Category Archives: Travels of an Intellectual Vagabond

Wherein I wax philosophical, intellectual, or pretentious.

Nerdgasm, Religion, Science, Travels of an Intellectual Vagabond

Just a little bit…

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I’ve taken to hanging out in the talk.origins newsgroup (you can find the website here). It’s a lively place, full of debate between Creationism and evolution. Personally, I have no trouble reconciling my religious beliefs with evolution, but there are a lot of people out there who do. And furthermore, some of the most ardent Creationists have a very strange way of arguing. I was able to summarize a typical Creationist argument this way:

The Scene: I hand Bob a piece of cake, which he scarfs and enjoys.
Bob: What a delicious cake! You must give me the recipe.
Me: There was no recipe. My wife made the cake.
Bob: Well, where did she find the recipe?
Me: I told you, there is no recipe. My wife made the cake.
Bob: Of course there was a recipe. How many eggs did she use? How much sugar? How much flour?
Me: Are you calling me a liar? Are you calling my wife a liar? I tell you there was no recipe! My wife made this cake!
Bob: But… Well, how long did she bake it in the oven?
Me: There is no recipe! Look, here’s this note from my wife that says, “Here, honey, I made this cake.” What more proof do you need that my wife made the cake?
Bob: But you can’t make a cake without a recipe!
Me: My wife is the cake maker. She made this cake! Didn’t you read the note?

Jennifer suggested that I could end the dialog with Bob replying, “But… you’re not married!” Which I think is even funnier.

But I digress.

The new semester has just started, and I’m now officially a second year student in the MLIS program at San Jose State. I’m taking three classes this quarter: Beginning Cataloging and Classification, Information and Society, and Interface Design for Information Systems. I’ve been looking forward to taking the cataloging class for months now (yes, I know I’m weird); it looks pretty interesting, but also pretty straightforward. In cataloging, you get a big book, the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, Revision 2 (2002 Edition), also known as the AACR2. And it’s basically a big book full of rules for how to describe a book or other document. How big is it? Use rule 1.D4 to describe the size. Who published it? Use rule 2.B2 to describe the publication information (I’ve got those rule numbers wrong). And then there’s MARC, a way of encoding all of this information so that a computer can read it. So a MARC entry might look like 300 ## $aThe Information $bThe Sub-Information.

Fascinating, yes?

Information and Society is kind of an overview class. What is a library? What kinds of libraries are there? What do librarians really do when they’re not shushing and stamping? (Those of you harboring “naughty boy librarian” fantasies about me will be disappointed to learn that I’ll probably be doing a lot of cataloging and computer programming in that spare time.) And Interface Design looks like it won’t quite be as I expected; I was expecting some hands-on programming and development, but this course looks to be mostly theory.

Still, I think it’s going to be an interesting semester.

If I can keep from developing an ulcer and permanent migraine, that is.

See, those three classes are nine units altogether. When I finish up this semester, I’ll be halfway done with the program, which is nice. But conventional wisdom dictates that if you’re working full time and intend to have any sort of life, then maybe you should take just three to six units: one or two classes. And I do have time yet to drop a class if that becomes necessary. We’ll see whether Jennifer decides that my stress level makes me unsuitable to live with.

I have been having fun, though. Last week, I was sick with bronchitis and couldn’t go to work, so I amused myself by building a Debian Linux server out of my old Gateway laptop computer to hold all of our book information (between Jennifer and me, we have over 1,000 books; the idea is to get them all entered into our Readerware database, which is on Lucien, the computer I built).

And last night, in between updating the MP3’s on my MP3 player and reading through the AACR2 for the first time, I set about hooking up a UPS to our main household server — the one that acts as our file, printer, and mail server. I wasn’t quite successful; the manufacturer claims that it’s compatible with Linux, and there is a Linux version of the controller software on the CD-ROM that came with it, but I haven’t managed to get it to work yet.

Boy, do I know how to have fun or what?

At work, my boss told me last week that a budget was finally approved that would let them hire me on full-time and permanently instead of as a temp that can only stay here for another year or so before being forced to leave the temp pool (yay unions). I am told to expect an interview sometime this week, but not to stress about it too much. “Unless someone comes along with really amazing technical credentials,” my boss told me a few weeks ago, “The job’s pretty much yours.”

Which would be nice. But I was hired on to make our website talk to Oracle, which I still haven’t managed to do. I’m feeling a tad stressed about that, and as I meet with more and more failures to do so, the stress is getting more intense. I know I can do it. I just have to find the right wand to wave over the server while chanting, “Serverum Repairus.”

Yeah. That will do it.

Rants, Science

As Big a Grain as You Can

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Last week, the Worldwide Fund for Nature (otherwise known by their old initials: WWF) released a report which states that our planet is going to run out of natural resources within 150 years, and that by the year 2050, all of the world’s population will face severe restrictions on their lifestyle, just because resources will start disappearing.

