Complexity Simplified

Emergence: Complexity From Simplicity

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:09:30 PST

Today’s guest post is by Jochen Fromm, a scientist and software engineer from Berlin, who is the founder of the Complex Adaptive Systems, CAS, group blog. He holds a degree in theoretical physics and has interests in complex systems, emergence, self-organization and, especially, multi-agent systems.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

As John H. Holland explains in the video that follows, emergence is one of the central principles that explain how complexity can arise from simplicity or how order comes out of chaos. It happens when large-scale order arises from small-scale interactions. In complex systems, simple rules can have complex results and small events can have great effects.

Classic examples are flocks of birds and shoals of fish. How they move as one is mysterious and fascinating. The first steps towards understanding this behavior was made by Craig Reynolds in 1986, who programmed the basic rules of bird motion into a computer. His agent-based model "Boids" shows how complex swarms can arise from simple interactions between agents following rules.

The Rules for swarms or flock of birds are simple: stay away from your neighbors, but stay close to the group. A swarm is a group of followers without leader. Global attraction (a move towards the group) is combined with local repulsion (stay away from individuals). Reynolds formulated three basic rules:

· Separation: steer to avoid crowding local flockmates

· Alignment: steer towards the average heading of local flockmates

· Cohesion: steer to move toward the average position of local flockmates

Agent-based models like the boids model are key to understanding the principles of emergence and swarm intelligence (the collective intelligence of swarms). These principles in turn explain how simple rules can have complex results.

Yet there is also a downside: although simple rules can lead to complex results, in most cases they do not. And not every group moving in synchronized ways is good.

Emergence happens with all kinds of living things that live in groups. An army marching in formation is fascinating, too, but these forms of "forced swarms" are certainly more controversial. Einstein said "that a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him," but people find marching armies fascinating for the same reason they like swarms. We admire the fascinating unity in diversity in moving crowds, flocks of birds or shoals of fish.

The essence of many agent-based models is a conflict. In the boids model, the problem is that the neighbors don’t have the right place or position. Each agent wants to be close to the group, but also wants to stay away from the other individuals. Many small conflicts about the right position in the neighborhood lead to large clusters of similar positions in the form of swarms.

Similar effects occur in models for human society, for example Thomas Schelling’s Segregation Model for ghetto formation and Robert Axelrod’s Dissemination Model for culture formation. In the first model, neighbors are of different races, while, in the latter, neighbors don’t have the same traits. Schelling showed that a small preference for one’s neighbors to be of the same race could lead to total segregation. Axelrod showed that a small preference for one’s neighbors’ traits could also lead to segregated cultures.

There are many other fascinating agent-based models and more complicated forms of emergence. What they all have in common is that the behavior emerges from actions controlled by the rules of the model. The behavior of the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

Emergence and swarm intelligence are not the only principles at work in these systems, however. Path dependence, lever points, frozen accidents and butterfly effects, all subjects for future posts, also help explain how small events can have great effects in complex adaptive systems.

The Omega Upgrade

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:12:28 PST

Several years ago, when bluetooth receivers for cell phones first started to appear, I stood in a grocery store listening to someone have a conversation with what seemed to be voices in his head.

Maybe we've gotten used to this phenomenon by now, but what if technology were to advance to the point where you couldn't see the bluetooth receiver? What if the conversations we have on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ began to dominate our world, drowning out face-to-face conversations?

What? It's already happening, you say? I think you might be right.

Today and tomorrow, February 5 - 6, my view of a not-too-futuristic world, "The Omega Upgrade," is available for the Amazon Kindle for FREE. Download it here now. If you don't have a Kindle, you can get a free app for your phone or computer.

And if all that isn't tempting enough, here's an excerpt!

The Omega Upgrade

A girl with purple hair and violet eyes was standing on the other side of the mango bin, talking into the air. “I don’t know why he wants to see you,” she said. “Can’t he just message you? For Pete’s sake, it’s 2019!”

Elaine was startled. It wasn’t so much what the girl said, it was that she was talking. Out loud.

“Maybe he wants to give you something. How should I know?” the purple-haired girl said.

Elaine shot looks around the fruit shop. Nobody but her and the girl were there, except for a short Indian woman over near the checkout turnstile. And she was out of earshot. Who was this girl talking to, anyway?

