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Fascination with numbers

It’s no stretch to suggest that quantifying life as we know it not in terms of quality but economic growth leaves everyone a bit empty, a bit lesser for the experience, such as it is.

Numbers are fine, can be fun, even. Inspiring. Take Clairaut’s Theorem, as just one example. Among the heights of the Enlightenment – there were several – the eighteenth-century French mathematicians/philosophers Alexis Clairaut and Pierre Louis Maupertuis led an expedition to Lapland in the Arctic Circle (in the 1730’s) in order to measure a single degree of the median arc. The goal was to calculate the shape of the Earth, and validate whether Newton was correct in his Principia where he theorized it was an ellipsoid shape.

In disagreeing with Newton’s theory, Clairaut suggested not only that the Earth is of an oblate ellipsoid shape, but it is flattened more at the poles and is wider at the center. You can imagine the controversial this unleashed among scholars of the day, and Clairaut leaned in, full tilt. He courted the fight and published work in the 1740’s that promoted Clairaut’s Theorem, which connects the gravity at points on the surface of a rotating ellipsoid with the compression and the centrifugal force at the equator.

Under the assumption that the Earth was composed of concentric ellipsoidal shells of uniform density, Clairaut’s theorem could be applied to it, and allowed the ellipticity of the Earth to be calculated from surface measurements of gravity. This proved Sir Isaac Newton’s theory that the shape of the Earth was an oblate ellipsoid. In 1849 George Stokes showed that Clairaut’s result was true whatever the interior constitution or density of the Earth, provided the surface was a spheroid of equilibrium of small ellipticity. [wikipedia]

Provides interesting context to our jokey notion about “views differ on the shape of the Earth.” There’s an amazing book about all of this and more that centers on Madame Du Châtelet, erstwhile mistress of Voltaire who translated Newton’s Principia.

Fascination may be in the eye of the beholder. However, a focus on economic growth beyond the point where it may be healthy, productive, even possible, disassociates us from even the power of numbers themselves. Growth becomes its own ends and we, captive to the destruction its portends, stand idly by and make nervous jokes about issues long settled, amidst our intellectual withering and spiritual decay.

Image: [shiny)Detail of a painting by Lou Kregel.

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Climate Broderism

As in the late Washington Post columnist David Broder, who made a real name for himself with the kind of ‘both sides do it’, why can’t ‘Obama and Boehner have a drink and settle this like Tip and Ronny used to’ false equivalence Villager-ism that makes anyone paying attention from outside the beltway feel like they’re picking up a signal from Venus on the state flower satellite dish. Anyway, this is a bizarre turn but because it’s right there in the paper of record (and elsewhere) we would be remiss in not mentioning it. Dave Roberts, via LGM:

Self-proclaimed moderates like to lecture anti-Keystone XL activists that they are “distracting” and “counterproductive,” without spelling out what the hell that means, yet they seem bewildered when that makes the activists in question angry.

Let’s review. This weekend, close to 50,000 people gathered for the biggest rally ever against climate change, a threat Revkin acknowledges is enormous, difficult, and urgent. Revkin and his council of wonks took to Twitter to argue that the rally and the campaign behind it are misdirected, absolutist, confused, and bereft of long-term strategy. They had this familiar conversation as the rally was unfolding.

As a result, Revkin suffered the grievous injury of a frustrated tweet from Wen Stephenson, a journalist who has crossed over to activism. This gave the wounded Revkin the opportunity to write yet another lament on the slings and arrows that face the Reasonable Man. He faced down the scourge of single-minded “my way or the highway environmentalism,” y’all, but don’t worry, he’s got a thick skin. He lived to tell the tale.

This is all for the benefit of an elite audience, mind you, for whom getting yelled at by activists is the sine qua non of seriousness. The only thing that boosts VSP cred more is getting yelled at by activists on Both Sides.

Read the whole thing. This is happening on the NYT Green blog. As Loomis explains, the most important thing for Revkin is compromise with the big polluters, no matter how wrong they are or how much their industries are the cause of it all and their lobbying keeps any solutions from being considered much less implemented.