Nonlinear Quotes

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.

You are there and to their ears, being a Syrian sounds like you’re unclean, shameful, indecent; it’s like you owe the world an apology for your very existence.

I am not an atheist preacher. I am not an absolutist or chauvinist whose ways are immune to evolution. My core philosophy is that I might be wrong.

The old law of an eye for an eye didn’t make them blind to the fact that another man’s terrorist wasn’t their freedom fighter.

I was a linear thinker, and according to Zen linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now.

Actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, its more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey...stuff.

For some reason, notwithstanding the alienation and utter rejection, I consider myself a global citizen. They say misery calls for company and I’ve always been a man of funerals. The companion of the misfortunate, until they are not!

The blind faith in some half-assed conspiracy theories lines up with the logic of having to believe in something with no questions asked. It gives us peace and comfort. As simple as I was, I found that resorting to this absolute nonsense was the root of all our problems. It was a road of willingly-learned helplessness, for no action could make a difference, thereby no action was needed.

I have to stress that my duties towards victims of all sorts, be it helping, taking their side, or caring, ends the moment their status becomes a bargaining chip. The moment the victim becomes a righteous sufferer. For in my short time on this planet, history and on-going affairs are full of those competing in victimhood.

For I’m neither a submitter nor a hating retaliator, I acknowledge the boundaries of my existence; yet, I still care. I care regardless of the way they choose to reduce me to the brand that is the birthmark of the accident of my conception. I care less about what that brand signifies in terms of my character, potential, and intentions. For the harmed I care. For the real victims. It’s the most basic of my mandatory civil duties. Only in caring, am I a citizen of the world.

I’ve been told that I cannot change shit, so I might as well stop torturing myself. My emotions are ridiculed and branded as childish. I have been told that the world has given up on my people. I have been told, and realise that on many occasions, I myself am viewed as an outcast by some of those suffering. I’ve been confronted and my answer is always the same: I care even in my most fucked-up moments. I care even when gates of shit pour open to drown me; I care because I am a citizen of the world.

As a citizen of the world, it’s my instinct to keep the fallen and the suffering in my thoughts. The human brain fascinates me; its limitless bounds of empathy. You see, in my mind there is logic to it: do no harm, prevent harm, help, support, care for the harmed, face the harmer. My stupid idealist conscience considers sympathy, not pity, at its worst, the most basic and the least negotiable civil duty. Of course as a citizen of the world, I should strive to do more. That said, I am only a man and so I often do the least.

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.

Nonlinear thinking means which way you should go depends on where you already are.

You've never heard of Chaos theory? Non-linear equations? Strange attractors? Ms. Sattler, I refuse to believe you're not familiar with the concept of attraction.

You get paid linearly for analyzing and solving problems. You get paid non-linearly for spotting and siezing opportunities.

Complex systems are full of interdependencies—hard to detect—and nonlinear responses.

Let's face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity, not uniformity. That's what makes the world interesting, that's what makes it beautiful, and that's what makes it work.

In the mantra of shared hatred and placing the blame on Israel, our cowardice to face the barbarity of our heads of states was replaced with a divine purpose. Contemplating the manifestation of the eradication of hatred I often concluded, the entirety of the Middle East’s theocracies and dictatorships would be replaced by total anarchy. We would be left with nothing, as our brotherhood of hatred was the only bond known to us. Enculturated in the malarkey of that demagoguery, forces beyond our control and comprehension seem to deceive us into a less harmful and satisfactory logic as opposed to placing some blame on ourselves and thus, having to act to reverse that state of affairs.

I am evolved as I freed myself from the expectations of others. These memories shape a nonlinear narrative, because queerness is intrinsically nonlinear, journeys that bend and wind. Two steps forward, one step back.

In light of my distanced telescopic exposure to the mayhem, I refused to plagiarise others’ personal tragedies as my own. There is an authorship in misery that costs more than empathy. Often I’d found myself dumbstruck in failed attempts to simulate that particular unfamiliar dolour. After all, no one takes pleasure in being possessed by a wailing father collecting the decapitated head of his innocent six year old. Even on the hinge of a willing attempt at full empathy with those cursed with such catastrophes, one had to have a superhuman emotional powers. I could not, in any way, claim the ability to relate to those who have been forced to swallow the never-ending bitter and poisonous pills of our inherited misfortune. Yet that excruciating pain in my chest seemed to elicit a state of agony in me, even from far behind the telescope. It could have been my tribal gene amplified by the ripple effect of the falling, moving in me what was left of my humanity.

People assume time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff

The spot is a self-organizing system, created and regulated by the same nonlinear twists that create the unpredictable turmoil around it. It is stable chaos.