The fact that anybody was talking at all should have made Elaine happy, since the whole summer had seemed so quiet, everybody walking around in silence in what had once been a bustling Manhattan neighborhood.

Instead, the sound of a person’s voice filled her with an unexpected sense of dread, a foreboding that Elaine couldn’t quite place.

The girl, who looked to be about twenty, stared right through Elaine as she continued jabbering away at the air. Elaine retreated into a spot of shade cast by a large piece of tie-dyed fabric stretched over the fruit stand and pretended to get interested in the mangoes again.

It was clear the girl’s attention was somewhere else—somewhere far away, halfway around the world for all Elaine knew. She had never gotten used to this habit people had of staring at others when they were twittering with somebody. No, not twittering. Did they still do that? Maybe this girl was cogno-texting, or whatever they called it. Elaine sighed. She just could not keep up with this stuff.

Elaine stepped a little to the side to see if, maybe, the girl’s hair was simply hiding the plug. Nope, nothing there. She didn’t seem to have a web connector at all, but was somehow talking into the air like they all did when they were on line, or logged in, or whatever the hell they called it now.

She looked once more at the girl’s earrings, just ordinary glass beads dangling on wire hooks. What would a webplug earring look like anyway?

Elaine shook her head and turned back to the mangoes. She picked up one of the green fruits, a rosy blush spreading across one of its sides, and squeezed it gently, before lifting it to her nose. The unmistakable scent of ripe mango rising from the slightly soft fruit assured her this one was perfect. At least she could still pick out fruit the old fashioned way. Next thing you knew they’d be inventing a nose implant for the detection of ripening fruit.

Across from her, the purple haired girl plucked a mango from the large pile of green fruit and polished it on her overalls. Still talking, she took a bite straight through the mango’s soft green skin, revealing juicy orange flesh.

“Um hmmm…Um hm,” she said, chewing. Elaine stared. Mango juice dripped down the girl’s chin. Wiping at it and stamping a foot, she exploded: “Jeri! Listen to me! This is getting way too complicated for talk. We have to switch to omega mode.”

The girl tipped her head sharply to one side, and seemed to go into some sort of trance. The mango, still held aloft in her right hand, one bite taken from the flesh, dripped orange juice onto the edge of the fruit stand. She looked like a statue, except for her violet eyes that flickered rapidly from side-to-side.

Was the girl having a seizure? Elaine watched in fascinated horror as a black fly approached the mango, hovered for a few moments, and then began to descend to the surface of the exposed flesh. At the very moment the fly planted its little feet on the orange fruit, the girl tipped her head sharply again, to the opposite side this time. She flinched, dislodging the fly, and took another bite of the mango.

“Feel better?” the girl asked, her violet eyes now steady and clear. “Good. I knew you would. Omega mode is so much better than the mindweb for these really emotional issues. I’m saving my debits so I can get the upgrade to Omega 2.0.”

Read the rest of the story here!

Patterns in Nature

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:18:10 PST

Today's post is by guest blogger, Bill Graham, a Marine Biologist who has worked in the US and Mexico for 30 years, He is a teacher, a researcher, a writer, and a nature photographer. Through his work, he has acquired an ever growing passion for nature and an appreciation of how everything is connected. He travels extensively writing about and photographing patterns in Nature and leads a program for talented youth in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico. Bill is the author of the Patterns in Nature blog and can be found on Google+ here.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am honored that Raima Larter has asked me to be a guest blogger on Complexity Simplified. She has asked me to write about my interests in patterns in Nature and how these interests are related to complex systems science. I have happily accepted her assignment because it is my desire to become part of an open dialog on this subject.

I write from the perspective of a Marine Biologist. I live in a holistic world of food chains and ecosystems. As a field biologist who works with "critters", I tend to use a "top-down" approach as I try to discern visual, behavioral, and energetic patterns in Nature. I've embraced the spiritual/philosophical principles of the Neo-Confucian "Li" where Nature is described by its organizing principles. I am guided by two key ideas. First, the presumption that there is order. And secondly, that the key organizing principle in Nature is that everything is connected. In my work, my quest is to discern Nature's connections.

