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PeakOil is You

Mathematics of depletion

Discuss research and forecasts regarding hydrocarbon depletion.

Re: Mathematics of depletion

Unread postby mrobert » Sat 01 Jul 2006, 15:29:34

You are right.
I would define greed as the fetish of man kind to waste/burn/destroy every precious resource we have, to quickly turn it into something useless called money, that is nothing more then a number in a computer.

Do you think your life is better if you have $10.000.000 then having $1.000.000?
No.

If you plot a chart with money on the x axis, and quality of life on the y axis, you will release that it's not a straight line :)

----
If someone would posses the technology to extract & burn all oil, and have a ridiculously high amount of money in the next second, even knowing that there wouldn't be anything left of this world to enjoy ... he/she would do it.

That's how fuckin stupid we are.

---
Please don't get me wrong. I don't have anything against having money or beeing rich ... but from a certain amount of money, it makes no difference, no mather how much you have ... only how much was destroyed to make that figure.
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Re: Mathematics of depletion

Unread postby SoothSayer » Sat 01 Jul 2006, 16:32:47


It's an answer to the rampant empiricism and cheap heuristics that has been de-rigueur the past 50 years.


Don't knock heuristics too hard .... simple (often iterative) rules etc can be more effective than analytical methods in modelling or decision analysis.

However you DO need to keep a look out for "broken heuristics" too.

Use of simple analytical "sanity checks" might also be wise!
Technology will save us!
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Re: Mathematics of depletion

Unread postby WebHubbleTelescope » Sat 01 Jul 2006, 22:46:41

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SoothSayer', '[')b]
It's an answer to the rampant empiricism and cheap heuristics that has been de-rigueur the past 50 years.

Don't knock heuristics too hard .... simple (often iterative) rules etc can be more effective than analytical methods in modelling or decision analysis.

However you DO need to keep a look out for "broken heuristics" too.

Use of simple analytical "sanity checks" might also be wise!


The Logistic curve used in Hubbert Peak modeling is entirely empirical. As far as I can tell, nothing in it derives from a sensible physical reality. For that reason, I would say that it is broken and we really should have better models based on intuitive statistical rate concepts. This can involve iteration or simple rules of course, if it makes sense.

I hate to believe that just because oil depletion theory encroaches on the field of soft sciences (economics, etc) that we suddenly have to use heuristics. I come into this from an engineering background and I really can't think off the top of my head something non-obscure that can't be derived mathematically from considering first principles.

The one obscure behavior I can give as an example of a heuristic-only model is the concept of "1/f noise" in electronics. This rule says that noise power decreases as the reciprocal of frequency. It remains a heuristic because no one can adequately explain its derivation from first principles.
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