Living my prime years

Another year, another birthday! And what a year it's been. Last year around my birthday I was working with NEON on the slopes of Mauna Loa (about which I gave a talk this week at the Hilo photography club meeting). This year I've just wrapped up finals weeks at UH Hilo after my first semester teaching, and attended the graduation ceremony yesterday. Attending graduation as faculty was an interesting experience and I have some thoughts about it, but they're still crystallizing so they'll come in a future post.

For today, I was thinking earlier that I'm celebrating my 37th birthday, and how that's back to being a prime number after 36. And then I thought about phrases like “being in one's prime,” or “being in the prime of life,” and started wondering: just how many years have I spent at a prime age?

Now, what does that very hastily-conceived notion mean? It's essentially just how many of your preceding years of life corresponded to prime numbers. We have to a little careful about birthdays, though; in essence, birthdays count years of age since the day of your birth, so your first birthday comes at the end of your first year of life. You are then “1 year old” during your second year of life until your second birthday. If we count the years which correspond to a prime number as “prime years”, we can compute, at each birthday, how many of your preceding years were “prime years” and what fraction that makes with your total number of years lived, as in this formula:

\[\text{prime years fraction}_{\text{at age }n}=\left.\frac{\text{prime years}}{\text{total years}}\right]_{\text{at age }n}\]

Confused yet? Let's start from your first birthday, which celebrates your first year outside the womb. One is not a prime number, so your total number of prime years lived to this point (out of a total of one) is zero; your prime years fraction is thus \(0/1=0\). At your second birthday, you have lived a total of two years; the first one is not prime, but your second year corresponds to two, which is prime, so you have one prime year out of two, or \(1/2=0.5\). At your third birthday, you have lived one non-prime year and two prime years (since two and three are prime), for a fraction of \(2/3=0.66\dots\)

And it's not hard to see that this is as good as it gets – at your fourth birthday you'll have lived two prime and two non-prime years so the fraction returns to 0.5, and since prime numbers only ever get farther apart your fraction of prime years begins a slow slide downwards. One interrupted by upwards jumps at each prime birthday, to be sure, but the overall trend is obvious. I found this sufficiently interesting to write up a quick Python program and plot what it would look like for ages 1–100, and here it is:

You can see the trend I've described: it starts at zero at your first birthday, shoots upwards the next two years, then begins a jagged descent. Since 37 is prime I've just jumped up to a prime fraction of 0.324, or, another way of putting it, just under one-third of my lived years have been prime (numbers).

The plot kind of reminds me of the nuclear binding energy curve in atomic physics, but I was also intrigued with where it seemed to be going. I thought it might be converging towards 0.2, but running it to 1000 dispelled that notion:

At this point I suspected it was converging towards zero at infinity, but my naïve implementation of prime-checking in my code was starting to take noticeably longer to run at higher upper limits. For a limit of ten thousand it still took under two seconds to run, but at a hundred thousand it took over four minutes:

I'm sure I could implement a more sophisticated method of prime-checking and push it higher numbers, but ultimately, checking whether a number is prime or not is a difficult problem (and one on which much of modern computer security depends). The overall trend is clear, mathematically, so for an idle musing like this I'm satisfied with what I got.

Anyway, I hope you found that at least a little interesting. We'll see where life takes me this year. Currently my summer is wide open (I've got a lot of ideas for things to do) and I'm on the schedule to teach again in the fall, but who knows where things might end up going. A hui hou!

On the semantics of uniqueness

I've mused occasionally for a while about the semantics of the concept of “uniqueness”. I've seen it asserted that uniqueness is essentially a boolean quality: something is either unique or it isn't. There's no comparative or superlative form of unique: uniquer, uniquest (although having written that, those sound pretty cool!). And the first two definitions from Merriam-Webster seem to agree with this: “being the only one : sole; being without a like or equal : unlike anything or anyone else : unequaled”.

But when I find myself pondering the concept, it feels like there should be degrees of uniqueness. For one thing, if we're talking about real objects, then every thing larger than a single molecule is technically unique at some scale. But that renders the concept rather useless as a word. If have a set of five “identical” rubber ball, four white balls and one blue one (⚪⚪⚪⚪🔵), it makes sense to describe the blue one as unique compared to the set of all of them, even if they technically are not all perfectly identical (and thus are all technically “unique”). So there's some tolerance built-in, within which we consider things to be identical for the sake convenience. That's fine – we live in the real world, not an ideal one.

