Home › Explaining exponential growth › Issues

The 29th Day

Mon, 14/04/2008 - 08:19 — augustin
Project:Explaining exponential growth
Component:Source material
Category:feature request
Priority:normal
Assigned:Unassigned
Status:active
Project wiki:Explaining exponential growth
Description

In the video "Are Humans Smarter than Yeast", an example is given of some lilly pads doubling every day and covering a lake on the 30th day. The 29th day, the lake is only half covered and most people wouldn't notice a problem.

I just notice that Lester Brown wrote a book called The Twenty-Ninth Day (1978)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_Brown
It seems that the title refers to the same problem (exponential growth and carrying capacity).

I wonder: who invented this allegory first?
Where else did you see this allegory (in one form or another) ?

Comments

Fri, 13/06/2008 - 03:29 — chay

#1

I'm not sure where the lily pad metaphor emerged. On page 29, "Limits to Growth" (1972), Donella Meadows uses the metaphor, calling it "A French riddle for children...." She also uses exponential growth of a colony of yeast cells in a different example. -- Dan Chay

Tue, 10/03/2009 - 01:25 — augustin

#2

Project:Overshoot TV (General issues)» Explaining exponential growth
Component:Documentation» Source material

moving to proper queue.

Post new comment

Edit issue settings
Note: changing any of these items will update the issue's overall values.
active
Use this field if you want to associate this issue to a specific wiki page. Enter the title of the wiki page. You can enter a comma separated list of nodes.
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Use [fn]...[/fn] (or <fn>...</fn>) to insert automatically numbered footnotes.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <blockquote> <br> <em> <img> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <h2><h3><h4><h5><h6> <pre> <table> <th> <td> <tr>
  • You may post code using <code>...</code> (generic) or <?php ... ?> (highlighted PHP) tags.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Project issue numbers (ex. [#12345]) turn into links automatically.
  • Use [toc list: ol; title: Table of Contents; minlevel: 2; maxlevel: 3; attachments: yes;] to insert a mediawiki style collapsible table of contents. All the arguments are optional.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.