Ian! - I found one of the links I promised you: Fusion Anomaly, which is sort of like Wikipedia but much trippier and self-referential in a very cosmic way. Check it out, including their article on mycelia. Oh, and here's a book review of Paul Stamets' __Mycelium Running__, and the first chapter is about how fungi are Nature's internet!- UrthBound

In order to avoid what happened last semester, I would like to propose my final project now rather than later.

I would like to write a program in the following manner, have the program read certain types of information--articles on homeland security, for instance--and then write an online paper analysing that data that my program has organized. Sounds good? l

This is going to be on the poster

Closed looped transformations, an excerpt from my poster...

Transforming waste products such as garden refuse, yesterday’s newspaper, and this morning’s uneaten leftovers into useable material is a fundamental challenge in the quest for energy conservation. Creating a closed-looped cycle of consumption, where waste once again becomes a resource, offers sustainability-minded individuals a way of reaping the most energy for their buck by using what is present in the physical matter they already possess. According to the law of conservation of energy, energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only continually transformed; hence, from the human perspective, energy can be roughly divided into two categories: usable and unusable. The goal then of the sustainability-minded individual is to abolish the separate categories altogether—that is, much the alchemist, render and transform trash into treasure, lead into gold.

It is nothing new that many of our waste products have harmful and far-reaching consequences on surrounding ecosystems. Fortunately, sustainability-mind individuals have over the years developed diverse methods in disposal and transformation of noxious waste. Not only does the decomposition of hazardous materials into non-toxic components prevent contamination of natural resources, the reclaimed material can be further processed back into resources, such as top soil. Hence, the reclamation process is a two-fold mechanism of conservation: preserving energy in it usable form, while simultaneously transforming waste into resources, thereby “doubling” the sources of energy.

In order to accomplish feat, sustainability-minded individuals have employed various means, such as chemical and fungal agents, in addition to, various microorganisms. Unlike human beings, many fungi and bacteria perceive our waste products, like paper and manure, as food, and eagerly devour what we no longer find useful. Consequently, these biological agents metabolize and transform our waste into energy that they themselves use. During the process they create byproducts—that is their own waste products. Despite the fact that these biological agents themselves cannot directly use their own byproducts—analogous to how human cannot directly use their own waste products–other organisms like plants can. Hence, by allowing plants, which humans can use for food or other purposes, access to these biological byproducts, the original waste product has transformed back into a usable resources. Again, since energy cannot be created or destroyed, this process can be repeated ad infinitum.

My wireless card is: Dell Wireless 1470 Dual Band WLAN.

cool - new ubuntu should work for it, otherwise MEPIS. I will find both disks or you can just download the iso, burn a disk, and reboot...

if you are running windows, you will need (free) isorecorder to download and burn an ISO disk image to boot from.

I imagine Penn State as a living organism—breathing, feeding, shitting, multiplying. Hopefully this analogy is not superficial, dismissed as the misguided rhetoric of an under-educated English major. I make the analogy in order to remind myself of a higher order schema, that despite of the common perception that we operate solely on the level of the individual, we are intimately connected our environment and its subspaces. In the same way that the heart beats as if independent of the conscious mind to which its blood flows, the individual and the institution also deny interconnection. (It should be noted the conscious mind under distress will synchronize the beating of its heart with the intensity of its fear; and that if the heart is made chemically to increase its frequency, the mind too multiplies its amplitude)

With that said, let me get to the point: energy being a general, yet crucial component in the language of transformation has been a particularly useful and unifying notion in the comprehension of the observable universe. In order to understand how Penn State gathers and disperses energy—an important step in making Penn State into a sustainable institution—it could be beneficial to use an episteme that emphasize the holistic aspects of paradoxically independent/interconnected collection of dynamical systems. Is this not the language of the living being/system? Although the analogy IS lacking in certain ways, by imagining Penn State as a living organism, the question of the resource/waste (both of which are another name for energy) dynamic becomes tractable. I will do my best to illustrate this.

Remember, the map is not the territory…employ only when lost or searching

Ideas:

Multitasking resources could be a sustainable step in the right direction...

