iEquals.net

After deciding that I was 100% bored out of my mind, a lightbulb went off in my head. 4.61 miles later I was out of breath and had explored a good portion of the city in which I’ve lived for 7 years. The dots on the map plot my path.

Fight depression the natural way!

Recently, meaning “in the last few years,” I have taken an interest in complexity theory. It started with a book by Stephen Johnson titled Emergence. He explains in enthusiastic detail the theory of emergence, which I won’t go into right now. The book set ablaze a new way of thinking for me, a fire that would spread to every aspect of my life and ultimately change my worldview. 

But this isn’t about emergence — we’ll get there someday. This is about chaos. Not the classical idea of chaos that immediately comes to mind. I know what you’re thinking. But what I’m talking about is a creative force masquerading as disorder. Nonlinear feedback systems that give rise to seemingly spontaneous creations. Dynamic systems that seem like they would be deterministic, but aren’t. (Keeping up?) 

I’m starting to view the world in terms of complexity instead of the classical statistical view I’ve been taught. At no point as an undergraduate was I told of chaos. Nobody explained to me the significance of very small perturbations in a system. If there was an inconsistency in the data I was told to ignore it; it must have been from experimental error. This assumption is only partially valid. If I were the teacher I would preface that statement with “It is the nature of measurements to have a certain level of error, and we cannot determine the importance of the portion containing the error.” I wish that the education I was given included chaos somewhere in the curriculum. In today’s scientific community it seems almost perverse not to teach chaos theory —  it has become more than just an interdisciplinary phenomenon, it has a devoted following and countless journals dedicated to it. And where was complexity in all my biology classes. I cannot think of a better vector for teaching complexity than the natural world with it’s myriad examples. 

This is the first in a string of posts. More later when I’m not so bogged down with the wiki.

Another week gone by. Friday’s are my meeting days… here’s a pic from the thrilling EcoliWiki meeting. I think we are discussing how to correctly annotate gene products in the folic-acid biosynthetic pathway. This is my life. Every Friday I get a million things added to my to-do list.

Details:

Thursday, July 10     5:30pm
Langford Architecture Center, Rm. 217

Overview:

I recently went to the PHP Users Group meeting in the Langford bldg. Apparently the turn out was pretty good, we had 17 show up and discussed a number of things, listed below. If I remember correctly we’ll be meeting monthly to give presentations and share information and generally be social.