One of the most fertile places for plants to grow is at the edge of the forest, where it’s adjacent to an open field. Forests and fields have different advantages from the viewpoint of a plant looking for a place to grow, so if a plant can shape itself properly, it can take advantage of the good parts of both. Neither a forest nor field could provide this on their own, only the edge allows it.
The forest’s advantages include its more complex network of plants, fungi, and other organisms, many of which fill beneficial roles. Trees also shade out the ground, which keeps it cool and moist, ideal for the crucial organisms that live in the soil. The field’s advantage is that the lack of trees means it’s easier for plants to access sunlight, which is necessary for photosynthesis.
In the northern hemisphere, the trees being to the north of the clearing is ideal, because the sun sits to the south, meaning it can hit the edges where trees are to the north, but if trees are to the south, they will shade the edge. In the southern hemisphere, north and south are reversed.
Besides the comparative advantages both provide, the two ecosystems simply bring different species to the table, making the diversity of life at the edge higher than elsewhere. This is valuable for plants, because they rely on many other species, like the bacteria and fungi in the soil that gather nutrients and transport them to plant roots in exchange for sugars from photosynthesis. Above ground, birds and other animals help disperse seeds. The combination of good soil conditions, high biodiversity, and access to sunlight makes the edge between forests and clearings highly fertile.
Where there’s fertility, there will be competition. Vines can do extremely well here, as they climb the trees at the edge, getting more sunlight than they could by climbing any trees deep in the forest. Kudzu is one example, easily seen driving through the southeastern US, where forests-field edges are created for roads and other development.
Brambles/canes are kind of a cross between a shrub and a vine, and also compete well here, as they can have their roots in the moist, shaded soil, but grow out into the sunlight. Perennial herbaceous plants – ones that die back to the ground every year but come back in the spring – can thrive on the same strategy as canes, if they can grow tall enough. The race for light is eventually won by trees, which do well at the edge also, in due time pushing the forest further into the clearing if they’re not cut back.
Competition makes it harder for any individual to thrive, driving evolution faster, and eventually resulting in species highly specialized to live in their particular conditions. What traits, specifically, will help plants thrive within the tight competition of the forest-field edge? First, it’s important to understand that different plants – and organisms in general – evolve to fill different niches. Vines do one thing, brambles do another, and both can be successful at the same time at a forest edge. The next key thing to consider is that a forest abruptly turning to open field is a fairly unusual circumstance in nature.
Where there’s enough rainfall and sunlight, trees tend to be the dominant plant, as they win the vertical race for sunlight. Other plants and organisms, collectively creating a forest, then evolve to operate within the condition a canopy of trees creates.
Prairies, on the other hand, don’t have trees, and there must be a reason. If trees could grow in a prairie, they would, since they could easily outcompete the plants there for sunlight. Prairies can sometimes have a few trees here and there, but not many. Generally, this is due to lack of water and/or sunlight. The amount of precipitation and sunlight doesn’t generally change abruptly enough to have a forest-sustaining climate directly adjacent to a no-trees-at-all-sustaining climate.
Ecosystems instead blend into one another as the climate gets drier, colder, farther from the equator, etc. Trees grow sparser over many miles until there’s few, and eventually none. An abrupt forest edge is the opposite of this: the two ends of what’s normally a long transition butted up against each other. Some natural phenomena can cause this to happen, like a landslide, which exposes an area of bare earth, while the adjacent land that remains in tact is still forested.
Over the years, the clearing left by a landslide would go through a process called ecological succession. First, plants that can quickly spread sideways will have a field day since there’s no vertical competition for light, e.g. crabgrass. These plants shade the soil while alive, then leave organic matter when they die, improving the soil in both steps. The improved soil allows a broader range of plants to grow, and the vertical competition for light begins. At first, it’s mainly annuals and herbaceous perennials, who shade out the early pioneer species, and add even more organic matter to the soil since they’re larger. This further improve the soil, allowing the ultimate trick in the competition for light: woody perennials. At first, only small shrubs can be sustained, but they still have a head start in spring over herbaceous perennials and annuals.
