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Hi I'm Sholto.

Born in London, living in Australia, relational affinities with South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Undergraduate Education in philosophy, and environmental science (Monash uni - Australia). Postgraduate in philosophy (logic) (University of Melbourne) - but I don't claim to be a logician, or philosopher for that matter..

Why

Why have I contributed to Wiki? I noticed that the entry on embodied energy was small & incomplete, talked about the concept of "emergy", and had my CSIRO article as a reference. On that basis I thought I would contribute what I know about embodied energy and the emergy synthesis paradigm & nomenclature, in a way that was as true to the literature as possible, whilst also being as clear as possible. (However my contributions need alot more work to make them clear and rigorous).

My personal view of embodied energy and emergy paradigms is that they are incomplete, and emergent methodologies. I do not advocate blind acceptance of the concepts or the methodology. It seems to be up to us all to clarify them and give empircally concrete examples and pragmatically useful algorithms.

Background: I have been researching embodied energy, in particular emergy, for about 7 years, and have found the discourse to be a really difficult one to enter because it involves other concepts like exergy, and much of the theory from ecology, cybernetics, thermodynamics, physiology and more. But also, alot of the literature is not available here in Australia, even at our best universities.

Obligation: If it is true that emergy literacy is important for global ecolonomic, energetic, and ecological sustainability then it seems that we really need to have the algorithms clearly and rigorously stated and freely available to the world's human population. So my thought is that it would be good to have a Wiki presence for this stuff. In the context of Wiki then, one problem in trying to clarify Odum's work (Odum was one of the earliest proponents of the emergy methodology in systems ecology & environmental accounting) is that it seems to open oneself up to the criticism of "original research". In fact alot of major research is still at the cutting edge, so I'm not sure how to work one's way around this...but I find it is all very exciting!

Strategy: My strategy was to put up the relevant entries and then fill them out as time permitted, hopefully with others contributing also. However this 'scattergun' approach of multiple articles, in hindsight, was probably ill fated - load resistance too high to maintain maximum power!!. Wiki is a good learning medium!!

Hey that makes me think it might be interesting to have a power efficiency rating for wiki editors...

My contributions to Wiki

I initiated the following articles: Emergy, Energy quality, Emergy Synthesis, Systems ecology, Energy Systems Language, Coherent energy, Ecological humanities, Characteristica universalis, Maximum power, Energetics, Ecological energetics, Biophysical economics,

and have made contributions to these articles: Leibniz, Calculus ratiocinator, Universal language, Embodied energy, Maximum power theorem, Zeroth law of thermodynamics, Permaculture, Ecosystems,

Research interests

• History and Philosophy of energetics.
• Emergy nomenclature and methodology
• Electronics - I'm really interested to see if the emergy principle apply here, and elsewhere.
• Applications and theory of energy principles, sometimes referred to as laws, for maximizing economic and environmental sustainability for the maximum number of people (and ecosystems).
• Philosophy, physics and play of music
• Aesthetics
• Design philosophy
• many more.

Readings

Trying to understand Tribus's book 'Thermostatics & thermodynamics' which applies both E.T.Jaynes' work, and references H.T.Odum with respects to the maximum power theorem. Also reading Brillion on information theory, Cox's 'algebra of probable inference', Maxwell, Hertz, Gibbs, Laplace, and a few others (did I mention Odum??),

but I don't claim authority in physics, (or ecology, or systems theory, or tennis).