Deep Thought — (a possible sci fi movie?)

You know, the earth is only so big – but there is sunshine landing on oodles of nothing out there.  Is the sun burning itself to extinction – the very definition of futility? Is earth the only place that uses the light as opportunity for life? What happens to all the sunshine, the huge gigantic arc of light that hits the not-earth area?  Does the sun have an exitential crisis about its own utility?  Where does all that other light go? What does it illuminate and warm and fuel?

Science Fiction Storyline:

What if, we surrounded the sun in a gigantic solar blanket just outside our widest trajectory to capture energy.  We’d be capturing all the light, not just what hits earth.  That would cause the aliens dependent on that light we think is surplus to come and attack the blanket.   A good way to find out if anyone else is using the sunlight that misses earth, or to kill them off completely by depriving them access.  Let me know if this film already exists.  I could use a little humorous perspective on my own idea of utilitarianism.

Improv: To make do with whatever materials are at hand.

This blog tips its hat to Buckminster Fuller and his “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”.

Buckminster Fuller talks about the Great Pirates.  From wiki:  “The source of their power is that they are the only masters of global information in a time where people are focused locally. Specifically, the Great Pirates (G.P.’s) are aware that resources are not evenly distributed around the world, so that items which are abundant in one area are scarce in another. This gives rise to trade which the G.P.’s exploit for their own advantage.”  So as the 99% speak around the world, and the current political climate of our leaders rings out “No and No”, I suggest we let the current paradigm huff and puff itself to exhaustion and focus our energies on charting a path to improvise on our current system and build a new one.

Improv works by saying “Yes, and…”

My favorite definition of Improvisation is : To make do with whatever materials are at hand.

I like this definition, bc it has a distinct sense of a finite set of conditions.  There is a base, a trumpet, and a piano. There is a comedian, an audience, a theme, and a moment in history.  There are acquired skills, honed intuition, resources, memories, experiences, feedback loops, desires, wants, needs.  Improv is definitely informed by past events, but it is very much motivated by current context. It is extemporaneous.  It is immediate.  What I love about improv, is that it is constantly pushing the edges of innovation.  It is the generative outcome of play.

I’ve been culling rules of improv from the web that I like.  I appropriated them from all kinds of authors in all kinds of fields to act as conceptual guidelines to define for ourselves Sustainable Systems by group play.

10 Rules for Innovation Improv:
1) Say Yes.

2) Say Yes, and..

3) Be Specific, Provide details. Offer up changes. Share. Contribute. Add one idea per line.

4) Don’t Ask Questions, Posit solutions.

5) Don’t Block or Deny. That’s a Know-No.

6) Pay Attention, Read, Listen, Watch

7) Build. Bring anything from anywhere. You look good if you set the frame for another good idea. Don’t feel self-conscious, your idea is an inspired stepping stone to an improved or divergent pathway.

Number Sense & how we unlearn the intuition of a log scale

My favorite science/wonder reporting is a WNYC program called RadioLab.

One episode called Innate Numbers discusses how children in our culture are trained out of an intuitive and innate understanding of the logarithmic scale and into integers and linear thinking.  This is based on research and speculation by Stanislas Dehaene who wrote The Number Sense and Susan Carey.

Mirror Image

The thing I love about the exponential function is that it always has a mirror image.  For example, exponential growth in human population, would have many images that mirrored it such as exponential loss in square feet per person.  Now perhaps this is one of those tautological redundancies that I’m prone to, but I’m not so sure.  It has more to do with layered causes and effects in a complex and dynamic system.  So for example, exponential growth in fossil fuel use relates to exponential depletion of fossil reserves storing carbon in the deep earth, which relates to the exponential increase in gaseous CO2 to the atmosphere.  Really, we could come up with all kinds of chains of events that integrate to tell something about our deeply interrelated world.  The point here, is the exponential has momentum and as that momentum builds, one can start looking for the causal impacts resulting from that momentum.

A graph of the exponential function is a map of growth and decay.  In general, an exponential pattern can go unnoticed for generations before the culminating impact of its sequential doublings becomes observable.  The exponential function is the summative outcome of ‘normal’ behavior – what our parents did, what our neighborhoods are doing, what our children will do (unless something changes this pattern of behavior).  Climate change, population growth, AIDS, and consumption are status quo problems of exponential nature.  The change seems imperceptible in day-to-day life until it reaches a critical level when the culminating force of the doublings becomes abundantly clear.  The exponential function is self-similar change (1, 2, 4, 8, 16 or the reverse).  As one element grows, implicitly another recedes; the exponential function has a mirror image.

A good way to illustrate the exponential function is with the story of the poor boy who returns a lost princess to the king.  When asked by the king for any gift in trade, the boy only asks for a grain of rice, to doubled across each square of a chessboard (64 doublings).  The king knowing he has eight million bundles of grain (with one trillion grains per bundle) exclaims: That is all you want for returning my daughter?