As I (mis)understand it, Penn State employs steam in order to heat its buildings. Likewise, students living the dorms enjoy hot showers. As steam loses thermal energy to sorrounding areas, and thereby heating it, unsurprisingly it cools, condensing into water. Why use this already heated water for showers rather than have separate mechanisms for the two?

use paper plates, compost them?

State College has a dog park, and goldmine of dog shit... they use plastic trash bags, but should use paper instead.

Windmills hanging from helium balloons...it's always windy high up in the sky?

Double entrances to Penn State buildings, so the heat/cool doesn't escape

A cost increase for parking on campus, addtional profits should go to alternative energy research.

Penn State should adopt a policy which requires sustainable design in all further construction projects.

There should be workshop the focus on practices of sustainablity at the center every weekend

Getting back on track

It’s been a while since I've posted a significant amount of text, and I cannot avoid feeling guilty about my lack of participation.

I’ve been thinking lately about what it is exactly we are doing in this class. Sustainability, as a muddle of concepts, practices, and ideas, is difficult to pin down to some unifying definition without denying other aspects of its infinitely dimensional being. If I have learned anything about the grand unified theories of past centuries, from Einstein to Laplace, it is that they always seem to be just out of reach—for every inch gained toward some final answer reveals many more to go. This is a good thing though, albeit frustrating and disheartening to those of us who desire completion, because it humbles us before the immense complexity of the universe. Once we have accepted our perpetual ignorance of space, time, and matter, we can begin to respect and even admire our beautiful planet, instead of thinking of it as something to be overcome, something to be manipulated, our plaything. That is the mistake of our ancestors. Once we believed that it was our inheritance and birth right that, like Zeus or something equally ridiculous, we should able to control the rain, wind, and sun. Lorenz showed us otherwise. But the important thing to remember is that this was not simply an end of one of our many God-like pretensions, but the beginning of non-linear dynamics, fractals, and chaos—some of the most beautiful and thought provoking mathematical objects currently being investigated. To put it banally, capitulation to impossibility often itself creates possibility. Let us marvel in our infinite ignorance, so that we may seek more knowledge. Let us recognize our individual insignificance, so that we may perceive the beauty of the collective, the not-self. Have I gone too far in saying so?

Forgive me for writing in non-sequitur.

This is a class in rhetoric—discussions about rhetoric abound, explanations multiply. However, I feel that I am (and perhaps many in our class are also) lacking in practice what I have become comfortable in theory. I have not spent much time in the occupation of persuasion. To make an analogy to science, as I often do, theory is worthless with out experimentation. An assignment for our class, if others feel obliged to do so: go out and try to persuade another person (or yourself if you are not already persuaded) that sustainability is not just exercise in vanity or condescension, but a necessary practice for survival, an emerging characteristic of evolution of the human race. You will fail, of course; try to explain why without recapitulating that “people just won’t change.” Trying again, but modify your rhetoric to include/remove what you have found to be effective/ineffective strategies. Repeat. Treat this like an experiment in rhetoric: make hypothesizes, test them, discard and modify them (only then should theory should emerge). To those who already feel confident that they understand human nature, do it anyways. You will be surprised; if not become prophet and shill apocalyptic futures at your local mega-church, because humanity is surely doomed if we cannot collectively change.

Think about what how to employ what you have learned, how you will to teach it to others, and how to modify the world around you. Collaboration is key to sustainability/survival...on a side note, a nice rhetorical technique would to be entangle the words sustainability and survival in such a way the as to make them interchangeable, indistinguishable.

REMEMBER:

We are beings of continuous transformation, fearing what we might be turning into. How can we coax a sustainable metamorphosis?

One of the biggest hurtles that Sustainability, as a cultural movement and daily practice, must overcome is that it demands the awareness of transformation—how humans have transformed their environment, how humans themselves must necessarily transform. Because it is a not purely a material change, but one of episteme, social dynamics, information transmission, identity…infinitely dimensional, Sustainability has the ability to produce diverse responses in those who encounter it. Any attempt to elucidate and transmit, what I now refer to, the gospel of Sustainability can result in fear, abhorrence, and ridicule. How can we mitigate negative responses to Sustainability, while coaxing positive ones? Experience, though no Authority, is right enough for me—as the Wife of Bath would say.