Now consider a set of five balls, all of different colors. ⚪🔵🟢🟠🟣 It makes sense to describe each one (within the set) as being unique: they're all different from each other member of the set in terms of color, which is a concept we generally attach importance to. (Though I just realized I haven't considered color-blind people in this example; I should remember that for the future.)

But what if we add an elephant to that set? ⚪🔵🟢🟠🟣🐘

Every item in the set is still technically unique – but it certainly feels as if the elephant is somehow more unique than the other items. It's more different from all of them than any of them are from each other. Remove any one item from the set and the diversity (in pretty much any metric) will be at a global minimum when that item is the elephant. Calling any of the balls unique – while technically true – seems somewhat understated in the face of the literal elephant in the room set.

I was prepared to argue this point more, until as I was looking unique up in the online Merriam-Webster dictionary I noticed a third definition, and a usage guide. The third definition reads “very special or notable : unusual”, and the usage guide notes that:

Unique is often cited as a word that should never be modified by terms like somewhat or very. The thinking is that unique properly only describes what is unequaled or otherwise distinct from all others. Just as something cannot be more "only" than another, it cannot be more unique than another. This logic fails, however, when we consider that unique can also mean "unusual" or "rare," as in "a unique opportunity" or "a unique feature." In these cases, phrases like "very unique" are standard.

 “Very”, I would argue, is just an intensifier adverb like “more” is, so I think it's ultimately fine to consider something more or less unique; it's expressing something about the ratio of how similar it is to other things in whatever set we're including it in vs. how similar those other set members are to each other. (You could probably come up with a mathematical definition for this in terms of set theory, but I'm not sure I know enough about it to do so.) But that's just my take on it, and it is, ultimately, semantics. Feel free to chime in in the comments! A hui hou!

Creating props for the game table: crafting an alien laser weapon from scratch

We're fast approaching the end of the spring semester, and I swear I've been doing things besides teaching and woodworking this year…but I have another project to show off. This one's a bit different, since it came about from an RPG campaign I'm playing in. A friend of mine has been running a years-long series of campaigns in the same homebrew setting using a number of different game systems where the events of one campaign become the background and history for the next, as the world changes and adjusts based on the players' actions. Perhaps I'll talk about it more at some point, but in the current campaign (using the Draw Steel system) we found ourselves fighting off a murderous hit squad of a mysterious alien race from the heavens, who fought with weapons of yellow light.

One of those weapons which my character recovered after we survived the attack was described as a laser chakram which could be thrown like a boomerang and also used to fight hand-to-hand (perfect for my sneaky dagger-wielding Shadow). As I was driving home after the session, I suddenly found an idea of what it might look like popping into my head…and then found I couldn't get it out of my head. It took me most of a weekend working obsessively to fashion it out of wood and paint, but I think the result is well worth it.

A chakram would normally be a single circular piece of metal, but in my head I saw an idea of a two-part weapon which could be split into semicircles for hand-to-hand fighting, then combined into one for throwing. I haven't done this yet, but I'd like to eventually countersink some magnets in the two bases so that they can snap together and simulate my vision for it. I realize it's hard to tell the scale in these pictures, but I can comfortably fit a hand into each half to hold on to it.

This is actually the first woodworking project I did without a pattern to follow (before the ones I mentioned in an earlier post), and it's remarkable how straight the path from my head to finished product was. I had to buy a router to trim away wood to make the laser “blades” stick out from the thicker board, and it turned out to work pretty much exactly like I'd expected it to (I'd been planning on getting one anyway, this was just a good reason to speed it up). Making the round cuts required a jigsaw, one of my favorite power tools but also one I hadn't had much occasion to use before. I realized after I'd made the cuts that I had a better jigsaw blade for fine cutting than the default one which came with the saw, so they could be slightly better, but as long as you don't look too closely it's fine.

Here's a shot of them on the campaign map. And yes, the laser portions do glow in the dark – this is me we're talking about, after all (you can just see a hint of it in this photo). It took several attempts over a few days, but I eventually figured out a way to mix my yellow glow-in-the-dark pigment with a regular yellow pigment in such a way as to look good in both light and darkness. I also took the chance to use some of the metallic paints sitting around in my paint collection, since I don't usually have much use for them in my paintings. The semi-random circuitry-inspired detailing was a late addition as they were coming together to break up the visual monotony of the design, and I'm really happy with how it turned out.

