{"id":15203,"date":"2015-12-12T10:57:42","date_gmt":"2015-12-12T15:57:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15203"},"modified":"2015-12-12T10:57:42","modified_gmt":"2015-12-12T15:57:42","slug":"magical-mathematics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15203","title":{"rendered":"Magical mathematics"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Magical mathematics<\/a><\/h3>\n
Recently I got into a spot of bother on Twitter (it\u2019s easily done) after I\u00a0wrote an essay<\/a>\u00a0criticising an astonishingly bad newspaper article by one Leigh Phillips. The thing is, I hadn\u2019t read his\u00a0book<\/a>\u00a0and, silly me, I didn\u2019t realise that you\u2019re not supposed to criticise people\u2019s newspaper articles until you\u2019ve read their books. Well, now I have, and, er\u2026it was astonishingly bad.<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
\n

I know that some readers of this blog get bored by my engagements with the ecomodernists, whereas others find them interesting. So I\u2019m going to try to keep everyone happy. I feel the need to recoup the wasted weekend I spent reading Phillips\u2019 book by writing a few things about it, but I\u2019m mostly going to do that elsewhere. The interesting task that Phillips sets himself, but makes a dreadful fist of tackling, is a socialist critique of left-green \u2018small-is-beautiful\u2019 relocalisation thinking. So I\u2019m hoping to have an article about that on\u00a0resilience.org<\/a>\u00a0soon. He also makes quite a mess of trying to critique the local food movement, a subject dear to this blog\u2019s heart, and to be honest he\u2019s not the only one to get in a tangle over this so I plan to write a little post about that on here soon. I\u2019ve written a wider critique of some of the magical mathematics associated with ecomodernist thinking, including Phillips\u2019s, which has just been published on the\u00a0Statistics Views<\/a>\u00a0website. This post is essentially a brief summary of parts of that article, plus a foray into Mr Phillips\u2019 enchanted world of geophagy, which I hope might be of wider interest even to people who don\u2019t much care to follow all the twists and turns of ecomodernist tomfoolery. It falls into three parts.<\/p>\n

Part 1: The future\u2019s orange<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2026or at least it is if you believe this graph:<\/p>\n

\"Energy<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Magical mathematics Recently I got into a spot of bother on Twitter (it\u2019s easily done) after I\u00a0wrote an essay\u00a0criticising an astonishingly bad newspaper article by one Leigh Phillips. The thing is, I hadn\u2019t read his\u00a0book\u00a0and, silly me, I didn\u2019t realise that you\u2019re not supposed to criticise people\u2019s newspaper articles until you\u2019ve read their books. Well, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[8075,1103,1406,11013,578,674,9738,2084],"class_list":["post-15203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-ecomodernism","tag-electricity","tag-green-energy","tag-leigh-phillips","tag-nuclear-energy","tag-renewable-energy","tag-small-farm-future","tag-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15204,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15203\/revisions\/15204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}