Posts Tagged ‘complex systems’
“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong… when we know that we actually do live in uncertainty, then we ought to admit it; it is of great value to realize that we do not know the answers to different questions.”*…
The immense complexity of the climate makes it impossible to model accurately. Instead, David Stainforth argues, we must use uncertainty to our advantage…
Today’s complex climate models aren’t equivalent to reality. In fact, computer models of Earth are very different to reality – particularly on regional, national and local scales. They don’t represent many aspects of the physical processes that we know are important for climate change, which means we can’t rely on them to provide detailed local predictions. This is a concern because human-induced climate change is all about our understanding of the future. This understanding empowers us. It enables us to make informed decisions by telling us about the consequences of our actions. It helps us consider what the future will be like if we act strongly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, if we act only half-heartedly, or if we take no action at all. Such information enables us to assess the level of investment that we believe is worthwhile as individuals, communities and nations. It enables us to balance action on climate change against other demands on our finances such as health, education, security and culture.
For many of us, these issues are approached through the lens of personal experience and personal cares: we want to know what changes to expect where we live, in the places we know, and in the regions where we have our roots. We want local climate predictions – predictions conditioned on the choices that our societies make.
So, where do we get them? Well, nowadays most of these predictions originate from complicated computer models of the climate system – so-called Earth System Models (ESMs). These models are ubiquitous in climate change science. And for good reason. The increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are driving the climate system into a never-before-seen state. That means the past cannot be a good guide to the future, and predictions based simply on historic observations can’t be reliable: the information isn’t in the observational data, so no amount of processing can extract it. Climate prediction is therefore about our understanding of the physical processes of climate, not about data-processing. And since there are so many physical processes involved – everything from the movement of heat and moisture around the atmosphere to the interaction of oceans with ice-sheets – this naturally leads to the use of computer models.
But there’s a problem: models aren’t equivalent to reality.
So, what can we do? One option is to make the models better. Make them more detailed and more complicated. That, though, raises an important question: when is a model sufficiently realistic to predict something as complex as climate change? When will the models be good enough? We don’t have an answer to this question. Indeed, scientists have hardly begun to study this problem, and some argue that these models might never be sufficiently accurate to make multi-decadal, local climate predictions.
Nevertheless, changing the way we use ESMs could provide a different and better way to generate the local climate information we seek. Doing so involves embracing uncertainty as a key part of our knowledge about climate change. It involves stepping back and accepting that what we want is not precise predictions but robust predictions, even if robustness involves accepting large uncertainties in what we can know about the future…
[Stainforth explains the current state of modeling, efforts to make them better, and the problems those efforts encounter…]
… focusing on high-resolution modelling is dangerous not only because we have no answer to the question of when a model is sufficiently realistic. Investing in this approach also means we don’t have the capacity to explore the uncertainties, which inevitably encourages overconfidence in the predictions that models make. This is a particular concern because Earth System Models are increasingly being used to guide decisions and investments across our societies. Overconfidence in model-based predictions therefore risks encouraging bad decisions: decisions that are optimised for the futures in our models rather than what we understand about the range of possible futures for reality.
By contrast, perturbed physics ensembles and storyline approaches focus on exploring and describing our uncertainties. Placing uncertainty front and centre is important. When we make an investment or a gamble, we don’t just base it on what we think is the most likely result. We consider the range of outcomes that we think are possible – ideally these are characterised by probabilities, although this isn’t always achievable. It’s the same with climate change. We should not only make plans based solely on our best estimate of what might happen. We should also consider the range of plausible outcomes we foresee. Our knowledge of uncertainty is also part of what we know about climate change. We should embrace this knowledge, expand it and use it.