This was a very interesting project for me with how I didn't really plan it, it just sort of…happened. I did feel a bit like one of Dwarf Fortress's dwarfs forging an artifact in the grip of a Strange Mood, hauling materials to a workshop and laboring on a great project until it's finished (fitting, in a way, for my character who is also a dwarf). I haven't been similarly inspired again yet, but it did sort of open my eyes to what I could accomplish with what I have. Will there be more like this in the future? We'll find out, I guess! A hui hou!

Edit (4/29/26): It took some work, but I managed to get some photos of the blades glowing in low light:

It's very hard to get the same effect in a photo compared to seeing it, but hopefully this gives a feel for what it's like.

End table improvements

I have been doing things besides woodworking this year, but I did get into it rather heavily and still have several projects to show off. One I finished mid-March is another end table using the same pattern as the first one I made. I actually started this one back in December not long after finishing the first one, but got interrupted by my family arriving and wasn't able to finish it until March (which led to some interesting differences, as I improved both my skills and equipment in the meantime). 

Whereas for the first one I used all pine, for this one I used a mixture of pine (for the legs and stretchers), red oak (for large flat surfaces including the top, drawer, and bottom shelf), and fir (which…you can't actually see in these photos, but it's essentially trim on the sides). I was a little worried at first that the colors would clash and I might need to do some staining, but the oak and pine actually came out looking fairly well-matched in the end. (The fir's a little off, but, well, live and learn…)

Here you can see the first table (on the left) next to the second one. There's a definite improvement in my opinion. The first one is functional, and the proportions generally work, but it's not the prettiest thing I've ever made. I wasn't paying much attention to the wood I used in it, and while I personally like the look of pine the color and patterns are kind of a mess, and it's got screws visible all over (though they might be hard to see in the photo).

In the meantime between starting and finishing the second table, I made a few upgrades to my workshop. For one thing, I got a pocket hole jig, which allowed me to hide the screws holding it together away from sight (by screwing in at an angle rather than straight into a surface). I had to do a little trial-and-error to get that working, but I'm quite happy with how it came out. I also got both a miter saw and a table saw in the interim, which let me make much better cuts than with the circular saw I was using (though there are still a few wonky cuts from the early stages of construction which I couldn't fix without completely tearing it apart and starting over).

Overall it's a big improvement, and while I think I could do even better now it's satisfying to see my progress already. I still have a lot to learn, but it's nice to see that I'm getting better. I don't have any plans to make more of these at the moment (though being able to start out with a table saw would be a huge help), but the skills I've been honing transfer, and I've got plenty more ideas for things to make. A hui hou!

Farewell gifts (and geese)

In addition to the larger furniture pieces I showed off in my previous post, I've been making a number of smaller woodworking projects too. Two friends of mine are both moving away from Hawaii in the near future, so I put my newfound skills to the test to make them some farewell gifts.

For my friend Mark, I wanted to try an end-grain cutting board after watching a video on how to make them. Basically, you glue a bunch of strips of wood together (all cut along the grain, or “rip cut”), then cut them in strips across the grain (“cross cut”) and flip them up 90° so that the end face of the board is made up of the end grain faces of each piece (the end grain is where you can see the rings). I haven't been able to test it myself yet (for reasons of time), but from what I've heard this results in a more durable cutting board than simply leaving those strip glued together to make an edge grain cutting board, though it's also more work (and has more wood lost to kerf from making more cuts). Experienced woodworkers can make all kinds of fascinating patterns by the selection, arrangement, and cutting angles of various kinds of wood, but the basic premise is relatively simple.

After wetting it down to “raise the [wood] grain” to get a smoother sanded finish.

The project still took me over a week, since I discovered the miter gauge on my table saw isn't really accurate enough for repeated cross cuts like I needed to make. I ended up with a bunch of wood strips which, when glued together, weren't all quite the same thickness. There are some tools which could potentially solve this easily, but I don't have them, so I had to spend hours trying to sand down and smooth out the irregularities. (Going forward I intend to preemptively solve this by making a cross cut sled, a simple jig made using plywood and some screws which should make getting repeatable cross cuts much easier.)

And here it is after applying a protective mineral oil and wax finish.

Anyway, after a lot of sanding and small cosmetic fixes I got it to a state where I'm mostly happy with it. It should serve as a cutting board, at least, even if it's not perfect. I wanted to make something using local woods as a reminder of Hawaiʻi, so I used koa and ʻōhiʻa (plus some African padauk for a pop of orange contrast. The edges and center are koa, with ʻōhiʻa to either side of it down the middle and then padauk just inside the edges.) I haven't decided on whether it'd be better with things like a juice groove or edge handles, but since Mark's still got some time before he leaves I'll probably just ask him.