From my perspective, patterns in Nature are complex dynamic systems. Ergo, the study of complex system science is the study of patterns in Nature. Nothing exists solely on its own. Patterns in Nature are not simply pretty flowers, rocks, seashells, or human beings. They are highly interconnected complex dynamic systems that are best described by their hierarchal connections with other patterns in Nature. Patterns in nature are manifestations of the organizing principles that define our universe.

As I see it, the goal of complexity science is to define patterns in the networks of connectivity that are contained within complex systems – searching for organizing principles that generate the order that is manifested in Nature's patterns.

The idea of connectivity in Nature has taken on a new importance in Western science in no small part due to the work by complex systems scientists at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere. To wit, Geoffrey West and his colleagues have noted the prevalence of quarter power scaling in many patterns in Nature. Of particular interest is that West goes on to attribute this apparent unity in Nature to the underlying connectivity networks of these patterns. West theorizes that these scale-free networks are energy transport systems and, in supplying energy, define the scaling characteristics of a given pattern in Nature.

An interesting example of interdependence within a set of complex systems is the King Penguin who lives in the waters and islands north of Antarctica. There are huge breeding colonies on South Georgia Island 800 miles east of the Southern tip of Argentina. The bird has an unusually long breeding cycle, taking some 14–16 months from the laying of an egg to offspring fledging. This long cycle dictates that the breeding colonies are occupied year-around and that chick behavior must include a defense against the cold winter.

The female penguin lays one egg. A newly hatched chick has only a thin covering of down and is entirely dependent on the parents for food and warmth -- spending the next 30-40 days balanced on its parents’ feet and sheltered by its pouch. During this time, the parents alternate every 3–7 days, one incubating while the other forages. After 40 days, to stay warm, many chicks form a tight group called a crèche. A few adult penguins stay behind to look after the chicks while the parents forage.

The interconnecting patterns in this complex system are many. The food chain in the ocean, the weather, the recognition of the chick by the parent, the crèche of juveniles, the overseeing of the crèche by adults other than parents, etc.

It is my hope that this post will generate some form of dialog about connectivity within complex systems in Nature. I invite your comments.

Nearly Wordless Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:15:11 PST

Watercolors

For more Wordless Wednesday, visit the main site.
For more of my photos, visit Flickr.

Fractals From Triangles

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:44:04 PST

Another interesting math video, this time with a fractal connection at the end. Watch and enjoy!

On Strike

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 06:13:34 PST

STOP

SOPA & PIPA

For more info: sopastrike.com

Spirals, the Fibonacci Sequence and Patterns in Nature

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 12:03:27 PST

Check out this great video about the geometry of spirals in nature:

Dark Matter Revealed

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:58:22 PST

Dark Matter. Credit: Van Waerbeke, Heymans and the CFHTLens collaboration

This started out as a Nearly Wordless Wednesday post since I don't (yet) have much to say about the above image other than "Wow!!!"

Constructed with data gathered by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, CFHT, the image provides the first direct glimpse of dark matter over long length scales. Dark matter is a mysterious substance that, along with dark energy, makes up 96% of everything in our universe. The other 4% is the ordinary matter and light that scientists spend so much time trying to understand.

The image was created by accumulating data for five years using a wide field imaging camera. The data was then analyzed by looking at the distortion of light emitted by galaxies as it was bent by clumps of dark matter. The results, along with other incredible images, were announced earlier this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas.

The analysis of the CFHT data revealed that dark matter is not distributed uniformly throughout the cosmos but, rather, in clumps connected by a network structure. The white spots in the above image are the places where the dark matter is most dense, while the darker spots are essentially empty space.

Further analysis by the CFHT scientists showed that the dense regions of dark matter correspond to locations where galaxies are clustered together. This makes sense, because dark matter interacts with the ordinary matter in stars and nebulas through the force of gravity. Still, it is remarkable to see clear visual evidence of this interaction and to realize what a huge impact dark matter has on the shape of our universe.

So, what does this have to do with complex systems? To be honest, I do not have an answer for that. We know so little about dark matter and dark energy. These two mysterious quantities make up the vast majority of the universe and it is becoming more clear with each new announcement that the largest amounts of dark matter are in the regions where planets and stars and galaxies are located. Since both dark matter and dark energy interact with ordinary matter and light in ways we do not fully understand, there very well may be some relationship between the ability of complex systems to adapt and self-organize and the behavior of dark matter.

