I love how Robb generalizes phenomena, creating useful frameworks that find application in many disparate domains (e.g. economics, politics, warfare, sociology, etc.) His latest is the concept of a “dissipative system,” a system that draws energy from its surroundings to resist entropic forces:

This upshot of this is that it can extract energy from this larger external environment to increase its structural complexity (build itself up through a process called self-assembly). It can also use this external environment to dump the entropy created during the energy conversion process to minimize the deleterious impact on its structure.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking (obsessing a bit, perhaps) about how complexity emerges in various forms (at different physical scales, on different substrates), and how our own individual experiences of consciousness fit into those ideas. Robb’s “dissipative structures” is a useful tool for generalizing the underlying constraint that shapes selection functions for natural selection at every level.

For example, in a later post, Robb begins re-framing economic and conventional warfare in terms of dissipative systems in conflict:

NOTES: Isolate your opponent from the external environment to prevent energy acquisition and trap entropy (force them towards thermodynamic equilibrium and “heat death”). Increase your own connectivity to acquire energy and expel entropy faster (movement farther away from thermodynamic equilibrium and greater structural complexity).

I had this to add, in a comment on that post:

The function that translates energy into complexity is far from constant. It is highly dependent on technology, for example (compare joules required to power the Pony Express vs. fiber optic communcation, per byte.) You might call this “efficiency,” but my suspicion is that the translation function is much more complicated than that.

In any case, struggling over energy sources is necessary tactic for dissipative system, but a system may prevail with lower energy sources if its energy-to-complexity function outperforms.

And by RIP, I mean “rot in historical ignominy.” It turns out that consumer demand for fuel is more elastic than we all feared. With gas prices going through the roof, people are finally starting to buy more reasonable cars.

GM saw a 28% drop in light-vehicle sales in May. Ford’s sales fell 16%. The Ford F-150, the most popular vehicle in the United States almost every year for the past three decades, was knocked off its perch by both the Toyota Camry and Toyota Corolla.

Hummer sales fell by 60%!

GM has announced the closure of its Janesville assembly plant, and the discontinuation of the plus-sized Tahoe, Suburban and Yukon lines as early as 2009. No word on the Hummer, but the buzzards are circling. GM will add additional shifts to plants that produce more fuel-efficient cars, and the company hopes to have the electric Chevy Volt in showrooms by 2010.

As a side note, the H2 hummer was not only an obnoxious and wasteful “fuck you” to everyone whose visual field it polluted, it was also a shitty car, engineering-wise:

A couple items from my Flickr feed. The first is a photo of a landfills taped to all the trash cans at work. The second is my long-lost license got returned to me when someone simply dropped it, loose, into a mailbox.

I wonder if there’s a better way to integrate blog-like images into my actual blog…

Landfill Portal,
originally uploaded by Nargopolis.

License Reappears,
originally uploaded by Nargopolis.

This one is beautiful. The entire plane is being deconstructed and reassembled into multiple structures. Here’s the main page, and the page for the main residence. Some photos and renderings, below.

I have some previous posts on this topic in the related links, below…

The old record of 29.4% was set in 1984. The new one is 31.25%.

[From Tim]

Tata unveils its new, sub-$1000 car for the domestic market. It gets 50mpg, due to its tiny 33hp motor, but there will be a projected 10 million cars similar to this sold over the next five years in India, as incomes rise.

Most people on this planet are getting richer, which is great. At least for those people, and for now. We’ll see how it goes in the long run…

Photo from a BusinessWeek article about the Nano.

