Manatees warming inland, wind addicts shredding in the Gulf

The Florida Manatee (Trichechus manatus latirostris) is a subspecies of the West Indian Manatee. The other subspecies is the Antillean Manatee, Trichechus manatus manatus. The distinction is that only the Florida Manatee has to deal with cold water in winter. It does so by migrating inland to "warm water refugia" like freshwater springs. The Florida Manatee is also a little bigger than the Antillean Manatee, which might be another cold adaptation. Development in Florida has destroyed or cut off access to a lot of the natural warm water refugia, but at the same time we have inadvertently created some unnaturally warm areas (like powerplant outflows) that the manatees can use instead. One of those is Manatee Park in Fort Myers, which is on an offshoot of the Caloosahatchee Estuary warmed by effluent from a gas powerplant. It's a popular tourist destination in winter when the manatees are there. I got to go there on Thursday to give a talk about aquatic plant restoration to a nice group of staff and volunteers. We are trying to restore freshwater plants in the low salinity part of the Caloosahatchee so the manatees can eat those near the powerplant and not have to swim a long way through cold water and boat traffic to get to the seagrass beds near the coast. The freshwater plants were THICK in the 1980s and 1990s but some devastating saltwater intrusion events killed almost all of them. We're trying to manage the river flow better to avoid that, but it's hard because there are a lot of competing demands for the water. Rising sea level and other factors aren't helping. But we're doing our best. Anyway, seeing all those adorable potatos basking in the warm river reminded me what it's all about.

The other Florida winter thing I wanted to write about is windsurfing. I got a great session today in strong Northwest winds associated with what's supposed to be an exceptionally cold cold front. The air was about 14 Celsius on the beach at Wiggins Pass State Park, which would barely qualify as cold in Virginia or Massachusetts, so it wasn't too bad. I wore a 3 mm scuba wetsuit with a hooded neoprene vest underneath for some extra warmth, and that was perfect. Sometimes I peeled the hood back, but after a dousing or in chilly, peppering rain I would put it back on. The wind was just starting when I got to the beach and the waves hadn't built much yet. It was perfect for the 5.7 sail and 106 liter exocet cross.

Later the wind increased significantly and I switched to 4.7 and my smallest board (83 liters). The waves were bigger by then and I got some fun little rides.

There were a few nice kiteboarders there who I chatted with in the parking lot. Good times. :)

First time on a road bike after 40 years of other bicycling

Sometime in the mid 1980s, in Red Square at The Evergreen State College, I took my first terrified pedal on a bike with no training wheels. I think my dad held the seat at first, and then let go once I got going. Some crying and mild injuries were involved and it took some more time before I decided I liked biking. So, same story as learning to windsurf. Once I was big enough my parents bought me a mountain bike with gear shifters and hand brakes, and I made good use of it for play and early transportation independence. For example, when I did sailing day camp I would ride 2.3 km to the nearest bus stop (at Evergreen), lock up the bike, then ride the bus to the marina downtown. There was also a phase where I was riding it to high school (7 km), riding it to work at McDonalds (7.7 km), or riding it to the gym to lift weights (8.8 km). Those "long" rides had an element of self-paced athletic challenge that was confidence-building for me as someone who remained deathly afraid of school sports and other competitive stuff.

I'm not sure how it happened (maybe suggested by parents?), but in 1997 my Seattle friend Josh and I signed up for the 330 km (very long) "Seattle to Portland" bicycle ride. Racers do it in one day but normal riders do it in two, staying overnight in a gymasium or fairgrounds or something near the halfway point. The STP required some preparation because neither Josh nor I had ever ridden close to that distance previously. I prepped by getting some less-knobby tires for the mountain bike, putting little toe-baskets on the pedals, and finding some spandex shorts with paddling in the "seat" area. I did some longish rides around Olympia leading up to the race and figured I'd be fine. I was so confident I didn't even wear the padded shorts the first day (mistake). By the end of the second day I had identifed SEVEN different types of excruciating malady affecting my butt and private areas. I don't remember all seven now, but some were chafing, bruising, and blocked circulation. My legs were also so tired I could barely walk up stairs. So even though it was a neat to have done, the extreme butt-torture aspect of it effectively turned off any nascent interest in long distance bike riding / racing. Once I recovered I got back to using the bike for commuting and stuff, but never signed up for another long ride or race.

