Sob esses outros tópicos, que já apareceram pelo Roda, eu já falei sob alguns pontos que considero particularmente cruciais; entre eles estão o controle populacional e o entendimento do conceito de “escalas”. Por exemplo, quando vc dobra a população, o que acontece com o consumo de energia? Essa é uma questão típica sobre “escalas”: vc escala a população por um fator de 2 (i.e., vc multiplica a população por 2) e pergunta como é que o consumo de energia é escalado, ou seja, como o consumo de energia é afetado por essa mudança de escala.

Minha primeira a mais instintiva reação para abordar um problema desses é explicar e discorrer um pouco sobre questões como: Homogeneidade de Euler, Análise Dimensional, Remoção de Dimensões e Unidades, Teorema de Buckingham-π, Biologia de Populações, Leis de Escala em Biologia, Estrutura e Dinâmica de Redes, Sistemas Complexos, Evolução e Entropia, Sistemas Auto-Organizáveis, Auto-Organização, Seleção e Evolução, e assim por diante… a partir duma base mais sólida como essa, fica mais fácil de se alçar vôos mais altos, como o tratamento dos problemas de mudanças climáticas, da economia global (globalização, “vila global”, wikonomics), e assim por diante.

Porém, infelizmente, um post que seguisse essas linhas iria acabar num limbo, sem atingir o seu objetivo final, que é a atenção do leitor. A grande razão para isso tem nome e se chama “Analfabetismo Numérico“. Esse é um ponto extremamente importante, pela seguinte razão: Se vc não consegue apontar o Distrito Federal num mapa, ou se vc nunca ouviu falar de Manuel Bandeira, ou se vc não lê a Folha, etc, o tiro é rápido: vc é uma pessoa às bordas da cultura, quiçá até um analfabeto funcional. Por outro lado, se vc nunca ouviu falar na Função Exponencial, ninguém vai achar estranho — isso é a definição de analfabetismo numérico: nossa sociedade não parece achar nem errado nem ruim que a população (as pessoas, unidades constituintes da sociedade!) não tenha a menor compreensão dos fatos mais básicos sobre matemática ou ciência dum modo geral! (E olha que eu não estou falando do fato de que a Terra irradia toda a energia que recebe do Sol: ela recebe fótons na faixa do amarelo e irradia a mesma quantidade de fótons na faixa do infra-vermelho — claro, senão o planeta estaria esquentando continuamente! Portanto, o uso que nós fazemos da energia vinda do Sol é via uma transformação entrópica: nós recebemos energia com um baixíssimo grau de entropia e irradiamos essa mesma energia com um alto grau de entropia — isso é o mais eficiente que se pode fazer! Mas não é disso que eu estou falando… nós estamos tratando, aqui, de conceitos bem mais simples do que esse, como, por exemplo, o fato de que para biocombustíveis serem viáveis é preciso se fazer uma continha simples, do montante de energia que é usado pra produzí-los, menos o montante de energia que eles produzem: quantas vezes se vê por aí esse “balanço energético”?!)

Nos dias de hoje, isso é completa e absolutamente chocante, um absurdo sem tamanhos! Por exemplo: se a população duma cidade dobra mas o número de vereadores e deputados continua o mesmo… a população dessa cidade passou a ter apenas metade da representatividade que tinha anteriormente! Se a população mundial aumenta de modo constante mas os recursos energéticos do planeta são finitos, é inevitável que o desenvolvimento não pode ser sustentável — isso é o mesmo que comprar uma passagem no Titanic: vc pode ir de primeira-classe, ou pode ir no porão do navio, mas o resultado final é o mesmo.

Portanto, falar em desenvolvimento sustentável sem se fazer uma discussão crítica e honesta do controle populacional é, no mínimo, desonestidade intelectual!

Mas, pra não tornar esse post algo que as pessoas achem “seco”, “árido”, ou simplesmente chato e “acadêmico”, eu vou deixar uns vídeos excelentes, que tratam essa questão dum modo leve porém cuidadoso, com o carinho que elas merecem.

• O primeiro deles é uma coleção de 8 vídeos, que capturam uma palestra dada pelo Professor Albert A. Bartlett, chamada “Population, Arithmetic, and Energy“.
• O segundo, entitulado “How it all ends“, é um conjunto de 45 vídeos, um projeto do Professor Greg Craven para mostrar como é possível se avaliar o debate atual sobre as mudanças climáticas de modo racional e científico, mostrando claramente como é que se pode tirar conclusões científicas, sólidas e robustas, independentemente do [aparente] debate que alguns insistem em dizer que existe.

