Alpaca Evolution

So a japanese friend showed me this last night, an app called Alpaca Evolution, a game in which you are an alpaca who "consumes" other alpacas and develops over time a freaky mutant body. Its nothing short of brilliant, download it and discover it for yourself or read a more detailed description here:

http://chicpixel.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-horrifying-world-of-alpaca-niisan.html

The result of a little bit of qualitative analysis from the other day, i'm pretty attached to this code, there's a fair bit of information concerning vegetation and slope embedded there.

Esto tambien es Lima

The perennial classic. Its not the destination that matters, but what happens along the way.

Or in other words, i dident manage to do everything I needed to do, but I had a great time nonetheless.

Sunset over Arequipa and El Misti

A brief introduction to Bofedales

Its time for some introductions, so the primary question begs, what exactly is a Bofedale? Beyond being a cool sounding name, Bofedales are in actual fact rapid peat forming plant communities of the Andes, which grow in inundated terrain forming dense mound like structures to survive the extreme conditions of high ultraviolet radiation, daily frosts, strong winds and regular fluctuations of the water table that is the environment of the high Andes. Basically they live where other plants don’t dare to tread.

Being plants and living where life is scarce, means they are an oasis of food in the Andean wilds and therefore an important habitat for many other species.  Humans included. According to archeological estimates, humans settled in the Andes roughly 6-7000 yrs ago, having encountered the high productivity pasture of the Bofedales and deciding it was to their liking, they set about domesticating the wild camelids and in effect produced the llamas and alpacas with which we are familiar today.

The people of the Andes also did a lot more than that. Not content with the natural extent of the Bofedales, they set about hand digging trenches, diverting mountain streams and aquifers, inundating valley bottoms and mountain slopes with the cascading streams of the Andes. What was the end result of this grand anthropogenic experiment? A greening of the Andean deserts, the spread of crucial life supporting systems and the development of an extensive pastoral system capable of supporting the people of the high Andes.

The practice of diverting streams to develop or enhance Bofedale pasture is still utilized today, as these images from google earth illustrate:

This last image reveals the complex morphology of a Bofedale and what is likely a herd of grazing llama or alpaca, represented by white specks on the Bofedale surface:

My research is focused on understanding the complex Bofedale morphology and the environmental factors driving its development.

Procrastination becomes Productivity

            

Dia de los Muertos (04-11-2011) - Promo Selection from gonzo440 on 8tracks Radio.

I recommend listening to this music loud while eating hotdog and drinking soft drink or yerba mate, and if you cant get soft drink or yerba mate, simply have a cup of black tea with 5 teaspoons of sugar. Should do the trick. Enjoy.

Temporary solutions and temporary dilemmas

An interior view of my temporary office in Valparaiso where I worked for a few days on the way to Peru. The room was so full of bed bugs that they would bite me as I worked at the desk. I left, having successfully re-analysed the satellite imagery but my face and neck were covered in itchy swollen red lumps.