Why are Saturn's rings flat? I was reading / gawping at the utterly stunning Cosmos over the weekend, and found the inklings of an answer. This site seems to confirm it: because particles and objects in many random orbits will eventually zoink each other out of their opposed planes, becoming more inclined, until eventually everything settles into one stable arrangement. Does it count as being an emergent phenomenon then?

Well, I am having a fun evening! Started the day happily making some relatively coherent-sounding plans for the PhD, and reading about the jolly arguments the Austrian and Historical schools were having about 'the economic calculation problem'... but then, then, I took a look at this Three Toed Sloth post, via its Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts tag. This led onto all sorts of terrifying things, such as this little outline of a conference from five years back now. Here's a lovely chunk:

The Independent and e-politix.com tell of a report from the Commons trade and industry committee on UK Trade and Investment (or UKTI). The fascinating part of this report, though, is its take on the Regional Development Agencies (of which Yorkshire Forward is one.)

It turns out the RDAs have all been setting up permanent trade promotion offices abroad - 42 in total, spread across the US, Japan and Australia. The committee sees this as a 'bizarre' duplication of effort, confusing potential investors. They think the job of trade promotion for the UK should be done by UKTI alone. A member of the committee said:

There is confusion about who is actually responsible for trade promotion, and an extraordinary situation when it comes to offices abroad, which are competing with each other, confusing investors and wasting taxpayers' money.

Its a lovely little window onto the peculiar nature of the UK's 'market state'. A previous post on epolitix told how the Institute of Directors thought the RDAs were doing too little to make themselves relevant to businesses in their areas. Now the poor sods are getting berated for going all the way overseas to help bring business in.

The obvious response to the committee's complaints is, well, what did you expect? Every region and city has been encouraged to promote this notion that they can be 'world class'. The point, surely, is competition, isn't it? Why should any RDA expect that a national body is going to promote their interests - especially when that body is London-based? And how is it a 'bizarre' duplication of effort? Could the same be said for all these pesky supermarkets we have, confusing the poor consumer? If not, why not? Because its tax-payer's money? Well, that doesn't make any difference, does it? Market efficiency is market efficiency, ain't it? Choice! Choicity-woicity-woicity CHOICE!

Well, my girlfriend Sue has gone to Oz for an eight or nine month work / travel jaunt. We've just had our first communication via Skype since she left, and I'd just like to report: Jesus Christ on a bike, in a bun. How amazing is the internet? Very, very bloody amazing. Amazing to the power of 'f*cking hell, it's amazing'. Somehow - Gawd knows how - the video was of considerably better quality than usual. Her speech and video were perfectly syncronised and - unlike the UK to UK comms that I've done - the frame rate was quick enough for it to feel like actually seeing her. And she's... on... the... OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD! YAAAAH! A-fooking-mazing. Most phone companies cannot be happy about this. I wonder whether it can last: there must be swarms of sleepless lawyers employed by great corporate behemoths convincing governments of its anti-competitive nature as we speak.

It was very, very hard not to think I was being duped and, in fact, she was in a studio somewhere with enormously bright lights simulating the warm afternoon sunshine. Viscerally, it's very much every cliche about globalisation shrinking the world. That vast distance - pretty much as distant as its possible to get without starting to get closer again - reduced to nothing. The two of us sat on different beds... oh, well, I could witter on about how amazing this is for some time, I think, but the point's made. Which was, just to re-emphasise, AAAAAAAAAA! FECKING BOLLOCKING WOW ON A STICK! YAAAAARGH!

I'll stop now.

Just a quickie: if you a) have Google Earth installed and b) do a search for EPZ Google Earth or Export Processing Zone Google Earth, you can quickly get some links to, e.g. an EPZ in Dhaka, or an Intel factory in the Philippines.

Allegedly. They may not be - and they look like any other industrial estate from the air. But there's a lot of much smaller shack-like buildings around the edge.

Interesting to note that Google has reportedly agreed to blur some Indian sites deemed to be a security risk. This is not unreasonable, from the point of view of the Indian government. But it makes me think we need more surveillance - by the right people, of the right sort, and open to all. If more of these EPZs could be Google-earthed by a bunch of unions, along with related data, that would be wonderful.

While to some it might appear a hideous, convulated mistake, to us, a chop-socky flick that comments on the Hegelian dialectic while having a guy who can fly and stop bullets is something that we are, well, pretty damn proud of.

A quote from the makers of which three films I watched today...?

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.

Still in the Lake District at the Complexity Summer School - day three now. Gosh, quite a long way to go. There's a small but significant chance that my brain won't make it to the other side. Here's hoping.

(I've been keeping a school diary on the laptop, but I'll edit this into a 'conclusions' post after its all done.)

So: quick general report, before going on to the model my project group is working on - a model I proposed, so it's quite exciting. For me.

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?'

This week I have been mostly either wandering the Cornish Coast, or at the Big Green Gathering. Here's some other things that occurred to me, or have since.

One. The second best thing at the Big Green Gathering (after the wonder of all those collectively cooked meals on an open fire) was Matthew Watkins, who Tom has termed a musicomathematical nomad / mathemusical itinerant.

Two hours evaporated happily listening to him talk about numbers, graphs and number theory. Just having a read through his site. When I got back from the BGG, there was an old Indy article (sadly, you have to pay for the online version) about Daniel Tammet, a savant with synaesthesia. He's written a book about being him, and the condition – something that almost never happens, apparently. (“Autobiographies happen a lot, silly!” Yes, I know that. I mean insights into the worlds of savants. Pff.)

He has a very personal (and visual) relationship with numbers; each one up to about 10,000 has a precise feel, colour, emotional shape -

The number one is a brilliant white light, like someone shining a torch beam into my eyes. Four is shy and quiet, like me. Eighty-nine is like falling snow...