I couldn't quite jam on any particular topic this week, so instead I'm going to share some quick half-baked thoughts.

1. Living in the Bay Area I feel exposed to so many mobility startups: Scoot, Lime, Bird, Jump, and more (all layered on top of Ford's GoBikes program). I think that what we're now calling "micromobility" is super important in resolving some of the first/last mile friction, but the clearest solution, to me, is just owning a fucking bicycle. (Maybe an electric bicycle.) They're already disposed towards play and right-to-repair; they're ubiquitous, they're cheap, they're efficient, and they take up very little space. I don't think that dockless/ownerless model does well for nurturing skills, care, and attention. But, classically, it's difficult to drum up excitement for something that is old and ubiquitous. (cc Clive Thompson)

2. Confronted with a given dichotomy, my general impulse is to sublate it. (Thanks, Hegel.) i.e., to the extent that a dichotomy presents a paradox when both poles are valid (due to Law of the Excluded Middle), we can resolve or at least ameliorate this by adding a dimension of conceptual space to our system. I believe this should be a fundamental part of any philosophy/mathematics education! 

3. Have there been more recent extrapolations on Oldenburg's "Third Place" theories? Updates for the 21st century, where our phones (or surveillance otherwise) complicate privacy and public spaces? I have been enjoying going to the clubs in San Francisco recently as places to be different selves, and feel like I am finally learning firsthand how important these physical spaces can be. Thinking that the distinction of anonymity in spaces (or disconnection from social or economic context) needs more attention. 

4. Interlinked with the above, perhaps, I've been thinking about how I feel too young to have internet nostalgia, but here I am regardless. Like many others in my socio-intellectual spheres, I grapple with how to use the internet mindfully, and many conversations on this revolve around reducing the amount of time and energy invested to online spaces and investing more in the physical spaces we inhabit. I support this, but also credit an incredible amount of my development as an adolescent to a huge investment of energy to talking with strangers on the internet. I got to try out many interests and meet a lot of people despite being bored and stuck in a white upper-middle class exurban single-family home in the Midwest. There is so much value in weird internet spaces, still, but I'm not sure where exploratory conversations can manifest today. For those lucky enough to be in cities or with mobility, third (fourth?) spaces can provide this place to explore identity—but for those without, the internet's social spaces are still invaluable.  

Not this, not that, but both,
Lukas

Hey, I made it halfway through the year writing my newsletter every week. I'm proud of that! 
I'm still spending half my time in Santa Cruz, half my time in Berkeley. Still in the throws of the decision on where to move, what to do when I graduate in December. Here's a good song. Now for the thing. 

~

I was hired for the summer to work on a specific project, studying erosivity of the bed of San Francisco Bay. Great precedent work by many researchers make us confident that the Bay is eroding. (The Bay naturally loses sediment to the ocean, but a lack of inflows—due to damming and construction in its watershed—mean a reduced sediment influx to the Bay, so its sediment budget isn't balancing.) This is bad for the integrity of the Bay's wetland habitats, which are meaningful for flood protection, bird populations, and water quality. The specific goal of my project is to nail down some parameters to inform bay-scale models using Delft 3D. 

Coastal erosion, like many things, is tricky to model because it is made out of processes that act across various spatial and temporal scales. The coast erodes a little bit every time a wave hits it and every time the tides move in-and-out. River flows erode their banks, and can affect coasts around estuaries. Especially in a mediterranean climates like California's, strong differences between summer and winter, where the latter brings storms, which bring rain and strong winds, lead to annual-scale erosion dynamics. Cliffy coastlines are also inclined to failure (in the sense of landslides, slumping, and cleaving). Wave, wind, tidal, and flow-driven erosion are slow-moving and relatively easy to forecast; cliff failure is sudden and hard-to-predict. 

This complicates metrics that might be used in management scenarios. For example, if you are building somewhere along the California coast, you want to make an appropriate setback to ensure that your building is still safe after so many years of coastal erosion and sea level rise. How quickly is the coast moving inland? We can probably find a value (for a specific location) using satellite imagery or long-form data sets. But these numbers average over both the continuous erosion processes and the sudden cliff failure; e.g. one might get combined value of 3cm per year via continuous erosion of 1cm per year and then one sudden event which dropped 1m of coast in a 50-year observation window. So is 3cm, in this imaginary scenario, accurate? Or should we separate the different processes? It quickly complicates both management strategies and numerical models. 

