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Why Nature is Quiet and the Built Environment is Noisy

Posted: Oct 15 2009 by Kim Kastens

The front page of yesterday's New York Times reports on a bill in Congress that would require a federal safety standard to "protect pedestrians from ultra-quiet cars," including plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles. The perceived danger is that pedestrians would not hear the quiet cars coming and would be more likely to be hit. One proposed solution is to require that the cars make an artificial noise, a "fake vroom for safety."

This story highlights a profound difference between the built environment and the natural environment: We expect the built environment to be noisy, and we expect nature to be quiet. More

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"How did Economists Get it So Wrong?"

Posted: Sep 7 2009 by Kim Kastens

In yesterday's New York Times magazine, Nobel prizewinner economist and columnist Paul Krugman asked "How Did Economists Get it So Wrong?" Earlier this year, in Mother Jones, journalist Dean Starkman asked "How could 9,000 business reporters blow the biggest story on their beat?" Starkman cited a multitude of intertwined factors, including failing financial health of the media industry with consequent newsroom layoffs, desire on the part of business journalists to keep on good terms with key sources inside corporations, and less investigative work by federal regulators. What with one distraction and another, almost all business journalists failed to anticipate that economic collapse was imminent or inevitable. Krugman cites a different multitude of intertwined factors, including mistaking an internally coherent line of reasoning for a correct line of reasoning, and academic infighting.

Both writers' arguments are clear and compelling as far as they go. But I think there is another reason: Most people who grew up to be today's economists and business journalists never studied Earth System Science. More

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Evolution selects for Energy Conservation

Posted: Jul 30 2009 by Kim Kastens

On the national scene, the powers that be are once again squabbling over the question of should the United States meet its future energy needs by finding new sources of energy or by energy conservation. Against this backdrop has been growing in my mind the realization that evolution selects for energy conservation.

You may think this is obvious. But it isn't how I was taught in school, and it isn't how natural selection is being presented to the public today. More

The Energy Budget of Thinking

Posted: Jul 14 2009 by Kim Kastens

At the spatial cognition workshop I mentioned in the previous post, we were asked to think big picture thoughts about what we most wanted to find out about spatial cognition. My big wish is to be able to find out the energy costs, literally the calorie expenditure, of various thought processes.

This notion is not totally far fetched. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the brain imaging technology that shows specific regions of the brain "lit up" when they are being used, is a measure of blood flow. Blood flows in order to bring oxygen. Oxygen comes in order to support respiration. And respiration occurs in order to generate energy. So at least conceptually, the increase in blood flow that occurs when a brain region is active could be a proxy for energy demand. More