Not a chaotic combination at all and entertaining birds

I had some spare time this week so I took the opportunity to catch up with my reading. I recently, after a one year search, acquired a copy of the book: ‘The Edge of Chaos’ written by M. Waldrop. It’s a thrilling story about the brilliant (Nobel-prize winning) minds at the Santa Fe institute (in the late 80s early 90s) who discovered how the world adapts itself to a state of continuous renewal on the edge of chaos. In fact, life can only thrive on this thin edge. The word ‘world’ you can interpret as biology, physics, evolution, chemistry, nature, climate, economy (aha!)… In one sentence: how life develops into ever more complexity floating on the edge of chaos. From only a couple of basic and simple rules, complex behaviour emerges and this behaviour stabilises under the right conditions to a limited number of steady states. Let me give you some examples from the book:

• a water molecule is very simple: one oxygen bound to two hydrogens. Nothing spectacular, but throw some trllions of them together and what you get is emergent properties (properties that a single entity does not have but a group of entities do). Water is fluid, or turns into ice below 0°C or becomes vapour above 100°C. When boiling water, the convection bubbles are purely chaotic.
• or how people in the Middle Ages were able to build cathedrals using only some basic heuristics as they did not have the knowledge to perform stress calculations. Still catherdrals are wonderfully complex and have stood the test of time. Compare this to today's buidlings and structures calculated up to 5 digits behind the comma.
• or chess: from a limited number of rules, there are 10^120 different moves. In case you have trouble picturing this number (a 1 with 120 zeros), if you would make one move every microsecond since the Big Bang, you would only have scratched the surface of the 10^120 combinations by now.
• or boids, the simulated computer equivalent of birds that are programmed with 3 simple rules but behave like a flock of birds and have no problem avoiding objects, just like a real flock of say starlings. The three simple rules are: keep an as small as possible distance to other objects in the surrounding, including other boids; keep the speed equal to the speed of other boids around; try getting closer to the center of the group. Compare the computer simulation with a video of a falcon diving on a swarm of starlings. Isn't life (and science!) wonderful?

It all also links in with the fact that history does not flow but that it jumps (see Taleb et al), with "The Tipping Point" (Malcolm Gladwell), with "Thinking Fast and Slow" (Daniel Kahneman) and of course with "Chaos" (James Gleick). But back to ‘The Edge of Chaos’, finally I read a book confirming my feeling there is something wrong with the term 'sustainability' (I never liked it)! I always felt that sustainability does not exist otherwise dinosaurs would still be around. Maybe a harsh picture but so it seems, rather accurate.

Not a chaotic combination at all.

In between the reading, birds kept me entertained (no it's not what you think you dirty minds, I'm talking about our feathered friends). Mocking birds were picking up walnuts, flying high in the sky and dropping hem on the terras and street to break them. Blackbirds and buzzards were doing dogfights (with spectaular wingovers and barrel rolls). And a black redtail took his daily bath in the bird water tub. Ah Autumn can be so wonderful!