Measurements Change Dramatically Depending on the Methodo...

Benoit Mandelbrot asked his famous question “How long is the coast of Britain?” long before this symposium was written, but it perfectly captures the sort of puzzle people in this crowd love. The question seems simple. Just look it up in the encyclopedia. But as Mandelbrot observed, the length of the coast of Britain depends on what you use to measure it. If you draw lines on a map to approximate the coastline, you get one length, but if you try to measure the real bumps in every inlet and ba...

 Metric System Adoption Must be Emergent

Thanks for your petition. There’s a lot of history here. Right after the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson signed legislation that made it "lawful throughout the United States of America to employ the weights and measures of the metric system in all contracts, dealings or court proceedings." In 1875, the United States was one of the original 17 nations to sign the Treaty of the Metre. Since the 1890s, U.S. customary units (the mile, pound, teaspoon, etc.) have all been defined in terms of t...

 International Environmental Year Project

We don't have a perfect understanding of Earth's systems and processes; it may be unachievable in the face of such complexity. However, we continue to develop imperfect but useful mathematical models, and we have beer able to isolate physical variables in the laboratory. We should celebrate our capacity to learn quickly about such things; and we need to continue funding the search for this vital information. We may need to commit to an International Environmental Year project similar to the I...