The Citizen Water Advocacy Group has good resources discussing this issue. Here's a video covering frequently asked questions.
Well water levels are declining by more than 1 foot/year in the center of the aquifer, and have declined more than 100 feet in the last 80 years. Wells at the edge of the aquifer, such as in Williamson Valley, are declining from 2 to 7 feet per year (data not shown).
The list of Drought Impacts:
D0 Forage is limited; soil is dry
Fire risk increases
D1 Plants are stressed; hillsides are unusually brown
Stock ponds and creeks are nearly dry; some springs are dry
D2 Water and feed are inadequate for livestock
Fire danger is high; fire crews are mobilizing
Little forage remains for wildlife; pine trees are losing needles
D3 Ranching operations are affected
Fire preparedness increases; fire restrictions are implemented early
Skiing tourism is low; snowpack is extremely low
Wildlife encroach on developed areas in search of food and water
Native plants are stressed
Livestock do not have adequate water; runoff is short; conditions are dusty
D4 Fire restrictions increase; large fires occur year-round
Vegetation green-up is poor; native plants are dying
Lakes, ponds, and streams are dry
This post and discussion on The Smokey Wire is one of the best, with in-depth reviews of the effectiveness of forest thinning to control wildfires.
https://forestpolicypub.com/2021/09/17/the-caldor-fire-and-fuel-treatments-sf-chronicle-la-times-and-sac-bee-stories/
Problem: Short-duration morning HRV measurements may be susceptible to exactly when you wake, your HR, breathing rate, thinking about work etc in that moment. Different apps report widely different values of HRV. Perhaps more importantly, morning snapshot measurements do not record HRV over a physiologically meaningful interval. The best case would be to record HRV 24-7, but this is not feasible with current wearable technology. However, wearables can and do report night time HRV. At least this is measuring vagal balance over a physiologically meaningful interval, namely, the sleep recovery timeframe.
Methods: I recorded overnight HRV using Polar H7 chest strap connected to the iOS app HRV Logger, for 12 nights over more than a month. HRV Logger stopped recording on 2 nights, perhaps due to loss of connection with the H7 or other errors, so I have 10 nights of complete data. The Polar H7 chest strap directly measures electrical activity (ECG) and is considered the gold standard for at-home HRV measurements.
I also wore a Fitbit Inspire 2 each night and downloaded the data file from Fitbit.com at the end of the month. Fitbit uses a green light PPB (photoplethysmography) sensor to measure blood flow changes at the wrist and infer heart rate and HRV.
HRV Logger was set to 5 minute recording windows and RR-interval correction was set at 25%. Fitbit also reports HRV in 5 minute recording windows. However, the 5-minute interval windows are only approximately aligned as they are based on offset starting times. HRV is reported as rMMSD.
Results: At this point, I am reporting preliminary data from 3 representative nights.
Night of 9/19
Summary
|
|
Fitbit |
Polar |
|
mean |
38.5 |
41.48 |
|
std dev |
6.75 |
8.44 |
Night of 9/21
Summary
|
|
Fitbit |
Polar |
|
mean |
39.82 |
44.32 |
|
std dev |
6.94 |
9.23 |
Night of 9/28
Summary
|
|
FitbitInspire2 |
PolarH7 |
|
mean |
35.06 |
39.57 |
|
Std dev |
5.31 |
7.80 |
Conclusion
An examination of the time course data shows that Fitbit was able to pick up the broad changes in HRV during the night. It appears Fitbit misses spikes in HRV that the Polar strap is able to detect. Although it is also possible that the Polar strap is biased by movement artifacts, it seems most likely that either Fitbit is not sensitive enough to detect short-duration changes in HRV, or a Fitbit error-correcting algorithm is too aggressive at removing short changes in HRV.
In addition to being less sensitive to variations in HRV (as measured by standard deviations), Fitbit also consistently records a lower average nightly HRV than the Polar strap.
The overall R squared value is only 0.38, however this statistic probably underestimates the correlation of time series data due to the fact that the 5-minute windows are not perfectly synchronized. Even so, R squared of 0.38 is a higher correlation that I was able to achieve using the Polar H7 with 2 other apps.
I previously looked at Elite HRV and My Ithlete and found poor agreement between them. I also tried HRV Logger and found even less correlation.
All of this was using a Polar H7 chest strap with morning readings alternating between the different apps. I believe HRV Logger is more accurate than the other apps, so I don't think this invalidates the results from HRV Logger.
