Very cool! Thanks.
In particular, our property abuts "the ravine", which is a semi-wild place. The
permaculture categories might help me orient my own intuition (that everything in the ravine should
be left alone) with my neighbor's (clearing the whole area and reintroducing natives). He owns the
majority of it. So, c'est la vie ... or perhaps "telle est la mort". (Don't blame me. I
don't know French.) One thing this zone 0-5 model might permit is modularity. That blog post
implies such with the inverted garden interface. But it seems like there could be pockets of
zone0es in wild areas and pockets of zone5s in urban areas, particularly in sprawling cities like
LA or Houston. Growing up in Houston, where every square inch of semi-abandoned land seemed rapidly
reclaimed by the swamp, is probably the source of my skepticism with my friends' diversity doctrine.
There's a lot to digest in the biophilia links. I have to confess, I haven't
given pattern languages much attention. It always seems motivated by geometry,
which fails for me. Of course, I'm familiar enough with software patterns. But
that's always failed for me as well. They seem too ephemeral, unstable ... i.e.
not real, convenient fiction, and *perfect* opportunity for gurus to blind
others with their gobbledygook mouth sounds. I guess it reminds me of category
theory, too abstract for my ape brain. But maybe some of his earlier work on
Clifford algebras might motivate me? I could start here, I guess:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4757-1472-2_41
Thanks again.
On 9/24/22 10:29, Steve Smith wrote:
On 9/24/22 9:49 AM, glen wrote:
Such efforts seem so inherently metaphorical it's difficult for me to approach
a concrete conversation. For example, I have a couple of biologist friends, one
meso (bugs) and one macro (ungulates), who thought I was being contrarian when
I challenged their assertion that biodiversity in urban areas was *obviously*
lower than that of natural areas like forests. Of course, I admit my ignorance
up front. Maybe they are. But it's just not obvious to me.
This may seem a little tangential but the realm of Permaculture Design has a
suite of truisms on these topics, though they are articulated in their unique
language which can be a little hard to translate sometimes. I think the
permaculture community represent a fertile laboratory for doing *some*
experiments as implied by Glen's questions.
A good example which gestures toward the Chan work at least morphologically is
maybe worth a scan if not a full read here:
https://aflorestanova.wordpress.com/2016/04/08/zones-in-permaculture-design/
Permaculture's 5 zone quantization doesn't preclude a recognition of there being continuous
gradients in many dimensions from a locus of "technological closed-loop" (zone 0) and
"biological closed loop" (zone 5).
There is a *lot* of talk in the literature about the interfaces around zone 0, 1, 2
techno-structures creating localized ecozones that harbor diversity (desired and
undesired == vermin) which I think provide some good anecdotal evidence about
biodiversity in transition zones and acute technological interfaces (e.g. roofs, walls,
corners, posts, fences, etc). Permaculture is a domain of recognizing and exploiting
"happy accidents".
It is also worth noting the diversity spike that happens in estuarial
contexts...
A more formal study of Urban/Architectural design with an eye to *health* (human-centric view) is the
domain of Biophilic Design
<https://www.terrapinbrightgreen.com/report/biophilia-healing-environments/>. Nikos Salingaros
is a hard-core Mathematician at UT-San Antonio who addresses abstractions of Complexity
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikos_Salingaros#Complexity> and Pattern Languages
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language> as well as Architecture and Urbanism. He also
has some interesting opinions <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikos_Salingaros#Philosophy> about
post modernism as well as Dawkins Atheism.
Since then, they've presented (meso and macro) arguments that justify their position. It
does seem obvious that urban areas trend to more adaptable animals like coyotes and
raccoons and less so to, say, deer. The bugs are more interesting. Meso guy found some
articles that show "species" diversity in urban areas is roughly the same as
natural areas. But phylogenetic diversity is clearly lower in urban areas. That seems
counter intuitive to me. It's a cool result.
My main point when I originally expressed skepticism, though, was about
microbial diversity. Is it possible that bug-layer and microbe-layer (including
what lives in/on large animals like rats and humans) diversity makes up for
lower diversity in large-layers?
I *feel* that projects like Chan's could help with this question since it seems
prohibitively expensive to sample and test enough microbial populations of
urban and wild areas, especially if we include intra-animal populations. I'm
just not sure *how* they could help.
On 9/24/22 03:38, David Eric Smith wrote:
It’s funny; I know Bert.
One of our colleagues played a role in bringing him out to work at Google in
Tokyo.
A mathematician (Will Cavendish) who has part-time support at IAS
https://www.ias.edu/scholars/will-cavendish
<https://www.ias.edu/scholars/will-cavendish>
is also interested in the mathematical dimensions of this, though I have only a
glancing exposure to how those two together are trying to frame the problems.
Because Bert has come at it more from the ALife/engineering approach, and
Will’s interests run more in the direction of proving capabilities of broad
classes of systems, often interested in their aggregation as categories (and
also about the role of simulation as a replacement for proof in systems that
produce complicated enough state spaces), it should be a productive and
interesting collaboration. I don’t know how engaged others are in the Google
group on this specific project, because I am too far outside that loop.
Eric
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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