Anthropogenic Warming ?

I suggested in a recent Friends of Wisdom thread, that  I didn’t really “care” whether global warming was caused by human activity, nor even whether it was “real”. The answer to neither question changes my belief that we should be concerned enough to work out what to do in response to the facts.

That is, we can learn from history, but not in simple “we did that and caused this, therefore if we do this we can achieve that” kinda ways. Life’s just complicated enough. 

Anyway, at first glance, this graph (linked also via Jorn) looks like a pretty random distribution of historical temperature fluctuations …. until you notice the right end of the graph has years as it’s time axis, and the left has hundreds of thousands of years. No idea how good the source data or its representation are, or even whether the western equatorial pacific temperature is a representative data point, but the graph is indeed scary. It’s 400,000 years since we had a period with average temperatures like the last 5 years, and for the last 100 years we’ve been 2 or 3 standard deviations higher than the long time average for the last 1,350,000 years, a period covering several ice-ages and retreats !!!

Plenty of caveats about the distortion of a graph with such a skewed distribution of data points and axes, but it still certainly seems significant.

Bacterial Quorum

I referred earlier to re-discovering the “myxobacter” example of simple bacteria performing some amazing feats when acting acting in unison, as an example of “emergence” of unpredictably “intelligent” phenomena from complex systems of simple units.

Well, here Johnnie Moore picks up a link to another example – cholera bacteria reaching a “quorum” before “deciding” to release toxins. Equally relevant to my agenda is Johnnie’s point in linking to the piece – the self-doubt of Bonnie Bassler, the scientist involved in the work.

Trail Of Tears

Updated my gallery with some photos taken at yesterday’s “Trail of Tears” motorcycle rally, (some 10,000 bikes, up to 200 per minute for almost an hour) which follows part of the route from Ross Landing (in Chattanooga, TN) to Waterloo (beyond Florence, AL), taken in 1838 by Cherokee Indians en route to being deported the other side of the Mississippi. It comemorates a particularly sad piece of history because for some three generations or more they had been living in relative harmony amongst the European settlers, trapping and trading, and even taking on homestead life-styles, before civil wars amongst those indian tribes rejecting the expansion of white-men into their lands, led to congress taking action.

The route to the Mississippi used the Tennessee River, except for the section through what is now Huntsville, beyond the shallows at Muscle Shoals, round which they were marched during time of drought, many to their deaths.

Attribution – The Fatal Flaw

Nice article linked by Johnnie Moore. A New Yorker article by James Surowiecki, via Rob May (Business Pundit) whose subscription newsletter I really must read more closely and often.

You can see my comment on Johhnie’s post, but this is another cause vs explanation confusion, where attributing cause looks like reason, but is really just culturally evolved short-hand for more contextual, complex (emergent) reality

Engineering at the Dawn of Time ?

Terry Bristol, Director of ISEPP (University of Oregon) introduced the concept of reality as Engineering into the Friends of Wisdom environment, which caught my imagination, because I’m an engineer and came to this space through engineering. (Notice, Linus Pauling and Bob Ulanowizc connections BTW.) And, having been inflicted by Pirsigian Metaphysics of Quality before noticing Dennett’s engineering view of evolution as nature’s problem solving ingenuity imagine my surprise when this turned up. [Hat tip to Anon for now, thanks by the way.]

Spookier still because I was just using Authur C Clarke / Stanley Kubrick’s 2010 fantasy to illustrate on MoQ-Discuss how the future of the cosmos really is in the hands of intelligent life – the intelligence behind the TMA replicates itself and turns Jupiter into a second star in our solar system.

And spookier still, because the first comment refers to Atlas Shrugged !?! Given recent threads on that subject.

The alternative to coincidence is paranoia, surely ?

Interesting also that Terry makes some interesting East v West comparisons of the engineering profession on Friends of Wisdom.

My god it’s full of engineers !