Domino effects give way to butterfly effects given nonlinearity. “Outsized” conflates with “unpredictable” as a small cause yields disproportionate effects.

Primed to expect that our lives will follow a predictable path, we’re thrown when they don’t. We have linear expectations but nonlinear realities... We’re all comparing ourselves to an ideal that no longer exists and beating ourselves up for not achieving it.

Imperfect knowledge, incomplete assessment of feedback, limited memory and recall, as well as poor problem-solving skills result in a form of rationality that attains not optimal decisions but more or less satisfactory compromises between conflicting constraints.

You can’t navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take your eyes off short-term events and look for long term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries and bounded rationality; unless you take into account limiting factors, nonlinearities and delays.

Creativity is a renewable resource. Challenge yourself every day. Be as creative as you like, as often as you want, because you can never run out. Experience and curiosity drive us to make unexpected, offbeat connections. It is these nonlinear steps that often lead to the greatest work.

to call the study of chaos “nonlinear science” was like calling zoology “the study of non elephant animals.

In a systemic world, there is no such thing as discrete or isolated events - impacts cascade and spill over. Drivers of disruption collide, intersect, and amplify.

Humans operate on millennia-old hardware. We can comprehend linear relationships, but have trouble processing accelerating rates of change.

So we pour in data from the past to fuel the decision-making mechanisms created by our models, be they linear or nonlinear. But therein lies the logician's trap: past data from real life constitute a sequence of events rather than a set of independent observations, which is what the laws of probability demand.[...]It is in those outliers and imperfections that the wildness lurks.

Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse). There is absolutely no benefit for someone in such a position to propose something simple: when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication. Anyone who has submitted a “scholarly” paper to a journal knows that you usually raise the odds of acceptance by making it more complicated than necessary. Further, there are side effects for problems that grow nonlinearly with such branching-out complications. Worse: Non-skin-in-the-game people don’t get simplicity.

Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules.

The world is not made up of separate parts operating in isolation. This reductionist view of an understandable, controlled, and predictable world is flawed. And so, the strings, wires, and controls used to manage this illusionary discrete world are obsolete.

Chaos theory describes nonlinear systems. It’s now become a very broad theory that’s been used to study everything from the stock market to heart rhythms. A very fashionable theory. Very trendy to apply it to any complex system where there might be unpredictability.

Motivation is a fine example of social complexity. It is nonlinear and sometimes unpredictable. It cannot be defined or modeled with a single diagram.

Whenever the whole is different from the sum of the parts—whenever there’s cooperation or competition going on—the governing equations must be nonlinear.

Their incredible determination creates the need for nonlinear thinking, combined with boundless energy. Champions also earn money in nonlinear ways. While the masses essentially trade their time for money, the great ones realize this is probably the worst way to acquire wealth. Using

The very idea of massified advertising meant that large cirulation newpapers were not in the business of selling information to people but rather of selling the attention of their readers to commercial concerns... to tap into the resorvoir of resources constitutred by the growing urban populations

Linearity is a reductionist’s dream, and nonlinearity can sometimes be a reductionist’s nightmare. Understanding the distinction between linearity and nonlinearity is very important and worthwhile. To

Remember, the thought experiment is the starting point, not the end. The process is messy and nonlinear. And the answer, as we’ll see in the next section, will often come when you’re least expecting it.

People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.

The suppression dates back to the early Christians who tried to root out calendrical paganism, denounced classical cycles, and pushed underground entire branches of nonlinear learning, such as the hermetic fields of alchemy and astrology.

physicist Paul Davies comments, nonlinear systems “possess the remarkable ability to leap spontaneously from relatively featureless states to those involving complex cooperative behavior.”5 And those behaviors? They can be as different as water to ice.

But [in bureaucracies], too, decision making takes place in a world full of unceratinties. Any actual system of information processing, planning and control will never be optimal but merely practical, applying rote responses to recurrent problems and employing a variety of contingency tactics to deal with unforeseen events.

If non-linear leaps in intelligence and ability are possible, why haven't these effects been observed in our schools? I believe the answer lies in the profound inertia of human thought: when an entire society believes something is impossible, it suppresses, by its very way of life, the evidence that would contradict that belief.

The most important question for every client is "W X ho are you?" I'm not as interested in an answer as I am in teaching a process that the girl can use for the rest of her life. The process involves looking within to find a true core of self, acknowledging unique gifts, accepting all feelings, not just the socially acceptable ones, and making deep and firm decisions about values and meaning. The process includes knowing the difference between thinking and feeling, between immediate gratification and long-term goals, and between her own voice and the voices of others. The process includes discovering the personal impact of our cultural rules for women. It includes discussion about breaking those rules and formulating new, healthy guidelines for the self. The process teaches girls to chart a course based on the dictates of their true selves. The process is nonlinear, arduous, and discouraging. It is also joyful, creative and full of surprises.