For my friend Josh, whom I worked with at my job with NEON last year, I decided to make a little coaster from some scraps of Phillipine mahagony I had from another project (which I'll reveal at some point). A few years ago I bought some novelty coasters designed to look like little wooden pallets, and I thought something like that would make a practical gift.

Raw materials after cutting them out, and the inspiration.

The strips of wood I had were slightly wider than in the original coasters, so I went for a solid flat face on the top. The result came out looking pretty good, in my opinion!

And since Josh enjoyed seeing the nēnē while we were working up in the natural area reserve, I pulled out my wood burning kit and doodled a quizzical nēnē from a photo I took while visiting the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge last year. This project was a lot quicker, and only took me a few hours over the course of a day.

The inspiration…

…and the (slightly off-center) result.

While the occasion of their creation is for less-than-happy reasons, it was a lot of fun to stretch my creative muscles for these projects and make something new. I like making practical furniture, but it's also nice to make smaller practical (and decorative) wood pieces. I've got more things to show off here at some point too, so stay tuned! A hui hou!

Getting started in woodworking

I have a lot of hobbies. Some (including me) might say too many, since there's not nearly enough time in the [day|year|arbitrary amount of time] to enjoy all of them. So ,what have I done in the past few months on top of moving/preparing for a family visit/starting a new teaching position? Picked up another hobby, of course!

Yes, that's right. I haven't mentioned it yet in part because I've been so busy, but back in December I started trying my hand at woodworking. It's not entirely new to me – I did some woodworking in 4-H in my teens, and helped out with carpentry jobs around the house growing up – but it's certainly been a long time, and I had to relearn some of the fundamentals pretty quickly.

I also hadn't said anything about it yet because I wanted a few finished projects to show off. Between the aforementioned things keeping me busy my progress in getting things done has been somewhat uneven, and I wanted more to show than a bunch of in-progress photos. (Although having watched a number of woodworking videos now, I'm thinking it might be fun to make my own showing off the process of building something.)

My very first project, completed around mid-December, was this end table/nightstand piece. Following a plan I found online I built it out of pine with little but a circular saw, a power drill, and an impact driver. It was something of an achievement in ignorance; given what I've learned since then it's remarkable that I only ended up wasting one board while making it and that it came out as good at it did. There's a lot I would do differently now (especially now that I have more specialized tools), but for what it was it came out remarkably good.

Making that piece was sort of a trial-by-fire learning process, as I re-learned concepts like kerf (how much wood is removed when sawing), cutting straight lines, and joining wood pieces together. It was simultaneously confidence-boosting and confidence-draining, as I realized the extent of my ignorance. Thankfully, my brother Joel (who's been woodworking for years) shared an online course with me, The Weekend Woodworker, which introduces key concepts and techniques through a series of directed projects. I've been working through it since then and it's been really helpful as I learn and refine new skills.

The first thing I built from the course was this mobile workbench, which has been essential for everything since. For my first project up above I'd used two old sets of shelves which I found in the downstairs workshop as a working area, but this workbench (and its large surface) makes things so much easier. It's sturdy, and the ability to roll it around to wherever I need it is incredibly helpful. (I had to upgrade the lighting in the workshop as the bulbs down there when I moved in weren't really up to the task of illuminating it, and being able to move my working area around for better light is great.)

Using that workbench (and some new tools), I managed to get this little patio table finished before my family arrived at the end of December. This was an exercise in getting to know the miter saw, which makes cross cuts a whole lot easier than a circular saw! I used Douglas fir for this project, as I quite like the look of it, and chose to leave the table unpainted. Some people find softwoods undesirable to look at, but I think they can be quite beautiful when properly finished (though hardwoods have their own allure, too). Actually, writing this reminds me that I bought a dowel to use to add the look of some fake dowel joinery to the legs as part of an optional enhancement, which I should get back to one of these days (though functionally, it's finished).

The next project from the course was this bench, which is also made of fir and pine, but stained to look like hardwood. This was another lesson in precision and accuracy, since it's made of interleaved slats with spaces between them that all need to join precisely together. I started this project between when my family left and when I started teaching in early January…and it then took nearly a month to finish between how busy I was getting up to speed teaching and how many coats of pre-stain, stain, and finish it took. All of which were annoyingly difficult to apply, due to the large surface area of all those slats and the constrained volume between them. It came out looking pretty good, though! I was skeptical about the stain at first, but it's grown on me.

