All,
I now have enough assignments to last me for the holiday week. thank you
all very much. You are very kind.
Next week I want to begin focussing on the relation of all of this to
complexity. Here is what I think many of you are saying to me.
"Nick [you old dummy],
"An engine is an unnatural contrivance that uses heat to do work. In so
doing, it disperses heat. In fact we could think of it as a heat
dispersing machine that incidentally does some work.... like an air
conditioner, no?
"So, think about benard cells for a minute. They do work (moving
molecules of liquid around) and they disperse heat. And they ARE a sort of
a contrivance. Except nobody contrived them. They are a "natural"
contrivance that emerges of the structure of water, etc. (note hand
waving, here) I am now expecting to discover (what Steve has been telling
me all along?) that self organizing systems are natural engines that do
work (assembling structures of some sort) that disperse heat. Different
structures require different activation energies and so are characteristic
of different degrees of heat differential."
If I get THERE, then I am going to try and figure out what the dickens
this might have to do with cellular automata and Steve's ants.
You guys are so good at this, I think you ought to apply to NSF to set up
an institute to do it for bucks.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Professor of Psychology and Ethology
Clark University
[hidden email]
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/ [hidden email]
Locked