Or there may not be! This is one of the reasons I find these new discoveries to be so awesome and exciting. Anything is possible.

Nearly Wordless Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:11:51 PST

Happy New Year!

For more of Wordless Wednesday, visit the main site.

For more of my photos, see Flickr.

In With the New

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:53:16 PST

The Butterfly Nebula, Hubble Telescope

As another year draws to a close, I'm celebrating in a way that seems to have become traditional for me lately - by tweaking and sprucing up my website and blog. This year, I've combined the two into one! You can now find raimalarter.com and the Complexity Simplified blog all in one convenient place.

In 2012, I hope to bring some improvements to the blog, so watch for a few new things:

Guest posts! If you have an idea for a guest post for Complexity Simplified, let me know. I am especially interested in posts on applications of complex systems science in the "real" world.
A series of tutorials! I started doing this back at the beginning when I wrote several short tutorials on attractors, bifurcations, fractals, and other concepts from complex systems science. Time to add to the list, and there is a lot more material to cover. Stay tuned.
Book reviews! I'm currently reading a fascinating book on dark matter and dark energy, and hope to review it soon. If you have a book on science or science and religion that you'd like me to review, please contact me.

Finally, I truly hope to be posting more often in the new year than I have in 2011. In fact, this is one of my new year's resolutions, so I really hope I can keep this one. Here's to a better blog in 2012!

O Great Mystery

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:57:24 PST

O magnum mysterium,

et admirabile sacramentum,

ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,

jacentem in praesepio!

Beata Virgo, cujus viscera

meruerunt portare

Dominum Christum

Alleluia!

Nearly Wordless Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:11:27 PST

Welcoming the Solstice...waiting for the return of the Light

For more Wordless Wednesday, visit the main site.
For more of my photos, see Flickr.

Celebrating Three Years

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 12:30:36 PST

Three years ago today, I started this blog, Complexity Simplified, and put up my first post, which was pretty weak. It basically said, "Here is my new blog and I will be posting some stuff soon!"

Not the strongest start, perhaps, but I did start posting stuff soon, including a post about this fractal vegetable, Romanesco broccoli, along with an explanation: Fractals in Nature. That post is one of the most viewed on my site, coming in third after a post about Haiti (more on that below) and a post on The Emergent System.

I suppose a lot of people start their blogs the same way. It takes awhile to decide to even start a blog, and most people who don't blog think the design and layout is going to be the hard part. I, like many other bloggers, learned very quickly that the design was easy -- it was the content that was challenging, especially the ever-present need to create new posts and keep it interesting.

I, of course, find all the topics I post about here interesting, but I sometimes wonder if my wide range of interests has left people wondering just what this blog is about. In one sense, this is a science blog. I am a scientist, after all, and a true geek, as nerdy as they come, so any blog I wrote would have to be about science at some level. And it would be about complex systems science, of course, since that's what I have worked on my entire 30+ year career.

But I've posted here about other things: religion and science is one major topic. I also have reviewed books (many on science, religion or books comparing the two), posted a lot of photos as a participant in the Wordless Wednesday endeavor, and posted lots of other random posts about something that just happened to be on my mind that week.

So, feeling a little nostalgic today, I've spent some time going back through all the 178 posts I've made over the last three years and working with Google Analytics to see if there was any consistent pattern in reader response to posts about different topics. I guess I really am an incurable scientist, because my first thought was to look at the data and see if there were any patterns. And there are!

By far, the most viewed post at Complexity Simplified, with nearly 5000 views, is one posted January 16, 2010, a few days after the massive earthquake in Haiti. Entitled Haiti: Not a Natural Disaster this post starts with the sentence "Scientists who study disasters agree that this week's earthquake in Haiti was not a natural disaster but, rather, a man-made one."

The Haiti post goes on to provide links to studies that back up this statement. The upshot of this post is that although the earthquake was, indeed, massive, economic and social factors are to blame for the catastrophic nature of the event. People are still viewing this post on a regular basis, nearly two years after I wrote it.