I have a few more projects I've completed (plus some on the way), but I need to cut this post short in order to head off to an observing run on the UH 2.2-m telescope tonight. I'll definitely have more to share in the future, though. I'm really enjoying the process of woodworking; it's a good fit for my 3D spatial reason capabilities, I love the smell of freshly-cut wood, and I love the idea of making things that are both beautiful and practical. I've felt the siren song of building practical things call to me in the past on the rare occasions I'd visit Home Depot, and being able to finally indulge it is an incredible feeling. A few friends have even expressed interest in commissions, so we'll see where this all goes in the future. A hui hou!

Visiting Papakōlea Green Sand Beach

With everything happening so far this year I haven't had time to talk about my trip to Papakōlea Beach while my family was visiting in January. Papakōlea Beach is one of two green sand beaches in the world (the other being in the Galàpagos Islands), with papa kōlea meaning “plover flats” in Hawaiian. It's located about three miles east of Ka Lae, or South Point, the southernmost-point on Hawaiʻi island, in the state of Hawaii, and in the US.

Windmills near South Point (facing north). They're on top of a huge scarp falling off to the west.

I'd never actually been to South Point before so visiting it was a new experience. I was once again struck by the vast amount and array of microclimates to be found around this island. The southern tip of Mauna Loa is windswept and barren, with only low grass or scraggly trees blowing fitfully in the ever-present breeze. 

Sea cliffs at South Point (facing north up the west coast).

Beach at South Point (facing south, towards Antarctica).

I knew there were sea cliffs at South Point, but didn't realize there were also beaches within the space of half a mile or so. It's interesting to think that, looking southwards, the next land is Antarctica, almost half the globe away! (And if you get swept out to sea, the current will take you straight there…) The eerie solitude of the place definitely instills a respect for the ocean. There are no lifeguards here, so while you can swim, it's definitely “at your own risk” (emphasis on risk). People have absolutely been lost to the sea here (I think there was one just last year).

Papakōlea Beach, within a volcanic tuff cone (facing east along the coast).

It's a few miles from the parking lot to the beach, and takes about an hour and ten minutes to hike. As I went along, at some point I remember looking down at the ground and thinking that the sand was starting to have a definite greenish cast to it. The trail passes very near the point where the photo above was taken, which provides a fantastic vantage point to see the partially eroded volcanic cone which provides the olivine crystals that give the sand its color.

View from the top of the path looking down to the beach.

I didn't get a great view of the path down, but it's not the easiest walk. Some old metal ladders near the top provided a start where the path is steepest, after which we carefully made our way down sloping, eroded tuff cliffs. It was slightly dicey, but it's not a long path and once down on the beach it was fine.

Sand up close! (Hand courtesy of my brother Joel.)

The color is a little hard to bring through in photos (I wonder if the camera is doing some color balancing), and it's not exactly a vivid green, but it's definitely not your normal sand color either.

View of some of the eroded parts of the cone on its eastern side, from down on the beach.

Looking back west from near the highest point of the cone.

Overall it's a very interesting beach to visit. Even if it weren't for the green sand, the topography and the way it exists inside an old volcanic cone is fascinating, and very picturesque.

One thing noticeable in many of these photos is the weather. The day we visited there was a winter storm over much of the island, and the clouds were fairly thick in the sky with a constant, stiff wind blowing. (Our timing couldn't have been better, though, since literally as we reached the car on our way back it started to rain.) This was probably about the best weather we could have asked for, in terms of hiking, as the exposed trail would be brutal under a clear sky or without a cooling breeze. If you go, definitely make sure you have good sun protection and plenty of water (and maybe try to go early in the morning).

I'm glad I finally made it out to the beach (it only took twelve years…), and hopefully I can get back there sometime with my drone in better weather when the wind isn't blowing constantly and get some aerial photos. We'll see! A hui hou!

A new chapter in life – undergraduate instructor!

In all the hustle and bustle the past few months between moving and my job at NEON ending, I realize that I never actually mentioned what was coming next for me. The answer is: teaching several physics and astronomy courses at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, my alma mater.

I think I forgot to mention it in part because it was something of a long time coming. I originally applied to the lecturer pool near the tail end of 2024, after my job at Gemini ended. There weren't any classes available for the spring semester in 2025, but they liked my application and asked me to apply again for the fall. I started working at NEON in April and didn't think too much about it, though I did apply. There was some discussion in the summer of me teaching a single class for the fall semester which ended up not happening (probably for the best, given how exhausted I generally was from work). However, for this semester I ended up going into the new year with an agreement to teach two classes, which I forgot to mention in the whirlwind of preparing for my family visiting that was December. Then, in the few days between my family departing and classes starting on the 12th I was asked if I'd like to teach another class. I said yes, and that's how I ended up teaching three courses this semester – with zero prior experience teaching in a formal setting.

