2hrs and 50 minutes. When I looked at my phone yesterday, that’s how much time it said I had left in the audio book of All We Can Save, a remarkable collection of essays and poetry on the climate crisis and solutions. This is just a bit longer than a 30 mile bike ride to New Paltz and back on the rail trail. Having been working since 6am, I decided a long afternoon bike ride was both needed and deserved. I popped on my aftershocks head phones, and off I went.

A bonus of the audio book is that all the poetry is read by the two editors, Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Dr Katharine Wilkinson, while all the essays are read by a collection of equally impressive woman like Jane Fonda, Julia Luis Dreyfuss, America Ferrera, and many more.

This book is remarkable. The wide range of voices, all with important but different insights. It’s not a single voice with an overriding thesis that keeps trying to convince you of something, it’s a rich chorus of personal experiences. 40 essays and 20 poems, orchestrated in an incredible tempo. There are so many layers in this book, that it will require rereading and relistening, and discussing and absorbing for years to come. And I cherish that idea of coming back to this book time and time again.

It’s hard to pick favorite pieces, but a few stand out in this first reading. (Many of the pieces were published in other forms prior to this book, so I’ll link to earlier versions where I can.)

Did It Ever Occur to You That Maybe You’re Falling in Love? is an irreverent take on “the problem”. It hit really close to home, and I laughed out loud during parts. Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s reading of it was spot on.

Heaven or High Water – Sarah Miller goes “undercover” in Miami pretending to be a Silicon Valley Wife looking for a place in this city under siege. And she keeps asking the realitors about climate change, and how it’s impacting them.

Reciprocity – Janine Benyus tells of her experience in forestry and ecology, and how a dominant narrative of individualism shaped forestry science for 5 decades. This prevented us from understanding what was actually happening beneath the soil, and the ways that trees exchange nutrients, and are healthier in a collective with diverse species.

A Field Guide for Transformation – Dr Leah Stokes lays out her journey, from recycling in 5th grade, to coming to really understand the energy system. How our influence, and collective action, works in widening circles, and how we must not demand perfection or purity in ourselves before tackling larger systems change.

This is just a flavor of the many incredible pieces in here, and only scratches the surface. I can’t recommend this book enough. Go get yourself a copy, and dive in. You won’t regret it.

From 1992 to 1994, a division called Maxis Business Simulations was responsible for making serious professional simulations that looked and played like Maxis games. After Maxis cut the division loose, the company continued to operate independently, taking the simulation game genre in their own direction. Their games found their way into in corporate training rooms and even went as far as the White House.

When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery | The Obscuritory

After the success of SimCity, Maxis started making other simulation “games” targeted at industry. It included a refinery game, as well as one to help inform the health care policy debate in the early Clinton white house.

This reminds me a lot of why En-Roads is such an effective tool for doing climate simulations, there is real time feedback, and it feels like a game. But as you move sliders around you can see how complex systems interact, sometimes in surprising ways.

I think the story also gives a really important cautionary tale on tools for policy. SimHealth was built to inform the health care debate. Many approximations and things were left out of the game to make it playable, and then it was largely targeted at policy insiders. Whereas the value was probably more in raising broad understanding for the complexity and interactions of different policy approaches.

30 years later, I still think about C, R, I as the basis for zoning (even though that’s completely inaccurate in a real world), because of years of SimCity play. It makes me wonder how cool it might be to have a SimCity 2050 that starts with a modern prebuilt city (or state), and your job is to rebuild it to net-zero by 2050. What a cool game that would be.

A little while back, the internet was abuzz with the inspirational story of Mary Anning, a pioneering 19^th-century paleontologist from Lyme Regis in England. Some of my favorite blogs and magazines got in on the act: Atlas Obscura, QI (Quite Interesting), Dangerous Women, Cracked, and Forbes, to name just a few, published versions of the Mary Anning story. Anning was a woman from a working-class family; her father, a cabinetmaker, was mentioned by Jane Austen in 1804. Despite her lack of formal education, Anning was involved in the discovery of several categories of ancient animals, including the ichthyosaur, the plesiosaur, and the pterosaur. She also figured out that some of the rocks she was finding and breaking open were fossilized feces, becoming one of the discoverers of the coprolite! Because she was a woman, and working class, and a religious minority to boot, she was not always recognized for her achievements, and many of her discoveries were published by Anglican male scientists. [1]

Normally, I’d love the way this story spread. It has everything: pioneer women scientists, Regency and Victorian England, beachcombing, fossils…it’s like Pride and Prejudice at the beach, with feminism, dinosaurs, and poop jokes. What’s not to like?

To be honest, there was one problem: the hook on which most of these blogs hung their story was the assertion that Mary Anning was the inspiration for the tongue twister “she sells seashells on the seashore.” Most of them even included the tongue-twister connection in the title of the blog post. But none of them provided any evidence for their claim.

She Sells Seashells and Mary Anning: Metafolklore with a Twist

Having a young daughter also made me want to believe this, and then today googling I came across this Library of Congress piece from a couple of years ago that dives into verifying it.

It turns out, it’s probably not true. But the entire process of attempting to verify it is amazing all on it’s own. Great read about what rigorous testing of assumptions looks like, and all the other far more interesting things you will find out along the way.

Having lived in the Hudson Valley for over 20 years, I now get to be one of those folks that says things like: “have you been to that new icecream place? It’s across from where that dumpling place used to be, that was a bbq place before it. You know the one in the old bank building.” Businesses and places leave a fossil record, and after 20 years you become aware of the fossil layers beneath the current facade.

