complexify

NYCEDC: Hacking Green Data

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:15:04 -0500

Starts this Friday night in NYC - via nycedc:

Go green with the Cleanweb Hackathon this weekend, where developers will hack together apps using energy and environmental data. The event kicks off Friday night with an icebreaker at the New York Academy of the Sciences, continues Saturday with an all-day, all-night hackathon at NYU…

Beautiful cartography - via wnycradiolab: Know what these are? ...

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:09:00 -0500

Beautiful cartography - via wnycradiolab:

Know what these are? Go ahead, guess.

Give up? They’re topographical maps of the moon, created in a collaboration between NASA and the US Geological Survey. I can’t get over how crazy beautiful they are. There are more here, super hi-res.

(via io9, thanks to Olga Abramson for the tip)

Made in Brooklyn: introducing Brooklyn Bridge Ventures and some...

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:32:08 -0500

Made in Brooklyn: introducing Brooklyn Bridge Ventures and some of the borough’s awesome innovators - via arig:

Made in Brooklyn

Charlie O’Donnell’s short video about what’s going on in Brooklyn

Save the planet, one line of code at a time

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:51:08 -0500

Save the planet, one line of code at a time:

Cleanweb Hackathon via challengepostblog:

Want to change the world this coming weekend? Sign up for the Cleanweb Hackathon, which takes place Jan. 20–22 in NYC. Participants will build apps that tackle sustainability issues and resource constraints (issues related to energy, food, waste, water, and so on).

arig: Albert Einstein - I have no special talents. I am only...

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:46:10 -0500

arig:

Albert Einstein - I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious

(via jaymug)

arig: Amazing. Philips just released a new iPad 2 app called...

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:44:10 -0500

arig:

Amazing.

Philips just released a new iPad 2 app called Vital Signs Camera that uses the camera to measure your heart and breathing rate. It detects subtle beat-to-beat changes in the color of your face to measure your heart rate.

We’re slowly living in the future.

(via jayparkinsonmd)

Obituary: the bookcase

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:30:49 -0400

Obituary: the bookcase:

As much as I love my Kindle, I wonder how technology will replace the humble (or not so humble) bookcase’s other functions. Via motivatr:

Yet there’s no replacement yet for the expression one can make with a bookcase. Showing off what books you read tells the world your interests, politics, philosophy and even religion. It’s acceptable for any houseguest to peruse your bookcase and even yank out a few books, while snooping around your Kindle or iPad at length would be intrusive.

Wish this wasn’t so true. via austinkleon: Report: 90% Of...

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:52:26 -0400

Wish this wasn’t so true. via austinkleon:

Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles | The Onion

Oldie and a goodie.

"When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t..."

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 13:09:16 -0400

“When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”

- Steve Jobs (via stewartmccoy)

Entrepreneurs from China, India and Europe were in NYC this...

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 12:13:00 -0400

Entrepreneurs from China, India and Europe were in NYC this month, meeting investors, mentors and potential partners, and also rowing on the Bronx River (via nycedc):

Another highlight of the week was a visit to Hunts Point to meet with Fellow Adam Green’s social venture, Rocking the Boat (see photos above). Fellows rowed on the Bronx River while learning about how Adam’s non-profit uses traditional boatbuilding techniques and on-water training to help young people in the South Bronx develop into empowered and responsible adults.

"We fly expensive semi-autonomous drones in the war on drugs and in Pakistan and Afghanistan - and..."

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:12:04 -0400

“We fly expensive semi-autonomous drones in the war on drugs and in Pakistan and Afghanistan - and shoot rockets from them. Where are the robots to fight the fire at Fukushima? Non-existant. A depressing sign of how deeply screwed up our priorities are at the moment.”

- Japan and Long Tail Risk - Continuations (via mikehudack)

"I think one of the difficulties of our present moment is that it’s difficult to pick a singular..."

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:50:15 -0400

“I think one of the difficulties of our present moment is that it’s difficult to pick a singular cause of any problem. Certainly fossil fuels are planetary disasters in the making but if you look at it, fossil fuel use is connected to all sorts of other things. In North America, it’s connected to land use; suburbs use a heck of a lot more energy and are responsible for more emissions than urban areas.”

- Alex Steffen author of Worldchanging II (via poptech)

Mapping “all the buzziest technologies in development...

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 14:27:32 -0500

Mapping “all the buzziest technologies in development today”, 25 years into the future, via Co.Design & poptech:

Infographic of the Day: The Next 25 Years in Emerging Tech | Co.Design

"I have always lived my life by making lists: lists of people to call, lists of ideas, lists of..."

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 20:01:50 -0500

“I have always lived my life by making lists: lists of people to call, lists of ideas, lists of companies to set up, lists of people who can make things happen. Each day I work through these lists, and that sequence of calls propels me forward.”

