Posts Tagged ‘physics’
Introducing Palindromic Queries
Humanity 2.0 on slideshare homepage
Nice one slideshare!
“Hey ResonanceBlog!
Your presentation Complexity & Humanity 2.0 has been selected amongst the ‘Top Presentations of the Day’ on the SlideShare homepage.
Our editorial team would like to thank you for this awesome presentation, that has been chosen from amongst the thousands that are uploaded to SlideShare everday.
Congratulations! Have a Great Day!
- The SlideShare team
p.s. Why not blog/twitter this and let the world know about the masterpiece you have created?”
More complexity theory & humanity 2.0
The discovery of complexity
Networks are an essential ingredient in any complex adaptive system. In biology, molecules interact in cells, cells interact in organisms, organisms interact in ecosystems. As Eric D. Beinhocker points out in one of my favourite books, ‘The Origin of Wealth’:
“The economic world likewise depends on networks. The earth is girdled by roads, sewers, water systems, electrical grids, railroad tracks, gas lines, radio waves, television signals and fiber-optic cables. These provide the highways and byways of the matter, energy and information flowing through the open system of the economy. The economy also contains massively complex virtual networks: people interact in companies, companies interact in markets and markets interact in the global economy. Just as in biology, the networks of the economic world are arranged in hierarchies of networks within networks.”
BUT… traditional economics glossed over networks because they didn’t fit neatly into the equilibrium paradigm, whereby the economy was likened to an equilibrium system, i.e. behaving like a ball dropped into a bowl, rolling around until finally settling in a predictable place, until something external disrupts it. More recently the perfect sums have been ditched in favour of the idea that the economy is a complex adaptive system, i.e. a system of dynamically interacting parts in which micro-level interactions lead to the emergence of macro-level behaviour patterns. A single ant or water molecule is boring on its own, but naturally becomes an army or whirlpool as a byproduct of complex interactions. People are the same – the internet is the same. If a system reaches a state of equilibrium, it’s essentially dead.
Physics has likewise evolved to embrace complexity in favour of neat maths that doesn’t fit reality. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy, a measure of disorder or randomness in a system, is always increasing. The universe as a whole is drifting from a state of order to disorder.
Our brains are made to deal with complexity, but we don’t make decisions by logically churning through every available piece of information. Instead we satisfice, taking the information we have and doing the best we can. Cognitive science has grown to recognise that we’re much better at inductive than deductive reasoning. We spot patterns and weave stories around metaphors and analogies.
Computers are the opposite, helping make up for our deductive shortfalls. It’s interesting that the rise of agile development follows the same pattern as new knowledge in physics, biology, economics and other advanced fields of discovery; as does the creation of new business models that embrace our inherent sociability and the complexity of networks. We’re no longer seeking the perfect, no longer adopting unrealistic assumptions to make the maths work out in the equilibrium framework we’ve been convinced explains everything for so long.
We know the energy inherent in what we’re doing renders equilibrium not only irrelevant, but impossible.
Our world might be a giant hologram
Craig Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, reckons “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”
For the past seven years, a team in Germany has been searching for gravitational waves – ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 hasn’t detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.
Check this out.
Equilibrium and fractal business models
A fundamental law of physics (in one formulation) states that left to itself any closed system will always change towards a state of equilibrium from which no further change is possible. One example is swinging a pendulum… if you hold it up to one side it’ll be in a state of extreme disequilibrium, then as you let go and it swings back and forth, gradually losing energy, it’ll come to a standstill.
Other examples include many media agencies and advertising agencies. You know why.
Someone said to me today, ‘but we need to prove the ROI – how much is it [implementing a vision that gives power to the people, to cut a long story short] going to cost and what will the return will be? How do we show that listening to the customer has better ROI than direct marketing?’
Errr…. I’m not even going to answer that.
Our obsession with plotting loads of numbers in loads of rows in so-called forecasts, that ‘demonstrate ROI’ may be a comfort blanket for some, but are forecasts ever accurate or meaningful? If we look back at them later (which we seldom do thoroughly, because they’re so irrelevant and unfriendly) we’ll be astonished (or not) at how far off the mark we were.
Way too many business models set themselves up for equilibrium. A scalable business model should be fractal in nature… infinitely scalable, independent of any company’s resources. You should be able to zoom all the way in… or all the way out… and see a repeatability, recursiveness and simplicity. We should focus on setting ourselves up to leverage the unforeseen opportunities, rather than attempting to predict the unpredictable and produce reams of comfort crap on autopilot.
The rotary motion of a harmonograph produces a series of complex drawings influenced by relative frequency, amplitude and direction.
Brands should communicate with a harmonic balance between relative frequency (WHEN… don’t interrupt), amplitude (WHAT…loudness…don’t shout / broadcast) and direction (WHERE… targeting, permission).
Companies should seek to produce beautiful pictures… not chaos (disharmony / dissonance). Business models that can be boiled down to a simple, beautiful picture tend to have inherent scalability.
