Monday, 12 May 2014

dynamic balance



With a set of scales, the balancing is static: you put a fixed amount of one side, and an amount of the other to determine the weight. When the scales are even, everything is balanced. Well, with a dynamic balance, things seem on the surface to be in that same steady, balanced equilibrium, but in actual fact they’re not.
As an example, consider sand on a beach. You may go to a beach and it looks to be the same, day after day after day, but often the sand is being continually washed away at one end of the beach, washed in at the other, and moved along (albeit slowly) from one end to the other. In that case, the sand on the beach is a state of dynamic balance: what is coming in balances what is going out.
As another example, consider a lake. It receives water from rain, runoff, and perhaps melt-water from a glacier, and loses water to evaporation, seepage and any rivers it feeds. Again, the situation may appear to be the same, but it relies on the inputs and outputs to balance.
Change the inputs or outputs, and you will change the situation. In the case of the lake, reduce rainfall and the water level will fall; in the case of the beach, do something like build a stone jetty, and you will cut off the flow of sand along the beach.
Another example of dynamic balance is our diet with regard to calories. We take in calories from food and drink (only water has no calories), and expend calories to keep our body functioning (breathing, heart pumping, digestion and a whole range of chemical processes) and with whatever physical activity we do. If they’re in balance, our weight stays the same. If something happens, for instance we wind up ill (e.g. arthritis) and thus unable to exercise, our expenditure of calories decreases, and thus our weight may go up – unless we make a change to our input.

As of the time this definition was written, I’ve touched on this topic in the following posts:

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