laodan's favorite complex-systems web sites

Last login: 2 hours agoLaodan: laodan is a 56 year old guy from Wisconsin, USA.; Likes 1,586 pages, 24 videos, 8 photos • 227 fans • Received 64 reviews; Member since Aug 08, 2005

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WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: The Open Future: Open Source Scenario Plan…: Feb 5, 5:30pm 3 reviews complex-systems, evolution, future
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004246.html; Open Source Scenario Planning in WorldChanging by Jamais Cascio
... scenarios offer a range of possible outcomes used less as predictions and more as "wind tunnels" for plans. ... Imagine a database of thousands of items all related to understanding how the future could turn out. This database would include narrow concerns and large-scale driving forces alike, would have links to relevant external materials, and would have space for the discussion of and elaboration on the entries. The items in the database would link to scenario documents showing how various forces and changes could combine to produce different possible outcomes. Best of all, the entire construction would be open access, free for the use. As a result, people around the world could start playing with these scenario elements, re-mixing them in new ways, looking for heretofore unseen connections and surprising combinatorial results. Sharp eyes could seek out and correct underlying problems of logic or fact. Organizations with limited resources and few connections to big thinkers would be able to craft scenario narratives of their own with a planet's worth of ideas at their fingertips. This is what a world of open source scenario planning might look like. Open Source Scenario Planning OtF Core: Open Source Scenario Planning in "Open the Future". WHAT IF? THE ART OF SCENARIO THINKING FOR NONPROFITS FREE 119 pages ebook. The Limits To Scenario Planning in TOD by Big Gav Limits to Growth, The 30-Year Update Whow! This idea is just great. I guess after reading the available material I'll need some time digesting it. I had read "The Limits to Growth" in the seventies and came out of it strongly influenced by this idea, that was new to me at the time, to look at the future as being the outcome of a scenario intertwining the possible evolution of a given number of determinant factors deduced from our understanding of the present. But I had never encountered before this idea of open source scenario planning. So no further comment for the moment only that I will now also have to read the 30 year update to "The Limits to Growth" that came out in 2004.

Frozen Bacteria Repair Own DNA for Millennia: Aug 28, 2007 4:00pm 3 reviews complex-systems, genetics, microbiology, life, complexity
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/08/070827-frozen-dna.html; Frozen Bacteria Repair Own DNA for Millennia in National Geographic by Mason Inman
Bacteria can survive in deep freeze for hundreds of thousands of years by staying just alive enough to keep their DNA in good repair, a new study says. Frozen Bacteria Repair Own DNA for Millennia Speaking about resilience... The principle of life seems to be hard wired for resisting extreme conditions. Advanced forms of life such as the human specie, for example, do not benefit from the same kind of resilience. It seems to me that the more advanced the level of development of a specie (the more diverse its components and the more complex their interactions) the less resilient that specie becomes. If this is correct it would mean that complexity engenders higher levels of fragility. Each new component engenders a flow of interactions with the other components. And a single interaction among that flow has the potential to destabilize the whole flux of interactions... There is a deep lesson of philosophy hidden in this mechanism of complexification - fragilization. I bet that the study of that mechanism shall gradually impose itself on a humanity discovering that it is at risk...

The New York Times & Log In: Jun 19, 2007 8:31am 1 review complex-systems, environment, collapse
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/opinion/19tue4.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin; Millions of Missing Birds in the NYT by VERLYN KLINKENBORG
... this is not extinction, but it is how things look before extinction happens. We love to finally care when the death watch is on. It makes us feel so very human. But in the past 40 years, we have killed all those millions of birds or, let us say, unintentionally caused a dramatic population loss, simply by going about business as usual. The Audubon Society portrait of common bird species in decline is really a report on who humans are. Let me offer a proposition about Homo sapiens. We are the only species on earth capable of an ethical awareness of other species and, thus, the only species capable of happily ignoring that awareness. So far, our economic interests have proved to be completely incompatible with all but a very few forms of life. In our everyday economic behavior, we seem determined to discover whether we can live alone on earth. E.O. Wilson has argued eloquently and persuasively that we cannot, that who we are depends as much on the richness and diversity of the biological life around us as it does on any inherent quality in our genes. Millions of Missing Birds The bees, The birds, The fish, Don't worry will remain Homo Sapiens. But having destroyed his habitat...

