The Edge has a 'third culture bookshelf' down the right margin of the website: what a fantastic list. One posthumous book, by Carl Sagan, has a nice review via amazon:

The values of certain physical constants such as the charge of the electron appear to be "fine-tuned" to produce a universe hospitable to the rise of conscious, worshipful life. But the universe is not all that hospitable - try leaving Earth without a space suit. Life took billions of years to take root on this planet, and it is an open question whether it made it anywhere else. To us carboniferous creatures, the dials may seem miraculously tweaked, but different physical laws might have led to universes harboring equally awe-filled forms of energy, cooking up anthropic arguments of their own.

I've been reading Seed to Seed by Nicholas Harberd, a plant-science populariser in the form of a diary. He studies the fruit fly of the plant world, Arabidopsis Thaliana (common name: Thale-cress), the same plant my girlfriend Sue spent her PhD examining. In it, he introduces the reader to plant biology and genetics in a way that conveys not only the mechanisms, but the wonder he finds in telling others about it. He also takes you through his day to day life as a scientist, and his struggle to get past a rut in the work:

Science is always like this. There are peaks and troughs. I've experienced both. But the problem with being in a trough is that it is a place from which the view is limited. There is the feeling of being trapped with no way out. And always the question of how long the entrapment will last. A self-sustaining state: at the time when new vision is most needed, it is most unlikely to come.

Had a day of thinking about the meaning of it all. Just been trying to find a Spinoza quote; failed but got this from Einstein:

I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

This isn't something I'm entirely comfortable writing about, because people either think you're a loony, or people who don't are loonies. But anyhoo here's what's been vexing me.

Kauffman argues in At home in the Universe that the laws of complexity can account for the emergence of life. On the mathematical boundary between chaos and order, the structures that life is built on appear. "We, the expected" - mathematics working through auto-catalytic loops.

James Harkin in The Guardian today talking about the internet 'hive mind', Lanier's attack on it (discussed on this blog a while back) and offering a neologism to describe the stupidity of the hive mind.

The free market fucked up my country and stuffed all my people into export processing zones!

Don't worry, dude. Snakes on a Plane.

Two things to sit next to each other on a table and stare at.

First, a review article (which I've also saved a here in case it disappears from the Manchester site) that's part of my reading list for the complexity summer school I'm (most likely) going to in a few days.

In it, Sumpter looks for principles of collective animal behaviour (though human behaviour appears plenty in there too.) He / she seems mostly to be poking around the question of substrate neutrality: can mathematical models be found that underpin different real-world phenomena? Sumpter's also looking for some benchmark / null hypothesis that lets us say 'yup, that's got some self-organisation going on'.

But its not until a little later that it gets to the question that's (ahem) bugging me at the moment; and Sumpter recognises it bugs a lot of people:

Tucked away here, as the last subheading in a section on components of collective behaviour, is the question that would spring to many biologists' mind even before I began giving different examples of collective animal behaviour: 'how did these collective behaviours evolve through natural selection?'

What we are witnessing today is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective.

Two things I've read today have something to say the things people create with their interactions, and especially the tendency to abstract the interactions from their human sources.

I went back to an old Crooked Timber seminar on Doug Henwood's after the new economy.

I'm just now in the middle of reading a sharp, impassioned rant against some of the more swivelly-eyed advocates of the emergent properties of online 'meta' projects like Wikipedia. (Got to via an article on today's Open Democracy).

This blog doesn't even have a name yet. That doesn't seem natural, somehow, to be writing its first entry before the poor thing even knows what its called. But its OK: given that a lot of it is going to be about emergence, I'm sure I can say something like: “the name will emerge from the interactions of the writings,” or some such nonsense. Actually, maybe I won't say that.

What kind of a blog is it? Well, its Drupal – an open source content management system, that has a much more flexible approach to categorising content than most things around, and has a very organic feel to it. Its also able to be very simple, but expand to whatever one might want it to be.

"No – what kind of blog is it?"

Oh. In September, I'm going to be starting four years of study, into a set of questions that has vexed me for many a year. In one way or another its been a theme running through all the stuff I've done. If I was forced to choose one question, it would be:

What is the correct balance between human order and natural order?