David

@yonderdavid.bsky.social

839 Followers 220 Following

Tomorrow ere fresh morning streak the east With first approach of light, we must be risen, And at our pleasant labour, to reform Yon flowery arbours, yonder alleys green

The Rebel by Albert Camus
A fake YouTube thumbnail of a white-haired techno musician on his backyard patio reads: "They Said I'm Too Old to Make Techno... So I Built an Insane Crank Too Weird to Mute."
Andrew McCarthy's "The Fall of Icarus" photograph of a skydiver against the sun. From https://www.galaxus.fr/en/page/photographer-succeeds-in-capturing-skydiver-in-front-of-the-sun-40489
An adult male American Goldfinch. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/173240451
Canary Yellow - #FFEF00
The growth of an animal colony compared with a drop of ink.
The table of contents of an origami book, showing the models one might naively suppose the book to be about first appearing on page 90.
On Twitter, mathematician Alvaro Lozano-Robledo writes: "If you are in math and you are depressed, you shouldn't be. The number of projects that I have in mind have tripled or quadrupled now that I can have access to LLM's to assist me on things I had given up before." To this, computer engineering professor Cem Say replies: "Exactly. I now have so much more work than before." Dr. Lozano-Robledo replies: "So much math to do and so little time! My grad students will profit with problems handed off to them left and right."
The Contrapoints meme reads: "They don't want adaptation, they don't want prevention. They want to endlessly prevent adaptation."
A speech bubble extends downward from a portrait of Khawaja Masood Akhtar.
"You know what the biggest problem with pushing impostorvid is? Wrong direction. I want AI to manage my tabs so that I can do posting, not for AI to do my posting so that I can manage my tabs."
[me telling my story how I survived a plane crash and lived on a deserted island for a year] it was crazy [friend who once got a text from me where I accidentally called a squinch a squink] was the squink there?
Men stand next to giant American Chestnut trees.
RIP to everyone killed by the gods for sieging tholdenblarna but im different. and better. maybe even better than the gods
Watts and Strogatz (1998)...which I am sure most Americans have read.
"The traditional approach to soil conservation in the Aegean, and throughout much of the Mediterranean, is the construction of stone-walled terraces on slopes and stone check dams across gullies and small streams. The system is not only effective in reducing erosion but actively stores soil behind the terrace walls. Kept in good repair, terraces and dams virtually eliminate sheet and gully erosion, but the soil reservoir which gradually accumulates behind them is delicately perched and metastable. Once that reservoir is set in motion by any breaching of its walls, erosion is rapid and difficult to contain. Although an excellent soil conservation method, terracing exacts it price by the need for unceasing maintenance (Forbes and Koster, 1976). Terrace walls appeared in the Levant during the later 2nd millennium B.C., associated with the culture of the olive (Gophna, 1979). In Greece, they have been used since at least Classical times, but few walls so old or older have been identified, and the date of intro- duction of the technique is not known. We have, however, seen behind an old terrace wall the occasional soil profile that appeared to be only slightly less mature than the Pikrodafni soil and hence might date to the 2nd millennium B.C. Mycenaean engineering, adept at the construction of fortresses, roads, bridges, and retaining walls, was certainly up to the task. Whatever the soil conservation techniques may have been (although terracing appears to us the only plausible candidate), they were eminently successful, because no further trace of alluviation is found for the entire period of Mycenaean prosperity. Not even the collapse at the end of this period and the subsequent major abandonment of the area shown by the apparent absence of 1 1th- and 10th-century sites have left any mark on the landscape. The reason must surely be the rapidity with which, upon abandonment of large tracts of land, the natural vegetation takes over..."
"Evidently, as regards soil conservation, a depressed rural economy may be far more damaging than total economic collapse. During an economic downturn, the upkeep of agricultural terraces, especially when distant and on marginal soil, is. seen as not cost-effective over the short term (Jameson, 1977-78), and the farmer will tend to redirect his efforts to better, more centrally located fields. A small continuing benefit may, however, be extracted by harvesting some olives and especially by turning the fields over to grazing by sheep or goats. This practice, common in the off-season in times of prosperity also, requires considerable effort by the shepherd to insure that terrace walls and land are not damaged, an effort less likely to be made when the interest of the landowner has so obviously lessened. When the shepherd ceases to control his flock with brush barriers and no longer repairs any damage they may have done to the walls, two things happen that are serious and eventually fatal to the soil accumulated for centuries behind the walls. Sheep and goats wander across those walls, kicking down stones and creating trails soon excavated by the winter rains into gullies, which branch within the deposits behind the walls and rapidly remove the soil. The increased and concentrated runoff swells the small streams and spills across check dams, undercutting them until they collapse. Very rapid vertical erosion is the result. We note that, unlike the fine quality of prehistoric hydraulic engineering seen in some other parts of the world (e.g. Donkin, 1979), check dams in the Southern Argolid tend to be poorly constructed without proper spillover rims and splash basins. Moreover, owners appear to prefer the freedom to schedule work that comes from repairing rather than preventing damage and to accept the limited soil loss that normally results. ..." The excerpt continues, taken from "Five Thousands Years of Land Use and Abuse in the Southern Argolid, Greece"
