It's taken me over a month to get to this post. Scared, I guess.
Donella Meadows said that every model is a simplification, but the shooter-weapon model is too simplified to give us enough leverage to reduce the carnage of mass shootings.
On the other hand, if I'm going to broaden the model to the point where we can make a difference,
* Somebody's going to think I'm nuts;
* I'm going to talk about an area in which my understanding is shallow;
* What it will take might be harder than rounding up all the ARs and forty-round clips in the US.
I just wrote a profile of Heinrich Himmler for Zenith City (semi-) Weekly, because Himmler, the 3rd Reich's top cop, was the all-time world-champ mass shooter. And he was raised according to an idiotic pedagogy in which, for the sake of his soul, "the child should be permeated by the impossibility of locking something in his heart."
They gave children enemas before bed, and ice baths, both to keep them from masturbating. They tied them to their beds for the same reason, and to keep them from curling up and getting comfortable.
There were other insanities, and when little Heinrich and his contemporaries grew up, they thought it was okay to murder millions.
For contrast I included information about James W. Prescott's 1975 Body Pleasure and the Origin of Violence. Prescott did a cross cultural survey of pre-literate societies. Societies which were physically affectionate with their children were usually peaceful. If a society was neglectful, they could still avoid violence by being sexually permissive. Cuddle babies, and let teenagers cuddle each other, and everybody got along. Prescott said that violence and pleasure are inversely related. If you had one, you didn't have the other.
Put that in your peace pipe and smoke it.
There's another couple or three things I want to throw into the mix.
* The shooters are usually young and aggrieved; they're seeking some warped version of justice.
* Researchers believe that schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, autism, ADHD, and major depression are genetically linked.
* Autism, schizophrenia, and depression seem to be common among mass shooters.
* Gregory Bateson's double-bind theory of schizophrenia says that what's happening with schizophrenics is that they got paradoxical communication ("Come here and give me some sugar, why are you always so clingy?") from somebody important when they were little. Consequently, they tend to mistake direct statements for metaphor, and vice versa. Their own conversation can be bizarrely metaphorical. In my sample of one schizophrenic acquaintance, this has been true. It's also true that this friend will perceive himself as attacked or slighted by surprising things, and acts out in what he calls "street theater" -- usually over environmental issues -- but which can look like the threat or beginning of violence.
Maybe what happens is that a baby's genetic tendency is shaped into one form of confusion or another by a welcome to the world that's contrary to what this individual organism -- who is smarter than we are, albeit entirely ignorant -- needs.
Bottom line: cuddle your kids, and don't jerk their chains. Make sure they understand about sexually transmitted diseases and contraception, and let them go.
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Monday, March 4, 2013
Gun Violence And Positive Feedback
Positive feedback is a cycle in which something's happening makes its happening again more likely.
Example: Compound interest. When you put a dollar in the bank, the bank is renting your money to invest by loaning it out at interest. So the first year, they put another penny with your dollar. You leave it there, and the second year the bank adds one and one hundredth pennies. In seventy years, you have two bucks, courtesy of positive feedback.
Donella Meadows offers several other examples:
Eroded soil increases erosion because the thinner, poorer soil supports fewer erosion-stopping plants;
"The more high-energy neutrons in the critical mass, they more they knock into nuclei and generate more;"
The more flu sufferers, the more the flu spreads;
The larger the population, the more offspring, which in turn produce even more offspring;
Income from production and trade invested in building more capital to allow the production of more goods for trade.
There are a couple of examples I like, and that Meadows didn't include in this section.
There's methane, a greenhouse gas, frozen in the arctic tundra. As the climate warms, the tundra thaws and releases the mathane, accelerating warming.
The other is the Tom Baker Dr. Who, trying to explain positive feedback to an evil, giant spider that is running some kind of power through some science fiction gadget to get more, more, more, mwahahahaha, unlimited power. Fortunately the Doctor wises up, and bails before the spider goes nova.
Usually a negative feedback loop kicks in, and slows the positive feedback, but Meadows says that we can get quicker results, less threatening to ourselves by slowing the positive loop. Back off the gas before you slam on the brakes. She says this give the existing negative loops time to work. (Meadows was probably thinking of her predictions from the Limits to Growth study.)
She tells us to "look for leverage points around birth rates, interest rates, erosion rates, 'success to the successful' loops, any place where the more you have of something, the more you have the possibility of having more."
What does this have to do with gun violence? It took me a while to get around to writing this, because I was hoping something would come to me. I don't think we get more guns because we have more guns, and I don't believe that conceal-carry laws are adequate or desirable negative feedback. You can't buy a gun in Chicago, but there are high schools there with multiple shootings every year. There was an armed guard at Columbine, and you know somebody in the audience was packing in the Aurora Batman shooting.
We have to intervene in some related system to end mass shootings. Meadows write about five more leverage points, but the next post will be me, going off about what I think is going on.
Example: Compound interest. When you put a dollar in the bank, the bank is renting your money to invest by loaning it out at interest. So the first year, they put another penny with your dollar. You leave it there, and the second year the bank adds one and one hundredth pennies. In seventy years, you have two bucks, courtesy of positive feedback.
Donella Meadows offers several other examples:
Eroded soil increases erosion because the thinner, poorer soil supports fewer erosion-stopping plants;
"The more high-energy neutrons in the critical mass, they more they knock into nuclei and generate more;"
The more flu sufferers, the more the flu spreads;
The larger the population, the more offspring, which in turn produce even more offspring;
Income from production and trade invested in building more capital to allow the production of more goods for trade.
There are a couple of examples I like, and that Meadows didn't include in this section.
There's methane, a greenhouse gas, frozen in the arctic tundra. As the climate warms, the tundra thaws and releases the mathane, accelerating warming.
The other is the Tom Baker Dr. Who, trying to explain positive feedback to an evil, giant spider that is running some kind of power through some science fiction gadget to get more, more, more, mwahahahaha, unlimited power. Fortunately the Doctor wises up, and bails before the spider goes nova.
Usually a negative feedback loop kicks in, and slows the positive feedback, but Meadows says that we can get quicker results, less threatening to ourselves by slowing the positive loop. Back off the gas before you slam on the brakes. She says this give the existing negative loops time to work. (Meadows was probably thinking of her predictions from the Limits to Growth study.)
She tells us to "look for leverage points around birth rates, interest rates, erosion rates, 'success to the successful' loops, any place where the more you have of something, the more you have the possibility of having more."
What does this have to do with gun violence? It took me a while to get around to writing this, because I was hoping something would come to me. I don't think we get more guns because we have more guns, and I don't believe that conceal-carry laws are adequate or desirable negative feedback. You can't buy a gun in Chicago, but there are high schools there with multiple shootings every year. There was an armed guard at Columbine, and you know somebody in the audience was packing in the Aurora Batman shooting.
We have to intervene in some related system to end mass shootings. Meadows write about five more leverage points, but the next post will be me, going off about what I think is going on.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Sequestration Proximate Cause Of The Next Recession
Next Donella Meadows/Mass Shootings post will be "Driving Positive Feedback Loops." I'm struggling with this one a little; I understand the difference, can give examples, and Meadows explains them both successfully, but I don't have a handle on how to work with positive feedback in general, much less in respect to violence. It seems like Meadows is continuing her discussion -- at least practically -- of negative feedback.
In the meantime, the thought struck me while listening to the news about Congress and "sequestration," that the consumption business cycle is said to take five to seven years, and the recession hit a little more than four-and-a-quarter years ago. The burst housing bubble was the proximate cause, but it was time for a recession, and something had to trigger it.
Predicting whether this particular cycle will be a long or short one is over my head, and I have pretty conflicted thoughts about the federal austerity. Still...
In the meantime, the thought struck me while listening to the news about Congress and "sequestration," that the consumption business cycle is said to take five to seven years, and the recession hit a little more than four-and-a-quarter years ago. The burst housing bubble was the proximate cause, but it was time for a recession, and something had to trigger it.
Predicting whether this particular cycle will be a long or short one is over my head, and I have pretty conflicted thoughts about the federal austerity. Still...
Monday, February 25, 2013
Mass Shootings And Regulating Negative Feedback Loops
Donella Meadows writes, "Now we're beginning to move from the physical part of the system to the information and control parts, where more leverage can be found."
In the few times I've heard the phrase "negative feedback" spoken, the speakers have usually meant criticism or psychology's negative reinforcement. Meadows is using the phrase to mean that something a system does has a slowing effect on itself. Think of foxes as negative feedback for field mice. The more the mice breed, the more food there is for the foxes, making more foxes, which reduce the mouse population.
What Meadows was saying was that we can get better results from a kind of system jiu jitsu than from concentrating on a problem's hardware.
She uses the thermostat example to illustrate negative feedback. You want a certain temperature, and you set the thermostat. There's a furnace in the basement that comes on when the house temperature drops below the setting. The fire in the furnace would keep heating the house until it became uncomfortable, except for the thermostat's also being an off switch. The negative feedback is that the more heat the furnace puts out, the more likely it is to turn itself off.
Meadow' other examples include:
Emergency cooling in nuclear power plants,
Sweating and shivering,
Rest,
Recreation,
Meditation,
Socializing,
Markets (provided they get accurate information).
She says that the real leverage related to markets is in ways of getting them accurate, unambiguous information.