- Richard Branson (via entrepreneurwisdom)

From rachelsterne: This weekend Foursquare held its first hack...

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 12:33:47 -0500

From rachelsterne:

This weekend Foursquare held its first hack day at General Assembly, inviting developers to spend the day building new applications with the Foursquare API. The event produced several apps, and I spoke with NYC Big Apps developers there who are using NYC open data in conjunction with APIs like Foursquare. As TechCrunch said, “There’s something happening in New York City.”

General Assembly: Three Reasons to Love This City (and How They Inspire Us)

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 12:29:17 -0500

General Assembly: Three Reasons to Love This City (and How They Inspire Us):

Congrats to General Assembly on their launch, not to mention this thoughtful blog debut:

By Mimi

“Despite the crush and the noise, I never tire of plunging into the crowd. I love the crowd as I love the sea. Not to be engulfed or lost in it, but to sail on it like a solitary pirate, content to be carried by the current, yet strike out on my own the moment it breaks or…

Stu Wall's blog: Good people don’t belong at a startup

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 17:50:46 -0500

Stu Wall's blog: Good people don’t belong at a startup:

stuwall on why hiring “good enough” people is a mistake for startups:

Outstanding teams have a multiplier impact, particularly at early stages. These teams will get good product out to market sooner, iterate faster, power through storms and attract more great people. These teams are more likely to hit the bimodal outcome that doesn’t involve lighting stock certificates on fire.

"Why does Twitter work better for news than Google Reader? Simple, Twitter gives you what’s new now...."

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:59:37 -0400

“Why does Twitter work better for news than Google Reader? Simple, Twitter gives you what’s new now. You don’t have to hunt around to find the newest stuff. And it doesn’t waste your time by telling you how many unread items you have. Who cares. (It’s like asking how many NYT articles you haven’t read. It would be gargantuan. I don’t bother you with the number of Scripting News posts you haven’t read, so why does Google?)”

- Dave Winer: How to reboot RSS (via marco)

Planes vs. the volcano

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:45:00 -0400

Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano’s ash cloud has many effects: creating stunning photos, stranding travelers, scaring horses (and even disrupting their semen shipments). Hotly debated by some has been the effect of the volcano on the earth’s climate. The grounding of thousands of flights per day surely represents a drop in emissions, but volcanoes emit CO2, among other gases, brazenly ignoring any emissions caps. As the chart below demonstrates, however, the net effect is likely a short-term, substantial decrease in total CO2 emissions in Europe.

Not included in this chart is the impact that other volcanic gases such as sulfur dioxide will have on the earth’s climate by reflecting sunlight back into space. Mount Pinatubo’s eruption in the Philippines in 1991 temporarily cooled the planet by 0.5-0.6°C. Scientists think that the current scale of the Icelandic eruption isn’t large enough to have a significant effect on the climate. If the eruption grows, or if additional volcanoes are triggered by its eruption, that could of course change. In the meantime, the CO2 reduction by grounded flights is perhaps a tiny comfort for the thousands stranded or inconvenienced by Eyjafjallajökull.

Does complexity lead to collapse? - Clay Shirky

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 11:51:00 -0400

Clay Shirky’s new article The Collapse of Complex Business Models starts with the following passage:

In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of those groups had rich traditions, complex social structures, advanced technology, but despite their sophistication, they collapsed, impoverishing and scattering their citizens and leaving little but future archeological sites as evidence of previous greatness. Tainter asked himself whether there was some explanation common to these sudden dissolutions.

The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, though a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.

Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.

The article is worth reading in its entirety, as it uses this argument to explain current cultural phenomena, notably that a one-minute amateur finger-biting video has been watched by more people than the Super Bowl.

However, I’m not entirely sold on the underlying assumption that complexity inevitably leads to collapse. As Kevin Kelly explored in Out of Control, there is evidence from the natural world that the opposite may be true. Complex natural systems such as tropical ecosystem are more stable than simple systems. It is essentially complexity on the edge of chaos that keeps such complex adaptive systems stable and resilient, resistant to the simple feedback loops that can bring down “simple” engineered systems. In between simplicity and adaptive complexity, the picture is much murkier. Scientists and engineers struggled for years to create a semblance of a self-sustaining ecosystem in Biosphere 2 in rural Arizona.

The question then is whether our current economic system, from startups to global conglomerates, is closer to an organically evolved ecosystem or to Biosphere 2. Neither wholly natural nor entirely engineered, it remains to be seen whether its resilience mirrors that of natural systems. If not, rigidity combined with complexity may indeed bring about dramatic simplification. Whatever your views on that issue, Shirky’s closing advice should give us all pause: “It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.”