Cloudy With a Chance of War | Hacker News Reader

Cloudy With a Chance of War

nautil.us

81 pointslingben20 comments

Well that was fascinating, and not at all what I expected from the title. The article is about the English physicist and mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson:

Richardson decided to do a “hindcast,” so his results could be compared with real weather on a target date in the past. He chose the weather over Central Europe on May 20, 1910—a date for which Bjerknes had already published a trove of data about temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and wind speed.

Richardson created a map of the atmosphere over the region, split into 25 equal-sized cells with sides of about 125 miles. Every block was further divided into five layers with about the same mass of air in each layer. (Because atmospheric density decreases with altitude, these layers were divided at heights of 2, 4, 7, and 12 kilometers above the ground.)

Richardson was an early interest and influence to me. For those so inclined and with a taste for a little more on Richardsons work and related areas I heartily recommend:

TH Körner "Pleasures of Counting" and Manfred Schroeder "Fractals, Chaos & Power Laws"

Wonderful mental fodder for kids and non-mathematical adults

I have to wonder - did Richardson's work influence Isaac Asimov at any point? The concept of diffusion applied to sociology sounds quite a lot like the basis of Foundation. Hell, the very idea that you could mathematically predict how nations in aggregate behave does sound like basis for psychohistory.

Asimov was a chemist, so he would have known diffusion by heart.

The diffusion of ideas is difficult to track and rarely do ideas have unique sources. So Asimov may have been influenced by Richardson as well as others, or come to similar conclusions on his own. John von Neuman believed that automated computation would allow something like Asimov's psychohistory, and there were other people thinking along similar lines.

In the modern world (shameless plug) my own novel deals with the problem of war from the point of view of computational biology (although, like Richardson, I am a physicist): http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/...

One of the internal debates I had while writing it was whether to reference Asimov, but eventually decided not to, as the route by which I'd arrived at the ideas in the book had nothing to do with reading Foundation at the age of 13 many years ago (at least not so far as I could tell.)

If I have understood correctly, the original Foundation (first 4+1 short stories) were themselves inspired by a mammoth tome, The Rise and Fall of Roman Empire.

I would love to know where the idea of mathematically calculable sociological movements came from. (History playing itself out in cycles was certainly not a new idea.) I do know that the stories have inspired a number of economists, and the modern age, big-data driven behavioural modeling does have a certain familiar vibe to it...

I would love to know also. I believe (gut, hunch, intuition) that it's an idea who's time has come of age. All we need are the right models, the right models are the hard part when it comes to society because you have to model the Earth's resources and geography and whatnot (society's environment) as well as take into consideration that the individual actors in society are autonomous sentient beings.

I'd like to know who besides Azimov talked about this in the past.

I think it would be fascinating to be able to predict the chance of political or economic instability or what have you.

A lot of people are resistant to this idea because they feel humans are either too special or too complex to model in aggregate, or at least their (our I mean, giving my robot self away there) interactions are.

From the article:

> A pilot flying through eddies too small to bump his plane around will not notice them—the effect of all the tiny eddies is averaged out into a general sense that the ride is smooth. On the other hand, neither will he notice an enormous eddy that enfolds the entire plane, any more than a fish would notice the water in which it swims.

I'm pretty sure that an airplane pilot would notice a wind blowing him off course. And I see that idea "fish can't notice water because they're in it" around all the time, but it's never made any sense to me. We move through and breathe the air just like fish do the water. Far from lacking the concept of air entirely, "air" was one of the classical elements. People notice when they get caught in strong winds. They even notice soft winds. What are we supposed to understand from this bizarre metaphorical assertion?

The relativity of position within motion i guess?

Well an example would be if the aircraft is sinking but the pilot is experiencing the sensations of gaining altitude because he feels the lift in the seat, he sees the angle of the wing against the horizon, and he hears the aircraft making the distinct noise it makes while climbing. But the instruments may tell him that he is not in fact climbing from the earth, he is descending, and he just feels like he's climbing because in the column of air he dwells, he is climbing. But that column of air itself is falling.

This disconnect between senses and reality is the whole reason even pilots that only fly visually require instruments. On a horizontal plane it's much easier for a person to determine if they're off course using visual reference points. For altitude it's much harder to determine using just your senses.

Stipulating everything you say about the experiences of pilots, it doesn't address the experience of fish at all. Imagine yourself, exposed to the atmosphere. If you're in a powerful current, you'll notice instantly, as you're covered in sensors embedded in your skin. Pilots can't actually feel the exterior of their plane... but fish can certainly feel their skin. And pilots make up for not physically being their plane precisely by paying attention to sensors that let them know they're being pushed. When they are being pushed... they notice. Planes don't just set out for LA and land in Vancouver because of unexpected wind from the south.

I remember this from Sagan's Cosmos - it's definitely in the book, presumably in the chapter "Who Speaks for Earth?".

It would be incredibly interesting to see a forecast for Europe just now. I wonder if the data he collected is available somewhere?

Sadly, we're overdue for a big one.

Or maybe there's an even larger trend of peace lately? http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1991-01-03/

Is it seriously? Right now we're having a civil war in the middle of Europe, "war on drugs" claims thousands of victims each year, both may continue without end and even expand.

And I'm not even touching middle east and africa where civil war without end seems to be the new norm.

We don't see superpower regular army clashes, but we're having other wars in excess.

Two recent works [0] have attempted to model the occurrences and magnitudes of terrorist events and war casualties. Both seem to fit power law distributions.

The Johnson et al. work was mentioned at the end of the article.

[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/the_power_law...

"And I'm not even touching middle east and africa where civil war without end seems to be the norm."

Nothing new in this, Im afraid to say.

I disagree with the assertion that it is cultural or societal, but i completely agree with the math.

If ANYthing actually happens in Europe, how could there not be a scramble in the Pacific? So many competing interests, so much war tech laying about.

Capitalism uses the large business cartels of the world to maintain a 'net peace' but the system is cracking because of isolationism.

watch for signs where it becomes more profitable to take other people's stuff or prevent them from having it than to fixing your own backyard.

If anything capitalism may be stalling full blown world wars now, it simply costs to much to do them and its far more profitable to not. However limited wars and police actions are far more likely to keep the threat to all that money being made minimal

That time is upon us. I agree that Capitalist Organization [G20,WTO,etc] has prevented at least one major conflict, but it would appear to have done that by fomenting and/or suppressing the conflicts of smaller groups. The weapons get sold, but the stockpiles stay evenish.

This is falling apart. Moscow was backed into a corner, and the bet a lot the US, NATO, and EU would do nothing substantial in the face of naked force. They won that hand. This makes every player at the table more gutsy or more scared.

Incipient Muslim region-states blossom across the globe, every single one of them in an area where rampant capitalism was used, and abused, to modernize[sic] the region.

Smaller European nations reforge alliances and mutual defense pacts. 'Scientific' reports of any given nations 'weakness' in terms of humanpower, weapons, etc. start to crop up in media forms. Soon enough the christians will jump in, and with them comes the child soldiery tolerance.

I digress from fantasy, but more to the point: the next war may look more like a massive construction project that kills a bunch of people on the edges.

all my opinions; would love to discuss if you think im way off.

I cant help but think of 1900-1914.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com