I had an internship back in 2012 where my biggest project was to research how to best make a single metric that would represent how vulnerable a particular geographic area was to natural disasters—any and all natural disasters. (We very much acknowledged how a single metric for this is super reductive, but there was still value in having it.) 

OECD refers to these as "Composite Indices"—where multiple types of processes and values get rolled together into a single number through of averaging, normalization, and creative combination. Heterogeneous metrics are really hard to do effectively, but the people who work in (social) risk management seem to be on the forefront, as far as I can tell. 

This territory touches on statistics of rare events, too ("extreme value theory"). Again, we run into the risk of, for example, making year-by-year management decisions based on numbers that actually represent the kind of events that happen only once or twice a century. For data sets like this, it's useful to remind oneself that "averaging" doesn't mean just one thing. Finding a descriptive "average" metric must be a conscious decision about how you expect the data to be, and what you need the number to represent. Folding together heterogeneous processes, metrics, and methods into single numbers can be useful, but turns descriptive complexity into simple values and thus carries a risk of its own. 

Slowly, then quickly,
Lukas

I spent the weekend in Los Angeles, as a place to work a little bit but mostly see friends and re-center myself in my favorite city. 

I find myself having to justify an affinity for LA nearly anywhere I go (but especially in the Bay). My parents were confused when I moved, but I think that their understandings were rooted in memories of what LA was portrayed to be through the 1992 race riots and before the Clean Air Act had really kicked into gear—slightly more apocalyptic. 

The social world I lived in before the moving West was full of Northeast Ivy League bullshit and otherwise inherited from my parents (cerebral, university-centric). This sphere did not seem to think much of Los Angeles, probably because its cultural production is not seen as high-brow enough to be accepted by Brahmin standards. Or maybe because Los Angeles makes little sense, from an urban planning perspective if your reference points are Boston, New York, DC. Or maybe because LA's legendary vapidity is assumed to create an intellectual wasteland of vice and appearance. 

I read Geoff Manaugh's post about Los Angeles just a couple days before I moved to the city (having never been before), and can't imagine a better tone-setting read. It celebrates how you can find anything in LA if you drive around the right block. In this vein, I've enjoyed collecting quips about what I call "LA Phenomenology"—how can a short paragraph speak to the deep plurality, dynamism, and strangeness of this place? 

I found most critiques of LA to be both true and not true, which is one of the reasons I became intellectually attached to the place. LA is incredible at self-narratizing, which leads to a wonderful weave of narrative and reality in the city—where the line between the two becomes irrelevant. Lots of people have opinions about what LA "is" and how LA "feels," and these could seem true or false depending on how far you drive along the freeway. I don't mean to deny that every city has plurality within it; my particular experience of Los Angeles' forced me to reconsider my terms of engagement with a city. LA forced me to slow down to the pace that the freeways permit and meet it on its own terms, closely examining my assumptions about the place versus what was actually going on, in front of my eyes: a highly navigable city full of thoughtful people, deep roots, and fascinating ecology. 

(I need to credit at least some people in furthering these thoughts. My friend Tristan has been my primary influence on theorizing Los Angeles. One of my first conversations on the subject was at a cafe in La Jolla with Sascha Pohflepp, who passed away recently. He welcomed me warmly to the bizarreness of Southern California and was the first to tell me about Reyner Banham—I am so thankful that our paths crossed.) 

A discussion I've had a few times in the Bay revolves around Northern vs. Southern California water rights. In order to supply drinking water to their populations, San Diego and Los Angeles share an artificial watershed that is 1.5 times the area of the state of California. ("Artificial Watershed" here being the combined natural watershed and area that delivers water via hydraulic infrastructure to the place.) They are sucking the Owens Valley and Colorado River dry. Northern California, just by being more rainy but also having more proximity to Sierran snowpack, has much smaller artificial watershed. Northern California views Southern California as parasitic as it pulls precious water down the Aqueduct that otherwise could have stayed where it was, upholding ecological or hydrological process rather than fulfilling urban uses. 

Of course, we can't undo Los Angeles. Southern California is fully terraformed, home to millions, and a key cultural player—cutting the water supply would be an extreme human rights abuse. Sustainability in water and otherwise will be some difficult ongoing complex of cultural shifts, technology, policy, and luck. "Sustainable Cities" are both slippery to define and difficult to achieve—is a sustainable Los Angeles one that is affordable? That has enough water? That produces zero waste? That celebrates a diverse population? All of the above and more, of course, I hope, but hard triage decisions are upon us. 

