#dothemaths — Public Fediverse posts

#collapse ? It's not your fault. The wrong choices were made 10 millennia ago...

“Agriculture led to settlements, then possessions, surplus, armies to protect (and raid) surplus, property rights, patriarchy and monotheism, division of labor, hierarchy, classes, and subjugation of animals and humans. Many negative ecological impacts also accompanied agriculture such as deforestation, soil erosion, salt accumulation, desertification, among others.”

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/07/mm-9-recipe-for-disaster/

#DoTheMaths

1/7
Last week for #MathsMonday we showed that Terms are separated by any operators, not just + and -, contrary to the impression one might get from this #Maths textbook. This week we'll again #DoTheMaths but on binary and unary #Math operators, and deduce for ourselves the #Mathematics properties of them. As far as I'm aware, they don't have a name, so I'm gonna call them TorAnds - the group of an operator and associated operand(s) 🙂

First note what the textbook says about an invisible + ...

3/5
Now let's look at where a textbook has been (perhaps unintentionally) misleading. It says "Terms are separated by + and - signs", which MAY lead one to think (and I've seen this claimed) that Terms are NOT separated by multiply and divide, only plus and minus. Indeed, above that it says "A Term is a collection of numbers, letters, and brackets, all multiplied/divided together" which further gives that impression. But is that even true? Well, let's #DoTheMaths 🙂 ...

Solar Power: Abundant or not?

So, yes, "as much raw incident sunlight falls on the Earth in 1 hour as all of humanity uses in 1 year."

Sounds like a lot. About a 7,000-times surplus.

But when you start doing the maths, it turns out that 1) the amount of usable sunlight is far, far lower (about 100 -- 200x present human energy usage) and 2) baked-in assumptions of human energy consumption growth based just on population growth and a modest levelling-up for the global poor chews up about 1/5 of that surplus.

More depressing truth/reality here:

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/f9899b600300013a2eb4002590d8e506

And no, the message isn't that renewables aren't realistic. It's that our expectations aren't.

#energy #solar #solarPower #DoTheMaths #population #affluence #renewables #limits #LimitsToGrowth