informationliberation - No Organic Bee Losses: May 13, 2007 4:25pm 10 reviews complex-systems, science
http://www.informationliberation.com/index.php?id=21912; No Organic Bee Losses via titansix's SU pages, in GroovyGreen.com to this original article in InformationLiberation
Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And, have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action in dealing with this issue? I'm on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies. No Organic Bee Losses Surprise! Organic Beekeepers Reporting Zero Losses Bush Bees
Interesting. This bee Colony Collapse thing could well become a major problem within a few years. What about pollination if bees are absent? Does it mean no fruits, no seeds, and thus no reproduction of many plant species? The side-effects of modernity are accumulating that indicate the necessity for change in the way we relate to our environment and the other living species in that environment...

Future Feeder & Archive & Genetic Architecture: Feb 4, 2007 8:55am 1 review architecture, complex-systems, life, reality, worldviews
http://futurefeeder.com/index.php/archives/2006/08/06/genetic-architecture/; Genetic Architecture in Future Feeder by cw wang
With the dissolution of the last utopian project of Man in the name of Communism, the great specter that once haunted Europe and the rest of the world has all but vanished, leaving in its wake an ideological vacuum that is now being filled by the tentacles of globalization with its ecumenical ambition. As humanity has become mesmerized by the triumphant spell of capitalism, what remains less apparent in the aftermath of this dissolution is that the world is moving incipiently toward a threshold that is far more radical and fantastic than any utopic vision since the dawn of the Enlightenment. Once again, the world is witnessing the rumblings of a Promethean fire that is destined to irrupt into the universe of humanity, calling into question the nature and function of life world relations as they so far have existed. Genetic Architecture Leibniz, Information, Math and Physics. G. J. Chaitin 14 pages PDF. A New Kind of Science FREE Online access (1280 pages)
CC Wang is primary concerned with architecture and the conclusion of his post goes "...architecture is becoming increasingly dependent on genetic computation: the generative construction and the mutual coexistence of possible worlds within the computable domain of modal space." I have nothing against the organic principle... it's the principle of life. BUT It frightens me when man starts dreaming of taking over the organic principle in order to devise a possible materialization of his fantasies. This is just what's on the verge of happening. A few thinkers, dwelling into their abstractions, could eventually unleash "a Promethean fire that is destined to irrupt into the universe of humanity"... How to call this? Is this not by definition the summit of what is totalitarianism? Totalitarianism is the principle of complete and unrestricted power of government. Tampering with the organic principle does not require the control over the power of a government. It only requires brain power and cash invested into that brain power. In the end this combination of capital + brain power is far more potent than government. It has the potential to inflict its will to all governments and all people on earth... This is uber-totalitarianism.

Biologys next revolution : Article : Nature: Jan 26, 2007 6:55pm 1 review biology, complex-systems
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7126/full/445369a.html; Biology's next revolution in Nature by Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese
... the convergence of fresh theoretical ideas in evolution and the coming avalanche of genomic data will profoundly alter our understanding of the biosphere \u2014 and is likely to lead to revision of concepts such as species, organism and evolution. Here we explain why we foresee such a dramatic transformation, and why we believe the molecular reductionism that dominated twentieth-century biology will be superseded by an interdisciplinary approach that embraces collective phenomena. It is becoming clear that microorganisms have a remarkable ability to reconstruct their genomes in the face of dire environmental stresses, and that in some cases their collective interactions with viruses may be crucial to this. In such a situation, how valid is the very concept of an organism in isolation? It seems that there is a continuity of energy flux and informational transfer from the genome up through cells, community, virosphere and environment. We would go so far as to suggest that a defining characteristic of life is the strong dependency on flux from the environment \u2014 be it of energy, chemicals, metabolites or genes. Questions suggested by the generic energy, information and gene flows to which we have alluded will probably require resolution in the spirit of statistical mechanics and dynamical systems theory. Biology's next revolution
Biology will thus be approached from the angle of systemic complexity meaning that an organism does not live in isolation but is the resulting sum of its interactions with all the other organisms and the environment. Wow! This starts to become exciting. My painting is a trial at rendering a visual "impression" of systemic complexity. Not in the sense of the impressionists but more in the sense of a visualization of brain processes explaining systemic complexity. If interested by the subject read my book and my articles.

