“Still … I cannot”: “To their places of business in the center of the town by the shortest routes, which run right through all the working class districts, without even noticing how close they are to the most squalid misery which lies immediately about them on both sides of the road. This is because the main streets which run from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are occupied almost uninterruptedly on both sides by shops, which are kept by members of the middle and lower-middle classes.” Engels, 86.
“It is indeed”: “Their houses lie outside the working-class belt, and between that belt and the more favorably situated suburban estates of the upper middle class. And their shops and small businesses are located along the main thoroughfares—acting so to speak as insulators for the city’s system of communication. Their location in space, therefore, is at both critical junctures an intermediate one. And their intermediary position is not merely structural but functional as well. They are acting as buffers between the antagonistic extremes.” Marcus, 172–73.
“The method of”: Quoted in Buck-Morss, 269.
There’s no need: “ …the Baron von Haussmann, in the course of building the boulevard Saint-Michel, that bleak, noisy thoroughfare, tore through the heart of the ancient Latin Quarter, which had been an almost autonomous entity since the Middle Ages. And he took the simplest of all methods of improving one portion of it: he wiped it out. He not merely cleared the area surrounding the Schools, but in a side-swipe even cut off part of the Gardens of the Palais by Luxembourg, sacrificing to straight lines, broad avenues and unimpeded vehicular traffic the specific historical character of the quarter and all the complex human needs and purposes it served. These baroque clichés of power, hardly even with the decency of a disguise, lingered right into the twentieth century: witness the plowing of the Seventh Avenue extension through the one historic quarter of New York that had integrity and character, or the similar, even more grandiose effacement created by the misconceived Benjamin Franklin Boulevard in Philadelphia—the latter a brutal gash from which the city has not recovered in more than thirty years.” Mumford, 1961, 388.
The pattern is: Hodges, 428–29.
As part of: “The argument depended on the key being absolutely patternless, and spread evenly over the possible digits, for otherwise the analyst would have reason to prefer one guess or another. Indeed, discerning a pattern in the apparently patternless was essentially the work of the cryptanalyst, as of the scientist.” Ibid., 154.
That very morning: Ibid., 466.
Shannon and Turing: Ibid., 251.
But Shannon pushed: “Shannon had always been fascinated with the idea that a machine should be able to imitate the brain; he had studied neurology as well as mathematics and logic, and had seen his work on the differential analyzer as a first step towards a thinking machine. They found their outlook to be the same: there was nothing sacred about the brain, and that if a machine could do as well as a brain, then it would be thinking—although neither proposed any particular way in which this might be achieved. This was a back-room Casablanca, planning an assault not on Europe, but on inner space.” Ibid.
Dense with equations: “We are beginning to see that such important elements as the neurons, the atoms of the nervous complex of our body, do their work under much the same conditions as vacuum tubes, with their relatively small power supplied from outside by the circulation, and that the bookkeeping which is most essential to describe their function is not one of energy. In short, the newer study of automata, whether in the metal or in the flesh, is a branch of communication engineering, and its cardinal notions are those of message, amount of disturbance or ‘noise’—a term taken over from the telephone engineer—quantity of information, coding technique, and so on.” Wiener, 42.
“This statistical method”: Weaver, 66.
“They are all”: Ibid., 69.
“The great central”: Ibid., 71.
To solve the: “ … unlike linear equations (the type most prevalent in science), nonlinear ones are very difficult to solve analytically, and demand the use of detailed numerical simulations carried out with the help of digital machines. This limitation of analytic tools for the study of nonlinear dynamics becomes even more constraining in the case of nonlinear combinatorics. In this case, certain combinations will display emergent properties, that is, properties of the combination as a whole which are far more than the sum of its individual parts. These emergent (or ‘synergistic’) properties belong to the interactions between parts, so it follows that a top-down analytical approach that begins with the whole and dissects it into its constituent parts (an ecosystem into species, a society into institutions), is bound to miss precisely those properties. In other words, analyzing a whole into parts and then attempting to model it by adding up the components will fail to capture any property that emerged from complex interactions, since the effect of the latter may be multiplicative (e.g., mutual enhancement) not just additive.” De Landa, 1997, 17–18.
Jacobs had just: “Then in the mid-1950’s, Mr. Moses came up with a new plan for erosion. This once involved a major depressed highway cutting through the center of the park, as a link for carrying a heavy volume of high-speed traffic between midtown Manhattan and a vast, yawing Radiant City and expressway which Mr. Moses was cooking up south of the park.” Jacobs, 1961, 360–61.
“This order is”: Ibid., 50.
“We may wish”: Ibid., 434.