It's been a bit hectic. The first week of classes I was frantically trying to figure out what resources we had available (I got mixed up and thought I had one week more to prepare than I did), and the second week I came down with something (probably COVID, based on the symptoms) which really hampered my efforts to catch up and prepare and teach. Three weeks in, however, I'm more-or-less recovered and finally feeling like I'm starting to get a handle on things.

I'm still adjusting to this new role; it's strange being addressed as “Professor” and being in a position I looked up to as a student. I've never been in a management position before, so it's weird having the power to assign homework. There's a bit of a learning curve as I get back up to speed on hazily-remembered physics and math that I haven't used in over a decade, and there are no lack of demands on my time throughout the week. I do like being in a position to help people learn; it's something I've always enjoyed informally, so hopefully it'll get easier with a bit of time and experience. We'll see, I suppose! Truly, never a dull moment in my life*. A hui hou!

*I wouldn't mind some dull moments in my life.

Starting the year with an exhibition

My family have come to visit and gone again, and as expected it was a wonderful, hectic, whirlwind of a time. I'll have a report of my trip (for the first time!) to Green Sands Beach coming Soon™, but for the past few days I've mostly been decompressing and getting ready for teaching a few astronomy and physics courses at UH Hilo this semester, so this'll be a short post. Classes start this week, instead of next week like I somehow got mixed up and thought, so I'll be jumping in at the deep end with less preparation than expected! But hopefully it'll work out – it's mostly labs, so there isn't really anything to do the first week, and everyone I've spoken to seems pretty relaxed about it. (In contrast to how stressed I am thinking about it.)

Leaving that aside, for this post I wanted to quickly mention that I've got two of my drone photos in the 2026 Hawaiʻi Island Art Alliance Invitational exhibition at the Wailoa Center in downtown Hilo, as part of a collaboration between the Hilo Photo Shooters Club and Pau Hana Writers called Hawaiʻi Island: Images by Light and Pen. The exhibition runs from January 16–February 12, with an opening reception from 5–7 PM on the 16th which I plan to attend. I think I've shared both photos on this blog previously so it won't be anything new to long-time readers, but I'll try to get some pictures of them in situ, as it were. It's funny to think that I'll now be a thrice-exhibited artist, and for sculpture, paintings, and now photography! A hui hou!

NEON protocols, part 2 (non-periodic)

After a pleasant Christmas I'm back to wrap up this short series on the various activities I got to take part in over the field season with NEON (the National Ecological Observatory Network). Part 1 covered the protocols we performed throughout the season. This post will look at the remainder.

These protocols I'm calling, for lack of a better term, non-periodic. They had windows of time (typically a few weeks to months) during the year during which they could be conducted, and our job was to perform them in as many different plots as possible during that time. (With some limitations, certain protocols only applied to certain types of plots.)

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Plant Diversity (DIV)

This was the first non-periodic protocol we did, and is also probably my favorite. The window opened around the time I began in April, and closed in early summer. The basic concept is simple: we looked for as many plant species as we could find in a plot.

A beautiful field of Elaphoglossum wawrae ferns.

In practice, it was a little more complicated. We were looking for vascular plant species, so didn't count mosses or other bryophytes. We also counted at various scales and locations around the plot. Each plot was a 20×20 m square, and we would count species at certain 1 m² subplots within it, at 10 m² subplots, and within the four 100 m² quadrants that made up the plot.

Maile (Alyxia stellata) fruit; they often grow in chains, one out of the other.

Looking at different spatial scales provided some interesting information on the biodiversity at each plot. In some plots, most of the species in the plot could be found within a single 1×1 m square, while in others there would be comparatively few in such a small area but a large number in aggregate across the entire plot.

ʻIeʻie (Fraycinetia arborea) fruits, somewhat rare to see.

This protocol was essentially a big treasure hunt for plants, and I enjoyed it a lot. It happening early in the season was helpful (as it really kickstarted our plant species knowledge), but I was sad that it also ended early, since it was so much fun. It was great for really getting to know the various different climates and environments around the Natural Area Reserve (NAR), from lava fields less than two hundred years old with grasses and sparse ʻōhiʻa, to dense koa forest, to lower and wetter rainforest disturbed by pigs, and a few more besides.