The second most-viewed post, an explanation of The Emergent System, was really not viewed very much at all until a writer at BigThink.com linked to it in a widely-read post about a column in the New York Times. Other posts that week, about using complex systems theory to understand the spread of swine flu, were widely read, so I found it odd that this more "academic" post was suddenly capturing people's attention. I saw views of the page spike but didn't know why until a friend on Twitter pointed the BigThink article out to me. All this just goes to show what we all probably already knew: the power of personal recommendation should never be underestimated.

The Haiti post tied with another post, a personal reminiscence about the influence Madeline L'Engle's book "A Wrinkle in Time" had on my development as a scientist, for number of comments. Very different posts, but both clearly touched a nerve with readers.

Two posts were also tied for second in commenting. The first, a post written shortly after the catastrophic tsunami in Japan when people in the US were needlessly freaking out about radiation, is entitled "What you need to know about potassium iodide." A provocative topic for sure, as was the post with the same number of comments: "What Do Scientists Believe?" which was a book review of Elaine Howard Ecklund's book of the same title about the religious beliefs of scientists.

So, my conclusion from this admittedly non-scientific study of the analytic data on my blog, is that topics that tie to the news get the most views. This actually runs counter to advice I've seen other bloggers make: they say that adding one more voice to the large number of voices blogging about a topic is not the way to get noticed. That doesn't seem to be true in the case of Complexity Simplified, but I think I know why.

I think people are interested in reading about a view of the day's news that emphasizes the complex nature of the systems that underlie the events that we are all trying so hard to understand. People want to know how to prevent another catastrophe like the one in Haiti. They want to know as much as they possibly can about the pandemic they've read about in the news or the radiation advancing toward them across the ocean, because they need information to know how to protect themselves and their family.

I believe that complex systems science has much to offer the world in coping with and understanding these types of situations, so I have been happy to share what I know. And I look forward to the next three years of blogging about this topic that I cannot imagine I will ever lose interest in.

Amazing Bird Videos

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:48:35 PST

I'm thrilled to see so many videos of bird flocking being passed around among friends on social networks. This amazing example of self-organization is truly awe-inspiring. Here is one example that has come to my attention lately. The action really starts about two minutes in, so keep watching!

For an in-depth explanation of this phenomenon, check out the post I wrote over two years ago when these videos first started to make the rounds.

Nearly-Wordless Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:05:11 PST

Fall Beauty

For more Wordless Wednesday, visit the main site.

For more of my photos, see Flickr.

A Social Media Experiment

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 16:49:01 PST

I unwittingly carried out a little social media experiment this summer when I took a sabbatical from most of my social media activity (Twitter, Facebook and Google+) and stopped posting to my blogs. At the time, I was overwhelmed with work that needed to be completed, travel that was taking up a lot of time, and starting a new business, so the sabbatical happened simply to create space in my life.

And it worked -- I completed most of the tasks I needed to do, completed the travel, launched the business -- but by taking "time off" from social media I found out a little bit more about the different social media platforms and their role in my life.

Looking back, I can now see that one of the triggers for my sudden sabbatical was the appearance of Google+ on the scene. I was very enthusiastic about the promise of this new social medium and wrote a post likening Google+ to an especially nourishing culture dish for people who want to talk to one another. But the time required to learn a new way to interact, find people to follow, post things and make comments, etc etc, was more than I had available, and my reaction was to shut down not only Google+ activity but everything else.

Or, ALMOST everything else, because I soon found that I was back on Facebook. It had been only a few weeks since I announced my sabbatical, but Hurricane Irene hit the east coast and I "needed" to let people know we were okay. I suppose I could have picked up the phone and called a bunch of folks, but how much easier it was to post one quick note that everybody could see...and so, I was back, but only on Facebook.

And, I completely understand why it is that FB is the place I went back to first. Here is where I will find people that I interact with in real life -- family members, friends and neighbors, co-workers, colleagues, and so forth. It is an online community that looks very much like my real-life community.

By and large, though, my FB friends do not share my intellectual interests. I have found many new "friends," although most are still only online acquaintances, who are interested in the same things I am through Twitter and, now, Google+. I enjoy reading their posts and tweets, but I had no problem turning off the flow of incoming information during that time I needed to get back to my own work and ignore everything else.