It was a good monsoon in AZ this year, with some locations up 8 to 12 inches above normal (June-September 8). But due to the uneven distribution of thunderstorms, even in this good year some areas barely received normal!
Comparison
Between April/May 2020 and August/September 2021....
.... my resting HR went from average 52.4 to 55.3
.... my deep sleep went from average 75.6 to 91.5 minutes
Nightly HRV analysis
Night of Sep 4-5th: Morning HRV was 62 in Elite HRV, 82 in ithlete, 41 in Fitbit, and 64 in HRV logger.
Night of Sep 5-6th: Elite HRV was 66, ithlete was 82, Fitbit was 51, HRV logger was 54. 94% of time HR was below resting.
Sep 6th-7th (but only 6th is shown, due to not downloading Sep 7th data yet...)
Comparison of cheststrap (30 sec sample data smoothed to 5 minute window, Fitbit HRV sampled on 5 minute intervals). Fit looks pretty good.
Recently found out Fitbit records temperature as well. There is a diurnal rhythm, with interesting variations. Sep 4th and 7th were both early morning outdoor exercise (jogging and hiking, respectively).
More temperature details:
The Inspire 2 temperature sensor is at least directionally-accurate!
The nightly data ("Computed Temperature" file) has what looks like temperature in Celsius. For me, it is 31-32 Celsius at night, which is around 90 F. This is the data that is reported as Skin Temperature in Health Metrics.
Interestingly, there is also continuous 24 hour temperature data at 1 minute intervals ("Device Temperature" file). This data appears to be recorded as variation (+/-) from some baseline, as the numbers are always between +3 and -8 for me. Again, probably Celsius. I plotted my data from the last few days, and the times when I was exercising outside in the sun were consistently +2 degrees above other times that I would guess were cooler.
I don't know if the temperature measures are absolutely correct, but they do at least make sense and could potentially be used to identify unexpected temperature anomalies.
If anyone else is trying to download their data, note that you have to request it on the Fitbit account setting website, and then confirm the email.
This biography covers many topics, some of which are synopsized here in quotes from the book.
Portugal
Pessoa was born into a world in which ghostly shades of former splendors hovered amid palpable poverty and decay.
What united them, besides the succulent food in the fine restaurants where they met, was not a feeling of failure in their personal careers as writers and artists but the conviction that, despite their best efforts to encourage reform, Portugal had failed and would continue to fail to be organically progressive, original, and self-determining. This larger failure was both the cause and consequence of saudade, a word that signifies intense longing, yearning, nostalgia, both as a temporary mood or state of mind and as an existential condition.
BUT LISBON WAS AND remains, even in the twenty-first century, majestic. Built, like Rome, on seven hills—or six, or eight, depending on what you call a hill—and stretching along the wide estuary of the Tagus River, which is sometimes called the Mar da Palha, or Straw Sea, because of how it goldenly reflects the sun at dusk, the city offers an ever-changing spectacle of light glinting off the pastel-colored buildings of its slopes. And the sky in Lisbon is more dynamic than in other European capitals, with sun and clouds and rain often entering and exiting in rapid succession, as if the pagan gods were still alive, vying for control of the weather.
Pessoa is one of those writers, like James Joyce, whom we automatically associate with the city of their birth, as if one were the reconfigured equivalent of the other.
“My nation is the Portuguese language,” he famously wrote in 1931, affirming a patriotism that was in the first place linguistic, rather than geographical. Far less quoted, since it is politically or socially incorrect, is this admission: “An adjective matters more to me than the real weeping of a human soul.” Which is not to say that Pessoa was insensitive to human tears. He shed many of his own. But words—and what words could represent—were what he lived for.
-------------------
A Victorian Novel
Of his mother: Maria's high-placed friends were impressed with her intelligence and regretted that she had not been born a boy, in which case she could have aspired to a brilliant career.
Pessoa's father is an enigmatic figure. Perhaps Pessoa's mother fell for a man she perceived as an artistic type, but he never tried to make art or music or to write creatively. He would have needed audacity for that. And a willingness to handle, shape, and transform the raw matter of his deep thoughts and emotions.
Pessoa’s father had neither the inclination nor the physical stamina for the armed forces. He was consumptive, to use an outmoded word that has the virtue of graphically evoking the effect of pulmonary tuberculosis.
Pessoa wrote: "I remember his death as a grave silence during the first meals we ate after learning about it. I remember that the others would occasionally look at me. And I would look back, dumbly comprehending. Then I’d eat with more concentration, since they might, when I wasn’t looking, still be looking at me."
