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Rating: 
Summary: Highly readable & Thought provoking
Review:
Adding my positive response to the others here is easy. This is a thought provoking work. Which thoughts it stimulates in you will be different from mine, but just as interesting. The fact that this work is so easily readable may be not just a pleasure, but a drawback. I say this in reference to the subtitle. I fear (perhaps unjustly) that readers may think all critical changes lead to catastrophe. It's better to take a neutral position on the value of change at least in a theoretical frame.
That small comment aside, I recommend this book to all readers with a general interest in science or at least what's going on around us.
Rating:
Summary: the power of simple toy models
Review: I think the book is really great at discusing the practical ramifactions of the simple toy models of sand castles ala Per Bak. The book doesn't go into nearly enough detail about the mathematics of the models. At its heart the book, takes the sand-castle pile,as a model of earthquakes, and equally simple epedimic models and forest fire models and applies them metamorphorically to the history of scientific revolutions ala Kuhn, stock prices, war and revolution. Perhaps the scale invariance in the size of paradigmn shifts, helps explain why many though Kuhn was inconsistent in his use of the word paradigm.
There isn't alot of detail in the history section but still the book would make great airplane reading and is well worth while. I hope someday someone(or did Wolfram try that?) will come out with a systematic can concise catalog of these toy models that push the behavior of stystems to that 'complex boundary of chaotic behavior...
Rating:
Summary: the power of simple toy models
Review: I think the book is really great at discusing the practical ramifactions of the simple toy models of sand castles ala Per Bak. The book doesn't go into nearly enough detail about the mathematics of the models. At its heart the book, takes the sand-castle pile,as a model of earthquakes, and equally simple epedimic models and forest fire models and applies them metamorphorically to the history of scientific revolutions ala Kuhn, stock prices, war and revolution. Perhaps the scale invariance in the size of paradigmn shifts, helps explain why many though Kuhn was inconsistent in his use of the word paradigm.
There isn't alot of detail in the history section but still the book would make great airplane reading and is well worth while. I hope someday someone(or did Wolfram try that?) will come out with a systematic can concise catalog of these toy models that push the behavior of stystems to that 'complex boundary of chaotic behavior...
Rating:
Summary: A Clear Explanation of the Complexity Theory
Review: I tried to learn the complexity theory, what the power law was etc from popular science books. Those I read prior to this did not make the job. For example they all gave the sand-pile example but did not really explain how it might trigger avalanches in different sizes and how the power law explains the relationship between avalanche sizes and the frequency of avalanches.
This book does them all very clearly. Buchanan's book is an excellent book for beginners of the complexity theory.
Rating:
Summary: hidden systems
Review: One of the ways I judge a book's worth to me is how often I think about it during the day, and in the days after I've finished it, and if it has added a valuable viewpoint reference. This book has scored high on that scale. This is a book that will present a new way of viewing, something to think about, and I think most would enjoy reading it. The first reviewer had an excellent synopsis of the substance of the points of the book.I am intrigued by systems thinking and explanations, a way to distill the random patterns of whatever a person is dealing with in their daily life, from the rare to the mundane. I was fascinated with the modeled games presented and how they illuminate the heart of the underlying mathematical "engine" that permeates our world. To see these findings correlate with the recent face of physics theories was compelling. I had recently finished "The hole in the Universe" by K.C. Cole, and thought about the condition of our universe being in a particular "frozen" state of conditions and how it's possible that that state could be "kicked down" to another "rung" on the ladder-not predictable as to when or under what conditions. It seemed to be a reiteration of these principles, seen on an immense scale. This picture could be disconcerting as to the randomness of chaos potential, but at the same time it presents a view of the dynamism of life and possibilities, how it can't be any other way if we are able to move and have effect and not live in a static world. How does this affect one's world view? It's the same as if you haven't read the book; navigate through as best you can, and appreciate life.