One paragraph that I took to be encouraging, in thinking about gun violence, says, "The strength of a negative feedback loop is important relative to the impact it is designed to correct. If the impact increases in strength, the feedbacks have to be strengthened too.
"A thermostat system may work fine on a cold winter day -- but open all the windows and its corrective power will fail."
The reason this is hopeful is that the phenomenon of mass shootings -- even gun violence in total -- is a minor blip in the system of our society. Horrific as it is.
If we can figure out what's happening, we ought to be able to correct for this painful phenomenon without strong negative feedback.
In the few times I've heard the phrase "negative feedback" spoken, the speakers have usually meant criticism or psychology's negative reinforcement. Meadows is using the phrase to mean that something a system does has a slowing effect on itself. Think of foxes as negative feedback for field mice. The more the mice breed, the more food there is for the foxes, making more foxes, which reduce the mouse population.
What Meadows was saying was that we can get better results from a kind of system jiu jitsu than from concentrating on a problem's hardware.
She uses the thermostat example to illustrate negative feedback. You want a certain temperature, and you set the thermostat. There's a furnace in the basement that comes on when the house temperature drops below the setting. The fire in the furnace would keep heating the house until it became uncomfortable, except for the thermostat's also being an off switch. The negative feedback is that the more heat the furnace puts out, the more likely it is to turn itself off.
Meadow' other examples include:
Emergency cooling in nuclear power plants,
Sweating and shivering,
Rest,
Recreation,
Meditation,
Socializing,
Markets (provided they get accurate information).
She says that the real leverage related to markets is in ways of getting them accurate, unambiguous information.
One paragraph that I took to be encouraging, in thinking about gun violence, says, "The strength of a negative feedback loop is important relative to the impact it is designed to correct. If the impact increases in strength, the feedbacks have to be strengthened too.
"A thermostat system may work fine on a cold winter day -- but open all the windows and its corrective power will fail."
The reason this is hopeful is that the phenomenon of mass shootings -- even gun violence in total -- is a minor blip in the system of our society. Horrific as it is.
If we can figure out what's happening, we ought to be able to correct for this painful phenomenon without strong negative feedback.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Systems Within Systems
In Environment, Power, and Society, Howard Odum wrote something to the effect that systems are limited in what they can do by what the larger systems of which they are parts will allow, and by what their own subsystems can provide for.
Thinking about gun violence, particularly inane mass shootings, in terms of systems, can be frustrating because the system is much larger and more detailed than individual, weapon, and victims. Where do you draw the line?
Adam Lanza, the reported Sandy Hook killer, was an un-photogenic twenty-year old Aspergers sufferer, with another learning disability, and divorced, affluent parents. That's somebody who had to have been part of a bullying system, who didn't have the internal system that would let him understand, cope, or avoid. He may have been alienated from his parents, or they from him. "Who knows what's going on in the kid's head. I don't know what to do with him. Listen, the child support's late again. When are you going to realize that you have a responsibility here too."
And yet, there are a million kids that fit that description.
Thinking about gun violence, particularly inane mass shootings, in terms of systems, can be frustrating because the system is much larger and more detailed than individual, weapon, and victims. Where do you draw the line?
Adam Lanza, the reported Sandy Hook killer, was an un-photogenic twenty-year old Aspergers sufferer, with another learning disability, and divorced, affluent parents. That's somebody who had to have been part of a bullying system, who didn't have the internal system that would let him understand, cope, or avoid. He may have been alienated from his parents, or they from him. "Who knows what's going on in the kid's head. I don't know what to do with him. Listen, the child support's late again. When are you going to realize that you have a responsibility here too."
And yet, there are a million kids that fit that description.
Liberals Excuse Child Killing
Yesterday I made up a story that might be taken as excusing wicked behavior. It was about a local man who killed a child and injured two women while shooting at random vehicles. The man really did shoot into traffic and kill a child. The part I made up was the story of his life, and that might be taken as my saying, "You poor put-upon murderer. I understand. it's alright."
It's been my experience, for about as long as I've been conscious of the news, that people who try to understand vicious behavior are trying to excuse it. "The bully comes from a broken home," etc.
It's certainly true that there's a large area of intersection between understanding and compassion, but, with me at least, the impulse to understand comes from a desire to protect myself by accurately understanding what's going on.
It's been my experience, for about as long as I've been conscious of the news, that people who try to understand vicious behavior are trying to excuse it. "The bully comes from a broken home," etc.
It's certainly true that there's a large area of intersection between understanding and compassion, but, with me at least, the impulse to understand comes from a desire to protect myself by accurately understanding what's going on.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Mass Shootings and Systems Theory: Materials Stocks And Flows
Material stocks and flows have to do with how things are arranged. Meadows uses her bath tub analogy, the idea being that the faucet's adding water at the same rate to a huge tub doesn't make the same difference as it does to a small tub. It's the same with the drain. If you don't have the drain stopped, you can probably get a bath in a big tub before the water runs out. If you're sitting in two inches of water, you'd better hurry.
Other examples are:
The effect of Hungarian road system, in which you have to go through Budapest to get from one side of the country to the other, on pollution and congestion;
Large commercial inventories, which allow for supply interruptions, and just-in-time inventories which make a business more flexible;
The baby-boom swell in US population;
The rates at which the environment removes pollutants (CFCs, acid rain, sewage, etc.);
Flooding in rivers, as opposed to lakes.
Meadows refers to large stocks as "buffers," and notes that correcting problems may be difficult because of the investment that went into the stocks, and what it would take to replace it. She says a dam (or a Hungarian highway) is literally "cast in concrete."
In terms of mass shootings, the stocks and flows are:
The inventory of firearms in the American private arsenal;
The inventory of ammunition in the American private arsenal;
Industrial capacity for producing weapons and ammo;
The population that is likely to murder groups of strangers.
There have been buy-back programs, but these have been few in relation to the size of the arsenal.
Gun control advocates have suggested that cities, universities and pension funds divest their investment portfolios of weapons manufacturers' stocks, a la the anti-Arpartheid movement of twenty years ago. I think there are candidates for this kind of campaign that will save more lives, and I'd like to keep my powder dry. Also, I'd like to preserve the firearms industry.
Who knows why people kill strangers. From the Associated Press: "Oakdale police said Tuesday they are still trying to determine why a 34-year-old man apparently began randomly shooting at vehicles, killing a 9-year-old boy and injuring two women." This was a couple of weeks ago in the suburban Twin Cities. The guy has a Hmong name, and at 34, he might have been born in Laos. My imagination cooks up a story for him, pretty quickly: Family disoriented and dysfunctional because of circumstances, kid picked on for being a "slope" or a "gook." Wishes he could have stayed in Indochina, sees his people as betrayed by their allies (the US) during the Vietnam War. Can't get a date, loses his job, sees his suburban neighbors as privileged, smug, and ignorant. Decides to teach them a lesson. Note that I'm pulling this stuff out of my ass. Tran's story could be entierly different. The thing is that it describes dozens of other guys in this one's milieu, and only one goes on a rampage.
The Aurora Batman-movie shooter sounds like a schizophrenic to me, but I've known two schizophrenics, and I've never known a murderer.
Same thing for bullying victims, and kids with stupid parents. There are millions of us.
I feel like the answer to this kind of violence probably lies in the human part of the system. "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." But, you know, we're stuck with each other, and we can't say, "I think it's the nuts. Let's lock 'em all up, and medicate the shit out of 'em."
Next post will be about systems within systems.
Other examples are:
The effect of Hungarian road system, in which you have to go through Budapest to get from one side of the country to the other, on pollution and congestion;
Large commercial inventories, which allow for supply interruptions, and just-in-time inventories which make a business more flexible;
The baby-boom swell in US population;
The rates at which the environment removes pollutants (CFCs, acid rain, sewage, etc.);
Flooding in rivers, as opposed to lakes.
Meadows refers to large stocks as "buffers," and notes that correcting problems may be difficult because of the investment that went into the stocks, and what it would take to replace it. She says a dam (or a Hungarian highway) is literally "cast in concrete."
In terms of mass shootings, the stocks and flows are:
The inventory of firearms in the American private arsenal;
The inventory of ammunition in the American private arsenal;
Industrial capacity for producing weapons and ammo;
The population that is likely to murder groups of strangers.
There have been buy-back programs, but these have been few in relation to the size of the arsenal.
Gun control advocates have suggested that cities, universities and pension funds divest their investment portfolios of weapons manufacturers' stocks, a la the anti-Arpartheid movement of twenty years ago. I think there are candidates for this kind of campaign that will save more lives, and I'd like to keep my powder dry. Also, I'd like to preserve the firearms industry.
Who knows why people kill strangers. From the Associated Press: "Oakdale police said Tuesday they are still trying to determine why a 34-year-old man apparently began randomly shooting at vehicles, killing a 9-year-old boy and injuring two women." This was a couple of weeks ago in the suburban Twin Cities. The guy has a Hmong name, and at 34, he might have been born in Laos. My imagination cooks up a story for him, pretty quickly: Family disoriented and dysfunctional because of circumstances, kid picked on for being a "slope" or a "gook." Wishes he could have stayed in Indochina, sees his people as betrayed by their allies (the US) during the Vietnam War. Can't get a date, loses his job, sees his suburban neighbors as privileged, smug, and ignorant. Decides to teach them a lesson. Note that I'm pulling this stuff out of my ass. Tran's story could be entierly different. The thing is that it describes dozens of other guys in this one's milieu, and only one goes on a rampage.
