At 12:13 PM +0000 9/1/02, olympus-digest wrote:
>Date: Sat, 31 Aug 2002 20:52:35 -0700
>From: dreammoose <dreammoose@xxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Re: [OM] Is the end of silver film anywhere in sight?
>
>John Malthus was able to make all the same mistakes and come to the same
>erroneous conclusions without the aid of computer or electronic calculator.
>'Malthusian' also sounds better than any descriptive adjective or phrase
>I can think of from 'Club of Rome'.
Exactly right. Actually, "hand calculator" can be twisted to include pencil
and paper, or counting on the fingers.
I don't recall the author, but there was an estimation paper published in the
late 1800s predicting that at the (then) current rates of growth, New York City
would soon be largely devoted to the care and feeding of horses (the primary
source of motive power then), and that the streets of NYC would all be five
feet deep in compacted manure. Only the arrival of the horseless carriage
averted this looming ecological disaster.
Joe Gwinn
>Joe Gwinn wrote:
>
> >The flaw was far deeper than that. The model assumed that all the natural
> >resources available were known, and were fixed with no substitution
> >possible, and further postulated an exponentially-growing rate of
> >consumption. You don't need a computer to predict the outcome -- you
> >quickly run out of something, and everthing falls down, with food riots and
> >revolutions. Doing this on a computer was purely for public relations. A
> >hand calculator is sufficient, but not as impressive.
> >
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