WaterWired

Two Evenings with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Mary Frances and I treated ourselves to two nights - about 4.5 hours on 28 and 29 November - listening to
lectures by famed astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. It was a remarkable experience. As if you did not know Tyson is an excellent lecturer with a well-developed sense of humor and a style that puts you at ease. He is an accomplished storyteller. And did I say smart? 

This won't be a review - just my few stream-of-consciousness (really?) thoughts on the event.

The Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in dpwntown Portland was the venue. It holds about 2800 people. It was close to full on Wednesday and looked to be just about full on Thursday. Both crowds were enthusiastic.

Yes, he did start each talk with a playful dig at those who feel Pluto should be a planet (after an introduction via 'Fly Me to the Moon'). 

He spoke on a different topic each night: 1) Adventures in Science Literacy (28 November); and 2) The Cosmic Perspective (29 November). Brief descriptions are on the event website:

“Adventures in Science Literacy”
The joys of knowing how the universe works and the disasters that can unfold when you do not. In this illustrated talk, examples of each will be drawn from across time and cultures, culminating in a commentary on the state of science in America today.

“The Cosmic Perspective”
There is no view of the world as emotionally potent as the one granted by a cosmic perspective. It’s one that sees Earth as a planet in a vast empty universe. It profoundly influences what we think and feel about science, culture, politics, and life itself.

 He promoted a few books (this is one of his PowerPoints):

We bought signed cooies of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry and his most recent (written with Avis Lang),  Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military. I don't fault him for doing a little sales pitch; he did not spend a lot of time on his books.

He gave a few fascinating examples on each topic. He spoke of his encounters with the US justice system - three calls for jury duty, but released each time during voir dire. In one case involving a person alleged to have sold 3000 milligrams of cocaine to an undercover police officer he questioned why '3000 milligrams' was used instead of '3 grams' (about a tenth of an ounce). Thisfirst case resonated with me since I use similar examples in the water resources field.

He said he felt it could prejudice the jury, since '3000' would sound like a lot to many people. He was excused. In another his excuse came about because he said that eyewitness accounts are not as reliable as most people believe. He used his debunking of many 'flying saucer' cases as examples. Excused again!

He made an interesting correlation between the iconic 1968 Earthrise photo by Apollo 8 and the rise of the environmental movement and laws that arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

All in all, money and time very well spent. We enjoyed it and it appeared that our fellow attendees did as well.

Fans will be glad to hear that the TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey will premier in March 2019... 

One minor complaint: he spent a lot of time running from center stage to the podium at stage left to change slides. Duhhhh.....

I would be remiss if I did not mention the sexual impropriety allegations against him by three women. Here is the Guardian article and Tyson's Facebook post on the issue.

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963 (tnx Neil deGrasse Tyson)

Kathleen Rugel: Getting to Water: Website, Blog, Book, and Lots More!

Dr. Kathleen Rugel, aquatic ecologist, WaterWonk extraordinaire, friend and Policy and Practice Fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) is no stranger to these pages. About a year ago I linked to her piece about the ACF Basin ACF Basin: Crossing Lines: Reaching Across the Table to Share Water. 

She has just created a website. Getting to Water: How Neighbor and Nation Share Our Most Precious Resource. She is also writing  a book of the same name.

Here is her introduction:

Getting To Water is a collection of case studies about how water is being shared and protected around the world. These are local to international examples of prudent management of water which is shared, often between stakeholders with very different agendas. The culmination of this project is a book entitled: Getting to Water: How Neighbor and Nation Share Our Most Precious Resource. I hope you will visit this site often as I travel regionally and internationally to collect these inspiring stories which can be used to guide anyone charged with or interested in helping to manage their water resources.

In her email to me she wrote:

 I just returned from Romania and Vienna where I was interviewing people working on the Danube River. I included a blog on the website with brief first impressions along with several other blogs,

Here is a link to her blog. Check out her piece on the ACF Basin.

Kathleen will be at the upcoming AWRA meeting in Baltimore. It'll be great to see her.

Excellent - enjoy!

"Re-examine all you have been told...and dismiss whatever insults your soul: and your very flesh shall be a great poem..." -- Walt Whitman (from the preface to Leaves of Grass - thanks to K. Rugel)

Stephen J. Burges Perspective 2: 'Why I am an Optimist'

Back with Steve Burges. Yesterday's paper was oriented to a journal whereas today's 2011 paper focuses on hydrology and water resources.   