If we understand the uncertainties well, we can bring our values to bear on the risks we are willing to take. Uncertainty therefore needs to be at the core of adaptation planning while also being the lens through which we judge the value of climate policy and the energy transition. In my view, climate researchers and modellers wanting to support society should focus on understanding, characterising and quantifying uncertainty, and avoid the trap of seeking climate models that make reliable predictions. They may well never exist…
A more practical approach to preparing for climate change: “The model of catastrophe,” from @aeon.co
* Richard Feynman
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As we preference plausibility (over predictability), we might send never-ending birthday greetings to August Möbius; he was born on this date in 1790. An astronomer and mathematician, he studied under mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss while Gauss was the director of the Göttingen Observatory. From there, he went on to study with Carl Gauss’s instructor, Johann Pfaff, at the University of Halle, where he completed his doctoral thesis The occultation of fixed stars in 1815. In 1816, he became Extraordinary Professor in the “chair of astronomy and higher mechanics” at the University of Leipzig, where he remained for the rest of his career. Möbius made many contributions to both astronomy and the math that underlay it: he was among the first to conceive the possibility of geometry in more than three dimensions; he introduced homogeneous coordinates into projective geometry; and he pioneered the barycentric coordinate system… all parts of the intellectual foundation of the complex system modeling described above.
But while he was an influential scholar and professor, he is best remembered for his creation of the “Möbius strip.”
“Never call an accountant a credit to his profession; a good accountant is a debit to his profession.”*…
The estimable Henry Farrell on accountancy as a lens on the hidden systems of the world…
When reading Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, The Bezzle [which your correspondent highly recommends], I kept on thinking about another recent book, Bruce Schneier’s A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules and How to Bend Them Back [ditto]. Cory’s book is fiction, and Bruce’s non-fiction, but they are clearly examples of the same broad genre (the ‘pre-apocalyptic systems thriller’?). Both are about hackers, but tell us to pay attention to other things than computers and traditional information systems. We need to go beneath the glossy surfaces of cyberpunk and look closely at the messy, complex systems of power beneath them. And these systems – like those described in the very early cyberpunk of William Gibson and others – are all about money and power.
What Bruce says:
In my story, hacking isn’t just something bored teenagers or rival governments do to computer systems … It isn’t countercultural misbehavior by the less powerful. A hacker is more likely to be working for a hedge fund, finding a loophole in financial regulations that lets her siphon extra profits out of the system. He’s more likely in a corporate office. Or an elected official. Hacking is integral to the job of every government lobbyist. It’s how social media systems keep us on our platform.
Bruce’s prime example of hacking is Peter Thiel using a Roth IRA to stash his Paypal shares and turn them into $5 billion, tax free.
This underscores his four key points. First, hacking isn’t just about computers. It’s about finding the loopholes; figuring out how to make complex system of rules do things that they aren’t supposed to. Second, it isn’t countercultural. Most of the hacking you might care about is done by boring seeming people in boring seeming clothes (I’m reminded of Sam Anthony’s anecdote about how the costume designer of the film Hackers visited with people at a 2600 conference for background research, but decided that they “were a bunch of boring nerds and went and took pictures of club kids on St. Marks instead”). Third, hacking tends to reinforce power symmetries rather than undermine them. The rich have far more resources to figure out how to gimmick the rules. Fourth, we should mostly identify ourselves not with the hackers but the hacked. Because that is who, in fact, we mostly are….
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… Still, there are things you can do to fight back. One of the major themes of The Bezzle is that prison is now a profit model. Tyler Cowen, the economist, used to talk a lot about “markets in everything.” I occasionally responded by pointing to “captive markets in everything.” And there isn’t any market that is more literally captive than prisoners. As for-profit corporations (and venal authorities) came to realize this, they started to systematically remake the rules and hack the gaps in the regulatory system to squeeze prisoners and their relatives for as much money as possible, charging extortionate amounts for mail, for phone calls, for books that could only be accessed through proprietary electronic tablets.
That’s changing, in part thanks to ingenious counter hacking. The Appeal published a piece last week on how Securus, “the nation’s largest prison and jail telecom corporation,” had to effectively default on nearly a billion dollars of debt. Part of the reason for the company’s travails is that activists have figured out how to use the system against it…
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… In other sectors, where companies doing sketchy things have publicly traded shares, activists have started getting motions passed at shareholder meetings, to challenge their policies. However, the companies have begun in turn to sue, using the legal system in unconventional ways to try to prevent these unconventional tactics. Again, as both Bruce and Cory suggest, the preponderance of hacking muscle is owned by the powerful, not those challenging them.
