Project Pete
The following are a set of links to papers/essays which I've enjoyed:
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1. Exposing Life's Limits with Dimensionless Numbers, Steven Vogel, Physics Today
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Steven Vogel was a really interesting dynamicist who also wrote an excellent book called Cat's Paws and Catapaults which compares and contrasts naturally evolved systems to engineered ones. This paper was the first thing I'd read of Steven's work and really liked his project of trying to distill a range of interesting natural phenomena (like insects walking on water, sap getting up trees, and efficient bird flight) into simple dimensionless parameters (like, Reynolds, Froude etc).
2. Dream Power, Erik Hoel, New Scientist
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This paper presents the idea of the Overfitting Brain Hypothesis (OBH) as an explanation as to why we dream during sleep. It suggests that dreams add random noise to our memories to allow our brains to generalise from real world experience more effectively. The same challenge is encountered in data-science/AI problems where a neural network or interpolant function 'overfits' a limited dataset which means that the model performs badly when encountering new data. Erik extends this idea to say that perhaps our lived experiences are too limited and we need to dream in order to generalise what we learn to the random things that come up from time to time.
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3. Simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics
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One of the early papers which first captured the idea of chaotic behaviour from seemingly simple systems. Further work throughout the later 70s and 80s built on these with theory that tied together fractals (Mandlebrot) and the bifurcations between order and chaos (Feigenbaum). This was covered really nicely in a book called 'Chaos' by James Gleick, and there's also an awesome video by Veritasium which basically covers the key things in Chaos within 20 minutes!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovJcsL7vyrk
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4. Simply Mistaken, Steven Salter, Edinburgh University
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This paper (which was originally a New Scientist article from the 70s), really challenges the idea that simple solutions are the best by pointing out how complex modern technology has become. When we talk about simplicity, Salter argues, usually we are referring to the human interface to a technology which is becoming more simple. The technology facilitating this interface however is getting much more complex. Salter wrote this with machine tools, cameras and bicycles from the 70s in mind, but I think it is prescient for today's world of touchscreens, one-click shopping and IOT devices like Alexa/Siri.
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I'm a massive hypocrite when it comes to the environment and have a weakness for BBQ's meat and blue cheese coated burgers. However, I'm pretty impressed by the improvements in meat substitutes from the likes of beyond meat etc and have often wondered how the world might look if we moved away from heavily processed/farmed meat. I came across this recent paper which is a very comprehensive analysis of the environmental impacts of different types of food in terms of CO2 emissions, land use and water impacts. It's quite astounding that if we moved away from intensively reared animals to vegetarian/vegan diets we could more than half the amount of land used for agriculture whilst the other half could be turned to managed wilderness, forests grasslands etc. I think there's an interesting argument to continue eating small amounts of meat to manage the populations of apex predators and grazing animals which are helping to manage the ecosystem but this would be a massive reduction compared to typical consumption levels today!
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6. Doubt and Uncertainty are Great Virtues, James Marriot
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A really interesting antidote to all the hysterical noise there is in the news about things - also a sobering check on my own tendency at times to be a bit dogmatic with opinions that are often pretty unsubstantiated!
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