Pardon me while I grab this salt lick.

Over the years, environmental extremists have issued dire warning after dire warning. We were supposed to run out of fossil fuels well before the end of the last century, according to some early predictions. Clean water, by some other accounts, was supposed to have vanished by 1995. Worldwide famine was supposed to have hit in the 1980’s, as well as many incurable and highly infectious diseases. The Brazilian rainforests were supposed to be completely gone by 2001. And, of course, something like 75% of the world’s species were supposed to have vanished by now.

None of these things have happened. And, honestly, some of these warnings are getting tiresome.

Oh, there have been ecological disasters in the past, of course. Scotland, known now for its broad grassy meadows and highlands, was once almost entirely covered by forests ("the deforestation of Caledonia," one tourguide told me while I was over there, "is probably the worst ecological disaster ever, and it happened well before mankind developed the technology to destroy the planet completely"). Then, of course, there was the move by Iraqi forces to set fire to petroleum refineries at the end of the Gulf War, poisoning the oceans in that area. The Exxon Valdez incident is still fresh in the minds of many people. And, of course, the vulture population in India and Pakistan is taking a frightening nosedive.

And things are not completely rosy now, either. Climate change is widely acknowledged in the scientific community (the debate centers on what the nature of the change is, and what — and who — is mostly responsible for it). There are indications that global warming is damaging the ecosystem and economy of some places in Antarctica. And so on.

But is the earth really going to expire by the year 2050? That sounds pretty extreme, even by the standards of environmental extremism.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I want there to be a planet around when our children grow up. I believe that Conservation is A Good Thing, and I have religious convictions which support that belief. And if I could figure out how to pull it off, I would ultimately like to build a career that focuses on integrating civilization with the natural world.

But the WWF and other environmental extremist groups are doing for the environmental movement the same favor that the religious right has done for the Republican party. Whatever credibility is there is being eroded away by fear-mongers and doomsayers; and there are times when I’ve felt that some of them are much more interested in promoting an agenda of eliminating modern technology all together rather than finding actual solutions to many of the problems we face. I have actually encountered environmentalists who argue that scare tactics are what people listen to, so the scare tactics are what the movement should stick with. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really work in the long run. When Doomsday passes several times without incident, people stop believing the Doomsday stories, and eventually simply start laughing at them. You lose credibility.

I get frustrated with this sort of thing. I like the Earth; I want it to stick around for awhile, and I want future generations to get to enjoy it as well. I get frustrated at "Spare the Air Days" in my own area, where the air quality gets so bad due to pollution that "sensitive groups" of people — such as people with respiratory diseases like asthma — are advised to stay indoors. And I get overwhelmingly frustrated at people who deny that there are any problems at all with the environment.

All the same, though, there are just some times when the most appropriate thing to do is to take what you hear with as big a grain of salt as you can, even if you sympathize with the group putting out the information.

Science, Travels of an Intellectual Vagabond

The Mystery of the Vanishing Vultures

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James Lovelock proposed the Gaia Hypothesis in the mid-80’s. Lovelock, a mathematician and an engineer, had proposed a model of the global ecosystem which maintains itself homeostatically; in other words, whenever one part of the system goes out of whack, another part of the system fills in. That, at least, is the basic idea of how I understand the Gaia Hypothesis; the notion that the Earth is some sort of huge "superorganism" is a bit of a stretch for the Gaia hypothesis, and there certainly are no mystical overtones to be inferred except by some New Age groups.

Something I find very interesting, though, is the role that the politics and culture of our own species can play in the ecosystem, beyond the obvious technological one. For example: in the Indian subcontinent, cultural, religious, political, and emotional factors may be contributing to an ecological disaster more than any technology.

Vultures play an undeniably vital role in the ecology of the Indian sub-continent: they eat dead things, including dead people. Without the vultures, dead and rotting animals would pose a major health hazard in the humid and hot conditions of India. In some areas, people practice a form of air burial of the dead, in which they place their dead on a platform, and the vultures come along and eat the remains. It’s surprisingly hygenic.

But now the vultures of India are dying; and no one knows why.

It has been estimated that since the early 1990’s, nearly 90% of the population of two of India’s most populous vulture species has died out completely. Where flocks of vultures used to darken the skies near the Towers of Silence in northern India, now very few are seen. Such a huge drop off in population is pretty much an ecological catastrophe; the extinction of any species is a cause for sadness, but this extinction — which it looks like it might be — could cause massive disruptions in the ecosystem of the Indian subcontinent. Rat populations, without the vultures to keep them in check, are exploding, as are feral dogs. The rat and dog populations are causing major health problems in many parts of India.

