May Almighty illuminate our intellect and inspire us towards the righteous graph...

At the moment I'm reading The Origin of Wealth by Eric D. Beinhocker because Amazon kept bugging me with it every time I bought Taleb.

And those Amazon algorithms know their stuff: Beinhocker is like Taleb only more polite, less bombastic, and generally more interesting.

TOoW leaves out most of the epistemological stuff and concentrates on wealth. So far Beinhocker has gone over why neoclassical economics is nonsense (it treats the economy as a closed, non-dynamic system, which it isn't, and treats people as perfectly rational, which they aren't).

Beinhocker is working his way towards describing complex adaptive systems of the Murray Gell-Mann variety...

In the meantime he also writes about non-linear equations and deterministic chaos: like this equation here:

B_t+1 = r * B_t * ( 1 + B_t)

Where B is the value of something at time t, and r is some other number.

When r is set to 1:


Now if you set r to 2:




Now if you set r to 3.3:


Now if you set r to 4:


Which is, apparently, chaotic.

I had always thought that in mathematical terms chaos meant "randomness", but in fact the two are very separate ideas.

A system is chaotic if it:

1. Is sensitive to initial conditions,
2. Is topologically mixed, and
3. Has dense periodic orbits.

Now I understand the first of those points, but not the second or third.

More reading to do methinks...

Operating system analogies

After reading Neal Stephenson's excellent ebook In the Beginning was the Command Line I was struck by the brilliance of his OS analogies (the book was written in 1999 but still holds true today):

• Apple OS X: a beautiful, reliable, ergonomic, brilliantly designed, European coupe. The only problem is when you open the boot everything is covered by plastic, and the only way you can repair any problems is by returning the car to the manufacturer.
• Windows anything: an ugly, inefficient, unergonomic and poorly designed station wagon that nevertheless became incredibly successful.
• Linux: an incredibly efficient, military-spec machine that never fails and can do 100 mph at 100 mpg over rough terrain. Anything and everything about it can be altered in the field by the user. Oh, and it's completely free and support is also completely free.

Other analogies that spring to mind from the Star Wars mythos:

• Apple OS X: Queen Amidala's shiny spaceship in A Phantom Menace. Really nice to look at but a bitch to repair if something goes wrong (not that anything does go wrong unless you're being attacked by someone).
• Windows: tricky. I'm inclined to go with Star Destroyers: big, slow, ugly, cumbersome, but incredibly powerful (but not by virtue of good design).
• Linux: the Millennium Falcon. The best there is, and fully user-alterable. However the anaology breaks down when you consider that the Millennium Falcon is fairly unreliable, and requires constant maintenance.