It's not mentioned in this article, but Geoffrey West's book "Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies" give a fascinating and approachable overview of similar ideas.
One of the ideas presented is the "quantization" of the exponents observed in power laws relating various biometrics. E.g. it's known that the larger a species' average mass, the longer it lives, and that this relationship is expressed as a power law. What West found is that the exponents in many of these relationships are integer multiples of 1/4! This book, and West's research, uncover the origin of that phenomenon, relating it back to the efficient distribution of material throughout the organism (certain branching laws of cardiovascular networks, or phloem in plants, etc.)
It's not hard to see how that could apply to things like cities and companies as well.
Thanks a bunch for linking this. I had similar ideas doing system architecture, quit my job after seeing those concepts at work and after some years actually started writing a presentation with the city being a single entity for my hometown. Both the article and the book are for sure some reassurance for me i wasn't abstracting into madness ;)
In my city this is kinda easy as the river is 1:1 named to the city, so any links between nature and human culture is faster to process.
Traditional engines proved unfit so i stubbornly continued working on a webgpu one allowing nestable entities for definition of laws across branches / groups in the graph. The graph is handed to compute shaders and calculates the world matrix for the scene tree per frame. Allows for portals too, etc.
Here's a demo of it doing 4D entities to animated 3D and the graph engine building a scaled universe without a fixed reference frame (dono if that's the right word, it just means there are no fixed world units or global grid, it's always derived from your position in the graph): https://krei.se/vid/demofinal.mp4
This is also halted for now as i'll go with Rust instead of TS in the future and handle the main graph logic on a central server handing out only trees to clients (similar to how ARMA and Battlespace works from what i read).
I'm not sure what i will get from the book, but if someone is poking similar ideas i'm always open for dialogue and/or wish you plenty luck and the best on this interesting journey!
Bit of a cliche but a few years ago I came back from a larger than planned acid trip and couldn’t unsee roads as arteries. Nice to see I’m not crazy and smarter people than I have formalised this to some degree :)
Let's be a little more clear: these are not "laws" as much as they are scaling relationships, this is not "new math" (see Ziph and others), and central planning has always had an impact on city development. Nevertheless, I appreciate this line of inquiry.
Kind of neat, especially with a bit of skepticism toward the bigger is always better claim. Lot of "really" large animals, not actually that successful.
Elephants, Rhinos, Tigers, not especially successful. Start to become really high value targets with limited ability to defend against threats from every direction, and almost every nearby animal is "red circle", including humans. The Asian elephant is Endangered, the African savanna elephant is Endangered, while the African forest elephant is Critically Endangered. The the black, Javan, and Sumatran rhinos are Critically Endangered. Tigers are Endangered at 5% of historic range.
Dinosaur replenishment rates became negative in the Late Cretaceous, even before the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. More species were going extinct than new ones were evolving with a decrease in the development of new traits or adaptive strategies. It all started stagnating, and then they could not cope with sharp changes.
A lot of cities are similar. Paralysis, stagnation, difficulty dealing with threats and changes, and almost every member of human society views them as a high value target. Why target podunk nowhere for pocket change, when a single success swindling New York or Los Angeles is millions. Politics targets them constantly. Now they're even drawing federal military responses.
It’d be strange if they didn’t. All human organization should be expected to behave like this, especially as rates of communication become faster.
As much as our brains seem to be evolved to delude us about it, we’re not uniquely able to resist the continuity between physics and chemistry and biology.
As self-replicating chemical and physical systems, we exist only because our atoms, molecules, cells, organs, bodies, and cultures all follow these rules naturally selecting for least action
Seems we are rediscovering concepts familiar to the Sumerians, where cities were considered as gods. Following the article, what animal (or components of an animal) would your city embody?
13 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 41.2 ms ] threadOne of the ideas presented is the "quantization" of the exponents observed in power laws relating various biometrics. E.g. it's known that the larger a species' average mass, the longer it lives, and that this relationship is expressed as a power law. What West found is that the exponents in many of these relationships are integer multiples of 1/4! This book, and West's research, uncover the origin of that phenomenon, relating it back to the efficient distribution of material throughout the organism (certain branching laws of cardiovascular networks, or phloem in plants, etc.)
It's not hard to see how that could apply to things like cities and companies as well.
It's an old mockup, please don't laugh - i soon hit walls and wrote my own n-dim graph engine since then: https://der-chemnitz.de/indexold.html
In my city this is kinda easy as the river is 1:1 named to the city, so any links between nature and human culture is faster to process.
Traditional engines proved unfit so i stubbornly continued working on a webgpu one allowing nestable entities for definition of laws across branches / groups in the graph. The graph is handed to compute shaders and calculates the world matrix for the scene tree per frame. Allows for portals too, etc.
Here's a demo of it doing 4D entities to animated 3D and the graph engine building a scaled universe without a fixed reference frame (dono if that's the right word, it just means there are no fixed world units or global grid, it's always derived from your position in the graph): https://krei.se/vid/demofinal.mp4
This is also halted for now as i'll go with Rust instead of TS in the future and handle the main graph logic on a central server handing out only trees to clients (similar to how ARMA and Battlespace works from what i read).
I'm not sure what i will get from the book, but if someone is poking similar ideas i'm always open for dialogue and/or wish you plenty luck and the best on this interesting journey!
Their big results seems to be that on a log-log scale CO2 emissions are linear with respect to population with a slope of 1.12.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2501224122
Elephants, Rhinos, Tigers, not especially successful. Start to become really high value targets with limited ability to defend against threats from every direction, and almost every nearby animal is "red circle", including humans. The Asian elephant is Endangered, the African savanna elephant is Endangered, while the African forest elephant is Critically Endangered. The the black, Javan, and Sumatran rhinos are Critically Endangered. Tigers are Endangered at 5% of historic range.
Dinosaur replenishment rates became negative in the Late Cretaceous, even before the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. More species were going extinct than new ones were evolving with a decrease in the development of new traits or adaptive strategies. It all started stagnating, and then they could not cope with sharp changes.
A lot of cities are similar. Paralysis, stagnation, difficulty dealing with threats and changes, and almost every member of human society views them as a high value target. Why target podunk nowhere for pocket change, when a single success swindling New York or Los Angeles is millions. Politics targets them constantly. Now they're even drawing federal military responses.
Bigger's definitely got issues.
As much as our brains seem to be evolved to delude us about it, we’re not uniquely able to resist the continuity between physics and chemistry and biology.
As self-replicating chemical and physical systems, we exist only because our atoms, molecules, cells, organs, bodies, and cultures all follow these rules naturally selecting for least action