complexity
chaoticutopia | November 20, 2006Casey Luskin, please come out of your box, or stop trying to stick your opinions through the keyhole without taking a look. Luskin, a mouthpiece for the Discovery Institute, recently tried to attack Carl Zimmer's National Geographic article on complexity. (Zimmer's article is, as usual, an incredibly fascinating read, accompanied by a beautiful gallery of images that I was tempted to "borrow" for a fractal.) Sufficed to say, Luskin failed miserably in attacking Zimmer's work, resorting to using the Ford Pinto as an example. (I won't bother to try to explain how; my fellow SciBlings have done…
chaoticutopia | November 17, 2006What's so special about a spiral? Why does it catch our eye, inspiring our art and architecture? Why is it even there? This week, I reviewed a program about the emergence of order, showing how organized patterns appear in nature and society, without the guidance of a leader. Spiral forms are an excellent example for this subject... did some creator or guide put these elegant forms in nature? Or do they appear almost by accident, a result of simple, repeated processes? Sounds familiar. Before comparing today's fractal with an image from nature, compare these two definitions:
A self-similar…
chaoticutopia | November 16, 2006
With my love for fractals, added to my experiences with a gigantic wasp/ladybug colony springing to order in front of my home, the subject of emergent behavior should feel quite natural to me. Indeed, as I listened to Monday night's program on NPR on emergence, I was not disappointed. Listening to the program, a common thread began to emerge, drawing together my subjects of interest... from the social systems of insects, the complexity of the brain and human consciousness, to google and the forces behind creation.
The program begins with firefly synchronization, but soon turns to the social…
chaoticutopia | November 13, 2006Tonight, Colorado Public Radio is hosting a program about emergence:
What happens when there is no leader? Starlings, bees, and ants manage just fine. In fact, they form staggeringly complicated societies, all without a Toscanini to conduct them into harmony. How? That's our question this hour. We gaze down at the bottom-up logic of cities, Google, even our very brains. Featured are: author Steven Johnson, mathematician Steve Strogatz and neurologists Oliver Sacks and Christof Koch.
The program begins tonight at 9pm (MST) on KCFR. In case you aren't local, you can listen online through…
chaoticutopia | November 1, 2006
...or at least, the end of any simple theory regarding the extinction of our saurian predecessors. A few announcements from the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America last week concerned the simplicity of mass extinctions. For instance, new evidence suggests the Chicxulub meteor impact was not the sole cause of the end-cretaceous extinction:
The Chicxulub impact may, in fact, have been the lesser and earlier of a series of meteors and volcanic eruptions that pounded life on Earth for more than 500,000 years, say Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller and her…
chaoticutopia | September 14, 2006I picked up my pen a few evenings ago, planning to take a few notes for upcoming posts. The following poem spilled onto the page, instead:
Embryonic Cognition
And so the twists tighten
Embracing us in the grip
Of convergence
Spinning helplessly
Towards emergence
A burgeoning mind
Of the societal body
Do we think?
Do we know?
Or do we cry out
Like helpless children
Echoing a lonely fear
A collective infant voice
Rising from the clamor
"Am I the only one?"
But does the mother listen?
KLF (9/11/2006)
chaoticutopia | August 21, 2006If there were ever a post to elude a specific category here on ScienceBlogs, this would be it. If it were simply a "hey, I'm back from the mountains" post, I could stick it under "Chatter". But sometimes, visiting remote regions, like mist shrouded mountains or vast, dry swaths of blowing sand can cause one to reflect on many things.... including the big picture, the synthesis of it all. I did quite a bit of that this past week, including when I saw the comments on my Schrodinger's Apple post. When I set it to repost, I didn't expect such thoughtful response. I'd like to address those…
chaoticutopia | August 17, 2006Sometimes, inspiration and insight can come from the strangest places. This post, gathered from a series on my old site, describes my experiences with the classic symbol for morality: The apple (as in, the fruit of knowledge of good and evil.) It started with a dream that some would consider blasphemous, a journey into the world of myth and metaphor, and ended up with some of the ideas I wrote about last week. I've condensed it all into one post, so you'll have to forgive me if it is a bit more tangential than usual-or if I'm relaxing in a hot spring somewhere, rather than editing it.
The…
chaoticutopia | August 15, 2006Grisha Perelman recently crawled out the woods with the solution to the Poincare conjecture, and snuck back. There was talk of his love for mushrooms. ...er... Well, it turns out he was correct, so we probably shouldn't question his inspiration.
Since I'm about to hit the road, I can't get into as much detail as I'd like. I've quoted Henri Poincare a number of times (here and here) and reffered to him as a grandfather to chaos theory. (I think... if I haven't, I should have.. he is.) His conjecture, which Perelman managed to prove, was that any object, in any dimension, could either be…
chaoticutopia | August 1, 2006The current "Ask a ScienceBlogger" opens a big can of worms:
I heard that within 15 years, global warming will have made Napa County too hot to grow good wine grapes. Is that true? What other changes are we going to see during our lifetimes because of global warming?
I waited until the last minute on this one, because the more I thought about it, the broader my answer became. So, where to begin?
For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost...
Does a little grape relate to the changes of an entire planetary ecosystem? Of course. Slight changes in temperature will affect the producers, before it…
sb admin | June 9, 2006With a click of your mouse, you find yourself in a chaotic utopia.
That click sent an electrical signal inside your computer,
passing through circuits, joined by a contact made of gold.
The gold, you may find, was mined from a mafic vein,
deep within the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by Precambrian gneiss.
The gneiss, disguised by the mountains for billions of years,
lays exposed to the north in a shaded canyon.
The canyon, still being carved by the creek below,
crumbles with age, loosening a piece of milky quartz.
The quartz, lured by gravity, tumbles from the canyon wall,
and lands with a…
chaoticutopia | June 9, 2006With a click of your mouse, you find yourself in a chaotic utopia.
That click sent an electrical signal inside your computer,
passing through circuits, joined by a contact made of gold.
The gold, you may find, was mined from a mafic vein,
deep within the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by Precambrian gneiss.
The gneiss, disguised by the mountains for billions of years,
lays exposed to the north in a shaded canyon.
The canyon, still being carved by the creek below,
crumbles with age, loosening a piece of milky quartz.
The quartz, lured by gravity, tumbles from the canyon wall,
and lands with a…