I found Los Angeles lovely not because it "works" in the sense of how Monocle magazine thinks a pleasant city should work, but because I reframed its demonstrated dysfunction (celebrity-centric culture, ignored public transit, punishingly walkable streets, landlord-as-investor model) as fertile symptoms of the difficulty of making a city address its own reality and be livable. Perhaps I love Los Angeles because I feel like if LA can make it, anywhere can. 

Getting gas at the Arco on Figueroa where the 5 and 110, and Arroyo Seco and LA River, meet,
Lukas

Lots of thoughts stewing recently, but I failed to make time to write this week. The past month of insanity is finally wrapping up, though: work has stabilized, I have a phone, car is functional, and my head is starting to screw on straight. I feel like I can start having long thoughts again.

I spent the weekend camping in a gulch near Mono Lake with a bunch of people who'd never met, trying to find a sense of community in the arid landscape. It was a great reset and a reminder that the Sierras are there if I want to make the drive. By default I tend to go to the ocean for respite, but there is a different kind of solace in sharing time with our granite giants. 

 

 

"Buy land, they're not making any more of it."

Is this quote, its attribution lost somewhere in the muck of cultural history (Mark Twain?), literally true? 

No! Humans increase the area of land available to them all the time. We erect multi-story buildings, build artificial islands, and reclaim shallow waters. The Mississippi has been called "the land-making machine" because of how it made new land in its delta by depositing sediment from upstream. I put this in the past tense because, now, upstream management and strong-armed engineering of where the Mississippi enters the Gulf are preventing the river from making land in prototypical fashion. Change is needed for it to go back to its historical ways. 

At a global scale, we are also running out of useful sediment. Both white, pillowy, instagram-ready sand and coarser gravel sand, useful for concrete, are scarce enough to warrant dark markets and large-scale international logistics. And we're consuming these sands faster than they can be created by nature's typical processes (wearing down shells of benthic organisms, erosion river rocks, etc). The sand floating in natural systems is no longer enough, due to urbanization and damming. Our wetlands just won't make it—they're going below sea level faster than they can lift themselves up. (If I had to credit any one particular essay with getting me to go to grad school, it's that one.)

This imbalance—the pace of anthropogenic forcing versus the pace of typical systems to adapting or replenishing—is the core driver of anthropogenic climate change. We're pumping CO2 into the air faster than it can be sucked back out by our oceans and trees; climate zones are moving faster than species can migrate, we're producing plastic much faster than it can decompose. From the temporal perspective of human lifespans, these are all linear processes, rather than a more sustainable circular system. 

(In a cosmological timescale, everything is linear, towards the heat death of the universe. But our little microcosm of Earth is a fun place to see if circularity is possible... or maybe it is more of a spiral, anyway.)

But that's not the point. What do we do today? I'm starting to work with a friend on a proposal sharing thoughts on adaptation for Los Angeles. I'm interested in prototypical adaptation—effective and ethical policy change, managed retreat, living coastlines, context-sensitive and livable built environments—but I'm also interested in changes of mindset that reframe adaptation. Perhaps beaches don't need to be sandy to be "pleasant" and perhaps your home flooding twice a year should be expected. Perhaps we need to outlaw ordering food to go, perhaps we need to locally decompose all of our own waste. Perhaps we need to slow down, and let the land catch up. 

Terraforming, 
Lukas

I started my summer job this past week, and my car broke down en-route to my first day. In the ensuing shuffle of towing, repair, car-swap, and pick-up, I've driven from Berkeley to Santa Cruz, up to the mountains and back to the sea, to San Francisco, back to Santa Cruz, and then all around again. It's been hours alone in a car. 

I'm the child of my father (a Detroiter) and product of the American Midwest, which is to say, I enjoy the act of driving and don't really flinch at long hours on the road. May was a really dynamic month, and I've appreciated lots of solo time on beautiful and well-maintained California roads to reflect, collect thoughts, and just look out at the world with the window rolled down.  We will see if I still find the drives refreshing by the end of the Summer, but for now, I love my car and I treat it like a little pod for thinking. 

I was reminded of a (possibly apocryphal) story of a conference organized without any events in it, particularly—the whole thing was made out of interstitial things (drink hours, meet-and-greets—but no actual presentations or workshops), and how it was a raving success. (I can't seem to find the source on this—I thought it was a Hans Ulrich Obrist quip, but no leads there.) It's going to be a scattered summer, where I live in Berkeley but work in both an office park in Santa Cruz and on a boat in San Pablo Bay. The interstitial moments—drives around the greater Bay Area—are going to be the only quiet time. 

