sequestering carbon, one Christmas at a time VI

His ’n’ hers Christmas presents (plus one still in transit..)

sequestering carbon, several books at a time XCII

A small batch, before the Christmas rush:

Hannover by night

I've arrived in Hanover for the conference on Cognitive Computing 2018: Merging concepts with hardware, starting tomorrow.  Here's a view from my hotel window around late morning, just before I went to suss out the tram system and find some lunch.

In the evening I went into the city centre, by tram, to meet up with some of the other conference delegates.  Between the tram stop and the Brauhaus, I took in the Christmas lights and markets.

all the trees are decked with lights

every open area has a little marketplace

just up the street from the Brauhaus

on my way back to the hotel

Looking forward to the conference starting tomorrow.

Narrating Complexity

My complimentary editor copies of our latest book have recently arrived.

This is an outcome of a fascinating collaboration we started way back in 2012.

blurb:

This book stages a dialogue between international researchers from the broad fields of complexity science and narrative studies. It presents an edited collection of chapters on aspects of how narrative theory from the humanities may be exploited to understand, explain, describe, and communicate aspects of complex systems, such as their emergent properties, feedbacks, and downwards causation; and how ideas from complexity science can inform narrative theory, and help explain, understand, and construct new, more complex models of narrative as a cognitive faculty and as a pervasive cultural form in new and old media.

The book is suitable for academics, practitioners, and professionals, and postgraduates in complex systems, narrative theory, literary and film studies, new media and game studies, and science communication.

See the Springer site for table of contents.

(This is the first time I have produced a book in anything other than LaTeX.  I won't be doing that again in a hurry.  But Springer made a great job of typeseting the ... shudder ... Word sources.)

Engineering Simulations as Scientific Instruments

My complimentary author copies of our latest book have just arrived.

blurb:

This book describes CoSMoS (Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation), a pattern-based approach to engineering trustworthy simulations that are both scientifically useful to the researcher and scientifically credible to third parties. This approach emphasises three key aspects to this development of a simulation as a scientific instrument: the use of explicit models to capture the scientific domain, the engineered simulation platform, and the experimental results of running simulations; the use of arguments to provide evidence that the scientific instrument is fit for purpose; and the close co-working of domain scientists and simulation software engineers.

In Part I the authors provide a managerial overview: the rationale for and benefits of using the CoSMoS approach, and a small worked example to demonstrate it in action. Part II is a catalogue of the core patterns. Part III lists more specific “helper” patterns, showing possible routes to a simulation. Finally Part IV documents CellBranch, a substantial case study developed using the CoSMoS approach.

See the Springer site for table of contents.  The Springer official cover in not quite the same as the one I designed a while back.  That’s probably for the best, I suspect.

This is one of the outcomes of our not-that-recent EPSRC project, CoSMoS.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time XCI

The latest batch, pre Christmas rush:

These are the days of miracle and wonder

Amazing time-lapse video of a rocket launch… seen from space!

On November 16, 2018, a Soyuz-FG rocket launched from Kazakhstan, and perched atop it was a Progress resupply ship carrying two and a half tons of materials for the astronauts on ISS. The launch occurred at 18:14 UTC, or just after midnight local time. As it happens the ISS was over the Russian/Mongolian border at that time, far to the east of the launch but high enough above the Earth’s surface to still see it directly.

screen grab from video showing the second stage re-entry burnup (top right) – the video is even more impressive

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