Tag: Nature
#oneaday Day 775: Perambulation
I've been for a walk out on the Common for the last three evenings. Tonight, I gave myself permission to take the evening off, because three days in a row is solid going, there is no need to go every single night, whatever the "sergeant major" part of my brain might say, plus my feet...
Walking on the beach
Yesterday I went for a walk on the beach. Linda maintains a vacation rental at Bayshore just north of Waldport. The house is on a bluff with a great ocean view. It's a bit of a hike down to the beach but not a problem for me. There are sand dunes and then a wide sandy beach. The tide was going out so I could walk on the hard sand just before the waves. Although it had been foggy and cold in the morning the fog had lifted and the sun was breaking through. There was also no wind so It was nice and warm for a walk. I grew up on the beach on the opposite coast. Lived 4 houses from the end of a dead end street that ended at the dunes. Needless to say I spent a lot of time on the beach. Unlike Oregon the water warms up in the summertime, and the days do too. I learned to swim well and navigate the currents a rip tides. The surfing craze hit when I was 12 and I jumped right on it. This eventually led to moving across the country to San Diego in search of better waves and warm winters. This was 1967 which, although I had no idea at the time, was the "summer of love" when the San Francisco hippie scene was born. The evolving culture and political climate of the late 1960's then led to a move to Oregon, where I landed less than 10 miles south of where I was walking yesterday. The thing about Oregon beaches is that they are never crowded. Where I grew up in Long Beach, NY the beach would be beach blanket to beach blanket on a nice summer day. On my walk yesterday I saw about 10 people over a half mile of beach. A family with kids, some teenagers, and a couple of solitary walkers like myself. More crowds the closer you get to Portland, less the farther south you go. In fact the south Oregon Coast is extremely remote, and there are many hidden beaches where you will not see another person. The ocean and beach the beach is so much a part of me, that I often feel like just sitting and watching the waves is enough to satisfy my soul and make me feel at peace. This was heavy on my mind yesterday as my recent bike crash has kept me from doing some of the things I love, and made doing many others much harder. Indeed I had to cut yesterday's walk shorter than I would have liked, and spend a lot of time sitting on a log, but that was okay, I was still there.
.plan-26-25: Planetary scale plans, Windows file-descriptor scale problems
Ten years of the CCI with Sir David Attenborough, Andrew's Royal Society Environment Medal lecture, and the third PROPL at PLDI, while wrapping a local DeepSeek agent in OCaml and a first stab at getting Eio fleshed out on Windows.
Sir David Attenborough joins us to celebrate the Cambridge Conservation Initiative
Sir David Attenborough drops by for the Cambridge Conservation Initiative's tenth birthday in the DAB, and I spend the afternoon demoing TESSERA and the Dash of Life to a campus packed with visitors.
The Royal Society Environmental Prize lecture on feeding the world without costing the earth
Notes from Andrew Balmford's Royal Society Environment Medal lecture, on why shifting diets and cutting food waste are necessary but not sufficient, and why sustainable high-yield farming tied to land sparing is the key to slowing the extinction crisis.
THE LANTERNFLY.
The spotted lanternfly is beautiful and terrible, an invasive species that illuminates even as it destroys. AI-generated content is flooding the Internet, and authenticity is becoming a premium commodity. We must refuse the premise that human writing is a niche product.
Ein Abend im Moor
Eigentlich legt man ja die Füße hoch, wenn man einen anstrengenden Tag hinter sich hat. Nach einen Termin beim Chirurgen meines Vertrauens in Hannover (Eine Schulter-OP steht an) und anschließendem Stadtbummel bzw. Shopping, war ich auch etwas platt. Aber nach der langen Autofahrt musste ich irgendwie doch wieder laufen. Der Mix aus Sonne, Wolken und...
Neue Fotos
Im letzten Beitrag hatte ich darüber geschrieben, dass ich von der Idee, jedes Foto als Einzelbeitrag zu speichern, abgerückt bin. Da stellt sich dann natürlich die Frage, wie ich auf neue Fotos aufmerksam machen kann. Wenn ich sie einfach nur in die Galerie einfüge, bekommt das ja niemand mit. Vielleicht monatliche Beiträge mit einer Zusammenfassung,...