The Aurora Batman-movie shooter sounds like a schizophrenic to me, but I've known two schizophrenics, and I've never known a murderer.
Same thing for bullying victims, and kids with stupid parents. There are millions of us.
I feel like the answer to this kind of violence probably lies in the human part of the system. "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." But, you know, we're stuck with each other, and we can't say, "I think it's the nuts. Let's lock 'em all up, and medicate the shit out of 'em."
Next post will be about systems within systems.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Gun Violence And Numbers As A System Levrage Point
I put off writing this post, worried that I might be missing something. This one's supposed to be about Donella Meadows' least effective leverage point for intervening in a system, numbers, and numbers as a way of reducing mass shootings.
Meadows uses her bathtub analogy to illustrate the effect of numbers -- or parameters -- on systems. How far do you have to turn the handle to get how much water. Is the drain open or stopped. Then she switches to the national debt, which despite changes in taxation and spending, continues to rise. She includes personnel changes under the jheading "Numbers," as well. Bill Clinton had a slightly different effect from George Bush, but only slightly. (Meadows was writing during the Clinton administration, and much concerned with the effects of overshoot on the economy.)
In the case of mass shootings, proposed changes in the debate seem to be about numbers. How fast can a gun shoot, and how many rounds can it hold? Can we get more honest people to carry concealed weapons, and hire police to patrol all schools? Can we eliminate fire arms sales to criminals and the delusional?
Meadows writes, "If the system is chronically stagnant, parameter changes rarely kick start it. If it's wildly variable, they don't usually stabilize it. If it's growing out of control, they don't brake it." She uses the phrase "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."
Prohibiting all firearms except, say, black-powder muzzle-loaders might have reduced the heartbreak at Sandy Hook by 96%, but that would have been twenty-five lives saved. The president says we can't eliminate the danger, but we shouldn't let that stop us from eliminating some.
Maybe we can do better, if we move up the list. The next post will be Daonella Meadows' eight-most effective leverage point, "Material stocks and flows."
Meadows uses her bathtub analogy to illustrate the effect of numbers -- or parameters -- on systems. How far do you have to turn the handle to get how much water. Is the drain open or stopped. Then she switches to the national debt, which despite changes in taxation and spending, continues to rise. She includes personnel changes under the jheading "Numbers," as well. Bill Clinton had a slightly different effect from George Bush, but only slightly. (Meadows was writing during the Clinton administration, and much concerned with the effects of overshoot on the economy.)
In the case of mass shootings, proposed changes in the debate seem to be about numbers. How fast can a gun shoot, and how many rounds can it hold? Can we get more honest people to carry concealed weapons, and hire police to patrol all schools? Can we eliminate fire arms sales to criminals and the delusional?
Meadows writes, "If the system is chronically stagnant, parameter changes rarely kick start it. If it's wildly variable, they don't usually stabilize it. If it's growing out of control, they don't brake it." She uses the phrase "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."
Prohibiting all firearms except, say, black-powder muzzle-loaders might have reduced the heartbreak at Sandy Hook by 96%, but that would have been twenty-five lives saved. The president says we can't eliminate the danger, but we shouldn't let that stop us from eliminating some.
Maybe we can do better, if we move up the list. The next post will be Daonella Meadows' eight-most effective leverage point, "Material stocks and flows."
Monday, February 11, 2013
Gun Control And Systems Theory
Meadows says that she isn't trying to give us recipes for finding and using leverage points, but to encourage more widespread thinking in systems.
I guess I'm guilty of wanting recipes. this series of posts is supposed to get me thinking in a specific subject -- mass shootings -- in terms of numbers, stocks and flows, negative feedback, etc. Maybe I'll also spread the word about Thinking in Systems a little further. (I think that that would come under the heading, "1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises.")
My next post will be based on "9. Numbers."
I guess I'm guilty of wanting recipes. this series of posts is supposed to get me thinking in a specific subject -- mass shootings -- in terms of numbers, stocks and flows, negative feedback, etc. Maybe I'll also spread the word about Thinking in Systems a little further. (I think that that would come under the heading, "1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises.")
My next post will be based on "9. Numbers."
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Donella Meadows And Leverage Points
Donella Meadows begins her famous essay, Places to Intervene in a System, by defining leverage points as "places within a complex system (a corporation, and economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything."
She quotes her teacher, Jay Forrester, as saying that people intuitively know what the leverage points are, and consistently push them in the wrong direction. The classic example of this is economic growth, with people always wanting to remedy the problems cause by growth with more growth.
The nine leverage points she discusses in the essay came out of a meeting about NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO at which she impulsively, and out of frustration, listed them on the easel on the dais.
She quotes her teacher, Jay Forrester, as saying that people intuitively know what the leverage points are, and consistently push them in the wrong direction. The classic example of this is economic growth, with people always wanting to remedy the problems cause by growth with more growth.
The nine leverage points she discusses in the essay came out of a meeting about NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO at which she impulsively, and out of frustration, listed them on the easel on the dais.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Gun Violence And Systems Theory: Thermostats and Bathtubs
The standard example of a "system" is a house thermostat. It's a heater on-off switch connected to a themometer. Somebody decides that the house should be at 68 degrees -- the "goal" -- and sets thermostat to turn the heater on if the temperature falls below that, and off when the temperature goes above. The heater is only either off or on. You can't really crank it up; it's just on more if you make the goal 75, and less if you set the thermostat at 60.
Donella Meadows uses a bathtub as her system example. There's water going into the tub from the faucet, and leaving by the drain. (Let's say there's a leaky plug.) The bather decides the goal of the system is six inches of water and adjusts the flow from the faucet to keep it at that level. The flow down the drain is "negative feedback," and the flow from the faucet is the "positive feedback."
The bather also has a goal for water temperature, and has a hot water valve (positive feedback) and a cold water valve (negative feedback), and a water heater, with a thermostat, in the basement.
A tub containing more water will hold its temperature longer. It will drain at the same rate, but be useful longer than a tub with less water to begin with. The capacity for water and the amount of heat in the water are both examples of "material stocks."
Meadows also mentions other systems connected to the bather and plumbing. There's the well or municipal water utility, the hydrological cycle, the bather's checking account, and the economy. This is interesting to me as an analogy for the system that includes gun violence.
I really don't have an agenda for or against gun control. (Alright, I'm tepidly pro-gun.) But I have a sneaking suspicion that the system that includes mass shootings is complex enough that the place where society can intervene is remote from gun ownership.
Donella Meadows uses a bathtub as her system example. There's water going into the tub from the faucet, and leaving by the drain. (Let's say there's a leaky plug.) The bather decides the goal of the system is six inches of water and adjusts the flow from the faucet to keep it at that level. The flow down the drain is "negative feedback," and the flow from the faucet is the "positive feedback."
The bather also has a goal for water temperature, and has a hot water valve (positive feedback) and a cold water valve (negative feedback), and a water heater, with a thermostat, in the basement.
A tub containing more water will hold its temperature longer. It will drain at the same rate, but be useful longer than a tub with less water to begin with. The capacity for water and the amount of heat in the water are both examples of "material stocks."
Meadows also mentions other systems connected to the bather and plumbing. There's the well or municipal water utility, the hydrological cycle, the bather's checking account, and the economy. This is interesting to me as an analogy for the system that includes gun violence.
I really don't have an agenda for or against gun control. (Alright, I'm tepidly pro-gun.) But I have a sneaking suspicion that the system that includes mass shootings is complex enough that the place where society can intervene is remote from gun ownership.
Monday, February 4, 2013
Gun Control, Disappointment, And Systems Theory
President Obama was in Minneapolis today, launching his initiative to limit shootings like the Sandy Hook Elementary slayings.
Everybody has an idea about gun control. Expect to be disappointed.
And not just the people who expect to forestall tragedy by limiting the kinds of arms citizens can own. I had a boss -- kind of an overbearing guy, and one who was two or three inches taller than I -- who gave me a lecture, with harrowing anecdote, on his Second Amendment rights. I hadn't expressed an opinion and he mistook what that opinion was.
What a dick. I hope I'm never in a crowded theater, with him, when some maniac pulls out a weapon. Caught in the crossfire.
Let's think about mass shootings like systems analyst Donella Meadows would have. Meadows wrote an essay, "Places to Intervene in a System."
The places (in increasing order of effectiveness) are:
Numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards)
Material stocks and flows
Regulating negative feedback loops
Driving positive feedback loops
Information flows
The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints)
The power of self-organization
The goals of the system
The mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise.
I'll go through the essay, trying to define each intervention point in terms of gun control. My next post will be a recap of Meadows' sidebar explanation of systems theory.
Everybody has an idea about gun control. Expect to be disappointed.
And not just the people who expect to forestall tragedy by limiting the kinds of arms citizens can own. I had a boss -- kind of an overbearing guy, and one who was two or three inches taller than I -- who gave me a lecture, with harrowing anecdote, on his Second Amendment rights. I hadn't expressed an opinion and he mistook what that opinion was.
What a dick. I hope I'm never in a crowded theater, with him, when some maniac pulls out a weapon. Caught in the crossfire.
Let's think about mass shootings like systems analyst Donella Meadows would have. Meadows wrote an essay, "Places to Intervene in a System."
