Don't just do something, stand there! Reflections on the counterintuitive behavior of complex systems, seen through the eyes of System Dynamics, Systems Thinking and simulation.
Today in 1941, the first Liberty Ship was launched, the Patrick Henry. About 4 years later, my grandmother launched the Fort Hoskins, a Liberty tanker.
She was a burner, i.e. a cutting torch operator, working at the Swan Island yard in Portland throughout WWII. One of her jobs was to lie under the huge bulkheads as they lowered them into place, to trim the steel to fit.
Are iPads the successor to the dark side of TV?
I love the iPad, but it seems rather limited as a content creation device. It’s good at some things (GarageBand), but even with a good app, I can’t imagine serious model building on it. Even some social media activities, like twitter, seem a bit awkward, because it’s hard to multitask effectively to share web links and other nontrivial content.
It seems that there’s some danger of it becoming a channel for content consumption, insulating users in their filter bubbles and leaving aspiring content creators disempowered. The monolithic gatekeeper model for apps seems potentially problematic in the long term as well, as a distortion to the evolutionary landscape for software.
It would be a bit ironic if cars someday bore bumper stickers protesting a new vehicle for mindless media delivery:
“You watch television to turn your brain off and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.”
— Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer and Pixar, in Macworld Magazine, February 2004
I’ve been browsing the ALEC model legislation on ALECexposed, some of which infiltrated the Montana legislature. It’s discouragingly predictable stuff, but not without a bit of amusement. Take the ALEC Energy Principles:
Mission: To define a comprehensive strategy for energy security, production, and distribution in the states consistent with the Jeffersonian principles of free markets and federalism.
Except when authoritarian government is needed to stuff big infrastructure projects down the throats of unwilling private property owners:
Reliable electricity supply depends upon significant improvement of the transmission grid. Interstate and intrastate transmission siting authority and procedures must be addressed to facilitate the construction of needed new infrastructure.
Like free markets, federalism apparently has its limits:
Such plan shall only be approved by the commission if the expense of implementing such a plan is borne by the federal government.
Companies self-regulate just fine, without any rule of law, like they do in Nigeria:
Some of the results are “horrifying” and “unprecedented,” Brown says. The wells serving at least 10 Ogoni communities, for instance, have unsafe levels of hydrocarbons; one well had levels of benzene, a known carcinogen, that were 900 times greater than those deemed safe by the World Health Organization. In some areas, the researchers measured 8 centimeters of oil floating on top of groundwater and oil-soaked soils 5 meters deep. “Areas which appear unaffected at the surface are in reality severely contaminated underground,” the report concluded. In one bit of good news, the researchers concluded that spilled oil had not tainted local fish, a major source of protein, although it had ruined numerous fish farms.
Well, sort of. This is a rolling shutter effect from the iPhone’s line scanning CMOS sensor. It’s not representative of true waveforms, but it’s fun to watch.
via DPreview
There are some fun string applets here (use your mouse to pluck) and here.
John Sterman takes time off from bathtub dynamics for a cameo appearance in a ScienceFriday cartoon:
IBM was founded a hundred years ago today. Its stock has appreciated by a factor of 40 from 1962 (about 5 doublings in 50 years is 7%/yr).
Perhaps more importantly, the Magna Carta turned 796 yesterday. It was a major milestone in a long ascent of rule of law and civil liberties.
What will the next century and millennium bring?
Via NPR,
All of us, even if we have no knack for science, look at the weather, at our children, at our markets, at the sky, and we see rhythms and patterns that seem to repeat, that give us the ability to predict. …
Do any of us live beyond pattern? …
I don’t think so. Artists may be, oddly, the most pattern-aware. Case in point: The totally unpredictable, one-of-a-kind novelist Kurt Vonnegut … once gave a lecture in which he presented — in graphic form — the basic plots of all the world’s great stories. Every story you’ve ever heard, he said, are reflections of a few, classic story shapes. They are so elementary, he said, he could draw them on an X/Y axis.
Systems thinkers, watch for:
I just rediscovered the Carnegie Mellon EIO-LCA tool, an online model for input-output lifecycle analysis. I ran it for the “Electronic computer manufacturing” sector to see how the results compare with Apple’s lifecycle analysis of my new MacBook.
The result: 284 tons CO2eq per million dollars of output. That translates to 340 kg for a $1200 computer. This is almost the same as Apple’s number, except that the Apple figure includes lifecycle emissions from use, for about a third of the total, so Apple’s manufacturing emissions are about a third lower than the generic computer sector in the EIO-LCA tool.
Directionally, it’s interesting that Apple’s estimate (presumably a process-based accounting) is lower, given that manufacturing happens in China, where electricity and GDP are both carbon-intensive on average. I wouldn’t read too much into the differences without digging much deeper though.
From my friends at the MIT Climate CoLab, a cool experiment in collective intelligence:
To the members of the Climate CoLab,
We are pleased to announce the launch of the 2011 Climate CoLab Contest. This year, the question that the CoLab poses is:
How should the 21st century economy evolve bearing in mind the reality of climate change?
This year’s contest will feature two competition pools:
- Global, whose proposals outline how a feature of the world economy should evolve,
- Regional/national, whose proposals outline how a feature of a regional or national economy should evolve.
The contest will run for six months from May 16 to November 15. Winners will be selected based on voting by community members and review by the judges.
The winning teams will present their proposals at briefings at the United Nations in New York City and U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C. The Climate CoLab will sponsor one representative from each of the winning teams.
We encourage you to form teams with other CoLab members who share your regional or global interests. Fill out your profile and start debating and brainstorming. If you would like to join a team, please send me a message.
Learn more about this year’s contest at http://climatecolab.org. Please tell your friends!Best,
Lisa Jing
For the Climate CoLab Team
(Click through for the full strip)