A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
This is a hella-cool site that i happened upon that attempts to categorize divergent kinds of visualization structures.

A comment on reparations

The other day i was watching part of the Youtube CNN debate for the democrats, where some guy asked whether the candidates believed in reparations. Of course, due to time constraints not all teh candidates could answer the question. And of course the self-selected 'token' Obama (who i love as a candidate) answered in a sly way saying that reparations can be applied to better schooling. I think that he said 'yes' in the only way palatable for white people, but failed miserably in opening up the debate about whether, when and how. . . but then again, it isn't his job to do that.

So, i'm going to put in my half-pence of thinking on the topic.

The fundamental question about reparations is whether White people will assume the moral responsibility, not for slavery, but for the four score years between the end of Reconstruction and the passing and enforcement of civil rights legislation. (side note - with the heavy influx of non-white immigrants, that will be a hard sell, and with the heavy influx of migrants in the 1910's and after WWI there is very little broad white 'responsibility' for what happened).

That's a big problem. And the other side of the problem, is that many of the people who deserve reparations don't know who they would actually be responsible for compensating them.

To understand the other point i'm making about reparations, you'd have to come with me on a little paradigm shift. Normally, with the civil rights movement, the aim was integration, being able to live, breathe, eat, drink, shit and work in the same buildings and in the same rooms as whites. For those brave souls who lost their lives and gained their freedom (alive and dead) i am and will be forever grateful. I have no bone to pick with you/them. For you/they addressed what seemed to be the most pressing problem at hand, dignity.

Having said that, and hopefully you get that what i said is way more than lip service, i'd like to add a different dimension to the debate about reparations, or even just black community development.

The problem with the aforementioned strategy of integration was that it focused on the day-to-day immediate concerns of life, safety and health of black folk. What i think really needs to be addressed is the disparity between who owns the businesses versus who works in them. The greatest generator of wealth in this country and any other is the starting and growing of businesses. Many people know this, even before Kiyosaki became famous. So, what i think needs to be addressed in any 'reparations' discussion is not how to integrate inside the businesses, but how to integrate the 'ownership class' (to steal a republican phrase).

get ready for pain

After a long arduous battle with the phone company, i finally got DSL!

So get ready for me posting a bit

buck rewild

I was reading up on the internet about rewilding and found out that there are two kinds of rewilding proposals.

the lesser of the two is to simply re-input animals and species that were native to a habitat, for instance wolves who were hutned to near extinction and now live in wildlife preserves, but not the wild.

The other kind of rewilding is more radical (hooray) and that is to put megafauna (large animals) in habitats similar to their native habitats. For instance, they want to put African elephants and lions in the great plains. Sounds good to me, mostly because i live nowhere near there!

In a related article, i read about how much bears are necessary in teh ecosystems where they live and hunt salmon. Apparently they eat about 1/10 th of the salmon they catch, and when they do eat, they only eat the most fatty portions (gotta hibernate). So what happens is that they deposit lots of nutrients from the water onto the land. Other animals such as small rats, birds and so on then eat the remains, and then you have the insects and fungi that decompose the body, all contributing to the biomass of that particular area.

Countering the pleiosteine argument is when hunters brought the red fox to the australian outback for hunting. Apparently it got loose and is mauling the 'natural' habitat of the outback. So the counter-argument says that we don't know what kind of consequences a non-native animal would have on a habitat. But that's kinda foolish, because the red fox isn't a predatory nor a large animal, and all the pleiostine advocates are talking about putting in large predatory animals . . . so there.

So in this example what you see is that large animals have dis-proportionally large affect on their environment.

organic molecules and big mamals

I was at a training yesterday and there was a SciAm subscription. During my breaks i happened to read it. i picked that one up because it had an article about the nucleotide that might have created life. the article was basically saying that RNA and DNA are higher up on the evolutioanry chart than many think. They argued that there were mor simpler molecules with carbon in them that were probably the precursors of life. It was also interesting because they outlined some broad conditions in which life would have to had occurred. One was that it would have to have happened in some small space where different chemical transactions and transformations turned the same set of chemicals back into themselves (a-b-c-d-a-b-c-e) or branch in different ways (a-b-c-d-e-b-d-e) etc [hard to draw in lines:]. i got a little bored of the article after i realized that i had intuitively known this a bit, or it was a re-hash of what i learned in a great book called microcosmos that i read a few years ago.

the other article i think was a bit more exicting though.
This article talked about repopulating the planet with large predatory animals. Elephants exert a disproportional amount of influence in their ecosystem because when they knock down trees, all sorts of organisms collect around the felled trees and create local ecosystems. It isn't a matter of size though, otters eat three times their body-weight in kelp, thereby regulating thier ecosystem not through mass but quantities consumed.

So, the argument was that before humans took over the planet in the las 50,000 years there was an abundance of large mamals that regulated the environments of all the different continents. So, the arguemt goes that re-introducing these large mamals would then create a massive beneficial effect on ecosystems that are seemingly in balance, but really out of whack. For instance, deer overpopulation.

I liked it for two reasons. The lesser reason is that they mentioned that fake Safari's get about 7 times the visitorship than national parks, and people go to see the big animals, not the flowers. Therefore, there would be more people going to national forests and parks to see the actually native (or closely related) big animals in their own habitat.

The greater reason is that this isn't just conservation, it's radical conservation. Before now, i haven't seen may articles or thoughts about re-creating the balanced ecosystem, most of the stuff that i've read was about stopping pollution and preventing ecological degradation. So now these 'conservationists' are going on the aggressive, which i applaud. Now there are proposals about how to actually re-balance the ecosystem first, and have humans cope with it instead of how to move humans somewhere and have the ecosystem follow its lead.

[the article was called Restoring America's Big Wild Animals]

google search word: rewilding

Superhero to consult: Captain Planet!