The places (in increasing order of effectiveness) are:
Numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards)
Material stocks and flows
Regulating negative feedback loops
Driving positive feedback loops
Information flows
The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints)
The power of self-organization
The goals of the system
The mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise.
I'll go through the essay, trying to define each intervention point in terms of gun control. My next post will be a recap of Meadows' sidebar explanation of systems theory.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Old Lady Sits Chatting While Naked Twenty-Year Old Lounges On Floor: Keith Richards
Drawing Group last night, Betsy's apartment, Kat modeling. When I started doing art in '72, one of my stoned fantasies was that I was performing a psychological experiment in which I went from no chops to having some, and managed to explain how it's done. I also forswore graduate school and any hope of a career comensurate with my considerable intellect, based on another stoned -- albeit correct -- mental construct that graduate degrees are a kind of educational inflation, and right thinking young men didn't need them. Waddamaroon.
Where was I going?
Oh, yeah, last night was an off night, but my bad stuff is still pretty strong. I got chops. The thing is, when it's not going well, I still don't know what to do to get the good stuff.
And I couldn't -- nobody could -- teach you how to draw: "Okay, dampen the beta waves. Bring the alpha up a titch. Good. Now really pour on the thetas." It's probably even more specific than that, with this cluster of brain cells shut off, and that one cranked up. The unfortunate Jonah Lehrer talks about the part of the frontal lobe that needs to shut down for jazz solos, and a degenerative and fatal brain disorder that introduces itself in middle age as an obsessive surge of creative work.
What I could do is put somebody in the way of figuring out how to draw, assign exercises. Correct habits that look like they're going nowhere. Maybe get in close with techniques for measuring, compensating for physical weakness like tremor, or using media.
Janet was at Group last night, with her visiting mother. Janet has been reading Keith Richard's autobiography Life. I've been listening to the same on audio book. Richards is a fatuous rich son of a bitch, but he's got the governor turned way down on his brain. He's all accelerator, no brake.
Where was I going?
Oh, yeah, last night was an off night, but my bad stuff is still pretty strong. I got chops. The thing is, when it's not going well, I still don't know what to do to get the good stuff.
And I couldn't -- nobody could -- teach you how to draw: "Okay, dampen the beta waves. Bring the alpha up a titch. Good. Now really pour on the thetas." It's probably even more specific than that, with this cluster of brain cells shut off, and that one cranked up. The unfortunate Jonah Lehrer talks about the part of the frontal lobe that needs to shut down for jazz solos, and a degenerative and fatal brain disorder that introduces itself in middle age as an obsessive surge of creative work.
What I could do is put somebody in the way of figuring out how to draw, assign exercises. Correct habits that look like they're going nowhere. Maybe get in close with techniques for measuring, compensating for physical weakness like tremor, or using media.
Janet was at Group last night, with her visiting mother. Janet has been reading Keith Richard's autobiography Life. I've been listening to the same on audio book. Richards is a fatuous rich son of a bitch, but he's got the governor turned way down on his brain. He's all accelerator, no brake.
Monday, January 28, 2013
Irannian Nukes and Economic Seppuku
Why should the Iranians have nuclear weapons when we can't trust them with rocks?
Groups of people have differring styles. As a white guy, I've noticed myself seeing the human vices of venality, intellectual laziness, etc., as black traits, when exhibited by American black people. This is in spite of my painful awareness of those vices among white people. It took me decades to notice that.
Can we extrapolate from my confusing style and moral substance among my fellow citizens to a similar confusion on the world stage? The Persians are certainly uptight authoritarians, but I see the same impulse in my society. North Koreans are belligerent fools, but remove oil wealth, and measure US foolish belligerence against Kim Jong Drool. We're eager for Bashar al-Assad's abdication, but the world would be better off if rich developed world assholes committed economic seppuku.
Groups of people have differring styles. As a white guy, I've noticed myself seeing the human vices of venality, intellectual laziness, etc., as black traits, when exhibited by American black people. This is in spite of my painful awareness of those vices among white people. It took me decades to notice that.
Can we extrapolate from my confusing style and moral substance among my fellow citizens to a similar confusion on the world stage? The Persians are certainly uptight authoritarians, but I see the same impulse in my society. North Koreans are belligerent fools, but remove oil wealth, and measure US foolish belligerence against Kim Jong Drool. We're eager for Bashar al-Assad's abdication, but the world would be better off if rich developed world assholes committed economic seppuku.
Individual Advantage Versus Collective Advantage
I got a useful natural history metaphor from my friend Jon.
There's a flock of birds grazing on the ground. These birds are prey to hawks, so some of the birds need to watch the sky. When a bird sees a hawk, it alerts the rest of the flock, and they scatter. If a bird watches the sky, it can't look for seeds or bugs, so sentry duty needs to rotate. If a bird neglects sentry duty, it prospers at the expense of the flock. (Well fed birds have a breeding advantage over dutiful but hungry sentries. On the other hand, a flock of non-sentries will be at a disadvantage vis a vis the hawks, and disappear.)
Birds can either look at the ground, the sky, or other birds.
There's a flock of birds grazing on the ground. These birds are prey to hawks, so some of the birds need to watch the sky. When a bird sees a hawk, it alerts the rest of the flock, and they scatter. If a bird watches the sky, it can't look for seeds or bugs, so sentry duty needs to rotate. If a bird neglects sentry duty, it prospers at the expense of the flock. (Well fed birds have a breeding advantage over dutiful but hungry sentries. On the other hand, a flock of non-sentries will be at a disadvantage vis a vis the hawks, and disappear.)
Birds can either look at the ground, the sky, or other birds.
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Literacy Tests For Legislators
I bristle at attempts at dampening voter turnout. In Minnesota we defeated a proposed voter ID amendment. Voter ID isn't what this post's about, but my shut up shut up shut up comment is from Greg Palast, writing in the Fall Yes Magazine:
"In more than 100 years, there has not been a single case of voter identity fraud in the state of Indiana. Yet in 2008, 145, 000 legitimate voters there were turned away from the polls because they could not produce the photo IDs acceptable to state officials on a crusade against 'voter fraud'." And in the nation, "more than 5.9 million citizens were wrongly barred from voting or having their ballots counted in 2008."
But... Sometimes I want to bring back literacy tests.
It wouldn't be spelling and identifying obscure public figures. I wouldn't ask my old mother to tell me vanadium's atomic number. Maybe it could even be oral, but it would be hard. There wouldn't be right answers -- not in the sense that you had to subscribe to climate change or the theory of evolution -- but you'd have to understand the issues that society grapples with. You'd have to know, for instance, how society uses calculus to operate, although you wouldn't have to perform the operations.
You couldn't cover it all. Everybody's got holes in their weltanschuaung.
It's a republic after all. We hire legislatures because we have our own rows to hoe. I wouldn't want to disenfranchise anybody for being a dope, either. I might wind up crying outside the polling place myself.
In my kingdom, though, if you want your name on a ballot, for dogcatcher or president, expect to spend a couple of days demonstrating your understanding of the canon.
"In more than 100 years, there has not been a single case of voter identity fraud in the state of Indiana. Yet in 2008, 145, 000 legitimate voters there were turned away from the polls because they could not produce the photo IDs acceptable to state officials on a crusade against 'voter fraud'." And in the nation, "more than 5.9 million citizens were wrongly barred from voting or having their ballots counted in 2008."
But... Sometimes I want to bring back literacy tests.
It wouldn't be spelling and identifying obscure public figures. I wouldn't ask my old mother to tell me vanadium's atomic number. Maybe it could even be oral, but it would be hard. There wouldn't be right answers -- not in the sense that you had to subscribe to climate change or the theory of evolution -- but you'd have to understand the issues that society grapples with. You'd have to know, for instance, how society uses calculus to operate, although you wouldn't have to perform the operations.
You couldn't cover it all. Everybody's got holes in their weltanschuaung.
It's a republic after all. We hire legislatures because we have our own rows to hoe. I wouldn't want to disenfranchise anybody for being a dope, either. I might wind up crying outside the polling place myself.
In my kingdom, though, if you want your name on a ballot, for dogcatcher or president, expect to spend a couple of days demonstrating your understanding of the canon.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Post-Transition Meeting Thoughts
I spent the evening at a Transition meeting for another neighborhood. One of the organizers asked me to come. maybe half of those attending were sixtyish. It was a well-run meeting and we talked about what we wanted to see in our neighborhood in 2020, and how did we expect tho get there.
I restrained myself from making provocative comments, and caricatured speakers. I had a nice chat with an MArch candidate, who was looking for a way to incorporate transition into her thesis.
***
If you take two Egyptian pyramids and glue them base-to-base, you have an octahedron.
Make an octahedron out of toothpicks and peas. You can use four of its eight sides as the bases for four tetrahedrons, collectively making a larger tetrahedron.
***
Transition plans for scarcity. Bucky would not approve, but we haven't implemented his plan, and time groweth short. No Utopia, but I'll be damned if I let Oblivion be the outcome.
***
I'd be a serf, if that were what it took to save civilization. Hope it don't come to that.
I restrained myself from making provocative comments, and caricatured speakers. I had a nice chat with an MArch candidate, who was looking for a way to incorporate transition into her thesis.
