So many things. But to manage my ADHD: Raworth's new Planetary Boundaries model, Cave Bears and Fluorescent Minerals, and Telomeres.
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New Planetary Boundaries Graphic – Doughnut Economics
I don’t fully understand this yet but it looks really promising for answering my questions about Socio-Ecological Systems Theory, Planetary Boundaries, and Tragedy of the Commons issues. I just read Monbiot’s review of Raworth’s new book and immediately bought it on Amazon: Doughnut Economics. Also, look up Raworth: (https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/)

Cave Bears and Fluorescent Minerals

I visited Clemson’s Botanical Garden Earth Day event yesterday and found the Bob Campbell Geology Museum. In that museum is a bunch of fun stuff but two things in particular caught my eye: a cave bear skull and glowing rocks. First, the cave bear. I am familiar with myths and stories of cave bears (Jean Auel!) and have been completely infatuated with their distant cousins – the North American Short-Faced Bears – but have never seen a cave bear skull. It’s huge. Like, huge huge. Easily twice as big as a modern grizzly but it looks like it was forged from steel and granite. Ursus spelaeus was a monster that died out about 24k years ago (the Short-Faced Bear, 10k years ago) and the depictions and renderings of it are the thing of nightmares.
 
Second, did you know that rocks can glow? I didn’t. I’ve been to Natural History Museums in every city I’ve travelled to on the globe and have never seen anything like this craziness. A smallish completely dark room with a bunch of rocks and minerals behind glass, lit up by a UV light. And then the rocks started glowing all kinds of crazy colors. It’s an acid trip. As a naturalist, I’ve had problems connecting with constellations, lakes, and geology. There’s something about them that doesn’t click and I don’t know why. But I took another step along the path to geology seeing this exhibit yesterday. According to geology.com/articles/fluorescent-minerals/: “Some minerals have an interesting physical property known as "fluorescence." These minerals have the ability to temporarily absorb a small amount of light and an instant later release a small amount of light of a different wavelength. This change in wavelength causes a temporary color change of the mineral in the eye of a human observer. The color change of fluorescent minerals is most spectacular when they are illuminated in darkness by ultraviolet light (which is not visible to humans) and they release visible light.”

Telomeres
I’m reading this self-helpy/sciency book about how to stay healthy and happy: The Telomere Effect.  Like several other books I’ve read it has its base in something scientific (like self-help books using neurochemicals or quantum physics to explain why and how you can be better…) explaining how to live a more fulfilling life. The science on this one is based on telomeres. I didn’t know what they were before this but it sounded interesting - so why not pick up the book? Getting into it and it reads like a bad self-help book but differently somehow – like they’re trying to be a bad self-help book. You can tell they’re trying to make things anecdotal and related to “real-life” stories. It occurred to me that this is either the lamest book ever or there is something really cool here and they are trying to make it make sense to the general public. I looked into the authors and Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn won the Nobel for her discovery of telomeres and was chastised by the Bush administration for her advocacy of stem cells in modern medicine. These people are geniuses and have found something super important for humanity and are trying to get discovery out of the weird realm of scientific articles and into the hands of everyday folk. I’m halfway through the book but quick synopsis so far:

• To the best of my understanding, telomeres are the shoestring ends hanging off of DNA that can be short or long
• The story of how they work and what they’re for is fascinating – look it up
• Long telomeres are good, short telomeres speed up cell death
• Don’t buy any telomere enhancing products – at best they’re a waste of money, at worse they work too well and can cause cancers
• There are all kinds of things correlated with longer telomeres: decreased stress, decreased chronic depression, processed food, alcohol, tobacco, sleep, etc
• Telomere length: part of it is causal (due to behaviors), part of it is environmental, part of it is genetic
• “Genetics loads the gun, environment fires it”
• Telomeres can be changed through behavior

Surrogate idea
 
This idea was thrown around casually in reference to using “the next best thing” as a substitute for an unknown characteristic in a system’s equation. This is a cool idea because it allows you to proceed with an idea even if you don’t know all the components. It allows you to work on and estimate interactions while being honest about lacking full knowledge. I wrote the term down and then tried to look it up and found subpar definitions. The best I found was in reference to electrical engineering and developing circuitry even if not everything is present:
“A surrogate model is an engineering method used when an outcome of interest cannot be easily directly measured, so a model of the outcome is used instead. Most engineering design problems require experiments and/or simulations to evaluate design objective and constraint functions as function of design variables. For example, in order to find the optimal airfoil shape for an aircraft wing, an engineer simulates the air flow around the wing for different shape variables (length, curvature, material, ..).”
 
With a little more digging I found how it relates to Critical Theory. Below are two hyperlinks that play with the idea.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/2009/february-09/surrogates-for-theory.html
https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/volltexte/institut/dok/full/gg/GG_Surr_1998.pdf
 
I think this could be helpful in SocioEcological Systems Theory and a surrogate of a critical unknown could be used to help solve a wicked problem.
 
 
Thinking too hard
I was busy doing busy work this week and didn’t learn too much new. However, I did have the idea that I am too concerned with knowing all the constituent parts that I don’t allow myself to learn what’s going on. In effect, I am getting in my own way, making things more difficult than they need to be and that is stopping me from learning. I believe our weaknesses are our strengths in excess and my strength is in understanding the narrative. My weakness though may just be in hamstringing myself until I learn the whole thing before being able to comprehend the parts. This is playing out in Statistics. I think I am making it more difficult than it needs to be.