Space is a tool for thinking with, and car dashboards are a particularly common case of a densely-wrought spatial interface for a particular task. I think most car dashboards post-2000 or so are garbage, where designs get more plastic-ey and electronically-controlled. I feel lucky that my 2002 Subie's dashboard is still dominated by physical buttons and knobs. I drive a manual and highly recommend it, if you want to be focused and put to use all four limbs while you drive. It's way more fun. More control and the demand of more of your attention brings driving closer to "flow" territory. Mostly I just want my dashboard to vanish. If you know a manual-transmission car well, you also know that you barely need a tachometer—it can all be handled through foot feel. 

I went through a phase as a kid where all I wanted to draw were dashboards—for cars, spaceships, and otherwise. Some of this later translated into LEGO builds. I loved following Car Interiors when I was on tumblr, and am pleasantly surprised today to find it still going. I think dashboards are fascinating because there are just so many design decisions packed into them—decisions about texture, density of information display, which of the car's systems need management—and it all has to be visible from one vantage point. 

(Deep LEGO cut for anyone listening: I still think Mladen Pejic's multiped mecha are the shit, and the cockpit arrangements are a major component of that...)

Thinking about multi-sensory interfaces for complex systems is one of the only things that gets me excited about AR/VR. I'm still shocked that surfing the web has the same interface as writing an essay (chair, screen, keyboard); I wish it felt more like driving a high-performance sports car. 

Throwing the clutch,
Lukas

I organized a little meet-up of Brown and RISD grads I knew in Oakland, recently, and was reminded that many of them I knew through working at the Brown Design Workshop. 

Since moving to the West coast, I haven't had access to a "workshop"-style space. A messy, communal space. I love spaces like this because of the relationships they help build—where, without forcing it, you can spend a lot of time with people of similar interests—and because they act similarly to a home "junk drawer." Stuff can accumulate until it finds utility by someone, for something, at some point. A natural pressure-release valve in the circulation of material in the world (but you need to make the time to sift through it...). 

Now that I'm doing field work, I've gained access to some of the instrument prep & testing spaces on university campus. The spaces are fairly locked-up, due to how expensive the tools are, but finally, I have a beat-up workbench that I can commandeer for a few days at a time. Whew! 

I appreciate working on physical objects (in contrast to conceptual or analytical work) because problems tend not to hide themselves: every aspect of the entity is present, whether you thought about it or not. (Whereas, with conceptual objects, they have the possibility of bringing along baggage you didn't prepare for.) My boss at the BDW, Chris Bull, once said that "there is an indelible truth in the construction of physical objects." 

Physical objects, too, rarely have a sense of starting "from scratch." You're always starting within a material, within a budget, within a spatial constraint. When doing open-ended analytical work, I can tie myself into a knot fretting about how early decisions will dictate my end results. When I'm working in a messier material reality, I find it easier to just start putting stuff together. (Maybe it's a childhood of LEGO...)

It's a dream of mine to (help) run a community space. I love thinking about the physical and social conditions that make for effective working and sharing space, be it a woodshop, library, co-working space, or dance studio. There is so much value in bringing some zones of action out of the home and into public or shared spaces; it prompts forming communities and sharing costs. 

 

First, a shameless plug for something I'm running a week from now: 
 

waterbodies is a workshop to connect with the water around you. waterbodies wants you to get wet! waterbodies wants you to remember what water tastes like! waterbodies wants you to know where the water comes from, and where it goes! waterbodies wants you to feel that complexity is natural! waterbodies wants you to feel like you belong here! waterbodies wants you to melt into the world and find yourself anyway.

Saturday, May 25th at 1pm at magic & pasta in Berkeley, CA, Ohlone land. 1135 Page St, then turn the corner to the garage. Please wear shoes that can get wet. Bring a towel, water bottle, and memories of childhood if you can. MORE INFORMATION HERE. 
 

~

I've been writing poetry off-and-on for a few years, but in April (National Poetry Month), I wrote some poetry every day. The timing was perfect, as April ended up being a bit of a rollercoaster. A daily reflective practice helps me get in touch with how I'm feeling and gives me a place to pour my energy. 

