Do your rudiments! That phrase couldn't be more of a turnoff to me. As a drummer I want drumming to be fun, not a boring job. Too bad then, that for so long I neglected the rudiments and therefore neglected fluidity and control.
Beyond Stick Control, by Glenn W. Meyer has increased my speed, fluidity, and control demonstrably. The name Beyond Stick Control is significant because Stick Control was Lawrence Stone's classic book of snare drum technique based on the rudiments. How do you go beyond Stone's famous book? Meyer does it by incorporating the bass drum in a marvelous variety of ways.
Yes, do your rudiments but throw in accents, and do variations. First learn them slow, then speed them up to get a sense of fluidity and flexibility. But, you say, what does the bass drum have to do with rudiments? That's what makes the modifier “beyond” so appropriate for this book. Adding the bass drum is what takes your playing beyond stick control.
Glenn Meyer divides his book into four sections. This is important, because each section involves using the bass drum in a different way. Section A ignores the bass drum. It doesn't even ask you to play solid four while you're practicing rudiments. Still I practice section A by tapping out quarter notes just as I learned with Ted Reed's classic book Syncopation.
Section B goes beyond Syncopation by incorporating improvisation in the bass drum. The bass drum becomes part of the beat by following and preceding phrases played by the hands. Meyer calls this technique “Linear Style” and he specializes in it. See especially: his encyclopedic book Funk and Fusion Concepts for a cornucopia of examples.
I love practicing section B. It has given me a powerful sense of control and fluidity with my right kick.
Section C is all about bass drum ostinatos. Don't know Italian? “Ostinato” is a repeated pattern played underneath everything else that supports and holds up the whole rythmic structure. Start with halfnotes, then count time with quarter notes like in Reed's Syncopation, then take your drumming beyond Syncopation by incorporating some latin bass beats, Samba, Baio, Tumbao, and the beautiful Baio/Tumbao. And Meyer knows his latin beats.
Section D “Linear Jazz Style” is worth the price of the whole book many times over. It incorporates what you've learned in the previous three sections into the entire drum set. This section is played with a broken triplets swing feel on the ride cymbal. My suggestion, which if you do take, you'll thank me for, is to practice section D with both R hand ride and with L hand ride. It seems like twice as much work but it isn't because the R hand “teaches” the left. And the added bonus is that you further strengthen your right kick without even thinking about it.
Speed these exercises up and play them as written instead of swinging them and they become more like cut time rock rhythms with the back beat on the three. Try, for instance page 56, #11 to see what I mean. Or they gain a latin like feel from the rudimental patterns. It was when I started practicing the triplet rudiments that I realized how challenging these exercises really are.
I love Syncopation, but doing straight four on the bass drum all the time drives me crazy. Going beyond syncopation I can use the hihat to tell time, and that frees up the bass drum to become a more powerful improviser. Section D takes lessons learned in the rudiments and incorporates them into jazz /rock fusion ride rhythms. For me, that's what makes rudiments so much fun to play instead of being a job. Before this book I had no idea how to play this stuff. Now it just seems natural.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Sunday, January 3, 2010
The Real Carbon Economy
We say the economic system works through flows: flows of resources, flows of capital, and flows of produced goods, which are all mostly exchanged through buying and selling, and then invested, saved, or consumed.
These flows can be measured in terms of money value. That's what the GNP and GDP are: dollar measures of the circular flow of a nation's economy over the time period of a year.
Think of life now. Life can't be measured by dollars because life includes a lot more than just humans and life has been around a lot longer than humans.
But life has circular flows too, flows of resources, flows of energy. And like an economy, life should have a balance between consumption and production.
Think of the Earth as an economy, a circular flow of resources with an input of high quality energy from the sun and output of low grade energy in the form of infra-red heat.
The Earth is a successful economy because it has life. It is life that is able to capture some of the sun's energy and maintain itself for countless generations in a continuous manner since its origins.
The Earth Economy is a lot bigger than the human economy and a lot lot older. In the Earth Economy carbon is the medium of exchange. In other words, carbon in the Earth Economy plays the same role as money does in the human economy. Carbon, like money gets cycled through the Earth Economy, but unlike money, carbon takes hundreds of millions of years to cycle through.
In the human economy money commands resources, goods and services. And money acts as a store of value. It can be saved and spent later. But money, unlike carbon, is conceptual, it only exists because we believe it has value. It ceases to exist when we cease to believe in it.
Money is really only a virtual reality. Ultimately, what makes all things work, all things go, and what makes living things alive is energy.
Energy flows, and like water, it always flows downstream. In the case of water, it flows downstream to the lowest point on Earth, which is the bottom of the oceans. In the case of energy, when we say it flows downstream we are talking about the “Second Law of Thermodynamics”.
Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. That's the first law. The second law has to do with what happens when energy is converted into work.
Living systems capture energy and convert it into chemical energy. The second law says that this must be a downhill process. You cannot reconvert chemical energy to electromagnetic energy (light) unless you add more energy from outside the system.
That's why a perpetual motion machine is impossible. Because whenever work is done, the energy used up, even though it still exists, cannot be used again to do the same amount of work. It gets degraded, or disorganized in doing work. In this sense it always flows downstream.
On Earth, carbon plays the role of life's currency, life's means of capturing, utilizing, and storing the high grade energy, and getting rid of the low grade energy. Because it plays such a central role in life, carbon is a lot like the Greek god Atlas, holding up the sky.
Energy is necessary for life because if there's not enough of it then life's activities stop. But too much energy raises the temperature too high and life can burn up.
Over vast scales of time the carbon cycle has had a huge influence on the flows of energy and the overall temperature of Earth's surface. And during those same spans of time, life has had a large influence on the carbon cycle, and hence on Earth's temperature.
Like goods and services in the smaller human economy, energy flows and circulates amongst living things. First, to the Producers: bacteria, diatoms, algae, and plants. Producers take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. Producers utilize photosynthesis and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to capture solar energy and store it in carbon compounds.
. Next, the energy, in the form of carbon compounds, flows to the Consumers: the bacteria, protists, fungi, and animals that feed on plants and on each other. Consumers breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.