The larger a plant is, the more complex its root system needs to be, particularly in its relationships with bacteria and fungi. All the good soil where these organisms live gets lost in a landslide, and in the immediate aftermath, trees simply can’t succeed without the right soil life, particularly fungi. Fungi mostly feed on wood, while bacteria feed on the green growth that dominates the early years of ecological succession. The small shrubs that show up next play the same role as the earlier plants when they die: improving the soil. Shrubs are made of wood, which helps fungi thrive, making the soil diverse enough to sustain the eventual winners in the vertical competition for light: trees.
While forest-field edges aren’t common in nature, they do happen periodically, but will typically follow ecological progression back to a forest. What’s even rarer is (or at least once was) when a forest edge is a permanent condition. These can sometimes have geographic or geologic causes, but almost always come from a different source: humans.
This brings us back to the question in bold above: What traits, specifically, will help plants thrive within the tight competition of the forest-field edge?
With extremely rare exception, humans don’t create forest edges for the sake of the plants living there, they create them because they want to build/grow/graze something in a location that was previously forest. When they do this once, they tend to do it again later, cutting further into the forest. Thus, while humans are the main cause of the forest edge microclimate, they’re also the main threat to the plants growing there. Thus, the most important advantage the plants need to have in this location is a way to survive against humans.
Some plants that thrive are just good at quickly regrowing when humans cut them back, which are the least interesting to me. These generally thrive on lawns, and are often called weeds. Others have defense mechanisms against humans, which fall into two categories: carrots and sticks. “Carrots” (not the literal plant/food carrot) are plants that are useful to humans, so the humans would prefer to keep them around. “Sticks” are plants that will harm humans, so they prefer to stay away, and let them be. Carrot is a reward, stick is a punishment.
Today, there’s enough personal protection, large equipment, and legal requirements like property boundaries, that the carrots and sticks don’t play as much of a role, but that’s only been true for a tiny amount of the time humans have been around.
Imagine a tribe living thousands of years ago in a clearing in the woods. Their population has grown, so they want to expand. To the north, there’s blackberries growing on the forest edge, to the east there’s poison ivy, to the west there’s stinging nettle (a plant that gives humans a rash if touched), and to the south there’s a number of other plants, none particularly harmful/helpful to humans. Which way would they likely expand their settlement?
Blackberries, and their close relatives raspberries, employ a dual strategy of berries as a carrot, and thorns as a stick. Stinging nettle does the same, since it’s a highly nutritious leafy green for humans, if prepared right to destroy the tiny spines that cause the rash. Poison ivy only employs the stick. Given these facts, if the group expands north or west, they’ll be cutting down a food source, and if the go east or west they’ll end up with a nasty rash.
Naturally, people without protective gear and fancy equipment to avoid contact with the plants would prefer to expand south, preserving the carrots and avoiding the sticks. As a result, the plants that are specifically good at helping or harming humans have a competitive advantage at the forest-field edge. Urushiol, the oil on poison ivy, oak, and sumac that gives humans a rash, is harmless to most animals. Many animals eat and seek protection in those three plants, they just happen to be harmful to humans. As a result, they were left alone whenever humans cut further into a forest for thousands of years, while plants not harmful to humans got cut down more often. Thus, poison ivy and the other carrot/stick plants had more chances to produce seed and spread over/under ground, and came to dominate the forest edge.
The overall effect is that the presence of humans created much more of a previously-rare microclimate that was highly fertile, but humans were also the main threat against the plants that grew there, as those who cut into the forest one time tended to do it again. This was, and still is, the main threat the forest as a whole faced, so the forest evolved to have more of the plants that prevented humans from cutting into it. Thus, when humans create forest edges now, the first plants to pop up are specifically the ones well-equipped to appease or annoy humans. This makes blackberries, poison ivy, and stinging nettles the forest’s immune response against humans, a scab to help heal the wounds the humans impart on it.
