Stuart Kauffman has a concept called the Adjacent Possible Buy Penisole Online Without Prescription, which I find incredibly useful in understanding the world.  Simply put, if you think of the space of possibilities from the present moment forward and just concentrate on those that are achievable today...

Imagine a multiverse, infinitely infinite.  There's just infinity.  Or if you prefer, nothing.   There's no space, no time, no matter, no energy.  There's no structure whatsoever, and nothing "in" any of the universes that make up the multiverse.  it's not even clear whether these individual universes...

Rick Bookstaber, author of “A Demon of Our Own Design” and Senior Policy Adviser at the SEC has hit the nail on the head as far as the bank reform goes – Breaking the Banks (via Infectious Greed): “It is not the case that the largest banks are the same as other banks, just bigger“ “The...

As careful readers of this blog will note, I've been obsessed with Alex Ryan's visualization of the way new levels of organization come into being (e.g. atoms --> molecules --> cells, etc).  In an attempt to complement and extend his model, here's a visualization of how I think of the various concepts...

The debate over vaccination is raging (c.f. Wired article) and it smacks of one of those conundrums that is unlikely to get resolved by scientific inquiry.  I offer the following hypothesis and a way out of the dilemma. Hypothesis: Vaccination is something that is good at the societal level but bad at the...

Have you ever heard of anyone selflessly helping out a stranger by buying their house at a bank foreclosure auction and just giving it back to them?  Well, now you have. More likely, you've probably heard of private investors taking advantage of the banks' unwillingness (or inability) to deal with all the...

1. Smile. 2. Spend time with friends, or even try and make a new one. 3. Help another person. Donate a small amount of money, that has nominal value to you, but significant value to someone else. (Kiva, Vittana Foundation.) 4. Quit Smoking. It might be even worse for you today. 5. Stop worrying about...

As part of President Barack Obama's stimulus package, NIH is awarding $200 million in "Challenge Grants." But, according to Science Magazine, these grants are far more competitive than initially intended: A frantic grant-writing effort that has consumed biomedical research scientists this spring came to...

Tweeter, Claus Metzner (@cmetzner) alerted me to this cool area of study with this paper. Suppose you meet a Wise being (W) who tells you it has put $1,000 in box A, and either $1 million or nothing in box B. This being tells you to either take the contents of box B only, or to take the contents of both A...

It's not hard these days to find vignettes like this one (starting at minute 1:45) that describe a microeconomic chain of events that give you a glimpse into the recessionary dynamic.  I think it's a good starting point to explain my personal theory of why asymmetry is the root of all value (economic and...