When there is a balance between Producers and Consumers Earth Economy is as healthy as it can be. If there is too many Producers and not enough Consumers, then too much of the plants and algae die without decomposing and more carbon gets locked into sedimentary rocks. Then the available supply of carbon decreases and Earth's temperature decreases. This is just one of, but not the only causes of ice ages.
We can call ice ages “Depressions” in the Earth Economy because just as in depressions when there's not enough money to buy everything the economy freezes, during an ice age there's less carbon available to capture the energy needed to drive life. Some of the great extinction events such as the Permian - Triassic extinction 250 million years ago are thought to have been caused by ice ages.
If there is too many Consumers and not enough Producers we get too much carbon available. Remember, Consumers breathe out carbon dioxide, so the more Consumers there are and the more that they consume, the more carbon dioxide there will be in the atmosphere. The amount of available carbon becomes so high that Earth's surface temperature climbs. We can call this “Inflation” .
For thousands of years the human economy was just an insignificant fraction of Earth Economy. But then we discovered fossil fuels – coal, and oil. These are forms of carbon that were saved long ago when for various reasons, plant life was not consumed by other life forms, but eventually was subducted underground. There it was converted by the heat and compression of Earth's techtonic forces into coal and oil.
By tapping into this stored form of ancient sunlight, we have been able to extract both biological and mineralogical resources at an accelerating rate. This is a situation akin to hyperinflation in human economy, where the circulation velocity of money (carbon) has increased at the same time as vastly greater quantities of money (carbon) are available.
The result is an overheating of Earth Economy and a new mass extinction event. We call this “Global Warming”.
These flows can be measured in terms of money value. That's what the GNP and GDP are: dollar measures of the circular flow of a nation's economy over the time period of a year.
Think of life now. Life can't be measured by dollars because life includes a lot more than just humans and life has been around a lot longer than humans.
But life has circular flows too, flows of resources, flows of energy. And like an economy, life should have a balance between consumption and production.
Think of the Earth as an economy, a circular flow of resources with an input of high quality energy from the sun and output of low grade energy in the form of infra-red heat.
The Earth is a successful economy because it has life. It is life that is able to capture some of the sun's energy and maintain itself for countless generations in a continuous manner since its origins.
The Earth Economy is a lot bigger than the human economy and a lot lot older. In the Earth Economy carbon is the medium of exchange. In other words, carbon in the Earth Economy plays the same role as money does in the human economy. Carbon, like money gets cycled through the Earth Economy, but unlike money, carbon takes hundreds of millions of years to cycle through.
In the human economy money commands resources, goods and services. And money acts as a store of value. It can be saved and spent later. But money, unlike carbon, is conceptual, it only exists because we believe it has value. It ceases to exist when we cease to believe in it.
Money is really only a virtual reality. Ultimately, what makes all things work, all things go, and what makes living things alive is energy.
Energy flows, and like water, it always flows downstream. In the case of water, it flows downstream to the lowest point on Earth, which is the bottom of the oceans. In the case of energy, when we say it flows downstream we are talking about the “Second Law of Thermodynamics”.
Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. That's the first law. The second law has to do with what happens when energy is converted into work.
Living systems capture energy and convert it into chemical energy. The second law says that this must be a downhill process. You cannot reconvert chemical energy to electromagnetic energy (light) unless you add more energy from outside the system.
That's why a perpetual motion machine is impossible. Because whenever work is done, the energy used up, even though it still exists, cannot be used again to do the same amount of work. It gets degraded, or disorganized in doing work. In this sense it always flows downstream.
On Earth, carbon plays the role of life's currency, life's means of capturing, utilizing, and storing the high grade energy, and getting rid of the low grade energy. Because it plays such a central role in life, carbon is a lot like the Greek god Atlas, holding up the sky.
Energy is necessary for life because if there's not enough of it then life's activities stop. But too much energy raises the temperature too high and life can burn up.
Over vast scales of time the carbon cycle has had a huge influence on the flows of energy and the overall temperature of Earth's surface. And during those same spans of time, life has had a large influence on the carbon cycle, and hence on Earth's temperature.
Like goods and services in the smaller human economy, energy flows and circulates amongst living things. First, to the Producers: bacteria, diatoms, algae, and plants. Producers take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. Producers utilize photosynthesis and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to capture solar energy and store it in carbon compounds.
. Next, the energy, in the form of carbon compounds, flows to the Consumers: the bacteria, protists, fungi, and animals that feed on plants and on each other. Consumers breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.
When there is a balance between Producers and Consumers Earth Economy is as healthy as it can be. If there is too many Producers and not enough Consumers, then too much of the plants and algae die without decomposing and more carbon gets locked into sedimentary rocks. Then the available supply of carbon decreases and Earth's temperature decreases. This is just one of, but not the only causes of ice ages.
We can call ice ages “Depressions” in the Earth Economy because just as in depressions when there's not enough money to buy everything the economy freezes, during an ice age there's less carbon available to capture the energy needed to drive life. Some of the great extinction events such as the Permian - Triassic extinction 250 million years ago are thought to have been caused by ice ages.
If there is too many Consumers and not enough Producers we get too much carbon available. Remember, Consumers breathe out carbon dioxide, so the more Consumers there are and the more that they consume, the more carbon dioxide there will be in the atmosphere. The amount of available carbon becomes so high that Earth's surface temperature climbs. We can call this “Inflation” .
For thousands of years the human economy was just an insignificant fraction of Earth Economy. But then we discovered fossil fuels – coal, and oil. These are forms of carbon that were saved long ago when for various reasons, plant life was not consumed by other life forms, but eventually was subducted underground. There it was converted by the heat and compression of Earth's techtonic forces into coal and oil.
By tapping into this stored form of ancient sunlight, we have been able to extract both biological and mineralogical resources at an accelerating rate. This is a situation akin to hyperinflation in human economy, where the circulation velocity of money (carbon) has increased at the same time as vastly greater quantities of money (carbon) are available.
The result is an overheating of Earth Economy and a new mass extinction event. We call this “Global Warming”.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Spontaneous Organization
The market economy is a self-organizing system because it is made up of countless people who act out of their own self interest to buy and sell to other people. It is not designed and not made by a designer.
