The idea offered that why cities become such thriving places for humans is because of the intensity of noise in the connections is somewhat fantastic. That's really what Storgatz & Ratti are proposing, as traditional science has always proposed to explain what is inexplicable to it's method. To their credit, the one thing they seem to accurately agree on is that science doesn't have a clue how that would work, and that we do indeed observe daily that it somehow really does.
They should read Jane Jacobs on the Nature of Economies or the Economy of Cities, who brilliantly describes the actual creative mechanism of the environment. The productive "wide open door" to recognizing it, that most everyone opts not to walk through, is that it's the diversity options, not the diversity of instructions in a creative organism like a city that do it. That sort of messes up the deterministic model, of course, but points to a gap in our rules where things could both exit and enter. Phil Henshaw From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of peter Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2008 2:27 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Strogatz and Ratti video conversation Nice one indeed , great catch Steve But do we all realize the implications with the words - Feedback Loops - Giant Non Linear systems ( being measured with linear systems ) - Network theory not translating into Euclidean geometry. I found the piece on natural laws of cities totally enlightening but fortunately for all of us SaFeans we live in Discworld nirvana where no natural laws apply as Owen can testify from his phenomenal research under Professor Pratchett ( : ( : pete Peter Baston IDEAS <http://www.ideapete.com/> www.ideapete.com Stephen Guerin wrote: Nice video of Steven Strogatz and Carlo Ratti discussing complexity and urban design: http://salon.seedmagazine.com/salon_strogatz_ratti.html Strogatz mathematically describes how natural and sociocultural complexity resolves into vast webs of order. Ratti uses technology as a tool to create interactive urban environments. In this video Salon, Strogatz and Ratti discuss whether building and analyzing human networks can help us overcome our poor mathematical understanding of complexity. -S
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