Rating:
Summary: hidden systems
Review: One of the ways I judge a book's worth to me is how often I think about it during the day, and in the days after I've finished it, and if it has added a valuable viewpoint reference. This book has scored high on that scale. This is a book that will present a new way of viewing, something to think about, and I think most would enjoy reading it. The first reviewer had an excellent synopsis of the substance of the points of the book. I am intrigued by systems thinking and explanations, a way to distill the random patterns of whatever a person is dealing with in their daily life, from the rare to the mundane. I was fascinated with the modeled games presented and how they illuminate the heart of the underlying mathematical "engine" that permeates our world. To see these findings correlate with the recent face of physics theories was compelling. I had recently finished "The hole in the Universe" by K.C. Cole, and thought about the condition of our universe being in a particular "frozen" state of conditions and how it's possible that that state could be "kicked down" to another "rung" on the ladder-not predictable as to when or under what conditions. It seemed to be a reiteration of these principles, seen on an immense scale. This picture could be disconcerting as to the randomness of chaos potential, but at the same time it presents a view of the dynamism of life and possibilities, how it can't be any other way if we are able to move and have effect and not live in a static world. How does this affect one's world view? It's the same as if you haven't read the book; navigate through as best you can, and appreciate life.
Rating:
Summary: A Clear Explanation of the Complexity Theory
Review: This is an excellent book for beginners of the complexity theory. His explanations of power law, small-world networks and nonlinearity are extremely clear to understand. His style of conveying the material is vivid, and fluid. It is hard to put it down as if it is a novel. Once you are finished with this book you will probably look for other books on this subject. Your best bets are already cited in this book.
Rating:
Summary: A clear presentation of a crucial idea
Review: Who hasn't wondered why catastrophes happen, and if they can be predicted or avoided? Economists and investors try to understand why markets crash, seismologists struggle to understand and predict great earthquakes, and historians speculate why empires crumble and global cataclysms such as the First and Second World Wars occur. Physicist and science journalist Mark Buchanan brings the science of what he calls "historical physics"--the study of systems that are far from equilibrium and, as he puts it poised "on the knife edge of instability" to bear on these questions. He describes a much-studied model of such catastrophe-prone systems, a simple sandpile. Build a sandpile by dropping one grain at a time on the top of the heap. It will eventually reach a critical state at which a grain can either make the pile a bit taller or start an avalanche, small or large. Scientists experimenting with real and virtual sandpiles have observed several important regularities: 1. The time between avalanches is extremely variable, making it essentially impossible to predict when the next avalanche will occur. 2. The size of avalanches is also extremely variable, making it essentially impossible to predict whether the next avalanche will be tiny or huge. 3. A big avalanche doesn't need a big cause; one grain can trigger a sandpile-flattening event. 4. Avalanche sizes follow what mathematicians call a power law. What that means is that large events happen less frequently than small ones according to a fixed ratio. For sandpiles the frequency goes down by a factor of 2.14 for each doubling of avalanche size. For earthquakes the frequency goes down by a factor of four for each doubling of released energy. 5. Any process that follows a power law shows two key features. The events are "scale invariant," meaning that no particular size of event is favored. And large events--big avalanches, 8.0 earthquakes, "1000-year floods" and many other kinds of catastrophic events occur far more frequently than common sense would suggest. We tend to assume that events distribute themselves along the familiar normal curve--like height, weight, IQ scores, etc. These distributions do have a favored scale--most people cluster around the average height, weight, or IQ, while the number of people with extremely low or extremely high scores is very small. Buchanan shows that many events that greatly impact our lives represent changes in sandpile-like systems, and so are not just hard to predict, but inherently unpredictable. The one thing that can be predicted is that huge events will occur far more often than our intuition prepares us for. Many natural events follow power laws, including earthquakes, forest fires, floods and the mass extinctions that have punctuated the history of life on earth. And many human events also show these regularities, including traffic jams, market crashes, the collapse of nations and empires, and wars. Buchanan's presentation of these regularities and their implications is well reasoned, well documented and well written. Read it for yourself, and see if the ideas he presents don't help you to understand what seems to be a profound pattern that underlies many of the events that shape and shake our lives. Robert Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley & Sons, September 2002).
Rating:
Summary: I never thought of that
Review: Wow! I am constantly amazed when someones careful investigation, and word crafting puts together a book like this.
The Author charts out the research path of scientists working in diverse fields as seismology and fire science,and takes the work on these seemingly random events and shows that there is a demonstrable, repeatable science to them.
More amazingly, he takes recent research work and shows that a large number of seemingly controlled things of mankind, such as city size, are driven by these same mathematical laws.
Even though the author alludes to the fact that these are events that just happen, and implies that they are beyond our control, I am hopeful that people are extending on this wonderful work to see the horizons of mankinds future in many different fields.
Brilliant work. If you are interested in the line of human history, and in the future, this is a great read.
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