alt Hacker NewsImpedance Matching (2017)
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As someone familiar with electrical impedance, I don't like this article. It's trying too hard to sound smart.
Whatever happened to Edge? They haven't really published since 2018
Coincidentally, I am reading 'Scale' by Geoffrey West where this concept of impedence matching is discussed (amongst many other things). It is fascinating how impedence matching was arrived at in biological systems viq evolutionary pressure to optimize energy usage.
> On a larger scale, we can think of atmospheric carbon dioxide as an undesired impedance matcher, coupling the infrared light waves of the sun into the planet. Someday, we may decide to cool our earth by adding tiny particles of dust to our stratosphere, tuning the optical surface to reflect away a tiny portion the infrared waves coming from the sun. The impedance mismatch between the atmosphere and sunlight would create a kind of half-silvered mirror to keep us cooler by reflecting away the unwanted energy flowing into our planet.
Good old geoengineering. The principle has been shown to work - in 536 AD [1], volcanic ashes and/or a cosmic impact event caused decades worth of cooling, causing or contributing to millions of deaths, pest spreads and massive migration movements.
The problem is... if we screw it up and overhit our target, we're in for a repeat, just this time with billions of deaths.
The question is... aren't we in for the same if we let human-caused climate change run its course anyway, just with us frying ourselves to death?
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I think concepts from impedance matching could also be loosely applied to other areas, for example:
- How veins in organisms branch out to give "energy" to different areas while being the right size for the required supplies
- How people can adapt and communicate with simpler words but taking more time. The optimum is when both parties are "matched"
- Information theory, data across a channel needs to be sent at a rate lower than its capacity, otherwise it's "rejected"
- In organizations, when a message needs to be passed from one area to another one, each impedance mismatch between individuals can lead to some "information bounce" and make it harder to get a message/idea across
- When politics adopt a measure, there's an impedance mismatch when people aren't fully onboard
It's a bit methaphorical but the overall idea is that efficient transfer across an interface requires compatibility between the source and destination. Incompatibilities produce some sort of "reflections", "distortions" or "backpressure".