I don’t know Olin Hyde – but I wish I did. From his bio, he’s one interesting dude.
He must also have have interesting search criteria – or he likes my blog. In any event, he just added a comment to a previous post of mine on Kleiber’s Law which you’re likely to miss unless I draw it to your attention – or, more helpfully, take you directly to the post in which he analyses the Egyptian Revolution:
… this moment in history represents a paradigm shift in the human experience: Mass movements can almost instantaneously change even the most rigid power structures.
Here’s an excerpt:
Welcome to the new world governed by the hallmarks of the information age: exponential change driven by mass connectivity.
The Math Lessons Learned from Egypt
The Egyptian revolt can large be explained by three quantitative laws that describe the efficiency of concentrating mass, the power (sic influence) of social networks and, most importantly, the accelerating nature of human knowledge:
Kleibler’s Law & The Efficiency of Crowds
Kleibler’s Law states that the metabolism rate of an organism is proportional to the ¾ power of its mass. This means that the energy required for any organism, from the smallest bacterium to the largest whale, is accurately described by the equation R ∝M3/4.
The implications of this can be extended to the energy efficiency of cities (which require less resources per person than a farm) to how innovation scales with density (cities are more innovative than small towns). …
Lesson from Egypt: Mubarak, like almost all dictators, lived inside a close-knit group of advisors and supporters. Implicit to his assumption that he could control the entire nation was his assumption that his inner circle could adapt and innovate as quickly as the masses that protested against him. Clearly he didn’t understand the implications of M3/4 where the opposition value of M represented tens of thousands of protestors and Mubarak’s M value was measured only in dozens of generals, ministers and other “yes men.”
It’s an interesting idea, but I’ve yet to see much evidence that much is changing, other than Mubarak himself. Indeed, his resignation was announced by the top ‘yes man’ and there doesn’t seem to be much indication that the structure will change; the figurehead, yes, but not the structure. Possibly there are some other currents under the surface and we’ll see an interesting negotiation ahead, but it seems as though the popular demands/coverage are focused really on that one figurehead.