Forget retired train cars. I’m becoming more and more enamored with airliner fuselages, designed to take even more stress than a shipping container, and extremely light. The Superuse Blog notes:

To have a chunk of 747 or even a complete one, should become more easier since there might be a surplus of 747-200s heading for the market any day soon. Aiationweek: ‘Mass retirement is looming for the world’s fleet of aging freighters, especially Boeing 747-200s. Boeing says that 40% of the 320 747 freighters in service are at least 25 years old but keep flying because strong demand for new passenger jets and delays in delivery of Airbus A380s have suppressed the supply of replacement airplanes. James Edgar, a cargo specialist with Boeing, says the old 747s “will be retired in droves” in the next few years as airframe production catches up with global traffic demand and passenger transports such as 747-400s are released for conversion to freighters.’ Prices for a complete stripped out 747, are about $ 100.000, this means 360m2 of interior floor space and this is just the passenger deck. Here is a line up of 747s waiting to get scrapped.

Here’s another guy who had the same idea:

This Boeing 727-200 is a work-in-progress home conversion, undertaken by Bruce Campbell from rural Hillsboro, Oregon. For $ 100.000 the plane was obtained by the electrical engineer and the estimated costs to make it a house are another $ 100.000. The aircraft provides 1,066 square feet (100 m2) of living space and near-total resistance to the elements. The house gives him ‘A feeling of strength, security, capability and ergonomics that eclipses any other, almost as if you were in a home designed 50 years in the future. Imagine removing all the clutter, such as the seats, the overhead compartments… What’s left is an open, ultra high tech home. Besides,’ he says, ‘it’s a great toy.’ On his labyrinthic website there is a million of pictures of the work-in-progress, both exterior and interior of jet-house and a cool possibility to build a house out of wide-body 747 jet. He maintains that ‘anybody can do it, given desire, luck (acquiring decommissioned plane) and determination.’

Amy posted on her blog about the difficulty of buying responsibly. In her post, she links to an SF Chronicle article that traces the myriad social and environmental costs of real versus fake Christmas trees. Amy notes:

the article more or less concludes that the number of variables to consider when determining whether to buy a product or which product to choose over another in terms of sustainability are completely overwhelming, but even though sometimes it feels like the more informed you are the harder it is to make the decision, there is always a better choice and we should just do our best.

For sure, it’s really difficult as a consumer to make informed purchasing decisions. However, the armchair economist in me believes that good regulation would simply make these social costs a part of the prices of things (i.e. government forcing the internalization of externalities.)

For example, things like toxicity and fire safety are hard factors for a consumer to consider, but good tort laws can push those hard-to-evaluate costs to the manufacturer. If anyone can sue a christmas tree maker/seller when a highly flammable plastic tree burns down a home , those companies will have to decide how to make their products safer and how much more to charge in order to cover legal costs. Instead of every consumer trying to navigate a whole mess of social implications, the legal system just raises the prices of the trees to reflect their true cost.

Carbon footprints are even easier: Carbon tax! If you tax carbon at the source (right where the coal is mined, right where the oil is extracted) then the extra cost is distributed throughout the web of consumption exactly as those costs move through the economy. Every carbon emission going into a tree (transport, petroleum-based plastic, disposal, etc.) is accurately reflected in the increased cost of the tree.

Of course, by “easy” I mean that these things are conceptually easy, not politically. The solutions are clear as long as one is dealing with a populace that believe that the environment and health are worth preserving, even if there is potential drag on our economy. And as obvious as that seems to me and most people that I know, there’s not consensus on that issue, nation-wide.

So, what to do in the meantime? Well, we should muddle through as the author of that SF Chronicle writer does. I just object to the exasperated tone of the piece. It conveys the sense that do-gooder consumers are engaged in a futile exercise, which they’re not. We can make better purchasing decisions, learning about where our products come from is a good in of itself, and raising awareness can lead to the systematic, political changes that will cause all economic players to do the right thing.

This is cool: Walk-Score looks up common businesses nearby, finds out how far you’d need to walk to get to them, and compiles a “walk score” to tell you how walkable your neighborhood is. Genius use of the Google Maps APIs!

Here’s an example of an intersection near where I live:

eekdog2005: CO2 is a pollutant in bizarro world.
granjuas: Put a plastic bag in your head and find out.

Doesn’t make scientific sense, but funny nonetheless.