A day for pluviophiles

We’re getting soaked with a prime October Pineapple Express, an atmospheric river that is delivering wind and rain from down near Hawaii all the way to our coast, filling the streams, dusting the mountains with snow and welcoming the salmon home. I absolutely love this weather and this morning I’m sitting in my favourite cafe, window wide open and the full force of the rain falling on the pier and the sea. Ahhh.

Complexity delivers mind-blowing things all the time. In addition to, well, everything, the evolution of the universe has created both more entropy and more forms of order. When Margaret Wheatley wrote “Leadership and the New Science” she implored us to move on from the Newtonian model of the universe – linear, knowable, predictable – to embrace the quantum physics and living systems approaches that were the philosophical legacy of the 20th century. Using these big frames of how scientists understand reality as stories and metaphors for the systems that operate all around us is an all consuming cultural project as we seek to make sense of realities. In this video from Quanta Magazine, Robert Hazan and Michael Wong discuss their theory of information as they try to explain how evolution seeks to fill every possibility space that it creates. There are multiple stories that flow from this work including the idea that functional information is what powers evolution and increases the number of ways things can be organized, and that in turn increases resourcefulness and possibility. This flows from diversity and capacity and from life working to fill every affordance it encounters. I picture a vine probing every crack in a wall and finding new pathways to get a foothold, new creatures to evolve, new ways to combine the basic building blocks of the universe, even as it all happens with a stability of constrained possibility. Anyway, watch the video.

The most complex things I have ever encountered are my own toddlers. If you have parented a toddler, Tim Urban has your back. He perfectly describes the utter mystification of parenting a two year old. Read it in the rain.

Have s good weekend. Go Blue Jays.