***
If you take two Egyptian pyramids and glue them base-to-base, you have an octahedron.
Make an octahedron out of toothpicks and peas. You can use four of its eight sides as the bases for four tetrahedrons, collectively making a larger tetrahedron.
***
Transition plans for scarcity. Bucky would not approve, but we haven't implemented his plan, and time groweth short. No Utopia, but I'll be damned if I let Oblivion be the outcome.
***
I'd be a serf, if that were what it took to save civilization. Hope it don't come to that.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Bucky Fuller's Funny Words
Buckminster Fuller loved new words -- neologisms. He saw himself as living at the moment when human understanding made a lot of language obsolete. Using the old words, he thought, shaped our understanding incorrectly, in spite of what we could answer correctly on tests.
"Sunsight" and "Sunclipse" are two Fullerisms, because the Sun does not really rise or set, on our round, rotating, and orbiting planet.
"Epistemography" might be the key Fuller neologism. "Epistemology" is the study of knowledge, or an understanding of existence. Epistemography is a graphic representation of existence.
You didn't even know you had one, did you? The need for such a word would have only come to somebody who recognized that there was such a thing because he had come up with a different one.
Here's the epistemography that I can't help but use: a universe filled with invisible cubes that I can walk right through and never notice. Perspective drawing is based on those invisible cubes.
In Euclidean geometry we learn that a point is dimensionless. String a bunch of dimensionless points together, and you get a one-dimensional string called a line. Make a raft out of one-dimensional lines, and call it a two-dimensional plane. Stack a bunch of two-dimensional planes to get a three-dimensional world. The polite word is "tautology." Fuller said "Baloney."
Here's Fuller's: Make a triangle out of toothpicks stuck into peas. Now make a three-sided pyramid by sticking three toothpicks into the three peas, and joining them with another pea at the top. That's a tetrahedron. Make four new tetrahedrons, one based on each side of the original tetrahedron. Keep putting new tetrahedrons wherever you make a triangle, until you fill the universe.
Make toothpick triangles, and they're pretty sturdy. squares feel wobbly. Tetrahedrons: sturdy. Cubes: wobbly. Carpenters brace framed walls with plywood. there are triangles in the plywood, keeping the lumber square. Fuller said that nature would choose the most economical structures, and triangles are more economical than squares.
He thought our uneconomical cubic way of building was part of the way that we're trying to kill ourselves, and he thought he's discovered "nature's coordinate system."
What if he was right?
"Sunsight" and "Sunclipse" are two Fullerisms, because the Sun does not really rise or set, on our round, rotating, and orbiting planet.
"Epistemography" might be the key Fuller neologism. "Epistemology" is the study of knowledge, or an understanding of existence. Epistemography is a graphic representation of existence.
You didn't even know you had one, did you? The need for such a word would have only come to somebody who recognized that there was such a thing because he had come up with a different one.
Here's the epistemography that I can't help but use: a universe filled with invisible cubes that I can walk right through and never notice. Perspective drawing is based on those invisible cubes.
In Euclidean geometry we learn that a point is dimensionless. String a bunch of dimensionless points together, and you get a one-dimensional string called a line. Make a raft out of one-dimensional lines, and call it a two-dimensional plane. Stack a bunch of two-dimensional planes to get a three-dimensional world. The polite word is "tautology." Fuller said "Baloney."
Here's Fuller's: Make a triangle out of toothpicks stuck into peas. Now make a three-sided pyramid by sticking three toothpicks into the three peas, and joining them with another pea at the top. That's a tetrahedron. Make four new tetrahedrons, one based on each side of the original tetrahedron. Keep putting new tetrahedrons wherever you make a triangle, until you fill the universe.
Make toothpick triangles, and they're pretty sturdy. squares feel wobbly. Tetrahedrons: sturdy. Cubes: wobbly. Carpenters brace framed walls with plywood. there are triangles in the plywood, keeping the lumber square. Fuller said that nature would choose the most economical structures, and triangles are more economical than squares.
He thought our uneconomical cubic way of building was part of the way that we're trying to kill ourselves, and he thought he's discovered "nature's coordinate system."
What if he was right?
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Pavel Tsatsouline Gave Me A Six Pack At Fifty
| When we were getting ready to invade Afghanistan, I saw a guy I'd taken some classes from on Fox News. Pretty neat, because I've watched Fox News half a dozen times in my life. What are the odds there? Pavel Tsatsouline is a personal trainer that ran some pretty intelligent fitness classes at the local Open U., back at the turn of the millennium. He was Russia-born in 1969, and served as a fitness instructor for the Spetsnaz, the Soviet special forces, In a Klingon-Federation reversal, Pavel's interview on Fox was to promote the Marine Corps. (Gotta ask, though, who was the Klingon and who was Captain Piccard in the deal?) Pavel had contracted with the gyrines to turn recruits into supermen. He talked about the Marine program and described the benefits of his system. Then the interviewer asked him where somebody could get trained like that. That's why I don't watch Fox: agree, don't agree, either way they're dumber'n dirt. Pavel suggested that folks enlist. And it really does make you stronger. So how's it work? Warning, Will Robinson: Don't try this at home. 1) I'm not a teacher; I hurt myself doing this stuff. 2) I'm leaving parts out. There were three classes: deadlifts and bench presses using a barbell, four or five abdominal exercises that you rotate two weeks each, and stretches. It's not bodybuilding; the point isn't to add muscle mass, but to train what you have to contract further. Pavel talked about women who lift cars to save their kids, Russian doctors who leap onto airplane wings to escape polar bears, and electrocution victims who break their own bones. You're not conditioning your muscles so much as your nervous system, teaching it to squeeze those cells just a little further each day. There's a Greek myth about Heracles or Alexander or somebody's lifting a newly foaled horse, and then picking it up every day, until he was lifting one of the Budweiser Clydesdales. It's not exactly like that. Take bench presses: Start out at some arbitrary weight -- say a hundred pounds because that's where I started. You do five sets of five, five timed minutes apart. Pavel stressed posture, which I won't describe; I don't understand the kinesiological reasons for it, and we've already established that you can hurt yourself. Inhale as deeply as you can and hold it. Do a full-body isometric, squeezing every muscle in your body as hard as you can. Take five seconds to lower the bar to your chest, maintaining the body squeeze. Exhale. Inhale, squeeze, and lift. That's one repetition. There's a similar deadlift drill. Holding your breath and squeezing really does train you to lift more. I was gonna start playing round ball above the rim, but I dropped the deadlifts because they were irritating my damaged left knee. Next workout, add five pounds to the bar, then another five pounds the time after that, and so on. One day you won't be able to finish your fifth set. Next workout, add five pounds, and do four sets. When you can't do four, add five pounds and do three. Eventually you can't finish your first set. Take a week off. When you start again, start at 105. Similar routine with the abs. I'm a tall guy with a very light frame and a tendency carry a little flab. In certain light I began to have a six pack. The stretching used the same hold-your-breath-and-squeeze technique. According to Pavel, the isometric was convincing my nervous system that it was safe to stretch. It worked. In the class he had a very tight guy do a (pitiful) forward bend. When the guy's fingers were as close to his toes as he could manage, Pavel had him inhale and squeeze for a count of five. When the guy exhaled, his hands dropped closer to his toes. I hung from a bar in the garage and did the hold and squeeze, to stretch my back, going from six-two-and-a-quarter to six-three. When I got to the point that I was benching about fifteen pounds shy of my weight, I pulled something in my back, and got out of the habit. I was around fifty then. When I started exercising again, it was because I got interested in yoga. Lately, a dozen or so years later, my workout has become a cobbled-together routine that includes asana, physical therapy assignments, and weights (either super slow or low-weight/high-rep). I feel like a coiled spring. I'm great at unscrewing pickle jars; my muscles just don't give up. When I'm slowly lifting these little weights, I can tell that I'm enlisting my trunk, hips, even my thighs to move the weights in just the right way. Everything in my body seems to seat right, and I don't mind having a little definition in my arms. So I figured, "Why not try the Pavel stuff again?" I expected to surpass what I'd done when I was fifty, because of how good I felt. I started out at 100, just like before, knowing it to be well within my abilities. After three reps, I had to call Barbara to help me get the bar off my chest. "You know it scares me when you do this." "Yeah, yeah. We'll talk about it later. This thing is bruising me." "Are you going to do this again?" "I don't know. This is killing..." "I said are you?" "Promises made under duress don't count." "Are you?" "Okay. This was dumb. I thought I was stronger." "Are you?" "I'll drop the weight back down." So, between the two of us, we got the barbell back on the rack, and I did drop the weight down to seventy pounds. Two workouts, and I feel like I could let my tovariches break flaming 2x4s on my chest. I think I have discovered a marker for age, though. Still, Pavel's old man seems to be doing okay at seventy-something. I went out at 140 back when I Pavelcized. It'll be interesting to see if I make it to 140 again. |
Monday, January 14, 2013
Kvetch About Limits
