The IC/Coralville area is under siege from rising water, with the ante upping tonight as waters top the spillway at the Coralville Dam.

Here are some interesting links:

RiverCam of the coffer dam from Facilities Management at the UI.

Waters to top spillway at midnight – Press Citizen

Iowa City: Reservoir will top spillway at midnight – Des Moines Register

Looking Alot like ’93 – Daily Iowan

—

I’ll try to post more as I find it.

Why we should love logarithms – nature.com

The notion of a decreasing distance between numbers makes perfect sense once we think about that difference in proportionate terms: 1,001 is clearly more akin to 1,000 than 2 is to 1. We can even quantify those degrees of likeness. If we space numbers along a scale such that the distances between them reflect the proportion by which they increment the previous number, then the distance of a number n from 1 is given by the harmonic series, the sum of 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 and so on up to 1/n. This distance is roughly proportional to the logarithm of n.

This, it is often said, is why life seems to speed up as we get older: each passing year is a smaller proportion of our whole life. In perceptual terms, the clock ticks with an ever faster beat.

Love your logs.