The Aesthetics of Change

Is an excellent book by Bradford Keeney. This is its first set of book snippets. Here's the second. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages...

All simple and complex regulation as well as learning involve feedback. Contexts of learning and change are therefore principally concerned with altering or establishing feedback.

Corrective action is brought about by difference. The system is technically "error activated" in that "the difference between some present state and some 'preferred' state activates the corrective response". Cybernetics therefore suggests that "all change can be understood as the effort to maintain some constancy and all constancy as maintained through change". [Gregory Bateson]

Occidentals ... practice in order to get a skill, which is then a tool - in which I, unchanged, now have a new tool, that's all. The Oriental view is that you practice in order to change yourself.

In the [predator/prey] example, the battle over food and territory between two species is only one half of the story. The larger cybernetic picture is that the battle is a means or process of generating, maintaining, and stabilizing an ecosystem.

For the most part, people take distinctions to be representations of an either/or duality, a polarity, a clash of opposites, or an expression with a logic of negation underlying it.

Both Don Juan and Erickson also made use of introducing confusion to bring about change.

A "dormative principle" is a more abstract repackaging of a description of the item you claim to be explaining. To paraphrase [Gregory] Bateson, this occurs when the cause of a simple action is said to be an abstract word derived from the name for the action... What one does, in this case, is to say that an item of simple action is caused by a class of action. This recycling of a term does not constitute a formal explanation.

When we encounter sufficient complexity, such as recursive organization of human interaction, our inability to discern higher orders of patterns leads us to committing what Whitehead called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." We then "abstract from relationship and from the experiences of interaction to create 'objects' and to endow them with 'characteristics'".

The more "fundamental" a premise, the less accessible it will be to consciousness. As Samuel Butler proposed, the more one "knows" something the less aware one becomes of that knowledge.

Mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life. [Gregory Bateson]

The truth which is important is not a truth of preference, it's a truth of complexity.

The Hidden Dimension

Is an excellent book by Edward T. Hall. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

One of the most important functions of territoriality is proper spacing, which protects against over-exploitation of that part of the environment on which a species depends for its living.

As numbers of animals in a given area increase, stress builds up until it triggers an endocrine reaction that acts to collapse the population.

Man's evolution has been marked by the development of the "distance receptors" - sight and hearing...

There is a general relationship between the evolutionary age of the receptor system and the amount and quality of information it conveys to the central nervous system. The tactile, or touch, systems are as old as life itself.

As Freud and his followers observed, our own culture tends to stress that which can be controlled and to deny that which cannot.

All works of art are created on a certain scale. Altering the size alters everything.

The present internal layout of the house... is quite recent. As Philippe Aries points out in Centuries of Childhood, rooms had no fixed functions in European houses until the eighteenth century.

Many of my European subjects observed that in Europe human relationships are important whereas in the United States the schedule is important.

The study of Japanese spaces illustrates their habit of leading the individual to a spot where he can discover something for himself.

Planning and renewal must not be separated; instead, renewal must be an integral part of planning.

Like the link between cancer and smoking, the cumulative effects of crowding are usually not experienced until the damage has been done.

smart swarm

is an excellent book by Peter Miller (isbn 978-0-00-738297-2). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

As successful foragers return to the nest with seeds, they're met at the nest entrace by foragers waiting in reserve. This contact stimulates the inactive ants to go out. Foragers normally don't come back until they find something. So the faster the foragers return, the faster other ants go out, enabling the colony to tune its work force to the probability of finding food.

Instead of attempting to outsmart the desert environment, the ants, in a sense, were matching its complexity with their own.

Instead of trying to keep fine-tuning a system so it will work better and better, maybe what we really ought to be looking for is a rigourous way of saying, okay, that's good enough. [Deborah Gordon]

If a scout bee was impressed by another scout's dance, she might fly to the box being advertised and conduct her own inspection, which could last as long as an hour. But she would never blindly follow another scout's opinion by dancing for a site she hadn't visited.

J. Scott Turner considers the mound's function as a respiratory system so essential that the termites couldn't live without it. In a sense, he argues, the mound is almost a living part of the colony.

If individuals in a group are prompted to make small changes to a shared structure that inspires others to improve it even further, the structure becomes an active player in the creative process.

Unlike our systems, which are tuned for efficiency, the termites' systems have been tuned for robustness, which they demonstrate by building mounds that are constantly self-healing.

What really made the lights go on was the realization that termites don't pay attention to the environment itself but to changes in the environment.

Not only does this complicated structure represent an indirect collaboration among millions of individuals, it also embodies a kind of ongoing conversation between the colony and the world outside. The mound might look like a structure, but it's better thought of as a process.

We should think of it [the termite mound] as a dynamic system that balances forces both inside and outside its walls to create the right environment for the termites.

When you feel like you belong to something, it gives you so much more freedom and so much more energy that might otherwise be used up in anxiety, to do other things.

On January 12, 2006, several hundred thousand pilgrims had gathered in a dusty tent city at Mina, three miles east of Mecca...
By noon... about a half-million or more pilgrims filled the Jamarat plaza in front of the bridge... The pressure inside the crowd was crushing... More than an hour later, victims were piled up seven layers deep: 363 men and women were dead.
"Those in charge need to remember the root cause of the problem: too many people trying to get through too small a space. The ingress rate at the bridge was 135,000 per hour. The thoughput rate of the pillars was only 100,000 an hour. You can't put a pint into a half-pint jug." [Keith Still]

Tragically I was an only twin

subtitled The Complete Peter Cook is an excellent book by (isbn 0-09-944325-2). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Builders of Xanadu (Saturday Live, Channel 4, 1986)

...
John Bird: Got the job then?
Peter Cook: Yes, got the job.
John Bird: Big one?
Peter Cook: Well, fairly big. He's got very grandiose in his old age, Kubla has.
John Bird: Well what does he want? An extension?
Peter Cook: No, no. More than that. He wants a pleasure dome.
John Bird: Nice. What sort of pleasure dome did he have in mind?
Peter Cook: Well, he was a bit vague about it. He rambled on a bit. The only adjective I got from him was 'stately'. In fact, that's what he decreed.
John Bird: Oh, he's decreeing things now then, is he?
Peter Cook: Certainly. No pissing about with planning permission for Kubla. If he wants a stately pleasure dome, wallop! He decrees it.
John Bird: Yes, well why not?
Peter Cook: Why not, at his age?
John Bird: Did you bung him an estimate, then?
Peter Cook: No, it's a bit tricky, you see.
John Bird: What's the problem? A pleasure dome's straightforward enough. I don't know about this 'stately' though. What's this 'stately'? That's new to me. What's that? Plants? Hammocks? Not structural, is it?
Peter Cook: No, it's not structural, 'stately'. It's more of an ambience sort of area.
John Bird: Well then, we'll just budget for a regular pleasure dome, and see if we can pick up some stately trimmings down the market.
...
Peter Cook: ... Part of his decree, vis-à-vis the stately pleasure dome, is he has this bloody sacred river Alph running through the structure.
John Bird: A sacred river?
Peter Cook: Running right through the structure. He specified that.
John Bird: We'll need a plumber then. I can have Ronnie bodge up a river for you and we can bung up a sign saying 'Sacred River of Alph'. Something along those lines.
Peter Cook: Yes, but we've still got a problem with his specifications.
John Bird: What's that, then?
Peter Cook: These caverns he wants.
...
Peter Cook: ... with these caverns, you see, he's specified, here, on the docket there, 'measureless to man'.
John Bird: Measureless? He wants caverns you can't measure?
Peter Cook: Yes.
...