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...

The truth is out there. Finally. The NYTimes has a piece on the problems and differences between generic and brand name drugs. Think they are the same? Think again. The article is excellent and I recommend everyone read it. As usual, I will quote liberally, with some of my own commentary. But there is a...

The following quotes are from a book describing a real set of events: [The incident] is an extraordinary example of what happens when you get... a dozen people with an average IQ of 160... working in a field in which they collectively have 250 years of experience... employing a ton of leverage. It's hard...

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...

A few articles on the economy that were sent my way recently. The Good: After Capitalism (Geoff Mulgan) "The era of transition that we are entering will be disruptive—but it may bring a world where markets are servants, not masters."  I urge you to read this entire article, and leave your ideological...

With his permission, I am posting an email thread between myself and Alfred Hubler.  I had contacted him on the recommendation of John Miller when Kevin and I were posting on the possibility of dampening boom-bust cycles in the financial markets through policy or other mechanisms.  Here's what Hubler had...

I remember reading this Wired article in 1998 suggesting that the "debunking" of cold fusion may have been way premature.  Last night, 60 Minutes did a pretty convincing piece claiming that more than 20 labs around the world have reported "excess heat" from cold fusion experiments: Click here for the...

Via a post at the always terrific Watts Up with That, a pre publication version of this paper examines the non-linear coupling dynamics of the climate. Its hypothesis is based on the mathematics of synchronized chaos (sorry, no good introductory link available). The essential idea is that certain complex...

Kevin just posted about a great article by Felix Salmon in Wired.  I underlined three quotes in my reading of it: "Correlation trading has spread through the psyche of the financial markets like a highly infectious thought virus." (Tavakoli) "...the real danger was created not because any given trader...

Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, an excellent article in Wired about how one formula, embodying one assumption, catalyzed the meltdown.  I recommend you read it and ponder it.  There are many useful lessons for modeling complex systems in general. However, I will summarize for those of you short on...

There is a proposed symposium on "Complex Adaptive Systems and the Threshold Effect: Views from the Natural and Social Sciences" on Nov. 5 - 7, 2009 in Arlington, VA.  According to the details, "A final determination for scheduling this event will depend partially on the amount of interest from the...

The following is a recent paper by Henry Heng published in JAMA.  I've linked concepts mentioned in the paper to corresponding explications from this blog. JAMA. 2008;300(13):1580-1581. The Conflict Between Complex Systems and Reductionism Henry H. Q. Heng, PhD Author Affiliations: Center for...

I attended the Singularity Summit today. Overall, it was worth the time spent.  I did not attend the workshop on Friday because it didn't look substantive when I reviewed the program.  Today, I spoke to several people who were there and they confirmed my prediction. I took 7 pages of notes at the summit...

I am a fan of prediction markets.   They have typically done much better than polls at predicting the outcome of elections.  Why?  Here's a thought experiment.  Consider who you think is going to win the election (not who you want to win).  Now consider that I was going to bet you $10,000 of your hard...

I apologize for the posting lull. I actually spotted an issue than I wanted to address a few weeks ago, but I've been pondering how to approach it.  It's pretty complicated and subtle.  I even ran a couple of drafts by Rafe to refine my thinking.  So please bear with me. As I've mentioned before, I am a...

Here are some notes that I took at TED 2008.  I have a bunch more on each of the speakers individually which I may post as time permits.  Let me know if you want me to expand any of the notes below into a full post. Themes TED sessions have their own explicit themes, but I detected a few implicit themes...

Parrondo’s paradox is the well-known counterintuitive situation where individually losing strategies or deleterious effects can combine to win.... Over the past ten years, a number of authors have pointed to the generality of Parrondian behavior, and many examples ranging from physics to population...

One of the most basic but misleading heuristics that the human mind uses is that of linearity. If we see a progression (say 0, 1, 2), our first instinct is that the next step follows linearly (namely 3). But there is no a priori reason to prefer the linear interpretation to any other, say quadratic (which...

A recent study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta claims that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used for many years in vaccines, is "not associated with problems in speech, intelligence, memory, coordination, attention, or other measures of childhood...