Jacobs’s book would: Although he disagreed with Jacobs on a number of fronts, Lewis Mumford was also using the language of emergence to describe city development around the same period: “The city came as a definite emergent in the paleo-neolithic community: as emergent in the definite sense that Lloyd Morgan and William Morton Wheeler used that concept. In emergent evolution, the introduction of a new factor does not just add to the existing mass, but produces an overall change, a new configuration, which alters its properties. Potentialities that could not be recognized in the pre-emergent stage, like the possibility of organic life developing from relatively stable and unorganized ‘dead’ matter, then for the first time become visible.” Mumford, 1961, 29.
“Vital cities have”: Jacobs, 1961, 447–48.
And at MIT’s: As usual, Turing was ahead of the game here: “It has been said that computing machines can only carry out the purposes that they are instructed to do. This is certainly true in the sense that if they do something other than what they were instructed then they have just made some mistake. It is also true that the intention in constructing these machines in the first instance is to treat them as slaves, giving them only jobs which have been thought out in detail, jobs such that the user of the machine fully understands in principle what is going on all the time. Up till the present machines have only been used in this way. But is it necessary that they should always be used in such a manner? Let us suppose we have set up a machine with certain initial instruction tables, so constructed that these tables might on occasion, if good reason arose, modify those tables. One can imagine that after the machine had been operating for some time, the instructions would have altered out of recognition, but nevertheless still be such that one would have to admit that the machine was still doing very worthwhile calculations.” Quoted in Hodges, 358.
“Mostly my participation”: Interview with Selfridge conducted October 2000.
“We are proposing”: Selfridge, 1.
After a few: Levy, 155.
Holland’s system revolved: Richard Dawkins has proposed that the analogy can run the other direction as well: “You can, if you wish, think of the genes in all the populations of the world as constituting a giant computer, calculating costs and benefits and currency conversions, with the shifting patterns of gene frequencies doing duty for the shuttling 1s and 0s of an electronic data processor. It is quite an illuminating insight …” Dawkins, 1996, 72.
“But I recognized”: Interview with Jefferson conducted December 2000.
You can date: Kelly, 235.
Our minds may: Some researchers argue that the centralized mind-set is hardwired into our brain; in other words, we default to top-down explanations and only reconcile ourselves to bottom-up explanations after extensive training. “People also view the workings of the economy in centralized ways, assuming singular causes for complex phenomena. Children, in particular, seem to assume strong governmental control over the economy. (Of course, governments do play a large role in most economies, but children assume they play an even larger role than they actually do.) In interviews with Israeli children between eight and fifteen years old, psychologist David Leiser (1983) found that nearly half of the children assumed that the government sets all prices and pays all salaries. Even children who said that employers pay salaries often believed that the government provides the money for the salaries. A significant majority of the students assumed that the government pays the increased salaries after a strike. And many younger children had the seemingly contradictory belief that the government is also responsible for organizing strikes.” Resnick, 123.
And while they: “Other ant and termite species are specialized to cultivate fungi underground, planting the spores, weeding the gardens to rid them of competing fungi species, and fertilizing them with compost mulched from chewed-up leaves. In the case of the famous leafcutter ants of the New World tropics, all the foraging efforts of their 8-million-strong colonies are directed towards harvesting fresh-cut leaves.” Dawkins, 1996, 264–65.
massive environmental impact: “Ants farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves… . They do everything but watch television.” Thomas, 12.
They lack our: Wilson and Holldobler, 1.
Harvester ant colonies: “ … a colony’s soldiers give off an odor, a pheromone distinctive to the soldiers. If the odor falls below a certain level in the colony, it means that the proportion of soldiers is less than normal; there’s no mistaking the purport of the feedback. Since the drop automatically causes the nursery to supply more soldiers, there’s no room for mistake in the response—or in cessation of the response, either. Pheromone feedback from newly produced soldiers reports, ‘That’s enough soldiers.’ In short, data, the meaning of the data, and appropriate responses to the data are all perfectly integrated.” Jacobs, 2000, 109.
“The sum of”: Wilson and Holldobler, 227.
“Let’s get rid”: Ibid., 252.
Without those haphazard: “Randomness plays yet another role in some self-organizing processes—it makes possible the exploration of multiple options. Ant researcher Jean-Louis Deneubourg notes that ants do not follow pheromone trails perfectly. Instead, ants have a probabilistic chance of losing their way as they follow the trails. Deneubourg and his colleagues (1986) argue that this ‘ant randomness’ is not a defective stage on an evolutionary path ‘towards an idealistic deterministic system of communication.’ Rather, this randomness is an evolutionarily adaptive behavior. Deneubourg describes an experiment with two food sources near an ant nest: a rich food source far from the nest, and an inferior source close to the nest. Initially, the ants discover the inferior food source and form a robust trail to that source. But some ants wander off the trail. These ‘lost ants’ discover the richer source and form a trail to it. Since an ant’s pheromone emissions are related to the richness of the food source, the trail to the richer source becomes stronger than the original trail. Eventually, most ants shift to the richer source. So the randomness of the ants provides a way for the colony to explore multiple food sources in parallel. While positive feedback encourages exploitation of particular sources, randomness encourages exploration of multiple sources.” Resnick, 138.