| A calculation I make, one I think everybody does, is "That looks important, meaningful, or interesting, but I can't afford the time and attention it'll take to understand it." You can't know everything, and I'll never open my calculus books again. And I'll never absorb Buckminster Fuller's proposed replacement for calculus, his Synergetics. Something tells me he was right when he said "I have found the models of synergetics, my system of geometry, quite capable of illustrating such basic principles as quantum mechanics, fourth-dimensional forms, and complex motions and phase transformations. "From 1938 to 1940 I was on Fortune's staff as the science and engineering consultant. In late 1939 I prepared an article on the Sperry Gyroscope company which appeared in May 1940. Although told by the president of Sperry that precession, the heart of the story, could be explained only in terms of mathematics of quantum mechanics, I presented a two-page explanation of precession in terms of human senses rather than mathematically abstruse formulae, as I have done from the lecture podium many times since." I e-mailed an earlier post about Fuller's claiming Mayan pyramids' foundations' are tangent to the Earth's spherical surface to an old friend, who disappointed me by saying that she wasn't a mathematician or engineer, and didn't understand. I re-read the post, and didn't see anything that far over the head of a sixty-something college grad. I think the sticking point had to be the word "tangent." There's stuff I'm not going to study, but there are dictionaries and search engines that can at least let me know how something fits into human culture. |
Sunday, January 13, 2013
A Dozen Aphorisms Or Something
| Stupidity requires an act of will. Error must be corrected; it doesn't have to be acknowledged. Dee Hock, creator of Visa and MasterCard If the perfect is the enemy of the good, is the adequate enemy of the inadequate? Is the necessary the enemy of "whatever, man." People think moral relativity or situational ethics is easy -- hedonistic indulgences of the Playboy Philosophy -- but you're more likely to do right that way, than if the economic policy of a bunch of Bronze Age shepherds is your crutch. The war between the theist and the atheist is over whether we should know God as God, or use some other name. Samuel Butler I'm for using a different name. Adam and Eve kicked God out of the Garden. Gregory Bateson (Gregory thought it was a bad idea. God, you should note, is not a rule book.) Gregory Bateson not withstanding, men who don't use the familiar forms of their personal names are trying to pull a fast one. |
| I watched Religulous, Bill Maher's 2008 comedy documentary about religion. You'd probably call me an atheist, but I found the movie smug and unkind. Sure, the interviewees were dumb and smug, and probably unkind, but the movie and Maher pretended to a superior knowledge. And a higher standard. Some scientist -- I forget who or what kind -- said that Richard Dawkins probably doesn't persuade anybody to atheism or even to tolerance, and the people who agree with him don't need to read him. (About God, anyway. Dawkins is an interesting thinker about evolution.) A guy I used to cross paths with had lived in Atlanta for a while. He was appalled that, when he enrolled his kids in little league, one of the key dads asked him for a hundred bucks. "Don't worry, you'll get it back." Later he asked them what the hundred dollar routine was about. "It's to keep the niggers out." He was appalled, but the interesting thing is that this guy and the other little league dads vote the same way. We heard a news story about the gang-rape murder in India. The cops argued about jurisdiction before getting medical attention to the victims; as many men as women have demonstrated; the courts have gagged the press, ostensibly for the privacy of a dead woman whose family wants to get the word out; India is the home of suttee; we wondered about the demographic of thugs who pull evil stunts like this. Conclusion: India is split between cosmopolitan pragmatists struggling toward justice and a place in the ecology of their world, and authoritarian, superstitious barbarians. Just like America. Is that the spirit of our world right now? |
Friday, January 11, 2013
Buckminster Fuller Quotes
Fuller claimed that humanity is in its "final examination." The man died in 1983, well before the Soviet collapse, so his preoccupation was nuclear war. One of his books was titled Utopia or Oblivion. Oblivion of course being nuclear holocaust, because wars are fought over resources the combatants believe to be scare. (Fuller believed they are mistaken.)
Utopia amounted to opening a valve that would let human ingenuity solve the problem of scarcity. Fuller called us "four billion billionaires, as yet unaware of their good fortune."
Here are some Fuller quotes that fit. They come from the first chapter, "The Dawn of Einstein's Universe," of Cosmography: A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity.
"[Fuller's invention, the geodesic dome] is the only structure we know of that gets stronger as it gets larger and has no limit to its span."
"When we double the diameter of a geodesic dome, we increase the volume by a factor of 8 and the surface by a factor of 4." (This lowers the heating bill.)
"My intuition seemed to describe an evolution that is intent upon developing humans to the point where they can achieve total physical success."
(Writing about what we call military spin-off technology) "For example, electric refrigeration., first used in battleships, is adopted a generation later for use in the domestic environment on dry land."
"Of course, acting with conscious direction is the next stage of human evolution. I call this discipline anticipatory design science."
"[Politics could never] produce so much high-standard life support with so little material and energy investment as now, for the first time in history, to be able to sustain all humanity at ever higher standards of living than we have ever before experienced or dreamed of."
"[Acquiring useful technology by developing it to wage war] inadvertently also produces life-supporting technology, but it tkes a quarter of a century longer than it would if humanity first recognized the public longing to attain sustainable peace for all humanity and directly used the same high-technology production for livingry rather than for armaments."
I blogged a week or two ago about Fuller's assertion, in this same book, that the Mayans built their pyramids' foundations tangent to the Earth's spherical surface. I said I would track down Fuller's adjuvant for Cosmography, Kiyosh Kuromiya.
Unfortunately, we lost Kiyoshi-san to AIDS in 2000. He was born in an internment camp in Wyoming in 1943, and was a witty and energetic human rights activist. Apparently, his parents named him Steven and, as a kid, he went by the name Steve.
Kiyoshi Kuromiya was active in ACT UP, and founded the Critical Path Project, an organization that continues to supply AIDS sufferers with internet access.
I also exchanged e-mails about Mayan engineering with someone at the Buckminster Fuller Institute with no progress toward an answer.
I'd be obliged for any suggestions.
Utopia amounted to opening a valve that would let human ingenuity solve the problem of scarcity. Fuller called us "four billion billionaires, as yet unaware of their good fortune."
Here are some Fuller quotes that fit. They come from the first chapter, "The Dawn of Einstein's Universe," of Cosmography: A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity.
"[Fuller's invention, the geodesic dome] is the only structure we know of that gets stronger as it gets larger and has no limit to its span."
"When we double the diameter of a geodesic dome, we increase the volume by a factor of 8 and the surface by a factor of 4." (This lowers the heating bill.)
"My intuition seemed to describe an evolution that is intent upon developing humans to the point where they can achieve total physical success."
(Writing about what we call military spin-off technology) "For example, electric refrigeration., first used in battleships, is adopted a generation later for use in the domestic environment on dry land."
"Of course, acting with conscious direction is the next stage of human evolution. I call this discipline anticipatory design science."
"[Politics could never] produce so much high-standard life support with so little material and energy investment as now, for the first time in history, to be able to sustain all humanity at ever higher standards of living than we have ever before experienced or dreamed of."
"[Acquiring useful technology by developing it to wage war] inadvertently also produces life-supporting technology, but it tkes a quarter of a century longer than it would if humanity first recognized the public longing to attain sustainable peace for all humanity and directly used the same high-technology production for livingry rather than for armaments."
I blogged a week or two ago about Fuller's assertion, in this same book, that the Mayans built their pyramids' foundations tangent to the Earth's spherical surface. I said I would track down Fuller's adjuvant for Cosmography, Kiyosh Kuromiya.
Unfortunately, we lost Kiyoshi-san to AIDS in 2000. He was born in an internment camp in Wyoming in 1943, and was a witty and energetic human rights activist. Apparently, his parents named him Steven and, as a kid, he went by the name Steve.
Kiyoshi Kuromiya was active in ACT UP, and founded the Critical Path Project, an organization that continues to supply AIDS sufferers with internet access.
I also exchanged e-mails about Mayan engineering with someone at the Buckminster Fuller Institute with no progress toward an answer.
I'd be obliged for any suggestions.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
A Different Take On The Idea Of Mind
More on Fuller tomorrow, particularly about how he saw us as problem solvers, but first another point of view on mind.
Fuller saw mind as uniquely human, and noticing patterns in sensory information processed by human brains. Gregory Bateson saw mind as immanent in all life, roses, redwood forests, the US Senate, you, me. Rather than dividing existence between mind and matter. Bateson divided it between life and non-life.
Here are his six criteria for mind:
1. Mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components.
2. The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference.
3. Mental process requires collateral energy.
4. Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination.
5. In mental process, the effects of difference are to be regarded as transforms (i.e. coded versions) of events which precede them.
6. The description and classification of these processes of transformation disclose a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena.
It might be an interesting exercise to try to map Fuller's idea of mind onto Bateson's criteria. Right now, I'm dubious, but I haven't actually sat down and asked myself -- for instance -- "What are the interacting parts of Fuller's mind?"
Fuller saw mind as uniquely human, and noticing patterns in sensory information processed by human brains. Gregory Bateson saw mind as immanent in all life, roses, redwood forests, the US Senate, you, me. Rather than dividing existence between mind and matter. Bateson divided it between life and non-life.
Here are his six criteria for mind:
1. Mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components.
2. The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference.
3. Mental process requires collateral energy.
4. Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination.
5. In mental process, the effects of difference are to be regarded as transforms (i.e. coded versions) of events which precede them.
6. The description and classification of these processes of transformation disclose a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena.
It might be an interesting exercise to try to map Fuller's idea of mind onto Bateson's criteria. Right now, I'm dubious, but I haven't actually sat down and asked myself -- for instance -- "What are the interacting parts of Fuller's mind?"
