Clouds

[Nick Thompson]

Owen,

Your cloud book looks magnificent!   If it lives up to its billing and
gives good scientific explanations for the SHAPE of clouds, it will be
everything I ever dreamed of in a cloud book.  One of my retirement
projects was perhaps to write a book called, What Clouds Mean, to explain
in detail the processes that give clouds their shape and what can be
concluded from them about the state of the atmosphere. Skew-T for the
layman.  This book may save me the labor.  

Take care,

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
nickthompson at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson

> [Original Message]
> From: <friam-request at redfish.com>
> To: <friam at redfish.com>
> Date: 8/17/2006 11:03:59 PM
> Subject: Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 45
>
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> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Douglas Engelbart's "Mother Of All Demos" circa 1968
>       (Edward A. Puckett)
>    2. OT: Pogue?s Posts -  Getting Hung Up on the Apple-Microsoft
>       War (Owen Densmore)
>    3. Cool Tool: The Cloudspotter's Guide (Owen Densmore)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 17:36:58 -0600
> From: "Edward A. Puckett" <blackguard at voltaic.com>
> Subject: [FRIAM] Douglas Engelbart's "Mother Of All Demos" circa 1968
> Message-ID: <42CAACCA-A6DE-478C-A1CD-9CE377219A42 at voltaic.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> I just saw a video of Douglas Engelbart's demo of his group's NLS  
> system that was given in San Francisco in 1968.  I was stunned at how  
> this demo presages much of today's computer environment, including  
> the first mouse, (programmable) word processing, hyperlinking and  
> groupware.  Watching this video and observing the codes he inserts to  
> affect presentation, I was overcome with a feeling that I was  
> watching the genesis of many things, not the least of which is SGML-
> style markup languages.  Though the SGML connection may be tenuous, I  
> cannot help but imagine that this "being in the air" influenced SGML.
>
> The video is about an hour and a quarter long, but if you're into  
> this sort of history, it's well worth the time.
>
> See: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097
>
> Also: http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html
>
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 18:50:30 -0600
> From: Owen Densmore <owen at backspaces.net>
> Subject: [FRIAM] OT: Pogue?s Posts -  Getting Hung Up on the
> Apple-Microsoft War
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Friam <friam at redfish.com>
> Message-ID: <B888663A-C6EE-4712-A3AF-1050B8D58E1C at backspaces.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
>
> Dede and I have followed David Pogue's books (Missing Manuals) and  
> writing for quite a while.  Recently his NYTimes blogs have popped up  
> as an interesting site.
>    http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=114
>
> This one is on the Mac/Win debate and for us Macaholics, its kinda  
> nice to get this sort of perspective.  Nothing new .. just soothing.
>
>      -- Owen
>
> Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 21:03:51 -0600
> From: Owen Densmore <owen at backspaces.net>
> Subject: [FRIAM] Cool Tool: The Cloudspotter's Guide
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Friam <friam at redfish.com>
> Message-ID: <DD17EB28-C099-4097-9FC4-B700CF4BD9C5 at backspaces.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
>
> This, in honor of my friend Nick's love of weather:
>    http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001354.php#more
> Great pix of "cloud-al waves" as our family calls them.
>
>      -- Owen
>
> Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
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>
> End of Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 45
> *************************************

[Phil Henshaw-2]

I was reading Yaneer Bar-Yam's construction of systems theory from
Shannon's information theory and couldn't help notice that I disagree
that disorder is harder to describe.  Yes, it's useful to have a theory
that helps you design efficient use of bandwidth, but maybe that doesn't
have to do with the real difference between order and disorder.  

A random distribution of data looks to me like a very complicated
question with a very simple answer, and a patterned distribution a
somewhat simpler question with an impossible answer (at least any way
we've agreed to describe natural systems so far).   The material
evidence is that science has made great progress with the former, the
phenomena of the world based on random processes, in that they can be
reliably described.

Could it be that there's a flaw in Shannon, or was he maybe talking
about data (questions) rather than information (answers)?



Phil Henshaw                       ????.?? ? `?.????
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
680 Ft. Washington Ave
NY NY 10040                      
tel: [phone]                
e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com          
explorations: www.synapse9.com    

[Jochen Fromm-3]

Something is hard to describe if it is complex.
Neither pure disorder nor pure order in form of simple
regularities is very hard to describe. Complexity is
characterized by order in disorder or order in chaos:
regularity in irregularity, predictability in
unpredictability, and unity in diversity.

Murray Gell-Mann argues that the effective complexity
for both completely regular and completely random systems
is very low, because you cannot find many regularities
in the system which can be expressed by a suitable schema,
description or rule (see the end of chapter 5 in his book
"The Quark and the Jaguar").

-J.