The rest of the biography fleshes out my grade-school hero-biography memory, always interestingly. For instance, he was probably born just after Emancipation, to a woman who had been a slave; but the man who bought her didn’t approve of slavery and seems to have raised Carver pretty kindly. We know he was a frail child; he spent his youth near the house learning women’s work and was a cook and crocheter his whole life (and would sit and do fancy work at extension meetings with farmwomen).

Also, undeniably brilliant, frighteningly hard-working, loved by almost everyone who got to know him, and he survived the viciousness and confusions of Reconstruction.

All this from Mark D. Hersey’s My Work Is That Of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), which I strongly recommend.

The same species of crows, carrion crows, are cooperative in Spain and (pair) isolates in Switzerland — but when eggs are swapped between countries, the crows grow up with the traits of the host families, not their genetic parents.

This should, like the formats of natural language documents, be merely a matter of taste.

The abstract of Guo’s thesis defense:

Software Tools to Facilitate Research Programming

Abstract:

Research programming is a type of programming activity where the goal is to write computer programs to obtain insights from data. Professionals in fields ranging from science, engineering, business, finance, public policy, and journalism, as well as students and computer hobbyists, all perform research programming on a daily basis. The contributions of this dissertation are to characterize the process of research programming, describe the unique challenges that people face throughout this activity, and present five software tools that I have developed to address some of the key challenges. 1.) Proactive Wrangler is an interactive graphical tool that helps research programmers reformat and clean data prior to analysis. 2.) IncPy is an enhanced Python interpreter that speeds up the data analysis scripting cycle and helps programmers manage code and data dependencies. 3.) SlopPy is an enhanced Python interpreter that automatically makes
existing scripts error-tolerant, thereby speeding up the data analysis scripting cycle. 4.) Burrito is a Linux-based system that helps programmers organize, annotate, and recall past insights about their
experiments. 5.) CDE is a software packaging tool that makes it easy to deploy, archive, and share research code. Taken together, these tools allow programmers to iterate and potentially discover insights faster by offloading the burdens of data management and provenance to the computer.

Also, at Earthcube, a nice definition of workflow: “Workflows are used to manage complex computations that have many steps or use large data. Workflow systems assist scientists to select models appropriate for their data, configure them with appropriate parameters, and execute them efficiently. This goal of this group is to advance the use of workflow technologies in geosciences to accelerate discoveries.”

Then my lab desktop machine was stolen (from a locked room on the third floor of a should-be-locked building). Down to one copy.

Then my home hard-drive started making funny noises, and I spent an unpleasant morning deciding how to get it backed up offsite with the least load on the drive. As it happens, the drive didn’t fail, so I now have  a private Subversion directory, a copy on my home machine, and a truncated Subversion copy coming back up on the department server (I think). Interesting trade-off between the commercial backup sites’ obligations, and attractive target status, and their having more resources to concentrate on reliability.

I’m certainly happy that all my money-related passwords are in my head, and everything else is in LastPass rather than on my stolen lab machine.

Belt, suspenders, and overalls? Back up your stuff, friends.

“Those results are all reported in Bulletin No. 54 of the Bureau of
Soils,” said the Chemist, “and I have extra copies right here and
will be glad to present you with one. And let me give you our
Bulletin 22 also. This will enable you to get a clear idea of the
principles we are developing which are solving the soil fertility
problems that have completely baffled the scientists heretofore.”

In fact, the main character Percy frequently reads off tables of nutrient values to other characters, in dialogue.

What I found most interesting was how long US agriculture has known that we were not farming sustainably: by 1911 many regions had already been exhausted. The science of the time was making great strides in diagnosing the exhaustion, and working out the mass-conservation problems to decide which manures would help, or only exhaust other land. Cheap shipping was making it possible to bring in nutrients from other continents. But in this novel the characters regret that their ancestors from 1811 had not avoided even the problems they had known about in 1811; and they earnestly assure each other that the government and commerce of 1911 will, for instance, come up with a plan to conserve phosphorus, since the geological supplies of that are finite and largely not in the US.

As far as I know, we have not come up with such a plan.

N.b.: The main character is a Yankee visiting the South to find a cheap farm to rehabilitate; he marries a young Southern woman of ‘good family’. I think rather a lot of the story is an illustration of how the North and South reconciled by switching out Reconstruction for Jim Crow: the racial scenes are pretty scabrous.

It was great talking to so many scholars and enthusiasts of burrowing mammals, patterned ground, and patterned plants.

If we were truly re-creating the spodosol, we would make some normal cake and then filter something through it until it had developed distinct layers. Perhaps the molecular gastronomists will take it up. Some genoise recipes are intentionally quite dry, so we can drizzle syrups and liqueurs on them, but I can’t think of a case in which we intentionally make distinct soaking-fronts within the food.

The research in this 1926 pamphlet has, of course, been improved on, but it might just be useful for historical information.

I scanned it because the pamphlet is old and brittle. The UC Berkeley library assures me that the original is digitally available through LexisNexis, and is public-domain anyway. I didn’t find it through LexisNexis, so here is a copy for anyone else who would like it.

Grinnell, J. (1926). Geography and evolution in the pocket gophers of
california. Technical Report 2894, Smithsonian.