Even so, the more that ordinary people understand the complexities of the system, the more that they will be able to push back. Perhaps the most magnificent example of this is Max Schrems, an Austrian law student who successfully bollocksed-up the entire system of EU-US data transfers by spotting loopholes and incoherencies and weaponizing them in EU courts. Cory’s Martin Hench books seem to me to purpose-designed to inspire a thousand Max Schrems – people who are probably past their teenage years, have some grounding in the relevant professions, and really want to see things change.
And in this, the books return to some of the original ambitions of ‘cyberpunk,’ a somewhat ungainly and contested term that has come to emphasize the literary movement’s countercultural cool over its actual intentions…
One word that never appears in Neuromancer, and for good reason: “Internet.” When it was written, the Internet was just one among many information networks, and there was no reason to suspect that it would defeat and devour its rivals, subordinating them to its own logic. Before cyberspace and the Internet became entangled, Gibson’s term was a synecdoche for a much broader set of phenomena. What cyberspace actually referred to back then was more ‘capitalism’ than ‘computerized information.’
So, in a very important sense, The Bezzle returns to the original mission statement – understanding how the hacker mythos is entwined with capitalism. To actually understand hacking, we need to understand the complex systems of finance and how they work. If you really want to penetrate the system, you need to really grasp what money is and what it does. That, I think, is what Cory is trying to tell us. And so too Bruce. The nexus between accountancy and hacking is not a literary trick or artifice. It is an important fact about the world, which both fiction and non-fiction writers need to pay attention to…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Today’s hackers wear green eyeshades, not mirrorshades,” from @henryfarrell in his invaluable newsletter Programmable Mutter.
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As we ponder power, we might recall that on this date in 1927, a “counter-hacker” in a different domain, Mae West, was sentenced to jail for obscenity.
Her first starring role on Broadway was in a 1926 play entitled Sex, which she wrote, produced, and directed. Although conservative critics panned the show, ticket sales were strong. The production did not go over well with city officials, who had received complaints from some religious groups, and the theater was raided and West arrested along with the cast. She was taken to the Jefferson Market Court House (now Jefferson Market Library), where she was prosecuted on morals charges, and on April 19, 1927, was sentenced to 10 days for “corrupting the morals of youth.” Though West could have paid a fine and been let off, she chose the jail sentence for the publicity it would garner. While incarcerated on Welfare Island (now known as Roosevelt Island), she dined with the warden and his wife; she told reporters that she had worn her silk panties while serving time, in lieu of the “burlap” the other girls had to wear. West got great mileage from this jail stint. She served eight days with two days off for “good behavior”.
Wikipedia
“The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see”*…
The breath-takingly broadly talented Joesph Preistley left us much– not least, Alyson Foster explains, a then-new way of understanding history…
It’s a testament to the wide-ranging and unconventional nature of Joseph Priestley’s mind that no one has settled on a term to sum up exactly what he was. The eighteenth-century British polymath has been described as, among other things, a historian, a chemist, an educator, a philosopher, a theologian, and a political radical who became, for a period of time, the most despised person in England. Priestley’s many contradictions—as a rationalist Unitarian millenarian, as a mild-mannered controversialist, as a thinker who was both ahead of his time and behind it—have provided endless fodder for the historians who have debated the precise nature of his legacy and his place among his fellow Enlightenment intellectuals. But his contributions—however they are categorized—have continued to live on in subtle and surprisingly enduring ways, more than two hundred years after his death, at the age of seventy, in rural Pennsylvania.
Take, for example, A Chart of Biography, which is considered to be the first modern timeline. This unusual, and unusually beautiful, pedagogical tool, which was published by Priestley in 1765, while he was in his thirties and working as a tutor at an academy in Warrington, England, tends to get lost in the shuffle of Priestley’s more notable achievements—his seminal 1761 textbook on language, The Rudiments of English Grammar, say, or his discovery of nine gases, including oxygen, 13 years later. But the chart, along with its companion, A New Chart of History, which Priestley published four years later, has become a curious subject of interest among data visualization aficionados who have analyzed its revolutionary design in academic papers and added it to Internet lists of notable infographics. Recently, both charts have become the focus of an NEH-supported digital humanities project, Chronographics: The Time Charts of Joseph Priestley, produced by scholars at the University of Oregon.