Nonlinearities are important not only because they confound our expectations about the relationship between action and response. They are even more important because they change the relative strengths of feedback loops. They can flip a system from one mode of behavior to another.

Complexity arises from the interaction of many parts, giving rise to difficulties in linear or reductionist analysis due to the nonlinearities generated by the interactions. Such nonlinear effects emerge from both positive (amplifying) and negative (damping) feedbacks, the key ingredients of complex systems.

In America's 'nonlinear war', with no frontline or clear political or territorial goals, the number of enemy killed apparently revealed who was 'winning'. 'The military kill' became 'the prime target, simply because the essential political target is too elusive for us, or worse, because we do not understand its importance'.

One of our greatest fears is to eat the wildness of the world. Our mothers intuitively understood something essential: the green is poisonous to civilization. If we eat the wild, it begins to work inside us, altering us, changing us. Soon, if we eat too much, we will no longer fit the suit that has been made for us. Our hair will begin to grow long and ragged. Our gait and how we hold our body will change. A wild light begins to gleam in our eyes. Our words start to sound strange, nonlinear, emotional. Unpractical. Poetic. Once we have tasted this wildness, we begin to hunger for a food long denied us, and the more we eat of it the more we will awaken.

Primed to expect that our lives will follow a predictable path, we’re thrown when they don’t. We have linear expectations but nonlinear realities. Even people who are linear in one area (a stable career, say, or long-running marriage) are nonlinear in others (recurrent health problems or frequent changes in their religious identity).

So we pour in data from the past to fuel the decision-making mechanisms created by our models, be they linear or nonlinear. But therein lies the logician's trap: past data from real life constitute a sequence of events rather than a set of independent observations, which is what the laws of probability demand.[...]Even though many economic and financial variables fall into distributions that approximate a bell curve, the picture is never perfect.[...]It is in those outliers and imperfections that the wildness lurks.

We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.

Chaos has become not just theory but also method, not just a canon of beliefs but also a way of doing science.

A chaotic system could be stable if its particular brand of irregularity persisted in the face of small disturbances.

Utilizing a nonlinear approach and companion competencies makes it possible for people to move from good performance to great.

Steve understood the value of science and law, but he also understood that complex systems respond in nonlinear, unpredictable ways. And that creativity, at its best, surprises us all.

In my early teens, I heard about Naked Lunch and its mutating typewriters and talking cockroaches. While I would hardly classify its dystopic vision as erotica now, at the time, Naked Lunch was my first foray into consuming smut. It was because of Burroughs that I knew about the particular musk that blooms when a rectum is penetrated, and that death-by-hanging produces spontaneous trouser tents. The first Burroughs I read was Naked Lunch, but I buried myself in a few of his stories, and thus the arc of my recollection is just as non-linear as his narrative.

Even more important is the way complex systems seem to strike a balance between the need for order and the imperative for change. Complex systems tend to locate themselves at a place we call “the edge of chaos.” We imagine the edge of chaos as a place where there is enough innovation to keep a living system vibrant, and enough stability to keep it from collapsing into anarchy. It is a zone of conflict and upheaval, where the old and new are constantly at war. Finding the balance point must be a delicate matter—if a living system drifts too close, it risks falling over into incoherence and dissolution; but if the system moves too far away from the edge, it becomes rigid, frozen, totalitarian. Both conditions lead to extinction. . . . Only at the edge of chaos can complex systems flourish.8 This threshold line, that edge between anarchy and frozen rigidity, is not a like a fence line, it is a fractal line; it possesses nonlinearity.

All right,” Malcolm said. “Let’s go back to the beginning.” He paused, staring at the ceiling. “Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behavior: planets in orbit, spacecraft going to the moon, pendulums and springs and rolling balls, that sort of thing. The regular movement of objects. These are described by what are called linear equations, and mathematicians can solve those equations easily. We’ve been doing it for hundreds of years.” “Okay,” Gennaro said. “But there is another kind of behavior, which physics handles badly. For example, anything to do with turbulence. Water coming out of a spout. Air moving over an airplane wing. Weather. Blood flowing through the heart. Turbulent events are described by nonlinear equations. They’re hard to solve—in fact, they’re usually impossible to solve. So physics has never understood this whole class of events. Until about ten years ago. The new theory that describes them is called chaos theory.

