From the most excellent pssst…: After winning several archery contests, the young and rather boastful champion challenged a Zen master who was renowned for his skill as an archer. The young man demonstrated remarkable technical proficiency when he hit a distant bull’s eye on his first try, and then split that arrow with his second shot. “There,” he said to the old man, “see if you can match that!” Undisturbed, the master did not draw his bow, but rather motioned for the young archer to follow him up the mountain. Curious about the old fellow’s intentions, the champion followed him …
I’m going to bring a little more focus in form to this weblog, mixing short posts in a more traditional weblog format with longer essays divided up into parts so you don’t get big long chunks of text to wade through. And we begin with a paper called Self Organizing Systems: a tutorial in Complexity This is a tutorial on the processes and patterns of organization in complex natural systems. No technical details are included in describing the models or theories used. Instead, I focus on the concepts of self-organization, complexity, complex adaptive systems, criticality, the edge of chaos and …
In case you think that intuition is just some wacky new age concept with no place in a real world which demands reason and logic, consider the case of Stanislav Petrov who single handedly saved the world from nuclear devastation in 1983 on nothing more than a gut feeling: It was Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov’?s duty to use computers and satellites to warn the Soviet Union if there were ever a nuclear missile attack by the United States. In the event of such an attack, the Soviet Union�?s strategy was to launch an immediate all-out nuclear weapons counterattack against the …
From Curt Rosengren comes a link to a Wall Street Journal article on trusting intution: “Watch for bias. Don’t confuse intuitive thinking with personal subjectivity, which often emerges as a result of prejudices, biases, fears, fantasies or purely emotional reactions. Constant analysis of your thinking is the only way to winnow genuine intuitive grain from emotional chaff. Keep a record. To determine how strong your intuitive ability is, keep a record of your intuitive insights, or hunches, as they occur. Rate them objectively. If a reasonable number have worked out, cultivate and pay attention to your intuitions. Diary-keeping is the …
The last of three parts on music. We are talking about improvisation as a method for working with or being in groups – developing a set of practices that refine one’s ability to think on one’s feet and to see full opportunities in small hints (Blake’s “world in a grain of sand“). Improvisation, especially in a collaborative environment, produces material that would never otherwise arise. And yet, it is worth pointing out that great improvisation is not simply making stuff up on the spot. Consider this from Becker’s essay: When I used to play piano in Chicago taverns for a …