After a very freaky hour re-discovering my early 90’s web-presence, the only thing I can happily provide in a public forum is my eventual, very obscure, home page. circa 1999. The earlier stuff is just way too embarrassing.

I do like the fact that I have an archived home page in the earliest bit of recorded internet time: March 1996. It was constructed with the latest and greatest tools and design approaches of the time: white text on an image background – ugh! – with frames – ugh ugh. Pre-internet Archive there’s no record my earlier pages dating back to 1993 (surfing using Mosaic 1.0 and HTML-ietf-draft, woohoo). I love the fact that the 1997 version of my search page uses Alta Vista and thanks a company called DEC. The early 1998 version of the search page links to http://googol.stanford.edu :-)

Oh, and thre’s also the long lost home page of that well known fictional scientist Ian Malcolm.

(And yes, I had purple hair. The colour on the picture is correct.)

For some reason today I was reminded of a quote from my PhD thesis. Murray Gell-Mann used to make some pretty funny contributions at SFI colloquia…

You’d generally rather use someone else’s toothbrush than their notation”

Life drags you to strange and fun places. In Boston last week for the Harvard Humanitarian Action summit I was chatting to a friend and managed to get myself invited to dinner: a (then) stranger’s Rococo house in the woods, where we all ate Paella, talked climate change, simulation, modeling and things humanitarian and ultimately many things human. The most fun I’ve had in ages, and many thanks to John Crowley for getting me the invite and Pablo Suarez and his family for hosting a bunch of strangers.

We talked the talk, and it came up that I used to create and run complex-system simulation games for students – games where they embody agents and their rules, and act out their own scenarios. Imagine twenty kids running around a courtyard flapping their arms shouting “boid boid boid boid”. Or something like that.

I started developing these games when teaching at the Australian National Science Summer School way back in the early ‘90s, and the Santa Fe Institute/MIT Media Lab program gave me even more excuses (and the chance to involve Nobel prize winners in the wing-flapping.) Perhaps my favourite of all was this way to teach carrying capacity and frequency dependent selection:

Growth Game

Requires:

• whiteboard/display paper/blackboard with markers
• sheets of letter sized paper
• large sheet of paper (A0 or 3×4 ft)
• students!

Start: by getting everyone to scrunch up their paper into a ball, and then sit down. Setup a graph on the board with x-axis time (turns) and y-axis from one to the number of students.

Explain the rules: everyone standing up is “alive”. To stay alive you have to survive, which means tossing your paper-ball up into the air (high) and catching it. If you survive then you pick someone sitting and get them to stand up.

Then throw your paper up and catch it (or risk embarrassment :-) and pick a student. Let them continue and map the exponential growth on the graph. Lots to talk about here once you’ve got everyone up. (Hopefully you’ll have a plot with a r<2 ;-) Some questions for the participants:

• What would happen if we made it harder? Throw higher?
• What would happen if you brought up 2 people instead of 1 each turn you survived?

Then: sit everyone down and start again with one new rule: you must keep one foot on the piece of paper.

Run the game and see what happens. You’ll see a bunch of jostling, and a lot of fluctuation in the population. Questions to ask (after drawing a line through the oscillations as the carrying capacity):

• What do you see? Oscillations around a carrying capacity.
• What would you see if you had a smaller piece of paper? (try it! Careful with the elbows.)

Basically it’s ecology with a few bits of paper. Fun.

Now how to do a climate change game?

After a year or more of faffing around I’ve finally finished up Miranda’s Xmas present: “our” cookbook. I collected most of the recipes we used and had written down in our various journals and scraps of paper, and worked through our favourite cookbooks to find the particularly gummy and food splattered pages. Only about half of it’s in here, leaving much room for a better, and expanded, edition.

Enjoy it here (warning 1.3Mb PDF)

A production note: I keep forgetting how much freaking time it takes to layout a book – it’s been several years since I last did one, and even here I’ve fudged on the whole article/item layout bit and just ran them all together (mostly). Plus I just couldn’t be faffed getting the graphic elements to perfectly match up. It was just time to let it go.

p.s. the version with decent pictures is available here as a 46Mb download.

It’s a cold winter’s night and I want to cook something warming, healthy, and from the fridge/pantry. There’s Kale, and a tin of chickpeas…

Kale and Chickpea Ragout

serves 4

• 6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, used in two lots
• 4 1 1/2-inch-thick slices Italian bread, crusts removed, each slice quartered
• 1 teaspoon plus 1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme

• 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 1/4 teaspoon dried crushed red pepper
• 5 cups (packed) thinly sliced kale (about 1 large bunch)
• 1 14 1/2-ounce can vegetable broth
• 1 14 1/2-ounce can diced tomatoes with green pepper and onion in juice, (just tomatoes will do)
• 1 15-ounce can Chickpeas/Garbanzo beans (cannellini beans too), drained

Heat 2 tablespoons oil in heavy large pot over medium-high heat. Add bread and 1 teaspoon thyme; cook until bread is golden on both sides, turning with tongs, about 2 minutes total. Transfer croutons to bowl; sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Add remaining 4 tablespoons oil, garlic, and crushed red pepper to same pot; sauté over medium heat 30 seconds. Add kale and broth; bring to boil. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer until kale wilts, about 5 minutes. Add tomatoes with juice, beans, and remaining 1 tablespoon thyme. Cover and simmer 15 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Ladle ragout into shallow bowls. Top with croutons and serve.