re: WNYC’s “Tell Me More” 9/22/08 Michel, I don’t think you, or anyone else, is getting a good picture of what happened, why, or what effect it will have. I’m not a mystic with secret answers, but a systems scientist who has been studying this kind of collapse in natural systems for 30 years. It’s … Continue reading What the collapse really means
Anselmo & all, I think it’s very relevant to consider the accumulating adverse genetic change due to human intervention. The principal process of evolution is not yet well understood yet though. “Punctuated equilibrium” requires a mechanism for relatively rapid change of the whole genome rather than a selective drift of individual genes, and as yet … Continue reading Human interference polluting the genome??
O2 post: Mauro asked about sorting out “carbon sinks” That’s an excellent question. What you want is the *accumulative* total effect, for the *choice* being made, not so much the particular carbon sink (if what you want is to give people ways to decide what choices are better than others). The way you’re starting is … Continue reading Measuring CO2 lifespan… and signs of nature’s rejection
post to FRIAM 1/20/07 marking a map to help navigating the sysems territory One of the things that Roger’s comments bring out about the discontinuities you find in tracing organism growth (epigenesis) is the question of markers. Normal single growth curves are famous for representing huge changes and having almost no markers at all to … Continue reading Quite easy to mark
Posted to AIA COTE forum 1/11/07 A great old oak that’s been the center of it’s neighborhood for decades, home to wild life and children’s play, a long labor for leaf raking and thing of beauty in every season, began it’s life with exponential growth that was equally splendid in its transformative magic even if … Continue reading What do you tell a tree?
From: phil henshaw Wednesday, September 23, 2006 8:09 PM To: ‘overpopulation@googlegroups.com’ Subject: RE: religion and overpopulation Bob, Perhaps if you thought of each kind of intelligence as a different language, only capable of receiving and interpreting certain kinds of nature’s phrases, you’d get the meaning of ‘cultural’ that I intended. There’s women’s intelligence, for example, often quite different … Continue reading Can ‘intelligence’ have an impact?
To: overpopulation@googlegroups.com All, I can hear that having a clear direction would be a relief and its own reward. The direction I hear being taken, though, is one that sounds the same as the ones taken many times before with much effort and commitment, and I don’t hear any sense of curiosity about how the … Continue reading Religion and Overpopulation
Stan, Approximation sweeps away ‘fuzziness’, and one thing your and my conceptions are completely consistent on is “any system during its development moves from being more vague to becoming more definitely embodied”. There are issues in differentiating descriptive, explanatory, and organizational/behavioral ‘fuzziness’, but it’s those “fuzzy bits” that are the main thing approximation sweeps away. … Continue reading RE: internalism…&things missing from approximation
Anyone in charge of almost any kind of organization, throwing a party, running a business, etc., will want it to build up to a point where it’s exciting, but not to where you loose control. You usually want things to approach the edge of stability, but not go over it to lose resilience. It’s fun, … Continue reading Risky Play
By 2020 the investors of the world will see their self-interest and stop compounding their returns, allowing the global economy to climax at a high stable rate of change, forestalling the climax of investment with a loss of resilience, expectation failures, environmental collapse, conflict and mistakes. The real limit of economic growth is the loss … Continue reading By 2020 – The Year of Clear Vision