Things don’t resonate coz they’re dense, innit.
According to general advertising industry relativity, black hole budgets are entirely compressed into a region with zero meaningful volume and near-zero relevance, which means their density and gravitational pull towards the 30 second TV ad and print campaign are infinite; and so is the curvature of space-time and agency-time that they cause.
These infinite values cause most physical equations – common sense, general relativity and good manners (i.e. not interrupting), to stop working at the centre of a broadcast industry black hole. So physicists, Resonance Jedis and every single one of us call the zero-volume, near-zero-relevance, infinitely dense region at the centre of the broadcast industry black hole a singularity.
A gravitational media agency singularity is a location where the quantities which are used to measure effectiveness (eyeballs, click-throughs etc) and the gravitational field become infinite in a way that does not depend on real life or the co-ordinate system. These quantities (with lots of zeros on the end which must mean brands should pay us loads for stacking them up) are the scalar invariant curvatures of agency metrics and ad-space-time, some of which are a measure of (the) density (of matter).
Plonkerisation
“As for intelligent life I’m putting my money on the fact that in the whole universe, we are pretty much unique.” [Dr Michael Perryman, European Space Agency]
Duuuuhhh! You’d think if we’d learned anything in the 470-ish years since the scientific revolution kicked in, it would be that we should hold our own knowledge in greatest suspicion.
I’m sure those 16th century dudes would’ve put their money on the fact the Earth was at the centre of the solar system.
A few words from Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan) are in order:
“The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are:
a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realise;
b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organised in history books than in empirical reality); and
c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories”
The frequency of fear
In the early 80s, engineer Vic Tandy was working in a supposedly haunted lab when he broke into a cold sweat, hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed an ominous grey shape drifting slowly into view. Terrified, he went straight home.
Tandy discovered that source of his discomfort was a 19hz standing wave, caused by an extractor fan. 19hz is in the range known as infrasound, below the range of human hearing (20hz). Low frequencies in this region can affect humans and animals in several ways, causing discomfort, dizziness, blurred vision (by vibrating your eyeballs), hyperventilation and fear, possibly leading to panic attacks. 19hz standing waves have since been discovered in many a ‘haunted’ building.
Prior to an attack, a tiger’s roar contains frequencies of about 18hz, which might disorientate and paralyse their intended victim. Is this the sound of fear itself?
Read the full Guardian article here.
Brand resonance
Just to explain a bit more about this Resonance thing I keep banging on about…
Resonance applies to physics and planets (orbital resonance) and music (acoustic resonance) and temperature (heat being caused by movement) and oceanography (tidal resonance) and brands and you and me and pretty much everything. In physics, the definition of resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate at maximum amplitude at certain frequencies. Consider that in light of what marketing attempts to do in terms of emotional connections; moving and shaking us.
A pleasant vibration is relaxing (consonance) versus a turbulent vibration that is torturous (dissonance). There are interesting parallels between marketing and music in endless ways (anyone who’s a musician and marketer gets it – you know who you are). A while back we knew our place – things were structured, holding form, shape, pattern (people accepted their lot), ‘photographic’ in artistic terms…think Bach, Mozart, cheesy aspirational image broadcast marketing. Then it became more extreme, ambiguous and chaotic… like new marketing and new media, eclectic, informal lifestyles, new found freedoms – no longer one right way to live and think. Society used to be static, set, still, calm, everything in its place – ‘classical’. Now it’s hip-hop, modern jazz, rock, pop, metrosexual whatever.
Then there’s musical colour, i.e. timbre (look at Klangfarbenmelodie, for example). Colour is all about mixing pigments, as is music. Pointillism, for instance; and minimalism, where there isn’t much going on at all. Then there are some people who hear, say, a G chord and see the colour green, consistently (synesthesia).
Also words – I love words. Words are vibrations (sounds) – but when you look at a word, do you see it or hear it? If there was no such word, would it still exist? Okay, okay. But what I love about words is their rhythm; and rhythm is just a slowed-down vibration that becomes a beat when our ear can pick it out. Vibes man 
Resonance ties in with physics/space time/existence too. Look at the ancient Greek stuff: Pythagoras and the muses were all about physics, geometry, mathematics, philosophy and music. Sound is characterised by the properties of waves: frequency (check out Dominic Travers’ work on frequency-of-use data), wavelength, amplitude, speed – like science and marketing and anthropology.
If you fancy a real brain-strain, check our Nassim Haramein’s Resonance Project, a bunch of scientists living in a think tank compound in Hawaii trying to work out stuff about the universe, from the origin of spin, to scale unification, to the role of the vacuum. If you can get over the garland-wearing weirdness and quasi-religious undertones (and the fact if you close your eyes you could mistake Nassim for Cheech / Chong), it’s truly fascinating stuff, whether or not you buy the theories.
Copyright ResonanceBlog 2009
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