Sublime

“The Global Economy as an Adaptive Process,” at seven pages and zero equations, is well worth a read. Holland recounts many, now familiar, difficulties in mathematical analysis of economics that assume linearity, exclusively negative feedback loops, equilibria, and so on, before proposing that the economy is best thought of as what he calls an adap

It took him forty years to formulate, but in the 1960s, Richardson finally found a model for this uncertainty; a paradox that neatly summarises the existential problem of computational thinking. While working on the ‘Statistics of Deadly Quarrels’, an early attempt at the scientific analysis of conflict, he set out to find a correlation between the

The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex

“Benford’s Law doesn’t just apply to galactic distances,” she says, turning left, and then right. “It applies to everything measurable, assuming there is variation. Let me frame this in twenty-first century numbers for you. You could take the population of towns and cities worldwide, remove everything but the first digit, and the curve would fit Be