Eu espero que vcs se divirtam e passem a apreciar a profundidade de todas essas questões em jogo — por favor, coloquem seus comentários no Roda.

So, without further ado…

Science:

• The J/Ψ particle original papers
• Harrison’s Geometric Calculus
• Electric-Magnetic-Duality and Hodge Duality Extended to Differental Cocycles
• Convenient Categories of Smooth Spaces
• Gravity and its Mysteries: Some Thoughts and Speculations
• Quantum mechanics and umbral calculus
• Path integration and perturbation theory with complex Euclidean actions
• HIM Trimester Geometry and Physics, Week 1
• String theory and the crisis of particle physics II
• Uses of Chern-Simons actions
• Knots as possible excitations of the quantum Yang-Mills fields
• Angular Operators Violating the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
• Comment on “’t Hooft vertices, partial quenching, and rooted staggered QCD”
• E₈ Quillen Superconnection
• 285G, Lecture 10: Variation of L-geodesics, and monotonicity of Perelman reduced volume, 285G, Lecture 11: κ-noncollapsing via Perelman reduced volume, 285G, Lecture 12: High curvature regions of Ricci flow and κ-solutions
• A string field theory based on causal dynamical triangulations
• The Eastwood-Singer gauge in Einstein spaces
• How quantum is the big bang?
• Black holes in loop quantum gravity: the complete space-time
• The QED beta-function from global solutions to Dyson-Schwinger equations
• Quantum Knots and Mosaics
• Heisenberg algebra, umbral calculus and orthogonal polynomials
• Physical state condition in quantum general relativity as a consequence of BRST symmetry
• Sidney Richard Coleman
• Structures of Scientific Collaboration
• String Theory and M-Theory: A Modern Introduction
• Science without borders
• Theorems Into Coffee, Theorems Into Coffee II
• Quantum Mechanics in Your Face

General:

• Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live
• ‘De quem é a Amazônia, afinal’, pergunta ‘NY Times’, Análise: Três razões por que a Amazônia merece atenção, The Food Crisis and Amazon Deforestation
• Written in the skies: why quantum mechanics might be wrong
• Hauser and Morris on Science and Morality
• Brasileiro assume presidência da Federação Mundial de Saúde Pública
• Brazil facts of the day
• Na Amazônia está em jogo o futuro do Brasil, diz Mangabeira, Falta incentivo para preservar Amazônia, diz príncipe Charles, Amazon challenge
• Woman power at the LHC
• Bye Matlab, hello Python, thanks Sage
• Open science
• Scientists get training to run for public office, Opinion: Scientists need to toughen up and get involved in politics
• International workshop on science writing and broadcasting
• How the NSA took Linux to the next level
• The most extraordinary mathematician of the 20th century celebrated his 80th birthday, crazy and alone
• Gigante da América do Sul está acordando, diz jornal
• Patent Attorney On Why We Need To Rethink Intellectual Property
• The science behind the sitcom The Big Bang Theory
• The Tao of programming
• The Cost of Smarts
• In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?
• Brazil, India’s Citizens Are Greenest, Survey Finds
• git vs bzr vs hg: Distributed Version Control Systems: A Not-So-Quick Guide Through
• Grau de investimento do Brasil não é certificado de desenvolvimento, diz ‘FT’
• Wishing for an African Einstein
• The Roots of the Crisis
• Top 10 myths about the Ancient Romans
• OpenSolaris Indiana Released
• Brazil, Free Software and “Castrated Windows”
• Science Documentaries for Youngsters?
• We Need More Novels about Real Scientists

It’s been quite sometime since i last had a chance to put some content here on the blog, nor have i had time to expand on the interesting comments that have appeared and so on… time has been short lately.

In some sense, this is good news: research has really taken the best of me (as opposed to, e.g., some of the network management tasks that have plagued me in the not-so-distant-past ) — last week i gave a talk at Syracuse, and if all goes well, maybe i’ll be able to talk a bit about it here.

Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.
— The Wizard of Oz

Scientific:

• Geometric Quantization of Algebraic Reduction
• Motivic renormalization and singularities
• Accelerator Disaster Scenarios, the Unabomber, and Scientific Risks
• Success is in the bank
• The Bohr paradox
• Passing of a legend, John Wheeler 1911-2008, John Archibald Wheeler 1911-2008
• Amazing Collection of Physics Video Lectures (Quantum Physics/Mechanics, Field Theory, Applied Group Theory, General Relativity. Cosmology, and others)
• Generalized Berezin quantization, Bergman metrics and fuzzy Laplacians
• Cosmological perturbation theory near de Sitter spacetime
• Effective Field Theory for Inflation
• The saga of rooted staggered quarks
• Mixed Hodge Structures and Renormalization in Physics
• What really goes on at the Large Hadron Collider: Brian Cox on TED
• Is there a crisis brewing in the reporting of science in the media?
• Charges and Twisted Bundles, IV: Anomaly Canellation
• Janus Configurations, Chern-Simons Couplings, And The Theta-Angle in N=4 Super Yang-Mills Theory
• Supersymmetric Boundary Conditions in N=4 Super Yang-Mills Theory
• A note on Infraparticles and Unparticles
• Dangerous Liouville Wave — exactly marginal but non-conformal deformation
• Exact Statistics of Chaotic Dynamical Systems
• Introduction to Quantum Mechanics
• Quantum Geometry and Quantum Gravity
• Is Open Access Science the Future?
• Charges and Twisted Bundles, III: Anomalies
• Self-organized criticality in quantum gravity
• Towards A No-Loophole Bell-Type Experiment?
• 285G, Lecture 7: Rescaling of Ricci flows and kappa-noncollapsing
• A draft version of the blog book
• 285G, Lecture 6: Finite time extinction of the third homotopy group, II
• Multimedia and the Journal of Number Theory
• Comparative Smootheology, II
• After graduation, fewer foreign PhD holders remain in US
• RIP Ed Lorenz
• 285G, Lecture 5: Finite time extinction of the third homotopy group, I
• CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses
• Differential Forms and the Canonical Bundle
• This is what the Higgs boson looks like, Can the Tevatron find the Higgs?
• Big bang e grande explosão: mal entendidos em Física vol. I
• Physicists On Tape
• Rigid Surface Operators
• On the origin of the particles in black hole evaporation
• 285G, Lecture 4: Finite time extinction of the second homotopy group
• Sigma-Models and Nonabelian Differential Cohomology
• World Science Festival 2008
• Critical gravitational collapse: towards a holographic understanding of the Regge region
• Scales of science
• Locally Free Sheaves and Vector Bundles
• Non-Borel summable Phiˆ4 theory in zero dimension: A toy model for testing numerical and analytical methods
• Black hole thermodynamics from simulations of lattice Yang-Mills theory
• Quantum Fields on the Groenewold-Moyal Plane
• Particle Identifications from Symmetries of Braided Ribbon Network Invariants
• Lectures on Scattering Amplitudes via AdS/CFT
• A Pointless Model for the Continuum as the Foundation for Quantum Gravity
• Formalism Locality in Quantum Theory and Quantum Gravity
• A note on the quantum of time
• Building an AdS/CFT superconductor
• A locally finite model for gravity
• A Matrix Model for 2D Quantum Gravity defined by Causal Dynamical Triangulations
• The New Math
• Sheaves of Modules
• This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 263)
• Stony Brook Dialogues in Mathematics and Physics
• Quantum foam and topological strings
• April Fool
• 285G, Lecture 2: The Ricci flow approach to the Poincaré conjecture
• This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 262)
• 285G, Lecture 1: Flows on Riemannian manifolds
• From Pure Spinor Geometry to Quantum Physics: A Mathematical Way
• Ettore Majorana and his heritage seventy years later
• What Has Happened So Far
• Symmetry and Integrability of Classical Field Equations
• Topological higher gauge theory: From BF to BFCG theory
• Is Quantum Gravity Necessary?
• Magnetic Charge Lattices, Moduli Spaces and Fusion Rules
• Instantons beyond topological theory II
• Sidney Coleman QFT Video Recordings
• Anatomy of a Black Hole
• Nonabelian Differential Cohomology in Street’s Descent Theory
• Security is Mathematics
• Matrix universality of gauge and gravitational dynamics
• Equivariant symplectic geometry of gauge fixing in Yang–Mills theory
• This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 261)
• `What is a Thing?’: Topos Theory in the Foundations of Physics
• Geometry of the Standard Model
• IAS Conference Question Dump
• 18 Billion Suns : Biggest Black Hole in Universe Discovered
• The 50 Topcited papers from SPIRES in 2007

