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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold and Silver Juniors, Mid-tiers and Producers -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (21247)	9/17/2006 2:25:55 PM
From: The Vet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78418

Koan, it's all about growth and simple arithmetic. Lecture by Dr Albert Bartlett a retired Professor of Physics from the University of Colorado in Boulder examines the arithmetic of steady growth, continued over modest periods of time, in a finite environment. These concepts are applied to populations and to fossil fuels such as petroleum and coal. transcript globalpublicmedia.com audio globalpublicmedia.com This is so simple and so easy to understand, but 99% don't get it.. "Well, you say, what's the exponential function? This is a mathematical function that you'd write down if you're going to describe the size of anything that was growing steadily. If you had something that was growing at 5% per year, you'd write the exponential function to show how large that growing quantity was year after year. And so we are talking about a situation where the requirements required for the growing quantity to increase by a fixed fraction is a constant 5% per year. The 5% is a fixed fraction, the three years a fixed length of time. So that's what we want to talk about. Its just ordinary steady growth. Well if it takes a fixed length of time to grow 5%, it follows it takes a longer fixed length of time to grow 100%. That longer time's called the doubling time and we need to know how you calculate that doubling time. It's easy. You just take the number 70, divide it by the percent growth per unit time and that gives you the doubling time. So our example of 5% per year, you divide that into 70, you find that growing quantity will double in size every 14 years. It gets better as it goes, especially in regard to oil, coal and metals....