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.

Solutions. A journal

Solutions Journal is a nonprofit print and online publication devoted to showcasing bold and innovative ideas for solving the world’s integrated ecological, social, and economic problems. Our mission is to provide a forum for developing and discussing seriously creative ideas to solve society’s most pressing problems in an integrated way.

Yes! In Our Back Yard. IOBY.org

NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard) is an unwillingness to take responsability for both the positive and negative externalities of a given industry that makes the products we use.  In addition to resistance to egregious companies, it includes resistance to wind, solar, bioenergy, etc for reasons ranging from health, ecology, aesthetics, and property values and yet doesn’t consider how our daily use of these resources mined or manufactured elsewhere takes away our democratic powers of regulating the pollution associated with our own consumption. In Our Back Yard or ioby.org makes my heart swell.  It helps communities organize and fund sustainable projects block by block in NYC. X!

350.org

350.org is building a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. Our online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions are led from the bottom up by thousands of volunteer organizers in over 188 countries.

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.

Squander of Conservative

I was born in 1973.  I vaguely remember something about fuel prices and a hostage crisis, but more notably how jellybeans could help stop cigarette smoking.  My brain didn’t really begin to formulate a sense of politics until 1979 as my parents talked about Reagan and Carter.  My political coming of age was during what my father, a lifelong Republican, despairingly called Reaganomics.  I grew to dislike Reagan, not because I was paying attention to who he was or what he was doing, but because he was the only thing I ever heard about.  Reagan poisoned my potatoes. I felt my dad progressively become more and more politically disempowered and disoriented.  My father was a life-long union member weathering though its upper administration corruption.  He was a dogmatic ‘buy-American’ consumer despite the better gas-mileage of Japanese cars and lemon status of his patriotically purchased Dodge Aries K-car that added to his big-business-bailout/corruption name-calling, like Lee-I-A-Coconut.  And more personally, he was my Turn-Off-The-Damn-Light-When-You-Are-Finished-Using-It mentor.

I grew up in rural NH – the Live Free or Die State.  1400 people in my hometown.  Probably more cows than people and certainly less people than may live in one NYC block – my current home.  I drank warm, unpasteurized, and unhomogenized milk from a classmates family farm.  We would fill up those glass bottles at a big stainless tank and close them with the paper stoppers while the cows named Daisy and Moe moo’d contently.   I grew up with homemade bread and cookies my mother baked and a wood stove that burned 7 cords of wood my brothers and father chopped to keep us warm.  In high school, I was very aware that it made my clothes smell of smoke, always.  My parents did all kinds of things that I didn’t really understand until much later.  In 1976, they helped convert an open dump into NH’s first volunteer Recycling Center.  The wood of the new building was treated with waste car oil and still gathers the towns newspapers and continues to host the industry of paper hornets.  That is when I began to learn the curious differences between materials — how to separate tin from aluminum because the tin recycling bin had a magnet hanging over it.  That is also when I began to enjoy the great pleasure of throwing glass bottles (to compact the glass volume in a 50-gallon drum of course, not just to vent my frustrations of adolescence) on the Saturday’s our family was responsible for stewarding the community recycling agenda.  The recycling committee that met on the second Tuesday of the month (that took precedent over my not-sweet-16 birthday) coined or capitalized on the jingoistic phrase:  “Recycling makes cent$”.

My point is, it wasn’t until my early 20′s when I was a budding environmentalist that I realized that my parents weren’t ‘environmentalists’ per se.  My parents were conservatives — old school conservatives, people whose value system was to conserve resources so as to conserve money.  Perhaps another tautology, but to me I had become an environmentalist:  one that conserved resources for environmental reasons.  Regardless of our personal rationales for conserving, when we conserve individually we also conserve our shared natural resources.  Conserving one’s usage is intrinsically civic; one leaves resources for another to access.  There is no tragedy in the commons.  So while I saw images of Sally Struthers holding emaciated children from Ethiopia, the U.S. deficit exponentially grew and grew during Reagan’s time.  Reaganomics was so contentious in my family because it was when resource conservation flew out the window.  Today, to my mind, all the right-wing “Conservatives” have any more is some kind of wacked-out moral conservatism that has morphed into the extreme of the Tea Partiers and the Religious Right and both are seemingly oblivious to growing strength of the Corporatocracy.  The political party identified as “Conservative” today, doesn’t resemble the definition of conservative as I learned it from my family. I’m going to conclude this post with the etymology and definitions of the words — conserve, conservative, and conservation — so that perhaps those that wish, can begin to take back the word. In the meantime, a quiet nod to all those old-school conservatives that hold my heart steady.  Politics feel far from leadership these days.  May the root of the word, conserve, bring Democrats and Republicans back to center of our material world.  The Laws of Thermodynamics don’t have a political agenda and entropy doesn’t care whose side you are on.

Etymology of Conserve:

late 14c., from O.Fr. conserver (9c.), from L. conservare “to keep, preserve, keep intact, guard,” from com-, intensive prefix , + servare “keep watch, maintain”. Related: Conserved; conserving. As a noun (often conserves) from late 14c.

Conserve:

Conservative:

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!