The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. They behave. Confronted with a nonlinear system, scientists would have to substitute linear approximations or find some other uncertain backdoor approach. Textbooks showed students only the rare non-linear systems that would give way to such techniques. They did not display sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Nonlinear systems with real chaos were rarely taught and rarely learned. When people stumbled across such things-and people did-all their training argued for dismissing them as aberrations. Only a few were able to remember that the solvable, orderly, linear systems were the aberrations. Only a few, that is, understood how nonlinear nature is in its soul. Enrico Fermi once exclaimed, "It does not say in the Bible that all laws of nature are expressible linearly!" The mathematicians Stanislaw Ulam remarked that to call the study of chaos "nonlinear science" was like calling zoology "the study of nonelephant animals.

The real issues aren’t the quarks that hold together our physical bodies. The real issue is our own personal nonlinearity - the real us. We can’t see our real selves; we only see the containers we happen to be in right now. The real “us” is software, not hardware, which means it’s without mass, which means it has no time. We are eternal - saved or not. That’s the problem, because we each have an eternity ahead of us. Where will we spend it?

Algorithmic complexity theory and nonlinear dynamics together establish the fact that determinism reigns only over a quite finite domain; outside this small haven of order lies a largely uncharted, vast wasteland of chaos.

In non linear systems-and the economy is most certainly nonlinear-chaos theory tells you that the slightest uncertainty in your knowledge of the initial conditions will often grow inexorably. After a while, your predictions are nonsense.

Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. People think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For

Glutamate signaling works in a fancier way that is essential to learning.2 To simplify considerably, while dendritic spines typically contain only one type of receptor, those responsive to glutamate contain two. The first (the “non-NMDA”) works in a conventional way—for every little smidgen of glutamate binding to these receptors, a smidgen of sodium flows in, causing a smidgen of excitation. The second (the “NMDA”) works in a nonlinear, threshold manner. It is usually unresponsive to glutamate. It’s not until the non-NMDA has been stimulated over and over by a long train of glutamate release, allowing enough sodium to flow in, that this activates the NMDA receptor. It suddenly responds to all that glutamate, opening its channels, allowing an explosion of excitation.

One of the ideas of this book is to give the reader a possibility to develop problem-solving skills using both systems, to solve various nonlinear PDEs in both systems. To achieve equal results in both systems, it is not sufficient simply “to translate” one code to another code. There are numerous examples, where there exists some predefined function in one system and does not exist in another. Therefore, to get equal results in both systems, it is necessary to define new functions knowing the method or algorithm of calculation.

The two board games that best approximate the strategies of war are chess and the Asian game of go. In chess, the board is small. In comparison to go, the attack comes relatively quickly, forcing a decisive battle.... Go is much less formal. It is played on a large grid, with 361 intersections — nearly six times as many positions as in chess.... [A game of go] can last up to three hundred moves. The strategy is more subtle and fluid than chess, developing slowly; the more complex the pattern your stones initially create on the board, the harder it is for your opponent to understand your strategy. Fighting to control a particular area is not worth the trouble: You have to think in larger terms, to be prepared to sacrifice an area in order eventually to dominate the board. What you are after is not an entrenched position but mobility. With mobility you can isolate your opponent in small areas and then encircle them... Chess is linear, position oriented, and aggressive; go is nonlinear and fluid. Aggression is indirect until the end of the game, when the winner can surround the opponents' stones at an accelerated pace.

Warping begets warping in a nonlinear, self-bootstrapping manner. This is a fundamental feature of Einstein’s relativistic laws, and so different from everyday experience. It’s somewhat like a hypothetical science-fiction character who goes backward in time and gives birth to herself.

Indeed, except for the very simplest physical systems, virtually everything and everybody in the world is caught up in a vast, nonlinear web of incentives and constraints and connections. The slightest change in one place causes tremors everywhere else. We can't help but disturb the universe, as T.S. Eliot almost said. The whole is almost always equal to a good deal more than the sum of its parts. And the mathematical expression of that property-to the extent that such systems can be described by mathematics at all-is a nonlinear equation: one whose graph is curvy.

There are numerous brain rhythms, from approximately 0.02 to 600 cycles per second (Hz), covering more than four order of temporal magnitude. Many of these discrete brain rhythms have been known for decades, but it was only recently recognized that these oscillation bands form a geometric progression on a linear frequency scale or a linear progression on a natural logarithmic scale. leading to a natural separation of at least ten frequency bands. The neighbouring bands have a roughly constant ratio of e = 2,718 - the base for the natural logarithm. Because of this non-integer relationship among the various brain rhythms, the different frequencies can never perfectly entrain each other. Instead, the interference they produce gives rise to metastability, a perpetual fluctuation between unstable and transiently stable states, like waves in the ocean. The constantly interfering network rhythms can never settle to a stable attractor, using the parlance of nonlinear dynamics. This explains the ever-changing landscape of the EEG.

