In my semi-sentient state, I listened to all three episodes of this podcast that Kottke linked to yesterday. It's from a year ago, but as history, it's timeless.

I was a 13-year-old environmentalist. I read The Population Bomb, The Limits to Growth, Future Shock and a bunch of other books about how technology and pollution were threatening our planet. One I can't recall was about the supersonic transport and the risk it posed to the ozone layer.

What I wasn't aware of back then was the guy who developed system dynamics, Jay Forrester. He developed Whirlwind at MIT, invented "core" memory ( genuinely useful randomly addressable memory), and thought deeply about systems.

Perhaps not as genuinely brilliant as someone like Claude Shannon, but I think his contributions equal Shannon's. Or they would have, had we paid attention.

Anyway, a lot of really good, interesting history in that podcast series. Easy to listen to, well produced and very sad.

The one piece of Apple II software I kept when I divested five years ago was Micro Dynamo. You can find very little to read about Micro Dynamo on the web. But it's a version of Dynamo, the modeling system developed for the world simulations in The Limits to Growth. There have been many modeling and simulation platforms developed since then.

Chaos theory added another important dimension to systems thinking, and we now have at least some understanding of complex non-linear dynamic systems, but I think the idea remains foreign to the vast majority of people. It should be a literacy requirement in a technological civilization, but we're probably not going to have one for very much longer, so that problem will solve itself.

As professions go, lawyers seem to get the most disrespect.

Should be economists.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:08 Wednesday, 25 September 2024