I amble over through an overgrown parking lot full of litter, and look through the wrought iron fence.
The train runs beneath the streets for several hundred feet in either direction, but here I am able to peer down into a one-block-long skylight, a gap where the train can breathe, only about three times its width. Car after car rolls directly beneath me, and some part of me entertains the (self-destructive) thought of trying to hop the fence and catch a ride on the train.
I’d probably break my leg falling, just before my head smacked into the top of the tunnel.
Instead, I just watch. Many of the cars are refrigerated. I wonder how they are powered? I look for indications that they draw from dynamos on the wheels, but am unable to see from my perspective. Perhaps they carry gasoline and generators. Regardless, they have “Satellite controlled module” written on them, and I imagine these cars rolling across the western plains, open to the sky and able to receive commands from someone in a far-off control center. They don’t seem to have dishes of any kind. I wonder how they get the signal.
I watch, and watch, and recall that trains can be as long as three miles. I wonder if I have enough time to watch three miles of train roll through at that speed. I don’t wonder long, because shortly thereafter the last car rolled away, and I carried on toward lab.
On reaching campus, my road forks. There is a building, called Garland Hall around which I must walk. We also walk around one side or the other of this building every day on the way to lunch. It has a raised, walled off apron around it with an opening on either end. These openings are not in the middle on either side, and so I’ve always wondered whether it’s the same distance around either way.
I start pacing from one entrance around using my marching band steps (consistently eight steps to five yards). I don’t count the sides of the building, because the path is the same length on either side. In the end, I find out that one way is 15 yards longer. Now, if I’m in a hurry, I take the shorter way.
Sometimes, though, it’s nice to take the long way to work.