http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/complexity-science-map-tp2452775p2456250.html
larger) so we can see it. But much better to have Mandelbrot derive
> Mikhail's link reminds me of
>
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project_details.cfm?id=273&index=273&domain=> the IIGSS project-in-progress since 2001 or so, i believe..
>
> (PDF on www.iigss.net/gPICT.pdf )
>
>
> - Siddharth
> the usual lurker, up on www.emergentX.net in India ; waiting to someday
> attend a friam meet!
>
> On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 1:31 PM, Nicholas Thompson
> <
[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I have been trying off and on for the last year to assemble a definitive
>> glossary of complexity terms along with definitions that would make sense to
>> any English major. I am having a harder time than one might expect finding
>> the locus classicus of complexity talk. For those of you who don't read
>> beyond the first screen of an email message, I am looking for sources,
>> preferably available on line, that will help me explain the meanings of the
>> words used in complexity talk.
>>
>> OK. Now for the rest of you: When I started, I thought it was just
>> because I didn't know enough physics, or thermodynamics, or mathematics, but
>> each time I look into one of these areas I find that word usages and
>> meanings in complexity talk don't really line up. For instance,
>> "constraint" in physics-talk is just a force acting perpendicularly to the
>> motion of the thing we are talking about, hence a force doing no work. In
>> at least one version of complexity talk, a constraint is that which
>> transforms energy into work. One candidate for a source of the meanings of
>> complexity-words was Alicia Juarrero's. She relates "constraints" to
>> information theory but also defines them as "relational properties that
>> parts acquire in virtue of being unified -- not just aggregated --into
>> systematic wholes. Here's another example: in thermodynamics, the "system"
>> is just the thing you happen to be talking about. In Juarrero the system is
>> the set of elements and relations among elements such that the properties of
>> the elements depend on the state of the system in which they are located.
>> I like her definition better, but the point is that in fact they are
>> different with very different implications.
>>
>> Where can I go to find stable language?
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
>> Clark University (
[hidden email])
>>
>>
>
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