General Interest:

• Brasil tem perdido grandes talentos em matemática, alerta presidente da SBPC
• Brasil, nação evanescente?, artigo de Carlos Lessa
• Pistol Pete Maravich & the Invention of Showtime Basketball
• Serra da Cangalha Crater, Brazil
• News: Politically Correct: Why Great (and Not So Great) Minds Think Alike
• power discussion
• Pleasing Google’s Tech-Savvy Staff
• ‘Economist’ pergunta por que crescimento do Brasil fica atrás da Argentina
• 20 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex
• 10 Great Scenes from TV and Film Told Using Only Typography
• Like bash.org for bash shell-fu Command line tips and tricks
• The Secret to Happiness? Giving
• Larry Lessig’s Open Congress
• From GNOME to KDE and Back Again
• Biggest Unix Cheat Sheet
• Anatomy of a Black Hole
• Óleo de bacalhau reduz uso de analgésicos em casos de artrite, diz estudo
• Fracassado leilão da Cesp foi em ‘hora infeliz’, diz FT
• Movitz: an x86 Common Lisp OS
• Países ricos incentivam imigração de ‘alto nível’
• Membros da comunidade científica comunicam ao CNPq sua preocupação com o destino do comitê de divulgação científica
• I’m not against Windows; Unix just works better
• Search with privacy: What a concept
• Cresce número de imigrantes em busca do ‘sonho brasileiro’
• Para empresário boliviano, Brasil é ‘terra de oportunidades’
• C++ is a language strongly optimized for liars and people who go by guesswork and ignorance
• Off-topic
• Tecnologia para muitos, artigo de Miguel Jorge, Sergio Rezende e Roberto Mangabeira Unger
• Infraestrutura deficiente será desafio para nova empresa aérea, diz ‘Wall Street Journal’
• Revolution OS — Documentary of Linux
• Excesso de carros = engarrafamento
• Learn Python in 10 minutes
• Xoopit Will Turn Your Inbox Into a Social Network
• Science: monkeys were the first doctors
• Emigração para os EUA perde ‘apelo’ para brasileiros, diz ‘FT’
• Linux: Too Much of a Good Thing?
• Keith Richards
• The 5 Most Ridiculous Lies You Were Taught In History Class
• Bird propõe ‘new deal’ alimentar com ajuda do Brasil
• Word of the Day: Zeitgeist
• Getting it on for science
• Everything should be code
• Asking Big Questions about the universe: Stephen Hawking on TED
• Memoize: a Python replacement for Make
• Waf: A portable Make and Autotools replacement in Python (15x faster than Scons, 3x faster than Autotools)
• Einstein can dunk
• Build a quad-core, 8-gig server for $900
• Soros predicts end of the road for cheap and easy borrowing
• Beautiful Handwriting, Lettering and Calligraphy
• Reader Piqued By French Mutilations
• The Thing About Git
• Five Words You Can Cut
• The Moral Authority Behind Intervention: Examining Sergio Vieira de Mello
• Penn and Teller subverting the old ‘pull an animal out of the hat’ trick by instead producing thousands of bees, including hundreds while ripping apart a stuffed rabbit — take that, kids
• Masters of the World — England > America > China?
• Physicists On Tape
• Richard Stallman Interview: How a hacker became a freedom fighter
• Tip #195: Bash
• Tip #192: Print a random shell-fu tip
• Soros describes the $45 trillion market in credit swaps (i.e. derivatives) as a “Sword of Damocles”
• Knuth on teaching calculus
• Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss Discuss Science, Science Education, Religion, Life, the Universe and Everything
• Open-source economics: Yochai Benkler on TED
• Brazil surprises markets with rate hike
• Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon by John Hemming
• Tip #216: Create a Terminal Calculator
• Grou.ps: All Your Collaboration Tools In One Place
• The Myth of the 30-Minute Meal
• 52 Million Brazilian Mini-Penguinistas
• Your genes are not your fate: Dean Ornish on TED
• 30 Adobe Acrobat Alternatives
• The Financial Crisis: An Interview with George Soros
• Princeton scientists discover exotic quantum state of matter
• Tip #232: Deleting difficult filenames
• KDE Desktops For 52 Million Students In Brazil
• Leaps of Faith
• Fruit flies trade lifespan for brain power
• Ten (mostly) false ideas about emacs
• How fast are you?
• Is Mathematics Discovered Or Invented?
• Donald Knuth Rips On Unit Tests and More
• Concrete Examples Don’t Help Students Learn Math
• Patron Saint of Computing on Free Software
• Why you aren’t Donald Knuth
• What Programming Languages Should You Know? (Less Fluff, More Stuff)
• The English language is not equipped for metric spaces
• An Interview with Brian Greene on the World Science Festival
• Bunch of Computing Video Lecture Courses (C, XML & Java, Algorithms, Functional Programming, and others)
• Super addictive magnet toy. The Neo Cube
• Cray, Intel To Partner On Hybrid Supercomputer
• 50 Open Source Resources for Writers
• The ABCs of securing your wireless network
• Lawrence Krauss & Natalie Jeremijenko on the Politics of Knowledge
• Economia brasileira vive ‘tempos de Carnaval’, diz jornal
• Larry Page on how to change the world
• Argentina vê de longe ‘golaço’ do Brasil na economia, diz jornal
• Sage: Open Source Mathematics Software: Can There be a Viable Free Open Source Alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab?
• Windows in Brazil Costs 20% of Per Capita Business Income
• Denzel Washington says inner-city schoolkids have to be reminded that scientists are more important than entertainers