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Buckminster Fuller Tells How People Are Different From Other Animals
| Buckminster Fuller thought that people's purpose was to be problem solvers. (He also thought that this was what will save our sorry collective ass.) I've transcribed a thousand words or so of Fuller's thinking from Cosmography: A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity about this idea. What he's saying is that other creatures got photosynthesis, fur, wings, etc. We got mind. He distinguishes between brain and mind, saying that brains interpret the senses, while minds discover the patterns in what we sense. In this excerpt Fuller discusses the scientific path to Newton's description of the relationship between distance and attraction that we call gravity, paying detailed attention to Kepler's discovery of the surprising way that the planets' obits relate to each other. He uses gravitation to stand for all of the natural laws which only humans seem capable of learning. Over half a century ago, when I embarked on my "experiment in individual initiative," I set before myself(as I have repeatedlt ever since then) one very large question: What is our function here in Universe? My first answer to that question came from two three closely related observations: 1. That all known living organisms other than humans have some integral bodily equipment that gives them special operating capabilities in special environments. 2. That many creatures, including humans, have brains, and that brains are always and only sorting the information reported by the senses and integrating this information into system images and therewith coordinating nervous control responses or forming improved new system imagings. Brains are therefore always dealing with special case experience -- for example, "This one smells a little sweeter than that one." Brains must sleep periodically. Brains deal in beginnings and endings of special-case considerations. Brains are physical, temporal, and frequently terminaled. 3. Humans also have a faculty unidentified with any other creatures -- the faculty of mind. Minds are always and only concerned with the discovery of eternal constant interrelationships manifest in a myriad of special-case experiences of the brain, which interrelationships are not to be found in any one of the special-case system components considered separately. One of the most important events of classical science involving the interrelationship findings by the human mind is demonstrated by the mathematician-astronomer Johannes Kepler, whose story I shall recount here. Based on his accurate observations and measurements, Kepler found that all the planets of which he was aware (a) were of different sizes, (b) operated at different distances from the Sun, (c) orbited the Sun at different rates, and (d) traveled their respective orbits at different rates. Kepler said that the planets, though apparently on the same team, seemed to be utterly disordered. He then said they did share one thing: the fact of all going around the same Sun. As a mathematician, he knew he could assign these planets something else in common. He also knew that given two known constants, one may discover other interrelationships within the team. Kepler then assigned a common constant to each and all the known planets -- exactly the same increment of calendar time. Starting at the same moment of calendar time and finishing at the same monet of calendar time, Kepler observed and recorded the plants' concurrent orbital travel over a twenty-one day period. this gave him the data for graphing the slices-of-pie-shaped, triangular patterns formed by each of the starting and finishing radii of measured distance from the Sun to each planet at the start and finish of the twenty-one-day event. The arc of travel distance between the start and finish closed the radii ends to form triangular shapes. Kepler intuitively decided to calculate the area of each of them. Doing so, he found that they were not only similar areas but were elegantly, exactly the same size. He surmised that the planets could not sweep out exactly the same cosmic area unless they were coordinating in some exact manner. Since the planest were not touching one another, they could not be coordinating like toothed gears. Far from touching, these massive bodies were rotating and orbiting millions of miles distant from one another. Kepler was forced to conclude that there was an invisible, unsmellable, soundless, untouchable, intertensionally restraining force governing the planets' orbital motions. The work and findings of Kepler's contemporary Galileo regarding the exact mathematical rate of acceleration of "falling bodies" led to Isaac Newton's discovering the mathematical expression of the gravitational laws of Universe. Newton found that the interattraction of any two celestial bodies always varies inversely with the second power of the arithmetical distances intervening. Thus, halve the distance, and increase the interattractiveness fourfold. Here again we have the human mind discovering what the brain's sensing is utterly incapable of apprehending. The mind can, and does, from time to time discover the only mathematically expressible laws governing these nonsensorially discoverable macro-microcosmic interrelationships which always hold true in all special-case instances. When such initial discoveries are found to be exceptionless, they become known as "laws" -- hence, the generalized laws of science. Exceptionlessness can be termed eternal. Human mind has discovered a meager inventory of these only mathematically statable, eternal laws governing the physical design and operation of Universe. These laws have never been found to contradict one another. All have been found to be interaccomodative. All of them may be objectively employed in special-case technology. Humans possessed of the family of generalized mathematical laws governing all the relevant, variable factors in aerodynamics are able to build a flying machine by which they can outfly the birds in speed and altitude. Humans can lend one another their "wings." That humans alone of all known phenomena have access to the great design laws of Universe immediately implies that we must have been introduced into Universe for some very significant ultimate functioning. |
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Green Lightning At The Blue Moon: Talking Disaster Blues
My transition group met last night at the Blue Moon coffee house on Lake Street. (It's something else with the same name, Kate.)
Transition is a movement to replace oil with community. The idea is that climate change and peak oil are a one-two punch that will cripple industrial economy. The powers that be either can't or won't stop sawing away at the branch upon which we perch so precariously, so it's up to us. ("Grass roots" mixed the metaphor too hilariously to use or lose, so I had to put it in parenthesis.)
We're reading Sharon Astyk's Making Home. We covered chapters 4 & 5 last night, but Schroedinger's cat still has my copy, so I listened and doodled surreptitious caricatures of the seven people at the table. Michelle, who is local, but just moved back to the Twin Cities after eight years in Sarasota, FL, chaired the conversation, and very nicely kept it, more or less, on topic.
In a prior meeting, we had established that it is important enough to keep your home that you sacrifice some pretty important stuff to do so. Home is a base of operations, site for workshop and garden, and toehold in your community. In hard times, let go of your phone, gas, and electrical services, if this will help you make your rent or mortgage payments. Good trick in Minnesota, I guess but freezing in the dark is better than being homeless. The part that sticks in my mind was that we could sort of run drills. Lee and her family have shut off their utilities for a day, much to their teenagers' dismay. When their drier crashed, they didn't replace it.
We also talked about a backhoe accident downtown that flooded a parking garage, diverted traffic, shut down businesses, and cancelled Guthrie Theater performances.
Even for economies, "In the midst of life, etc."
We are enjoying mild weather up here on the 45th parallel, this second week of January. We could see temps in the forties, and it's already been above freezing. There's a chance of rain on Thursday, with a return to normal temperatures behind that. Somebody from Kansas City last night mentioned that down there, what happens is the rain freezes on the branches, which snap off and fall onto the power lines.
"There was all this green lightning, and nobody could figure out what it was. It turned out that the transformers were exploding."
If this stuff is all true, I'm not the grasshopper anymore. I'm a freaking ant!
Monday, January 7, 2013
Adolph Eichmann, Moishe Dayan, And the Limits To Growth
Israel hanged Adolph Eichmann in 1962, thirteen months after they caught him Argentina. Co-incidentally, the Oscar-winning film Judgement at Nuremberg hit movie theaters in 1961. I was in the Seventh Grade when Eichman died, and I was appalled that anybody would hang anybody.
Eichmann's crime was to be the logistical genius who designed and ran the system that transported Eastern European Jews to their deaths. His defense was that he was a cog in the machine, only doing what his superiors ordered. In fact, Eichmann may have been an enthusiastic executioner, an anti-semite, and an ambitious opportunist. The joke among the junior high set at the time of Eichman's death was "Can't you Jews take a joke?"
In Judgement, the sympathetic Judge, played by Spencer Tracy, is kind and attentive to the Germans he meets, witnesses, the accused, a young woman at a sausage vendor's, the servants at the mansion where he's lodged, the widow (Marlene Dietrich) of a general hanged for war crimes. They are all "little people," small cogs in a great machine.
Much is made, by defense counsel, Maximillian Schell, of the fact that the defendants, particularly one learned and revered jurist, were caught up in the system, and that convicting them convicted the entire German population. The story takes place during the Soviet Berlin blockade, and the judge experiences considerable pressure to slap the defendants wrists, and let them go on their ways. The Allies need the Germans on their side to meet the Soviet threat. The judge does the right thing, if not theexpeditious one.
I was kind of an oblivious kid.
For instance, I have no recollection of the Cuban Missile Crisis. That happened in the fall of my Eighth Grade year, when you'd think I was old enough to notice.
But somehow I took Eichmann's hand-washing defense, that he was following orders, as the epitome of evil. I remember a cartoon of Moishe Dayan -- maybe by Edward Sorel -- at the time of the Six Day War, in which Dayan says, "I was only following marauders."
I couldn't help but oppose the Vietnam War, and the contradictions and compromises of work, particularly post-Limits to Growth -- were a handicap to the career of one of the best minds of my generation, namely me.
I've mellowed in early senescence.
Howard T. Odum pointed out that a system is limited by what its sub-systems support and what the larger system in which it's embedded will allow.
What's a little feller to do as the world crashes around him?
Eichmann's crime was to be the logistical genius who designed and ran the system that transported Eastern European Jews to their deaths. His defense was that he was a cog in the machine, only doing what his superiors ordered. In fact, Eichmann may have been an enthusiastic executioner, an anti-semite, and an ambitious opportunist. The joke among the junior high set at the time of Eichman's death was "Can't you Jews take a joke?"
In Judgement, the sympathetic Judge, played by Spencer Tracy, is kind and attentive to the Germans he meets, witnesses, the accused, a young woman at a sausage vendor's, the servants at the mansion where he's lodged, the widow (Marlene Dietrich) of a general hanged for war crimes. They are all "little people," small cogs in a great machine.