Coarse Downed Wood (CDW)

This protocol was about tallying up and recording information about downed trees. For each plot, we'd walk 90 m out from the center along three transects (lines) 120° from each other and record dead wood we encountered along the way. This was…among my less-favorite protocols, for reasons I'll get to. Its window also opened early in the season, but didn't close until near the end. We stopped doing it around the end of June because other protocols (see below) crowded it out, and I wasn't sad to see the end of it…until we ended up doing it again a few months later once things finally calmed down a bit and we realized we still had a few weeks left in the window and a few more plots to perform it at.

In theory, it was simple: follow a line through the woods using a compass, measure out 90 meters, and record dead wood that the line crossed. Each piece of dead wood was termed a “particle” (a term I found amusing from a physics standpoint). There was a nuance that particles below a certain diameter weren't tallied (so you weren't recording every dead twig), and that minimum diameter was a function of distance along the transect (so – just making up some arbitrary numbers – a branch 10 cm in diameter encountered at 2 m along the transect would be recorded, but if it were encountered more than 30 m along the transect it would no longer be recorded as it would be considered too small to count. I didn't fully understand it, but there were published statistical reasons behind this.).

That still wasn't too complicated, but if you got into a situation where the transect encountered multiple forks of the same dead branch or tree, it got way more complicated with a bunch of measurements that needed to be done to determine an ‘average diameter’ to see if it got recorded. Frustratingly, this could result in spending 10 minutes making measurements and doing calculations only for the resulting value to be too small, and all that work being for naught. Thankfully that was rare, but I definitely didn't enjoy it when it happened.

Most of the time, the transect would cross a particle at one point along its length, which made measurement of its diameter simpler, but not necessarily easy. With many plots in mature rainforest, a lot of the dead wood we encountered was in advanced stages of decomposition; it was often hard to get a diameter (or even determine limits) as the log was slowly turning into dirt (“tree puddles,” we called them).

On top of such difficulties, running transects through the forest could be quite arduous. The transects went straight on, with no consideration for the roughness of the terrain or plants through with they passed. Those same dead trees we were recording could, when crossing our path, make getting past them pretty difficult – it's remarkable how many trees fall in such a way, suspended slightly above the forest floor, that it's hard to get either under or over them. The final plot we performed CDW at had a patch of uluhe (Dicranopteris linearis) so dense that we had to go around, but in general we went straight through thick, thin, and thicket.

Dicranopteris linearis, one of three fern species called uluhe in Hawaiian. It forms dense thickets.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that CDW could be very easy and quick in plots on newer land that didn't have any large dead trees yet. In some plots, walking a 90 m transect could take two hours or more; in others, it could take ten minutes. And while I personally didn't enjoy it much, it was the favorite protocol of a few of my coworkers, unlike:

Below Ground Biomass (BGB)

Hoo boy. Where to start with Below Ground Biomass? (It actually had a second official name, but I don't remember it as we all just called in BGB.) Where CDW had its share of people who both liked and disliked it, pretty much no one enjoyed BGB (it's definitely my least-favorite protocol). The basic premise was simple: at certain plots, we would extract a ‘brownie’ of soil, including all the roots in it. We would then carefully rinse the dirt away and strain out the roots, which we would then pick over and sort into bins based on their diameter. I forget the exact cut-off points, but they were in the single-digit millimeter range; these were small roots. The extracted roots would then be dried, weighed, and a portion of them would be ground up to be sent off for analysis.

While the soil retrieval and washing weren't too bad, the root sorting was simultaneously mind-numbingly tedious and exhausting. We spent several weeks over the middle of summer doing little else other than sitting bent over a tray of roots in water in the lab, picking out teen-tiny roots one by one with forceps. I didn't mind it too much the first few days…but by the time we finally finished it we were all ready to snap at the sight of another root. I forgot to take any photos of this protocol, but frankly, you're not missing much.

One notable incident involving this protocol was the first time I was using the Wiley mill to grind up some roots after we'd finished sorting and drying them. These machines are not cheap, to put it lightly, so when I managed to get it into a non-starting state when accidentally over-stuffing it with roots I had some very worried thoughts pass through my head. Thankfully, the fix was simple; I'd simply blown a $5 fuse that was easily replaced, though it had to be sourced off-island because it wasn't a common configuration.

