"Like multiplication is a shortcut for addition & exponents are a shortcut for multiplication, Napier sought the next computational shortcut: a shortcut for exponents.
The basic idea of what logarithms were to achieve is straightforward: to replace the wearisome task of multiplying two numbers by the simpler task of adding together two other numbers...."
From here
"Extinction events are not especially rare in geological time. They have occurred in randomly varying magnitude throughout the history of life. Those that are truly apocalyptic, however, have occreed at only about hundred-million-year intervals. There have been five such peaks of destruction of which we have record, the latest being Chicxulub. Earth required roughly ten million years to recover from each. This is the reason that the peak of destruction that humanity has initiated is often called the Sixth Extinction."
From Half-Earth (Edward O. Wilson)
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Trying to see/unedited notes:
//The age, of flowering of humanity, yet that flowering has degraded the biosphere for not just rest of life forms, but humanity itself. There are a couple of nuances to this - one, the population of humanity in the world is unsustainable (for the way we live or the way of growth and consumption), but that is not for anyone to say. Each human that walks the earth belongs to this biosphere. It (the population) is going to peak somewhere in this century, perhaps then, then it would begin to change. These changes take years and years to reflect in each new generation's outlook on the world. To expect something quickly is sort of delusional. It will take its time for changing the outlook from 'master' to 'steward'.
The idea is once that change begins to flow through humanity, many problems of today will either resolve or find their solution. But the other nuance is this large population is not the same throughout the world. Many portions of it are fighting for survival, existence before even reaching a decent existence. This aspect of the biosphere is not noted as one of the key things, if at all. As in, this is the biosphere we are born in, some of us are well off enough to think about it, some of us are still struggling to find fresh water to drink and that is life.
The question requires respect and dignity for the whole of humanity, whatever numbers we are and whatever circumstances we live in. Being human, that becomes primary. So perhaps the first urgent requirements stay ensuring food, water, health to as many people as possible, and that somehow so far is solved through growth. As to consumption, that is the way of market economy and the emptiness of our lives, and that too is the outcome of the same growth that sustains the most basic requirements. It is not a matter of one person or a small group of persons to decide, it is a wave a massive wave on which we are carried, we can create small eddies of reversal, but the wave is humanity, and its primary concerns are survival.
And that is the reason I take heart in the fact, that in 10 million years perhaps earth can restore itself to new life, to new forms of being. This time of ours becomes the small, really small interval of a beautiful flowering yet a crumbling of the entire biosphere.
Bleak thoughts at some level but hopeful too. We begin from here.
// He suggests half -Earth. Yet to read through the book.
// It is my internal debate. Between calling it bleak and 'doing' something about it, or living like one of nature's own and letting nature take care of things. The nuances of the situation and the slow changes to human generational minds. It is not about one person's choices, the question is how does one consider and change humanity's choices. When at some level it is not even a choice, but a matter of survival. One of the difficult things to understand or wrap the head around is that we are the biosphere as well. As in we are not separate from it. We are a kind of flower in Earth's myriad flowering, which, the human flower seems to have worsened the conditions for other life forms as well as for itself. Now the system readjusts, evolves, is my sense of a living system. There are a number of us, for whom the imperative is survival first. Isn't it life blossoming through every instance fighting for existence. And then the appreciation slowly awakens that we are not surviving by ourselves, but as a biosphere. But there is a gap between those two perceptions. The imperative of survival and the slow dawning of appreciation of a need of a healthy biosphere. Of the role of steward of a living system rather than resource exploiter.
// The important thing to appreciate to make good decisions is that it is humanity's imperative rather than a human being's. Because a lot of energy is spent and the momentum is lost in personal guilt and small decisions about living choices. Or a lot of virtuous feeling is randomly begotten from choices. What I wish to separate is human decision from humanity's decision. Or not even humanity's decision but the way to see the problem or situation afresh. There is no static world. There is no static biosphere. I have an aversion to guilt-ridden religions or to guilt-ridden random thinking...where the human thinks it is larger than what it is. A human is part of a system. A system is adjusted through key levers. Not through its outcome. Or a paradigm shifting thinking needs to begin.
One of it is appreciating that what we have done, or humanity is still a new kid on the block. Once humanity's bubble is proportionate....like in any new thing, there is a period of adjustment. In epochs or times of earth's biosphere, humanity is still going through its ups and downs of adjusting. We seem to find this generation and ourselves in the bottom of a difficult period, perhaps things are yet to feel the full impact, but by then perhaps there'll be less of us. What I am trying to say is that there is perhaps an adjustment period. (And then there is the Earth's recuperation period of millions of years.)
This is the thing - the number of humans has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 1.6 billion in 1900 to 8.3 billion today. The world is adjusting to it. Nothing we do is as impactful as just perhaps what humanity will do itself, reach its peak in this century...then a natural birth rate decline. A system adjusts itself. Is something for us humans to understand - perhaps one thing that goes towards steward thinking rather than still continuing as masters trying to fix the biosphere.
