The Hummingbird and the Poison Tree

Lorenz realized that it could. The most basic tenet of chaos theory is that a small change in initial conditions—a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil—can produce a large and unexpected divergence in outcomes—a tornado in Texas. This does not mean that the behavior of the system is random, as the term “chaos” might seem to imply. Nor is chaos th

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The archives of human cleverness are filled with blunders. When read in a good mood, history is a blooper reel. But it should not be lost on us that history never repeats, and modern technology enables ever more leverage. The more technology you can harness to commit an idea, and the faster your idea can spread, the greater the magnitude of somethi... See more

Nature’s laws do not change very much. So long as the store of human knowledge continues to expand, as it has since Gutenberg’s printing press, we will slowly come to a better understanding of nature’s signals, if never all its secrets. And yet if science and technology are the heroes of this book, there is the risk in the age of Big Data about bec

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