This continued to be the pattern for the next two months. I completely ignored Twitter and Google+, except for occasionally logging in to see if anything was happening (it wasn't). When I finally ended my sabbatical in October, I was astounded to see that my followers on Google+ had jumped from less than 100 to, as of today, over 700. And this, despite the fact that I hadn't posted anything for two months!

Since re-appearing, I've had a hard time getting started with Twitter again. I find my way into a few conversations, see a few tweets with interesting links, but something seems to have disappeared from my Twitter experience. There are still a few friends on Twitter I like to talk to, but much of the news I see there is repeated over on G+, so I continue to wonder if Twitter will soon be obsolete.

Google+ also seemed kind of dead until the last week or so when brand pages appeared. Not that I followed any of them, but suddenly I'm seeing new things on Google+ that I don't see on Twitter. And I'm wondering if this will continue and there will eventually be a big shake-out of all the different ways we organize ourselves into interacting on-line communities.

So, no words of wisdom from me about this today, just some raw anecdotal data. I would be interested to hear from others who have done similar experiments or are following the evolution of these media with an eye to their self-organizing capacities. It's an interesting era we are living in!

Nearly-Wordless Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 07:45:52 PDT

Porcelain Berries

For more Wordless Wednesday, see the main site.
For more of my photos, visit Flickr.

Nearly-Wordless Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 13:50:32 PDT

Sand Shark

For more Wordless Wednesday, visit the main site.

For more of my photos, see Flickr.

I'm Back!

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 07:55:31 PDT

I've been taking a sabbatical from Complexity Simplified and most forms of social media, as well as my other blog Yoga Emergence, for almost two months, and my sabbatical is now coming to an end.

When I announced that I needed a break, I was overwhelmed with things I needed to do, trips I needed to take, and a pressing need to get back to my writing. I think my sabbatical accomplished what I hoped it would, since:

(1) I organized and launched my new yoga teaching business and now have about a dozen regular students;
(2) I added about 2300 miles to the odometer in my car, bringing the total for this summer to over 5000 miles (that's what happens when you drive from Washington DC to Indianapolis and back three times);
(3) I completed a draft of my new novel and have started distributing copies to my writing buddies, who will help me find where it still needs work (and I'm sure it does!)

I have a few other observations about the results of this sabbatical--including the curious (to me) finding that of all the social media platforms I use, the only one I made a regular appearance on during my sabbatical was Facebook--but will hold the rest of my musings about sabbaticals and their value for a later post.

Oh, and in addition to all that this sabbatical has brought into my life, surely the most photogenic is the young cat that we have just adopted. Meet Cricket, the newest member of our family!

Nearly-Wordless Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 03:30:01 PDT

Soaring High

For more Wordless Wednesday, visit the main site.
For more of my photos, see Flickr.

I am currently on a blog and social media sabbatical (see here for more details) so may not respond to comments right away. See you in October!

Nearly-Wordless Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 03:30:02 PDT

At the Beach!

For more Wordless Wednesday, visit the main site.

For more of my photos, see Flickr.

On Sabbatical

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 08:32:19 PDT

After going through my calendar for the next several weeks and agonizing, once again, about how I am just not getting to the things I want and need to do, I've come to the inevitable conclusion that something needs to go, at least for awhile. So, Complexity Simplified will be "on sabbatical" for a few weeks, until October 1st, while Raima tries to get caught up.

Sabbatical might not be the right word for this break I need to take, since I expect to be very busy with several writing projects during that time, and with launching my yoga teaching business (as chronicled on my other blog, Yoga Emergence) and traveling to no fewer than three destinations between now and the end of September.

Vacation is not quite the right word, either, although one of the upcoming trips involves a short (four-day) stay at the beach. I toyed with the idea of an "internet fast," since the break from regular posting to Complexity Simplified will also involve a break from social media, but that didn't seem quite right, either.

I finally decided that I would just post an announcement that I'm "Gone Fishing," and that's actually a pretty good description of what I hope to accomplish during this time. It has actually been quite some time since I had anything of substance to say on this blog, and this is a reflection of being tapped out. The well feels like it's running dry, primarily because I'm not taking time for renewal and recharging the source. So, I'm going fishing, and hope to return in the fall refreshed and renewed with a lot more to say, and maybe with a mess of fish.

