Scale : the universal laws of life and death in organisms, cities and companies

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quantropy
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Scale : the universal laws of life and death in organisms, cities and companies

Postby quantropy » Sun Jun 17, 2018 5:41 am

Why I looked at this book
Many governments are implementing a policy of austerity at present, but there is a lot of criticism of this. For a household it may sometimes be best to reduce expenditure, but but big systems such as the economy may follow different rules - it may be better to spend to stimulate the economy. Also I understand that working in a big city pays better than in a small town. Why should this be. Is there something more efficient about a big city, or is it that its not so good so wages have to be higher to compensate. I'm hoping that this book will look into questions such as these.

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quantropy
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Re: Scale : the universal laws of life and death in organisms, cities and companies

Postby quantropy » Wed Jun 27, 2018 9:16 am

First Impressions
The book starts off with a couple of pages of acclaim from well known people, but more noticable to me was the people also bought list on Amazon which is full of books I'm interested in, predicting that this should be my sort of book.

Cities seems to be able to go on forever, while companies and organisms have a finite lifespan (for mammals about a billion heartbeats). Why should this be, when you would think our self repair mechanisms should be able to keep us going indefinitely? That is one of the questions posed by this book
(I'd note here Figure 2, the billion heartbeats graph didn't look right to me, as it has humans with fewer heartbeats that other mammals. I think that it was based on correct data, but upside down.)

A central theme of the book is the study of complexity science. A top down organisation may be complicated, but that is different from a complex system which can exhibit emergent behaviour with with no overall controller. Another important topic in the book is the urbanisation of the global population. As the majority of people come to live in cities we will enter a new era with new challenges.

It looks to be a fascinating book and I'm looking forward to reading it.

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quantropy
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Re: Scale : the universal laws of life and death in organisms, cities and companies

Postby quantropy » Sun Aug 12, 2018 4:11 pm

The first part of the book lived up to my expectations. The books explains how scaling arguments can be used to explain many properties we observe in living things, and tells of how looking at the nature of networks, such as blood vessels, within living things, can predict the quarter power scaling laws that are observed.

What came after, looking at scaling properties of cities and businesses, was also interesting, but after a while I began to think that it was going on for too long. It is clear that there are fewer interesting results than for living things. If the book had gone along with this, giving results that were available, then it would have been a worthwhile read. But instead West seems to be constantly saying how amazing the results are, and I got to feel that a lot of what I was reading wasn't really saying anything new.

At one stage West discusses exponential growth, with the story of the inventor of chess asking for 1 grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on, doubling with each square. He explains how many people don't understand what a huge amount of rice would really be needed. The trouble is that he then falls into the same trap himself. Suppose we start with a single bacterium in a flask at 8pm, which reproduces to give two bacteria in the first minute. Then each of its offspring do the same every minute till midnight. When will the flask be half full? It's the sort of question I've seen before, and shows the questioner doesn't really understand exponential growth. By midnight the resulting mass of bacteria will be a billion times greater than the observerable universe - hard to fit in a flask.

Then we get to the chapter 10, where West tries to scare us by claiming that population is growing superexponentially. To do this he quotes from a paper from 2001. Now even in 2001 it was fairly clear that the population was going to stabilise (the paper talks of this stabilisation as some sort of collapse), and by 2017 repeating such nonsense is pretty unforgivable.

On balance I think the book was certainly worth reading, but it would have been better if it had been 100 pages shorter, and missed out some of the hyperbole.


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