ATS2780 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Critical Thinking, Precession, Calender
25 May 2018
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Lecture 9 – Open Systems and Data
Phenomena and Scale
• Phenomena have a characteristic scale
o “trade in cappucinos’ vs ‘trade in cars’
o Global climate change vs Elnino
o Sampling and resolution of data needs to suit scale of phenomenon
• Scales are hierarchical – spatially and temporally
o Wider scale processes → boundary conditions
o Finer scale processes → considered equilibrium value
Geographical Thinking
• Phenomena with spatial dependence
• Discovering spatial patterns
• Formulating hypotheses
• Testing and confirming
• Representing results
• Critical thinking applied throughout
• Tobler’s First Law of Geography
o Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more
related to distant things hahaha the guy next to me highlighted like his
whole text book
Time
• Our world has 3 dimensions in space
o X,y,z or
o Lat, lon, alt
• 1 dimension in time
• Newton
o Space is absolute: time flows continuously
• Einstein
o Space is relative: space and time are inter-transformable
• Indigenous cultures
o Legends are ‘timeless’
• Measuring passage of time
o Longitude problem
▪ Need accurate time to determine longitude pendulum clocks
▪ Dependent on each other
Cycles of Time
• Grouped into cycles
• Earth’s rotation → day/night
o Originally: 12 hours of day, 12 hours of night
• Moon’s orbit – 29.531 days
o Easily observed
o Lunar calendars: Easter-full moon
• Solar year – 365.242 days
o More difficult to determine accurately
• Week
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