In writing, I've been reflecting on the metaphors I use and find important in my navigation of the world. In language, what isn't a metaphor? A word is a word, but it projects some array of connotations and denotations into the minds-eye of the reader. My first interest in poetry came through reading Aram Saroyan's Complete Minimal Poems (beautiful edition), which helped me recognize that poetry doesn't have to be long-winded and densely wrought to have emotional weight; it can be playful, brief, and still knock the wind out of you. Saroyan's work also plays with  words both as metaphors (i.e. linguistic objects) and objects in themselves (as typographic objects). 

Earlier this year I noted how Learning Gardens developed a sense of importance around the metaphor of gardening. I find "gardening" deep in connotations, connections, and values that I appreciate. I've also written about water, how water in the landscape has served me well as a metaphor for an entity that exists as both solute and substrate, or for things where boundaries are both necessary but often difficult-to-define. 

If you've ever worked with a group on a complex project, you know how much time can go into making sure everyone is on the same page—a state that can be more easily reached through an easy-to-grok metaphor. Call this a "conceptual model," call it "shared language"—it boils down to having similar metaphors for understanding the object of your focus. 

In this sense, a metaphor is a tool for grasping something. A glove, a handle, a mode of holding. ("Grasp" feels a bit strong here—alternatively, "hold" or "cradle" may make more sense.) We approach abstract, intangible, and complex things through metaphors as a way to build an understanding. Douglas Hofstadter has a great lecture about this and more, "Analogy as the Core of Cognition." 

Some metaphors stick, and some are useful only once. As one's relationship with a metaphor deepens (either by spending a lot of time with it, or seeing it ubiquitously), the metaphor can expand, and our understandings along with it. We can start to "jump" between metaphors, where two adjacent metaphors may connect their two otherwise-distant signified entities.

I've thought about mathematical notation as metaphor, too. Einstein Index Notation is one of my favorite mechanisms by which, in trusting the expressive power of the notation system, I've found myself able to make conceptual leaps. For instance: within a train of logic, I might be at a moment where the physics of the problem make sense and are well-expressed by the mathematical symbols, but I need to make a jump to another point. With this notation system, sometimes the in-between steps have no physical reality. But, once on the other end, the connections between the notation and the physical entities I'm seeking to capture re-emerge. The notation—a metaphor itself—acts as a bridge between two other coherent metaphorical states. 

My poetry practice has been a way for me to engage with some metaphors I hold dear—water, gardens, the moon, the skull, bedrooms. Sometimes writing poetry feels navel-gazing to me, but I'm trying to believe in the act of creating and publishing a metaphor as valuable and lovely. Sharing metaphors is sharing your set of keys to concepts and feelings, which gives others the opportunity to find some new understandings, too. 

Nic has a great channel on Are.na for more thoughts on this: Theorizing Metaphor. 

Seeking a foothold,
Lukas

 

Listless Lukas this week. I don't want to write much. 

In Summer 2015 I had a block of time with few external expectations. I did a lot of work on myself that summer, including writing a small manifesto of values and things I felt I had learned in life thus far. Advice for myself, by myself. That link goes to the current version, which has been updated and tweaked over the years, as it should be until I die or otherwise give up. 

I've returned to this document at times when I need to remind myself how little control there can be in life, and how to keep building towards one's values regardless. It reminds me how to center myself through what I seek to manifest in the world. This helps me think about self-care outside of self-indulgence. 

Recalibrating,
Lukas

In late May (25th, likely) I'll run a workshop at Magic and Pasta. We're figuring out the exact nature of the event, but largely it will focus on how people relate to and conceptualize bodies of water, especially those we live around. I thank Helen, Kendal, and John for the opportunity! I can also credit many others with this idea: Hydrosocial studies, this lecture, messages with Pierie. 

My interest revolves around water as an intractable hyperobject—but also one that is terrifically mundane. We connect to water reservoirs whenever we turn on the tap; we create our own bodies of water whenever we take a bath; you are also probably just a short walk from your closest creek, river, or reservoir. We exist as bodies of water and in bodies of water (the atmosphere), which is especially apparent in the Bay Area. 

Talk to any surfer and they'll probably say they feel "connected" to the ocean, inasmuch as they regularly spend time there, paying attention to it. Despite the fact that a complete view of the physics of water flow escape us, plenty of people are extremely adept at "reading" water towards mechanistic understanding and emotional connection. What happens when we give this kind of attention to a nearby creek? To the reservoir that gives us drinking water? To our own bathtubs? 

In the face of climate change's disruption of typical hydrologies, perhaps "using water should be like drawing blood" (ref by Éd). I'm also hoping that by physically interacting with Berkeley's bodies of water (creeks and the Bay), we can build a more emotional connection to their dynamism and sensitivity to coming changes. 
 

