"(False extrapolations of human populations-in a few centuries, for example, humans will form a solid mass equal to the volume of the earth and no escape into outer space will be possible because the rate of increase will cause the diameter of this human sphere to grow at greater than the speed of light..." p96
Hilarious. I guess this is one reason why we need to extrapolate with caution and only extrapolate for the short term. I think Mark Twain said something about the length of the Mississippi River being negative in a few millennium. A solution is more data and better models. There may be a linear trend in the decrease of female Boston marathon times, but obviously there must be a lower limit as they approach the physical limit. So in experimentation, vary the independent variable to see a bigger slice of data.
No comments:
Post a Comment