So (and this would have happened earlier, but I am only remembering it now): I am visiting her one afternoon.

Time Warrior gives us a revolutionary, non-linear approach for dealing with time, as bold as it is fresh and new.

The Procrustean bed in life consists precisely in simplifying the non-linear and making it linear—the simplification that distorts.

If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved. To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese. Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing. But say you’ve inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it’s soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure. More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn’t get any better than that.

There is no linear additive process that, if all the parts are taken together, can be understood to create the total system that occurs at the moment of self-organization; it is not a quantity that comes into being. It is not predictable in its shape or subsequent behavior or its subsequent qualities. There is a nonlinear quality that comes into being at the moment of synchronicity.

In a non-linear and relative world, each person is empowered to change the course and meaning of their life completely. That change only takes an instant; it is a leap through a wormhole. Perceived

I am also realizing the nonlinear effect behind success in anything: It is better to have a handful of enthusiastic advocates than hordes of people who appreciate your work—better to be loved by a dozen than liked by the hundreds. This applies to the sales of books, the spread of ideas, and success in general and runs counter to conventional logic. The information age is worsening this effect.

When one combines the new insights gained from studying far-from-equilibrium states and nonlinear processes, along with these complicated feedback systems, a whole new approach is opened that makes it possible to relate the so-called hard sciences to the softer sciences of life—and perhaps even to social processes as well. (Such findings have at least analogical significance for social, economic or political realities. Words like “revolution,” “economic crash,” “technological upheaval,” and “paradigm shift” all take on new shades of meaning when we begin thinking of them in terms of fluctuations, feedback amplification, dissipative structures, bifurcations, and the rest of the Prigoginian conceptual vocabulary.) It is these panoramic vistas that are opened to us by Order Out of Chaos.

My sense of narrative structure was shaped by ROM (Spaceknight) comics. I'd find random issues at the flea market and read them out of order with no context. The entire series was based on a toy I never owned. None of this made any difference.

Meanwhile, people are busy using fractals to explain any system that has defied other, more reductionist approaches. Since they were successfully applied by IBM's Benoit Mandlebrot to the problem of seemingly random, intermittent interference on the phone lines, fractals have been used to identify underlying patterns in weather systems, computer files, and bacteria cultures. Sometimes fractal enthusiasts go a bit too far, however, using these nonlinear equations to mine for patterns in systems where none exist. Applied to the stock market to consumer behavior, fractals may tell less about those systems than about the people searching for patterns within them. There is a dual nature to fractals: They orient us while at the same time challenging our sense of scale and appropriateness. They offer us access to the underlying patterns of complex systems while at the same time tempting us to look for patterns where none exist. This makes them a terrific icon for the sort of pattern recognition associated with present shock—a syndrome we'll call factalnoia. Like the robots on Mystery Science Theater 3000, we engage by relating one thing to another, even when the relationship is forced or imagined. The tsunami makes sense once it is connected to chemtrails, which make sense when they are connected to HAARP. It's not just conspiracy theorists drawing fractalnoid connections between things. In a world without time, any and all sense making must occur on the fly. Simultaneity often seems like all we have. That's why anyone contending with present shock will have a propensity to make connections between things happening in the same moment—as if there had to be an underlying logic.

All this comes under the heading of what the journalist Thomas L. Friedman has called “the really scary stuff we already know.” Much worse is what he calls “the even scarier stuff we don’t know.” The problem, Friedman explains, is that what we face is not global warming but “global weirding.” Climate change is nonlinear: everything is connected to everything else, feeding back in ways too bewilderingly complex to model. There will be tipping points when the environment shifts abruptly and irreversibly, but we don’t know where they are or what will happen when we reach them.

The Newtonian model of biology is based on linear events in which chemical reactions occur in a sequence of steps. But that’s not actually how biology works; you can no longer explain something even as simple as how a cut heals without the understanding of the interconnected coherent information pathways you just read about. Cells share an intercommunication of information in a nonlinear way. The universe and all the biological systems within it share an integration of independent, entangled energy fields that, in turn, share information beyond space and time on a moment-to-moment basis.

There is a new science of complexity which says that the link between cause and effect is increasingly difficult to trace; that change (planned or otherwise) unfolds in non-linear ways; that paradoxes and contradictions abound; and that creative solutions arise out of diversity, uncertainty and chaos.

It uses the greatest random-access indexing system ever invented—one that computer scientists haven’t come even close to replicating. Whereas an index in the back of a book provides a single address—a page number—for each important subject, each subject in the brain has hundreds if not thousands of addresses. Our internal memories are associational, nonlinear. You don’t need to know where a particular memory is stored in order to find it. It simply turns up—or doesn’t—when you need it. Because of the dense network that interconnects our memories, we can skip around from memory to memory and idea to idea very rapidly.