"The soils of the gently rolling hill country of the southern peninsula and of the ophiolites of the Fournoi valley and Iliokastro plateau, mainstays of agriculture during the 4th through 2nd millennia B.C., are not especially vulnerable to erosion even without deliberate attempts at soil conservation. Evidence for this is the relatively large area of deep soil still remaining after 5,000 years of exploitation. In the semiarid climate of the eastern Mediterranean, landscape stability is naturally maintained by the vegetation (e.g. Naveh and Dan, 1973), and even after a major disturbance maquis and pine woods will quickly establish a protective cover provided that the disruption by burning, brush cutting, or overgrazing does not continue too severely. We have seen terraces bulldozed into steep slopes of shale which, having been abandoned after failure to deliver the expected yield, had become fully protected by a dense growth of maquis within a decade or so. Therefore, a system of long fallow, with plowed fields scattered between larger areas left untended for many years, would present little risk of major soil erosion, because maquis would swiftly colonize fallow fields, as pollen data indeed indicate (Sheehan, 1979). Occasionally, a few years of exceptional rains in summer when the plant cover is most fragile might induce sheet erosion, but otherwise the risk of soil erosion would only gradually increase as growing population pressure led to shortening of the fallow and exploitation of progressively steeper slopes." Excerpt from "Five Thousands Years of Land Use and Abuse in the Southern Argolid, Greece"
"I recall arriving in terraced vineyard country just east of Delphi in central Greece on the morning after a violent thunderstorm. I spent some time watching a farmer recovering soil that had washed down off a terrace by shoveling it into baskets, loading them two at a time onto the pack saddle of a single donkey, leading the animal back up to the top of the terrace, and emptying the baskets there. The same scene, including replacing stones in terrace walls, must have been repeated countless times by that farmer’s predecessors. Such antierosional measures are labor-intensive. If anything interrupts the labor, walls collapse, ditches are choked, and erosion accelerates. Erosion due to lack of maintenance was surely sometimes the fault of absentee landlords who failed to keep watch over what was happening on their land. Warfare especially could prevent maintenance by making a territory unsafe, by conscripting farmers, or by killing them. Rural populations were the manpower resource of ancient armies, and as men were recruited to battle, the land often suffered. Study of underwater siltation at the mouths of Mediterranean rivers indicates that erosion was more rapid during periods when a particular drainage basin was the locale of warfare." Excerpt from "Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans" by J. Donald Hughes.
A screenshot of Google Earth, looking downslope toward Thermopylae. The view shows land stretching seaward from Thermopylae, with miles of land between it and the shore.
"Erosion Rates Near Rome, Italy Abstract. Before man's intensive use of the land the rates of erosion near Rome, Italy, were approximately 2 to 3 centimeters per thousand years. With intensive occupation by man the rates have increased by an order of magnitude." https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.160.3835.1444
"Evidently, the barren aspect of this part of the Peloponnese is largely due to the ravages of Pleistocene climate and sea-level changes and only to a lesser degree attributable to human carelessness." Excerpt from "Five Thousands Years of Land Use and Abuse in the Southern Argolid, Greece" https://www.jstor.org/stable/147733
"Consequently, since many great convulsions took place during the 9000 years—for such was the number of years from that time to this—the soil which has kept breaking away from the high lands during these ages and these disasters, forms no pile of sediment worth mentioning, as in other regions, but keeps sliding away ceaselessly and disappearing in the deep. And, just as happens in small islands, what now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away, and only the bare framework of the land being left. But at that epoch the country was unimpaired, and for its mountains it had high arable hills...and it had much forestland in its mountains, of which there are visible signs even to this day; for there are some mountains which now have nothing but food for bees, but they had trees no very long time ago, and the rafters from those felled there to roof the largest buildings are still sound...Moreover, it was enriched by the yearly rains from Zeus, which were not lost to it, as now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea; but the soil it had was deep, and therein it received the water, storing it up in the retentive loamy soil and by drawing off into the hollows from the heights the water that was there absorbed, it provided all the various districts with abundant supplies of springwaters and streams, whereof the shrines which still remain even now, at the spots where the fountains formerly existed, are signs which testify that our present description of the land is true." Plato, Critias 111a-d Translated by R. G. Bury
A page of Greek text from Plato's Critias as it appears in this book in the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/b2900049x_0009/page/272/mode/2up
Hermann Gottlieb from Pacific Rim
"Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Brains"
A speech bubble emanates downward from a bust of Aristotle.
The user replies "Haha, 'head-to-head'" to Claude. Claude replies "Ha—entirely unintentional, but I'll take it. Probably the most on-topic pun I'll land all day."
no gods no masters no gravity wells