One night, a few months ago, I was walking home alone. As my mind wandered, I decided to find the optimal way to walk between two points on a city grid. My hometown was not designed on a grid, so the shortest path between two points was usually clear. On a grid, however, there are many paths that are the same distance:
In my last post, I explained why widening roads isn’t a useful thing to do. I’d suggest reading that first if you haven’t, but the main takeaway was: in highly populated areas (where most people live), the amount of traffic will settle itself at the worst point where people still choose driving over alternatives, and thus is a function of human priority setting more than a function of road design. From here, I’m going to explain why I don’t expect autonomous cars to improve our lives.
This post is part one of a two-part post (part two) on why I am not looking forward to the future of autonomous cars. That opinion in itself is far from uncommon, but everyone else I’ve met who feels the same way has justified it with one or more of these three reasons:
As someone who prefers to get around by biking or walking, I tend to notice ways in which car-centric thinking makes things worse. A big one is in the layouts of towns and cities. In the recently-built suburbs of Oregon that I work in now, there are a few main roads that you spend most of your driving time on, and neighborhoods are divided so that they don’t connect main roads, or if they do it’s via a very convoluted path. This prevents rat-running which likely reduces traffic congestion, but it also forces walkers and bikers to take the main roads, which are almost always slower, as they’re not the direct route, and those not in cars are limited by distance, not speed limit. This design was made to accommodate driving, and in turn discourages human-powered transportation, by making it more difficult to do so. Cul-de-sacs have gotten an increasingly bad name over the past few years for the same reason. Even in cities, where disjoint neighborhoods and dead-end roads are much less common, the car-centric design still makes for longer commute distances, which is what I’m going to show here.
For the past four years, I’ve been experimenting with various types of fasting. When it comes to diet, I’ve found that there’s contradicting research for just about everything, so I like to incorporate different ideas and pay attention to how I feel as a result. I tend to think the body is pretty good at telling you what it does and doesn’t like – you just need to pay enough attention to notice. So this February, I decided to try out a more rigorous fasting regimen than I’ve ever done: only eat half of the days. For the most part, this worked out to eating every other day, but there were also a pair of 2-day fasts, each followed by 2 eating days. I’m glad I did it, and enough people have asked about it that I figured a post was in order. Here are the things I learned and observed over my month of only 14 eating days.
As a historically numbers-minded person, it has been quite a change over the past year for me to come to the realization that psychology is perhaps the most valuable subject I’ve learned in life. Sure, a computer science degree or an MD might be a path to high paying jobs, but psychology is valuable in just about every career, and, more importantly, life in general. Coming to realize the value of psychology made me think about psychological literacy as a form of capital that can be utilized to ones advantage in the free market, if one so chooses.
The calendar reset recently, and that often brings reflection on the past with it. This year I’ve been thinking about the changes I’ve made and lessons I’ve learned in the past few years that have had the most positive impact on my life. When doing an exercise like this, it can be tempting to point to the large changes, like moving to a new job or a new city. However, these are obviously harder to repeat or model new changes on, and often are more of an effect than a cause - the accumulation of many smaller changes. What I found to be the truly valuable changes were the ones that automated my personal decision making. This serves to avoid requiring willpower to make good choices, and frees up that mental energy to be used elsewhere.
Having gone through the search for housing three times in two locations in the years since graduating, I’ve picked up a few tips for choosing that are not often considered. Most people will look at the price, location, layout, appliances, and make a decision from there. While these are important factors, they are an incomplete look at how your new home will affect your life once you move. Here, I will explain the additional factors I now look for. Some points are framed around someone working a typical Monday-Friday daytime shift in the northern hemisphere, but the core ideas can easily be altered to apply more widely.