Much is made, by defense counsel, Maximillian Schell, of the fact that the defendants, particularly one learned and revered jurist, were caught up in the system, and that convicting them convicted the entire German population. The story takes place during the Soviet Berlin blockade, and the judge experiences considerable pressure to slap the defendants wrists, and let them go on their ways. The Allies need the Germans on their side to meet the Soviet threat. The judge does the right thing, if not theexpeditious one.
I was kind of an oblivious kid.
For instance, I have no recollection of the Cuban Missile Crisis. That happened in the fall of my Eighth Grade year, when you'd think I was old enough to notice.
But somehow I took Eichmann's hand-washing defense, that he was following orders, as the epitome of evil. I remember a cartoon of Moishe Dayan -- maybe by Edward Sorel -- at the time of the Six Day War, in which Dayan says, "I was only following marauders."
I couldn't help but oppose the Vietnam War, and the contradictions and compromises of work, particularly post-Limits to Growth -- were a handicap to the career of one of the best minds of my generation, namely me.
I've mellowed in early senescence.
Howard T. Odum pointed out that a system is limited by what its sub-systems support and what the larger system in which it's embedded will allow.
What's a little feller to do as the world crashes around him?
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Why Rich? Why Poor?
Sam and Marissa returned an old CoEvolution Quarterly I had loaned them. We were talking about space exploration a few months ago, and there is a story in the magazine, Manuel's Tears, that made the point that a space colony would live at the expense of people on the planet.
There's also a quote from John Ruskin on the back cover.
In the community regulated only by laws of supply and demand, but protected from open violence, the persons who become RICH are, generally speaking, industrious, proud, resolute, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive, and ignorant. The persons who remain POOR are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just, and godly person.
There's also a quote from John Ruskin on the back cover.
In the community regulated only by laws of supply and demand, but protected from open violence, the persons who become RICH are, generally speaking, industrious, proud, resolute, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive, and ignorant. The persons who remain POOR are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just, and godly person.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Cloud Atlas
Saw Cloud Atlas this evening, second run and the Deco-Moderne Riverview Theater where we see most of our movies, with Sam and Marissa.
The film is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by David Mitchell, directed by and with a script by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis. It takes place in several eras, with Hanks, and actors including Halle Barrry, Hugo Weaving, playing multiple roles during periods from slave-trading to post-futuristic tribal. I thought one of the villains was doing a Hugh Grant impression, then learned from the credits that it was Hugh Grant. Cloud Atlas is the name of a piece of music written by one of the characters, during the 78 RPM era.
The reviews we read weren't good, but Cloud Atlas was nice. It's been a long time since I've seen a puzzle movie, and this one spoke well of the human soul. Joe Versus the Volcano and That Thing You Do notwithstanding, it's a long way from Bosom Buddies.
The film is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by David Mitchell, directed by and with a script by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis. It takes place in several eras, with Hanks, and actors including Halle Barrry, Hugo Weaving, playing multiple roles during periods from slave-trading to post-futuristic tribal. I thought one of the villains was doing a Hugh Grant impression, then learned from the credits that it was Hugh Grant. Cloud Atlas is the name of a piece of music written by one of the characters, during the 78 RPM era.
The reviews we read weren't good, but Cloud Atlas was nice. It's been a long time since I've seen a puzzle movie, and this one spoke well of the human soul. Joe Versus the Volcano and That Thing You Do notwithstanding, it's a long way from Bosom Buddies.
Friday, January 4, 2013
Travis McGee Depressive Existential Hero
| The legend is that John D. MacDonald began writing fiction as a WWII GI so he could send something meaningful to his wife by censored mail. She submitted his detective stories to magazines, and began his career. MacDonald was a "writing machine" who cranked out over fifty books, and innumerable short stories. His prose is a little florid, but it's readable with few mechanical problems. Example: "Hefty Salvation Army Lassies in their wagon-train bonnets dingle-dangled spare change into their kettles, and fat foam Santas were affixed to the palm boles and light standards, high enough to keep the kids from yanking their foam feet off." That was from Pale Gray for Guilt, of the Travis McGee series, told in first person by Travis McGee, who is prone to describing skies as full of "smutch" and machines as going "pockety-wock." The cutesiness is usually ironic. As an informant MacDonald was only middling reliable. It's pretty obvious he knew about LSD from the inside, but he confused Monet and Manet, and I haven't been able to find online evidence of a real Dormed sleep machine -- an electronic gadget that keeps the girl in Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper -- in half an hour of searching. MacDonald's series character Travis McGee regarded women as real humans. Interetingly, at a time when Playboy was serializing James Bond, McGee had little use for Playboy, key clubs, or Hugh Hefner. Still, sex was "full-frontal." "But her breathing changed and she pushed her hips so close she could not fail to notice what all the thought of ice and pain had failed to quell. "She sat up abruptly and unbuttoned her blouse and took it off. She kept her eyes shut as though unwilling to watch what she was doing. She made a mouth, as the French say, a mouth of resignation and self contempt. She knelt, put her thumbs inside the waist elastic of the baggy white slacks and peeled them down, rolled back an kicked them off. She had worn nothing under either the blouse or the slacks. Her body was elegant, sleek as fire-warm silk and ivory, with a deceptive flavor of immaturity about it, the nipples small and pink, the pubic hair a sofft sooty smudge." McGee longs for love, but rejects a life of punch cards, pension plans, and decimal-fraction-sized families, preferring his chosen occupation of "Ke-Ho-Tay" in tin-can armor, with broken lance and spavined steed. This is a problem for a series character, and -- somebody told me -- McGee's conquests in twenty-one books was in the fifties. Lois was murdered, Pidge jilted our hero, Dana went back into her shell, Puss disappeared (we find out in another novel that she died), Annie preferred her career, and so on. Liberal MacDonald's homophobia seems quaint, slanderous and exploitive forty years after Stonewall. Desk clerk's stifle yawns behind dainty fists, and "the butch" live in "colonies" where they guard their "brides" from "true males," dispensing beatings "stevedores would be proud of." Travis McGee is a Florida boat bum, who lives aboard a fifty foot sybaritic houseboat he won playing poker. The loser's friends led him away before he could write an IOU with his Brazilian mistress as collateral. McGee makes his living retrieving things stolen legally, and taking half the value as fee. He does not expect to live to great age -- when he would be less capable of enjoying himself anyway -- so takes his retirement in installments. MacDonald created McGee as a kind of depressed hero, tall, strong, handsome -- if scarred and shopworn -- a former paratrooper and professional running back, who lives life on his own terms, but describes himself as living outside the light and warmth cast by the fire, unable to take part in our songs and laughter. It's a kind of fantasy fulfillment and moral caution to his readers, mostly WWII and Korea vets or their contemporaries, educated, a pipe smokers, Democrats, libertarians, cynics, thinking of themselves a s men's men, but supporting lives of dinner at the club with wife and kids. The typical Travis McGee novel begins with McGee taking his ease after making a big score. An old friend, girlfriend, or somebody he owes big makes a claim on his attention. The loss is seldom something that fits with his fee structure, and it's been taken by a sociopath, someone who has no empathy for other people, who imagines we are all as empty as himself. McGee starts looking into the case, randomly stirring things up. (In several of the books, McGee needs information from a tertiary character who is not forthcoming. McGee tortures the informant, feeling soiled afterwards. Fortunately MacDonald abandoned this device after the early novels.) He meets the villain, sort of an evil Travis McGee, alerting the villain to his presence. As McGee is set to steal the prize back, the villain attacks him, injuring him seriously before McGee can dispatch him. Every hero needs a sidekick, and McGees is a gentle, charismatic, semi-retired economist, named Meyer. McGee is not in every book. In spite of being highly moral, Meyer discovers a taste and talent for being a con man. Because of his economics contacts and curriculum vitae, Meyer can often take the con to very high levels. The thing that distinguishes the Travis McGee novels from other mystery thrillers, is McGee's soliloquizing about Florida, the environment, human dignity, and -- quoting Meyer -- economics. In 1973's The Scarlet Ruse, Meyer is telling McGee how he met the defrauded stamp dealer Hirsch Fedderman. Fedderman had helped Meyer develop an economic indicator based on the activity in markets for rare commodities like stamps. "I wanted the kind of warning they used to have in France. When the peasants started buying gold and hiding it, you knew the storms were coming." "Are they coming, O Great Seer?" "What do you think we are standing out in the middle of with neither spoon nor paddle?" Later in the same book: "...so divide everything into two hundred million equal parts. Everything in theis country that is fabricated. Steel mills, speedboats, cross-country power lines, scalpels, watchbands, fish rods, ski poles, plywood, storage batteries, everything. Break it down into raw materials, then compute the power requirements and the fossil fuels needed to make everybody's share in this country. Know what happens when you apply that formula to all the peoples of all the other nations of the world? "You come up against a bleak fact, Travis. there is not enough material on and in the planet to ever give them what we're used to. The emerging nations are not going to emerge -- not into our pattern at least. Not ever. We've bagged it all. Technology won't come up with a way to crowd the Yangtze River with Munequitas." (The Munequita -- "Little Doll" -- is McGee's twin engine speedboat, behind which he is towing his latest romantic interest, and the sociopathic villain of the book.) |
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