In the first few years of the last century, during his summer breaks at a farm, Norwegian schoolboy Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe spent time observing chicken. He noticed that when hens peck on each other—as they do when they fight, typically about food—they follow specific patterns. If hen A pecked on hen B, B would not peck […]
How the names of measures influence their interpretations
In my and adjacent research fields, measures and methods and their names have complex and sometimes detrimental relationships. This is especially true when the names have a clear and relevant meaning in the vernacular. There are several related mechanisms for which I have only scanty evidence (hopefully to be supported further in the future): The […]
What complexity science is, and why
I also posted this post on arXiv, in a more reader-friendly layout and somewhat shaped-up writing. This is a post/essay about understanding complexity science, via some peculiarities of the field, as a meeting place for a special kind of scientist. It is the result of my nostalgia-driven hobby of reading popular-science complex systems books, and […]
The network scientist’s survival kit
Throughout the scientific disciplines, core values, methodologies, and worldviews vary to a frustrating degree. Network scientists are interdisciplinary. Through years of catching up with our disciplinary colleagues, we have learned to understand other disciplines better than many scientists of those disciplines understand us. Such a fundamental thing as who a scientific result should benefit, and […]
Beauty contest or masonry
A lighthearted post about whether or not it is right to market your scientific output—a topic I am neutral about because there are great arguments on both sides, canceling each other. So, my inner dialogue could go like: Hey! Did you see César Hidalgo tweeting that storytelling is an American thing? Isn’t it anthropology 101 […]
Using networks to design an Indian village
Notes on the Synthesis of Form by maverick architect/mathematician Christopher Alexander belongs to the canon of design theory. In 150 pages of youthful enthusiasm, Alexander brings together D’Arcy Thompson, cosmology, modernist architecture, anthropology, and his own algorithm to hierarchically decompose a graph. In 1962, two years before the publication of Notes on the Synthesis of Form, […]
Faraway, so close! Nobel prize to complex systems
Yesterday, it was announced that Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi get to share the 2021 Nobel prize in physics. Woo hoo! I had a smile on my lips running through the night streets of Tokyo (my usual exercise). The best part is the motivation: “For groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical […]
Universality: Stronger than logic
I was re-reading some old universality papers. You know, universality in the stat-mech sense—the critical exponents that characterize phase transitions are insensitive to details of your model or crystal structure of your material. This insight matured in the 1950s and 60s and culminated with Kenneth Wilson’s development of the renormalization group in the first few […]
Minds, Machines and Herbert Simon
Our designed reality Two years late to the party, I discovered the brilliant review paper “Machine Behavior” by Iyad Rahwan and an all-star cast. Its premise is that we need to let systems relying on artificial intelligence be scientific study objects in their own right, even though they are, to some extent, engineered. The article […]
The watershed of feedbacks
This is a follow-up to my previous post about the differences between the traditions of integrative, systemsy science. I will use the same –5 to +5 scale as in that post. Negative numbers are not bad but represent people, papers, places, and concepts more to the complex systems / Santa Fe Institute side. Positive numbers […]
Petter Holme 