A Modest Proposal

WHAT IS SUSTAINABILTY

Environment is often the context under which the word sustainability is used. However, the concept itself, separate from any specific material connotation, evokes a set of core principles (axioms, properties). For example, if object A possesses properties 1-4, then it is defined to be whatever name we give to the aggregate of properties 1-4. In this case, I will try to define some properties that embody the “essence” of sustainability, which can be applied to any arbitrary object.

More abstractly sustainability conjures, at least in my understanding of it, some of the following attributes:

work in progress...

After reading some of our provisional definitions of sustainability, it seems that our little word evokes a whole constellation of ideas. Rather than reducing sustainability to a set core concepts which apply to the word under any context, I suggest that we permutate the “core” to the specific context, like a wikipedia disambiguation page. For instance, my attempted axiomization of sustainability takes on a distinctly mathematical, ecological flavor, and hence should only be taken to mean sustainability in those settings. i.e. we restrict mathematical sustainability to these core ideas, without eliminating other subtleties important to other contexts…

With that wrote, I’d like to continue my haphazard delineation of ecological/mathematical sustainability with a discussion of the logistic map.

The logistic map is an important to study of population dynamics, as it is the discrete analogue of the ordinary differential equation dp/dt=rp(1-p/k), called the logistic equation. In order to study this beautifully complex, yet simply stated, map let us become familiar with its more tractable differential form.

Mathematicians and ecologists have historically used the logistic equation as a means of population analysis because it satisfies several intuitive notions about population dynamics, which follow:

Let us see how the logistic equation incorporates these principles. If we interpret the variable p to be the number of people, gophers, dog...in other words, the population...at time t, we can read the logistic equation in the following way:

(1) and (2) are essentially the same statement, since analytically solving the equation, dp/dt=rp (i.e. the change in population over time is proportional to the original population. Notice that if we take r to be constant, then the rate of change of the population, dp/dt, only increases as the population, p, increases), gives us an exponential function of the form, p=ce^rt, where c is an initial condition. The logistic equation satisfies (1) if we take unbounded to mean a population that is far from its maximum. This consistent with our intuition since, far from its maximum capacitance, a population would not “feel” the boundaries of its living space, and hence would behave as if it were provided with unlimited resources. If we look at the quantity, (1-p/k) where k = max population, and take p to be small compared to k—that is, the population is far from its maximum—then p/k~0 and (1-p/k)~1. Thus dp/dt=rp(1-p/k)~rp and for small p, the logistic equation acts a lot like the exponential function, satisfying (1) and (2). Note that p=0 implies dp/dt=0 and hence the population does not change if the population reaches 0 (consequently we call 0 a fixed point). The logistic equation satisfies (3) as the population nears it maximum. Again, notice the quantity, (1-p/k). As a population approaches its maximum capacity, that is as p->k, p/k~1 and (1-p/k)~0. Thus dp/dt=rp(1-p/k)~0, and the population halts its growth as it reaches its maximum. Notice what the logistic equation says when the population EXCEEDS its maximum. This occurs when p>k, which implies p/k>1 and 0>(1-p/k) . Since p is never less than 0 (-5 people?), this implies that dp/dt<0!! Hence, when the population exceeds its maximum, its rate of growth is decreasing, as we would expect.

Now that we have seen how the logistic equation encodes our intuitions into a mathematical statement, let us see what implications arise from our premises. To do this, consider a graph of logistic equation:

Logistic Map - this Link doesn't work for me UrthBound, Ian! Loughborough University apologizes.

Writing Physics

When time and space are used teleologically to define each other, the fact that each is dynamic in ways slightly independent of each other yet in ways which affect each other, continually undermines the effort to define each term. Great stuff.. - UrthBound

Information often ends up being a term used as a larger framework within which to define space and time. Cf. John Wheeler - flobius