Misunderstanding dynamical systems

By -
I once argued with a woman online — can you imagine? Me, arguing online! — Who claimed that global warming couldn’t possibly be due to human activity, because of the small amount of CO2 our activities release compared to the total in the atmosphere. 

So I slipped her 500 µg of LSD, and said “Let’s see what small amounts of a chemical can really do!”

Ha ha! It was online, so I could not do that.

But imagine if she had never encountered ice but only water between 100°F and 32.5°F. I’m sure if I tried to explain to her that the next drop of 1° would make a huge difference, she would scoff, and say “No, the water is just going to get a little more dense and a little more sluggish.”

Dynamical systems experience phase transitions, where a small move past some point throws the system into a whole new form of behavior. 

Comments

  1. BZ4:01 PM

    Don't you mean between 212 °F and 32.5 °F?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah7:27 PM

      No. I meant what I said. I could have said 212, but it would make zero difference to the example.

      Delete
    2. BZ10:32 PM

      So you finally figured out the comment problem on your blog.

      Delete
    3. gcallah12:14 AM

      Nah, I didn't figure out anything! It just worked!

      Delete
  2. BZ4:02 PM

    Also, the search function on your blog is now broken.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more