A language system such as the english language, is a self-organizing system. Each speaker of english uses english words in conversation with other english speakers. The language itself is shaped and evolves through the sum total of individual conversations and at the same time the language system as a whole shapes the way that each individual speaker uses it in conversation.
Although laws are made by governments and moral codes are often passed on from one generation to the next through formal and informal education, moral systems can also be seen as self-organizing. Our interpretation of values, social norms and rules helps to shape our everyday conduct with others. Each person's conduct in turn, is interpreted by and influences other's value systems and conduct in a vast circle of social networks. Some people's behaviour is exemplary and very influential, other's behaviour is despicable and serves as an example to be shunned.
All these human systems I am describing have emergent properties that are not reducible to a simple description of physical causes. Being an english speaker I can choose to speak eloquently or massacre the language. Either way, I am part of the english language system without being determined by it.
Consciousness is another system, in this case neurological, where the state of consciousness is an emergent property, not reducible to a physical chain of neurons firing.
The parts of consciousness interact together with the other parts: The mid-brain systems that keep us alert and awake and that help us to pay attention, the sensory systems, the motivational system that helps us to focus and prioritize, the memory systems of the cerebral cortex that help in making associations with past experience, and make experiencing into a continuous flow, the parts of the cortex dealing with language, and meaning that help to put ideas into words, the parts that allow us to visualize ideas, and the prefrontal areas of the cortex that assist us in judging and and decision-making.
Our thoughts, sensations, feelings and judgement get organized into coherent ideas and narratives spontaneously without being planned or designed. For any planning, necessarily already involves ideas and narratives, so it can't be primary.
We tend to model reality after ourselves. This is called “anthropomorphism”. At first we attribute human qualities to natural phenomena such as the weather, the sea, volcanoes, the sun and moon, and the stars. We invent mythologies to explain how these things act, as if they were people and acted according to their own purposes.
Determinism can be seen as just another form of anthropomorphism. Just as all humans make things and do things for a reason, determinism sees everything that happens as determined by previous causes. Determinism equates living things with machines as if they were designed for a reason.
According to determinism there is no free will because everything that happens is determined by antecedant causes. But does causation explain everything, and does it really determine behaviour?
Think back to the flock of sandpipers that I talked about in a previous article. The flock flies in unison, quickly manoevering around obstacles as one, and lands on the beach in unison. Where was the cause of that flock's behaviour? Was it the sum total of all the individual sandpipers' behaviour?
But didn't the behaviour of the flock as a whole influence the behaviour of each individual bird? The behaviour of the flock influenced the behaviour of the individual birds, and the individual birds influenced the behaviour of the flock. In which direction was the cause?
We're talking in circles here. If causation happens in both directions or is “circular” in what sense is it determinate?
Everything can influence us at once, and if so what is it that causes us to do what we do? Everything? Then the concept of causation and determinism itself are both meaningless.
It seems to me that self-organization can generate free will because the influence and interaction of a self-organized system can be omnidirectional.
Think of the brain. Interactions between many different parts of the brain contribute to each moment of consciousness. At the same time our conscious experience influences those interactions. What causes the experience then?
That's why we say that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon and not reducible to the firing of nerve cells. And we can say the same thing about “purpose” and “meaning”. These emerge out of living and self-organizing systems.
Purpose is more basic than meaning because it does not require consciousness. The purpose of maintaining life appears to be already part of every life-form. Meaning emerges from consciousness so it requires consciousness.
It may seem rather abstract, what I'm talking about but these are all things that science has a problem dealing with but are in the province of religion. Consciousness emerges from physical phenomena but cannot be reduced to them because it influences those phenomena. Purpose emerges from life and influences life, meaning emerges from consciousness and influences consciousness.
The key to all these phenomena is that they appear to emerge spontaneously from the bottom up in self-organizing systems, without being designed or planned. This has obvious implications for religion. But that's not my department.
A language system such as the english language, is a self-organizing system. Each speaker of english uses english words in conversation with other english speakers. The language itself is shaped and evolves through the sum total of individual conversations and at the same time the language system as a whole shapes the way that each individual speaker uses it in conversation.
Although laws are made by governments and moral codes are often passed on from one generation to the next through formal and informal education, moral systems can also be seen as self-organizing. Our interpretation of values, social norms and rules helps to shape our everyday conduct with others. Each person's conduct in turn, is interpreted by and influences other's value systems and conduct in a vast circle of social networks. Some people's behaviour is exemplary and very influential, other's behaviour is despicable and serves as an example to be shunned.
All these human systems I am describing have emergent properties that are not reducible to a simple description of physical causes. Being an english speaker I can choose to speak eloquently or massacre the language. Either way, I am part of the english language system without being determined by it.
Consciousness is another system, in this case neurological, where the state of consciousness is an emergent property, not reducible to a physical chain of neurons firing.
The parts of consciousness interact together with the other parts: The mid-brain systems that keep us alert and awake and that help us to pay attention, the sensory systems, the motivational system that helps us to focus and prioritize, the memory systems of the cerebral cortex that help in making associations with past experience, and make experiencing into a continuous flow, the parts of the cortex dealing with language, and meaning that help to put ideas into words, the parts that allow us to visualize ideas, and the prefrontal areas of the cortex that assist us in judging and and decision-making.
Our thoughts, sensations, feelings and judgement get organized into coherent ideas and narratives spontaneously without being planned or designed. For any planning, necessarily already involves ideas and narratives, so it can't be primary.
We tend to model reality after ourselves. This is called “anthropomorphism”. At first we attribute human qualities to natural phenomena such as the weather, the sea, volcanoes, the sun and moon, and the stars. We invent mythologies to explain how these things act, as if they were people and acted according to their own purposes.
Determinism can be seen as just another form of anthropomorphism. Just as all humans make things and do things for a reason, determinism sees everything that happens as determined by previous causes. Determinism equates living things with machines as if they were designed for a reason.
According to determinism there is no free will because everything that happens is determined by antecedant causes. But does causation explain everything, and does it really determine behaviour?
Think back to the flock of sandpipers that I talked about in a previous article. The flock flies in unison, quickly manoevering around obstacles as one, and lands on the beach in unison. Where was the cause of that flock's behaviour? Was it the sum total of all the individual sandpipers' behaviour?
