Who… else thinks like I do?

Know anyone?  please say so.   Here are some notes on my sources.

Influences - Correspondents - Reading  - Fields - Bookmarks

Phil Henshaw
id (at) synapse9 dot com  5/23/08

One could never make a whole list of all the important unbiased explorers of the world or the gifted and insightful individuals connected to your own life experience.   There does seem to be a line one can draw, though, particularly for those who try to 'explain things'.   Some see the object of explanation as perfecting the model in their minds and others seek to guide readers to and display the real complexities of the environmental events that animate our world.   I've been searching a long time and people are finally getting enough of an idea that what I'm talking about are the latter type, for some people to start mentioning some others.   It seems worth mentioning the select few of those who appear to be somewhat 'adept' at it.  

Years ago this page contained lists of people I guessed were heading in the direction of studying the real life of individual events, how they develop and how to watch what becomes of them.   That list went away.   So few searchers seem to even experiment with the idea of making the whole physical process of natural happenings themselves the subject, rather than just trying to perfect our own descriptions.    Now I seem to have another list, of a few who succeeded in failing to be seduced to explain things as only existing in their own minds, a few that at some point just 'left that box behind'.   Even fewer have become somewhat adept at sketching out what they find looking at the world that way.   I guess I now have four.   

I’ve just been finding Wendell Berry’s poetry most enjoyable for how he explores many of these very same issues of change and the place of reality.   Jane Jacobs the urban historian does much the same in her portrayal of the life of cities and the intense inconsistency that makes them thrive .   A recent discovery is Walter Lippman the political scientist who beautifully described the cognitive dysfunction of politics.   There's also Malcolm Gladwell, the investigative journalist who very inventively gets big chunks of it too.   Being adept at it seems to involve their all noticing and finding pleasure in 'the twist'.   Every story has a natural twist, the 'dive' you take that if done well 'turns around' or 'turns inside out' in mid-process, and is one of the main things that confounds our attempts to perfect our explanations.

Sources, Other people - [the partial short list] [I found more physics in other places]

• Economic systems theorists: J.M. Keynes, Kenneth Boulding,
• Process ecologists: Howard T. Odum, Fritz Holling, Rob Ulanowicz, Stan Salthe
• Complexity as exploratory learning processes: Gerald Midgley, Peter Allen
• Designers: Buckminster Fuller, Lou Kahn, Jane Jacobs
• Environmentalists: Lester Brown & World Watch,
• Scientific archeology: NASA Archeology, Joseph Tainter, Colin Renfrew, Erich Neumann
• Evolutionary Developmental Biology, Steven J Gould, D'Arcy Thompson, Kirschner & Gerhart
• Network science, Self-organizing software devl., Alife, von Neumann, Barabasi
• General systems theory:  Bertalanffy, Ashby, Weinberg, Donella Meadows
• Old guys finding useful errors: Lamarck, Leibniz, Zeno, C.L. Henshaw, S.A. Forbes
• Writers on change: George Orwell, Walter Lippman, Malcolm Gladwell
• Poets of change: Wendell Berry, Robert M. Pirsig
• Comedians: all of them, New Yorker Cartoons
• Numerous friends asking great questions and sharing life experience
• Sustainability science (when not duplicating the mistakes being corrected...arg!)
   

I've been doing a lot of correspondence in 2008:

Fields of Exploration & Influences...  Everyone reading this is, and knows of numerous other groups and individuals, schools of research and spiritual paths that seek to learn how to be resourceful with understanding our complex personal and community relationships with each other and the earth.    Some of those I've most learned from were the leaders and followers of the appropriate technology movement and various cultural, spiritual & activist movements of that time, and from the number of transformative personal relationships that so much of my own thinking developed as an extension of.    I was also particularly inspired by the deep and pure thinking of Louis Kahn, the global awareness of Kenneth Boulding,  the study of growth and form of D'arcy Thompson, the free thinking genius of Bucky Fuller, and by their quests for understanding pure form and process.    I found their hints very helpful while searching for that myself, much of it focused through the problems and potentials of architectural design that first showed me what was missing from my background in physics.    What made my choice to change direction possible and very productive for me was partly an emersion in phenomenology through living with some friends studying for their Ph D's in philosophy for a few years while I was trying to figure out what to do after graduating from college in 1968.   After I started developing my own 'new theory of physics' in the late 70's I began to find and study other disciplines that were attempting to do the same.   Both popular and research environmental ecology, the dynamic systems models as used by Meadows' to study limits to growth, Bertalanffy and Weinberg's approaches to  general systems theory,  the systems ecology of H.T. Odum, Prigogine's non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and complexity/chaos theory as that came along were all parts of that.   I started my wider readings with micro-climatology of Geiger and later a wide variety of economics and various of 'the worldly philosophers' including many popular books with original theories of social or environmental change.   I didn't read large amounts really, but very widely sampled.    

