moving past success

Have you noticed that apparently-successful folks sometimes miss the fact that operating-procedures need to evolve?

This is a natural handicap, and one whose potentially-disastrous effects we're working to help eliminate via refinement of the concept-sets that folks use.

For more on this subject, stay tuned...

conserving value

The values of money, community, reputation and culture are all measures of subsystem-correlation. These things are not automatically conserved like, for example, momentum is in the physical sciences.

For example money is often thought of as an analog to total-energy, whose numeric value (like that of momentum) remains the same as it is passed from one form to another. Of course money is really an analog for available-work (what the energy crisis is about), whose value is in fact expected to decrease over time in the absence of new ordered-energy and/or information.

More importantly, uninformed action is likely to erode the usefulness (independent of its numeric quantity) of money, available work, as well as the other measures of subsystem correlation listed above. Hence humility has to accompany hard work if we, as fragile beings in a seriously unfriendly universe, are to make the most of the resources available to us.

feeling vs. logic

The organism-focused world of behavioral ecology perhaps long ago pointed out the behavior modes common to many animals as "four F's", namely feeding, fleeing, fighting, and having sex. More recent work in neuroscience suggests that our behavior is indeed governed by such modules, elicited via a kind of (hopefully) just-in-time spreading-activation (JITSA) by ongoings in the world around. With respect to these activations even today our conscious "press secretary" is at best an observer/advisor, and is sometimes even kept in the dark.

Rapid-response capabilities generally rely on instinctive-reactions (sometimes refined by training and practice in contemporary settings) of neolithic or earlier origin, like the four F's mentioned earlier. Long-term response strategies tend to have more contemporary (and "cerebral") origins. This tension between feeling and logic is a familiar theme in popular culture.

In this context, how about a less "organism-centric" framework in which we consider that natural selection may be operating on all behavior-modules that look in and/or out from one of the three symmetry-defined layer-boundaries (i.e. skin, family & culture) in metazoan communities. Hence there may be (and have been) reasons for the emergence of both short & long term modules for taking care of self, friends, family, community, culture and profession.

The four F's mentioned above are among those behaviors that serve self, friends & family, but of course this task-layer formalism leaves room for stuff that is not included in that original four. The behavior modules which serve culture and profession may be of special importance in human communities.

evolving narratives

Weak, confusing or ill-posed choices/statements/questions, with ways to move past them, might include...

• Drop "Choose one: mano-a-mano OR state-paid healthcare." for "Nurture responsible health-management for & by all citizens.",
• Trade "Organisms do/don't evolve?" (since replicable-codes do that instead) up to "How do code-organism systems change over time?",
• Replace "Either un-tax the rich, or give money to nuts." with "Spend group-funds on well-defined social-goals with checks/balances.",
• Change "Mass increases with speed." into "Proper (not coordinate) time/speed/acceleration underlie dynamics when v ~ c.",
• Substitute "Choose one: support abortion OR prevent birth control." with "Help avoid unwanted pregnancies and abortions.", 
• Exchange "entropy increases" for "correlations decrease" over time, with sub-systems from which you are isolated.
• ...and what else?

Once folks agree on a set of objectives, and are mature enough to put aside gratuitous-cartoonification of one other, different ideas about tactics and strategy for meeting those objectives can be addressed by testing and observation over time.

social heartbeat

Is the pulse of a social organization related to how much time members get to spend taking care of self, friends, family, community, culture & profession?

If so how might we track this for neighborhoods, businesses, and social networks in general e.g. to see how it is impacted by unfolding challenges, and the strategies used to address them?

4 cups of anything?

At an average of say 17,280 normal breaths per day, about how many exhalations are needed to recycle the carbon-weight gained from each tablespoon of food? Stuff we eat (like meat, veggies & yogurt) has about the density of water, so a tablespoon of food has about 15 grams mass. If most of that mass (say 85% neglecting roughage) is carbon with between 4.5 to 9 kcal of energy per gram that is (eventually) turned into CO2, then we're talking about ~0.85×15/0.048 ≈ 265 normal breaths of exhalation per tablespoon of food.

Does this mean that about 17,280/265 ≈ 65 tablespoons (~ 4 cups or 2 lbs) of food provides all the carbon that you exhale with normal-activity in a day? More food than that, and you either need extra activity or you add carbon weight that will have to await exhalation some other day. Less than your limit, and you may find yourself losing carbon weight or taking steps to conserve energy instead. More (or less) than 4 cups a day might then add (or subtract) as desired. If nothing else, carbon-tracking might help put good-old available-work (i.e. Calorie) tracking into more concrete weight-for-weight terms...

learning to exhale

Since the only way to lose carbon weight after it's metabolized may be to send it out from your lungs as carbon dioxide, one might recast the problem of weight-balance in the simple maxim: Eat what you plan to breathe out, no less no more!

The various energies widget below might help one get calibrated on how much intake is needed for a given amount of exhalation.  For instance, if you plan to do fifty pushups then you probably should consume the 5 Calorie equivalent of a single m&m (plain not peanut).  Likewise what would be needed for 5000 steps of walking, or a quarter-mile run?

Getting in the habit of planning each day's respiration, and then ingesting the carbon-based energy needed to support that activity whether we are hungry or not, might thus be good habit to get into...