A pond full of ice

It's the first day of winter, and it's hard to ignore its arrival. The temperature dropped overnight to the single digits, with a steady wind blowing. The backyard fish pond has been transformed into a frozen puddle, its surface a dull grey circle of ice three feet around and as many inches thick. This is the first year we've left fish outside, and I'm a little bit worried.

That's the problem with abstracting a bit of nature, you have to keep fussing at it. If the pond covered an acre and was ten feet deep, my fish's survival would be obvious. But shrink it down to the size of a bathtub, and you've taken on a full-time job as caretaker, doing by measurement and constant adjustment everything that nature does automatically. Too acid? add bicarbonate. Too basic? Add acid. Dirty? change the filter. Algae? too much nitrogen, change the water. Winter? let it get cold, but not too cold, frozen, but not too frozen, and wait for spring.

Feedback loops are funny. People like them straightforward and stable - set the thermostat and complain if your house varies by more than a degree no matter what the weather. By comparison, feedback loops in nature tend to be individually more unstable, but interact in complex and messy ways such that the everything works out OK.

The fish I brought indoors for the winter are in a perpetual autumn, stable temperature, filtered water, food every morning. They'll go outside in the spring unchanged - fat, dumb, and happy. Their cousins in the pond are dormant, lying near the bottom in nearly-freezing water, living off the reserves they built up during a frenzied eating binge of the summer, when even the pond's decorative plants were suddenly fair game for nibbling. If I don't do anything wrong, they'll be skinny but alive in March, and if I'm very lucky I'll get surprised with a batch of baby fish come May. Wheels within wheels; the seasonal variations in feeding and activity are part of the trigger for breeding.

Under the ice the circulator pump continues to hum, but the water's outlet is covered by a asymmetric bubble of clear ice inches thick, like some Steuben Glass fantasy in Tiffany's window. The pump is my engineering trade-off between two evils, as the circulating water gets more uniformly cold, but also should maintain an unfrozen hole in the surface to allow trapped waste gasses to escape. Shaking my head, I realize that pretty theory was hatched in the heat of summer, and now it's the first day of winter and the surface of the pond is solidly frozen.

Taking on my designated role as meddler, I decide to help nature along a bit by pouring a bucket or two of water onto the pump outlet, not warm enough to change the pond temperature and shock the fish, but perhaps enough to melt a new channel for the flowing water. Sure enough, a narrow groove begins to form, followed a few minutes later by a thin stream of flowing water, and then finally by a small hole that opens in the pond's surface.

Time for a walk.

Digital fire, Digital Ice

Reading this article http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/photo.html
brings to mind the poem about the world ending "in Fire, or in Ice."

It's becoming more and more obvious to me that we're about half way into a period that history will note as "the time no one knows much about." More and more of our incidental records - - newspapers, correspondence, photographs, are being kept on volatile media (color snapshots rather than silver prints, acid pulp paper instead of rag stock, and of course digital data on unknown media encoded in unremembered format.) It's a bit like losing all of your family's memorabilia to a house fire, only this inferno burns slowly and silently, and may take away a whole generation's memory.

Librarians and preservationists are working on solutions, both technological (periodic media conversions) and legal (archival waivers of copyright and DRM restrictions.) But, it's a big job and it's funded purely out of the petty cash box, relatively speaking.

The more subtle amnesia may come if by some whimsy or miracle the bulk of those bits survive, leaving an unsolvable needle in the haystack problem. A little back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that I'm sitting on a bit more than a Terabyte of personal data, mostly in the form of photographic negatives, vinyl records, CDs, and paper. I think I can find a photo from thirty years ago; it would be in a box upstairs, and there's probably a contact sheet to simplify my search. Finding my expense records for eight years ago would be a whole lot harder, and an email from three jobs (and similar number of PCs) ago nearly impossible. I've got the data, but as it becomes more digital it becomes less accessible, freezing me out.

Indexing it all gets harder over time, too. It's bad enough to go through old photo albums with my mom, asking "what's that?" and getting slightly different answers each time. What happens when that's multiplied exponentially? What if there is so much data that there isn't enough eyeballs to look at everything before its memory fades beyond recollection?

Maybe that's what pays the way for all of those folks in the Star Trek universe. All that casual walking around the flight deck of space ships is their "off time." After that, they have to put in a sweaty eight hours sorting old credit card receipts, annotating digital images of people waiving in front of long-demolished buildings, and reverse-engineering technical manuals for Betamax VCRs, and 8-track tape players.

The Fox

There's a fox in our neighborhood. I occasionally see him trotting across the road in the distance as I walk the dogs at twilight. By conventional wisdom, there shouldn't be any foxes within miles of us. The common belief is that we live in far too urban a setting -- more appropriate turf for squirrels, raccoon, an occasional rabbit. Yet, there is the fox.

Musing on this dichotomy between fact and expectation, I wondered what the fox thought of this tangle of houses, roads, and fences in which it found itself. It's obviously lost, I thought, having wandered here from some more rural locale, perhaps driven by starvation or fear. This was followed by the odd notion that I and my dogs could just as easily be the interlopers in a world of foxes.

With that in mind, I attempted to view my evening's stroll through a fox's eyes. Parked cars turned to rocks, houses to hills, and landscaped yards lost their geometric perfection and became small fields broken by clumps of bush and ridges of stone, with each shadow and bed of mulch hinting at the possibility of a mouse.

Suddenly, the fox's route made perfect sense, not as a furtive dash between suburban lots, but as a casual meander across backyard meadows occasionally bisected by the dried stream bed of a street. I saw the fox again -- no, two foxes, exiting a break in an old stone wall and through the fence into the old town reservoir. The taller grass there must give promise of more prey, but also of more competition from the hawks and owls that might roost in the peripheral trees. I laughed, thinking of the gated community at the top of the hill, and wondering what the people there would think if they knew their iron-barred fence was no barrier to a narrow fox, their "luxury townhouses" no more to him than steep brick cliffs surrounding a verdant hunting ground.

The fox was not driven here by fear or stranded by accident. The fox was at home, and perhaps raising a family. And now I knew what had happened to the chipmunks, so numerous in the spring and so rarely seen in the fall.

What else in our lives is hidden from our normal sight, waiting for us to look on it with new eyes? What relationships lay unaware, what wisdoms unrevealed?

What other foxes live among us?