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How automatic transmission almost made sperm whales extinct

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Re: How automatic transmission almost made sperm whales extinct

#71

Post by [deleted] »

bdunbar wrote: post #69
borism wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, two guys all of us might or may not be related to... one have domesticated deer, offered good conditions for it to breed (protected it from other predators including hunters like himself) and then he and his children prospered off their cattle... the other one just hunted his food to extinction... guess who's children have survived to tell the story?

the other one just hunted his food to extinction All of mine - and your - ancestors have done just that. They found new sources for food or they didn't become our ancestors. I get what you are saying about hunting one's food to extinction, how it's a bad idea. Do you get what _I_ am talking about when I say that poachers don't _care_ about tomorrow, that they are do poor and desperate that today is all that matters?

[deleted]

Re: How automatic transmission almost made sperm whales extinct

#72

Post by VladRussian »

Lagged2Death wrote: post #50
dexen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me reverse that question for you: Can you name an ecosystem (as in, natural system) that doesn't have similar flaws? A predator predates on its prey as long as feasible. When prey is overhunted, some of the predator population dies out (negative feedback, if you will), or the predator adopts (behavior or genome) to use alternative food sources, or to better utilize the resource. Nothing new to see here, move alon…

When prey is overhunted, some of the predator population dies out (negative feedback, if you will) ... please don't make it sound unnatural. I think it's OK to characterize human interaction with the ecosystem as unnatural. Feedback loops like the one you mention work OK for cheetahs and gazelles. Too many cheetahs leads to too few gazelles leads to skinny cheetahs and eventually to fewer cheetahs, etc. But that happ…

> Americans all learned to drive stick. Impact on human population of the planet: none. Impact on the rapaciousness of future generations: questionable. Feedback loops (as opposed to straight-line cause and effect) closed or otherwise in evidence at all: zero.

Either less drivers on the road or more accidents ( i did drive stick back in the Russia and it is very different driving, esp. when all around you is also driving stick). It would also result in smaller cars with less powerful engines. It looks like a very powerful feedback loop for me.

>Demand for sperm whale oil had virtually nothing to do with the number of humans alive on the planet

Huh? who was driving automatic transmission cars?

>One might even say that what separates humans from animals, in the grand scheme of things, is our ability to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is in the thrall of, or even to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is.

a very Grand Statement of Dilusion. We'll see how we escape global warming.

Re: How automatic transmission almost made sperm whales extinct

#73

Post by stephth »

jamesbkel wrote: post #12
srean wrote: post #8

Sperm whales are incredibly interesting animals. Amongst their multiple records is their ability to dive deep, fast and long. They are the deepest diving warm blooded animal, they go close to 25 times deeper than their other equally famous and endangered cousin the blue whale. To give an idea of how deep they dive, here is an infographic http://i.imgur.com/ESp2j.jpg The jpg needs to be magnified to get the perspectiv…

A quick addition to the awesomeness of sperm whales: part of the reason they dive so deep/long is to hunt giant squid. While a sperm whale vs. giant squid battle has never been observed, there are multiple counts of sperm whales with scars that are from squids and in some cases almost certainly from giant squid.

Add to the list the story where a large sperm whale managed to sink a whaleship that was attacking multiple of its kin [1] (story which later inspired Moby-Dick).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship)#Whale_attack

Re: How automatic transmission almost made sperm whales extinct

#74

Post by mbell »

JonnieCache wrote: post #18
jamesbkel wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick addition to the awesomeness of sperm whales: part of the reason they dive so deep/long is to hunt giant squid. While a sperm whale vs. giant squid battle has never been observed, there are multiple counts of sperm whales with scars that are from squids and in some cases almost certainly from giant squid.

They find giant squid beaks inside sperm whale stomachs too.

Interestingly this, combined with scars is really the only way we know how big giant squid can get. The largest that has been actually observed or caught is really quite small in comparison to the sizes indicated from sperm whale data.