THEN—AS HAPPENS IN FAIRY tales and also, less often, in real life—her fortune abruptly changed. Maria’s new sweetheart was many things that her first husband was not: close to her in age (four years older instead of eleven), strong and a little husky, outgoing, jovial, and serene. In her mind his whole being radiated serenity and safety.
But, in yet another blow to the weary bride, who had dreamed of wearing a fancy dress made of black velvet for the occasion, the captain-turned-consul could not make a trip home so soon after taking up his new post, she had to settle for a wedding ceremony with his older brother, a gentleman with wild eyes and a walrus moustache whom she hardly knew, serving as proxy.
No less strange for Pessoa than the fact that things end, including things as enormous and profound as his father’s soul, was the fact that life continues, inexorably.
Together they would set sail (as they learned several months later) for the town of Durban, on the eastern seaboard of South Africa.
If they had not gone to South Africa, the rest of this story would be very different, or, more likely, there would be no story to merit a biography. Not only genes but also myriad contributions from one’s surroundings all combine to shape one of those rarely occurring specimens known as a genius.
Pessoa would always feel a little out of place, there but not all there, irremediably foreign. Strange soil, it turned out, was exactly what he needed for his kind of genius to flower.
----
Gandhi and Pessoa in South Africa
However much they resisted mixing with and being influenced by other groups, and however superior they deemed their own culture to be, they were forced to recognize that it was not the only one.
Racially tripartite Durban, with its imbricated subdivisions along religious, economic, and class lines, may have been just the right breeding ground for the spirit of tolerance that marked the thinking of Pessoa as well as of Gandhi, both of whom deemed truth to be as variable as the people who live by truth.
Durban was indeed well managed, for the comfort of white people, and if life there impressed Pessoa as a quasi-socialist paradise, it was because even strictly middle-class whites could live like kings and queens, thanks to the racist division of labor.
Like virtually all the city’s white residents, he would have instinctively preferred to remain as ignorant as possible.
The article in The Natal Mercury described how the hostile crowd of pursuers “began to assert itself, and Mr. Gandhi became the object of kicks and cuffs, while mud and stale fish were thrown at him. One person also produced a riding whip, and gave him a stroke, while another plucked away his peculiar hat. As the result of the attack, he was very much bespattered, and blood was flowing from the neck.”
The admiration Pessoa expressed for Gandhi in the later years of his life suggests that Pessoa—who was not a vegetarian, a teetotaler, or a nonsmoker, let alone an active defender of humanitarian causes—somehow identified with Gandhi, almost in an atavistic way.
They [both] conceived salvation as a private matter, insofar as each person has to find and follow their own path toward self-realization, and at the same time as a joint concern, with all individual efforts contributing toward human betterment. Their asceticism, taking different forms, implied in both cases a rejection of conventional notions of well-being and progress.
---------
The Writer
Pessoa was a volcanic writer, and when the words started flowing, he used whatever sort of paper was close to hand….
All of which he deposited in the large wooden trunk, his legacy to the world.
But as we read the work, it almost seems that Fernando Pessoa, and even we ourselves, are variations on this invented self, who expresses with uncanny precision our unuttered feelings of disquiet and existential unsettledness, speaking not only to us but also for us. “The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves,” observes Bernardo Soares, who refuses to adapt to the world.
Pessoa, like his semiheteronym, was an abundance of qualities that did not cohere and would not settle into just one soul. “The active life has always struck me as the least comfortable of suicides,” he wrote. He remarks on his instinctive hatred “for decisive acts, for definite thoughts.” He is actively, militantly passive. Dreaming is not a vice that hinders him from accomplishing his goals; dreaming is what he lives for, and he organizes his existence accordingly.
He wrote “Nature is parts without a whole” , yet he often berated himself for being unable to create whole works of literature.
Pessoa could not imagine that his literary dispersion, which faithfully mirrors our ontological instability and the absence of intrinsic unity in the world we inhabit, would make him required reading by the time the next century arrived.
His universe of disconnected parts prefigured our own worldview, with developments in history, science, and philosophy having disabused us of whatever harmonious wholes we once cherished.
His fashioning of the heteronyms may be construed as a religious act, as his way of paying homage to God, by realizing his divine potential as a co-creator, made in God’s likeness and image.
One day he copied out, on a sheet of paper tossed into the trunk and not discovered by researchers until the present millennium, a single verse from the ninth chapter of St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians: “I became all things to all men, that I might save all.”