Anyway, there were no major changes to my bike situation for the next 29 years. The one I used for commuting in college was a mountain bike. I don't think I had a bike in grad school or in my postdoc jobs after that. Shortly after I moved to Florida in 2012 I got a silver Schwinn at Walmart that suited me well. I'm not sure what you'd call it- maybe a city-bike or a touring bike? It had 29 inch tires with fairly smooth tread, and it seemed efficient. The original handlebars curved back towards the seat which put you in an upright posture like the wicked witch of the west. I didn't like that but I traded to the straight handlebars of my wife's mountain bike so we both got the kind of handlebars and riding posture we like. I didn't use it regularly until 2022 when we moved close enough to FGCU that I could easily bike to work every day. A couple years of daily use and outdoor storage (I put a tarp over it but it still gets wet) degraded it to the point where each time I took it for a tune-up they lectured me that it would be cheaper to just get a new one. It's not my style to get rid of things that still work, but when I learned that my windsurfing buddy Max is a bike afficionado / refurbished bike dealer I got curious about what he might have for me.

For all my encyclopedic knowledge of wind and paddleboards equipment, I really don't know shit about bicycles. I wasn't even sure what kind of bicycle I would want if I could have any kind. But I'll admit to being a little road-bike-curious from seeing all the fit retiree road bikers zooming along Florida's straight, flat roads; often zooming past me even when I felt like I was riding fairly fast on my Walmart Schwinn. I also watched that Netflix series about the Tour de France and related to it because of its similarities to SUP racing (drafting, etc.). And even going WAY back to when I was a kid, I was curious about those ram's horns handlebars on my dad's ancient road bike in the garage that I never saw anyone ride. So when Max said he had various road bike variations I could try and maybe buy, I rode over there as fast as my Schwinn would take me.

Max and his wife Marissa are new parents, so an even-more-interesting-than-bicycles thing at their place was checking out their very cute baby and getting the rundown on all his precocious achievements, dietary experimentation, allergen exposure regime, etc. The first time I saw the baby (during a windsurfing session at the quarry lake Max lives on), he was very new and behaving like a bread loaf in a bread box. However, this time he was crawling around, pulling the dog's tail, making and imitating facial expressions, and generally indicating rapid progression towards being a delightful handful for his parents.

At some point we moved to the garage / bicycle laboratory and checked out Max' impressive hoard of bikes and parts. He had one "beater" bike that was sort of a road bike but with straight handlebars and simpler gearing, so I tried that first to build confidence. I didn't immediately crash, so it was on to the real road bike that Max had in mind for me.

This is the bike:

It seemed super fancy and high-performance, with carbon fiber components and clever aerodynamic and shock-absorbing details of frame, seat post, etc. Would I be able to ride it, though? The narrow, low handlebars and very leaned-forward posture were an awkward adjustment, but I tentatively rolled down the avenue. Even with hands on top of the handlebars I was way more aerodynamically positioned than on my old bike, and with hands on the dropped down part of the bars I felt extremely speed-crouched like a downhill skier. I don't know which aspects of a road bike are most important for making it faster than a normal bike, but the ducked posture and narrow/hard tires obviously contribute. The scariest road bike adjustment, where I felt most at risk of crashing, was switching hands between the upper and lower handle bar positions. Getting more confident with my weight distribution and balance is making that easier, though. The racey seat was uncomfortable at first, but slightly adjusting the height and angle helped a lot. Max and Marissa talked about humans' "sit bones" and the importance of getting them lined up with the supportive parts of the seat. I'm not sure I have the personal anatomical awareness to detect when I'm seated right, but I'll work on it.