That’s all folks!

[]’s.

Ultimate geekdom sorcery!

[]’s.

If you’ve done six impossible things before breakfast, why not round it off with dinner at Milliway’s, the restaurant at the end of the universe?
— Douglas Adams, “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”

• First coca find in Brazil Amazon
• MCT completa 23 anos de existência
• MCT cria Conselho Científico Consultivo sobre Assuntos de Cooperação Internacional
• Nova ação do CNPq vai investir R$ 36 milhões em jovens doutores
• From BFS to ZFS: past, present, and future of file systems
• Unscientific
• A Brazilian in Goa

But, for my own part, it was Greek to me.
— William Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar”

• Brazil exchanges in global party mood
• Brazil moves to top of emerging market index
• BRAZIL’S ECONOMY: The biggest emerging market, sort of
• BETTING THE FAZENDA: A different kind of risk-taking
• US diplomats ‘should pay more attention to science’
• Indian government boosts science spending
• The Copyright Emperor Has No Clothes
• Creators of The Wire: “If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented.”
• The unlikeliest gangbanger
• Who’s Your City?
• Following Singapore’s Lead
• Creative collaboration: ideals and reality
• Mr. Gates Goes to Washington
• 11 Greatest Basketball Commercials Ever Made
• After a classic ‘rm -rf ~’ on ext3, Carlo Wood succeeded in recovering most of his data. Here’s how.
• Security guide to customs-proofing your laptop
• The University, the Next Multinational Corporation
• Brasil ‘se tornou ator econômico de peso’, diz ‘The Guardian’: Inside Brazil
• March 14: PI DAY! But what is Pi?…watch the first minute, trust me., Happy Pi Day!, A non-trivial holiday
• Debian Cluster Replaces Supercomputer For Weather Forecasting
• Panel Finds Faults in America’s Math System

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
— Fred Brooks

• Harvard podcast: Computer Science E-1: Understanding Computers and the Internet
• SP terá 3ª área metropolitana mais populosa do mundo em 2010, diz ONU
• Criminalidade está diminuindo no Brasil, destaca jornal dos EUA: Mayor in Brazil transforms ‘deadliest’ town: It has fallen from sixth to 298th on the country’s Violence Map
• Demanda doméstica alimenta crescimento do Brasil, diz ‘FT’: Domestic demand fuels Brazil’s growth — Brazil cracks down on Amazon loggers, Bovespa and BM&F in merger talks, Brazil’s secrets of big oil discoveries stolen, Higher ore prices bolster Vale bid for Xstrata, Byzantine taxes sap Brazil’s business spirit, Brazil’s progress, Business as usual in Brazilian credit markets
• Why isn’t University free?, Criticism is overrated
• The Pintadas Project
• Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits