Who said that cities are thriving places for humans?
I live in Berlin, which is not as big as London or
Tokio, but it is loud, crowded and polluted enough.
It is more exhausting than exciting to live here. Lots
of carcinogenic and pathogenic substances in the air.
You meet every day different people in the subway.
I think in a small city people know each other
much better, although you meet less people, you
are connected with more.
But I like the following statement from Steven Strogatz
in this interview, which leads us to "Black Swans" again:
"In the world of dynamical systems, from a mathematical
standpoint, feedback loops, especially in complex systems,
can be really scary. Because of their unintended consequences.
They can create all the beauty and richness in the world
around us as well as unforeseen horrors."
-J.
----- Original Message -----
From: Phil Henshaw
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2008 3:22 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Strogatz and Ratti video conversation
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 Strogatz & 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.
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