John C. Baez's Blog, page 67

Quantifying Biological Complexity

Next week I’m going to this workshop:

• Biological Complexity: Can It Be Quantified?, 1-3 February 2017, Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Arizona State University, Tempe Arizona. Organized by Paul Davies.

I haven’t heard that any of it will be made publicly available, but I’ll see if there’s something I can show you. Here’s the schedule:

Wednesday February 1st

9:00 – 9:30 am Paul Davies

Brief welcome address, outline of the subject and aims of the meeting

Session 1. Life:...

Azimuth Backup Project (Part 3)

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Along with the bad news there is some good news:

• Over 380 people have pledged over $14,000 to the Azimuth Backup Project on Kickstarter, greatly surpassing our conservative initial goal of $5,000.

• Given our budget, we currently aim at backing up 40 terabytes of data, and we are well on our way to this goal. You can follow our progress on our Issue Tracker.

• I have gotten a commitment from Danna Gianforte, the head of Computing and Communications at U. C. Riverside, that eventually the...

Saving Climate Data (Part 4)

At noon today in Washington DC, while Trump was being inaugurated, all mentions of “climate change” and “global warming” were eliminated from the White House website.

Well, not all. The word “climate” still shows up here:

President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan….

There are also reports that all mentions of climate change will be scrubbed from the website of the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA.

From Motherboard

Le...

The Irreversible Momentum of Clean Energy

The president of the US recently came out with an article in Science. It’s about climate change and clean energy:

• Barack Obama, The irreversible momentum of clean energy, Science, 13 January 2017.

Since it’s open-access, I’m going to take the liberty of quoting the whole thing, minus the references, which provide support for a lot of his facts and figures.

The irreversible momentum of clean energy

The release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) due to human activity...

Solar Irradiance Measurements

guest post by Nadja Kutz

This blog post is based on a thread in the Azimuth Forum.

The current theories about the Sun’s life-time indicate that the Sun will turn into a red giant in about 5 billion years. How and when this process is going to be destructive to the Earth is still debated. Apparently, according to more or less current theories, there has been a quasilinear increase in luminosity. On page 3 of

• K.-P. Schröder and Robert Connon Smith, Distant future of the Sun and Earth revisite...

Information Processing in Chemical Networks

There’s a workshop this summer:

• Dynamics, Thermodynamics and Information Processing in Chemical Networks, 13-16 June 2017, Complex Systems and Statistical Mechanics Group, University of Luxembourg. Organized by Massimiliano Esposito and Matteo Polettini.

They write, “The idea of the workshop is to bring in contact a small number of high-profile research groups working at the frontier between physics and biochemistry, with particular emphasis on the role of Chemical Networks.”

Some invited s...

Give the Earth a Present: Help Us Save Climate Data

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We’ve been busy backing up climate data before Trump becomes President. Now you can help too, with some money to pay for servers and storage space. Please give what you can at our Kickstarter campaign here:

• Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project.

If we get $5000 by the end of January, we can save this data until we convince bigger organizations to take over. If we don’t get that much, we get nothing. That’s how Kickstarter works. Also, if you donate now, you won’t be billed until January 31st...

Saving Climate Data (Part 3)

You can back up climate data, but how can anyone be sure your backups are accurate? Let’s suppose the databases you’ve backed up have been deleted, so that there’s no way to directly compare your backup with the original. And to make things really tough, let’s suppose that faked databases are being promoted as competitors with the real ones! What can you do?

One idea is ‘safety in numbers’. If a bunch of backups all match, and they were made independently, it’s less likely that they all suffe...

Azimuth Backup Project (Part 2)

I want to list some databases that are particularly worth backing up. But to do this, we need to know what’s already been backed up. That’s what this post is about.

Azimuth backups

Here is information as of now (21:45 GMT 20 December 2016). I won’t update this information. For up-to-date information see

• Azimuth Backup Project: issues.

For up-to-date information on the progress of each of individual databases listed below, click on my summary of what’s happening now.

Here are the databases...

Azimuth Backup Project (Part 1)

This blog page is to help organize the Azimuth Environmental Data Backup Project, or Azimuth Backup Project for short. This is part of the larger but decentralized, frantic and somewhat disorganized project discussed elsewhere:

• Saving Climate Data (Part 2), Azimuth, 15 December 2016.

Here I’ll just say what we’re doing at Azimuth.

Jan Galkowski is a statistician and engineer at Akamai Technologies, a company in Cambridge Massachusetts whose content delivery network is one of the world’s lar...