But didn't the behaviour of the flock as a whole influence the behaviour of each individual bird? The behaviour of the flock influenced the behaviour of the individual birds, and the individual birds influenced the behaviour of the flock. In which direction was the cause?
We're talking in circles here. If causation happens in both directions or is “circular” in what sense is it determinate?
Everything can influence us at once, and if so what is it that causes us to do what we do? Everything? Then the concept of causation and determinism itself are both meaningless.
It seems to me that self-organization can generate free will because the influence and interaction of a self-organized system can be omnidirectional.
Think of the brain. Interactions between many different parts of the brain contribute to each moment of consciousness. At the same time our conscious experience influences those interactions. What causes the experience then?
That's why we say that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon and not reducible to the firing of nerve cells. And we can say the same thing about “purpose” and “meaning”. These emerge out of living and self-organizing systems.
Purpose is more basic than meaning because it does not require consciousness. The purpose of maintaining life appears to be already part of every life-form. Meaning emerges from consciousness so it requires consciousness.
It may seem rather abstract, what I'm talking about but these are all things that science has a problem dealing with but are in the province of religion. Consciousness emerges from physical phenomena but cannot be reduced to them because it influences those phenomena. Purpose emerges from life and influences life, meaning emerges from consciousness and influences consciousness.
The key to all these phenomena is that they appear to emerge spontaneously from the bottom up in self-organizing systems, without being designed or planned. This has obvious implications for religion. But that's not my department.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Earth-House-System
I'm reading a book by Phillip Ball, called: Water, Matrix of Life. If you want to know more about water, it's fascinating and well written. I particularly like this quote of his: “Water is the agent of geological, environmental and global change. It confers fecundity on parched regions, while it's passing turns grasslands into deserts.”
Water does all this and more. But water is incredibly effective at what it does because water is a team player. Apparently there's water on the moon in the form of patches of ice, but it's inert, it doesn't do anything because it lacks the other team players. Let's introduce these other team members.
Water is a compound not an element although the Greeks and the Chinese thought it was one of the “four elements” - Earth, Air, Water and Fire. Let's run with this idea but let's assume that fire can mean all types of energy, especially the Sun. Let's use a bigger name for Air. We'll call it the Atmosphere. Let's say that “Earth” means the planet and not just a hunk of rock. Now let's add a fifth element, and call it “Life”.
Put these five elements together and they will interact spontaneously. And these interactions form the great geophysical systems of the Earth.
The Earth's surface has mountains and basins. It's lowest points are where most of the water is – in the oceans. The Earth's gravitational field is strong enough to hold all the gases: the oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapour that make up the atmosphere.
Think of Earth as a house without a switch because it runs itself. It's roof is the atmosphere. It lets vital energy from the Sun in and gives us a bit of insulation at night. Too much insulation is not good, as we see with the planet Venus, with its surface temperature of 460 *Celsius.
The Earth's got plumbing, heating, ventilation and power, mostly run by one system: the weather. But it's also got backup power from internal heat which causes plate tectonics to reconfigure the seas and continents every hundred million years or so.
It's not like a house that was designed and built, because it repairs itself. Tell me, what house that we have built repairs itself, or has lasted as long as Earth has?
As a plumbing and heating system and power system the weather is partly predictable and partly unpredictable. Sometimes we get too much water sometimes not enough. Sometimes it gets too hot, sometimes it's just right.
The weather operates under the usual physical laws. The Earth's spin causes winds to curve in the direction of rotation making cyclonic wind patterns counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Sun's radiation heats water on Earth's surface and causes water molecules to change from liquid to gas. The water vapour can rise into the atmosphere because it contains heat from the sun.
Weather is partly predictable, we recognize the seasons, but also unpredictable, we don't know what the weather will be like a month from this day. The weather is a self-organizing system. Weather systems can last up to a week and travel thousands of kilometres.
Let's call a system: a group of parts that interact together to form a whole that is separated from the external world by a boundary.
Let's divide the world of systems into three: machines, institutions, and self-organizing systems.
Self organizing systems are systems of parts that interact via simple physical laws. The parts of the Solar system - the sun and the planets, interact by the laws of motion and gravity to form a balanced system that has maintained itself over time.
All machines are mechanical systems designed and built by humans for various goals. A house is a mechanical system that transfers heat and energy from outside and holds it inside. Houses and other machines have switches on them. When the switch is turned on, the machines start to work and when it's turned off they stop working.
What is a self-organizing system? Think of a flock of sandpipers flying low over the water – the precision and coherence of their flight. The flock swoops and glides as a unified whole as if it acts with one mind.
But each bird is acting on its own and the subtle alterations in flight that each bird makes in response to its neighbours creates an emergent unity.
Unlike machines, self-organizing systems are not deterministic. These systems have properties that emerge from the interaction of all the parts that cannot be predicted from the nature of the parts alone.
You cannot predict the weather beyond a week; Human behaviour is both predictable and unpredictable. Weather systems and large-scale human societies exhibit complex behaviour that is the hallmark of self-organizing systems.
Water does all this and more. But water is incredibly effective at what it does because water is a team player. Apparently there's water on the moon in the form of patches of ice, but it's inert, it doesn't do anything because it lacks the other team players. Let's introduce these other team members.
Water is a compound not an element although the Greeks and the Chinese thought it was one of the “four elements” - Earth, Air, Water and Fire. Let's run with this idea but let's assume that fire can mean all types of energy, especially the Sun. Let's use a bigger name for Air. We'll call it the Atmosphere. Let's say that “Earth” means the planet and not just a hunk of rock. Now let's add a fifth element, and call it “Life”.
Put these five elements together and they will interact spontaneously. And these interactions form the great geophysical systems of the Earth.
The Earth's surface has mountains and basins. It's lowest points are where most of the water is – in the oceans. The Earth's gravitational field is strong enough to hold all the gases: the oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapour that make up the atmosphere.
Think of Earth as a house without a switch because it runs itself. It's roof is the atmosphere. It lets vital energy from the Sun in and gives us a bit of insulation at night. Too much insulation is not good, as we see with the planet Venus, with its surface temperature of 460 *Celsius.
