Sergey Buldyrev

A study from Sergey Buldyrev and colleagues was published in Nature the day before Eyjafjallajökull’s eruption. The researchers investigated catastrophic failures in complex networked systems—systems like the closely coupled infrastructures underlying modern transportation, electricity distribution, telecommunications, and financial transactions. These systems are constructed from many interdependent nodes, which gives them greater stability and resilience: If one node fails, material, money, energy, or people are routed through other nodes, and functionality is maintained. But past a certain critical threshold of node failures, the system fragments and cannot function.

Buldyrev’s team modeled how disruptions percolate through a tightly linked pair of idealized interdependent networks, and found a counter-intuitive result: The failure of even a small number of nodes in one network can cause additional failures in the second. These failures can then feed back into the first network and cause yet more node failures. In other words, the greatest strength of an interdependent network in isolation is also the greatest weakness of interdependent networks as a whole. Two closely linked, highly resilient systems can suffer catastrophic failure through initially small disruptions that would have been essentially harmless to either network individually. What’s true for two linked networks presumably holds for larger assemblages.

A better message for Earth Day would be more frightening, and closer to the truth: save the humans. The planet will endure our collective ravages and the biosphere will eventually rebound. The world has certainly changed over the past forty years, but we have changed even more. As the products of countless interdependent complex systems, we seem to somehow harbor their flaws. Now, we’re making them manifest, eliminating the interstices that used to protect and insulate the thin veneer of life that glosses this planet. Our greatest strength has become our greatest weakness; we are complex, but fragile. Our systems are connecting, with each node at our fingertips. Alas, if only their failures could teach us to fly.

“Conciseness in art is essential and a refinement. The concise man makes one think; the verbose bores. Always work towards conciseness.” – Édouard Manet

Good to Great by Jim Collins

“The enemy of great is good.”

Magnifying the Quantum World by Dave Munger

In the 1870s, when Max Planck was still a young German university student, his professor Philipp von Jolly discouraged him from continuing to pursue physics, reportedly saying that nothing was left to discover in the field except for a few minor details.

Undaunted, Planck became a professor of physics at the University of Berlin, and by 1900 had developed a theory that would turn physics upside-down: Electromagnetic energy could only be emitted in discrete packets, or “quanta.” The field of quantum mechanics was born, and its ramifications continue to echo through physics today. Indeed, modern quantum researchers aren’t just filling in minor details; they’re still adding in leaps and bounds to our knowledge of how the world fundamentally works.

Planck’s breakthrough came out of his studies of “black bodies,” idealized objects that perfectly absorb and then re-emit electromagnetic radiation. In reality, nothing can absorb light so perfectly, but many real-world objects, like a hunk of iron, absorb and emit electromagnetic radiation similarly to a black body. As an iron ingot is heated, it begins to emit electromagnetic radiation, energy that travels on a spectrum of frequencies. When it’s quite hot, the ingot turns red—and as its temperature rises further, the ingot will progressively turn orange, then yellow, then white. These are only the frequencies we can see—the ingot, of course, is emitting invisible electromagnetic radiation too, in frequencies like infrared. Planck studied this “black-body spectrum,” and precisely measured how changing temperature affected the radiation a black body emitted. In his work, he came to realize that the emitted radiation didn’t smoothly increase with temperature, but in fact changed in sudden steps. Planck never quite understood the implications of his discovery, but Einstein and other physicists soon began to see its reach. Their conclusion: Everything in the universe—energy, light, particles, and all the macroscopic objects they form and influence—is somehow quantized, and subject to strange probabilistic behavior that defies classical explanations. In the quantum world, objects can be in multiple places at the same time, can simultaneously harbor mutually exclusive states, and can pop in and out of existence spontaneously. Even Richard Feynman, the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist who arguably had a better grasp of quantum mechanics than anyone else in the 20th century, quipped that no one really understood it.

On Closing the Culture Gap

by Paul Ehrlich

Many are aware that climate disruption may cause horrendous problems, but few seem to realize that this peril is not the only potentially catastrophic one and may not even be the most serious threat we face. Humanity finds itself in a desperate situation, but you’d never know it from listening to the media and the politicians. Loss of the biodiversity that runs human life-support systems, toxification of the planet, the risk of pandemics that increase in lockstep with population growth, and the possibility of nuclear resource wars all could be more lethal. We are finally, however, starting to understand the patterns of culture change and the role of natural selection in shaping them. And since everything from weapons of mass destruction to global heating is the result of changes in human culture over time, acquiring a fundamental understanding of cultural evolution just might be the key to saving civilization from itself.

The change will begin with clearing up the misapprehensions; even climate disruption, for instance, is widely misunderstood. Sea-level rise, displacing tens of millions of people, may be the least of it. Changing patterns of precipitation, which likely will be continuous over the next millennium, will make vast problems for agriculture. So will the melting of mountain snows and glaciers that are so critical to the flows of water upon which food production depends. Furthermore, the temperature sensitivity of crops and impairment of natural pest controls will make maintaining crop yields in many areas ever more difficult. Melting of the Himalayan “water tower” (the ice and snow on those mountains and on the Tibetan plateau), combined with reduced productivity of wheat and rice, now imperils the nutrition of some 1.6 billion nuclear-armed people in south Asia. Worldwide, we face the possibility of today’s billion hungry people becoming several billion starving to death.

