Editing 1007: Sustainable
Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
The edit can be undone.
Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
| Latest revision | Your text | ||
| Line 11: | Line 11: | ||
The use of the word "sustainable" has been increasing as people become more aware of the steadily increasing use of nonrenewable resources and need to ensure that the Earth's resources do not become totally exhausted, through sustainable development. {{w|Sustainable development}} refers to the practice of using resources that simultaneously aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present time, but also for generations to come. | The use of the word "sustainable" has been increasing as people become more aware of the steadily increasing use of nonrenewable resources and need to ensure that the Earth's resources do not become totally exhausted, through sustainable development. {{w|Sustainable development}} refers to the practice of using resources that simultaneously aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present time, but also for generations to come. | ||
| − | + | As Randall somewhat depressingly mentions in the title text, the ~100 years that it will supposedly take for the word "sustainable" to become unsustainable is actually a lot longer than most of our nonrenewable resources will last on the Earth. The idea that ''all'' of the Earth's coal, oil, natural gas, etc. that has built up over the past millions of years may be completely gone within the century is unsettling. | |
| − | + | More realistically, the actual use of "sustainable" is likely to be logistic rather than exponential growth. A logistic curve describes a trend that at first behaves exponentially, but then tapers off and reaches a cap. This is demonstrated by the [https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sustainable&year_start=1940&year_end=2014&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csustainable%3B%2Cc0 Google ngrams graph of word usage for "sustainable"]. Logistic growth is commonly used to model data that naturally increases exponentially but has a limiting factor, which in this case is the meaningfulness of text consisting entirely or mostly of a single word. | |
This comic was used in the 2018 book ''[https://books.google.ca/books?id=J6grDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA128&lpg=PA128&dq=enlightenment+now+xkcd&source=bl&ots=8LvAVHQU2_&sig=ACfU3U27rxPWl4N8-muk1eRSm0BMMqWoHA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjOkIne-rTkAhUYs54KHRCZCHsQ6AEwEHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=enlightenment%20now%20xkcd&f=false| Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress]'' by Steven Pinker as it discusses the concept of sustainable energy. | This comic was used in the 2018 book ''[https://books.google.ca/books?id=J6grDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA128&lpg=PA128&dq=enlightenment+now+xkcd&source=bl&ots=8LvAVHQU2_&sig=ACfU3U27rxPWl4N8-muk1eRSm0BMMqWoHA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjOkIne-rTkAhUYs54KHRCZCHsQ6AEwEHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=enlightenment%20now%20xkcd&f=false| Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress]'' by Steven Pinker as it discusses the concept of sustainable energy. | ||
Extrapolation of data has also appeared in the following comics [[605: Extrapolating]], [[1204: Detail]] and [[1281: Minifigs]]. And yes, "sustainable" has appeared in every paragraph so far. | Extrapolation of data has also appeared in the following comics [[605: Extrapolating]], [[1204: Detail]] and [[1281: Minifigs]]. And yes, "sustainable" has appeared in every paragraph so far. | ||
| − | |||
| − | |||
| − | |||
| − | |||
| − | |||
| − | |||
| − | |||
| − | |||
| − | |||
| − | |||
==Transcript== | ==Transcript== | ||
| − | :[A large two-axis scatterplot graph with a caption below. The y-axis displays percentages on a logarithmic scale from 0.000001% to 1,000%, and is labeled "Frequency of use of the word "sustainable" in US English text, as a percentage of all words, by year. Source: Google NGrams." The x-axis displays years from 1950 to 2140, and is labeled "Year". Plotted data points show a high linear correlation (effectively exponential due to being a log scale), ranging from approximately 0.000005% in 1960 to approximately 0.003% in 2012. A linear trend line is drawn through the data points, and is extrapolated to the end of the graph. Four points on this trend line are marked and | + | :[A large two-axis scatterplot graph with a caption below. The y-axis displays percentages on a logarithmic scale from 0.000001% to 1,000%, and is labeled "Frequency of use of the word "sustainable" in US English text, as a percentage of all words, by year. Source: Google NGrams." The x-axis displays years from 1950 to 2140, and is labeled "Year". Plotted data points show a high linear correlation (effectively exponential due to being a log scale), ranging from approximately 0.000005% in 1960 to approximately 0.003% in 2012. A linear trend line is drawn through the data points, and is extrapolated to the end of the graph. Four points on this trend line are marked and labled:] |
:(2012, ~0.003%): Present Day | :(2012, ~0.003%): Present Day | ||
| Line 45: | Line 35: | ||
[[Category:Line graphs]] | [[Category:Line graphs]] | ||
[[Category:Extrapolation]] | [[Category:Extrapolation]] | ||
| − | |||
