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:

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

[From Tim]

Here’s another batch of notes on three TED Talks (you can see all of them here). The Pinker one is particularly interesting, to me; I’m going to solicit comments from an email list I’m on.

Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence

Pinker lays out a story of humanity that I believe to be true, but has been challenged repeatedly by those I’m close to: A long history of dramatically-declining violence and a commensurate increase in our empathy towards the other. He describes this history at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and individual years, calling it a “fractal” decline. He also draws from thinkers over the last hundred years to lay out four explanations for why this decline has occurred:

1. Thomas Hobbes: Life in a state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The Hobbesian solution to this problem was the “leviathan state,” a central authority with a monopoly on violent power. The Machiavellian explanation here would give some credit to the rise of central governments for the
2. Life is Cheap: When suffering and early death are commonplace, the consequences of violence seem less dramatic to us. As wealth and quality of life increase, so does our value of that life, even if it is of the Other.
3. Robert Wright: Nonzero-sum games can often result in parties benefitting when they trade or cooperate rather than enter into violent conflict. Over time, the greater ability of parties to communicate has allowed more and more people to discover these nonzero-sum dynamics in more and more situations.
4. Peter Singer: The “expanding circle” of empathy. This, too, has been borne along by increasing wealth, access to communication technologies, and education.

There are holes that one can poke in this description of our history. Pinker’s narrative is very Euro-centric (what happened in China during these centuries? Africa?) It also completely ignores the incidence of sexual violence towards women; It’s hard to say if that how much that has declined over the ages, if it has.

Overall, though, I think Pinker is right. I’d be interested to see any data that contradicts the trend line that he can draw from hunter gatherer times to our own.

Bill Clinton: TED Prize wish: Let’s build and health care system in Rwanda

Clinton discusses the work of his foundation, and how it fits into the larger picture of social inequalities and development work. He stresses the importance of focusing on systems rather than taking on problems piecemeal. The Clinton foundation cut out middlemen in Haiti, cutting per-annum costs of anti-retrovirals from $3500 to $500, and then reduced it further to $190 by helping the pharmaceutical companies change their business models (from “jewelry store” to “grocery market.”) Mentions Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health; they are working with PIH to reproduce that system in Rwanda. In time, they want to develop a health administration system that can be adapted for any number of other countries. An interesting thought on “fund leakage”: On corruption in developing nations, Clinton mentions that he believes that lost opportunities due to health problems are a much greater problem, and they in fact feed corruption.

Juan Enriquez: Why can’t we grow new energy?

Playing on words, Enriquez extends the definition of “bioenergy” to include coal and oil, which of course were originally plant and animal matter, eons ago. He describes the possibility of using biological processes to convert underground oil and coal into gas, thus allowing us to extract the energy content without mining, and thus greatly increasing the reserves we have access too (3x, possibly.) He likens the possible growth of such an industry to the “green revolution” that allowed the productivity of agriculture to boom in the 20th century: think in terms of biology, not chemistry, in order to scale massively.

Of course, this is not a carbon-reduction technique (in fact, it sounds like a perilous way to keep dirty energy costs very low.) Enriquez proposes it only a “bridge” to new tech.

Another, separate idea: stabilizing oil prices by taxing to set a floor on oil prices, giving alternative fuels a floor to work with (and thus be able to invest against.)

As usual, you can see all of the TED talk notes, here.

I’ve been consuming TED talks at a fairly rapid pace for a year now, and they keep on coming. As I’ve been going along, I’ve been capturing brief notes on the ones that I’ve found interesting. Going forward, I’m going to post small batches here. This is mostly for my own reference, but maybe the internets will also find them useful.

Here are the first three (you can see all of them here):

Ron Eglash: African fractals, in buildings and braids

I rolled my eyes a couple times as he was introducing his topic, but as the talk went on, most of my skepticism was addressed, and then I was totally absorbed. He seems to have found many instances where fractal math was consciously used in African culture for very practical engineering and cultural purposes. He has also found that this conscious use of fractals is not present in other non-state societies. He finishes his talk by mentioning how these cultural uses can actually be used in the US to show African-American students that their heritage includes a rich mathematical history, as well.

Matthieu Ricard: Habits of happiness

A Quebecois molecular biologist-turned monk relates the basics of Buddhism, from a Westerner’s point of view. This talk is simple and straightforward, they way I like my explanations of Buddhism. There is a good balance here that represents my belief in mindfulness practice: part subjective experience, part science.

Amory Lovins: We must win the oil endgame

Author of the book Winning the Oil Endgame sees the path to an oil-import-free U.S. as a profitable, not a costly one. His ideas are comprehensive, including new materials for making cars lighter, “feebates” to change buying incentives per weight class of car (rather than between them), and an overall focus on efficiency. The latter one is interesting, as he makes those savings clear by pricing efficiency in terms of $/barrel of oil displaced. He is very glib with his free-market cheerleading, however, and explain very well why profit motives haven’t already pushed our industries to make these changes on their own. Some of his comments about the military wanting to defend America rather than oil pipelines in foreign countries are incredibly naive; it’s not our people on the ground who make policy, it’s the politicians who are financially bound to arms manufacturers.

Again, you can see all of the ted talk notes, here.

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:

I have plug-in hybrids on the brain. Traditional hybrid cars couple electric and gas-powered motors to generate propulsion for a car. They can recapture momentum during braking as electricity to charge a small set of batteries. Plug-ins, unlike current hybrids, have bigger batteries and can be charged off the electrical grid.

Ian Wright (founder of electric car-maker Wrightspeed and maker of the X1 prototype) was recently at Squid Labs doing a talk, discussing the potential for upcoming hybrid tech. Plug-ins with sufficient battery capacity could allow drivers to drive 100 miles or so on a charge, but also have a small gas-powered generator for longer drives. Typical commuters would basically be using an electric car, but with longer range for the occasional road trips.

Using electricity is certainly cheaper (half that of gas, even including the amortized cost of batteries), but aren’t we just shifting the pollution elsewhere? Mostly likely, not. Yesterday, the Terrapass blog wrote up a new report that estimates that plug-ins would significantly reduce carbon emissions, even if the U.S. continues to generate electricity using the dirty technologies (e.g. coal) that it currently uses.

The report mapped out nine different scenarios by varying both the market penetration of plug-ins and the carbon intensity of the U.S. electrical grid. In even the most pessimistic scenario, plug-ins result in significant emissions reductions. In the median (and presumably most likely) scenario, plug-ins shave about half a gigaton of carbon from annual U.S. emissions. To put this in perspective, this is about 10% of the reductions we need to stabilize the climate. Not bad.

The switch would also net reductions in pollutants across the board.

Where are the plug-in hybrids? I want one now.

Below are two posters up on the wall at my office, both extremely dense visualizations produced by Stanford’s Global Climate & Energy Project. I wanted find PDFs of these, but Google didn’t turn them up. So, I took pictures with my phone and posted them here. Better than nothing, though the second diagram (the more interesting one, IMHO) is almost illegible.

Click on each thumbnail to see the full image.

There are lots of good nuggets in this Wired article on getting business to internalize the costs of environmental damage. Here’s my favorite:

“Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.” - Oystein (Exxon’s former vice president for Norway and the North Sea)

Check out the article. All the sound bites you want on development in China and India, too.