Sublime

“Well, Mandelbrot found a remarkable thing with his geometric tools. He found that things looked almost identical at different scales.”

But occasionally some would find forecasts that would change their behavior enough to perturb the overall price pattern, causing other investors to change their forecasts to re-adapt. Cascades of mutual adjustment would then ripple through the system. The result was periods of tranquility followed randomly by periods of spontaneously generated pert

One of the things that distinguishes an emergent property like the flow of liquids from a fundamental law—like quantum mechanics or gravity, for example—is that an emergent property can suddenly change. With a small shift in temperature, liquids suddenly change into solids. That sudden shift from one emergent behavior to another is exactly what we

I think I know the explanation, and it also explains why 80/20 is becoming even more prevalent, affecting our lives in mysterious and perplexing ways. The answer is in the burgeoning power of networks. The number and influence of networks has been growing for a long time, at first a slow increase over the past few centuries, but since about 1970 th

What’s really happening within each city is a massive exchange of information across social and economic networks of people and organizations, all taking place on a complex infrastructural landscape of buildings, roads, pipes, and wires. For the most part there is no maestro; the properties of cities emerge from countless interactions of millions o

Wiener was as worldly as Shannon was reticent. He was well traveled and polyglot, ambitious and socially aware; he took science personally and passionately. His expression of the second law of thermodynamics, for example, was a cry of the heart: We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to