This is my very first and therefore utterly serious post as a guest blogger for the Cognitive Edge site. When I was invited to do this, I felt both happy and worried. Happy because it's a tremendous honor to write for such a select and intelligent audience. Worried because I had so much to say, but had to wait for four or five months before being able to do so.

Now these months have passed, like whoosh, and I find that what I had to say is perhaps less interesting than I then imagined. Some topics just faded. Others are off limits as I am forbidden to discuss work. And others again are – well – important for me personally, but perhaps not exactly what people visiting this site are looking for.

I'm afraid something went wrong with the links in my previous post. Sorry, I still have to get the hang of the blogging software. However, reposting links gives me a good excuse to tell something more about what I referred to, and why (I intended to do so anyway, but that's not the point).

Here they are:
* Arithmetic, Population, and Energy (by A. Bartlett)
* The Crash Course (on money, economy, environment and energy, by Chris Martenson)

My first link was and is again to a lecture by Professor Emeritus A. Bartlett, Physics Department of Colorado University at Boulder: Arithmetic, Population, and Energy. Cut into eight parts, his lecture has been uploaded to YouTube by a blogging scientist – or science teacher - calling himself wonderingmind42. You might want to check him out; he's quite briljant in my opinion (I mean content-wise, not per se qua styling or mise-en-scene, but that not the point).

In his lecture – which I think was recorded in the late nineties – professor Bartlett explains the exponentional function. Sounds complex perhaps, but sits smack in the middle of the simple domain of the Cynefin model. One plus one is two. Two plus two is four. Four plus four is eight. And so on. According to professor Bartlet, the foremost shortcoming of human kind is their – our – lack of understanding of this simple pattern. A beautiful and telling example is of course the well known but poorly understood tale of the Chinese emperor, his chessboard and the clever man opposite of him. 'My request is simple, my emperor. I just want some grain. Put one seed on the first square, two on the next, four on the third...”Adding all the grain on all 64 squares of the chessboard, this man asked for more than three times the global grain production of the late 1990's. Perhaps you can imagine this amount. I can't. Still it takes only 64 squares, a doubling time of one field, and a start at one.

There's something else about this simple exponential function. Which is that if you have reached a doubling time, hopping from square to square as it were, the total is more than the addition of all previous jumps. Let's say we are at square 3 of the chess board and obediently drop grain on those squares. One, two, and then four drops of grain at the third square. Adding the first and the second square gives us three. And so it goes on.

Yes, we burn more oil this year than all previous years in history combined. Crisis not withstanding.

Next time I'll write some more about Bartlett and Martenson.

Best, Mireille

Continuing my last post: there's a magic thing about doubling time, which in the tale of the emperor and his chess board is represented by hopping from square to square. Which is that it's really easy to calculate how much time it takes for something to double, if you know its growth percentage per year.

Logarithms aside, the rule of thumb is this: divide 70 by percentage of growth per year to know how many years it takes for a given quantity to double.

For example: if something grows one percent per year, its doubling time measured in years is 70 divided by one, which is 70 years. In 140 years, it will be four times as much. In 210 years, eight times as much. And so on. Other example: if something grows two percent per year, its doubling time is 70 divided by two, so 35 years. In 70 years the amount is a fourfold of the initial value. In 105 years its eight times as large. In 140 years: 16 times. In 205 years: 32 as much.

You may have become bored by this second example, but think again! A seemingly slight difference between one and two percent growth per year means a huge difference in numbers after just about 205 years!

This pattern is not complex. It is really, really simple. But it has some very ´complex´ consequences if you consider population, energy, food, and environmental effects.

The primary reason for these complex consequences is that growth of population, and of energy and food consumption, and of the environmental effects of all of these, take place on and in a world – our earth - that's limited. That, in my opinion, is the fundamental flaw of all growth ´philosophies´ which have dominated corporate and governmental thinking for so long. Growth as preached is not sustainable, and to understand that you don´t need a degree, just elementary school math.

Next time I´ll discuss Martenson´s views about our money system, and how it ties in to growth. Well, I'll make a start.

Aside from being fascinated, I felt worried after having watched the Arithmetic, Population, and Energy lecture by Bartlett - see my last posts. But there was still something unclear to me, and that is why we continue to celebrate and aim for growth if the consequences will be so devestating. I mean: we could start being happy with what we have instead of always wanting more, right? (I know I'm neglecting human psychology and economic inequality here.)