The Earth's got plumbing, heating, ventilation and power, mostly run by one system: the weather. But it's also got backup power from internal heat which causes plate tectonics to reconfigure the seas and continents every hundred million years or so.
It's not like a house that was designed and built, because it repairs itself. Tell me, what house that we have built repairs itself, or has lasted as long as Earth has?
As a plumbing and heating system and power system the weather is partly predictable and partly unpredictable. Sometimes we get too much water sometimes not enough. Sometimes it gets too hot, sometimes it's just right.
The weather operates under the usual physical laws. The Earth's spin causes winds to curve in the direction of rotation making cyclonic wind patterns counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Sun's radiation heats water on Earth's surface and causes water molecules to change from liquid to gas. The water vapour can rise into the atmosphere because it contains heat from the sun.
Weather is partly predictable, we recognize the seasons, but also unpredictable, we don't know what the weather will be like a month from this day. The weather is a self-organizing system. Weather systems can last up to a week and travel thousands of kilometres.
Let's call a system: a group of parts that interact together to form a whole that is separated from the external world by a boundary.
Let's divide the world of systems into three: machines, institutions, and self-organizing systems.
Self organizing systems are systems of parts that interact via simple physical laws. The parts of the Solar system - the sun and the planets, interact by the laws of motion and gravity to form a balanced system that has maintained itself over time.
All machines are mechanical systems designed and built by humans for various goals. A house is a mechanical system that transfers heat and energy from outside and holds it inside. Houses and other machines have switches on them. When the switch is turned on, the machines start to work and when it's turned off they stop working.
What is a self-organizing system? Think of a flock of sandpipers flying low over the water – the precision and coherence of their flight. The flock swoops and glides as a unified whole as if it acts with one mind.
But each bird is acting on its own and the subtle alterations in flight that each bird makes in response to its neighbours creates an emergent unity.
Unlike machines, self-organizing systems are not deterministic. These systems have properties that emerge from the interaction of all the parts that cannot be predicted from the nature of the parts alone.
You cannot predict the weather beyond a week; Human behaviour is both predictable and unpredictable. Weather systems and large-scale human societies exhibit complex behaviour that is the hallmark of self-organizing systems.
Monday, November 30, 2009
How Water Keeps Us Alive
It's uncanny how many essential functions water serves for life processes. But perhaps the most important function is the regulation of temperature. And the amazing thing is, water acts to regulate temperature simultaneously and independently on multiple levels. On a micro sub-cellular level, a human level, a regional level, and a global level.
Life survives in a narrow temperature range that just happens to correspond with the temperature at which water is a liquid. That's not a coincidence. Life and water are tightly coupled on Earth. All of life's metabolic processes – the things that make a living organism “alive” - happen in water.
The temperature at which water is a liquid is not necessarily the temperature that's ideal for many types of chemical reactions. In some cases heat needs to be added to get a reaction underway, or a chemical reaction can produce a lot of heat in an uncontrollable chain reaction. Either way, the reaction proceeds at a temperature much too hot for life.
All biochemical reactions are catalyzed (made easier) by large convoluted protein molecules called enzymes. The key to an enzyme's function as a catalyzer of chemical reactions is its complex shape. And the key to an enzyme's shape is how the molecule twists and folds in on itself in relation to the water molecules that surround it.
Water is also necessary because it facilitates the flow of dissolved molecules that form the raw materials and the products of enzyme mediated reactions. But that's another story.
The enzymes that catalyze most biological reactions work best within a narrow range of a few degrees centering around 37 Centigrade, normal body temperature. Hotter than this and the enzymes lose their shape and cease to function. Too cold and the chemical reactions slow down too much to sustain metabolic processes.
The human body has several independent systems that work to keep the body's temperature within the narrow range necessary for life. All of these systems involve water in a crucial way and yet each uses water in a unique way.
When we are cold our circulation system shunts blood away from the extremities, where it would be more likely to lose heat to the external environment. This keeps more of the body's water within the better insulated core where it protects the vital organs.
When we are too hot our circulation system shunts more water out to the extremities where heat can be transferred out of the body. Another independent system kicks in to cool the body by secreting water in the form of sweat on the body's outer surface. On a hot sunny day the sweat on our skin evaporates cooling us off.
When we are cold another independent system come into play. We “shiver”. This is a muscular reaction that produces heat to warm the body by increasing metabolic rates and shunting blood to the large muscles of the body. Muscle cells are controlled by nerve cells, and nerve cells cannot tell muscle cells what to do without the medium of water.
So here comes the analogy. Just as water plays the major role in keeping our bodies alive it also plays the major role in keeping life on Earth alive. For it is water in all it's forms that moderates temperature on Earth's surface.
Did I already mention in a previous column that water has the second highest heat capacity of any liquid? Water retains heat. That's why we use it for radiators. But that's also why it's warmer near the ocean in winter, and cooler in the summer. Large bodies of water moderate climate, because they absorb heat and are slow to give it up.
In places far inland it's colder in the winter and hotter in the summer because these places lack the moderating influence of a large body of water. Note that the majority of the world's population lives within 50 miles of the ocean.
Water also has a huge role to play in temperature regulation via an entirely different system – the weather. Here's how it works: The Sun's radiant energy heats the surface water of the oceans. When this happens some of the surface water evaporates. It changes from it's liquid form to water vapour – a gas. In doing so it absorbs heat and cools the surface water.
Not a big deal in terms of the proportion of water that ends up in the atmosphere .001 % of Earth's total, but it's still enough to make a huge difference to the Earth's surface temperature.
The water vapour rises up into the atmosphere where it gets blown far away by the winds. The higher the water molecules rise the colder the air. Eventually the the molecules condense back to liquid and form water droplets. When this happens the latent heat of evaporation is given off into the atmosphere.
But here's the deal - where the water molecule absorbed the heat and where it gives it back can be thousands of miles apart. Thus the sun's energy powers the transfer of heat over the Earth's surface through the medium of water.
But that's not all folks. There's another couple of systems involving water in a major role that effect the Earth's surface temperature independently of the one's I just mentioned. Water freezes into ice at 0 C. Ice reflects sunlight and cools the Earth's surface. That's why during an ice age the Earth's surface gets colder.
