When you are pulling a trailer with your car and it starts to veer to left then right then left, you may think the problem is your vehicle's direction (which you keep correcting) rather than the frequency of your response (which is pumping energy into a resonant oscillation).
I've seen vehicle drivers who made this mistake spin out sideways across 5 lanes of interstate highway traffic.
Likewise modern electronic media's ability to spread ideas across the world willy-nilly may confuse us into thinking that a problem is being caused by people, when in fact it's being caused by a poor choice of ideas (unwittingly reinforced by our echoing of them in response).
Multi-celled plants and animals long ago learned to express their molecular codes in ways that are informed to multiple levels of organization. This is key, for example, to the magic of embryonic development.
If communities are going to get a grip on the problem of runaway ideas, they'll have to do the same with their idea codes.
The good news: Scientific study of complex systems is pointing the way to strategies for dealing with this problem, about which more in days ahead...
Ideas are only a pale shadow of the world around, but it's fun nonetheless to look for ideas that reflect reality as simply as possible. What can do this better than a reflective sphere?
various energies
We encounter energy in many applications with different units. The quantities in the first units menu of this widget provide clues to how they relate. Are the first menu list entries all in order of increasing energy? Which entry corresponds to the thermal noise in an unpowered RC loop? What quantities would you add to the list?
one-gee constant proper-acceleration
Plot proper (traveler) and map times elapsed, as well as proper and coordinate speeds, as a function of map distance traveled for one acceleration-leg of a constant proper acceleration round trip.
historical and natural units for information
Note: Changes in Wolfram's widget-engine after the fact began obfuscating the simple log-relationship (s=k ln[W]) between bits, nats, & bans as well as J/K, with the result that the two widgets below were not working reliably. The problem may now have been fixed.
This first information units widget was inspired by the Information Storage Unit Converter widget, and allows conversion from a wide variety of information units including historical thermodynamic units like J/K.
bits of reciprocal temperature
The widget below calculates the coldness of the environment relative to the human basal value in natural units (about 175 ZB/Cal absolute) given the temperature in historical units (degrees Fahrenheit). This quantity relates to the information value of available work, as well as to the thermodynamic value of a cool place to dump excess heat. Just as the Fahrenheit scale was designed to go negative at the bottom range comfortable for human habitation, so this coldness scale goes negative near the top of that range.
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