Baseball, Weather Records and A Rest in the Woods

     Last weekend, just before Thanksgiving, in the woods of the Finger Lakes of Central New York, it could have been colder.  It's hard to say 'should have been' colder, because in truth, we don't know what it's supposed to be like on any given day or weekend.  Yes, if you like to see minute snippets of weather--single day high temps, for example--as passing bytes of proof that climate is changing, then you would say it should have been colder, more raw.  If, on the other hand, you believe that climate is changing, but you also see any given day's weather as an expression too ephemeral to represent the whole, then you just take a warm day in stride.  Or a warm weekend.  How about a warm month?  I think you can still take those in stride.  But the larger the data set, the harder it is to dismiss.  And larger data sets are, of course, collections of small bits of data--just as the streambed is a moving collection of cobbles and gravel, and while any one cobble isn't the streambank, well, in a cosmic way, it is.  Our aim should be to understand things at multiple scales and on several levels before we take a strong stance.  Scientists know this, which is why biologists study cells and organelles, but also organisms and systems, and why astronomers need to understand fundamental laws of physics and chemistry: the infinitessimal, and the infinite.

     Records in sports and weather are of two kinds: the meaningless and the meaningful.   The three things I follow most closely in life (aside from family) are weather, our emotional relationships with nature, and sports--not in any order.  In sports, we see humanity's main themes expressed somehow, so as an ex-jock but also as an observer of life, I think there's fundamental meaning in sports.  Meaningless sports records are ones that are either broken regularly, or that are statistically insignificant.  Often those two criteria are met in the same records.  For example, say a baseball player had more walks than anyone else since 2009.  Trumpeted as a real feat by announcers or statisticians, this means that such record has been broken twice in 3 years.  So is it a record, in the sense of a real accomplishment, or is it really just a statistic that reflects some artificial change in the way the game is played, managed, or officiated?  Or a team hitting its highest number of triples since 2007.  Compare that calibre of feat with something like most shutouts by a pitcher in one season since 1974 or most stolen bases by a player since 1981.  Of course, the idea is that rarity matters, scope matters, margins matter.  That's what makes records meaningful.  We understand the governing influences of baseball pretty clearly--and other sports--so most people tend to agree on the meaningful vs. meaningless distinction in sports records.  I am using baseball because of its deep history of stats. 

     With weather, it's not exactly equivalent, but we do have our share of meaningless records, and some that seem more meaningful.  Breaking the record high temperature for a given day in a given place, by a couple of degrees, may be analogous to someone breaking a sports record by a very small margin--250 innings pitched vs. 248 innings--or to breaking a very singular, isolated record that by definition is subject to the occasional low-probability outcome--maybe most throwing errors in a night game following a day game, for example.  The enhanced ability to track all types of data now allows for more data, more qualification of data, and therefore, more records.  However, this doesn't make weather data inherently meaningless, just because there's more of it.  In the above example, a record would be much more meaningful if it were broken by a wide margin.  There's nothing inherently interesting about Syracuse breaking a July high temperature record by 1 degree.  But breaking it by many degrees, or breaking single-day records many times in a given year, or breaking monthly averages several times over several years--that's when the gravels and cobbles start to become a streambed, and it's hard not to see them that way. 

     So that's the long way around to saying you can't extrapolate from little bits if information, but you can't ignore them either.  Isn't this just re-stating the law of averages?  Maybe.  I think of it more visually, as a fractal view.  Each scale of reality stands alone, but is also embedded in ever-larger scales.  In ecology this is called an 'organismal' approach--where we see cellular structure and organization as small-scale expressions of the same principle we see organizing larger systems in nature.  As if all scales are not only related, but together make up a larger organism, a cohesive whole.  For some, the organismal approach is just symbolic--a model or an idea--while others take it literally.  I take it literally.

     Thanks for the Ecology segue--overdue.  Ecology is really the study of all nature, and where we observe all rules of nature playing out.  Some rules play out in deep space, but then again, everything is deep space, even right here.  Darwin was an ecologist, just showing us a mechanism by which we might understand most rules of nature.  He was also tormented by his own awareness that his insight into ecology would more or less permanently weaken a religious explanation for everything.  By most accounts, Charles Darwin was a religious man who called nature as he saw it (this would make him a true scientist, practicing observation rather than projecting ideas first), and tried neither to stage, or avoid, a battle between opposing views of life.  To him, his observations were compatible with his belief in God, but he knew others would have trouble seeing it that way.

     So last weekend, just before Thanksgiving, in the woods of the Finger Lakes of Central New York, it could have been colder.  Maybe it should have been colder.  But either way, on this given day, trying to enjoy the moment and trying not to read context into the momentary weather, it was a sweet chance to spend a mild day in the woods with my 11-year old son.  We visited a local nature center and spent a few hours walking trails.  We wandered paths through some brutally disturbed struggling woods, with an understory of pure multiflora rose, privet and invasive honeysuckle.  He said he didn't really like those trails and I hoped it was because he was picking up on the absence of native vegetation, so we talked about that a little as we walked.  I suggested that people sense that even if they don't always pinpoint it.  He showed me where he found crawdads in the creek along this same trail earlier in the year.  Then we headed upslope between two small gorges, on a gentle jutting ridge of bedrock, and wandered into a much more promising oak woods with a supporting mix of ironwood, hickory and maple.  We found a semi-open gap in the forest, with the ground strewn with a perfect pad of soft crinkly oak and maple leaves mostly.  My son spontaneously sat down and then laid down to look up at the sky.  I asked him redundantly if he wanted to stop and take a rest here.  He said yes, it seems like a good spot.  Between us and the gray sky a hawk raked the canopy and prowled the woods.  We watched treetops move in a light breeze but the air was mostly still.  For a few minutes it was nice to just recline and rest in silence, taking in the subdued, rich tones of fall with a boy who will someday, with his peers, inherit the earth.