But there's more. In the atmosphere water vapour molecules have a stronger greenhouse warming effect than carbon dioxide. This is counterbalanced both by the cooling effect of evaporation, and the fact that water molecules do not stay long in the atmosphere before gravity takes over and pulls the water down to the earth in the form of rain.
OK but there's still more. Because water, unlike most other liquids expands when it freezes, ice forms on top of liquid water and because of that, ice insulates water and keeps most of it from freezing in the winter.
Used for warming and cooling, multiple independent systems involved, tightly coupled with life itself -That's Water.
Life survives in a narrow temperature range that just happens to correspond with the temperature at which water is a liquid. That's not a coincidence. Life and water are tightly coupled on Earth. All of life's metabolic processes – the things that make a living organism “alive” - happen in water.
The temperature at which water is a liquid is not necessarily the temperature that's ideal for many types of chemical reactions. In some cases heat needs to be added to get a reaction underway, or a chemical reaction can produce a lot of heat in an uncontrollable chain reaction. Either way, the reaction proceeds at a temperature much too hot for life.
All biochemical reactions are catalyzed (made easier) by large convoluted protein molecules called enzymes. The key to an enzyme's function as a catalyzer of chemical reactions is its complex shape. And the key to an enzyme's shape is how the molecule twists and folds in on itself in relation to the water molecules that surround it.
Water is also necessary because it facilitates the flow of dissolved molecules that form the raw materials and the products of enzyme mediated reactions. But that's another story.
The enzymes that catalyze most biological reactions work best within a narrow range of a few degrees centering around 37 Centigrade, normal body temperature. Hotter than this and the enzymes lose their shape and cease to function. Too cold and the chemical reactions slow down too much to sustain metabolic processes.
The human body has several independent systems that work to keep the body's temperature within the narrow range necessary for life. All of these systems involve water in a crucial way and yet each uses water in a unique way.
When we are cold our circulation system shunts blood away from the extremities, where it would be more likely to lose heat to the external environment. This keeps more of the body's water within the better insulated core where it protects the vital organs.
When we are too hot our circulation system shunts more water out to the extremities where heat can be transferred out of the body. Another independent system kicks in to cool the body by secreting water in the form of sweat on the body's outer surface. On a hot sunny day the sweat on our skin evaporates cooling us off.
When we are cold another independent system come into play. We “shiver”. This is a muscular reaction that produces heat to warm the body by increasing metabolic rates and shunting blood to the large muscles of the body. Muscle cells are controlled by nerve cells, and nerve cells cannot tell muscle cells what to do without the medium of water.
So here comes the analogy. Just as water plays the major role in keeping our bodies alive it also plays the major role in keeping life on Earth alive. For it is water in all it's forms that moderates temperature on Earth's surface.
Did I already mention in a previous column that water has the second highest heat capacity of any liquid? Water retains heat. That's why we use it for radiators. But that's also why it's warmer near the ocean in winter, and cooler in the summer. Large bodies of water moderate climate, because they absorb heat and are slow to give it up.
In places far inland it's colder in the winter and hotter in the summer because these places lack the moderating influence of a large body of water. Note that the majority of the world's population lives within 50 miles of the ocean.
Water also has a huge role to play in temperature regulation via an entirely different system – the weather. Here's how it works: The Sun's radiant energy heats the surface water of the oceans. When this happens some of the surface water evaporates. It changes from it's liquid form to water vapour – a gas. In doing so it absorbs heat and cools the surface water.
Not a big deal in terms of the proportion of water that ends up in the atmosphere .001 % of Earth's total, but it's still enough to make a huge difference to the Earth's surface temperature.
The water vapour rises up into the atmosphere where it gets blown far away by the winds. The higher the water molecules rise the colder the air. Eventually the the molecules condense back to liquid and form water droplets. When this happens the latent heat of evaporation is given off into the atmosphere.
But here's the deal - where the water molecule absorbed the heat and where it gives it back can be thousands of miles apart. Thus the sun's energy powers the transfer of heat over the Earth's surface through the medium of water.
But that's not all folks. There's another couple of systems involving water in a major role that effect the Earth's surface temperature independently of the one's I just mentioned. Water freezes into ice at 0 C. Ice reflects sunlight and cools the Earth's surface. That's why during an ice age the Earth's surface gets colder.
But there's more. In the atmosphere water vapour molecules have a stronger greenhouse warming effect than carbon dioxide. This is counterbalanced both by the cooling effect of evaporation, and the fact that water molecules do not stay long in the atmosphere before gravity takes over and pulls the water down to the earth in the form of rain.
OK but there's still more. Because water, unlike most other liquids expands when it freezes, ice forms on top of liquid water and because of that, ice insulates water and keeps most of it from freezing in the winter.
Used for warming and cooling, multiple independent systems involved, tightly coupled with life itself -That's Water.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Water, The Restless Creator
The cells of our body are bathed in water. It circulates throughout our bodies in our blood vessels. Water is intimately involved in all aspects of life. No other substance is as important for life.
Water is constantly moving, circulating over the Earth's surface in ocean currents, or drawn downhill to the sea by Earth's gravity, or up into the atmosphere.
Water is drawn up into the atmosphere by solar powered evaporation, it forms into clouds and falls again to Earth as rain, sometimes in the sea and sometimes on land.
When it falls on land some of it ends up as groundwater, some in lakes. But all is drawn to the sea by Earth's gravity. It is the triple actions of the Sun's radiation, the Earth's gravity, and its centrifugal motion that creates the water cycle on Earth's surface
As if to mirror what goes on on the face of the Earth, water in the form of blood is pumped and circulated throughout our bodies by our hearts. This coordinated internal flow of water provides us with food in the form of dissolved carbohydrates , dissolved oxygen, and electrolytes; It gets rid of wastes; It carries immune cells that protect us from disease, white blood cells and platelets that help to repair the body and hormones and chemical transmitters that communicate information from one organ to another.
Water is not just water. It is the universal solvent. It can hold an unbelievable amount of different molecules in solution. Water is constantly in motion, carrying things, carrying chemicals in solution, carbonic acid, which eats away at minerals and carrying sulphates, phosphates, carbonates, and oxides to the sea.