Even those of us ignorant of (or uninterested in) infographics can look at the painstakingly detailed Chart of Biography for a moment or two and appreciate how it has become a source of fascination. The two-foot-by-three-foot, pastel-striped paper scroll—which contains the meticulously inscribed names of approximately 2,000 poets, artists, statesmen, and other famous historical figures dating back three millennia—is visually striking, combining a formal, somewhat ornate eighteenth-century aesthetic with the precise organization of a schematic. Every single one of the chart’s subjects is grouped vertically into one of six occupational categories, then plotted out chronologically along a horizonal line divided into ten-year increments. Despite the huge quantity of information it contains, it is extremely user-friendly. Any one of Priestley’s history students could run his eye across the chart and immediately gain a sense of the temporal lay of the land. Who came first: Copernicus or Newton? How many centuries separate Genghis Khan from Joan of Arc? Which artists were working during the reign of Henry VIII? The chart was a masterful blend of form and function…
The most significant design feature of Priestley’s chart—as historians point out—was the way in which he linked units of time to units of distance on the page, similar to the way a cartographer uses scale when creating a map. (The artist Pietro Lorenzetti lived two hundred years before Titian and thus is situated twice as far from Titian as Jan van Eyck, who predated Titian by about a century.) If this innovation is hard for contemporary viewers to fully appreciate, it’s probably because Priestley’s representation of time has become a convention that’s used everywhere in visual design and seems so obvious it’s now taken for granted.
To Priestley’s contemporaries, though, who were accustomed to cumbersome Eusebian-style [see here] chronological tables or the visually striking but often obscure “stream charts” created by the era’s chronographers, Priestley’s method of capturing time on the page revealed something revelatory and new—a way of seeing historical patterns and connections that would have otherwise remained hidden. “To many readers,” wrote Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton in their book, Cartographies of Time, Priestley’s Chart of Biography offered a never-before-seen “picture of time itself.”
It was no wonder, then, that eighteenth-century readers found themselves drawn to it. A Chart of Biography sold well in both England and the United States, accruing many fans along the way. Along with the New Chart of History, it would go on to be printed in at least 19 editions and spawn numerous imitations, including one by Priestley’s future friend Thomas Jefferson, who developed his own “time chart” of market seasons in Washington, and the historian David Ramsay, who acknowledged Priestley’s influence in his Historical and Biographical Chart of the United States. The time charts marked Priestley’s first major commercial success and played a key role in establishing his reputation as a serious intellectual, earning him an honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh, and helping him secure a fellowship nomination to the Royal Society of London.
As much as anything he published, and he published a staggering amount—somewhere between 150 and 200 books, articles, papers, and pamphlets—Priestley’s time charts encapsulate his uniqueness as a thinker. Of his many intellectual gifts, his gift for synthesis—for knitting together the seemingly disparate things that caught his attention—might have been his greatest…
Read on for how Priestley went on to become the most controversial man in England: “Joseph Priestley Created Revolutionary ‘Maps’ of Time,” by @alysonafoster in @humanitiesmag from @NEHgov.
More info on the Chart– and magnified views– here.
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As we celebrate constructive charts, we might spare a thought for Edward Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist, best remembered as a pioneer of Chaos Theory; he died on this date in 2008. Having noticed that his computer weather simulation gave wildly different results from even tiny changes in the input data, he began investigating a phenomenon that he famously outlined in a 1963 paper— and that came to be known as the “butterfly effect,” that the flap of a butterfly’s wings could ultimately determine the weather thousands of miles away and days later… generalized in Chaos Theory to state that “slightly differing initial states can evolve into considerably different [later] states.”
