
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy

Blogroll
- All about ENSO, and lunar tides (Paul Pukite) Historically, ENSO has been explained in terms of winds. But recently — and Dr Paul Pukite has insisted upon this for a long time — the oscillation of ENSO has been explained as a large-scale slosh due to lunar tidal forcing.
- Why "naive Bayes" is not Bayesian Explains why the so-called “naive Bayes” classifier is not Bayesian. The setup is okay, but estimating probabilities by doing relative frequencies instead of using Dirichlet conjugate priors or integration strays from The Path.
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- Dominic Cummings blog Chief advisor to the PM, United Kingdom
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- Busting Myths About Heat Pumps Heat pumps are perhaps the most efficient heating and cooling systems available. Recent literature distributed by utilities hawking natural gas and other sources use performance figures from heat pumps as they were available 15 years ago. See today’s.
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- The Plastic Pick-Up: Discovering new sources of marine plastic pollution
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- All about models
- Mertonian norms
- NCAR AtmosNews
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- Mike Bloomberg, 2020 He can get progress on climate done, has the means and experts to counter the Trump and Republican digital disinformation machine, and has the experience, knowledge, and depth of experience to achieve and unify.
- Ted Dunning
- Peter Congdon's Bayesian statistical modeling Peter Congdon’s collection of links pertaining to his several books on Bayesian modeling
- Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard on how businesses can help our collective environmental mess Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard set the standard for how a business can mitigate the ravages of capitalism on earth’s environment. At 81 years old, he’s just getting started.
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- Higgs from AIR describing NAO and EA Stephanie Higgs from AIR Worldwide gives a nice description of NAO and EA in the context of discussing “The Geographic Impact of Climate Signals on European Winter Storms”
- Label Noise
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- Gavin Simpson
- Dr James Spall's SPSA
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- American Statistical Association
- Brian McGill's Dynamic Ecology blog Quantitative biology with pithy insights regarding applications of statistical methods
- Hermann Scheer Hermann Scheer was a visionary, a major guy, who thought deep thoughts about energy, and its implications for humanity’s relationship with physical reality
- Awkward Botany
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- Tim Harford's “More or Less'' Tim Harford explains – and sometimes debunks – the numbers and statistics used in political debate, the news and everyday life
- Gabriel's staircase
- Simon Wood's must-read paper on dynamic modeling of complex systems I highlighted Professor Wood’s paper in https://hypergeometric.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/struggling-with-problems-already-attacked/
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- Team Andrew Weinberg Walking September 8th for the Jimmy Fund!
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, reviews Reviews of Cathy O’Neil’s new book
- Darren Wilkinson's introduction to ABC Darren Wilkinson’s introduction to approximate Bayesian computation (“ABC”). See also his post about summary statistics for ABC https://darrenjw.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/summary-stats-for-abc/
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- James' Empty Blog
climate change
- Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature
- `The unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed Barry Goldwater, Jr’s campaign to push for solar expansion against monopolistic utilities, as a Republican
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- Wally Broecker on climate realism
- The HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- History of discovering Global Warming From the American Institute of Physics.
- Documenting the Climate Deniarati at work
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- Sea Change Boston
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- “The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- MIT's Climate Primer
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- The beach boondoggle Prof Rob Young on how owners of beach property are socializing their risks at costs to all of us, not the least being it seems coastal damage is less than it actually is
- US$165/tonne CO2: Sweden Sweden has a Carbon Dioxide tax of US$165 per tonne at present. CO2 tax was imposed in 1991. GDP has grown 60%.
- Bloomberg interactive graph on “What's warming the world''
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- The Sunlight Economy
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- Ice and Snow
- "When Did Global Warming Stop" Doc Snow’s treatment of the denier claim that there’s been no warming for the most recent N years. (See http://hubpages.com/@doc-snow for more on him.)
- Agendaists Eli Rabett’s coining of a phrase
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- Ray Pierrehumbert's site related to "Principles of Planetary Climate" THE book on climate science
- World Weather Attribution
- Isaac Held's blog In the spirit of Ray Pierrehumbert’s “big ideas come from small models” in his textbook, PRINCIPLES OF PLANETARY CLIMATE, Dr Held presents quantitative essays regarding one feature or another of the Earth’s climate and weather system.
- NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index report The annual assessment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the radiative forcing from constituent atmospheric greenhouse gases
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- And Then There's Physics
- Tamino's Open Mind Open Mind: A statistical look at climate, its science, and at science denial
- Social Cost of Carbon
- Professor Robert Strom's compendium of resources on climate change Truly excellent
- Warming slowdown discussion
- Équiterre Equiterre helps build a social movement by encouraging individuals, organizations and governments to make ecological and equitable choices, in a spirit of solidarity.
- Model state level energy policy for New Englad Bob Massie’s proposed energy policy for Massachusetts, an admirable model for energy policy anywhere in New England
- The great Michael Osborne's latest opinions Michael Osborne is a genius operative and champion of solar energy. I have learned never to disregard ANYTHING he says. He is mentor of Karl Ragabo, and the genius instigator of the Texas renewable energy miracle.
- Grid parity map for Solar PV in United States
- Rabett Run Incisive analysis of climate science versus deliberate distraction
- "Warming Slowdown?" (part 1 of 2) The idea of a global warming slowdown or hiatus is critically examined, emphasizing the literature, the datasets, and means and methods for telling such. In two parts.
- Updating the Climate Science: What path is the real world following? From Professors Makiko Sato & James Hansen of Columbia University
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Category Archives: bryophytes
Dr Des Callaghan’s “Bryophytes around the world”
Dr Callaghan is a superb bryophyte photographer.
Posted in bryophyte, bryophytes, The British Bryological Society, zero carbon
Tagged bryophyte photography
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2026 March 14 [J 073.87] “Pi Day”
Geographic coordinates N42.227, W71.230, Westwood, MA, USA
Pohlia lescuriana
Posted in ABLS, blog, Botany, bryology, bryophyte, bryophytes, mosses, New England Botanical Society
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Climacium in Lawns
Posted in Botany, bryology, bryophytes, mosses
Tagged Botany, bryophytes, ecology, mosses
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2024Dec5J340 first snow Westwood: Full temperatures missing as yet
First snow: Cones specifying where sample temperatures etc will be taken described and illustrated in images below: This taken day before snowfall.
2024J315 Mosses of the Day
All Polytrichum. It’s been a couple of months since we have had any serious rain, This is in Westwood, Masschusetts, USA.
2024J281
Taken with 100mm Rokinon lens, OM-5 mirrorless OMD camera.
Posted in bryology, bryophytes, mosses
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Collection of Photos of Moss
As of 2024J266, with various cameras such as Google Pixel, Olympus TG-6 (of two of them), Olympus E-M1 Mark III, and OM Systems (Olympus) OM-5. Various lenses used in case of latter two. Which lenses should be recorded in metadata … Continue reading
Posted in bryology, bryophytes, mosses
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a variety of bryophyte macrophotographs
Posted in ABLS, amateur science, American Bryological and Lichenological Society, biology, Botany, bryology, bryophytes, citizen data, citizen science, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, ecology, field biology, Hale Reservation, macrophotography, mosses, National Phenology Network, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, sampling algorithms, statistical ecology
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Adobe Lightroom for scientific photos
As some readers may know, now I’m retired, I am deeply invested in a multiyear longitudinal study of (primarily) mosses (Bryophyta) at 25 plots near my home. This has been running since end of November 2020, with the first month … Continue reading
Photo of the week: Repeatedly distressed Mnium hornum
This Mnium hornum community is located near a brook which occasionally overflows its banks and at a relative elevation lower than the brook floor. Because of unusual big rains in Dover, Massachusetts in 2021, this hornum community has been inundated … Continue reading
Cladonia coniocraea in a field of Polytrichum juniperinum
Cladonia coniocraea is a lichen. Polytrichum juniperinum is an acrocarp moss. In any case they are beautiful. Full size is available by right-clicking the image and electing “open image in new tab.” Try it. It’s worth it.
Posted in bryology, bryophytes, lichenology, lichens, macrophotography, mosses
Tagged mosses
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Moss Evolution
A lecture by Professor Ralf Reski.
Posted in biology, bryology, bryophytes, evolution, mosses
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Why I Retired
Today’s New York Times contains an article “For Some People, Working from Home Sped Up their Decision to Retire“, by Paul Sullivan. I also retired in 2020. But my motivation was quite different. Unlike many people, I had the option … Continue reading
Mosses of the Week, 4 June 2021
All photographs by Jan Galkowski, 2021.
