Adrian Bejan takes the recurring patterns in nature—trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts—and reveals how a the Constructal Law accounts for the evolution of these and all other designs in our world. Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, and Social Organization, written with J. Peder Zane, looks at how everything—from biological life to inanimate systems—generates shape and structure and evolves in a sequence of ever-improving designs in order to facilitate flow.
Tagged with “systems”
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Design in Nature
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Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster
From edge.org: http://edge.org/conversation/geoffrey-west
For the past few years Geoffrey West, a physicist former president of SantaFe Institute has been calling for "a science of how city growth affects society and environment".
After years of focusing on scalability of cities and urban environments, West, is now is bringing "some of the powerful techniques, ideas, and paradigms developed in physics over into the biological and social sciences". He is looking at a bigger picture and asking the following question: "to what extent can biology and social organization (which are both quintessential complex adaptive systems) be put in a more quantitative, analytic, mathemitizable, predictive framework so that we can understand them in the way that we understand ‘simple physical systems’?’
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What Technology Wants
Kevin Kelly, former executive editor of Wired magazine, discusses his brand-new view of technology, and explains how technology can give our lives greater meaning. In What Technology Wants he suggests that technology is a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies, and by aligning ourselves with the long-term imperatives of this near-living system, we can capture its full gifts.
Tagged with book:author=kevin kelly technology innovation future technium systems
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Tim Brown: Change By Design
Tim Brown is the CEO and president of IDEO, and speaks regularly on the value of design thinking and innovation to business and design audiences around the world. He participates in the World Economic Forum at Davos, and his talk “Serious Play” can be seen on TED.com. In this interview, he reviews his career at IDEO, explores the impact of design processes (drawing and storytelling), as well as discussing his new book, Change By Design.
http://observermedia.designobserver.com/audiofile.html?entry=11317
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Astronomycast 152: Binary Stars
Did you know that our Solar System is a rarity with its single star. Astronomers believe that most star systems out there actually contain 2 or more stars – imagine seeing a sky with 4 suns. These binary and multiple star systems are a great target for new astronomers, and the dynamics of multiple stars keep astrophysicists busy too. Let’s take a look at what it would be like to live on Tatooine.
Tagged with astronomy space stars binary stars pulsars supernovae science planets solar systems
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Mix: Kandel – “Drive-By Shootings”
62 Minutes 45 Seconds 192 Kbps MP3 86 MB
Tracklist: http://www.berlin-mitte-institut.de/mix-kandel-driveby-shootings/
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Howard Bloom’s “Global Brain” 10 Years On
Many of us feel that the Web is ushering in a new era of global consciousness. But Howard Bloom thinks life has been a collective mind from the very beginning. He made the case in his book "Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang To the 21st Century." Host Jon Udell speaks with Bloom who reviews the themes of that book — group selectionism, complex adaptive systems, collective learning — and considers what has, and hasn’t, changed since the book was published in 2000.