At the end of the testing and tuning rides in Max's neighborhood I left my Schwinn with Max and rode home with what was now MY road bike. I tracked the ride with my GPS watch so I can start getting an idea of how fast the bike goes with different levels of effort. I got home a few minutes faster than I got to Max' house, but I was also riding harder and didn't hit the traffic lights and stuff the same so it's not a fair comparison. Maybe I'll do some more testing over the weekend. In the meantime I'm riding the bike to work and getting more tuned to it.

MLK vs. the idea that some people have the right to dominate others

The United States has several federal holidays that celebrate people or historical events of significance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_holidays_in_the_United_States

One of the most inspiring among these is Martin Luther King Day, established by a bipartisan bill in 1986 to honor slain civil rights activist Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK). MLK was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia and murdered on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. We celebrate MLK day on the third Monday of every January. The main reasons I think MLK day is so inspiring are:

1. Because of Martin Luther King’s amazing leadership of a huge and successful movement to gain civil rights for black Americans and end (legal) racial segregation. King also worked tirelessly against the oppression of the poor by the rich (e.g., he supported organized labor, tenants’ rights, etc.) and he was a global peace activist who opposed the Vietnam War. He wasn’t perfect (nobody is), but in all our history he is unquestioningly among the Americans who have done the most to help other people and improve society, joining a legacy also full of the great abolitionists and suffragists of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

2. Because our embrace of Martin Luther King’s legacy shows that we are capable of recognizing and rejecting the evils of our past and becoming a better, more egalitarian society. MLK was a Baptist minister, and for all my skepticism of religion I am still incredibly moved by the spiritual aspect of his humility and self-sacrifice. At the broader scale, our nation’s struggling transformation from enslavers and oppressors to protectors of freedom for all is our truest enactment of this ideal of spiritual change and betterment.

Of course, our nation’s transformation is incomplete, tenuous, and imperiled. WE MUST NOT FALL BACK INTO THE EVILS THAT KING HELPED US OVERCOME. We are at dire risk of doing just that now because of the fascist regime that has risen to power here.

The regime’s rise owes to the awkward but dangerously successful political marriage of blue-collar white people and the ultra-wealthy elite. This awkward marriage was the “southern strategy” that Nixon’s republicans began in MLK’s time and which lead to Reagan and eventually to the Tea Party and Trump. Trump’s MAGA regime is now the apotheosis of the southern strategy; enthroning a gold-draped billionaire while deploying armies of poor goons to terrorize perceived enemies. The only philosophical tenet uniting the extremely wealthy and the aggrieved poor is the horrible idea that some people have a right to dominate others. This is the polar opposite of the loving, egalitarian society that MLK dreamed of. MLK’s dream is the clear vision we need to fight the fascist corruption taking hold. (And that is why modern propagandists perennially seek to co-opt, distort, and denigrate King’s legacy. Watch out for them.)

3. There’s a third one and it’s a tough one for me. It’s King’s courageous practice of non-violent resistance, refusing to meet hate with hate. He said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” To win freedom for oppressed black people in America he had to touch a spark of love and sympathy in the hearts of largely indifferent white people. While his movement eschewed the strength of arms it grew in the power of moral righteousness enough to finally turn the tide of public opinion. Maybe that is not always possible, but it was so, so beautiful and I want that more than anything for America again today.

Discipline over Doom-scrolling?

One marshmallow now or two marshmallows later? Delaying gratification to achieve a greater good for oneself or the world is a fundamental challenge of adulting, if not THE fundamental challenge of adulting. Convincing myself that something hard is worth it, then really FEELING that it's worth it, is not easy. 

With that said, I'm taking a more serious than usual approach to New Year's resolutions this year. My overall goal is to establish a more functional, integrated approach to work, wellness, and righting the wrongs of the world. More handling, less hand wringing, if you will. 

Hopefully posting about this doesn't jinx my attempts, but SO FAR things are going well. My specific resolutions / actions have been:

1. Make better use of at-the-desk time at work to ensure progress on long-term goals like publishing papers. Towards this end I have dusted off the "JamesWorkLog.xlsx" spreadsheet that Rhonda inspired me to make back in 2023. (It's based on the one she uses to track her writing work.) I can't share the whole thing because parts of it are too embarrassing or profane, but below is a screenshot of part of last week, which went well. 