This doesn't mean that you won't see posts from Complexity Simplified during this time. I'm loading in a bunch of photos and short posts and scheduling these for publication throughout the coming weeks. Thanks to TwitterFeed and NetworkedBlogs all these posts should show up on Twitter and Facebook and it will look like I'm here, when actually I'm not. The wonders of computer automation!

Despite my enthusiasm for the newest social network site, Google+, it is still not sufficiently developed that automatic feed mechanisms are available, so it will probably look like I've all but disappeared from Google+ for the next couple of months. It will be interesting to see what that medium is like in October, since it's grown at an enormous pace in its first month of life. I predict big changes and new developments in the weeks to come, but they will have to take place without me hovering around to watch.

I really need to thank my friend, Susan Henderson, who posted a note on her blog LitPark back around the middle of June that she was taking a break from all things internet for the entire summer. I've missed her posts and missed interacting with her, but I completely identify with her story of saying that you want to write, but doing everything else instead. Social media is a wonderful new development in our society, but it can also become an addiction if used to avoid the work we need and want to do. I don't know if I'm quite to the "addicted" stage yet, but I know when I need a break--and I need a break.

So, I'll be back in the fall, when the leaves are starting to turn and the temperature is no longer hovering around 100 degrees days after day after day. If anybody really needs to find me, I will be reading email during this time. (I flirted with going on an email sabbatical, too, but that would be akin to not answering my phone!)

See you in October!

Colonizing Google+

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 11:35:05 PDT

I'm in! I've actually been in (to Google+) for a few days now, but have taken some time to play with it and see how it works. And I have to say, I am really impressed and see lots of potential for this new social medium. You can find my Google+ profile here, so please connect!

Bacterial Colony in Petri Dish

One of the things I've been impressed with is how the designers of the Google+ social medium have initiated the process of "inviting" people to join. It seems that they did, in fact, actually "invite" a few people at the beginning, but now those people have invited others, who've invited others, and so on.

All it takes now to get in is to know somebody who is in and ask them to invite you. So, if you want in, send me your email address and I'll invite you!

I was struck by how the people who are on Google+ are coming in through their already-well-established social networks. It's like we're colonizing this medium the way a group of bacterial cells colonizes a petri dish. The result can, at times, be quite beautiful, as shown in this photograph from one of my far-flung friends and colleagues, Eshel Ben-Jacob at Tel Aviv University.

I wish I could have sat in on the discussions of the Google+ design crew as they made plans for launching this new platform. How did they choose those first adopters? It seems to me that they chose people who had a lot of well-established contacts, people who were already enthusiastic and competent users of other social media. I, for example, received my invitation from Meredith Gould who is linked to more social media communities than anybody I know -- and knows how to use them.

I have the same sense of potential for Google+ as I did for Twitter when I first joined it about two and a half years ago. The medium is set up to allow a self-organizing system to flourish, and it will, since people are very (very) social and will tolerate even a poorly-designed interface to get more chances to talk to one another and interact. Google+ seems to have fixed some of the problems with both Twitter and Facebook, which is great, but only time will tell if these improvements are enough to get people to migrate to this new medium.

One thing I am impatiently waiting for is the day when all these social media will merge and I can just "go online" to one place and see all my messages, all the ongoing conversations, all the news, all in one place with one login. Google+ works for me, a Gmail user, because it pops right up at the top and side of my email inbox. I don't have to make a special effort to go look at it, like I do with Twitter and Facebook. I would love to see this trend continue. (Developers, are you listening??)

Note added after initial publication of this post: Just saw this study which estimates the number of Google+ users at 10 million -- and this just two weeks after its launch!

End of an Era

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 08:07:25 PDT

Today the space shuttle is scheduled to launch for the very last time. I'm both sad about the end of an inspiring era but also excited about the future of space flight.

This image shows the shuttle Atlantis on the launchpad a few days ago. Launch is scheduled for 11:26 AM today and you can watch live at NASA TV.

At the moment, launch is a go!

Nearly-Wordless Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (Raima) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:40:24 PDT

For more Wordless Wednesday, visit the main site.
For more of my photos, see Flickr.