​System vs Piece Thinking
 
I’m trying to understand ecological ideas and social studies together and these present themselves as systems. I’ve looked at Chaos systems, Socio-Ecological Systems, and Complex Systems but I never thought about what a system is or how to define it. Specifically, there is a way of thinking different from normal ‘Piece’ Thinking called ‘Systems Thinking’. I’m trying to understand it but Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive explanation of it:
 
Systems thinking has been defined as an approach to problem solving that attempts to balance holistic thinking and reductionistic thinking. By taking the overall system as well as its parts into account systems thinking is designed to avoid potentially contributing to further development of unintended consequences. There are many methods and approaches to systems thinking. For example, the Waters Foundation presents systems thinking as a set of habits or practices within a framework that is based on the belief that the component parts of a system can best be understood in the context of relationships with each other and with other systems, rather than in isolation; and that systems thinking focuses on cyclical rather than linear cause and effect. Other models characterize systems thinking differently. Recent scholars, however, are focused on the "patterns that connect" this diversity or pluralism of methods and approaches.
 
Several ways to think of and define a system include:

• a system is composed of parts
• a system is greater than the sum of its parts
• all the parts of a system must be related (directly or indirectly), else there are really two or more distinct systems
• a system is encapsulated (has a boundary)
• a system can be nested inside another system
• a system can overlap with another system
• a system is bounded in time, but may be intermittently operational
• a system is bounded in space, though the parts are not necessarily co-located
• a system receives input from, and sends output into, the wider environment
• a system consists of processes that transform inputs into outputs
• a system is autonomous in fulfilling its purpose (a car is not a system. A car with a driver is a system)

 
Systems science thinkers consider that:
 

• A system is a dynamic and complex whole, interacting as a structured functional unit circuit.
• Energy, material and information flow among the different elements that compose a system (see open system).
• A system is a community within an environment.
• Energy, material, and information flow from and to the surrounding environment via semi-permeable membranes or boundaries that may include negotiable limits.
• Systems are often composed of entities that seek equilibrium but can exhibit patterns, cycling, oscillation, randomness, or chaos (see chaos theory), or exponential behavior (see Exponential Function).

 
Types of Systems:

• Hard systems – involving simulations, hard systems approaches to system thinking often use computers and the techniques of operations research/management science. Hard systems approaches are useful for problems that can be justifiably quantified. However, hard systems cannot easily account for unquantifiable variables such as opinions, culture, or politics, etc.,[citation needed] and may treat people as passive elements, rather than as beings with complex motivations.
• Soft systems (or soft systems methodology) – is a methodology for systems that cannot easily be quantified, especially systems that involve people holding multiple and conflicting frames of reference. Soft systems methods are useful for understanding motivations, viewpoints, and interactions, and for addressing qualitative as well as quantitative dimensions of problem situations. Soft systems approaches to system thinking may use foundation methodological work developed by Peter Checkland, Brian Wilson, and their colleagues at Lancaster University. This approach may include morphological analysis, which is a complementary method for structuring and analyzing non-quantifiable problem complexes.
• Evolutionary systems – Béla H. Bánáthy developed a methodology that is applicable to the design of complex social systems. This technique integrates critical systems inquiry with soft systems methodologies. Evolutionary systems, similar to dynamic systems are understood as open, complex systems, but with the capacity to evolve over time. Bánáthy uniquely integrated the interdisciplinary perspectives of systems research (including chaos, complexity, cybernetics), cultural anthropology, evolutionary theory, and others.

The systems thinking approach incorporates several tenets:[5]

• Interdependence of objects and their attributes – independent elements can never constitute a system
• Holism – emergent properties not possible to detect by analysis should be possible to define by a holistic approach
• Goal seeking – systemic interaction must result in some goal or final state
• Inputs and outputs – in a closed system inputs are determined once and constant; in anopen system additional inputs are admitted from the environment
• Transformation of inputs into outputs – the process by which the goals are obtained
• Entropy – the amount of disorder or randomness present in any system
• Regulation – a method of feedback is necessary for the system to operate predictably
• Hierarchy – complex wholes are made up of smaller subsystems
• Differentiation – specialized units perform specialized functions
• Equifinality – alternative ways of attaining the same objectives (convergence)
• Multifinality – attaining alternative objectives from the same inputs (divergence)

A treatise on systems thinking ought to address many issues including:

• Encapsulation of a system in space and/or in time
• Active and passive systems (or structures)
• Transformation by an activity system of inputs into outputs
• Persistent and transient systems
• Evolution, the effects of time passing, the life histories of systems and their parts.
• Design and designers.

Using the tenet of "multifinality", a supermarket could be considered a:

• "Profit making system" from the perspective of management and owners
• "Distribution system" from the perspective of the suppliers
• "Employment system" from the perspective of employees
• "Materials supply system" from the perspective of customers
• "Entertainment system" from the perspective of loiterers
• "Social system" from the perspective of local residents
• "Dating system" from the perspective of single customers