To help avert such an outcome, humanity must revise civilization’s water-handling infrastructure for maximum flexibility. And that could be a minor chore compared with the necessary restructuring of the world’s energy economy in the next few decades, or addressing the racism, sexism, and economic inequity that make environmental problems so difficult to solve in the first place.

Educated people generally realize that humanity’s negative impacts on our life-support systems are tightly tied to population size; for instance, the more people, the more greenhouse gases are added to the atmosphere. But few realize that the 2.5 billion people projected to be added to the human population by midcentury will have a much greater destructive impact than the last 2.5 billion. People are smart and therefore naturally use the most concentrated, highest-grade resources first. So each additional person must be fed from more marginal land, equipped with objects made of metal won from poorer ores, supplied with water from more distant sources or expensively purified, and so on. Similarly, while politicians and many economists believe that increasing consumption is the cure for all economic ailments, it is only because they do not understand that the human economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of nature’s economy. They have not yet learned that it is the aggregate consumption of Homo sapiens that is destroying our natural capital. They are unwitting victims of the culture gap.

For most of our species’ existence, all members of hunter-gatherer bands possessed virtually the entire body of their group’s non-genetic information—its culture. But since the agricultural revolution, and especially in the past century or two, that situation has changed completely. No living person knows even a billionth of the cultural information possessed by humanity. No reader of Seed could assemble a 747 from its parts, let alone tell how each part was manufactured, where, and from what. Of course, there’s no way to close that enormous culture gap now. But critical parts of it could be filled in, so that most people would know, for example, what an ecosystem service is, the difference between ozone depletion and climate disruption, the biological significance of skin pigmentation, and the importance of the second law of thermodynamics.

Scientists today believe that such critical information must be disseminated and quickly acted upon to avoid catastrophe. But that is not happening, as indicated by the “much talk, little action” status of climate change. The central need is clearly not for more natural science research (although in many areas it would be very helpful). Rather, the social sciences and humanities need to be reorganized and refocused—“rebooted”—to provide better understanding of human behaviors and how they can be altered. Our civilization must move toward the formation of a sustainable, empathic, global family. Its members must be able to cooperate intensively to deal with global problems before it is too late.

That’s why a group of natural scientists, social scientists, and scholars from the humanities decided to inaugurate a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB, pronounced “mob”). It was so named to emphasize that it is human behavior, toward one another and toward the ecosystems that sustain us all, that requires both better understanding and rapid modification. The idea is that the MAHB might become a basic mechanism to expose society to the full range of population-environment-resource-ethics-power issues, and sponsor research on how to turn that knowledge into the required actions. Perhaps most important, the MAHB would stimulate a broad global discussion involving the greatest possible diversity of people, about what people desire, the ethics of those desires, and which are possible to meet in a sustainable society. It would, I hope, serve as a major tool for altering the course of cultural evolution.

The MAHB would differ from other global efforts such as the IPCC and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in that public input and outreach would play a much more dominant role. Local MAHB discussion groups are already forming, and I hope that the MAHB will kick off with a world megaconference around 2012 on the scale of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development that was held in Rio de Janeiro two decades earlier. The purpose of the MAHB conference would be to initiate a continuing global discussion, creating the MAHB as a new, semipermanent institution. The whole MAHB program is now at a preliminary stage, and the need for input from those accustomed to working in the social sciences and humanities, in the media, in the business community, in NGOs, as well as the general public, is obvious.

The really big MAHB issue is how to ethically reorganize global civilization and consciously reshape its norms so that humanity can transition to a sustainable and fair society. Finding convergence will be challenging: There are few ethical universals, and it is highly unlikely that many will be agreed upon soon, although most ethical systems do converge on some basic elements (for instance, murder and cheating are wrong).

We clearly need an international discussion of such contentious topics as the degree to which wealth should be redistributed from rich to poor, what people owe to future generations, or the kind of population-control programs that are ethically justified. Such discussions should involve not just “leaders” but as many diverse publics as possible. Humanity’s future hangs on finding broad agreement on such major eco-ethical decisions. One role of the MAHB would be to facilitate discussion and debate of those usually ignored topics. The MAHB could also serve as a rallying point for myriad organizations now fighting for environmental quality and social justice. The discourse would emphasize that our brilliant, dominant species has undermined its own life-support systems. It now faces a daunting array of self-generated threats, ones that the human family could cooperatively organize to fight and, with luck, overcome by avoiding the first collapse of a global civilization.

Paul R. Ehrlich is Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University and president of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology.

Dr. Ehrlich hopes that MAHB can become the focus of badly needed new, coordinated efforts by social scientists, scholars in the humanities, members of the business community, and the media alike. If you are willing to get involved, go to the MAHB website.

