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Santa Fe Complex Announces June 18 Blender
Numbers and Metaphor
Wednesday, June 18
6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
632 Agua Fria St.
Blenders are a Wednesday night feature at Santa Fe Complex, located
at 632 Agua Fria St. Entrance is on Romero St. Admission is free.
Light refreshments will be served; donations to defray their costs
are welcome.
Admission is free.
Refreshments provided.
Click here for directions.
Santa Fe, NM - Aug 16, 2008 - This Wednesday's Blender at Santa Fe
Complex brings four national experts on the study of form through
numbers in a a blend of morphology, metaphor and category. Ralph
Chapman, Tiha von Ghyczy, Thomas P. Caudell, and Steve Smith will
discuss their own research interests and their applications of
morphology, metaphor and category in understanding complex problem
spaces. It will be a wide-ranging talk, moving from paleographic
fossils to modern business communications and neuroscience. The
speakers will limit their formal presentations to 15 minutes each,
leaving time for contributions from the audience and lots of
discussion.
What Is Morphology?
Numbers are metaphor: they describe the world in an abstract manner
that implies their object. They can tell us how much something
weighs, how tall its is or how fast it is going. Or, they can delve
deeper into their objects and help us understand them in an almost
intuitive way.
When numbers are used to study variations in nature-and learn how
natural processes influence organisms-they form the basis for the
field of morpholoy, the study of changes in form. Morphology
underlies much of our knowledge about the evolution of creatures
over time, particularly in the fossil record. By studying how a line
of fossils changes, for example, paleontologists can theorize about
evolutionary forces that create species or variations within species
long-since vanished from the planet.
About the Speakers
Steve Smith, founder of Los Alamos Visual Analytics (LAVA) and
former Visualization Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory,
has nearly 30 years experience in helping scientists understand
their data, models and theories through immersive perceptualization.
Steve will guide the discussion of how the application of cognitive
or conceptual metaphors and the structure-function duality can be
used to aid in the exploration, discovery and analysis of complex
problem spaces.
Ralph Chapman, a paleontologist by training and member of LAVA, is
the former director of the National Museum of Natural History's
Applied Morphometrics Laboratory, the former director of the Idaho
Virtualization Laboratory, and an instructor at the first NSF-funded
workshop on evolutionary morphometrics.
Tiha von Ghyczy, a fellow at the Strategy Institute at the Boston
Consulting Group, will describe the Strategy Institute's Strategy
Gallery, a collection of over 250 metaphors they have found useful
for gaining insight into complex business strategies. Tiha studied
philosophy and mathematics at the University of Amsterdam and earned
his M.B.A. from IMEDE (now IMD), in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Dr. Tom Caudell, the director of the High Performance Computing
Center at the University of New Mexico, is an astrophysicist by
training and a pioneer in the development of augmented and virtual
reality with specific application to understanding complex
information spaces and processes. Dr. Caudell will discuss his work
in the application of category theory to the understanding of
complex systems ranging from decision and risk support systems to
neural architectures.
Quotes on Morphology
In 1966, Fritz Zwicky proposed a generalized form of morphological
research now known as General Morphological Analysis:
"Attention has been called to the fact that the term morphology has
long been used in many fields of science to designate research on
structural interrelations - for instance in anatomy, geology, botany
and biology. ... have proposed to generalize and systematize the
concept of morphological research and include not only the study of
the shapes of geometrical, geological, biological, and generally
material structures, but also to study the more abstract structural
interrelations among phenomena, concepts, and ideas, whatever their
character might be." (Zwicky, 1966, p. 34)
In The Fruitful Flaws of Strategy Metaphors, Tiha von Ghyczy
examines the power of both cognitive and rhetorical metaphors.
Such metaphors communicate and clarify complex ideas using seemingly
disparate sources-and in so doing, spur creativity. In this piece,
the author contends that cognitive metaphors can be a particularly
effective means for generating innovative business strategies. Tiha
von Ghyczy believes that by focusing on something unfamiliar (that
is, the subject of the metaphor), a metaphor can spark creative
thinking about something familiar (the object of the metaphor).
In the 1980 Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
introduced conceptual metaphor as referring to the understanding of
one idea, or conceptual domain in terms of another, and being
pervasive in everyday life and thinking.
About Santa Fe Complex
We are a community studio creating connections in science,
technology and art. Our roots lie in the rich cultural, scientific
and artistic traditions of northern New Mexico; our vision is a
world where technology supports a renaissance in art and science
that opens our minds and hearts to our full human potential.
Santa Fe Complex
Don Begley
Managing Director
505/26.7562
624 Agua Fria St
Santa Fe, NM 87501
http://sfcomplex.org
Santa Fe Complex supports the open source and GNU public license
philosophies. Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim
copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. Please
credit our work.
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