Complexity Course day one

Greetings one and all or Ire O, the meaning of which is goodwill at least blessings in its essence and prosperity in the face of a young year still emerging from the sac of emergence covered in the fluids of memories yet to be forgotten. I have not written in a while because somehow life took on a turbo charge with little or no time but to hang on for every nuance and permutation.

Here I am in Cambridge girded by the cold surrounded by nubile minds and disturbed by own snoring into the hollow chamber of life. So I came to explore and engage Complex Physical, Biological and Social systems, today was my first day. It was a challenging one. The location is MIT which compared to Harvard is a sterile urban landscape covered with in the sweat of nerds. The coldness of Cambridge air pervades every effort. Like in Harvard my Teacher is Jewish and has a father figure in tow both are incredible intellectuals with the attendant detachment and dislocation. My colleagues are from all over the world so I am now esconsed with them preparing for the day. It came with all my enemies in tow, Mathematics, calculus, physics as well as computer modeling. So the day was on to a start and I was struggling to process.

I suppose my key learning points today was about the use of modeling as a way of describing emerging patterns in a complex system is an art which uses key relevant parameters but cannot ever provide a detailed representation. So in essence the model is a caricature of the real system with focus on the main issues. The second aspect is there are very limited amount of pattern models but they have universal explanatory capacity. So we then examine emergence, interdependence, Networks and evolution. In engaging Fractals which are patterns that retain features irrespective of scale e.g coastline as opposed to patterns that get lost when it is observed as a big distance.

I am still processing a lot of these maybe I should not write about it but the point of serious disequilibrum was when we got into discussing modeling of Ethnic Violence and their Global pattern. What was amazing was coarsening model that is used to understand how oil and water behave actually is able to identify and predict patterns and emergence of ethnic violence in Bosnia.

I think much on this as my brain starts to really motor. For now need to get sleep my team and I have a project to address Complexity as it works in Social capital within the EU.

Ire O!