But by the end of the simple doubling (1, 2, 4, 8, 16) across 63 squares, the poor boy has the king’s wealth in rice.  For the first 55 squares, the king is beaming because this request has barely made a dent in his stores.  By the 61st square, the king still has ¾ of his grain but by the 63rd square, the king is completely broke and encourages marriage between his daughter and the boy since he can no longer fulfill his end of the deal nor feed his daughter.  By simple doubling, the king experienced exponential loss of his finite resources and the boy exponential gain.

The ‘fact’ of the exponential function is that there is relatively little time to respond when the curve becomes noticeable.  In the example above, the simple doubling pattern can go for more than 55 generations, before the exponential function begins to be observable in the graph of the king’s rice.  Just two doublings from being broke, the king still has 75% of his resources.  This doubling is exponential growth coupled to exponential depletion of available resources.  When the resources are no longer sufficient, the king gives way to the boy.

The exponential function makes for a very simple graph – it is easy to name when you see it.  So easy, that the pound-in-your-heart implication embedded in the graph is lost and it is simply named:  ‘Oh, that is exponential’.  To most, it is a factual word without cultural embodiment.  It is a word lacking a literalization to bring it forth from the abstract.  What is the implication of ‘giving’ cultural meaning to ‘made’ abstract facts?  How do we culturally qualify the quantified?  There are nearly 7 billion people, each standing on his/her changing two foot square of earth with his/her own perspective on what is going on.

Meanwhile, the contemporary economic system thrives on infinite growth.  Infinite growth would be possible if we lived in an infinite world, but we don’t.  In ecology, the term carrying capacity is used to define the maximum population of a given organism that a particular environment or habitat can sustain (this includes biological and technological limits).

Awareness of the consequences of exponential growth is not recent.  In fact, Darwin cites the exponential function in the context of natural selection in the Origin of Species: ‘There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair’.    And yet, modern civilization has not come to terms with the social, cultural, and political significance of the exponential function:  that our normal behavior will be changed with or without our thinking consent, with or without our ability to use the information embodied in the multiple expressions of the exponential function.

The doubling of a population mirrors the doubling of resource depletion which mirrors a doubling of waste products or pollution.  As a species advances on the ecosystem creating a network of chemical synthesis, spreading out from the originator, it both exponentially grows in number and simultaneously depletes it resource base.  The mirror informs us too.

jlw29aug11 tho much of this text came from JVC.2008.7(3).309-334.

Energy Flash Cards

For 10/10/10 (a global day of action for climate change) and the Conflux festival, I made Energy Flash Cards.  See attached word document for printing out your own sets (there are 2 1-sided word documents they are complementary if printed double sided).  These flashcards highlight U.S. and New York energy use.  Or you can glean your own info from these fine sites.

EIA, US Energy Information Agency. www.eia.doe.gov

NYSERDA, NYS Energy Research and Development Authority. www.nyserda.org

PLANYC, Inventory of NYC GHG Emissions. www.nyc.gov/planyc203

Here are the word docx for downloading the front and back side of your flashcards.

Flashcards 1

Flashcards 2

Some are cut to 4.25″ x 3.5″, the others are 8.5″ x 3.5″ and folded over.  I stack them all together in a 4.25″ x 3.5″ package and tie them up with a ribbon to give away.

Reduce

In January 2010, I made 2^5 (or 32) sets of my grandma’s molasses cookies spelling the word “REDUCE” for an exhibit at 18 Rabbit Gallery in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  The pun of this project is in the command: REDUCE. It is eaten and it is itself reduced. It plays with viewer participation: does the viewer A) not consume the cookie so as to reduce his/her personal consumption, or B) consume the cookie and reduce the cookies available for others. As the cookies disappear, entropy takes over and the pattern REDUCE becomes an incomprehensible landscape of characters transformed from its original meaning. Both the non consuming viewer and the consuming viewer are tied together in the entrophic landscape. One leaving resources for another to partake. The other eating away at the cliche and in so doing, is fueled to share new observations of the world, to tell the time of now – generating living phrases to effect a meaningful environmental action in the current context. Both the consumer and the non consumer influence each other by their ‘action’ or ‘inaction’ in a shared commons. Together, they transform their surroundings and their understanding by their agency.

Hello world!

Word press has this little application that takes words from Louis Armstrong’s “Hello Dolly” and intermittently posts fragment of the song in a header as I work back here in administration.  I love Louis!  and post below, the lyrics from my favorite song of his, to set the tone of this blog:  What a wonderful world.

I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world

I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world

The colours of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shakin’ hands, sayin’ “How do you do?”
They’re really saying “I love you”

I hear babies cryin’, I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world
Yes, I think to myself, what a wonderful world

Oh yeah!