Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kinkblot who wrote (430)	4/24/2003 2:43:16 PM
From: Volsi Mimir	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 480

This is interesting I just logged on to SI when you gave the message and its about this book (and reviews) from Amazon........... Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order by Steven Strogatz amazon.com A quick search here rendered this- interesting once you realize that the book has a published date of March 5 2003 Message 16951962 My fav review in Amazon of this book has one 'bout Wolfram......... Strogatz beats Wolfram 10-0, March 31, 2003 Reviewer: A reader from New York, NY When you have a flight to catch early in the morning, you'd like to sleep early in the evening. You go to bed but you stay awake until your usual bedtime. When you stay up for a late party, you'd like to sleep in until noon. But you wake up tired and can't fall back asleep. Why can't you sleep for as long as you need to? Why can't you fall asleep when you want to? The culprit is a small cluster of neurons right at the bottom of your brain. These cells have the amazing power to synchronize their activity to each other and to the cycle of day and night. Their combined effect is to regulate your bodily functions along a fixed 24-hour cycle. Your body temperature, hormone secretions, and a myriad other functions are regulated by this internal clock. And so is your sleep-wake cycle. Your day contains two "forbidden zones," for most people around 10 am and 10 pm, when your brain dictates that you can hardly fall asleep. Slightly after lunch your brain says it's a good time for a nap, as so many cultures discovered on their own. Between 3:00 and 6:00 am, it's so hard to stay awake that shift workers call this time the "zombie zone". Most catastrophic accidents that depend on human error, like Three Miles Island and Chernobyl, occur at this time. For all of their importance in helping people sleep well and avoid accidents, understanding the neural clock is among the most difficult problems facing science today. It requires understanding how thousands of cells, connected together in complicated ways, manage to coordinate their behavior. New mathematical concepts have been developed over the last few decades to tackle this kind of problem. Synchronization is exhibited by stock markets, brains, and many other things we'd love to understand better. Studying synchronization is part of the larger enterprise of understanding complexity. One of this field's pioneers is Steven Strogatz. His book Sync is the first popular introduction to this groundbreaking investigation. The book is as delightful a read as its topic is timely. Complexity is fashionable today. Plenty of books about complexity address the general public. In 2002, Stephen Wolfram made a big splash with his A New Kind of Science, in which he argued that complexity demands a radically new scientific approach invented by Wolfram, which uses simple computer programs to understand everything. On close examination, A New Kind of Science turned out to contain few new ideas, and those few turned out to be unpersuasive. To make matters worse, Wolfram's book is repetitive, self-aggrandizing, and poorly written. Like Wolfram's, Strogatz's book is about complexity. Fortunately, the similarities stop here. In every other respect, Sync is diametrically opposite to A New Kind of Science. In spite of his brilliant achievements, which are documented throughout the book, Strogatz is refreshingly modest. He acknowledges the role of his mentors, colleagues, and students. Strogatz motivates his choice of topics, links them beautifully to one another, and repeats definitions and explanations when they are needed without ever being verbose. He also respects the general public of nonscientists. He stresses that even the most curiosity-driven scientific research often has life-saving applications. And in his acknowledgements, he thanks the American public for supporting the funding agencies that make science possible. To top it all off, Strogatz is an awesome writer. PS: Please, let's not attempt to bring intelligent design into serious scientific discussion. Intelligent design is the view that some things were created by one or more non-human intelligent designers. It is a charming hypothesis with no scientific credentials, for the simple reason that there is no scientific evidence that non-human intelligent designers exist, no story about where non-human intelligent designers come from, and no shadow of a theory of how non-human intelligent designers function and manage to create ======================== of course there is one in there that poo's this one and rah's Wolfram. Still didn't read Wolfram.....will now or check it out (library) ========================= The review of John Bardeen book at Amazon has one review from one of the colleagues written in the book......pretty cool.......my take-- fluffy more historical but the essense of teamwork is there. His ability to comprehend, reason and deduct, besides the lesson of solving smaller problems echoed throughout, is left to my diminished imagination. Made me look at SUPX too.