“Typical teenagers,” I: More on the ants’ adolescent behavior: “Older colonies were more consistent from week-to-week than younger ones. I performed the same experiments, week after week, with several groups of older colonies and with several different groups of younger colonies. Week after week, each group of older colonies responded much as the other groups did, but week after week, each group of younger colonies had a different response. Curiously, in any given week, the variation among younger colonies was no greater than the variation among older colonies. The differences were only in week-to-week comparisons. Apparently younger colonies are more susceptible than older ones to changes in weather or to the amount of food available. In one week, a given perturbation pushes the young colonies in one direction; in another week, it pushes them in another.” Gordon, 133.
“And the other”: “Younger colonies were more willing than older ones to put up with neighbors in order to get food. In all colony pairs, regardless of colony age, both colonies foraged toward the seed bait when I put out seeds. In both age classes, the colonies foraged toward the bait even after it was gone. But younger colonies kept up longer. Younger colonies continued to forage toward the bait and to fight with each other for up to six days after the bait was gone. The older pairs gave up the conflict sooner. Once the food was gone, they were more likely to direct their foraging efforts elsewhere. For the younger colonies, a site that had offered abundant food for a few days before was still worth fighting over.” Ibid., 51.
How does the: Gordon’s theory is that the life cycle of the ant colony derives from population changes: “Since workers live only a year, the colony must re-create itself each year. The 4,000 ants of a 3-year-old colony have to feed 6,000 larvae to make the 4-year-old colony. For a colony 5 years or older, already at its adult size, the situation is different. For every new ant to feed, there is already an ant there to help feed it. The colony must produce 10,000 workers each year to maintain its size of 10,000 workers—but it has 10,000 workers to collect and process the food necessary to do this. So the demand for food, per forager, may be greater in the smaller, quickly growing colony. This might make foragers of a small, quickly growing colony more prone to engage in conflict over food than those of a larger one.” Ibid., 83.
“The ancestors of”: Ridley, 232.
And yet somehow: The argument extends down to the atomic level as well. “We can argue that consciousness and identity are not a function of the specific particles at all, because our own particles are constantly changing. On a cellular basis, we change most of our cells (although not our brain cells) over a period of several years. On an atomic level, the change is much faster than that, and does include our brain cells. We are not at all permanent collections of particles. It is the patterns of matter and energy that are semipermanent (that is, changing only gradually), but our actual material content is changing constantly, and very quickly.” Kurzweil, 54.
The runaway power: “Exponential growth puts great power in the hands of naturally selected genes. It means that a tiny adjustment to a detail of embryonic growth control can have the most dramatic effect on the outcome. A mutation that tells a particular sub-lineage of cells to go on dividing just one more time—say go on for twenty-five cell generations instead of twenty-four—can in principle have the effect of doubling the size of a particular bit of the body. The same trick, of changing numbers of cell generations, or rates of cell division, can be used by genes during embryology to change the shape of a bit of the body… . In a way, the remarkable thing is that cell lineages stop dividing when they are supposed to, in such a way that all our bits are well proportioned relative to one another.” Dawkins, 1996, 293.
Cells rely heavily: “… within a time frame, a cell’s competence depends upon its location, its previous history of locations, and the proximity of its neighbors in a collective. There is no indication that a cell’s exact position in this collective is critical, but its fate can be determined by how many cells of similar history are located close by. A cell’s fate thus depends upon its competence and upon its neighborhood.” Edelman, 1988, 22.
Since every cell: Ridley, 175.
The words seem: Many brain researchers also draw upon the language of neighborhoods to describe how the brain develops. “Imagine now thi
s epigenetic drama in which sheets of nerve cells in the developing brain form a neighborhood. Neighbors in that neighborhood exchange signals as they are linked by CAMs and CIMs. They send processes out in a profuse fashion, sometimes bunched together in bundles called fascicles. When they reach other neighborhoods and sheets they stimulate target cells.” Edelman, 1992, 64.
Because each cell: Twenty years before Wright released SimCity, Thomas Schelling sketched out its basic principles in a decidedly low-tech game-theory experiment: “Get a roll of pennies, a roll of dimes, a ruled sheet of paper divided into one-inch squares, preferably at least the size of a checkerboard (sixty-four squares in eight rows and eight columns) and find some device for selecting squares at random. We place dimes and pennies on some of the squares, and suppose them to represent the members of two homogeneous groups—men and women, blacks and whites, French-speaking and English-speaking, officers and enlisted men, students and faculty, surfers and swimmers, the well-dressed and the poorly dressed, or any other dichotomy that is exhaustive and recognizable. We can spread them at random or put them in contrived patterns. We can use equal numbers of dimes and pennies or let one be a minority. And we can stipulate various rules for individual decisions.” Schelling, 147.
“They differ from”: Jacobs, 1961, 30.
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