Growth is good? Good for what?
We live on a finite Earth. But really understanding what that means is difficult. I guess because most of us think that in our own little way we can’t really be doing any harm to the planet – I mean what’s another few grams of CO2?
Well here’s Dr Albert Bartlett of the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado chatting about arithmetic! And if you go to his website, you will come across this quote on the home page:
“Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?”
Want to sit in on his famous lecture, “Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101”? Well you can.
The lecture is broken down into 8 10-minute videos, each of them on YouTube. The first two instalments are in this post with each of the following three days having the next two.
Part One
Part Two
By Paul Handover
Learning from Dogs 
I have mentioned for years the problem with the exponential function. It is the most important function in mathematics, the simplest solution to the simplest non trivial differential equation.
It is the function which is equal to its own growth, or proportional to it, as the professor more or less says.
More exactly the problem is that most voters do not have enough mathematical, or HISTORICAL culture to understand the danger of the exponential. History can replace math, by providing with examples. Hence the greater caution in Europe. The last exponential country in Europe was Nazi Germany. The USA, should it want to survive, will have to go non exponential… But we are in same boat, as the Nazi example showed.
PA
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
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