logs written by Luis Apiolaza in Christchurch, New Zealand
In 1976, when I was 9, I believed that taking a picture of a black and white television would produce an image in full, majestic, colour. The idea came from an accidental photograph, which due to an interaction between the film and colour temperature produced a bluish tinted image.
Needless to say, further trials ended up in disappointment. I often remember this story when setting up research trials.
Trees are amongst the most variable living organisms in the planet. How variable is wood colour for a given species?
Eucalyptus urophylla x Eucalyptus grandis hybrid’s sawn timber. Notice the range of available colours. Maybe the use of clones is exacerbating colour differences. Photo taken in Bahia State, Brazil.
Rough location for the picture
Rough location for the picture.
Trees: some of the most diverse organisms in the planet. Why do trees choose such different wood properties strategies? Why do some species have really low basic density (e.g. balsa) while others have wood that sinks in water? What is the evolutionary trade-off between different properties? How do these properties confer a reproductive advantage? How can we perform very early selection for breeding purposes?
Statistics: the mathematics of variability. Environmental statistics, longitudinal analysis, trying to make sense of Bayesian stats, R and ASReml.
Information flow: the role of information in our lives. How do we learn and obtain information? Sharing research results without limitations, Who are the winners? and What do they do to make the most of information?
No really fascinations but things that I would like to learn (in no particular order): judo, Chapman stick, archery, running, Portuguese, shooting and Japanese.
The Orwell Price is publishing George Orwell’s diaries ‘in real time’, just 70 years apart. The entry of 17th August has a reference to a newspaper clipping on Greenheart Wood:
Greenheart wood, probably the most durable timber in the world, is a member of the laurel family, and grows high on the slopes of the British Guiana Highlands. It is dark green in colour, is so heavy as to sink in water, and takes a high polish.
Its great elasticity makes it suitable for the construction of fishing-rods and the butt ends of billiard cues, yet it is listed A1 at Lloyd’s for shipbuilding, and serves us besides, as piles for piers, jetties, dock entrances and lock gates.
It withstands the attack of submarine borers such as the teredo worm, and is much less vulnerable than most timbers, even tropical hard-woods, to the land attack of the white ant.
Greenheart was largely used in making the Panama Canal. Piles made of the wood have, elsewhere, been taken up and found to be in excellent preservation after 80 years under water.
In a Glasgow museum are two pieces of planking from a wreck submerged on the west coast of Scotland for over 18 years: one, of teak, is almost entirely eaten away: the other, greenheart, is slightly pitted on the surface.
A log of greenheart measuring 45 feet by two feet by two feet weighs six tons. A.B.
Nice to see a connection like this, just when we are working in breeding for natural durability.
Rocking trees from zentree on Vimeo.
This is one of the things that I am writing about: rocking trees, which are located around 100 m from my office.
I recently started reading Haruki Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman collection of short stories(*). I often skip prefaces and introductions but, for an unknown reason, I began skimming the pages and read:
Since the beginning of my career as a fiction writer in 1979 I have fairly consistently alternated between writing novels and short stories. My pattern has been this: once I finish a novel, I find I want to write some short stories; once a group of stories is done, then I feel like focusing on a novel. I never write any short stories while I’m writing a novel, and never write a novel while I’m working on short stories. The two types of writing may very well engage different parts of the brain, and it takes some time to get off one track and switch to the other.
In my case it is the same with other types of writing (no comparison with Murakami intended): scientific papers are my novels and blog posts are my short stories. I have spent the last month working(**) in three papers, which involves a large amount of time thinking, tinkering and putting the words together.
During this time I have not posted one item in Quantum Forest. I did post seven short items in Spanish (in Tren de Carga), but nothing that required much thinking, really, I know that. However, it was good from the microblogging point of view: dozens of updates in Twitter and Amarillo. Microblogging is almost automatic.
There are some times for updating the ‘public face’ (this site) but there are others when much more interesting things take precedence.
(*)Incidentally, last year I did enjoy Murakami’s The wind-up bird chronicle. You may find many people commenting on the many loose ends left in the novel. There are many, but are not a deal breaker.
(**)When I say working, this covers not only writing, but putting together datasets and doing statistical analyses.
Last week I was contacted by my friend Marcelo about increasing awareness of air pollution problems in Santiago, Chile. He was becoming involved in the problem from a technical point of view (GIS and urban forestry). One of the main problems was the lack of proper information for decision making, so we decided to quickly put together a prototype. Today the page on particulate material pollution went online.
The general process was relatively simple. CONAMA provides data on pollution in graphical form (see, for example, here). I had a quick look at the pages using Firebug, which showed that all the data used for the graphs was contained in one of the javascript files called by the page (variable.js). Then I could obtain up to date pollution data by reading that file, which seems to be updated hourly.
The other component was the location of the air quality stations together with the coordinates of the polygon that marks the city boundary. Marcelo provided me with a KML file containing all the coordinates.
The really fun part was to write a script using Python glueing all these components. The advantages of working with such a great high level language is the default library, which makes chores like reading a file located in another web site very simple, like:
import urllib f = urllib.urlopen('http://www.conama.cl/rm/airviro/hoy/variable.js') lines = f.readlines()
Probably the most challenging part has been to quickly learn the basics of KML (without having much free time to do so). The documentation for KML is OK, but the tutorial was not exactly what I was trying to do, so there was a fair amount of trial and error to get things working properly.
Overall, coming back to Python (which I started using in version 1.5) has been a lot of fun, particularly when one has a project of ’social value’.
Using Great Circle Mapper to get an idea of the full itinerary (14 flights) that I followed last April.
Just over 30,200 km in planes.
I finished studying forestry in 1992; it reads like a life ago. I did study in Santiago, Chile and one of my first decisions was to leave the city. Actually I was thinking of leaving Santiago well before completing the degree.
When people ask me about going to Chile and their intention to visit Santiago my first thought is always ‘Why?’ Despite of tourist brochures, and the not always reliable ‘Lonely Planet’ guide, the city is a shit hole. A five million people city, spread ad infinitum, with the consequent crime, pollution and neurosis. However, a redeeming — for me — feature of that city is that some of my friends live there. One of my friends is trying to sort out pollution (or at least part of it) using trees.
I grew up having the Andes as a point of reference, and when one can see them, they are very impressive.
Photo by Felipe Trucco.
The problem is that a lot of the time — particularly in winter — the city looks like this.
Photo by .S.
Besides the visual difference, there is a lot of particulate materials that have very negative effects on health. Here is that trees come into place.
‘Traditional’ foresters tend to be suspicious about ‘Urban forestry’, but it is an approach that could benefit Santiago. Trees would contribute to reduce the amount of small particles suspended in the air, not the least by stabilizing land areas now simply covered by dirt. These areas become all muddy under rain and are transformed into dust sources when they dry up.
Have a look at Anisotrópico (Marcelo’s blog) for details. He also setup a handy KMZ file (16 KB) for checking the data of the EMC stations monitoring air quality in Santiago through Google Earth.
This was a quick shot at Eucalyptus urophylla residues coming from a sawmill in Brazil. A beautiful mess.
Sawmill residues in Brazil.