Last year I was fortunate to get to work with a new team of co-authors on a paper titled “Quantifying minimum mobility needs: the Who, the Where, and the Why.” The project afforded a little space to think about the concept of wellbeing, in particular how it relates to mobility, and to engage with some fascinating early literature on fundamental human needs.

This is a new kind of post for me, in which I'll share some commentary or spare thoughts on this paper. These are links and connections to other topics, authors, and ideas that didn't fit into the paper …

This post expands on some text from the README of iam-units, in order to illustrate some improved ways to structure data and metadata. These are especially helpful in systems research, where data from multiple disciplines/domains/contexts are often combined.

iam-units is a thin wrapper around the very useful pint, that I wrote with some colleagues to handle unit conversions for data from integrated assessment models (IAMs) of energy and climate, including global warming potential (GWP) conversions between greenhouse gas (GHG) species:

In [1]: from iam_units import registry, convert_gwp

# Use a pint.UnitRegistry to convert from one unit to another …