Friday

I’m increasingly convinced that citing complexity in these things is mostly a thumb-sucking, multisyllabic way of saying something is hard. And yes, deepwater drilling is hard. But so was shallow water drilling. And so were the first high-pressure land wells. Throwing in complexity doesn’t really add much to the discussion. You would be better to talk about generational changes in related extraction technology, and whether that technology is up to the task of producing oil predictably and safely.

In a recent magazine article, Brian Eno announced "the death of uncool": "We're living in a stylistic tropics," he declared-- an evolutionary hot zone of subgenre crossbreeding and mutation in which no one fad can gain dominance.



The coastline paradox is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length. This results from the fractal-like properties of coastlines.[1][2] It was first observed by Lewis Fry Richardson.

More concretely, the length of the coastline depends on the method used to measure it. Since a landmass has features at all scales, from hundreds of kilometers in size to tiny fractions of a millimeter and below, there is no obvious limit to the size of the smallest feature that should not be measured around, and hence no single well-defined perimeter to the landmass. Various approximations exist when specific assumptions are made about minimum feature size.

For practical considerations, an appropriate choice of minimum feature size is on the order of the units being used to measure. If a coastline is measured in miles, then small variations much smaller than one mile are easily ignored. To measure the coastline in inches, tiny variations of the size of inches must be considered. However, at scales on the order of inches various arbitrary and non-fractal assumptions must be made, such as where an estuary joins the sea, or where in a broad tidal flat the coastline measurements ought to be taken.