Digital computers are themselves more complex than most things people build; they have very large numbers of states. This makes conceiving, describing, and testing them hard. Software systems have orders of magnitude more states than computers do. Likewise, a scaling-up of a software entity is not merely a repetition of the same elements in larger size; it is necessarily an increase in the number of different elements. In most cases, the elements interact with each other in some nonlinear fashion, and the complexity of the whole increases much more than linearly. The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one.

Many organizations and militaries use VUCA as an acronym to describe the disruptive state of the world, given its Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. UN-VICE is an updated way of capturing the state and velocity of the world, with our acronym for UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex, and Exponential: - UNknown: Recognizing that you can’t know anything perfectly, and that many of our decisions are based on assumptions. Increased uncertainty lowers the value of ad-vice and requires increased self-reliance. - Volatile: Our world, and change itself, is evolving faster than ever before. Volatility is not inherently good or bad; it is simply impactful. In volatility we see shifting speed, texture, and magnitude of the changing environment. - Intersecting: The broader our filters, the more we realize that what we observe overlaps with other things. Boundaries are disappearing, connecting new areas through combinations. - Complex: These more-than-complicated systems have unreliable input-output relationships and cannot be summarized or modeled without losing their essence. Unpredictable situations with unknown unknowns. - Exponential: A nonlinear type of change that increases in its growth rate. To an observer, this change may happen gradually, then suddenly. Rapid acceleration of seemingly-small shifts.

Basically, what I'm saying is not at all new to Eastern philosophy. It's never seen the world as anything else but a complex system. But it's a world view that, decade by decade, is becoming more important in the West-both in science and in the culture at large. Very, very slowly, there's been a gradual shift from an exploitative view of nature-man versus nature-to an approach that stresses the mutual accomodation of man and nature. What has happened is that we're beginning to lose our innocence, or naivete, about how the world works. As we begin to understand complex systems, we begin to understand that we're part of an ever-changing, interlocking, nonlinear, kaleidoscopic world.

Recognition for us is about presence, about profound listening, and about recognizing and affirming the light in each other as a mechanism for nurturing and strengthening internal relationships to our Nishnaabeg worlds. It is a core part of our political systems because they are rooted in our bodies and our bodies are not just informed by but created and maintained by relationships of deep reciprocity. Our bodies exist only in relation to Indigenous complex, nonlinear constructions of time, space, and place that are continually rebirthed through the practice and often coded recognition of obligations and responsibilities within a nest of diversity, freedom, consent, noninterference, and a generated, proportional, emergent reciprocity.

Taking least squares is no longer optimal, and the very idea of ‘accuracy’ has to be rethought. This simple fact is as important as it is neglected. This problem is easily illustrated in the Logistic Map: given the correct mathematical formula and all the details of the noise model – random numbers with a bell-shaped distribution – using least squares to estimate α leads to systematic errors. This is not a question of too few data or insufficient computer power, it is the method that fails. We can compute the optimal least squares solution: its value for α is too small at all noise levels. This principled approach just does not apply to nonlinear models because the theorems behind the principle of least squares repeatedly assume bell-shaped distributions.

At the same time, Kaufmann discovered that in developing his genetic networks, he had reinvented some of the most avant-garde work in physics and applied mathematics-albeit in a totally new context. The dynamics of his genetic regulatory networks turned out to be a special case of what the physicists were calling "nonlinear dynamics." From the nonlinear point of view, in fact, it was easy to see why his sparsely connected networks could organize themselves into stable cycles so easily: mathematically, their behavior was equivalent to the way all the rain falling on the hillsides around a valley will flow into a lake at the bottom of the valley. In the space of all possible network behaviors, the stable cycles were like basins-or as the physicists put it, "attractors.

What is our UN-VICE in the context of Disruption 3.0? To sum up, UN-VICE is an updated way of capturing the state of the world. Framing the dynamics of systemic disruption as UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex, Exponential enables an empowering response. We are not helpless victims unable to make decisions. With UN-VICE, we have the power to shape our own futures. KEY POINTS: OUR UN-VICE ACRONYM - UNknown: Uncertainty becomes our comfort zone. Recognize you can’t know anything perfectly and many decisions are based on assumptions. Increased uncertainty lowers the value of advice and requires increased self-reliance. Learn how to respond regardless of the lack of precedents. - Volatile: Harness change for gain. Our world, and change itself, is evolving faster than ever before. Volatility is not new; we simply can’t ignore its impact. In volatility, we see the shifting speed and texture of the changing environment. - Intersecting: Everything connects to everything else. The broader our lens, the greater the insights gained from realizing how boundaries are disappearing. - Complex: Notice emergent properties and adapt. In complex environments, inputs do not map clearly to outputs. Practitioners must acknowledge emergent properties and reconcile the immediate with the indefinite. Such systems require critical thinking, experimentation, and judgment. Evaluate emerging issues, build resiliency, and learn to adapt to expanding complexity. - Exponential: Pay attention to nonlinear types of change that increase in growth rate. Notice rapid acceleration of seemingly small shifts. Monitoring early on will mean fewer surprises.