James Sturm: The reasons are unimportant

James Sturm is a cartoonist and co-founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. He is the author of the best-selling and award-winning graphic novel The Golem's Mighty Swing, chosen as the Best Graphic Novel of 2000 by magazine. In 2007, his trilogy of historical graphic novels was collected in a volume entitled Sturm's America: God, Gold, and Golems.

I like the question "Why Do You Make Art?" because it assumes what I do is art. A flattering assumption. The question also takes me back to my freshman year of college, where such questions like "What is nature?" and "Is reality a wave or a circle?" were earnestly debated (usually late at night and after smoking too much weed).

Twenty-five years later I'd like to think I am a little more clear-headed regarding this question. Perhaps the only insight I've gained is the knowledge that I have no idea and, secondly, the reasons are unimportant. Depending on my mood, on any given day, I could attribute making art to a high-minded impulse to connect with others or to understand the world or a narcissistic coping mechanism or a desire to be famous or therapy or as my religious discipline or to provide a sense of control or a desire to surrender control, etc., etc., etc. Whatever the reason, an inner compulsion exists and I continue to honor this internal imperative. If I didn't, I would feel really horrible. I would be a broken man. So whether attempting to make art is noble or selfish, the fact remains that I will do it nevertheless. Anything past this statement is speculation. I would be afraid that by proclaiming why I make art would be generating my own propaganda.

Poetry

Abecedarian
"Abecedarian poems are now most commonly used as mnemonic devices and word games for children, such as those written by Dr. Seuss and Edward Gorey."

Anaphora
"As one of the world’s oldest poetic techniques, anaphora is used in much of the world’s religious and devotional poetry, including numerous Biblical Psalms."

Ballad
"Their subject matter dealt with religious themes, love, tragedy, domestic crimes, and sometimes even political propaganda."

Ballade
"One of the principal forms of music and poetry in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France."

Blues Poem
"A blues poem typically takes on themes such as struggle, despair, and sex."

The Bop
"Not unlike the Shakespearean sonnet in trajectory, the Bop is a form of poetic argument consisting of three stanzas."

Cento
"From the Latin word for 'patchwork,' the cento is a poetic form made up of lines from poems by other poets.

Chance Operations
"A chance operation can be almost anything from throwing darts and rolling dice, to the ancient Chinese divination method, I-Ching, and even sophisticated computer programs."

Cinquain
"Examples of cinquains can be found in many European languages, and the origin of the form dates back to medieval French poetry."

Dramatic Monologue
"The poet speaks through an assumed voice—a character, a fictional identity, or a persona."

Ekphrasis
"Modern ekphrastic poems have generally shrugged off antiquity's obsession with elaborate description, and instead have tried to interpret, inhabit, confront, and speak to their subjects."

Elegy
"The traditional elegy mirrors three stages of loss. First, there is a lament, then praise for the idealized dead, and finally consolation and solace."

Epic
"Elements that typically distinguish epics include superhuman deeds, fabulous adventures, highly stylized language, and a blending of lyrical and dramatic traditions."

Epigram
"Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker."

Found Poem
"The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems."

Ghazal
"Traditionally invoking melancholy, love, longing, and metaphysical questions, ghazals are often sung by Iranian, Indian, and Pakistani musicians."

Haiku
"Often focusing on images from nature, haiku emphasizes simplicity, intensity, and directness of expression."

Limerick
"A popular form in children’s verse, the limerick is often comical, nonsensical, and sometimes even lewd."

Ode
"Originally accompanied by music and dance, and later reserved by the Romantic poets to convey their strongest sentiments."

OULIPO
"Although poetry and mathematics often seem to be incompatible areas of study, OULIPO seeks to connect them."

Pantoum
"The pantoum originated in Malaysia in the fifteenth-century as a short folk poem, typically made up of two rhyming couplets that were recited or sung."

Prose Poem
"Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels."

Renga
"Renga began over seven hundred years ago in Japan to encourage the collaborative composition of poems."

Rondeau
"The rondeau began as a lyric form in thirteenth-century France, popular among medieval court poets and musicians."

Sapphic
"The sapphic dates back to ancient Greece and is named for the poet Sappho, who left behind many poem fragments written in an unmistakable meter."

Sestina
"The thirty-nine-line form is attributed to Arnaut Daniel, the Provencal troubadour of the twelfth century."

Sonnet
"From the Italian sonetto, which means 'a little sound or song,' the sonnet is a popular classical form that has compelled poets for centuries."

Tanka
"One of the oldest Japanese forms, tanka originated in the seventh century, and quickly became the preferred verse form in the Japanese Imperial Court."

Terza Rima
"Invented by the Italian poet Dante Alighiere in the late thirteenth century to structure his three-part epic poem, The Divine Comedy."

Triolet
"The earliest triolets were devotionals written by Patrick Carey, a seventeenth-century Benedictine monk."

Villanelle
"Strange as it may seem for a poem with such a rigid rhyme scheme, the villanelle did not start off as a fixed form."