Something that's making this both easier and more important is that my boss reduced my teaching load by one class for this semester only. So this is my chance to get ahead and I don't want to blow it. 

2. A parallel resolution is to avoid getting sucked into unproductive doom-scrolling. I.e., I can get the gist of our planetary plight and ghastly descent into fascism over morning coffee at home and a few hallway and cafeteria conversations at work. I don't need to constantly traumatize myself to the point of losing focus during the day or losing sleep at night. I want to be informed enough to do my part for citizen resistance while maintaining the ecologist / professor work activities that (I believe) are also a force for good in the world. 

The other motivation for doom-scrolling less is to withhold attention and advertising revenue from the big tech "broligarchs" like Mark Zuckerberg who have chosen to financially support the fascist Trump regime. I still have a lot of room for improvement in this area since, for instance, this blog is hosted by Google, and their billionaire CEO Sundar Pichai is one of the creepy oligarchs who donated a million dollars to Trump's inauguration party as an obvious tithe for the king. 

Specific actions that I have taken so far for digital wellness and ethics are: 

a) I uninstalled the FaceBook app from my phone. 

b) I forbade myself from checking news or social media at work, with the exception of I still let myself scroll bluesky on my phone at lunch. This has been hard but I have kept it up so far and it has already helped me, I think. The temptation to doom-scroll hits hardest when my concentration is needed to complete a difficult or anxiety-inducing task, but when I resist the temptation I keep both the time and the mental mojo I need for the task. 

c) I'm trying to do a "FaceBook fast" for a while (from a few days ago until groundhog day) to see how that goes and if it's something I could do more permanently. There are both pros and cons to that. Like, I reach more people when I post something on FaceBook than when I just post it on this blog and bluesky. But the more read it is on FaceBook the more money it makes for evil Meta corp, abettors of fascism.

d) I removed the ad banners from this blog (today). In 15 years they earned me a total of about $200, and (if I did my math right) over the same time period they earned evil Google corp, abettors of fascism on par with Meta, about $94. Now my blog shall burden Google's servers while giving them nothing in return. NOTHING! On a deeper level it seems like it's always the case that the nearly powerless masses must make great collective sacrifices to finally disempower their greedy masters. Taking down my ads is not a great sacrifice, but it's like, a warm-up for exercising that principle. 

e) I decided to make reading my personal emails a thing again, after about a year of basically never checking the account because I was only barely able to keep up with my work email account. To the extent that I eschew FaceBook I will be more dependent on the old-Internet mode of using email to keep up with family, friends, and if anybody ever comments on my blog. <waits patiently>

f) When I am looking at news or bluesky I'm trying prioritize thoughtful newsletters and blog posts and stuff over the general clickbait articles. Like reading blog posts from historian Heather Cox Richardson and economist Robert Reich. 

Something I haven't done YET, but is on my list to do, is extricate myself from super-evil, F-rated by the Better Business Bureau company "Photobucket," which has been extorting me for $6.99/month for years for hosting my old blog images, heavily watermarked. It was a free service when I started using it in conjunction with my blog in the early 2000s, but then they basically destroyed my blog and held my precious memories for ransom with their black-mirror-like policy change in 2017, earning them the F-rating. 

3. The final resolution thing is "wellness," which I've partially addressed with the above-discussion of how I'm trying to avoiding mojo-stealing doom-scrolling. For physical wellness I'm already in an OK place of getting a bit of daily exercise by biking to work, always taking the stairs at work, paddleboarding or windsurfing whenever I can, and jogging when I can't find time for any other type of exercise. The change for 2026 is just to be a little more pragmatic and less uptight about exercising (like, just choose an activity and do it instead stressing so much over what where and when), and to add the gym at work as another "when I can't make time to get on the water" option. 

Which is the right "hot take" regarding our political situation and the way out?

