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Dangerous Models on cod fish populations and the current financial crisis, via kottke.
for most of earth’s surface systems, whether biological or geological, the complex interaction of huge numbers of parameters make mathematical modeling on a scale of predictive accuracy that would be useful to fishers a virtual impossibility.
i’ve caught some flack for being cynical and pessimistic for believing this, that essentially all these predictions we make for the future are just educated crapshoots and will often turn out to be wrong, most notably on our economy and the environment.
i think it’s gone so far as to make friends think i’m a global climate change naysayer, but that’s not what i think at all; i don’t doubt that global climate change is occurring and that it will have some crazy effects on the world, i just doubt that we can accurately predict what will happen as a result. i mean, we can’t even figure out a unified theory of physics, or even how many codfish there are in the world, how can we accurately predict what the earth will look like when the temperature is increasing, iceburgs are melting, cows are farting, polar bears are swimming, the polarity of the earth is weakening, and we’re hurtling through space at millions of miles per hour amongst many other things hurtling through space?
anyways, this also kinda relates to the argument i had with jancy over the cyclical nature of the economy and whether or not we would know if we had entered economic collapse. with the environment, scientists will very willingly report that we have entered a death spiral because awareness of the increasing problem is essentially a call to action to try and counteract it. with our economy, however, the logic is kind of reversed because reporting on some kind of economic death spiral could cause massive amounts of panic which would in turn cause the death spiral itself. i dunno. i don’t want to be alarmist, and i ain’t no mathematician, but the math of our current prosperity just doesn’t jive with me.
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i am a well-documented worrier, and there is no better time to worry during election season during which you are the object of a constitutional ban.
there was a segment on good food last week about stress hormones like cortisol and how the affect they have on your body. i think the lady was saying that these stress hormones build up in your blood and can actually damage your organs or something. i don’t know, she was probably over-simplifying the concept for us lay folk. her main point was that for animals in the wild, the release of these hormones into the blood is normally followed by some kind of fight-or-flight response, (mauling, sprinting across the veldt, vigorously digging a hole, etc.) whereas humans are often faced with situations in which we cannot utilize the release of stress related hormones in the same way, unless you want to get fired from your job for jumping across the table and punching your boss in the teeth or something.
my point, and the idea that ties that first sentence and the following paragraph together, is that, as a well-documented worrier, hypochondriac AND modern jackass, the convergence between these two events (election, radio segment about stress) has convinced me that i can feel cortisol coursing through my veins at this very moment.
last night our second no on 8 sign got ripped down and that was like, it for me. i felt totally red hot all night and could not be bothered to lift myself off the couch. i was like, completely drunk on stress and rage. even now, i’m finding it pretty impossible to focus. most of the time it’s extremely easy to ignore the way that the world is but at the moment i’m having a hard time digging a hole deep enough.
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dreads the day when eating right meals are no longer 2 bucks a piece at vons.
i was vehemently opposed to david archuleta throughout this last season of american idol, mostly because he might be a good singer, but he has a weird mucous-y sounding voice. i dunno, blame the vocal paralysis or something. maybe puberty too. regardless i don’t really like the garbly/phlegmy tone of his voice and i wasn’t too keen on his first single “crush” either. but you know, speed it up a little and give the beat a little oomph, and i suddenly can’t stop listening to it:
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