But, there are times when the new facade plays so much tribute to the old, and the old was so familiar, that it’s notable in it’s own right. As with Sloop at the Factory, where we were last night.

Sloop is one of the older craft breweries in the area, I remember them with bottles at farmers markets close to 20 years ago. I had heard recently that they had opened a new brewing facility at an old IBM plant, but the way it was described to me at first it didn’t sink in where it was. Which is the old IBM East Fishkill 330C building. The building that was on the other side of the cafeteria from 330D where I first worked when I moved to the Hudson Valley.

The old IBM site is really a great place for a brewery. It’s got all kinds of infrastructure, as this used to be chip manufacturing. 20 years ago they put in a new water pipeline from City of Poughkeepsie to have high quality water for their lithography lines (tolerances for chip manufacturing are much stricter than drinking water standards). And it’s nice to see something using that space instead of it sitting empty.

But where I truly applaud the Sloop folks is how much they embraced the bones they are built upon. They converted an old monitoring station to their water tap. They have plaques of various IBM invention accomplishments out along the walls. The whole place pays homage to an era that’s past, as they expand into the future. With over 60 breweries in the Hudson River Valley, it feels really appropriate to have one now in an old IBM site, spanning the industries between the generations.

Sloop’s always had some great beer. But with all the space available to them in this place they also put in a kitchen (with a kids menu), and have a ton of low, high, and picnic tables through out it. There are stacks of board games, including an old copy of candy land that we played last night. As a parent of a 4 year old I really appreciate this new brewery ethos of being kid friendly (Kings Court is doing this right as well). I like good beer, and being able to bring the whole family along makes for a fun evening.

We’ll definitely be back. And I look forward to taking old friends that used to work in those buildings back as well to get a glimpse of the past and the future all at once.

Over the holidays I finally got around to reading/listening to The Sixth Extinction. It was quite good, but the language was at a density level where I found listening to the audio book to be a lot easier than reading on my kindle. Fortunately for me, both copies were in our library, so after my ebook lend expired I switched to e-audiobook lend to finish it off.

The book uses the lens of a number of extinct or endangered species to look at humanity’s impact on the world. And each species provides an opportunity to dig into a different part of science or the history of science around them.

The chapter on the Mastadon was fascinating. I never realized that the Mastadon, first discovered not that far from here in the Hudson Valley, was the trigger for the idea of species extinction. Unlike the Mamouth, whose teeth can be confused for that of an elephant’s, the Mastadon has cone shaped teeth that can’t be. It was odd enough that Thomas Jefferson believed these beasts were roaming the west, and were part of the reason he sent survey teams out. Eventually it would trigger the idea that species could go extinct, and start the process of reconstructing our past. But it’s super cool this happened in our back yard.

I learned was that Ocean Acidification was kind of accidentally discovered to be a thing after picking through the remains of the failed Biosphere 2 project. It turns out their biosphere wasn’t so good, so CO2 levels got up north of 1000 ppm, which drove the pH of the water quite acidic.

I discovered that I had a closer relationship to bat white-node syndrome than I realized, as Al Hicks was one of the state ecologists that first found it in NY. I met Al last year through at the regional Citizens’ Climate Lobby conference, as he’s also the Albany chapter lead.

And I really liked some of the visuals around the idea of a “new pangea”. It’s interesting to think about how global trade has effectively eliminated all the island barriers that we once had.

Definitely a recommended read. Going to be digesting some of it for a while.

Given that google is shuttering hangouts sometime in the next year, I decided this was finally the time to bail out of it. It did a lot of different things.

Chat

One thing Hangouts gave me, was a chat system that I could easily use from my computer and my phone, and that didn’t super compress images when my wife and I would exchange kid pics when I was on a trip.

Signal looks like it will be my more or less full replacement for that this year. It’s based on an open and secure protocol, and there is an electron desktop app that seems to work quite well. It also seems to be where a critical mass of the folks I chat with regularly have landed, so nudging over the few stragglers will hopefully not be that hard.

Group Chat

I’m using Slack a lot for work, and for HV Open. Our completely dead IRC channel became a more lively rolling conversation once we moved that community to Slack. And it’s a much better place for a rolling conversation than this long standing group Hangout that we had going a year ago. I’m no longer actively involved in any open source project that uses IRC as their communications base (Home Assistant uses Discord which I start from time to time), so I haven’t run IRC for the better part of a year.

Video

The other thing that Hangouts gave me was convenient video platform that mostly just worked (even on Linux). Fortunately Zoom does that even better. Citizens’ Climate Lobby uses Zoom extensively, and I’ve been using it whenever I can instead of phone calls. Video is so much more expressive. We’ve even had pretty good luck linking in external participants to our CCL monthly meetings.

Hangouts video was also how I called home during business trips. There will be less of those in 2019, but I’ll see how zoom works on the mobile side this year.

Blogging

I really want to be blogging more often again. This blog is self hosted WordPress. We’ll see if this sticks once I’m back in the office and time slips away. While I’m not planning to drop out of social media in 2019, I do think that giving them less exclusive content is a good thing, and posting more here in the open is good. I use Feedly to read a lot of blogs, so if anyone else who reads this is also writing, drop your RSS url in the comments, and I’d happily follow you on the open internet instead of in a closed garden.

Email / Texting

Email is always good as well. You can always find me at sean at dague dot net. Easy enough. Email has inertia, I get it. Texts are good as well. I’ve tried to go out of my way and check in on folks a little more than I used to, which means my text messages are a thing now (and never used to be). We’ll see how many of those folks (who are not computer people) I can convince to hop to Signal this year.

I do wish Google didn’t auto abandon everything it created, but given that it does, at least there feels like there are good replacement tools now.