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POPSWhy nature can't be reduced to mathematical laws If so, then even perfect knowledge of the physics at one level would be inadequate for understanding organisation at higher levels. This conjecture has been debated ever since. Now Mile Gu at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and colleagues, claim that it may be possible to prove Anderson's idea. They studied a basic mathematical model called the Ising model, which is often used to study how magnetism arises in iron and other materials from the collective organisation of their atoms. Using the model, the team focused on whether the pattern that the atoms adopt under various scenarios, such as a state of lowest energy, could be calculated from knowledge of those forces. They found that in some scenarios, the pattern of atoms could not be calculated from knowledge of the forces - even given unlimited computing power. In mathematical terms, the system is considered "formally undecidable".
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POPSReligious Hate Speech The view from one of the believers. If you care to wade through this drivel you will be entertained by a multitude of false assertions, straw men, and arguments from ignorance. The depth of illogic is stunning. It's sad that many people who read this sort of crap swallow it as readily as they do the dogma behind it.
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POPSBuilding 'The Matrix' Feynman envisioned, a general purpose, programmable quantum computer could itself carry out quantum simulations. But such machines are still decades away, most researchers say, while machines designed only for quantum simulations may become available sooner.
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POPSHow to Think? 9. Document everything obsessively. If you don't record it, it may never have an impact on the world. Much of creativity is learning how to see things properly. Most profound scientific discoveries are surprises. But if you don't document and digest every observation and learn to trust your eyes, then you will not know when you have seen a surprise.
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POPSPrivate Sector Caused This Mess, The Government Has To Get Us Out
from government bondage. Right. There's also a bridge to the Kremlin they'd like to sell you. Which brings us back to the current subprime mortgage crisis. When we strip away all the complexity, we discover that social planning largely led to this debacle. Government politicians and bureaucrats forced lending institutions to make un-creditworthy loans and helped create unnatural demand in the housing market by priming the pump on bad loans. I don't pretend to have enough information or expertise to know whether the Bush-Paulson bailout proposal, or some iteration of it, is necessary to avert a horrifying financial meltdown, but apparently, many experts, including conservative ones, do. Now the stability of our entire financial system is said to be at risk. It's so bad that even conservatives are considering supporting an unprecedented plan None of this would be half as troubling to me if I believed both political parties would address it in good faith.
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POPSgado gado - Indonesian steamed vegetable salad with peanut sauce Sudar hopes to open his own Indonesian restaurant some day. Indonesia is made up of more than 17,000 islands, each with its distinctive flavor profile. Sumatra is spicy; Java is sweet. He believes the complexity of the cuisine has yet to be fully explored in this country. "I think the cuisine has a lot of potential here," Sudar says with a smile. "There are no famous Indonesian chefs here yet. I'd like to be the first one."
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POPSBlue skies, scorched Earth? What is Global Dimming? If we were to eliminate global dimming all together without addressing global warming the increase in temperature and extreme weather might be more significant than previously predicted. This has been recorded with one full degree temperature change in just a few days of decreased pollution in the days following the 9/11 attacks . This reverse effect of dimming has been has been blamed along with global warming for increasing temperatures, appropriately called global brightening . No one wants smoggy skies but it could be smog and particulates that may be shielding us from the full consequences of the greenhouse gases we pump into our air daily. Clear blue skies are something many folks thinks of when they think of “going green” but those clear blue skies may hold more heat than we can handle.
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POPS-Are Humans Destroying the Planet's Web of Life? Very sobering, disturbing article. Just put global climate disruption aside and think about what we humans are doin to the life in the oceans and the air and land, the forests, the over fertilizing, the plastics...it's abominable and has to be changed or we die.
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POPSThe Moral Instinct "the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”
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POPSMessy Truth about Georgia Article deals with US foreign policy. What's horribly remarkable about this human tragedy is how utterly predictable have been many responses by those unwilling (or unable?) to consider the situation in its full historical complexity.
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POPSBeyond Web 2.0: How Tech will Change the World (video)
The video (1h40m) can't be clipped, but you can watch it online at the source. Dr. Hiroshi Tasaka discusses Beyond Web 2.0: How the Next Tech Revolution will Change the World. Dr. Hiroshi Tasaka, Professor at Tama University in Tokyo, and President of Thinktank SophiaBank, has authored numerous books on the philosophy of working, management theory, business strategy, the Internet revolution and knowledge society, as well as paradigm shifts in human society. A specialist in complexity systems, Dr. Tasaka will explore how next technology revolution will further empower the individual, blending the monetary and voluntary economies to create a new system of Capitalism. Dr. Tasaka will also discuss ways in which technology will help build bridges between the U.S. and Japan, as well as among countries in Asia in the emerging post-knowledge society - Imagining Global Asia He talks about Dialectic Philosophy, Complexity Sciences & Collective Psychology among other th
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POPSHandle With Care "Last year, a private company proposed “fertilizing” parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile, researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet. This technology might be useful, even life-saving. But it would inevitably produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo. So a growing number of experts say it is time for broad discussion of how and by whom it should be used, or if it should be tried at all."
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POPSMirrors Don’t Lie.. : -) “When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they are doing,” Dr. Bodenhausen said. “A byproduct of that awareness may be a shift away from acting on autopilot toward more desirable ways of behaving.” Physical self-reflection, in other words, encourages philosophical self-reflection, a crash course in the Socratic notion that you cannot know or appreciate others until you know yourself. "
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POPSOne more game has been won Go, played by placing stones on a uniform 19x19 grid, does not allow for that kind of shortcut. The strategy that's proved most effective for computer Go is the Monte Carlo method, in which possible moves are assembled in a tree structure, and given statistical weight based on how likely they are to lead to a win."
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POPSCrystal clear? think again "of fast-moving and slow-moving regions in a solidifying glass were seen in experiments, and computer simulations predicted that this pattern, called dynamical heterogeneity, should exist." interesting stuff.. what amazes me, is as one zooms in (and out:) new levels of complexity that were not seen before, are discovered.
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POPSBiocultural Evolution in the 21st Century: The Evolutionary Role of Religion My outline introduces the concept of biocultural evolution, particularly with reference to the Twentieth Century and the prospects for the Twenty-First Century. I then explore the concept of complex distributed systems to characterize all highly creative processes in both culture and nature. Subsequently, I turn to the problem of complexity horizons and the challenge that these present for traditional moral reflections. Humans are then characterized as a Lamarckian wild card in epic of evolution. I close by discussing the evolutionary role of religion. See source for the full paper: http://metanexus.net/magazine/ArticleDetail/tabid/68/id/8779/Default.aspx
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POPSNew Mode Of Gene Regulation Discovered In Mammals As research advances, the more it becomes clear, that gene regulation networks are actually complex computing machines. DNA is not a mere repository of information. What's more, the newly discovered mechanism is self referential, which adds another later of complexity to gene regulation processes.
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POPSdumb passwords my IT staff still insists I change my login password every 90 days - and they ask that we do it over the phone, with other people around (I work at a magazine - everyone in my group has the same access to everything that I do). my response has been to make them as simple and easy to remember - and as guessable - as possible.
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