Steven Johnson's Emergence

I just finished reading Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson. He's done an excellent job of explaining how emergence theory is evolving and how it is being applied in many different ways.

Emergence in this case refers to cases where complex, higher order, collective behaviors emerge from simpler actions of individuals. For example, slide mold is a single celled organism. But when conditions get dry, the slime mold colasce into a single larger organism that slowly moves together. When conditions get wet again, the mass disperses. For years, biologists searched for "pacemaker" cells - a different variety of slime mold cell - that was signaling the individuals to colasce and to move together, but no one could find one. They eventually learned that the complex behavior emerges as a result of each cell following simple rules based on strictly local information about their immediate environment and about their neighbors.

Emergent behavior is being used in the software industry today. Airlines and network providers are applying models of ant foraging behavior to optimize networks. "Swarms" of simple networked sensors are being used to monitor environmental conditions. Corporations are even applying emergence theory to their organizational structures.

Having read this book, I find myself looking for cases of emergent behavior and for places where the principles could be applied. Johnson's exploration of emergence is a good ride. He cites many interesting examples and provides interesting ideas for how this way of approaching problems could change our world in the future. Recommended.

Posted 10/06/2003 09:29:00 PM - permanent link to this entry

August 2003 Blackout Cascade

The Department of Energy has posted an initial timeline of the events that evolved into the August 2003 blackout in the northeast. A couple of isolated events in Ohio at 12:00 PM and 2:00 PM started the ball rolling. By 4:10 PM much of northern Ohio and eastern Michigan were in trouble. That's when the cascade really accelerated. In the next 3 minutes, it rippled through New England and Ontario. To a layman, this sure looks like a fragile chaotic system.

Posted 9/14/2003 07:39:00 PM - permanent link to this entry

Lake Champlain

I just spent 6 days in Burlington, Vermont at a conference. Had a sixth floor room in the Radisson overlooking Lake Champlain. What an incredible view, facing west. Mesmerizing. I watched the sun set, dawn break on the Adirondacks in New York, and, on the last day, the full moon set as dawn faded in. Every time I looked it stopped me short. There's a great path that runs along the shore for miles. Chilly mornings. Cool afternoons. Plenty of sunshine. Recommended.

Posted 9/12/2003 09:20:00 AM - permanent link to this entry

Joining the Thumb Tribe

We finally switched to a latest generation cell phone plan. Went with LG LX4400 phones on Verizon. For the first time, I've got text messaging. Through a simple interface you can send text messages to other text messagees or to any email address. I've heard that Japanese thumbinistas can type faster on a cell phone keypad than they can on a full QWERTY computer keyboard. Not me, but I'm getting the hang of it.

Posted 8/26/2003 08:09:00 PM - permanent link to this entry

Classic Haiku: An Anthology of Poems by Basho and His Followers

Just finished this haiku anthology by Asataro Miyamori. Matsuo Basho is the main man when it comes to haiku. A Buddhist priest who lived in Japan in the 1600's, he refined the classic form that has thrived from then on.

I have mixed feelings about this particular anthology. Miyamori's translations don't have the clarity, the concision, the visceral impact of others. On the other hand, the descriptions of the historical context of many of the haiku is very helpful. In many cases this is the difference between "getting it" and not with classic haikus, especially when you don't have the deep knowledge of historical references that are frequently used.

The book also includes others' translations for some haiku. It's interesting to see the wide range of interpretation. There are even a few cases where two translations are diametrically opposed in meaning. Either one translator or the other got it backward.

Bottom line: I wouldn't recommend this book as someone's first haiku book. Something deep and important is lost in the translations. But as a companion to other books, augmenting, it's worth a read.

Posted 8/19/2003 08:21:00 PM - permanent link to this entry

Touring the Solar System

A month ago, I took a look at Mars, which is making it's closest approach to Earth in the last 50,000 years. At the time, the polar cap was quite prominent. Mars is even closer now, so I had another look last night. The polar cap is still there, but if my memory serves me, it was larger in July. Makes sense since it is Summer in that hemisphere now. I was able to clearly make out a dark region, probably Mare Serinum. Apart from the polar caps, the surface features are always very subtle on Mars.