Burges, S. J. (2011), Invited perspective: Why I am an optimist, Water Resour. Res., 47, W00H11, doi:10.1029/2010WR009984. [Free access]

Download Burges_Optimist-WRR_2011

Abstract

I address a range of topics that provide the sociopolitical‐technological setting for my professional life. I discuss some influential features of post–World War II world geopolitics, landmark technological developments of that era, and the resulting follow‐up technologies that have made it possible to approach various problems in hydrology and water resources. I next address societal needs that have driven developments in hydrology and water resources engineering and follow with a discussion of the modern foundations of our science and what I think are the principal issues in hydrology. I pose three community challenges that when accomplished should advance hydrologic science: data network needs for improving the water budgets at all scales, characterizing subsurface water flow paths, and the information archiving and mining needs from instruments that will generate substantially richer data detail than have been used for most hydrologic work to the present. I then discuss several hydrologic and water resource risk‐based decision issues that matter to society to illustrate how such risks have been addressed successfully in the past. I conclude with a long‐term community “grand challenge,” the coupled modeling of the ocean‐atmosphere‐landform hydrologic cycle for the purpose of long–lead time hydrologic prediction.

Introduction

The work that we can do is influenced heavily by the social and political setting and the technical capabilities of the times. I was born in August 1944 in Newcastle, Australia, so I have chosen to address issues that place my living and work environment into perspective starting from the mid‐1940s. I start with some details of the world geopolitical setting and follow that with a discussion of landmark technological developments that have occurred during my lifetime and the resulting follow‐up technology that made it possible to approach various problems. I next list what I consider to be the major issues in hydrology and water resources engineering and follow with a short discussion of the foundations of much of our science. With this background I address issues associated with improving the catchment water budget and pose three community challenges: the need for improved measurement of hydrologic fluxes and states, how to characterize “hillslope” heterogeneity, and data storage and use from increasingly data rich instruments.

Hydrologists and engineers a century ago faced the same risk‐based decision problems (e.g., floods and droughts) we face today, albeit usually with shorter records than are now available. One modern concern is how to account for apparent or possible “nonstationarity” in our data time series. I address this by considering two examples and also provide two inspiring examples for how societally important risk‐based (under considerable uncertainty) designs were made with only short records. I close with a community “grand challenge” to work toward hydrologic prediction at time scales on the order of a decade and longer.

I once had a colleague tell me that he told his students that there was little point in reading papers more than five years old. This paper and yesterday's should disabuse us of that ridiculous statement.

Enjoy!

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach." - Aldous Huxley (quoted in @TheVDT via @TheWeek)

Stephen J. Burges Perspective 1: 'Water Resources Research - Past, Present, and Future'

The title of this guest editorial refers to the journal Water Resources Research, arguably the most prestigious multidisciplinary water resources journal in the world. It's from July 1990 and written by Stephen J. 'Steve' Burges, one of the great hydrologists of our time. I've gotten to know Steve much better these last few years and he sent me this as a result of an online request I made of him.

Still relevant almost 30 years later.

Download Burges_WRR_Guest_Editorial_July_1990

Abstract

Water Resources Research was established as a multidisciplinary journal largely to satisfy needs perceived by a committee headed by the late Walter Langbein in 1962. The papers in volume 1, number 1, set the tone and high standard of scholarship for all subsequent issues; we are all in debt to the founding co‐editors, Allen Kneese and Walter Langbein, for their leadership and vision. Most research workers consider this journal to be a highly desirable forum to share their ideas and findings with colleagues. What has served the community well for twenty‐five years may or may not be the most appropriate medium as we enter the era of multimedia and multisensorial display of the information from which we distill our knowledge.

I'll post another perspective from Steve tomorrow. Chew on this one till then.

Enjoy!

"Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present." - Bill Keane

A Father's Day Tribute to Giovanni Pellegrino Campana

Giovanni Pellegrino Campana would have been 104 just 11 days prior to this Father's Day.  That name
is on his birth certificate, but we knew my father as John Pilgrim Campana. Born on 6 June 1914, the son of Italian immigrants Consiglia and Domenico Campana, who arrived on these shores from Naples, Italy, in the late 1890s.   

The family settled in Boston, where my father grew up playing baseball, ice hockey, but most of all, studying. He attended Boston Latin School, the oldest and arguably still the best high school in the USA.