“Several thousand years from now, nothing about you as an individual will matter. But what you did will have huge consequences.”*…
In 2013, a philosopher and ecologist named Timothy Morton proposed that humanity had entered a new phase. What had changed was our relationship to the nonhuman. For the first time, Morton wrote, we had become aware that “nonhuman beings” were “responsible for the next moment of human history and thinking.” The nonhuman beings Morton had in mind weren’t computers or space aliens but a particular group of objects that were “massively distributed in time and space.” Morton called them “hyperobjects”: all the nuclear material on earth, for example, or all the plastic in the sea. “Everyone must reckon with the power of rising waves and ultraviolet light,” Morton wrote, in “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World.” Those rising waves were being created by a hyperobject: all the carbon in the atmosphere.
Hyperobjects are real, they exist in our world, but they are also beyond us. We know a piece of Styrofoam when we see it—it’s white, spongy, light as air—and yet fourteen million tons of Styrofoam are produced every year; chunks of it break down into particles that enter other objects, including animals. Although Styrofoam is everywhere, one can never point to all the Styrofoam in the world and say, “There it is.” Ultimately, Morton writes, whatever bit of Styrofoam you may be interacting with at any particular moment is only a “local manifestation” of a larger whole that exists in other places and will exist on this planet millennia after you are dead. Relative to human beings, therefore, Styrofoam is “hyper” in terms of both space and time. It’s not implausible to say that our planet is a place for Styrofoam more than it is a place for people.
When “Hyperobjects” was published, philosophers largely ignored it. But Morton, who uses the pronouns “they” and “them,” quickly found a following among artists, science-fiction writers, pop stars, and high-school students. The international curator and art-world impresario Hans Ulrich Obrist began citing Morton’s ideas; Morton collaborated on a talk with Laurie Anderson and helped inspire “Reality Machines,” an installation by the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. Kim Stanley Robinson and Jeff VanderMeer—prominent sci-fi writers who also deal with ecological themes—have engaged with Morton’s work; Björk blurbed Morton’s book “Being Ecological,” writing, “I have been reading Tim Morton’s books for a while and I like them a lot.”
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The problem with hyperobjects is that you cannot experience one, not completely. You also can’t not experience one. They bump into you, or you bump into them; they bug you, but they are also so massive and complex that you can never fully comprehend what’s bugging you. This oscillation between experiencing and not experiencing cannot be resolved. It’s just the way hyperobjects are.
Take oil: nature at its most elemental; black ooze from the depths of the earth. And yet oil is also the stuff of cars, plastic, the Industrial Revolution; it collapses any distinction between nature and not-nature. Driving to the port, we were surrounded by oil and its byproducts—the ooze itself, and the infrastructure that transports it, refines it, holds it, and consumes it—and yet, Morton said, we could never really see the hyperobject of capital-“O” Oil: it shapes our lives but is too big to see.
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Since around 2010, Morton has become associated with a philosophical movement known as object-oriented ontology, or O.O.O. The point of O.O.O. is that there is a vast cosmos out there in which weird and interesting shit is happening to all sorts of objects, all the time. In a 1999 lecture, “Object-Oriented Philosophy,” Graham Harman, the movement’s central figure, explained the core idea:
The arena of the world is packed with diverse objects, their forces unleashed and mostly unloved. Red billiard ball smacks green billiard ball. Snowflakes glitter in the light that cruelly annihilates them, while damaged submarines rust along the ocean floor. As flour emerges from mills and blocks of limestone are compressed by earthquakes, gigantic mushrooms spread in the Michigan forest. While human philosophers bludgeon each other over the very possibility of “access” to the world, sharks bludgeon tuna fish and icebergs smash into coastlines…
We are not, as many of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers would have it, trapped within language or mind or culture or anything else. Reality is real, and right there to experience—but it also escapes complete knowability. One must confront reality with the full realization that you’ll always be missing something in the confrontation. Objects are always revealing something, and always concealing something, simply because they are Other. The ethics implied by such a strangely strange world hold that every single object everywhere is real in its own way. This realness cannot be avoided or backed away from. There is no “outside”—just the entire universe of entities constantly interacting, and you are one of them.