Martenson's explanation of the money system gave me a missing piece of that puzzle. What he explains in part six, seven and eight of his Crash Course series, is that our money system is based on perpetual exponential growth, and that without this growth the system will collapse. This is because the system is based on debt: our money is lent into existence. And to be able to pay the rent for all these debts, each year all outstanding debt must grow ('compound') by at least the rate of interest on that debt. So perpetual growth is a requirement of our money system and modern banking. If this growth stops or goes negative for too long, people and companies will default on their debts and the system will collapse. Ever wondered why governments are pumping so much money into the system right now, and urge remaining banks to lend out money? Right.

Watch the following episodes for a much better explanation than I could ever give:
Part 5 – Growth versus prosperity (ca. 4 minutes)
Part 6 – What is money (ca. 6 minutes)
Part 7 – Money creation (ca. 4 minutes)

Hello Jim Grant,

Thanks for your comment.You raise a very interesting point, and I haven't figured out the answer. So I'm just thinking aloud here.

Some patterns may perhaps be conceived as linear, while actually they aren't. In those cases there may be randomness at play. Ordinary Gaussian dice throwing randomness, or – as Nassim Taleb (author of Fooled by Randonmess and more recently The Black Swan) argues, a different kind of randomness, which partly may be captured by chaos theory / fractal math (Mandelbroth) and for the most important part is totally unpredictable, sitting firmly in the complex domain of the Cynefin model. The last ten words are utterly mine – I don't know whether Taleb knows this model.

Here are some links in case you want to delve some more into Taleb's work and way of thinking:
* Edge video: Reflections on a Crisis
* Library of Economics and Liberty podcast: Taleb on Black Swans
* Edge article: The Fourth Quadrant
* McKinsey article: Taking improbable events seriously
* FT article, opinion: Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world

The worth of investments over time is certainly non-lineair if you look at the graphs, and except for quite short periods of time only seemingly predictable by using models like exponential growth and Gaussian probability. I mean the fact that the current financial crisis came unexpected for loads of people who were heads over heels into Gaussian prediction math, shows the fallability of this model. I think Dave Snowden would call this 'bounded applicability' (or, depending on his mood and audience, 'plain stupidity').

I would have to look way deeper into birth rates, rainfall, average temperatures, and other natural phenomena to answer you on those. But actually, I haven't said anything about rainfall, average temperatures, and natural phenomena in my posts. I just said something about – and referred to sources on - population and environmental effects which should be taken account because of being directly and clearly effected by pop growth. Like energy production / consumption.

Concerning population: however much birthrates drop and rise in certain regions during certain times, until now, if you add it all up, overall world population has grown since some millenia BC. I know we've only started to officially 'measure' birth- and death rates since a relatively short span of time and in just some regions, but archeologists and historians tell the same story. The trend is more people, not less. And the trend is more need for energy, not less. And the trend is that we use more natural resources, not less, each and every year. Not just oil, which just goes on since we discovered the combustion engine. But also space, wood, and so on. This will become a problem (if it's not already), not because we're bad or something, but because we live on a spherical globe dancing along in space, which has a limited surface and limited resources.

Intellectual analysis and philosophical hair splitting aside, I think the question is when this clash between growth and finiteness will happen, not if. People like Chris Martenson think we're living through this change right now, and has adjusted his life accordingly.

Again, thanks for your comment. I'm thinking aloud here and made a separate post out of this because I took so long.

Best regards,

Mireille

Perhaps people reading my posts at CE's guest blog now think that I have an obsession with environment and such. That I am a single issue person. Well, I'm not. If I have one shortcoming (except lazyness, impatience, lack of manners, and being bored way too soon) it's that I am interested in way too many subjects and am expert at none. Other side of the medal is that I read and think all the time. Because I know I don't know shit.

One of the remarkable things about discovering the concept of complexity through discovering Dave Snowdens work, is that I now understand way better why I can't know, let alone understand, everything. Understanding has been a huge issue for me from about my 2th year on this earth. Since five or six I read like crazy. Hoping I would start to understand how the world is, how and why people are as they are, what matters and why. What the rules are.

I am fifty now, and I haven't figured it out. Still remember a conversation with my mother, we were sitting in a car. I – eight or nine - asked: how can it be that the universe expands, but never arrives? How can infinity grow if it's already infinite? She was silent for a while, steering the car, then said: I don't know. And after a some more time: You know, you get used to it. To not understanding.

