I'm giving my "2009 Q1 award for most concise, lucid comment" to Paul Phillips for this gem: Viewed from a thousand miles, the financial system has a incalculably large incentive to fail catastrophically as frequently as it can do so without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. As long as there is...

[ I'm asking for your help in answering this question, read past the fold to see how ] In my post on invisible etiology, I challenged us all to be as open-minded as possible when dealing with our most complex problems, for this is the only way to make the invisible become visible.  Here's where I attempt...

[ This is an edited version of a blog comment on Brandon Kein's Wired Science post here ] The question of whether we will "break through" to a superorganism or collapse through any number of spiraling cascades or catastrophic events is the subject of Ervin Laszlo's book, The Chaos Point, which I highly...