Streams and rivers carry aluminum and magnesium silicates in suspension, and carry rocks and boulders down stream , depositing sediments on the edge of the continental shelves. Over vast scales of time water recycles all the major elements of life except nitrogen.
No-one can survive without water. Not only do we have to drink it every day, but we wash in it, cook with it, clean with it, use it in manufacturing, use it in transportation, and in recreation.
Without water we wouldn't be able to make cement and even our houses would lack a foundation. It's indespensible in religion, where it signifies holiness, purity, and rebirth
Water is the mother of life. The very first living cell was born in water, All of us were conceived and gestated in water. When we are born, we are born from out of our mother's water.
We find ourselves drawn to water, and feel it's calmness, it's churning, it's raging, and it's bubbling. Houses with a water view are worth more money because of the positive psychological effect of seeing water.
But water by itself is not sufficient for life. Without the Earth in it's special relationship with the Sun, and the Earth's size and shape to hold and channel the water, life could not have existed.
What do I mean by Earth's special relationship with the Sun? We know that the Earth, unlike the rest of the planets is just the right distance away from the sun to keep most of the water on Earth in a liquid state. Not to cold to freeze everything and not too hot to boil it all away.
Water is necessary for life, but it's got to be largely in liquid form for life to have originated and for life to continue. That's because life's metabolic processes, the ways that living things get energy, all happen in liquid water.
When, cells photosynthesize it happens in water; When cells do respiration it happens in water; When cells divide it happens in water. All the molecular reactions that are necessary for life work in water and never outside it.
That doesn't mean that water isn't important to life in it's non-liquid phases. Right now 2.9 % of Earth's water is locked away in glacial ice. Over millions of years the glaciers ebb and flow creating ice ages and lowering sea levels then mysteriously stopping their advance over the Continents, retreating towards the poles and making the oceans rise during warmer times.
Water vapour is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide but the reason it does not play as important a role as carbon dioxide in global warming is because a water molecule only stays in the atmosphere for a matter of days, whereas a molecule of carbon dioxide can stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.
97% of Earth's water lies in the great oceans. Because water has one of the highest heat capacities of any substance, second only to ammonia, the Earth's oceans play an important role in moderating and regulating climate and temperature. Tune in next week when I talk about the effect of water on global temperature regulation.
Water is constantly moving, circulating over the Earth's surface in ocean currents, or drawn downhill to the sea by Earth's gravity, or up into the atmosphere.
Water is drawn up into the atmosphere by solar powered evaporation, it forms into clouds and falls again to Earth as rain, sometimes in the sea and sometimes on land.
When it falls on land some of it ends up as groundwater, some in lakes. But all is drawn to the sea by Earth's gravity. It is the triple actions of the Sun's radiation, the Earth's gravity, and its centrifugal motion that creates the water cycle on Earth's surface
As if to mirror what goes on on the face of the Earth, water in the form of blood is pumped and circulated throughout our bodies by our hearts. This coordinated internal flow of water provides us with food in the form of dissolved carbohydrates , dissolved oxygen, and electrolytes; It gets rid of wastes; It carries immune cells that protect us from disease, white blood cells and platelets that help to repair the body and hormones and chemical transmitters that communicate information from one organ to another.
Water is not just water. It is the universal solvent. It can hold an unbelievable amount of different molecules in solution. Water is constantly in motion, carrying things, carrying chemicals in solution, carbonic acid, which eats away at minerals and carrying sulphates, phosphates, carbonates, and oxides to the sea.
Streams and rivers carry aluminum and magnesium silicates in suspension, and carry rocks and boulders down stream , depositing sediments on the edge of the continental shelves. Over vast scales of time water recycles all the major elements of life except nitrogen.
No-one can survive without water. Not only do we have to drink it every day, but we wash in it, cook with it, clean with it, use it in manufacturing, use it in transportation, and in recreation.
Without water we wouldn't be able to make cement and even our houses would lack a foundation. It's indespensible in religion, where it signifies holiness, purity, and rebirth
Water is the mother of life. The very first living cell was born in water, All of us were conceived and gestated in water. When we are born, we are born from out of our mother's water.
We find ourselves drawn to water, and feel it's calmness, it's churning, it's raging, and it's bubbling. Houses with a water view are worth more money because of the positive psychological effect of seeing water.
But water by itself is not sufficient for life. Without the Earth in it's special relationship with the Sun, and the Earth's size and shape to hold and channel the water, life could not have existed.
What do I mean by Earth's special relationship with the Sun? We know that the Earth, unlike the rest of the planets is just the right distance away from the sun to keep most of the water on Earth in a liquid state. Not to cold to freeze everything and not too hot to boil it all away.
Water is necessary for life, but it's got to be largely in liquid form for life to have originated and for life to continue. That's because life's metabolic processes, the ways that living things get energy, all happen in liquid water.
When, cells photosynthesize it happens in water; When cells do respiration it happens in water; When cells divide it happens in water. All the molecular reactions that are necessary for life work in water and never outside it.
That doesn't mean that water isn't important to life in it's non-liquid phases. Right now 2.9 % of Earth's water is locked away in glacial ice. Over millions of years the glaciers ebb and flow creating ice ages and lowering sea levels then mysteriously stopping their advance over the Continents, retreating towards the poles and making the oceans rise during warmer times.
Water vapour is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide but the reason it does not play as important a role as carbon dioxide in global warming is because a water molecule only stays in the atmosphere for a matter of days, whereas a molecule of carbon dioxide can stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.
97% of Earth's water lies in the great oceans. Because water has one of the highest heat capacities of any substance, second only to ammonia, the Earth's oceans play an important role in moderating and regulating climate and temperature. Tune in next week when I talk about the effect of water on global temperature regulation.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Science vs Religion
Religion and Science are two very different activities, but they are both quintessentially human endeavors.
Science is really a way of asking questions and getting answers. Scientists asks how things happen and look at antecedent causes to find the answers. But answers in science are provisional – never final. For instance, Issac Newton's Theory of Gravity was supplanted two hundred years later by Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
That's why scientific knowledge is made up of theories, not immutable decrees. Scientific knowledge is ever growing and never completed. This is different from religion where if someone adds new revelations to established scripture, it often becomes a separate religion with separate adherents, like Mormonism.