WolframTones: How WolframTones Works: Jan 13, 2007 8:36am 2 reviews complex-systems
http://tones.wolfram.com/about/how.html

Resources & CooperationCommons: Jul 3, 2006 6:35am 2 reviews complex-systems, networks, complexity
http://www.cooperationcommons.com/resources; Cooperation in loose networks We have the centralized version of societal organization that is being "like" imposed on all of the world nowadays and then there is the Cooperation model or the loose network cooperation model that is "like" our present utopia... via WorldChanging by Alex Steffen... """ Cooperation Commons, the single best source for information on the emerging science of studying what makes cooperation work has posted the video from all their Literacy of Cooperation lectures at Stanford. If you're serious about understanding the phenomena of online citizen action, tech bloom cooperation, distributed collaboration and open source behaviors which we discuss so often here on Worldchanging, you really couldn't do better than watch these lectures. """ URL: Literacy of Cooperation lectures at Stanford. URL: what makes cooperation work URL: how best to help cooperation and collaboration flourish. (Free 8 pages PDF)

Perilous Problems That Lie Ahead | Science Blog: Jun 12, 2006 8:01pm 1 review complex-systems
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/perilous-problems-that-lie-ahead-10781.html; We are approaching a period of perilous geopolitical instability Excellent article. in ScienceBlog by Mike Treder """ The global situation is becoming a vortex, a maelstrom in which multiple risk factors will swirl and combine to create sudden new crises for which we may not have time to prepare. The act of reaching into the vortex to grab hold of and deal with one problem could send others spinning in new, ever more dangerous directions. It's a recipe for cataclysmic disaster. How dangerous it actually becomes will depend largely on how fast things happen. """ URL: We are approaching a period of perilous geopolitical instability

Complexity Rising: From Human Beings to Human Civilization, a Complexity Profile: May 29, 2006 7:19pm 5 reviews complex-systems
http://necsi.org/projects/yaneer/Civilization.html; FROM HUMAN BEINGS TO HUMAN CIVILIZATION, A COMPLEXITY PROFILE An interesting perspective. History would gain enormously by being approached from this perspective ... in New England Complex system Institute by Yaneer Bar-Yam """ There are two natural conclusions to be drawn from recognizing that human beings are part of a global organism. First, one can recognize that human civilization has a remarkable capacity for responding to external and internal challenges. The existence of such a capacity for response does not mean that human civilization will survive external challenges any more than the complexity of any organism guarantees its survival. However, one can hope that the recent reduction in the incidence of military conflicts will continue and the ability to prevent or address local disasters will increase. The difficulties in overcoming other systematic ills of society, such as poverty, may also be challenged successfully as the origins of these problems become better understood. Second, the complexity of our individual lives must be understood in the context of a system that must enable its components (us) to contribute effectively to the collective system. Thus, we are being, and will continue to be shielded from the true complexity of society. In part this is achieved by progressive specialization that enables individuals to encounter only a very limited subset of the possible professional and social environments. This specialization will have dramatic consequences for our children, and their educational and social environments are likely to become increasingly specialized as well. """ URL: FROM HUMAN BEINGS TO HUMAN CIVILIZATION, A COMPLEXITY PROFILE

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