 

After that, it was off to the oldest college in the USA, Harvard, where he graduated summa cum laude with a degree in history in 1936. In those days, Harvard was not a hospitable place for Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, or Jews. Forget about Latinos or African-Americans; it was the bastion of WASPs - White (or Wealthy) Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

 

He loved playing hockey - he was a right winger - but didn't play for Harvard after his freshman year. He told me that the rich kids on the team would rent one of the indoor arenas for practices that were restricted to themselves and their friends. So while he worked, they practiced and he fell behind. When he told me this, there was nary a trace of bitterness in his voice. That's just the way it was.

 

But his true sports love was baseball. He played shortstop and pitcher on the Harvard team till he graduated in 1936. I have a team ball signed by all the players on the 1936 team, with the inscription: Harvard - 3, Yale - 0.

 

He married 'Southern belle' (North Carolina) Ruth Ellen Emerson in 1943 and they had three children. They first lived in Manhattan, then moved out to Queens, and finally, headed to the Long Island suburbs in December 1951, where they remained until 1978., retiring to Mooresville, North Carolina.

 

He started teaching in the New York City school system in 1938, a career that spanned 36 years, 26 of which were spent at Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High School, the nation's second-oldest high school. He taught history and political science and coached golf and bowling. In those days, EHHS was one of the nation's best. Its top students won scholarships to the USA's finest universities. As I grew up, I remember many visits from former students who would drop by to thank him for all he had done. They told me what a remarkable teacher and man he was and how much he had helped them.

 

Many of his students in those days were Jewish students from the Flatbush section. Their parents were not wealthy but small shopkeepers and homemakers. Yet their children routinely won scholarships to the Ivy League schools. I recall one of them who ranked 100th in his senior class but won a free ride to Princeton. My father was so proud of them - he knew they still faced the discrimination he had known in the 1930s. He had some famous students - Barbra Streisand and Bobby Fischer were among them. How about Kenny Vance? Listen to him sing 'Looking for an Echo' (skip to 1:15 if you don't want to wait). Kenny was one of the founders of Jay and the Americans. 

 

He left EHHS in 1964 to help open Canarsie High School in Brooklyn. He was the Assistant Principal, a position that earned him more money but meant no more teaching. That was a tough call for him.

 

His time at CHS was difficult - an unreasonable boss and trouble from the start. In those days, the races and ethnicities mixed worse than they do today. On some days scores of NYPD officers patrolled the halls and grounds. When a chair whizzed by his head during a cafeteria free-for-all, he knew it was time to retire. That was 1974. 

 

The photo was taken a few years before he left CHS.

 

My father was an inveterate and prolific letter-writer. He would write letters to all kinds of people: political leaders, heads of state, CEOs, editors, sports figures, et al.  At the time of his death he was working on a book titled, One Small Voice, a collection of his letters. His favorite target was Tom Yawkey, then the owner of his beloved but then-incompetent Boston Red Sox. He would instruct Yawkey on whom to trade, whom to release, etc. He reminded Yawkey that he was losing black players to other teams (the Red Sox were one of the last teams to integrate). It was a futile exercise, of course, but he enjoyed it. One of my big regrets in life was seeing him die in 1984, before the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, 2007 and 2013. But at least he did not witness the 1986 debacle. That surely would have killed him. My father's devotion to the Sox and their history still has an impression on me: although I am a Yankees fan, there is a soft spot in my heart for the Red Sox.

 

He worked summers serving as a golf instructor at summer camps or running camps supplying caddies for resort hotels - The Balsams and Mount Washington hotels in New Hampshire. Because of him I have a love for the Granite State's White Mountains, where I caddied at the Maplewood Hotel - the same place he caddied in the late 1920s - early 1930s.

 

I often wonder how the Internet would have appeared to him. Given his love for writing and commentary, would he have become a blogger? Somehow I doubt it. He was committed to letters.

 

He was remarkable man. A student of history, language, politics, sports, chess, and more. He was small in stature and an unlikely athlete. Baseball, hockey, golf, bowling, and tennis were his games.

 

I know for sure what he would think of our current President!

 

Whatever my talents are as a scholar, mentor, and teacher I owe to him. Likewise for what it means to be a man. He was so proud when I received my PhD. He had an ABD (all but dissertation) from Fordham - marriage and a family intevened - and he never finished.  He would have made quite a professor!

 

At the end of my freshman year in college he even took my announcement that I wanted to be a disk jockey with uncustomary tranquility. Well, sort of.... 

 

I miss you, Dad; I think of you each day.  You're my role model.

But I think the Yankees will beat out your Sox this year. And what happened to the Bruins this year?

 

"Democracy is like a raft; you're safe, but your feet get wet." -- John P. Campana