Category: geography

I had a nagging suspicion that our home wasn’t in an orange circle despite it being the second closest to date. A quick glance at ArcMap showed that we were not in an orange slice of ideal, but damn close. Now I just have to figure out what shaved off the rest of the circle.

Oh, we’re the red dot towards the bottom right. Its on what would be the outer periphery of the circle had something not removed it.

updated
Ok, we’re the house near the bottom right. The blue circles are restaurants, the blue area is the resulting “desirable” area from my project. I checked to see what was missing, and it appears that we’re over 1/4 mile from a park. Not by much, but that was the omission. We’re not in a “avoid” area, which is good.

John F. Kennedy is remembered for his “Ask Not” speech, but nearly 60 years earlier, John Charles Olmsted made a similar declaration about people and their communities:

“It is constantly becoming more generally and more clearly realized that every inhabitant of a city owes to it, in return for benefits and advantages derived from it, certain duties not specifically compulsory according to law. Among such duties is that of aiding in every possible way to make the city more beautiful and more agreeable to live in and work in and more attractive to strangers.”

– Report of the Park Board, Portland, OR 1903

In order to obtain financial aid, I had to find a 1 credit class. With no colloquium, I chose a field trip class on open spaces in Portland. One evening lecture and a day in the field? Sounds nice.

The lecture provided a decent background on the Olmsted vision for Portland, and our century long progress towards it. The field trip included visits to several parks in the area mostly focusing on “natural” parks like Marquam nature park, Johnson Creek Nature Park, Beggar’s Tick natural area, and a section along the Columbia Slough. The sites varied from archetypical midwest lamplight lawns with winding paths and large deciduous trees to tangled messes of native and invasive plants. Some were created over a century ago and some were gifted, traded, or reclaimed. The variety of opportunities is immense, though one of the classmates was only interested in the sites that offered opportunities for fishing.

John Charles Olmsted, adopted son of Frederic Law Olmsted (Central Park) came to Portland in 1903 and developed a park master plan for the city. Although much of it was shelved, sections like Forest Park have an immense legacy for the city. Over a century later, Portland is trying to recreate a circular trail Olmsted had envisioned, connecting the city by greenway between open spaces. It appears that the city is close to realizing this goal, due largely in part to a tireless band of dreamers and the support of the citizens. A 40 mile loop of nearly connected trails is in places and more are planned that would bring the count to 160 miles.

I think this summer is going to have to include a bike circumnavigation of Portland.

The last volume of Annals of the Association of American Geographers included a fascinating article titled “Exploring Complexity in a Human-Environment System: An Agent-Based Spatial model for Multidisciplinary and Multiscale Integration.” The research synthesized the work of an army of previous work in areas of GIS modeling, computer science, population dynamics and resource management. All told, the model was used to predict the destruction of habitat in a small province in China that is known for its biodiversity and as important Giant Panda habitat. You see, people living in the area harvest forest for their own use, which reduces habitat. So by looking at the wood fuel needs of people based on reproductive rates, in/out migration, access to electricity, and so forth, they were able to run this monstrous model to predict how certain behaviors would effect habitat loss.

While reading the article, I remembered a similar model being used for a seemingly less academic research project. But you never know when you’ll need to simulate a zombie infestation.

I presented a rough approximation of what I may pursue as a research topic in my class yesterday. The instructor suggested that I look to see what had been written about social physics which asked many of the same questions I was curious about. This pleased me because its nice to have a place to start. So this morning I started looking for information on Social Physics and was somewhat disappointed to to learn that there are two areas of research that are known as social physics.

One describes itself as a many2many peer collaboration system interested in privacy and information exchange. This, while interesting, isn’t of any use.

The second area is of much more interest (and use). This is the social physics (which I imagine first coined the name) that looks at using a scientific framework to understand social interaction and human systems. Early examples of this framework include some work by Hobbes where by he used Galileo’s heavenly body studies to explain which political governance system was best.

although this isn’t exactly what I’m looking at, it’s part of the same suspect realm that tries to fit an understanding of human interaction into a framework that matches a real science like physics. Economics is a good example – there are theories and formulas, but they’re all based on things that can’t possibly be universal constants.

What I’m interested in social physics for is to develop a way to look at things like entropy in human communities. Where is the greatest loss of potential energy?

The reason I want to know this is because I’ve lost faith in the aesthetic and economic arguments for environmentalism. I still believe they’re effective, but they’re imperfect in the sense that aesthetic doesn’t matter to a lot of people, and economics only make a solid argument when you’re talking about including external costs, something we as Americans have been told by God we didn’t need to do.

My hope for physics is that it will provide something more helpful. You can argue all you want about how humanity needs wilderness for the good of its soul, or how in the long run sustainable food sources will be better for us, but you can’t ignore the laws of physics. Producing a good inefficiently, or producing it elsewhere and shipping it here greatly increases the entropy of that transaction. That energy can never be used again. Our tenure here surely depends on finding a way to reduce the amount of waste in our lives. So now I’ve got some reading to do.

The Kyoto Protocol goes into effect today, and although the US has refused to sign the international treaty, there’s still something we can do about it. Like the folks at Cascadia Scorecard, you can ratify the protocol yourself.

I’m a little uncertain as how to calculate it since I’m not living with my parents anymore, but I’ll make my best efforts to reduce my emission of CO₂ to sub 1990 levels. Here’s an easy way:

1 gallon of gas when burned releases 17lbs of CO₂. That’s roughly 20 miles given the average US fuel economy for new cars in 2001.

A normal breath of air is roughly 1 liter in volume. When you exhale, 4% of that is CO₂. A liter of air weighs roughly 1.2 grams, so you exhale ~.05 grams of CO₂ with each breath. So you produce 17lbs of CO₂ with 160,647 breaths. On average, we take 12 breaths per minute. So lets say when you ride a bike you’re averaging 20 breaths per minute. That means you can ride for 8032 minutes before you expel 17 pounds of CO₂. If you average 10mph on a bike, that takes you 1330 miles. Hmmm…

I’m to lazy to show or check my work. Tommy or Scott will be interested and probably corroborate or disprove the evidence for me. Oh, and I don’t remember my sources. The Internet will show the way.

Last night I was cleaning up my desk and the GIS & Maps section of my site when I found my old procedure library from my undergrad GIS final project. At the time I was annoyed for having to keep proclibs. Who really forgets how to do this stuff anyway? Well, I have. And I was pleased to see that I still had the info available. Now I know how I made those cool DEMs.