Re: How automatic transmission almost made sperm whales extinct

#75

Post by mseebach »

taejo wrote: post #64
microarchitect wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ask this question as if it were a rhetorical question. Is there any reason to believe that such an economic system that also combines much of "good" properties of capitalism cannot exist? Disciplines like game theory and mechanism design have made tremendous advances over the last few decades. Surely we can put these ideas to work in designing better political and economic systems.

For those who don't know, "mechanism design" is the extremely interesting field which is the "opposite" of game theory: instead of analysing how rational players act in a certain game, it asks what game will force rational players to act in the desired way.

So that just leaves the problem of figuring out what the desired way is.

Re: How automatic transmission almost made sperm whales extinct

#77

Post by microarchitect »

philwelch wrote: post #61
microarchitect wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ask this question as if it were a rhetorical question. Is there any reason to believe that such an economic system that also combines much of "good" properties of capitalism cannot exist? Disciplines like game theory and mechanism design have made tremendous advances over the last few decades. Surely we can put these ideas to work in designing better political and economic systems.

It wasn't a rhetorical question. Or rather, it remains a valid rhetorical question until it receives a satisfactory answer. Until that point, all supposed flaws with capitalism are really flaws with all industrial civilizations observed thus far. Tangentially, no real world economic system is "designed". They evolve out of competing interests. Even if you did design a system and implement it perfectly, it would have…

Even if you did design a system and implement it perfectly, it would have unintended consequences.

Sure, but what prevents you from then measuring these unintended consequences, plugging them back into your model and asking the question "how should my system change?". Is there any reason to believe we can never reach a stable fixed point?

We do things sort of like this in microprocessor design for instance - where we need to deal with "unintended consequences" like parasitic capacitances and resistances that we cannot fully model until the design is complete, but we need to account for while designing the system.

Re: How automatic transmission almost made sperm whales extinct

#78

Post by wisty »

aidenn0 wrote: post #41
blhack wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dive-master friend has told me that the bends isn't an issue if you're holding your breath. The bends is a result of the air mixture that you're breathing with a SCUBA. This is why freedivers can dive down to 100meters, and then come back up quickly without dieing.

This is not true. DCS has been found in cases of free-divers who perform repeated deep dives. The primary gas that causes DCS is nitrogen, which exists in large quantities in the air you are breathing now. The reason you don't often see DCS in free divers is that it takes time for the high-pressure nitrogen to dissolve in the blood and enter tissue.

My dad was a doctor on a small island, for a year. The islanders dived for sponges and pearls. They couldn't afford a decompression chamber, so if someone got DCS (after freediving too long) they dropped them off the side of the jetty with an old diving helmet, and a friend to keep them company, and pumped air down to them as they gradually re-ascended. Apparently it worked OK.

Re: How automatic transmission almost made sperm whales extinct

#79

Post by mbell »

mbell wrote: post #74
JonnieCache wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They find giant squid beaks inside sperm whale stomachs too.

Interestingly this, combined with scars is really the only way we know how big giant squid can get. The largest that has been actually observed or caught is really quite small in comparison to the sizes indicated from sperm whale data.

I should add that this topic made me take a second look at giant squid data (what can i say, i think they are really interesting creatures). It does appear that large giant squid have been found dead but never seen alive or caught. Those seen in a well documented manor or caught have been around 25ft in length max, while the expected maximum size is around 60ft with the largest dead specimen being about 59ft long, although that was in 1878 so i don't consider it overly reliable data.

Re: How automatic transmission almost made sperm whales extinct

#80

Post by microarchitect »

mseebach wrote: post #75
taejo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who don't know, "mechanism design" is the extremely interesting field which is the "opposite" of game theory: instead of analysing how rational players act in a certain game, it asks what game will force rational players to act in the desired way.

So that just leaves the problem of figuring out what the desired way is.

Rather than trying to design for how people should act, we can try to design in a manner that optimizes for measurable objectives that we can all agree on as good. A few objectives I can think of are "least number of people hungry", "most number of people reporting themselves as satisfied" etc.

I don't understand why we aren't doing this now. Our political mechanisms and were designed a few centuries ago by people who had the mathematical and scientific sophistication of a contemporary high school student. There is every reason to believe that we can do better if we put our best minds on this task.

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