The usual suspects have been examined. Toxicology tests show no environmental toxins or poisons present in the bloodstream of the autopsied birds. And there are no bacteria present. And yet, the die-off shows signs of being a disease of some sort: vultures get sick, displaying lethargy and malaise for something like thirty days before they simply die. Indians report seeing birds literally fall down dead in flight. This mystery illness seems to have an incredibly high mortality rate among the vultures.

And it’s spreading as well. Vultures in neighboring Pakistan are becoming ill as well, with the same symptoms and the same massive die-off.

Neither India nor Pakistan have the resources or the equipment to deal with the crisis, or even to study the corpses of the vultures in the depth that’s required, and, as NPR reports, getting the tissue samples out of either country is next to impossible. India is wary of "bio-prospectors", who take genetic material from India, patent it in the United States, and do not share the rewards; while Pakistan, since September 11, is wary of allowing scientists to take the three-foot tall steel canisters which carry the carcasses onto international flights.

So I guess I have to say that I’m fascinated by the fact that this crisis, while probably natural in origin, appears to be exacerbated by human greed and human fear and human apathy.

It’s a scary prospect; I can’t think of any human diseases that have such a high transmission rate coupled with such a high mortality rate; the most fatal human illness that I know of is rabies, with a 95% mortality rate for untreated cases. Even ebola and smallpox have higher survivability rates; and rabies is awfully difficult to contract.

At one time the vulture population in India was so dense that the sky was dark with them; now it’s possible to go for days without seeing a single one. If the two species vanish, then the ecosystem will recovery; the Parsi will begin cremating their dead after millennia of sky burial. I don’t believe humanity is to blame for this crisis, but I do think that some of our human tendencies towards fear and greed are hampering the recovery from it. And because of that, I can’t help but wonder about some of the other long-term hidden costs of business as usual.

And that, basically, is what I’m writing about. Fear and distrust have become business as usual in our post-9/11 world. Perhaps, in some vague ill-defined way, there is some good in that. But the bigger consequences are ecological instability and cultural degradation; are these prices that, in the long run, we can afford to pay?

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I Should Have Been a Firefighter, Science

Ecological Engineering

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The other day after church, Jennifer and I had lunch with her parents. Jennifer’s mother asked me about the classes I’m taking in chemistry and mathematics, and what I plan on pursuing in graduate school. "What, exactly, is an ecological engineer?" she asked me.

Well, according to the website for the website for the International Ecological Engineering Society, it is:

"the design of the human society with its natural environment for the benefit of both" (Mitsch & Jorgensen, 1989). Ecological engineering integrates various existing environmental fields such as classical ecology, agro-ecology, and restoration ecology. The skills of these fields are used to design low-impact systems for waste treatment, food and energy production, habitat restoration and other benefits.

Yes, it’s a big switch for me; but as my friend Craymore pointed out to me, "Big switches like that are just so you, Richard!" This is quite true, although I’m sure that the point could be made that the reason why I haven’t gotten very far in my life is that I haven’t managed to keep my focus on any one thing long enough to succeed at it.

Now, if the definition that I quote above were all the ecological engineering were, then it would be the habitat restoration that intrigues me the most in that list of possibilities. But, honestly, what really excites me are the possiblities for information technology in the field.

The use of computers in biology is something that has fascinated me since high school, when I participated in a contest to generate models of ecological systems. My own fishery model was never completed, unfortunately, but my solid waste disposal model/game was a hit in my AP biology class. And I was constantly modelling population dynamics in BASIC on my old TRS-80 Color Computer 2. Unfortunately, when I was in college, I let my interest in computer programming slide, and that proved to be a mistake for many reasons. It has only been in the past few years that my interest has been piqued again. And in the past few months, my interest in applications of computer technology to ecosystem engineering has grown, especially after a conversation I had in Westport, Ireland with a computer programmer who’s involved in that sort of work (although, honestly, I don’t remember all of that conversation, given the circumstances under which the conversation happened).

Bioinformatics is the application of information technology to the biological sciences. Generally, when people talk about bioinformatics, they refer to computer technology in the "hard" areas of biological science: molecular chemistry and genetics, to name just a couple. I have seen references, however, to the application of bioinformatics to ecology and ecosystems, and that is where my interest is. I’m convinced that there is a place for the use of bioinformatics, especially when combined with GIS technologies, in ecosystem engineering. I’ve asked a local bioinformatics special interest group that I belong to for more information about the field, but I’m told that such an application hasn’t really been developed, and that it sounds more like a PhD thesis.

I’m not certain that I want to go as far as pursuing a PhD in the field of bioinformatics or any of the biological sciences. I do know,though, that there is a lot that I should learn, about bioinformatics, about computer programming, about biology and ecology and engineering.

Who knows, though? Perhaps this will just end up being yet another pipe dream that will end up on the heap with some other ideas I’ve had. I think I saw that Starbuck’s is hiring. Perhaps that is a more realistic goal for me.

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