Next I hunted down Uranus which was quite close to Mars. Uranus is particularly challenging to find right now because it is in Aquarius, a very sparse constellation with no bright stars to serve as guideposts. I starhopped the telescope at low magnification starting from Mars, using stars too dim to be visible to the unaided eye. After getting lost several times, I finally found a very pale blue star. Upping the magnification to 192X, I was able to make out the planet's disk but certainly no features. (Uranus doesn't ever show much in the way of surface features anyway, even from up close.) At high magnification, the color had a touch of green in it. It looked far away, like an apparition from the deep. And it is far away, about 1.8 billion miles away from Earth right now. So far away that it had taken the light I was seeing about 5 1/2 hours from the time it left the Sun, reached Uranus, and came back to my eye on Earth. Seeing that planet that is four times bigger than Earth as nothing but a tiny blue dot really gives you a tremendous sense of scale.

Next I swung over to the Moon -- dazzlingly bright after dim Uranus. Lots of intricate terrain along the sunrise line. That's when I decided to bring out the digital camera. I got a few good pictures of the Moon. In retrospect, I was probably pushing too much magnification. Between the somewhat soupy Summer air and a telescope mount that is less than rock solid, many of the shots were blurred. I swung back over to Mars, but didn't have any luck there. Got a few snaps of the blurred disk. Mars just isn't bright enough to allow the short exposures needed for a shaky mount.

All in all, a very satisfying evening. I'm glad I got another chance to check in on Mars before it starts to move away.

Posted 8/16/2003 09:37:00 AM - permanent link to this entry

Foggy Maine

Just spent a week in Bar Harbor, Maine on an extended-family vacation. Beautiful place right on the edge of the Acadia National Forest. Rocky coasts, conifer and aspen forests, miles of hiking trails (all levels of difficulty), and miles of old "carriage roads" - a network of crushed gravel roads built by the Rockefellers and their buddies back in the good old days.

There's a free bus service with routes to Bar Harbor and throughout the park. Very reliable. So you can basically get on the island and never need a car. Just walk into town for meals and shopping, and catch a bus in the Village Center to anywhere you want to go on the island.

Lots of good restaurants in Bar Harbor. Lobster everywhere, including Lobsters rolls at the McDonalds just before you get on the island. My favorite meal of the week was dinner at the Parkside Restaurant, a seared yellow fin tuna steak coated with toasted sesame seeds. The swordfish at Galyn's is also excellent, with very nice atmosphere. Both on Main Street, of course.

We jogged the six mile carriage road loop around Eagle Lake. Very nice. Mostly quiet, except for a coyote/wolf/fox howling up above us on the ridge a couple of times.

We hiked/climbed the Great Head trail, classified as "moderate". This wound along rocky sea cliffs and through dense conifer woods. There were all kinds of wildflowers along the route. There's a native shrub that grows everywhere, leaves and stems like a rose, little pods that look like green cherry tomatoes, and bright pink-red flowers with yellow centers.

We went to the peak of Cadillac Mountain, the highest peak in the eastern U.S. This spot supposedly has incredible views, but it was socked in with fog so thick you couldn't see more than about 50 feet. There was a good breeze blowing up there too, whipping the fog along like a river. By the time we left, everything on us was dripping.

We went to Thunder Hole, a long narrow channel in the sea cliff that ends in a cavity. The ocean waves funnel down the channel and slam into the cavity with a big boom. The seas were fairly calm when we were there, but there was still enough action to make the crowd go "ahhhh".

The only down side of the trip: it was densely foggy there every day, all day and night, the entire week. Some kind of interaction between a stalled Low to the west and a stalled High in the Atlantic. The scenery was beautiful there, but it must be really amazing on a clear sunny day. We'll go back, but we'll probably try to go at a more off-peak time. It was fairly crowded there. And hopefully we'll have better luck with the weather next time.