Religion, is also a way of asking questions and getting answers but it asks the question “Why?” rather than “How?” because it is really about meaning and purpose in our lives.
We are the only religious species because we don't do well if we don't have a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. Science can also give one a sense of meaning and purpose but, because science is provisional – it doesn't give the same sense of security that religion does.
One of the reasons that science and religion conflict is because they are both about life, and life, as we have discovered, is about maintaining itself. Life is intrinsically purposive. Living creatures try to keep on living for as long as possible; They try and begat progeny; They behave purposefully.
Science has subtle problems with this because it doesn't like asking questions about purpose – that's too subjective. It would rather ask questions about physical causes.
One of the main reasons a lot of people are uneasy with scientific descriptions of life is that they sound too mechanistic and meaningless. You can get the impression from strict Darwinists, like Richard Dawkins, that life just happened to evolve purely by chance.
This offends our religious sensibilities – it certainly offends mine. Since everything about life is purposeful, I don't see how the evolution of life could all be due to chance.
But that's a religious approach, not a scientific approach. The questions: “Why does life exist?” and “Why am I here?” - that sort of thing.
I like to think that I'm here for a purpose, that the universe begat life for a purpose, that there is a meaning to life. These are concerns about my subjective experience, about my participation in life.
Science is trying to be objective, trying to approach the ideal of objectivity - which it never quite reaches, because it is provisional and never final. Science is largely uncomfortable getting mixed up in “subjective experience” But that's OK because we've got religion and our religious propensities to deal with the subjective.
We can be uneasy about mechanistic explanations of evolution and human behaviour, but some people go to the extreme of denying the existence of evolution and global warming.
When people deny that life evolved they are taking Martin Luther's extreme position that the holy scriptures trumps every other human authority, including and especially Science.
The people who wrote the Bible were not scientists, they were not really interested in the question of causes and evidence for causes. They were interested in religious questions about who we are, why we are here, why do bad things happen to us, and what happens after we die.
The people who wrote the Bible were fundamentally human. Therefore they had axes to grind, they had personal and political reasons for writing the things that they did. No living person is immune from this, especially not people who claim to be inspired by God, as recent events testify over and over again.
Whoever wrote the book of Genesis was not writing a scientific description of how life originated. He or she, was trying to get people to observe the Sabbath.
God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. So we should observe one day in the seven day week as a holy day. That's what that story is all about. This writer had ulterior motives, as do all other writers.
When scientists ask questions such as: “How old is the human species?” and “Where and how did humans originate?” , the answer from Genesis, that God created the world in six days seems to be more a way of telling people to shut up and stop asking inconvenient questions, than a way of pushing inquiry forward.
The evidence is all around us that life is constantly changing, that life is incredibly old, that the Earth is incredibly old, and that we, as the human race, are not all that old. We should have more respect for our elders.
Science is really a way of asking questions and getting answers. Scientists asks how things happen and look at antecedent causes to find the answers. But answers in science are provisional – never final. For instance, Issac Newton's Theory of Gravity was supplanted two hundred years later by Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
That's why scientific knowledge is made up of theories, not immutable decrees. Scientific knowledge is ever growing and never completed. This is different from religion where if someone adds new revelations to established scripture, it often becomes a separate religion with separate adherents, like Mormonism.
Religion, is also a way of asking questions and getting answers but it asks the question “Why?” rather than “How?” because it is really about meaning and purpose in our lives.
We are the only religious species because we don't do well if we don't have a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. Science can also give one a sense of meaning and purpose but, because science is provisional – it doesn't give the same sense of security that religion does.
One of the reasons that science and religion conflict is because they are both about life, and life, as we have discovered, is about maintaining itself. Life is intrinsically purposive. Living creatures try to keep on living for as long as possible; They try and begat progeny; They behave purposefully.
Science has subtle problems with this because it doesn't like asking questions about purpose – that's too subjective. It would rather ask questions about physical causes.
One of the main reasons a lot of people are uneasy with scientific descriptions of life is that they sound too mechanistic and meaningless. You can get the impression from strict Darwinists, like Richard Dawkins, that life just happened to evolve purely by chance.
This offends our religious sensibilities – it certainly offends mine. Since everything about life is purposeful, I don't see how the evolution of life could all be due to chance.
But that's a religious approach, not a scientific approach. The questions: “Why does life exist?” and “Why am I here?” - that sort of thing.
I like to think that I'm here for a purpose, that the universe begat life for a purpose, that there is a meaning to life. These are concerns about my subjective experience, about my participation in life.
Science is trying to be objective, trying to approach the ideal of objectivity - which it never quite reaches, because it is provisional and never final. Science is largely uncomfortable getting mixed up in “subjective experience” But that's OK because we've got religion and our religious propensities to deal with the subjective.
We can be uneasy about mechanistic explanations of evolution and human behaviour, but some people go to the extreme of denying the existence of evolution and global warming.
When people deny that life evolved they are taking Martin Luther's extreme position that the holy scriptures trumps every other human authority, including and especially Science.
The people who wrote the Bible were not scientists, they were not really interested in the question of causes and evidence for causes. They were interested in religious questions about who we are, why we are here, why do bad things happen to us, and what happens after we die.
The people who wrote the Bible were fundamentally human. Therefore they had axes to grind, they had personal and political reasons for writing the things that they did. No living person is immune from this, especially not people who claim to be inspired by God, as recent events testify over and over again.
Whoever wrote the book of Genesis was not writing a scientific description of how life originated. He or she, was trying to get people to observe the Sabbath.
God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. So we should observe one day in the seven day week as a holy day. That's what that story is all about. This writer had ulterior motives, as do all other writers.
When scientists ask questions such as: “How old is the human species?” and “Where and how did humans originate?” , the answer from Genesis, that God created the world in six days seems to be more a way of telling people to shut up and stop asking inconvenient questions, than a way of pushing inquiry forward.
The evidence is all around us that life is constantly changing, that life is incredibly old, that the Earth is incredibly old, and that we, as the human race, are not all that old. We should have more respect for our elders.
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