Superlinear cities

Superlinear cities (Geoffrey West talk)
salt-bounces@list.longnow.org 
on behalf of Stewart Brand [sb@gbn.org]
Sent: Tuesday, July 26, 2011 1:56 PM

"It's hard to kill a city," West began, "but easy to kill a company."  The mean life of companies is 10 years.  Cities routinely survive even nuclear bombs.  And "cities are the crucible of civlization."  They are the major source of innovation and wealth creation.  Currently they are growing exponentially.  "Every week from now until 2050, one million new people are being added to our cities."


"We need," West said, "a grand unified theory of sustainability--- a coarse-grained quantitative, predictive theory of cities."


Such a theory already exists in biology, and you can build on that.  Working with macroecologist James Brown and others, West explored the fact that living systems such as individual organisms show a shocking consistency of scalability.  (The theory they elucidated has long been known in biology as Kleiber's Law.)  Animals, for example, range in size over ten orders of magnitude from a shrew to a blue whale.  If you plot their metabolic rate against their mass on a log-log graph, you get an absolutely straight line.  From mouse to human to elephant, each increase in size requires a proportional increase in energy to maintain it.


But the proportion is not linear.  Quadrupling in size does not require a quadrupling in energy use.  Only a tripling in energy use is needed.  It's sublinear; the ratio is 3/4 instead of 4/4.  Humans enjoy an economy of scale over mice, as elephants do over us.


With each increase in animal size there is a slowing of the pace of life.  A shrew's heart beats 1,000 times a minute, a human's 70 times, and an elephant heart beats only 28 times a minute.  The lifespans are proportional; shrew life is intense but brief, elephant life long and contemplative.  Each animal, independent of size, gets about a billion heartbeats per life.  (West added that human bodies run on 100 watts---2,000 calories of food a day.  But our civilizational energy use adds up 11,000 watts per person.  We're like blue whales walking around.)


Does such scalability apply to cities?  If you plot, say, the number of gas stations against the size of population of metropolitan areas on a log-log scale, it turns out you get another straight line.  Ditto with the length of electrical lines, carbon footprint, etc.  Per capita, big city dwellers use less energy than small town dwellers.  As with animals, there is greater efficiency with size, this time at a 9/10 ratio.  Energy use is sublinear.


But unlike animals, cities do not slow down as they get bigger.  They speed up with size!  The bigger the city, the faster people walk and the faster they innovate.  All the productivity-related numbers increase with size---wages, patents, colleges, crimes, AIDS cases---and their ratio is superlinear.  It's 1.15/1.  With each increase in size, cities get a value-added of 15 percent.  Agglomerating people, evidently, increases their efficiency and productivity.


Does that go on forever?  Cities create problems as they grow, but they create solutions to those problems even faster, so their growth and potential lifespan is in theory unbounded.


(West pointed out that there is a bit of variability between cities worth noticing.  On the plot of crimes/population, Tokyo has slightly fewer crimes for its size, and Osaka has slightly more.  In the U.S., the most patents per capita come from Corvalis, Oregon, and the least from Abiline, Texas.  Such variations tend to remain constant over decades, despite everyone's efforts to adjust them.  "Exciting cities stay exciting, and boring cities stay boring.")


Are corporations more like animals or more like cities?  They want to be like cities, with ever increasing productivity as they grow and potentially unbounded lifespans.  Unfortunately, West et al.'s research on 22,000 companies shows that as they increase in size from 100 to 1,000,000 employees, their net income and assets (and 23 other metrics) per person increase only at a 4/5 ratio.   Like animals and cities they do grow more efficient with size, but unlike cities, their innovation cannot keep pace as their systems gradually decay, requiring ever more costly repair until a fluctuation sinks them.  Like animals, companies are sublinear and doomed to die.


What is the actual mechanism of difference?  Research on that continues.  "Cities tolerate crazy people," West observed, "Companies don't."


                                --Stewart Brand

Iceland Considers Making Cigarettes Prescription-Only

I really wish we had the balls to do this. Of course,

who needs their HMO paying for some boneheads

smokes?

