> Here's my theory: We perceive economic activity as coming in waves, cycles,
> uptrends and downtrends. It is, of course, actually a colleciton of
> particles, not waves--overstock hgere, layoffs there, bites and bytes of
> eventoids.
> But the cycles will also be shallow and short.
First we have an argument against cycles, and then a
phrase which seems to resurrect them. Perhaps there
is no difference between the cycles and the events:
both are figments of our hyperactive pattern match
systems. Economic activity, like a flag in the wind,
is subject to noise, and we see cycles in flapping
and events in snapping, but there's not much going
on underneath beyond a whole mess of timescales and
some innovation processes.
-Dave
:: :: ::
When I first read Jaynes' bicameral mind book, I
found it an intruiging nutty idea. There's a nice
related effective decision-making method: if given
a set of possible actions, take the obvious one,
unless there is no obvious one, in which case let
the gods decide by giving a sign. Assuming one is
listening to the right gods, they are likely to be
helpfully both decisive and decoherent.
:: :: ::
It looks like there are a bunch of new windmills
up along the 10. Wind power is more interesting
than it appears because the energy available goes
as the cube of the wind speed. For pumping water,
this is OK. For generating electricity, it isn't,
as the difference in wind speeds between "enough
to run the generators" and "enough to damage the
mechanism" isn't that large. Windfarms need to
be places where the wind blows both heavily and
consistently; it is easy to imagine they are not
the most desirable of living locations.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:19:04 PDT