As 2026 begins, many Americans, including me, are reflecting on our deeply troubling political, cultural, economic, and environmental dysfunction. I know this because of all the hot-takes and hand-wringing about it I see and hear on the Internet and in real life. My contribution today will be a hot take on the hot takes; a meta-hot-take, if you will. Here's what I've seen:

Today's hot takes usually fall somewhere on a three-pointed triangle of who is to blame for the Trumpian nightmare. The extreme perspectives forming the points of the triangle are:

1. "It's all the fault of uneducated, middle-America MAGA types, based on their deplorable racism, sexism, religious zealotry, xenophobia, low IQ, etc. They can't be cured or converted so the best solution is to overpower, ignore, or disenfranchise them."

2. "It's all liberal democrats' fault for being elitist snobs obsessed with political correctness and woke ideology. We've forgotten the common working man, especially the uneducated white Christian working man, forcing him to align with Trump as a last, desperate means to preserve his dignity and economic prospects." Sometimes this take ends with the suggestion that democrats drop their support of women, diversity, education, LGBTQIA+, etc. and elevate blue collar white dudes to the center of everything. 

3. "It's all the fault of billionaires and mega-corporations usurping the nation's treasure and warping politics and media to their selfish ends. They cynically fuel right vs. left culture wars to divert attention from their ongoing heist of the world, all while viciously exploiting their employees, consumers, and young sex-trafficking victims."

Not all hot takes go fully into the extreme of one of the points. For example, Chris Hedges' 2016 essay https://www.truthdig.com/articles/we-are-all-deplorables/, which is still relevant, did a lot of self-critical #2 but didn't excuse the bigotry of #1, and suggested a focus on the economic side of #3 as a way to move forward. 

For my part I think there are bits of truth in 1 and 2, but 3 is the truest. Unfortunately, it seems like we're usually duking it out between 1 and 2 while not giving point 3 proper consideration. I.e., we're giving crooked billionaires a pass that they don't deserve, while playing into their hands by fighting each other on the media platforms they control. 

Here are two quick thoughts on how left-leaning people like me can avoid that playing-into-the-billionaires-hands thing. 

1. DO reject racism and other bigotry, but don't be too snobby against people who didn't go to college or whatever, because when it comes down to it we're all basically working-class people who need to cooperate to resist being exploited by the the ultra wealthy. One of billionaires' tricks is to portray working class liberals as the elites, hiding the fact that billionaires are the actual elites. We shouldn't make it any easier for them to portray us that way. 

2.  Make sure our liberal political offerings are actually GOOD for working people, and not corrupted by corporate BS. As an example, it's hard to argue strongly in support of corporate-mangled policies like the Affordable Care Act because they're so compromised by giveaways to wealthy interests. The republican offerings are all corporate giveaways, too, but we need to offer something that's clearly not that. 

Excel calculator for measuring volume and displacement with a cup or bucket

It's easy to measure the volume of a fluid sample or the volumetric displacement of an irregularly-shaped object if you have access to a "graduated cylinder" of the appropriate size. Unfortunately, graduated cylinders, especially big ones, are hard to come by. Measuring cups for cooking can work for small amounts of liquid and small dunked-objects, but they're usually not marked in fine enough increments to provide scientific precision.

Other mundane vessels such as cups and buckets can be used to measure displacement pretty well if you don't mind doing a little extra math and measurement. The purpose of this post is to simplify that math and share a tool that will do it for you. At the end of the post I share a story of how a student and I applied this technique to answer an ecological question. 

The Math Part: There's a formula for the volume of a cylinder (V = πr²h) that makes it easy to relate fluid volume to the level of fluid in a cylindrical container. In the formula, r is the radius of the cylinder and h is the height. Most cups and buckets are not true cylinders, though. They're usually wider at the top than at the base, so technically they are a truncated cone or "frustum" shape. The formula for the volume of a frustum is V = (1/3)π(R²+Rr+r²)h where R is the bigger radius of the top and r is the smaller radius of the bottom. Another thing that's tricky about a frustum compared to a true cylinder is that its vertical height (h) is shorter than the length along the wall (w), which complicates measurement. Luckily, the relationship between h and w can be calculated by substituting the relevant measures into the Pythagorean theorem for right triangles, a² + b² = c² -> (R-r)² + h² = w² then solving for h.