When I first started dual enrollment at Lake City Community College you could print in the library for free. I printed whole books. Like James Legge's 1891 "Tao Te Ching" translation. He was to parentheses what Emily Dickinson was to the Em Dash. "To know and yet (think) we do not know is the highest (at­tain­ment); not to know (and yet think) we do know is a dis­ease." I'd sit around listening to records as their dot matrix printer whirred. Slowly printing a book from the 6th century BCE. They had those hard blue plastic headphones. Your ears would ache. But Rimsky-Korsakov was pretty metal. Herbert Benson's "The Relaxation Response" had me picking "ZOOM" as my meditation mantra. Reading Vonnegut with his nonlinear narrative. Books will often have Acknowledgments. A page or two. Things that helped you. What matters. Everything I write is an Acknowledgment. What matters. And I've printed whole books.

analogue tape is notoriously forgiving on transient peaks, applying small amounts of tape saturation (or distortion) on the occasional stray hit, and thereby keeping the transient levels in some degree of order. Of course, in an entirely digital production chain, it’s highly likely that these transient peaks have passed through the majority of recording and mixing without any of these pleasant ‘non-linearities’ slipping in, and therefore the average level is several decibels quieter than a comparable analogue recording.

Paint in several colors was squeezed out of tubes and mixed and applied to woven fabric stretched on a wooden frame so artfully we say we see a woman hanging out a sheet rather than oil on canvas. Ana Teresa Fernandez’s image on that canvas is six feet tall, five feet wide, the figure almost life-size. Though it is untitled, the series it’s in has a title: Telaraña. Spiderweb. The spiderweb of gender and history in which the painted woman is caught; the spiderweb of her own power that she is weaving in this painting dominated by a sheet that was woven. Woven now by a machine, but before the industrial revolution by women whose spinning and weaving linked them to spiders and made spiders feminine in the old stories. In this part of the world, in the creation stories of the Hopi, Pueblo, Navajo, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples, Spider Grandmother is the principal creator of the universe. Ancient Greek stories included an unfortunate spinning woman who was famously turned into a spider as well as the more powerful Greek fates, who spun, wove, and cut each person’s lifeline, who ensured that those lives would be linear narratives that end. Spiderwebs are images of the nonlinear, of the many directions in which something might go, the many sources for it; of the grandmothers as well as the strings of begats. There’s a German painting from the nineteenth century of women processing the flax from which linen is made. They wear wooden shoes, dark dresses, demure white caps, and stand at various distances from a wall, where the hanks of raw material are being wound up as thread. From each of them, a single thread extends across the room, as though they were spiders, as though it came right out of their bellies. Or as though they were tethered to the wall by the fine, slim threads that are invisible in other kinds of light. They are spinning, they are caught in the web. To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.

Almost all official statistics and policy documents on wages, income, gross domestic product (GDP), crime, unemployment rates, innovation rates, cost of living indices, morbidity and mortality rates, and poverty rates are compiled by governmental agencies and international bodies worldwide in terms of both total aggregate and per capita metrics. Furthermore, well-known composite indices of urban performance and the quality of life, such as those assembled by the World Economic Forum and magazines like Fortune, Forbes, and The Economist, primarily rely on naive linear combinations of such measures.6 Because we have quantitative scaling curves for many of these urban characteristics and a theoretical framework for their underlying dynamics we can do much better in devising a scientific basis for assessing performance and ranking cities. The ubiquitous use of per capita indicators for ranking and comparing cities is particularly egregious because it implicitly assumes that the baseline, or null hypothesis, for any urban characteristic is that it scales linearly with population size. In other words, it presumes that an idealized city is just the linear sum of the activities of all of its citizens, thereby ignoring its most essential feature and the very point of its existence, namely, that it is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions. Cities are quintessentially complex adaptive systems and, as such, are significantly more than just the simple linear sum of their individual components and constituents, whether buildings, roads, people, or money. This is expressed by the superlinear scaling laws whose exponents are 1.15 rather than 1.00. This approximately 15 percent increase in all socioeconomic activity with every doubling of the population size happens almost independently of administrators, politicians, planners, history, geographical location, and culture.