But what he imagined, envisioned, and projected was uniquely vast and varied. “Be plural like the universe!” he imperatively wrote on a slip of paper found in the trunk in the 1960s.
"Ever since I was a child, I’ve felt the need to enlarge the world with fictitious personalities—dreams of mine that were carefully crafted, envisaged with photographic clarity, and fathomed to the depths of their souls. When I was just five years old, an isolated child and quite content to be isolated, I already enjoyed the company of certain characters from my dreams, including a Captain Thibeaut, the Chevalier de Pas, and various others whom I’ve forgotten, and whose forgetting—like my imperfect memory of the two I just named—is one of my life’s great regrets."
"And instead of ending with my childhood, this tendency expanded in my adolescence, taking firmer root with each passing year, until it became my natural way of being. Today I have no personality: I have divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. Today I am the meeting-place of a small humanity that belongs only to me…."
Zenith, Richard (2021-07-19T22:58:59). Pessoa: A Biography .
I tested 2 apps to record morning HRV. I used both apps first thing in the morning for 2 weeks, alternating which app I used first. There are several different measures of HRV, and I used rMSSD because it was common between the 2 apps and is commonly used to report HRV.
I got very different HRV values for the 2 apps.
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| "Erosion control" plastic mesh has been washed downstream and wrapped around a sapling. |
This is restoration:
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| Carefully-laid rock armors the entrance to a dry pool. Balanced stones mark the location of human intention. |
All information is from https://hiitscience.com
HIIT Science will be a classic in exercise physiology. It breaks down high intensity interval training into 6 different types of training, depending on energy system (aerobic, anaerobic, neuromuscular) to be trained:
Each type is built around specific intensities and interval times:
They argue that passive recovery is more beneficial than active, since it allows for more work during each interval. https://hiitscience.com/recovery-bout-intensity-of-hiit-active-or-passive/
Bottom line:
- Shorter rests increase HR and leads to more cardio conditioning
- Longer sets increase burn and lead to more anaerobic conditioning
- Higher intensity/weights increase neuromuscular stress and lead to more muscle growth
- Focus on all three increases stress and leads to exhaustion, longer time between workouts, and loss of fitness
Is is possible to plant trees and restore grassland savanna in a hyper-arid desert?
In Al Baydha it sometimes doesn't rain for 26 months, and apparently there are trees that can survive and thrive in that environment.
The Story of Al Baydha: A Regenerative Agriculture in the Saudi Desert.
The research is quite interesting. They have determined that a large suite of plants used by people in the past are more likely to be found in the vicinity of archaeological sites on Bear’s Ears NM. Basically people were planting medicinal and other useful plants, and those plant communities have persisted at these locations in greater numbers to modern times. We see similar things here in Arizona with agaves, yucca, devil’s claw, and a few other plants. In AZ the phenomenon is sometimes referred to as “Legacies on the Landscape.”
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/21/e2025047118
But looking through the Supplemental table for the paper, they basically included every species that grows up there. Not surprisingly, native peoples utilized most of the naturally-occurring botanical resources on the landscape. So their results are really more that cultural sites are associated with biodiversity in general, not specific assemblages of “cultural” species.
Also, the paper implies that the causality goes native people>plant diversity, but it could just as easily go plant diversity>native peoples, since native people would be more likely to settle in places with more plant diversity (e.g. places with water).
https://www.noaa.gov/stories/record-number-of-billion-dollar-disasters-struck-us-in-2020
https://carbon180.medium.com/in-search-of-carbon-removal-offsets-42abf71b3ccc
https://forestpolicypub.com/2020/12/10/bloomberg-green-on-the-nature-conservancy-and-meaningless-carbon-offsets/
https://www.wri.org/blog/2020/05/regenerative-agriculture-climate-change
https://agfundernews.com/opinion-where-the-world-resources-institute-got-it-wrong-about-regenerative-agriculture.html
https://undark.org/2020/01/31/podcast-43-regenerative-agriculture/
The CCP's use of internal-directed propaganda sounds like any successful corporation in the US. (that is a good thing.) Most US companies constantly role out initiatives, revise their mission and value statements, conduct constant surveillance and try to inspire workers with shared goals from the C-suit down to the entry level worker. Any organization that can achieve alignment will have higher morale and be more productive that one that cannot achieve this. There are a number of sacrifices necessary to live in a democratic state, but I think this essay points at one of the most important: the lack of inspiration.
