I think that it is important to keep in mind that we have two choices for becoming ecologically sustainable: we can directly engineer our societies and economies to be in harmony with nature, or we can allow for collapse of one or more of the triad of economy, environment, and equity. A destabilized economy is, in the end, the most ecologically sustainable — unless we can design an economy that is different.

My worry here is pretty simple: with the ‘practical’ approach of adapting to inevitable climate change is beginning to gain traction across the United States, the end of near-term denial will fail to pull along our long-term denial. As people begin to contemplate triage responses to climate change, they may delude themselves into thinking that we can ‘adapt’ our way out of the larger, unstoppable long-term consequences of ‘business as usual’.

These are pretty clever. I have not walked my way through them yet, but they use arrows to show the relative gradient of payoff for each player, and a little blue circle to represent Nash equilibrium (if any) for the game.

What I have not yet figured out with these is whether or not they can be used to teach the Nash equilibrium for each game… can you use the direction of the arrows to better understand why a Nash equilibrium exists and, if so, why it exists?

The bit about “hyperbolic geometry” is very interesting, but I wonder what its biological significance is. Why do organisms develop in this manner? Is the act of crocheting these analogous to the developmental process of organisms with hyperbolic geometry? Are the “crochet mutations” analogous to genetic mutations that affect development?

The physical nature of this work suggests that not all forms can be represented by mathematics: that some objects must be directly modeled. Computational biology anyone?

Missing from this article is a more comprehensive discussion of the risks posed by concentrated animal feed operations.

To me this finding indicates that Australopithecus sediba is unlikely to be an ancestor of modern humans.

There’s also a seminar series going on this winter:

Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics ”Cooperation and the Evolution of Multicellularity”

It is fascinating how many physicists are tackling theoretical questions related to cooperation these days!

I am reading the new-ish Railsback and Grimm book Agent-Based and Individual-Based Modeling: A Practical Introduction, and this book is finally compelling me to learn NetLogo. I am pretty excited about its potential for teaching and curious about whether I can use it for research.

It is wonderful that this policy is yielding results, but a bit scary how slowly recovery takes. Obviously climate change is a very different problem, but seeing how this “success story” has come with such time lags really makes me scared of how long we will need to wait for recovery even if we enact real climate change policy.