Then, her answer upset me tremendously. I thought: how can grown-up people live like this, willingly accepting that they don't mind things that are so very important? Later I started to understand and appreciate her answer, and to love her for her honesty. What she said was real. To a certain extent we all live like this, blind to what's important because of other, more pressing matters.

Returning to pressing matters and the subject of my posts: Sir David Attenborough – remember his wonderful BBC nature series? - has become a sponsor of Optimum Population Trust.

Thank you for reading. I had never blogged before and I must say that two weeks is way too short to really delve into a subject, too short to be nuanced, and too short to cover the span of interest and experience any one person has. Nevertheless I hope that you have appreciated some of the things I wrote, and the sources I have referred to.

As a desert I want to dish out some video's and other material on other subjects I deeply care about. Education or rather learning would be the common denominator here. But not inflicted learning; not the standard one-to-many, curricularly imposed instructional-design stuff. It's about individual, self sought, self-directed discovery and development. This theme is perhaps so important to me as it is through this and through the passion and motivation inherent in it that I have always, even in circumstances where I was (or am) regarded as a 'resource', been able to combine work with play, exercise, discovery, learning, and sense of self.

Here are some tips for people interested in learning, development and passion:

* Mathematicians lament (essay) - Paul Lockhart
* The Element (video), by Ken Robinson
* Corporate Learning Trends and Innovation (community site), by Jay Cross and others
* Tales of Passion (video), by Isabel Allende
* The story of a passionate life (video), by Ben Dunlap
* The wayfinders (video, part 1 of 2), by Wade Davis
* Do schools kill creativity? (video), by Ken Robinson
* Poverty and Education – The challenge of improving schools (blogpost + video), at the Open Education blog

I could go on. But everything is fragmented, as Dave Snowden puts it. And the world is complex (including our perception of it, I would add). So even if I would make a list of a hundred resources, I would only have scratched the surface of this learning and passion theme.

Hope you enjoy this!

Kind regards,

Mireille

It is a great honor for me to be asked to be the Cognitive Edge Guest Blogger this fortnight.

I would like to start this series of guest posts by reporting and attempting to reflect on the little personal experiment I have been conducting in micro-blogging (or micro-sharing), using Twitter, in the last 6 months. This experiment is one which I am thoroughly enjoying, which is bringing me a lot and accordingly have no intention of discontinuing any time soon. It has in many ways being an eye opener, in particular, but not only, by making me more aware of the potential of social networking.

In my first post I alluded to my Twitter experiment and how it had been an eye opener for me in many ways, even in my field of research. The keyword again is network: through Twitter, I have established connections to people who are generally interested in the same ideas and who, through posting and interacting, enable me to question my own research practice whilst opening new areas of inquiry.

One of the people I follow who has contributed to my personal reflection on networks is Dr Mark Drapeau (aka @cheeky_geeky on Twitter) http://twitter.com/cheeky_geeky), who works at the National Defense University in Washington DC. Together with Dr Linton Wells II, the holder of the Force Transformation Chair at NDU, he has recently published a very interesting working paper on Social Software and National Security that stresses the increasing interest, in defence circles, for the potential use of social networks. Their paper is available for download here.

There has been in the last decade much emphasis in American strategic thinking on technological network, following the work of Arthur Cebrowski and John Garstka on network-centric warfare. Mark Drapeau and Linton Wells's paper, Social Software and National Security: An Initial Net Assessment is testimony of the fact that the awareness of social networks and of their pertinence to National Security is increasing. This of course does not mean that technological networks and social networks are mutually exclusive; much to the contrary, they are eminently complementary.

It is capital to stress that it is no longer a question of thinking in terms of opposition between technological networks and social networks, as in this early twenty-first century people are increasingly at ease with technology. They don't see the machine anymore, but rather the people they are connecting with through the machine. The emphasis has shifted from mastering the technology to using it to interact socially and create personal content. A strong sense of presence can thus be felt in the social networks that are emerging through technology. The connections that we see form today - friendship, business and even love relationships - have existed since the beginning of mankind. What's different now is the scale and breadth; never before has it been so easy to interact and connect with people outside of our physical, geographic and cultural space. Technology, more than ever, has become a relationships and connections enabler and that's (mostly) a good thing from a personal perspective.