The other thing that is interesting about water is that you’re never looking at water alone. You’re looking at water in relation to something. Whether a lake, or a river, or environment. Water is a very dependent material in terms of its neighbors, and you do have to wonder where its transparency comes from. The transparency of water is also the most opaque thing about it. (ref)

Stay tuned, I'll share as details come into full-view. 

Bubbling,
Lukas

I've been thinking and conversing a lot, recently, on geology. In alternate universes, I imagine studying architecture or geology in college. In going into engineering, excitingly, I get to touch on both of these. 

When I think about geologic timescales I return to thinking about scaling: from a lived-experience day-to-day, geology appears inert. And to objects and processes operating on geologic timescales, culture and biology are negligible perturbations at the surface. The scales do not match at all. Stewart Brand's famous diagram captures this: 

 

 

There's a looming big decision in my life, and I'm writing this week partly to start conversation. The decision is, "what next?" I'll finish my master's program in December of this year, which feels soon enough to start figuring things out. I have some specific work I'm interested in doing: coastal adaptation to sea level rise, sediment management, fluvial habitat restoration, flood risk mitigation. I also miss teaching. Still, as always, I am pretty open to whatever comes my way. 

(I remember going to a talk by Ann Pendleton-Jullian where she discussed her pathway through life, and she introduced the metaphor that one's vehicle through life is more akin to a sailboat than something with an outboard motor.)

I have a history of being sloppy at making large life decisions: I pulled teeth out over changes as a teen, I lost some friends due to flip-flopping on my decision to transfer colleges, my move to Los Angeles was sudden and stupid, and the decision to come to the Bay Area for grad school was almost flippant. I regret none of it, of course, and have a supportive family (thanks!!). Now, with the next chapter of life on the horizon, I'm curious if I can structure the next transition more intentionally. 

After 8 months I finally feel something of a social and emotional network in the Bay Area, but I still ache for the social spheres I left behind in New York and Los Angeles. Leaving this academic program can ostensibly set me up into the first truly professional job of my life, and most of the connections are in San Francisco or Southern California. That said, I'm lucky that there is environmental engineering work to be done anywhere: I will not be tied to metropolitan areas to find work, but my expertise (and desire to surf) will keep me on the coasts. I've always dreamed of having a chapter of my life outside of the United States. 

I'm not someone particularly motivated professionally, but I would like to find meaningful work; I care deeply about my friends and community-building, but I believe I could do this in many places; geographic location is important to me, but I believe any new places can force me to change and develop. Basically, my scaffolding for the decision feels very mutable. This is all just a bit of context to ask: how shall I establish a set of priorities to inform what I will do next?

(and for me, "what I will do" and "where I will go" feel very intertwined...)

Have you made a structural change in your life recently? Change in place, change in work, change in personal life, some combo of any or all of those, something else? To the extent that you had control, how did you assess your priorities to guide the decision-making? Were there any cognitive tools (ways of thinking) that helped? I'd love to hear. 

Waffling,
Lukas

Short and early Gnamma this week; I'm in an all-weekend Wilderness First Aid workshop and won't have time to write much. 

I want to touch on why the newsletter format feels right to me. 

My first social online experiences were in 2005, and I started blogging right away (on a Blogspot account), as a place to share LEGO creations that I thought were cool. I was 12 years old. I then co-ran a blog with a guy named Dez who I think lived in North Carolina. Or maybe Oklahoma. I joined another LEGO blog as one of a handful of writers. They all fizzled, and I can hardly remember their names. 

In 2008 I got a tumblr and loved it. Tumblr helped cement some of the friendships I had made through the LEGO community which, at the end of the aughts, was crumbling. But then tumblr got ads and lost the small-scale feel of the blogging circles I was accustomed to. (In the context of today's platform landscape, it started to feel more like Instagram than a blog: short posts mostly seeking to position myself within a web of meta-aware subcultures on the platform, and less sharing what was actually on my mind.)

My tumblr use waned as I started using Are.na, twitter, and instagram. Now it's down to just Are.na and instagram, the rest fading into the internet ether. There have been fits-and-starts of a blog on my website, out of a desire for a place to put longer-form thoughts, but I always hate figuring out how to keep links alive while my stylistic preferences and web technology change. I like my instagram private, as a way to reduce noise and focus on people I already know. 