Posted 8/10/2003 11:55:00 AM - permanent link to this entry

Moon buzzes Mars

On July 17th, the Moon skimmed past Mars. From here in Gainesville, Florida, Mars was just off the dark limb of the waning crescent Moon, playing hide-and-seek behind high clouds before dawn. Farther south, the Moon actually occulted Mars. NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day site has a good shot of the Moon's edge biting off a chunk of the Martian ice cap. (The same cap that I just recently saw for the first time.)

Posted 7/27/2003 03:26:00 PM - permanent link to this entry

Doc Searls - Saving the Net

Good editorial by Doc Searls on media concentration and protecting the Internet as a public domain and a natural habitat for markets.

Posted 7/23/2003 12:25:00 PM - permanent link to this entry

Mars Up Close

This August Earth and Mars will be the closest together they've been since Neanderthals walked the Earth. Right now it's 42.7 million miles away. I've never been able to see any details on Mars through the telescope - just a light orange disk.

This morning I went to have a look. This was the first clear morning we've had here in a couple of weeks. The sky was very clear and seeing was steady. I centered Mars up with a low power eyepiece then switched to my highest, 198X, which I just recently ordered. The view literally took my breath away. A polar ice cap was bright, white, and clear at the top of the disk. The edge of the cap was surprisingly sharp. I looked for several minutes, allowing my eyes to acclimate. In moments of steady seeing, I could make out a faint, fairly concentrated darker area in the upper left quadrant. Occasionally I could see a similar spot on the upper left limb. Quite an amazing view.

I swung around to the last quarter Moon. I seldom get a telescope out at 5:00 am, so I don't usually see the Moon with the Sun shining at that angle. Through the new 198X eyepiece, the terminator, the edge where the Sun was setting, showed intricate detail all the way along. There was a plain out on the edge with a peak in the middle that was casting a shadow that must have been hundreds of miles long. There was an mountain range right on the edge of the termiinator that was incredibly rugged, a jumble of peaks and valleys sharply highlighted in the oblique Sun.

All of this observing was done using my trusty 30 year old Criterion Dynascope RV-6. It's dinged up, a bit dusty, but it still does the job.

Posted 7/21/2003 06:13:00 AM - permanent link to this entry

Ping Pong - Matrix Style

Spectacular ping pong match using low tech Matrix effects (Windows Media format). (Thanks Byron Scott)

Posted 5/25/2003 12:37:00 PM - permanent link to this entry

Gibson Digital Media Talk

William Gibson posted the talk he gave at the Directors Guild of America's Digital Day. Commentary on where film and media in general is headed. It's just plain fun to read his stuff.

Which is to say that, no matter who you are, nor how pure your artistic intentions, nor what your budget was, your product, somewhere up the line, will eventually find itself at the mercy of people whose ordinary civilian computational capacity outstrips anything anyone has access to today.

Posted 5/23/2003 10:58:00 PM - permanent link to this entry

Lunar Eclispe

Nice one last night. As the last sliver of sunlight faded on the limb, the dark side was monochrome fading into a deep rich amber-brown. It's always strange to see so many stars out under a full Moon. Something in the hind brain just doesn't like that.

Posted 5/16/2003 08:43:00 AM - permanent link to this entry

Event-driven Architecture

The next wave?

Posted 5/14/2003 01:52:00 PM - permanent link to this entry

Top 10 Things I Hate About Star Trek

When in doubt, reverse the polarity. (Thanks Happy Fun Pundit)

8. Reversing the Polarity

For cripes sake Giordi, stop reversing the polarity of everything! It might work once in a while, but usually it just screws things up. I have it on good authority that the technicians at Starbase 12 HATE that. Every time the Enterprise comes in for its 10,000 hour checkup, they've gotta go through the whole damned ship fixing stuff. "What happened to the toilet in Stateroom 3?" "Well, the plumbing backed up, and Giordi thought he could fix it by reversing the polarity."

