Did I mention that I'm not only going to be covering technical topics on this blog? Today's word, kids, is "Aquaponics".
Aquaculture is growing fish for food. Hydroponics is growing food (or other) plants in water or other non-soil rooting medium. Aquaponics is using the fish water as the hydroponic nutrient solution, which does two things for you: the plants filter the nutrients (ammonia is fish urine but plant ambrosia) out of the water, so they don't choke the fish but instead are converted into, say, lettuce; and the fish provide completely organic and relatively balanced set of nutrients for the plants. So the combination is superior than either together, which makes perfect sense if you consider that two smaller ecologies put together into one bigger one are necessarily more balanced and stable.
Anyway, that's our family's project this week. We had already wanted to grow lettuce indoors for the winter, and so instead of simply growing lettuce, we are growing lettuce floating in a styrofoam block on an aquarium. The aquarium will have goldfish, so we won't be eating that end of the system -- but it could just as well have tilapia in it. In fact, tilapia are great aquaculture fish because they'll essentially eat anything. If they don't eat it, it just feeds algae, and they eat the algae instead.
So after we level up with 25 gallons of goldfish tank, I am very seriously considering building a much larger tank in the backyard under a geodesic dome (per Organic Gardening of 1972) and growing me some serious tilapia. Did you know that in a round pool 12 feet in diameter and 3 feet deep (a small section of our backyard) you can harvest 500 half-pound tilapia every couple of months? No, neither did I until today.
Anyway, I see all this as related to programming. Both are simply the design of systems to meet needs. And in fact, I find the way I think about an aquaponics system is very similar to the way I think about a general data processing system. Where an aquaponics system outputs lettuce, a data processing system outputs some information I want. To make lettuce, I need to consider the nutrients and water and light; to make valuable information I need to consider the available raw data.
In either case, I find that a small, modular approach works well. In the case of aquaculture, it's a matter of considering what nutrients are where and what organisms can convert one thing to another; whereas in software, it's a matter of seeing simple data structures and designing lightweight tools that can convert one to another -- and then you organize all your little modules/organisms into an ecology.
Lately, there have been two (software) projects I've worked on in which this systems approach has worked well. The new Toon-o-Matic is composed of a number of small, relatively simple Perl scripts which are all organized by a Makefile. Each script reads one or two or three input data structures, and emits one or two. The overall network could be drawn as a graph (and indeed, that would be edifying and entertaining, and I should do that.)
The other such system is this blog. I've deliberately kept the approach simple and completely sui generis. I'm reinventing the wheel to a certain extent, but that's the attraction -- I like new wheels, and the occasional flaw doesn't bother me, as I always learn. Evolution doesn't mind reinventing the wheel -- did you know that the eye has evolved many completely separate times? The eyes of insects, vertebrates, and molluscs are three completely independent instances of the evolution of a visual sensor. And the eyes of molluscs (like octopi) are demonstrably superior to ours: our retinal nerves are in front of our retinae, thus each eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve penetrates the retina to leave the eyeball. Molluscs sensibly have their retinal nerves behind the retina: no blind spot. Another reason to believe in Intelligent Design -- just, you know, not of us. God loves the octopus, which is why global warming is going to provide the octopus with lots of shallow, warm seas with recently vacated cities in them.
Anyway, back on something resembling a track: my ultimate goal in the case of aquaculture is to close the ecological loop. I want to take my kitchen and garden waste, recycle it with vermiculture and composting, feed the worms and plants to tilapia, use the fish water for lettuce and seedlings and the worm castings for root vegetables, and ultimately I believe it may well be possible to feed my family fresh fish and veggies with not much more input than cardboad, grass clippings, and leaves, and whatever's on sale at Kroger.
My goal in the case of most data processing systems is less lofty: I simply want to model some useful process in small, easily maintained and easily modified steps, so that the system remains flexible and reliable. But in either case, the thought processes are similar: to attain a large goal, break it down into small, reusable task utilities.
I'll keep you posted on both.