Interestingly enough, creative geniuses seem to think a lot more like horses do. These people also spend a rather large amount of time engaging in that favorite equine pastime: doing nothing. In his book Fire in the Crucible: The Alchemy of Creative Genius, John Briggs gathers numerous studies illustrating how artists and inventors keep their thoughts pulsating in a field of nuance associated with the limbic system. In order to accomplish this feat against the influence of cultural conditioning, they tend to be outsiders who have trouble fitting into polite society. Many creative geniuses don’t do well in school and don’t speak until they’re older, thus increasing their awareness of nonverbal feelings, sensations, and body language cues. Einstein is a classic example. Like Kathleen Barry Ingram, he also failed his college entrance exams. As expected, these sensitive, often highly empathic people feel extremely uncomfortable around incongruent members of their own species, and tend to distance themselves from the cultural mainstream. Through their refusal to fit into a system focusing on outside authority, suppressed emotion, and secondhand thought, creative geniuses retain and enhance their ability to activate the entire brain. Information flows freely, strengthening pathways between the various brain functions. The tendency to separate thought from emotion, memory, and sensation is lessened. This gives birth to a powerful nonlinear process, a flood of sensations and images interacting with high-level thought functions and aspects of memory too complex and multifaceted to distill into words. These elements continue to influence and build on each other with increasing ferocity. Researchers emphasize that the entire process is so rapid the conscious mind barely registers that it is happening, let alone what is happening. Now a person — or a horse for that matter — can theoretically operate at this level his entire life and never receive recognition for the rich and innovative insights resulting from this process. Those called creative geniuses continuously struggle with the task of communicating their revelations to the world through the most amenable form of expression — music, visual art, poetry, mathematics. Their talent for innovation, however, stems from an ability to continually engage and process a complex, interconnected, nonlinear series of insights. Briggs also found that creative geniuses spend a large of amount of time “doing nothing,” alternating episodes of intense concentration on a project with periods of what he calls “creative indolence.” Albert Einstein once remarked that some of his greatest ideas came to him so suddenly while shaving that he was prone to cut himself with surprise.

He ran long at the White House, and arrived late to his next meeting with Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan and Frank Ruggiero—their first major strategy session on Taliban talks after the secret meeting with A-Rod. She was waiting in her outer office, a spacious room paneled in white and gilt wood, with tasseled blue and pink curtains and an array of colorfully upholstered chairs and couches. In my time reporting to her later, I only ever saw Clinton take the couch, with guests of honor in the large chair kitty-corner to her. She’d left it open for him that day. “He came rushing in. . . . ” Clinton later said. “And, you know, he was saying ‘oh I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ ” He sat down heavily and shrugged off his coat, rattling off a litany of his latest meetings, including his stop-in at the White House. “That was typical Richard. It was, like, ‘I’m doing a million things and I’m trying to keep all the balls in the air,’ ” she remembered. As he was talking, a “scarlet red” flush went up his face, according to Clinton. He pressed his hands over his eyes, his chest heaving. “Richard, what’s the matter?” Clinton asked. “Something horrible is happening,” he said. A few minutes later, Holbrooke was in an ambulance, strapped to a gurney, headed to nearby George Washington University Hospital, where Clinton had told her own internist to prepare the emergency room. In his typically brash style, he’d demanded that the ambulance take him to the more distant Sibley Memorial Hospital. Clinton overruled him. One of our deputies on the SRAP team, Dan Feldman, rode with him and held his hand. Feldman didn’t have his BlackBerry, so he scrawled notes on a State Department expense form for a dinner at Meiwah Restaurant as Holbrooke dictated messages and a doctor assessed him. The notes are a nonlinear stream of Holbrooke’s indomitable personality, slashed through with medical realities. “Call Eric in Axelrod’s office,” the first read. Nearby: “aortic dissection—type A . . . operation risk @ > 50 percent”—that would be chance of death. A series of messages for people in his life, again interrupted by his deteriorating condition: “S”—Secretary Clinton—“why always together for medical crises?” (The year before, he’d been with Clinton when she fell to the concrete floor of the State Department garage, fracturing her elbow.) “Kids—how much love them + stepkids” . . . “best staff ever” . . . “don’t let him die here” . . . “vascular surgery” . . . “no flow, no feeling legs” . . . “clot” . . . and then, again: “don’t let him die here want to die at home w/ his fam.” The seriousness of the situation fully dawning on him, Holbrooke turned to job succession: “Tell Frank”—Ruggiero—“he’s acting.” And finally: “I love so many people . . . I have a lot left to do . . . my career in public service is over.” Holbrooke cracked wise until they put him under for surgery. “Get me anything you need,” he demanded. “A pig’s heart. Dan’s heart.