And after that, for governments to decide, renewable power systems, recycling, just simple principles of leaving the source better than what you withdraw from it. Of what that has been done, especially the oil and the coal and the fossil fuel, there is no putting it back except for time and the millions of years to do its work. But accepting, that this is the world today. And knowing that after us too the world will restore itself. Millions of years. Perhaps the recuperation would be longer, what with plastics strewn everywhere on the planet.
A longish detour of trying to fathom and understand. And to see clearly. Our role as well as our place in the system. Humanity is Earth. Guilt and that approach is futile, a sort of demeaning. Humans have done what they know best - survive. And then they have let consumption rule the roost. Which is a need and greed to have more, be more, do more. Now how does one go against the basic nature...how does one evolve systems which appreciates the underlying's nature. Because going against nature requires energy. And if high impact levers can be found in a system which allow nature to flow its course, they are our best bet.
So after government decision points, and the basic tenet of leave the source better than you found it, it is about culture. Our culture of consumption needs to change. Our definitions of prosperity needs to change. One needs food, water, security, good health. And many on the planet struggle towards it, either through scarcity, and some through having too much.
How does that change?
Meanwhile, the impact is felt everywhere, from changing weather, to rising tides. To fewer species to plastics everywhere.
Part of me has faith in the Earth to take care of itself. Our small voices are meant to soothe or annoy ourselves. Apart from our goings on, Earth at its core knows, life knows how to heal itself.
Part of me believes that if we charge consumption for more than resource cost, for the cost of leaving the source cleaner than found, it will automatically adjust, the market rules that way. It is on the govt, and indirectly on us to choose so, to pay for the cost of cleaning, and not just extracting. That is perhaps a lever, which can impact or align consumption itself. As in not changing the need and greed, but just pricing it correctly.
What else? Where else?
"Our modern conception of genius makes creativity synonymous with originality. In matters artistic, there is no more severe accusation than that of plagiarism. Students are therefore surprised when you share these two passages. They are scandalized that Shakespeare did not make up his own story. The barge and all its accoutrements, the apparel of Cleopatra herself, her gorgeous attendants, the common people running out of the city to gaze upon the exotic queen, imperial Antony left alone on his throne in the market place: each successive detail is lifted straight from the source.But to the Elizabethans, this prodcedure would have been admirable, not reprehensible. For them, there was no higher mark of artistic excellence than what they called the 'lively turning' of familiar material. This was the art of copiousness which they were taught in school: take a piece of received wisdom (a proverb, a phrase, a historical incident, a story out of ancient myth), 'turn' it on the anvil of your inventiveness and you will give it new life."
"In terms of shape, the poem is a collage, somewhat disparate pieces assembled to create in readers the kind of despair that infected much of Western Europe after the Great War. England and America (among other countries) had fed hordes of its young men into that conflict, which wasn't unusual for a war. But the First World War also delivered the blindest, most efficient machine for carnage to date. Sure the Chinese had passed gunpowder along to Marco Polo, and there'd been the remoteness of catapults and cannon fire for centuries, but the First War's air battles and chemical weaponry broadened the bloodbath's scope. Airplanes could fly over and dismantle troops where they stood. Mustard gas could creep across the fields into trenches to scorch lung tissue and other soft membranes. Such slaughter could also now be captured efficiently on film and shipped home. (The first box camera from George Eastman in 1888 had seen myriad improvements by 1914.) Wireless communication also made accurate reportage of distant campaigns transmittable.
...
This wholesale motorized murder was part and parcel of the increasingly mechanized world that had been assembling since the first cotton gins and mills marked the Industrial Revolution. The notion of technological progress heaped lifestyle changes on the Western world more radical, perhaps, than written history ever recorded. Lightbulbs banished night, and instruments of velocity like steamships and airplanes were shrinking the Earth's distances. The first subways opened in London in 1890 to whisk human beings through underground chasms in herds. As cars began to replace buggies, cities ceased to be designed around human traffic and began to be built to accomodate vehicles, often eradicating pedestrian traffic in the process. Buildings ceased to approach human scale and scraped the heavens. You need only compare modern-day Los Angeles with Paris to grasp how those looming, boxlike structures combined with newfound bustle and clanking whatnots to isolate and estrange various urban citizenries."
- Mary Karr on Eliot's The Wasteland.
(To compare, perhaps, one can consider the war in War & Peace. How different was the outlook, scope and means of fighting the battles. The army slowly progressing through unending snow towards a futile-seeming end, is a very different war from the wars, battles and skirmishes of the world since the dawn of twentieth century.)
"...the center of reality is wherever one happens to be, and its circumference is whatever one's imagination can make sense of." - Northrop Frye, quoted by Margaret Atwood in Negotiating with the Dead, A Writer on Writing.
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// separately, this thought, that one perhaps writes to make sense of the world.
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In the same book, she shares her early influences (or her group's early influences). Following:
