Alan Cooper's About Face is a good place to start. I read Version 1.0 back in the day, and am reading the 3rd Edition now. Alas, he's gotten a bit more tedious in the interval, but is still smart, funny, and committed to better GUIs.
It was long considered a Good Thing to put out forest fires in the national forest ASAP. But it turns out that there is an inverse relationship between fire frequency and intensity: would you rather have a lot of little forests fires (that basically clean out the underbrush and don't do much damage to the forest) or a few horrendous crown fires, that wipe the forest clean as a plate and sterilize the soil? An extreme example of a big fire might be the Tillamook burn, where the firestorm was so intense that 200 foot flaming trees were being tossed a half mile through the air.
Now, view the hurricane cycle as a natural system of energy dissipation. If you squelch the natural process of energy dissipation, where does that energy go? Are you breeding super-hurricanes? The possibility seems strong enough to make this a somewhat dubious venture.
We should attempt things like this because they are a good idea, not because they might be a good idea.
The Buffalo Commons is a proposal by Karl Popper and others to reintroduce buffalo on a large scale in a belt of counties that are depopulating from Texas to Montana/North Dakota. There are hundreds of counties here where 50% of income is either farm subsidies or social security.
They, for one, might welcome the new megafauna theme park overlords.
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Alan Cooper's About Face is a good place to start. I read Version 1.0 back in the day, and am reading the 3rd Edition now. Alas, he's gotten a bit more tedious in the interval, but is still smart, funny, and committed to better GUIs.
It was long considered a Good Thing to put out forest fires in the national forest ASAP. But it turns out that there is an inverse relationship between fire frequency and intensity: would you rather have a lot of little forests fires (that basically clean out the underbrush and don't do much damage to the forest) or a few horrendous crown fires, that wipe the forest clean as a plate and sterilize the soil? An extreme example of a big fire might be the Tillamook burn, where the firestorm was so intense that 200 foot flaming trees were being tossed a half mile through the air.
Now, view the hurricane cycle as a natural system of energy dissipation. If you squelch the natural process of energy dissipation, where does that energy go? Are you breeding super-hurricanes? The possibility seems strong enough to make this a somewhat dubious venture.
We should attempt things like this because they are a good idea, not because they might be a good idea.
The Buffalo Commons is a proposal by Karl Popper and others to reintroduce buffalo on a large scale in a belt of counties that are depopulating from Texas to Montana/North Dakota. There are hundreds of counties here where 50% of income is either farm subsidies or social security.
They, for one, might welcome the new megafauna theme park overlords.