I have long been a proponent of finding time throughout the day for the mind to be unoccupied. This serves as a preventive measure against entertainment addiction, and allows the mind to wander and come up with some of its best thoughts. While eating dinner a little while back, I had a thought that piqued the interest of my mechanical engineering-trained mind: what actually happens to foods as we chew them that causes them to break down? More technically, what is the failure mode, or modes, of foods when we eat them? Following that meal, I began paying more attention to my chewing than I’m sure most people ever will, in an attempt to find my answer. I came up with the following five modes of failure, which turned out to be a pretty good crash course on solid mechanics – the study of how solids react to loading.
You can often hear the world of nature and the world of business described with the same clichés: "dog eat dog", "survival of the fittest", etc. These clichés are simplifications of the theory* of evolution, so it follows that perhaps evolution could be applied to business, and not just nature.
As is the case with many people, I probably spent more time than I should have playing the card game War as a child. Also like many others, I stopped playing once I realized there was no strategy or skill involved at all. But now, many years later, I am here to tell you that I was wrong, and War does have a strategy.
As the days get hotter here in the Northern Hemisphere, I become more inclined to put ice in my morning coffee as an additional means of staying cool. Doing so this past week led me to realize an interesting point about putting ice into drinks that aren’t water: Initially, the more ice you put into the drink, the more watered down it gets, but after a certain maximum point, adding more ice actually makes your drink less watered down. In fact, theoretically, you could put enough ice in to not water your drink down at all.
In a previous post, I made my best argument for why the 45 lb weight plate shouldn’t exist. I actually had to cut that post up because it got too long; this post is the second part of my weight plate analysis. The last post was about what plate weights should exist, while this one will deal with choosing weights among the ones that do exist. This will come in two parts. First, I’ll consider the case where you have an effectively infinite supply of weight plates, like at a gym, and figure out which of the standard set of 2.5, 5, 10, 25, 35, and 45 lb plates are the most and least useful.
I am a big advocate of alternative energy, and I plan on installing solar panels and/or a backyard wind turbine as soon as I buy a home. I drive a hybrid car, and bike or walk instead whenever practical. I mow my lawn with a push reel mower, and I use bar soap, bar laundry detergent and a reusable water bottle to minimize plastic consumption. But please, don’t call me an environmentalist.
By now, we are already well into March, and you know what that means: watching NCAA basketball and simultaneously enjoying the madness and stressing out about how poorly your bracket is doing. To provide some perspective for the large portion of us who have chronically bad brackets, I looked at how many possible outcomes there are, and related that back to various things.
The first time I stepped foot in a gym, I wondered why it used 45 lb as the heaviest plate weight (some have a 100 lb plate, but those are not nearly as standard as the 45 lb plate). I would have expected it to be a 50 lb plate, to make calculations simpler.
I’ve decided to dedicate my first year post-graduation to figuring out all the important life skills and strategies that you don’t learn in school. Recently I have been fixating on budgets, which lead me to consider convenience costs. Most people are probably familiar with the idea of convenience cost – things are more expensive when they are prepared for you, delivered to you, etc. It’s important because it’s how the businesses that provide the convenience are able to make a profit. However, at some point you have to determine when the added convenience isn’t worth the cost. In digging deeper, I found convenience costs to be a case of diminishing returns.
I'm a pretty big fan of a summer road trip, and at this point, I've seen a lot of the best roads America has to offer. I've driven across the country twice, with other shorter road trips mixed in. Here's my list of the ten most beautiful roads I've been on.
As one of my past blog posts would attest to, I am not afraid to be unconventional, so long as I don’t think it’ll be a hindrance. Today, I will explain a few of the things I do on a regular basis that often draw comments from others for being “weird.” I put that in quotes because, while they are unconventional, they are actually conscious decisions that I feel are well founded. I will explain these below, in increasing unusualness.
One day this past week was the first time this season that I had to scrape frost off my windshield. Anyone who’s seen how my hands react to cold air would know that I naturally wanted to spend as little time out in the brisk morning air as possible. When I pulled into the parking lot at my office, I, for the first time ever, really thought about what spot would afford me the shortest walk into the office. Like many, I had always naturally gravitated to what I thought was the closest spot, but until this past week I did not realize that I had been doing a pretty poor job of minimizing my walk from the car to the destination. Upon this realization, I started looking at the parking patterns of others and realized they make the same mistake I always did.