Much of the joy in my relationship with online media has come through sharing things with people I don't already know. I can hardly imagine removing a public face from the internet: it is part of who I am. It's been 14 years of sharing myself and meeting people on the internet. (That's over half of my life.)

A newsletter makes sense because I want to have a public-facing place where my ideas are accessible, but I hate the necessary upkeep of my personal webpage. A newsletter using the tinyurl service for now, allows me to have a point of public access but, even if tinyurl folds, the material is decentralized into everyone's email inbox space. Those who want to hold on to the words will be able to. It takes the locus of control, in terms of maintenance, out of my hands. In terms of internet infrastructure, I think email servers are one of the most stable, so for now I'll trust in that. 

Knowing that this goes straight into inboxes removes some of the ambient internet performativity that I felt came with an always-accessible blog. (Yes, I know, these are publicly archived too, but it feels like the ephemeral aspect of the publishing is more embraced.)

Some newsletters I enjoy:
Night Heron
Dream Machine
Potato Is A Mass Noun
Metafoundry
The Internet Is A City
News from Alexandra Lange
Kneeling Bus
Subpixel Space

Hitting Send,
Lukas

 

As with many of my Are.na channels, Neogeographia started as a private channel with an invented phrase, to start collecting something for which I didn't yet have a solid name. 

But now the name has stuck, and what I'm seeking to capture are "new geographies" or ways we relate to and study the land. In my eyes, this comes intertwined with greater public awareness that "nature," inasmuch as we linguistically separate "natural" and otherwise, is constructed from an anthropocentric point of view. Humans are natural, too, and "wilderness"—well, I'll let Bill Cronon take the wheel: 

Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, [wilderness] is quite profoundly a human creation-indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it is a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. 

21st-century environmentalism needs to abandon its romantic upholding of "natural / wilderness" and develop a more holistic view of how humans both fit into and create the world. Inference's review on Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres gets into this: 

We are vitally dependent on the earth’s biosphere, yet “the containers and atmospheres that we must allow to surround us can no longer be taken for granted.” We have entered an age in which our “surroundings themselves became, or were recognized as [becoming], constructs.” [...] Sloterdijk has diagnosed the Anthropocene as marking the irrevocable end of what he calls the “backdrop ontology,” the state in which nature is nothing other than “the inoperative scenery behind human operations.” The backdrop is now becoming the foreground, and rapidly becoming a matter of life and death. Immune systems have become central concerns. Making the immune systems explicit means, Sloterdijk writes, in the most important and tragic messages of the book, that human intelligence must break its ancestral habit of trusting to the “backdrop ontology”

Hi Everyone, firstly, some quick bullets: 

Now on to the regular stuff. 

One of the reasons I chose to be an applied math major in college was that I felt mathematics could provide powerful metaphors for making sense of the world. 

My focus area was in partial differential equations. I'm still doing this: when we do analytical fluid mechanics, we're dealing with partial differential equations (PDEs). PDEs can be tricky because there aren't well-structured techniques for finding solutions to them. As such, a lot of what mathematicians do is try to simplify them into known forms, or at least get ballpark estimates of what is going on. 

One of the tools for doing such is nondimensionalization, a process of scaling. For equations derived from physical situations, primarily, this means taking parts of the equation that have units attached (i.e. the acceleration in Navier-Stokes Equations could have units of meters per second^2) and pulling the units out as separate coefficients. Essentially, one can "clump" all of the elements with units into a single term, which yields a nondimensional quantity. 

 

This past week, I went to a workshop at 2727 California Street run by Audrey Johnson, a Detroit-based dancer I met via a friend. 

Audrey's guidance in the workshop was poetic, and I know that she is thinking and working around how language and movement can blend. Mostly, she asked questions and implored us to respond through movement. I was reminded of Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood—150 pages of pure, rapid-fire questions. Reading the Interrogative Mood is a bit difficult: if you start to skim and read the questions just as words, you lose the nuanced patterns throughout; if you endure each question, each page can take a half hour. I didn't think of it at the time, but I may have been channeling such when I made my list of questions on pedagogy (see Gnamma #7). 

It's hard to find meaningful questions for anything, and I find some appeal in this "brute force" approach as a place to begin. (Audrey's queries weren't a deluge: they were nuanced and fairly structured sequentially.) Remember your teachers saying, I hope, that "there's no such thing as a stupid question?" I believe in the adage because any question is a starting point, to build momentum and comfort in exploring answers. 

