Top all-time · #5978
Al Bartlett
Personal blog · albartlett.org/articlesscienceeconomics
Al Bartlett's personal blog at albartlett.org covers science and economics. Since 2009, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “Arithmetic, Population and Energy - a talk by Prof. Al Bartlett”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (17) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Al Bartlett's lecture "Arithmetic, Population and Energy" and related writing on exponential growth, using it to explain why doubling growth is hard to grasp and unsustainable with finite resources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 17 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Professor Emeritus Al Bartlett - Physics at University of Colorado at Boulder - articles on exponential growth, peak oil and population growth, sustainability, renewable resources and the environment
Most-linked posts?
- Arithmetic, Population and Energy - a talk by Prof. Al Bartlett3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-10-20
- /presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html2 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-05-13
- /2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-02-20
- Arithmetic, Population and Energy – A Talk by Al Bartlett2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-07-08
- /presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-08-03
What Hacker News says?
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function” https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati... “Growth” as the politicians and the lobbyists push it is simply not sustainable. But both “the left” and “the right” have their agendas not to let you discuss or act on that. "Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide…
Comment linking /presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html
on “CO2 in the atmosphere just exceeded 415ppm for the first time in human history”Submitted Arithmetic, Population and Energy – A Talk by Al Bartlett as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'd like to quote Al Bartlett: His thesis: " The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function " An example from the rest of the talk: "Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, the 4 become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacteria into…
Comment linking /presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html
on “The human body is already close to thermal limits in many regions”Submitted Arithmetic, Population and Energy - a talk by Prof. Al Bartlett as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSpecifically: "In 2016, a report published by the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Limits to Growth concluded that "there is unsettling evidence that society is still following the 'standard run' of the original study – in which overshoot leads to an eventual collapse of production and living standards".[45] The report also points out that some issues not fully addressed in the original 1972 report, such as clima…
Comment linking /presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html
on “Some corals regrow after 'fatal' warming”Submitted Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis (1978) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionBartlett on Simon: http://www.albartlett.org/articles/art1998jan.html
Comment linking /articles/art1998jan.html
on “Our greatest shortcoming is our inability to understand the exponential function”Submitted Arithmetic, Population and Energy as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati... "It's a great pleasure to be here, and to have a chance just to share with you some very simple ideas about the problems we're facing. Some of these problems are local, some are national, some are global. They're all tied together. They're tied together by arithmetic, and the arithmetic isn't very difficult. What I hope to do is, I hope to be able to co…
Comment linking /presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html
on “How the CDC’s restrictive testing guidelines hid the coronavirus epidemic”But this is the problem of exponential growth - you can sustain it without even noticing the detrimental effects, until suddenly you can't. The resource usage of all the doubling time periods until the last one would have used up only 50% of the resources available(this could be millions of years, depending on the exponent), and then suddenly the last one would use up all the resources left. This is repeatedly exemp…
Comment linking /presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html
on “The cost of games”One of the biggest problems with the way the news is presented is the idea of framing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences) ) -- stories are presented in a narrowly-framed viewpoint so most public debate only occurs inside the framed perimeters. Our perspective is constrained so we see things through a "reality tunnel" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel ). We never see the whole picture…
Comment linking /
on “A rare look into North Korea's famed Propaganda School”https://www.albartlett.org/
Comment linking /
on “Astronauts take shelter in Starliner, other spacecraft after satellite breakup”"One bacterium is put in a bottle at 11:00 a.m. and it is observed that the bottle is full of bacteria at 12:00 noon. Here is a simple example of exponential growth in a finite environment. This is mathematically identical to the case of the exponentially growing consumption of our finite resources of fossil fuels. 11:58 a.m. -> Bottle is one quarter full. 11:59 a.m. -> Bottle half-full ! 12:00 noon -> Bottle is ful…
Comment linking /articles/art_forgotten_fundamentals_part_4.html
on “Astronauts take shelter in Starliner, other spacecraft after satellite breakup”Do you imagine we will box up our terrestrial waste heat and launch it into the sun? The portion people who leave the Earth do not matter, the fate of the portion who remain remains the same. See "Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101", Al Bartlett https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati... Full length video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8
Comment linking /presentations/arithmetic_population_energy.html
on “Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws”Yes, I agree, only it's not about the percentages alone. I'll quote from my post from April (1) which was already in the context of Covid-19, where I quote the start of the presentation by Al Bartlett: https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati... "It's a great pleasure to be here, and to have a chance just to share with you some very simple ideas about the problems we're facing. Some of these prob…
Comment linking /presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html
on “Face masks considerably reduce Covid-19 cases in Germany”Overpopulation is the elephant in the room that no one talks about, and I believe that most of the issues today have it at its core. Much of propaganda is designed to dance around the issue of population control -- "the primary responsibility of government is to project the minority of the opulent from the majority" (listen this Harvard talk on "Propaganda and Control of The Public Mind" http://www.youtube.com/watch…
Comment linking /
on “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”Also about that Asimov's article: http://www.triumf.info/wiki/pwalden/index.php/Issac_Asimov's... Also, Al Bartlett's thesis: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8 The transcript: https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati...
Comment linking /presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html
on “The Population Bust”For people who prefer to read, here's a transcript: https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati...
Comment linking /presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html
on “High-Tech can’t last: there are limited essential elements”Thanks for mentioning Al Bartlett here. This video is very relevant to this post and worth watching. Al Bartlett is a brilliant man and does a wonderful job explaining the profound implications of misunderstanding exponential growth. Here is another link to his videos: http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populatio...
Comment linking /presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_video1.html
on “Peak Oil Perspective”http://www.albartlett.org/ Does some cool work with it. I've seen many examples from his lectures where it worked quite well.
Comment linking /
on “Rule of 72”The earth will run out of space before that happens. "If the current [population growth rate] of 1.3% per year could continue, the world population would grow to a density of one person per square meter on the dry land surface of the earth in just 780 years, and the mass of people would equal the mass of the earth in just 2400 years" ( http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populatio... , http://www.yout…
Comment linking /presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html
on “Galactic-Scale Energy”
