Author Archives: jas920
Rare earths in things
This week I spent some time learning about rare earths, which have very obscure element names but are ubiquitous. All their names end with the same few letters which seemed like it might lend itself nicely to computational manipulation. I wanted to play with the scientific taxonomy and naming conventions of these strange elements, the […]
Project sketches
Reading “contaminated soil” described as Mel Chin’s “sculpture medium” in To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet made something click. Of course soil is central to the problem of exponentially increasing phosphorus use, but I hadn’t thought of as a ‘medium’ in itself. I was immediately reminded of the image included in Liu, Tang, & Li’s […]
P recycling research & references
[updated 5/7/2017] Articles Roy, E. D. (2017). Phosphorus recovery and recycling with ecological engineering: a review. Ecological Engineering, 98, 213-227. doi: 10.1016/j.ecoleng.2016.10.076 Bradford-Hartke, Z., Lane, J., Lant, P., & Leslie, G. (2015). Environmental benefits and burdens of phosphorus recovery from municipal wastewater. Environmental Science & Technology, 49(14), 8611-8622. doi: 10.1021/es505102v “Overall, mineral depletion and eutrophication […]
Built to Last: ch.3-4 response
I used to think I didn’t understand the motivation of for-profit companies, but now I think I understand it even less. If part of what makes a company ‘visionary’ is its pursuit of varied goals and a ideals, then what’s the point of being for-profit? I understand that making money is important for the continued existence of […]
OpenVPN
This week we made a device a client of the Towers of Power VPN–I used the virtual box we set up last week. Downloading openvpn and running the ssh server were pretty straightforward. The ps command allows you to see a snapshot of current processes. After creating the client.conf file and leaving my cert and […]
First computational poem
For Temporary Expert I’m currently researching the concept “Limits to Growth,” which led me down the path of researching Phosphorus depletion, something I didn’t really know anything about. I decided to use source text from Phosphorus Futures, a research group. I liked the alliteration I noticed on the website and thought this might be fun […]
Limits to Growth & Peak Phosphorus
Limits to Growth is an idea as well as a book that was published in the early 1970s. A group of experts in various fields (The Club of Rome) worked together to specify a “formal, mathematical model” of the world “built specifically to investigate five major trends of global concern-accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread […]
Anthropocene readings
For class we read Oreskes’ & Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization: a view from the Future, a science fiction book that examines our current climate crisis from the future, when the social, economic, and environmental consequences have been realized and the human race has somewhat recovered thanks to the overgrowth of a CO2-consuming fungus. I really enjoyed […]
Built to Last: ch.1-2 response
It was interesting to reflect on the take-aways presented in the first chapters of Built to Last that apply to any organization. This weekend I was thinking about the non-profit organizations at which I’ve worked, faith in U.S. government institutions (I was amused the the U.S. government’s founding was brought up as as example), and non-state groups […]
Finding IMSI and IMEI numbers
We were tasked this week with finding our phones’ IMSI and IMEI numbers. In researching how to find these, I came across how-to’s that mentioned several other kinds of numbers. Quora helped me clarify exactly what I was looking for: IMSI International Mobile Subscriber Identity. This is a unique identifier that defines a subscriber in […]