Hi Jay. China 1760? What the heck was going on then? I'll have to ask my mate Google. He knows everything.
That was many lifetimes ago. Even human evolution has moved on since then, let alone the technological, cultural, legal and other tools overlaid on that new DNA foundation. Plus, the numbers of us are huge compared with then.
We are running a never-before experiment. Well, I suppose plenty of technological developments such as fire, spear and wheel had similar consequences in proportion. Evolution has always moved along at a good speed in the human zone.
But small hunter gatherer tribes finding themselves safe from lions due to the invention of the spear is a world away from 6 billion high IQ people plugging into cyberspace.
We are in uncharted waters. This is boot-strapping writ large.
However, some things remain very human. Monkey see, monkey do is how we still do things. So around the world, we are all looking with our darting, beady, monkey eyes, to see what's up and how we can benefit. We are peering into cyberspace for clues as that seems to be where the river of money is flowing. Dabbling in the river is a good thing as far as most people are concerned. Some just want a hut in Montana. But most want to live near the river and have their own little tributaries.
People have been studying, experimenting with and developing hydrostatics, hydrodynamics, elastohydrodynamics, Reynolds number, hydrology, viscosity, density and evaporation.
In the old days, when the spear was invented, people would simply take a bucket to the river and lug back what they could carry. Now we have engineers somewhere else clicking around in cyberspace with elastohydrodynamics.
Look, Google can in a moment inform you about this: wspc.com.sg
Now, think of the money river. The Aztecs used to have what they thought was a very sophisticated money system. They dug up gold, with a lot of hard work, and used those rare baubles to swap for other stuff. That was like lugging water 10 miles from a well in a bucket. Which was no doubt a great improvement over having to live right beside the river to drink each time one got thirsty. But lugging water or digging gold is hard yakka.
The USA has got elastohydrodynamic money engineers these days. Debt is just another aspect of money. The point with debt is to keep the system below the financial Reynolds Number. I bet Google has something on that too. Hang on.... sure enough ... a minute later... brodylab.eng.uci.edu
I remember too, the Airy Wave Theory, which saved my bacon in Fluid Mechanics IIIa all those decades ago. I'll ask Google about that.... back in a tick .... hmm, this isn't going so well. I'm downloading a pdf file via WiFi on my notebook puter, into a dial up modem in a one horse town called Rangataua, sitting in bed, with a drizzly day outside the window. The dial up modem is slow. I need those super-swishy CDMA2000 1xEV-DO phragmented photons suffusing the aether. This is so last century! Curses...
Anyway, I asked Google for a link to "Airy Wave Theory Raudkivi" and got this: civil.auc.dk I feel almost nostalgic reading it. Prof Raudkivi was my fluid mechanics lecturer. A little Hungarian magician [he wore a red bow tie]. We had a reunion recently and there he was! Prof Segedin, who taught me about Fourier Transforms, died some years ago. He enabled me to retire as I could figure out that with modern silicon chips [back in 1989] all signals could be jumbled together and decoded right there in the handset, resulting in great frequency efficiency. I totally fluked meeting a guy from QUALCOMM who told me [back in 1991] that that's what they were inventing. Boy, was I lucky. Preparation meets opportunity. Serendipity should not be misunderestimated.
Back on track. Airy Wave Theory here. ocean.washington.edu The best thing I ever did at university was on this. I felt inspired. Having bacon saved was good too. Oh, hang on, there was another thing to do with filling a sphere as liquid drained out a hole. That was pretty cool too.
Suffice to say that the river of money is much the same. Think of a dollar as a particle of H2O.
Uncle Al KBE is an elastohydrodynamic money engineer. No longer do we just lug water from the river. No longer do we dig up gold to run the economy.
Mqurice |