The Practical Approach: Follow this step by step guide and use the Microsoft Excel calculator tool embedded and linked below to turning a frustum shaped cup or bucket into a useful measuring container. The calculator file has two worksheets- "Template" is a blank version with no measurements added yet, and "Example" is filled out already with approximate dimensions of a hardware store bucket. 

Step 1) Measure the inner diameter at the wider (top) of the vessel, which we'll call "D." Half that diameter will give us the radius of the top of the vessel, "R." If you enter the value for D the calculator will fill in the value for R. 

Step 2) Measure the inner diameter of the bottom of the vessel, which we'll call "d". You might have to measure the outer diameter of the bottom of the vessel and subtract 2x the wall thickness to get the inner diameter. Half of d will give us the radius of the inside bottom of the vessel, "r." If you enter the value for d the calculator will fill in the value for r. 

Step 3) Measure the inside wall length from top to bottom, which we'll call "W." Enter that in the calculator. The calculator will now give you the total volume of the vessel in cubic mm, cubic cm, and liters. You can tweak the file if you need volume expressed in different units. 

Step 4) Put the vessel down on a flat, even surface and partially fill it with liquid. Add enough liquid to cover the object(s) you're going to dunk in it, but not so much that it will overflow when you dunk the object(s). It shouldn't matter what liquid you use, but water is nice. 

Step 5) Measure the distance from the rim of the vessel to the surface of the liquid and enter it in column L. We're calling that value "B" because it's the before dunking measurement. 

Step 6) Dunk whatever you need to measure the volume of in the liquid and measure the distance from the rim of the vessel to the surface of the liquid again. Enter it in column M. We're calling this value "A" because it's the after dunking measurement. If the thing you're measuring the displacement of floats you might have to push it down or weigh it down in a bag to get it all the way under. Just be careful that you account for the volume of whatever other objects you're using to sink the object of interest. Also make sure there aren't any air bubbles trapped in the thing you're sinking, unless you want the air pockets included in the volume. Note that the fluid displacement method won't work if the thing you dunk dissolves in the fluid, because dissolved matter won't displace as much fluid as solid matter.

Step 7) Once you've filled in all the yellow boxes the calculator should be giving you accurate values for volume of the fluid, volume of the fluid + object, and volume of the object. 

This is the calculator- It should work online but it will probably be less annoying if you download it. 

How my student used it: In fall 2025, one of my undergraduate research interns used an earlier version of this bucket displacement method to determine how much space is occupied by the plants in dry detention ponds with different management styles. Her results showed that even though it LOOKS like the plants in a natural meadow or wetland occupy a lot of 3d space, the volume that they actually take up is negligible. I.e., the added water storage capacity you get by mowing a dry detention pond is less than 1 vertical millimeter and doesn't justify the loss of plant habitat and ecosystem services that occurs when you mow. 

For the sake of completeness, I shall end this post with a classic meme image of a southern elephant seal (Mirounga leonina) with a bucket. 

Hudson Bay - Where is the sea ice? + Polar/Temperate Ocean Boundaries

Hudson Bay in Canada is exceptionally late in icing up this year.



The bay is interesting in normal times, too, as it's an extension of the Arctic Ocean into the middle of Canada that kind of refrigerates the climate there through feedbacks between the ocean, atmosphere, and continental landmass. The default latitudinal boundaries between earth's polar and temperate seas are 60 degrees N and 60 degrees S, but the usual climate of Hudson Bay gets it it included as part of the Arctic Ocean despite its lower latitude. Conversely there are parts of the North Atlantic above 60 degrees N that are warmed by the Gulf Stream and not considered part of the Arctic Ocean. Watching how anthropogenic climate change is shaking up the usual climate / ocean boundaries is interesting but also scary because of the rapid environmental and geopolitical change it's causing. One interesting tool that US has (for now) for viewing polar conditions is the National Snow and Ice Data Center's "sea ice today" website. https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today Highly recommended.