Soils (SLS)

I almost forgot this one, because it was a relatively easy protocol that went by quickly. This despite the fact that we performed it twice during the season, once around May/June and again around September (to capture soil chemistry at different seasonal conditions). Similarly to BGB it involved collecting soil samples from plots, but the analysis of those samples was much simpler: just a little lab work to prepare them for shipping to a central laboratory for further analysis (and most of that only had to be done the first time, in June). The most difficult part of SLS was simply finding deep enough soil to get a sample; we had to sample from a list of random coordinates in the plots, which would sometimes be pointing at roots, places where the soil was a half-inch deep, and other unhelpful locations. In such cases, we'd cross off the coordinates and move to the next until one happened to coincide with sufficiently-deep soil. Still, even with that slowdown, this protocol only took about two weeks each time, with soil samples being collected from multiple plots per day (versus other protocols that could take multiple days to finish a single plot).

Vegetation Structure (VST)

One such protocol was Vegetation Structure, the last protocol in the season. VST was another divisive one, though in the opposite direction from CDW: some of my coworkers disliked it, but I actually quite enjoyed it. Where CDW measured dead wood, VST involved measuring the living; specifically, trees and small woody shrubs. The exact measurements varied slightly by size and category, but generally included things like a stem or trunk diameter and height, plus sometimes various other bits of data like the extent of the crown, the health status of the plant, or the position in the forest (ranging from Open Grown to Full Shade). 

Me marking a decumbent (but still living) hapuʻu pulu (Cibotium glaucum).

As part of the protocol we'd tag each plant measured and mark where we measured the diameter so that future field techs could reproduce the measurement. Many plants were already marked from the last time VST was done (five years ago for some plots), but new plants would grow large enough to be measured in the intervening time so we usually had a few ‘adders’ in each plot.

Me rewiring a tag around a maile stem (foreground).

I liked VST, but I can understand why some people found it arduous. One facet even I agreed on was the requirement for measuring the extent of the crowns of trees. In a thick forest, for mature trees (or even young but tall ones) this can be, to put it mildly, difficult. The best method usually involved two people making their way out to beneath the edges of the crown on opposite sides (as best they could guess) and measuring the distance between them. This was prone, we felt, to a high level of error as it was often not at all easy figuring out where a particular tree's leaves and branches extended to or how directly ‘underneath’ it we were, especially when such leaves were 15 or more meters in the air and surrounded by leaves from other trees. The height of a tree could also be difficult to ascertain, even with the electronic range finders we were using, and prone to large systematic error.

Old growth koa forest (one of only two plots). The orange color is lichen that grows on koas preferentially.

Still, other than having to scrabble around in leaf litter to find tags on downed hapuʻu tree ferns, I generally enjoyed VST. I was able to put my Python skills to use with the data we collected this year to make some graphs for the annual report we were obligated to provide as part of our agreement to be able to use the NAR. Some protocols (including VST) only get done every five years in some plots; this was one of those years, and since the Hawaiʻi NEON site was established relatively recently in 2018 this was only the second time some of those measurements had been taken. It was really exciting to see how the trends looked, and I could even pick out different environments in the plots clustering in certain parts of the phase space.

One notable result from this year was that a lot of our trees actually shrank in diameter compared to five years ago. That's because this was a really, really dry year and the trunks had shrunk from lack of water. The trees had generally gotten taller, so they were definitely still growing, they just weren't growing out as much. Hopefully next year brings some rain, we could really use it. (But given how miserable working in the rain was when it did happen, a part of me is glad this year was a dry as it was.)

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So there you have it: a rough outline of what the 2025 NEON field season looked like. We started out with DIV and CDW, transitioned into SLS then into BGB for an interminable few weeks over the summer, started VST (and SLS again), realized we were making excellent time on VST and that the CDW window was still open, so finished off CDW and VST near the end of the season. And of course, in the background, all the periodic protocols were being conducted as well. It's quite the symphony of science being coordinated and conducted by NEON, carried out at sites across the US each year. It should hopefully run for about another twenty years, and it'll be interesting to see just what kinds of things we learn from such a large-scale project. As an open-access project, all the data collected are available here; as an astronomer, with a commitment to open knowledge, that was one of the things that initially drew me to this job.

My family's coming to visit on New Year's Eve, so this'll probably be my last post for the year as I prepare for that, and what a year it's been! I've given up on trying predict the future and where I might end up working, but in the near term: next semester I'll be teaching a few courses in physics and astronomy at my alma mater, the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Having never taught in a formal setting before I'm quite nervous, even as everyone tells me what a good teacher I'll make. We'll see I suppose! Big changes ahead next year. Hauʻoli Makahiki Hou, a hui hou!