Reframing thoughts as questions can help suspend logical thinking, too, if you're seeking a divergent mode. My former coworker Lindsey once posed the question, "[can you] walk without sharp edges?"

If I read the words "a walk without sharp edges," my gut response would to think about what in the world that could mean, or if it makes sense. Posed as a question, however, I felt the idea entered the room more softly, with a suspension of disbelief. 
 

The imagined action presses into reality. (This mode of thinking could be framed through Fluxus.) I left the workshop with my body warm and mind reeling from the scope of what felt possible as I followed the questions posed and responses I explored. 

 

The semester is starting to wind down, forcing me into a convergent mode of working, which feels against-the-grain for my brain these days. As such, I'm feeling thankful for the spaces around me that are promoting expansion, questioning, movement. 

Asking the stupid question,
Lukas

My love for surfing has done (at least) two things to my experience of California: brought me back to the same specific locations with some regularity, and made me crucially interested in some conditions of the place. (Where are the winds coming from? How sharp is that big rock on the left? How deep is the break at low tide?) Surfing has become a way for me to "practice geography."

"Practicing Geography"—this phrase has been ringing in my head for the past half-year, colliding with thoughts on bridging digital and physical space, back-to-the-land millennials, and the experience of topographic surveying. For me, it connotes an attention to site-specific conditions: a desire to engage with place as it is. The practice may deepen with a commitment to return, especially at a timescale on which you start to see geographic change (cc, Terra Fluxus). 

My mother's a geographer. This fact, naturally, rubbed off on me. I grew up with ever-present maps and discussion of the nature of place, space, and how people intertwine with landscape. She also loves art museums. Largely because of her, the first thing I wanted to be growing up was a scientist, the second thing a sculptor. 

 

Richard Long

I find a distinct joy in furniture that is really simple. Stupid simple. Mostly in the sense of materials and construction. 

To bring this back to last week, I like furniture that is "legible" in as much as it is honest about its materials and demonstrates some of its manufacturing. This both makes me feel closer to the raw materials (celebrating some primitivism) and more willing to modify it to fit my needs. (i.e. if I can see how it was made, I'm more willing to take it apart and to modify confidently.) I also just appreciate budget, ingenuity, and creative recycling. 

(Aside: some of the side effects of machine learning-driven design will be increasing illegibility in form and manufacturing process to humans. I think Morgan gave me this thought. But a consumer-side illegibility is already happening through complexity and proprietary maintenance. The black-boxing of car functionality, for instance—or really anything that works agains the right to repair.)

At the fun and low-brow end of simple furniture, there's a genre I call "home depot furniture"—that which you can make with a single trip to your local church of the 2x4, Home Depot. 

 

 

While differentiating "human-made" and "natural" landscapes is pretty fruitless, we can effectively make the distinction between objects designed for human legibility or not. Sedimentary layers in rock? Readable if you have some geology background, but not designed with legibility in mind. Some plants have co-evolved with animals towards legibility (appetizing and approachable fruit, say), but many require scrutiny. For the majority of humans on earth, the objects we deal with day-in day-out are designed by humans, for human use. Still, some tools are built to be legible at a mass scale (think: signage in a public transit terminal) while others are "expert interfaces" with steeper learning curves. 
 

 

What am I studying? I've been asking myself this question as I develop an independent study this semester, with little pressure from my advisors. And to answer it, I've been trying to return to why I'm in graduate school in the first place: to develop some skills at the intersection of what I find interesting and what what I see as necessary for the world. 

Well, I've always found fluid mechanics fascinating. This interest started with a love for the descriptive power of partial differential equations, grew with recognition of their epistemological difficulty, and, now that I'm a bit of a surf bum, blends with a love for splashing in the ocean. 

And what's necessary? Finding ways to exist under climate change, of course. Hydrology will be critically important as meteorology becomes more volatile and glaciers melt. Between extreme precipitation and sea level rise, our landforms are going to start shifting around faster than we anticipate. 

Tectonics take the lead, but sediment accumulation by fluid transport is the second major way that landforms are made (whether anthropogenic or natural). How do we account for the sediment necessary to make and maintain landforms under a changing climate? How do we manage infrastructure towards healthy sediment dynamics? 

These are question I'm hoping to dive into. There are long-term (geologic) and short-term (flood insurance) implications of the morphology afforded by sediment budgets. Additionally, much to the joy of an applied mathematician, the opportunity to bring statistical records, observational insights, and analytical models together for mutual cross-validation. 

Short newsletter this week, but something I wanted to share. 

Saltating,
Lukas