[Geowanking] reading recommendation

[Mikel Maron]

yes, agreed

a symptom of much popular-esque science writing is the over use of
words without precise definitions, in fact the subject of intense
debate .. some of the worst offenders: emergence, self-organization,
complexity ... 

or misuse of words like equilibrium. since there is just no
satisfactory physical vocabulary to describe phenomenon like cities,
life, ecologies, earth

information and dynamical systems theory comes close, autopoesis .. but
then you get into the situation where cities are defined as alive. 

Ok quick poll -- who here thinks cities are alive?

More reading suggestions, both vastly titled:

"Integrating Geographic Information Systems and Agent-based Modeling
Techniques for Simulating Social and Ecological Processes"
[http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/publications/Bookinforev/gis-info.html]

"The Geometry of Ecological INteractions: Simplifying Spatial
Complexity"
[http://books.cambridge.org/0521642949.htm]

--- "Dan R. Greening" <greening at bigtribe.com> wrote:
> It's a thought provoking paper, but this part irked me:  
> 
> "Order in fact is the equilibrium that we see around us although
> as it requires much energy to sustain it, then this order is hardly
> an
> equilibrium based on
> least effort. It is in fact an order which is far-from-equilibrium in
> the
> traditional terms of
> classical physics and it is this that makes the focus on processes
> which
> reach, maintain
> and evolve these structures so essential to this new science."
> 
> Actually equilibrium is a macroscopic (thermodynamic) quantity that
> reflects
> the aggregate of microscopic actions.  "Order" is not a concept
> normally
> applied to equilibrium.  There is nothing alien about the
> balanced-disorder
> of equilibrium to "classical physics" if you lump thermodynamics into
> classical physics.  Many chaos theoreticians--including me I
> guess--have
> made the connection between classical thermodynamics, equilibrium,
> networks
> of spatial and temporal relations, and optimization algorithms.
> 
> The patterns of fractal self-similarity discussed in the paper were
> also
> discovered by researchers in circuit-placement, wire-routing,
> graph-partitioning and many other NP-complete problems.
> 
> The paper continues to misuse the term "equilibrium", which distracts
> from
> the otherwise valuable content of the paper.  If the paper would just
> say
> "stasis" instead, I'd be happier.
> 
> I'm not intending this spew to be so much a complaint, as a
> suggestion for
> other places to look for related material.
> 
> Very interesting stuff.  Like a blast-from-the-past for me.
> 
> Dan Greening, Ph.D.  CEO BigTribe
> http://dan.greening.name/contact.htm 
>  
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: geowanking-admin at lists.burri.to 
> > [mailto:geowanking-admin at lists.burri.to] On Behalf Of Mikel Maron
> > Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 8:11 AM
> > To: geowanking at lists.burri.to
> > Subject: [Geowanking] reading recommendation
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > At the moment, I'm reading a paper called "Network Geography:
> > Relations, Interactions, Scaling and Spatial Processes in 
> > GIS", available at 
> > http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/working_papers/paper63.pdf
> > 
> > Many relevant ideas to the new sorts of conceptual and 
> > locative, experiences and representations, folks here have 
> > been exploring.
> > 
> > mkl
> > 
> > =====
> > Brain Off :: http://radio.weblogs.com/0100875/
> > 
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