I wanted to compile a few notes about our recent article “Building back bigger in hurricane strike zones“, which appeared in the December (2018) issue of Nature Sustainability. We’re grateful to have received some ace media coverage. Eleanor Cummins wrote about our findings for Popular Science. YaleEnvironment360, put out by the Yale School of Forestry…
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>1M views (and counting)
[Photo courtesy of NOAA.] At the end of last October, Scott Armstrong & I got a ping from Carlos Waters, a journalist and multimedia producer with Vox.com. He was working up a piece on beach nourishment. He’d come across our paper in Earth’s Future (Armstrong et al., 2016), in which we (et alia) show, using…
Read MoreArrow’s impossibility theorem – for academics
I’m reading John Cassidy’s remarkable book How Markets Fail (2009), which includes a brief aside on economist Kenneth Arrow‘s fundamental work on “‘social’ ordering” – the problem of “converting individual preferences over a set of [possibilities]…into a consistent ordering for society as a whole” (p. 62, in Cassidy’s paperback edition). To paraphrase Cassidy’s eloquent summary,…
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Ghost research: taking stock of work that disappears
I recently discovered a citation (in Breen, 1990) referring to a short article my father wrote for National Fisherman, in 1988, in which he reported on a new kind of lobster trap with a “catch escape panel”, aimed at reducing bycatch. My dad had a steady freelance gig at the time with National Fisherman, and…
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A writing exercise: manually mapping one draft onto another
Scott Armstrong & I just tried this writing exercise: Required materials include two different drafts of the same manuscript (here, let’s call one “early” and one “final”), several sheets of flip-chart paper, scissors, tape, and a handful of coloring markers. Make sure there are line numbers in the margins of both manuscripts, and print them…
Read MoreOverwash experiment GIF – continuous scanning @saflumn @stcNCED
Sneak preview of a forthcoming animated feature. Below is a sequence of topographic scans taken from a single run. Data are a bit raw, but they still offer a sense of how active the berm could be. One pass with the laser along the three meter length of the berm required five cross-shore swaths (here…
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Race to a spectacular beginning (overwash experiments conclude, for now)
Today was my last on the SAFL shop floor. What a spectacular visit this has been. I’m grateful to both the NCED2 program and the British Society for Geomorphology for the opportunity to work here in Minneapolis these past two weeks. Rich discussions, incredible facilities, and so much enthusiasm from so many people – not…
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“Someone’s gotta help me dig…” (Day 3 @stcNCED @saflumn)
Been singing to myself this line from Father John Misty en route to the lab these past couple of mornings. Today was one of learning systems. Chris Ellis found a rotameter, introduced me to thread-seal tape (Teflon tape), and gave me a plumbing problem to work out (I still managed to install it upside-down the…
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Day 2 @stcNCED @saflumn – check your levels
Yesterday’s trial produced one overwash lobe; today’s produced two. Getting there. I spent much of today off by an eighth of an inch. I misaligned the blocks on the screed we’re using to level the planar surfaces, reminding myself of the classic construction adage to “measure twice, cut once.” After a lot of frowning and…
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“Morphodynamics of breaching” experiments @stcNCED @saflumn – Day 1
It almost worked the first time. I’m writing from the University of Minnesota’s St. Anthony Falls Lab (SAFL) in Minneapolis, home of the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED). Thanks to Chris Paola, I’m here as a visiting scientist, funded by NCED and a small research grant from the British Society for Geomorphology to run…
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The Environmental Dynamics Lab (EDL) 