A short time ago, while attempting to improve my eating habits, I decided to start by thinking of the foods I knew of that were both healthy and delicious. Like any sane person on the sixth day of a 95+ degree heat wave, I immediately thought of watermelon. Seriously, I eat enough watermelon that I often wonder if I could stop drinking water and still stay hydrated.
In mechanics, if an object does not move over time it is said to be in equilibrium. There are three different types of equilibrium: stable, neutral, and unstable. Stable equilibrium means if you move it then it will return to its original spot, like a swing. Neutral equilibrium means if you move it then it will stay where you move it, like rolling a ball a quarter turn on flat ground. Finally, unstable equilibrium means if you move it then it will continue to move away from its equilibrium point, like tipping over a domino. Today I will explain why I feel success is an unstable equilibrium, give examples of such, and explain why this makes consistency a crucial trait.
This post is about a saying that I play along with when it’s said, but deep down always wished didn’t exist. I’m referring to the mnemonic device “Lefty-Loosey, Righty-Tighty.” For those unaware, it is a trick to remember which way to twist something like a screw or valve in order to loosen or tighten it. However, I can tell you for sure that simply moving a screw right will not make it tighten.
This is a strange behavior that I noticed in myself first, then I allowed people I was walking with to lead the way and noticed it generally applied to them as well. As with most things on this blog, I do not have enough data to make confident conclusions on this matter; I’m simply sharing what I’ve noticed in my observations.
I have decided to start a small series of blog posts about irrational things people say or do. These aren’t particularly problematic things, just oddities I’ve noticed over time and never really understood. The first one is when people wear sunglasses.
An increasingly common discussion in America today is how we can create an economy where everyone can earn a living wage. Some of the common suggestions are a higher minimum wage and higher taxes on the top earners. Different economic models could suggest positive or negative outcomes from these ideas, but regardless of how effective they might be, I feel there is a deeper problem that they fail to address.
Today I am going to share some coveted information of mine – my secrets to navigating traffic as quickly as possible. None of these methods are proven, but my anecdotal evidence is convincing enough to me to share my strategies. I recall a time this summer when I was driving on an LA highway, never exceeding the speed limit, and one car passed me four different times because the driver would speed by me at about 15 mph faster than me and then I would pass him each time the traffic slowed, as it’s known to do often in LA.
Previously, I talked about how I am not a fan of the aux cord, and today I have another modern technology that I feel can become detrimental. Oddly enough, this is also related to cars: GPS. I once was at an event of about 80 people. Everyone was flown into the nearest airport and given a rental car to get to the venue. One speaker began by asking who used a GPS to get to the venue. I had not, and looked around to see if anyone else hadn’t, but I couldn’t find a single one. Here is the worst part: the directions from the airport to the venue consisted of two turns. Two turns required 98.75% of the people there to turn on their GPS.
I have long dreamt of being an inventor-someone who comes up with something new, whether it is a product or a way of doing something. This is what attracted me to engineering, and I try to bring this dream into reality in every situation I can. I feel that the most difficult part of promoting change is coming up with the idea of what should be changed. The implementation can be figured out by applying principles learned in textbooks and classrooms, but the idea requires a special skill. I have worked over the past few years to hone this skill. The obvious first step is to consciously look at everything you do keeping in mind to seek opportunities for improvement.
Like most people my age, I have an aux cord in my car. However, several months ago I implemented a ban of its use except for during the rare occasion when there are no radio stations to be found. The last time the aux cord was resurrected from my glove box was on a cross-country road trip this past summer when we lost signal in the middle of the Rocky Mountains.
About a month ago I was talking with a few friends of mine and mentioned a thought that had come to me a few days before, which I named the “Musical Pareto Front”. Upon my explanation, one of them suggested I make a blog to share thoughts like these. Naturally, I decided that should be what my first post is about.