Posted 5/14/2003 01:50:00 PM - permanent link to this entry

Avian Faucet

The Chuck-Will's-Widow is the dripping faucet of the bird world. Apparently it's purpose in life is to sit in a tree all night long and sing the same little riff over and over and over and over. Easily loud enough to keep you awake at 100 yards. And then the chorus starts in...

Posted 4/20/2003 05:11:00 PM - permanent link to this entry

Shirky on Permanet versus Nearlynet

Yet another good essay from Clay Shirky. This time drawing parallels between how cheap cellular service marginalized the value of in-flight phones and how WiFi could do the same to 3G data services.

What the permanet people have going for them is that good vs. lousy is not a hard choice to make, and if things stayed that way, permanet would win every time. What they have going against them, however, is incentive. The operator of a cheap but lousy service has more incentive to improve quality than the operator of a good but expensive service does to cut prices. And incremental improvements to quality can produce disproportionate returns on investment when a cheap but lousy service becomes cheap but adequate. The good enough is the enemy of the good, giving an edge over time to systems that produce partial results when partially implemented.

Posted 4/11/2003 01:57:00 PM - permanent link to this entry

Smart Mobs

Two thumbs up for Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. He's done a good job of covering the latest developments, research, and commentary about the patterns arising from ubiquitous communications and emergent behavior. The i-mode Thumb Tribes in Japan. The WTO protesters in Seattle. Big Brother. Collaborative filtering. WiFi meshes. Smart Dust. He also runs a good web site about this space.

Posted 3/30/2003 09:30:00 AM - permanent link to this entry

Spray-On Organs

On a whim, Douglas Chrisey at the Naval Research Laboratory decided to try a laser deposition circuit building technique with living cells. The result is a tool that can apply fine layers of most any cell to a surface. They're trying to scale it up to build organs one layer at a time and to integrate circuitry into living tissue. The Extropians are gonna love this.

Posted 3/30/2003 09:05:00 AM - permanent link to this entry

NewsMonster

There's a new news aggregator that's getting all kinds of buzz. Builtin reputation system. Cross-platform portability. Looks like it might have a feature to help you track what you have and have not read, which is something I've been wanting. Stop over at NewsMonster. It's in beta now. This one bears watching.

Posted 2/20/2003 12:22:00 PM - permanent link to this entry

Haiku

Spring rain --

under trees

a crystal stream

Basho

the single rivulet

how slowly a pond

lets go

Laurie W. Stoelting

meteor!

quicksilent

into first Light

Blue Dawn

Mars setting

So close -

An owl calls.

Blue Dawn

At dusk the harvest moon

Paints a pine tree

against the blue.

Ransetsu

Crickets winding down,

Cicadas awakening:

The hidden creek.

Blue Dawn

See how a tree-frog is swaying,

Perched on a banana leaf.

Kikaku

Winter-blue sky

In midsummer -

A storm has passed.

Blue Dawn

A pine cone drops

silent

until

Blue Dawn

Blue sky

through aspen leaves:

Summer breeze

Blue Dawn

Aspen grove,

Black on white -

The quiet wind.

Blue Dawn

Lunar eclispe

Sun on the rim

The armadillo forages.

Blue Dawn

In the spring breeze

The snowy white heron flies white

Among the pine-trees

Raizan

Wide awake:

listening to

your deep breath

Blue Dawn

almost asleep

a breeze wakes me--

northern lights

Tom Lynch

The vast night

now is nothing else

but a fragrance.

Jorges Luis Borges

sun & moon

in the same sky

the small hand of my wife

Gary Hotham

the stillness --

soaking into stones

a cicada's cry

Basho

at the edge

great heron strikes!

no sound.

Blue Dawn

The stillness;

Peaks of cloud

In the busom of the lake.

Issa

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