Moss of the Week, 2021-05-31: Pohlia nutans
All photographs by Jan Galkowski, 2021.
Posted in American Bryological and Lichenological Society, Botany, bryology, bryophytes, mosses
Tagged Botany, bryophytes, mosses
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Field survey update for 2021-03-03 and 2021-03-10: Bryophytes, lichens, and Lycopodia in winter (LoSoMaaCoF)
Online data from principally bryological the longitudinal field survey described here has been updated in its: spreadsheet Photos for Site 1 Photos for Site 2 Photos for Site 3 Photos for Site 4 with the photos and remarks from 2021-03-03 … Continue reading
New Meetup: Massachusetts Mosses and Lichens
I have started a new Meetup group: Massachusetts Mosses and Lichens. I am inviting anyone with an interest in mosses and lichens to join in, particularly if you live in the “greater Massachusetts area”. Because of pandemic, there’ll be no … Continue reading
Posted in ABLS, American Bryological and Lichenological Society, American Statistical Association, biology, Botany, Brent Mishler, bryology, bryophytes, citizen data, citizen science, ecology, field biology, field research, field science, Hale Reservation, Janice Glime, Jerry Jenkins, lichenology, lichens, longitudinal survey of mosses, macrophotography, maths, mesh models, mosses, Nancy G Slack, National Phenology Network, population biology, population dynamics, Ralph Pope, science, spatial statistics, statistical ecology, Sue Williams, the right to know, Westwood
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Field survey update for 2021-02-24: Bryophytes, lichens, and Lycopodia in winter (LoSoMaaCoF)
Online data from principally bryological the longitudinal field survey described here has been updated in its: spreadsheet Photos for Site 1 Photos for Site 2 Photos for Site 3 Photos for Site 4 with the photos and remarks from 2021-02-24. … Continue reading
Why I care about and study mosses
For a guy who has spent most of his professional career developing, studying, and improving engineered systems, software, and applying mathematics to them, the idea of devoting a substantial part of the rest of his life to the study of … Continue reading
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, astrophysics, bryology, bryophytes, carbon dioxide, climate, Cosmos, Ecological Society of America, icesheets, longitudinal study of mosses, longitudinal survey of mosses, National Phenology Network, Neill deGrasse Tyson, science
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Moss of the Week, 2021-02-19
Actually, mosses of the week. This pair of communities are part of my longitudinal study of mosses, some Cladonia chlorophaea lichens, and a few Lycopodium obscurum individuals. This is Site 3, community instances A and B. Instance A is Mnium … Continue reading
Field survey update for 2021-02-17: Bryophytes, lichens, and Lycopodia in winter (LoSoMaaCoF)
(Updated, 2021-02-23) Online data from principally bryological the longitudinal field survey described here has been updated in its: spreadsheet. This post is simply a matter of record, as are the additional rows in the spreadsheet. There were no observations on … Continue reading
Field survey update for 2021-02-03 and 2021-02-10: Bryophytes, lichens, and Lycopodia in winter (LoSoMaaCoF)
(Updated, 2021-02-23) Online data from principally bryological the longitudinal field survey described here has been updated in its: spreadsheet This post is simply a matter of record, as are the additional rows in the spreadsheet. There were no observations on … Continue reading
Field survey update for 2021-01-26: Bryophytes, lichens, and Lycopodia in winter (LoSoMaaCoF)
(Updated, 2021-02-23) Online data from principally bryological the longitudinal field survey described here has been updated in its: spreadsheet Photos for Site 1 Photos for Site 2 Photos for Site 3 Photos for Site 4 with the photos and remarks … Continue reading
On storing and logging moss specimens
(Updated 2021-02-21) The standard way of storing moss specimens — at least that’s taught — is to press them, like most botanical specimens, or to store them, dessicated, in folders like these: That’s from Ralph Pope’s (2016) Guide, Pope, Ralph. … Continue reading
Posted in biology, bryology, bryophytes, data collection, field biology, field science
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Field survey update for 2021-01-20: Bryophytes, lichens, and Lycopodia in winter (LoSoMaaCoF)
(Updated, 2021-02-23) Online data from principally bryological the longitudinal field survey described here has been updated in its: spreadsheet Photos for Site 1 Photos for Site 2 Photos for Site 3 Photos for Site 4 with the photos and remarks … Continue reading