IcelandConsiders Making Cigarettes Prescription-Only

CA Legislature Passes Bill To Teach LGBT History In Schools

This will not come to OK any day soon.

CA Legislature Passes Bill To Teach LGBT History In Schools

Band Presses Vinyl Record On Chocolate

Chocolate and Music...

They might be on to something here.

Band Presses Vinyl Record On Chocolate

13 exotic elements we can't live without - tech - 20 June 2011 - New Scientist

You've probably never pondered that touch screen on your iphone made of transparent metal (iridium).
13 exotic elements we can't live without - tech - 20 June 2011 - New Scientist

And the past informs the present...

Why writers should have their own domains
Cory Doctorow at 9:00 AM Wed (BoingBoing.net)

Great, sage advice from John Scalzi about why a writer might want to pay to register a domain in the era of Facebook:

So, let's go back to 1998. You're a new writer and you want to establish a permanent residency online. Which would be wiser: Having your own site at your own domain, or putting up a site at GeoCities?
It's 2001, same drill: Which is wiser: Having your own domain, or creating a site on AOL servers?

2003: Your own domain, or a Friendster page?

2007: Your own domain, or a MySpace page?

(Hindsight is a useful thing.)

And now it's 2011 and the choice is one's own domain or a page on Facebook. Guess which I think you should do.

Read to Dylan's "Everybody must get stoned"

Animals in the wild will also voluntarily and repeatedly consume psychoactive plants and fungi. Birds, elephants, and monkeys have all been reported to enthusiastically seek out fruits and berries that have fallen to the ground and undergone natural fermentation to produce alcohol. In Gabon, which lies in the western equatorial region of Africa, boars, elephants, porcupines, and gorillas have all been reported to consume the intoxicating, hallucinogenic iboga plant (Tabernanthe iboga). There is even some evidence that young elephants learn to eat iboga from observing the actions of their elders in the social group. In the highlands of Ethiopia, goats cut the middleman out of the Starbucks business model by munching wild coffee berries and catching a caffeine buzz.

But do we really know whether these animals like the psychoactive effects of the drug, or are they just willing to put up with them as a side effect of consuming a valuable food source? After all, fermented fruit is a tasty and nutritious meal. While it's hard to dissociate these motivations in animals, many cases suggest that the psychoactive effect is the primary motivator for consumption. Often, only a tiny amount of plant or fungus is consumed, so while its nutritional effect is minuscule its psychoactive effect is large

Perhaps the most dramatic example of nonnutritive animal intoxication is found among domesticated reindeer. The Chuckchee people of Siberia, who are reindeer herders, consume the bright red hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria as a ritual sacrament. Their reindeer also indulge. Having discovered the mushrooms growing wild under the birch trees, they gobble them up and then stagger around in a disoriented state, twitching their heads repeatedly as they wander off from the rest of the herd for hours at a time.

Environmentalism's Bad Rap

From the Long Now List:
 
Kareiva began by recalling the environmental
"golden decade" of 1965-75, set in motion by 
the scientist Rachel Carson. In quick succession 
Congress created the Clean Air Act, the Clean 
Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act---
which passed the Senate unanimously.

Green influence has been dwindling ever 
since. A series of polls in the US asked how 
many agreed with the statement, "Most 
environmentalists are extremists, not 
reasonable people." In 1996, 32% agreed. 
In 2004, 43% agreed. Now it's over 50% who 
think environmentalists are unreasonable.

Kareiva noted that as the world is urbanizing, 
ever fewer people grow up in contact with nature
---current college freshman have less than a 
tenth of the childhood experience of nature as 
previous generations. And there's a demographic 
shift toward multiethnicity, with whites already a 
minority in California and soon to be a minority in 
the whole country. Asked to describe a typical 
environmentalist, current grade school students 
say it's a girl, white, with money, preachy about 
recycling, nice but uptight, not sought as a friend.

In general, environmentalist have earned the 
reputation of being "misanthropic, anti-technology, 
anti-growth, dogmatic, purist, zealous, exclusive 
pastoralists."