Wildlife B&W #15
Namibia Kudu Einfach nur schöne Tierfotos - in Schwarz-Weiß
Beautiful azalea garden courtesy of our local water company
I was shocked to learn that our local water company, WSSC, maintains a beautiful azalea garden. We visited this week when the azaleas had just peaked and it was absolutely stunning. Five acres of nothing but azaleas bushes. The area is very accessible. There is parking just across the street near the WSSC facility, with a well marked crosswalk that provides access into the garden. Once in the garden area, you can traverse wide gravel paths. There are parts that are slightly hilly but it is fairl...
Life makes Life
Awhile back I read a fascinating book called Becoming Earth [1]. Conventional wisdom has it that our planet evolved through geological means until it was suitable for life. The theory presented in this book is that it was life itself that brought about the geological changes needed for life to thrive and evolve. For example before our atmosphere contained enough oxygen for air breathing life to evolve, more primitive life forms evolved to add oxygen to the atmosphere. >Life and its environment have coevolved for billions of years, transforming >a lump of orbiting rock into the cosmic oasis we call home. Life breathed >oxygen into the atmosphere, dyed the sky blue, concocted the modern oceans, >and converted barren crust into fertile soil. > It's a fascinating book and I encourage everyone to read it. Now comes news of a recent discovery [2] that certain fungi, using DNA that they appropriated from bacteria, can seed clouds and create rain. Basically the soil itself influencing the sky to send it some rain. Many years ago while walking through a Redwood forest in central California I had an illuminating experience I will never forget. It was drizzling rain. The ground was covered with moss and ferns and all the kinds of things that only grow and a cool wet environment. But then I came to a clearing and walked out into the dry sunshine. It was a clear day, not a cloud in the sky. Looking back at the forest I could see that it was holding in it's own fog like moisture layer. A few years later I moved to the Oregon Coast where I witnessed huge swaths of clearcuts. I could see the rain clouds coming in from the ocean would pass right over the clearcuts until they hit a standing forest which slowed them down so they could dump their rain. Years before climate change was a well understood phenomenon I could see how clearcut logging was upsetting the coastal environment. Planet Earth is one big interconnected organism. Our survival as a species depends on our ability to understand and work with the natural systems that makes life possible. [1] https://www.ferrisjabr.com/book [2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aed9652
Bicycle Day - It's not what you think
I recently discovered that April 19th is Bicycle Day. [1] Now I've know for a long time that May is National Bike Month, [2] and within that there is a Ride Your Bike to Work Week, and a Ride Your Bike to Work Day, so I was a little confused as to why there would be a Bicycle Day outside of Bike Month. Well it turns out that Bicycle Day is only peripherally related to riding bicycles. The April 19 event commemorates the day in 1943 when Dr Albert Hofmann rode his bike home fro work after being the first human to ingest a does of LSD, which he invented. From this BBC article [3]: >After taking the drug, Hofmann began to feel unwell, and rode home >unsteadily on his bicycle through the streets of Basel. As the journey >progressed, things got weird. His vision distorted as if he was looking in a >fairground mirror. By the time he made it home, his sense of reality had >disintegrated. > Being both an avid bicycle rider and an old hippie one would think I would have known about Bike Day. Maybe that's because my hippie days were spent in the backwoods of Oregon and not in Haight-Ashbury. While I never did ride a bicycle while high on psychedelics, there was one time when I went surfing on mescaline. The most memorable part of that experience was how the water sparkled and the waves curled in slow motion. It was not scary but very peaceful and left me with an overwhelming sense of well being, much like a good bicycle ride. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_Day_(psychedelic_holiday) [2] https://bikeleague.org/events/bike-month/ [3] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260410-the-bizarre-story-of-the-worlds-first-lsd-trip
Foundational AI for Ecosystem Resilience workshop
Workshop report combining TESSERA geospatial foundation models with Concordia agent-based modeling to simulate ecosystem resilience, covering causal modeling for ecology and AI applications in nature conservation.
Do not rule out nature from climate action; an open letter
Open letter to UN Article 6.4 supervisory body advocating for nature-based climate solutions alongside durable carbon sequestration technologies.