… “[Covid-19 is] the ultimate hyperobject,” Morton said. “The hyperobject of our age. It’s literally inside us.” We talked for a bit about fear of the virus—Morton has asthma, and suffers from sleep apnea. “I feel bad for subtitling the hyperobjects book ‘Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World,’ ” Morton said. “That idea scares people. I don’t mean ‘end of the world’ the way they think I mean it. But why do that to people? Why scare them?”
What Morton means by “the end of the world” is that a world view is passing away. The passing of this world view means that there is no “world” anymore. There’s just an infinite expanse of objects, which have as much power to determine us as we have to determine them. Part of the work of confronting strange strangeness is therefore grappling with fear, sadness, powerlessness, grief, despair. “Somewhere, a bird is singing and clouds pass overhead,” Morton writes, in “Being Ecological,” from 2018. “You stop reading this book and look around you. You don’t have to be ecological. Because you are ecological.” It’s a winsome and terrifying idea. Learning to see oneself as an object among objects is destabilizing—like learning “to navigate through a bad dream.” In many ways, Morton’s project is not philosophical but therapeutic. They have been trying to prepare themselves for the seismic shifts that are coming as the world we thought we knew transforms.
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For the philosopher of “hyperobjects”—vast, unknowable things that are bigger than ourselves—the coronavirus is further proof that we live in a dark ecology: “Timothy Morton’s Hyper-Pandemic.”
* “Several thousand years from now, nothing about you as an individual will matter. But what you did will have huge consequences. This is the paradox of the ecological age. And it is why action to change global warming must be massive and collective.” – Timothy Morton, Being Ecological
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As we find our place, we might send classical birthday greetings to James Clerk Maxwell; he was born on this date in 1831. A mathematician and and physicist, he calculated (circa 1862) that the speed of propagation of an electromagnetic field is approximately that of the speed of light– kicking off his work in uniting electricity, magnetism, and light… that’s to say, formulating the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, which is considered the “second great unification in physics” (after the first, realized by Isaac Newton). Though he was the apotheosis of classical (Newtonian) physics, Maxwell laid the foundation for modern physics, starting the search for radio waves and paving the way for such fields as special relativity and quantum mechanics. In the Millennium Poll – a survey of the 100 most prominent physicists at the turn of the 21st century – Maxwell was voted the third greatest physicist of all time, behind only Newton and Einstein.
“The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope”*…
After this post, your correspondent is heading into his customary Holiday Hiatus; regular service will resume in early 2021. In the meantime, a piece to ponder…
“Civilizations with long nows look after things better,” says Brian Eno. “In those places you feel a very strong but flexible structure which is built to absorb shocks and in fact incorporate them.”undefined You can imagine how such a process could evolve—all civilizations suffer shocks; only the ones that absorb the shocks survive. That still doesn’t explain the mechanism.
In recent years a few scientists (such as R. V. O’Neill and C. S. Holling) have been probing the same issue in ecological systems: how do they manage change, how do they absorb and incorporate shocks? The answer appears to lie in the relationship between components in a system that have different change-rates and different scales of size. Instead of breaking under stress like something brittle, these systems yield as if they were soft. Some parts respond quickly to the shock, allowing slower parts to ignore the shock and maintain their steady duties of system continuity.
Consider the differently paced components to be layers. Each layer is functionally different from the others and operates somewhat independently, but each layer influences and responds to the layers closest to it in a way that makes the whole system resilient.
From the fastest layers to the slowest layers in the system, the relationship can be described as follows:
All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure. It is what makes them adaptable and robust…
Stewart Brand (@stewartbrand) unpacks a concept that he popularized in his remarkable book How Buildings Learn and that animates the work of The Long Now Foundation, which he co-founded– pace layers, which provide many-leveled corrective, stabilizing feedback throughout the system. It is in the contradictions between these layers that civilization finds its surest health: “Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning.” Do click through and read in full…
* Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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As we take the long view, we might recall that it was on this date in 1872 that HMS Challenger set sail from Portsmouth. Modified for scientific exploration, its activities over the next four years, known as The Challenger Expedition, laid the foundation for the entire academic and research discipline of oceanography.
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