Kareiva gave several examples of how that reputation 
was earned. In Green rhetoric, everything in nature 
is described as "fragile!"---rivers, forests, the whole 
planet. It's manifestly untrue. America's eastern 
forest lost two of its most dominant species---the 
american chestnut and the passenger pigeon---and 
never faltered. Bikini Atoll was vaporized in an 
H-bomb test that boiled the ocean. When National 
Geographic sent a research team there recently, they 
found 25% more coral than was ever there before. The 
Deepwater Horizon oil disaster last year caused 
dramatically less harm to salt marshes and fisheries 
than expected, apparently because ocean bacteria ate 
most of the 5 million barrels of oil.

The problem with the fragility illusion is that it 
encourages a misplaced purism, leaving no room 
for compromise or negotiation, and it leads to "fortress 
conservation"---the idea that the only way to protect 
"fragile" ecosystems is to exclude all people. In Uganda, 
when a national park was established to protect 
biodiversity, 5,000 families were forced out of the 
area. After a change in government, those families 
returned in anger. To make sure they were never 
forced out again, they slaughtered all the local wildlife. 
In the 1980s, Kareiva was a witness in Seattle for 
protecting old growth forest (and spotted owls). At 
the courtroom loggers carried signs reading: "You 
care about owls more than my children." That jarred him.

When genetically engineered crops (GMOs) came 
along, environmentalists responded with "knee-jerk 
anti-technology religiosity," Kareiva said. How to 
feed the world was not a consideration. Lessening 
the overwhelming impact of agriculture on natural 
systems was not a consideration. Instead, the 
usual apocalyptic fears were deployed in the usual 
terms: EVERYTHING'S GOING TO BE DEAD 
TOMORROW! When Kareiva was working on protecting 
salmon, he saw the same kind of language employed 
in a 1999 New York Times full-page ad about dams 
in the Snake River: TIMELINE TO EXTINCTION! He 
knew it wasn't true. Salmon are a weedy species, and 
the re-engineered dams were letting the fish through.

The Nature Conservancy---where Kareiva is chief 
scientist working with the organization's 600 scientists, 
4,000 staff, and one million members in 37 countries---
promotes a realistic approach to conservation. Instead 
of demonizing corporations, they collaborate actively 
with them. They've decided to do the same with farmers, 
starting an agriculture initiative within the Conservancy. 
For the growing cities they emphasize the economic 
value of conservation in terms of valuable clean water 
and air. They started a program taking inner-city kids 
out to their field conservation projects not to play but 
to work on research and restoration. An astonishing 
30% of those kids go on to major in science.

Kareiva sees conservation in this century as a profoundly 
social, cooperative undertaking that has to include 
everyone. New social networking tools can be in the 
thick of it. For instance, people could use their smartphones
to photograph (and geotag, timestamp, and broadcast) the 
northernmost occurrence of bird species, and the aggregate 
data could be graphed in real time, showing the increasing 
effects of global warming on the natural world. When everyone 
makes science like that, everyone owns it. They've invested.

--Stewart Brand

Demystifying the Artists Statement

So that's what that means...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v8DbLWAXvU&feature=player_embedded

Zero Charisma—a movie about D&D players

Trailer for Zero Charisma - a movie about D&D players

The Story:

Scott Weidemeier spends his time in exactly three ways: working a menial job at a local donut shop, caring for his abusive grandmother, and running The Greatest Dungeons & Dragons Game of All Time. Though overbearing and short-tempered, Scott is a hero to his fellow players--that is, until neo-nerd hipster Miles Butler joins the game, fueling Scott's rampant insecurity and alienating him from his own players. Can Scott overcome his contempt for the mainstreaming of nerdery, or will this clash of the subcultures come to a head?

Why We're Doing It:

The video you can see above is a teaser trailer specifically made to launch our IndieGoGo campaign, that we think shows the rough story and feel of our vision. Though the topics of gaming and nerd culture are close to our hearts, our real passion for this story lies in the main character. Over the last year, we have taken great care to write someone who is neither your typical leading man, nor the archetypal nerd who exists only for laughs. And that's the challenge we are excited to take up: evoking a range of emotions from the audience--from revulsion to delight to fear to sympathy--for the most unlikely of characters.

http://boingboing.net/2011/05/12/trailer-for-zero-cha.html