I was also carefully reading some of the wonderful historians, anthropologists, archeologists, evolutionary biologists, paleontologists and investigative journalists who appreciated change as a environmental learning process like Henry Guerlac, Jane Jacobs, Joe Tainter, Colin Renfrew, Stephen J Gould, Mark Kirschner and Malcolm Gladwell.   It wasn't just their answers that I learned from, but also the echoes of their disappointments and how they kept making better and better mistakes.   I really learned a lot from echoes of free thinkers of all kinds,  what pieces I could hear getting picked up in the media or through conversations, what pieces got misused, what were used in new ways.   The field of network science is a relatively new interest, but clearly has major potential for exposing the detailed design of working complex systems, if applied using the exploratory paradigm as a small minority of people in the field are actively doing.  Another area of great interest is Gestalt learning theory for identifying clearly what the conflict is between mental models and environmental processes.  My main recent fields of greatest interest have been sustainable design methods and  sustainability science, and using them to learn about techniques for environmental intervention and partnerships.    Much of that is directly the work of solving on the ground the problem that scientific models, based on physics, leave out all of what have been my greatest sources of inspiration, nature's individual working parts... !

Science Reading Library (~250 good books as of 10/08)
I learn from how people struggle with a question, because that raises really good ones.  Clear answers are quite hard to come bye in a culture being forced to rethink it's thinking by necessity of finding the old way in deep conflict with its physical world.  
Books that Changed my Thinking, (by date present copy acquired)

Books with unusual depth, (by date present copy acquired)

Books with unusual spiritual value (by date present copy acquired)

Books with unusually telling documentary (by date present copy acquired)

Others valued for content or vision (by date present copy acquired)

Recent & Misc Old Bookmarks  

• You can browse my May 2008  Bookmark web for the kinds of places I keep for reference

Misc Old Bookmarks

• Below is an older set of 2000-06 links that shows some of my range of interests.

Global Sustainability

There's wide confusion between sustaining the earth and sustaining growth of our uses, with most advocates quite unaware of the it....   Let me know if you find a good ways to tell which is which.

Earth Portal - National Council for Science and the Environment
AAAS Sustainability Web - SustainabilityScience.org
European Sustainability - IES Joint research center
Sustainability Roundtable - US National Acad of Sci

....and among many
Base of the Pyramid Protocol   - Bottom up development
Columbia Earth Observatory - One of many institutes
The Earth Institute at Columbia University -
The UN Millennium Development Goals MDG

Integrated Science Methods

IntSci - Integrated science for sustainability
NRM Improving Community Participation in Environment & Development
Aidsmap Participatory Workshops - Introduction
International Association for Public Participation
Internet Resources For Participatory Action Research
Participation guide@Partnerships Online
Conservation Ecology A Classification of Collaborative Management Methods

Overpopulation and Sustainability Data

EcoFuture (TM) Population and Sustainability
Gapminder Human development trends
Worldmapper  world data maps
Poverty Mapping world data maps
Human Population Growth
Human Populations

Complexity & Emergence

Complexity Digest - Networking the Complexity Community
www.santafe.edu   complexity
Welcome To Trojan Mice
Complex Systems Virtual Library - by themes - Artificial Life
Complexity and Artificial Life Research - Chris Lucas
Quotes & links: Stewart Kaufman, Lee Smolin, John Brockman
Sante Fe Institute: A center for complexity & artificial life
Duke Univ: Center for Non-linear and Complex systems
Emergence - physics of the origin of order
Artificial Intelligence - some similar ideas in approach
Statistical Methods - some links to other shape identification

A quirky assortment of interesting people

other 'far out' explorers
Albert Einstein Online
Anthony Campbell's Freethinker Site Home Page
Charles Francis
Crank Dot Net _ science
David Brin's Official Web Site
David Chalmers Common-Sense Physics
Dr. Geoffrey Miller
Dr. Michio Kaku, Physicist and Peace Activist
George Hammond is God
Gladwell dot com -blink, tipping point
Irving Stein, The Foundations of Special Relativity
Johan Galtung
JOHN BROCKMAN
Jonathan Swift 1667-1745
Karl Spence Fair Construction
KurzweilAI.net
Len Troncale
Metafuture.org
Michael Scheuer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paul Pangaro
Peter Michael Jack hypercomplex
Research Interests, Peter Young
Roger Penrose - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Salthe The Natural Philosophy of Ecology
School of Community & Regional Planning
Shannon's Communication
SRP Explorers- Service de Recherche
T-Factor - Jay Gary - G Land
Weird Science (Bill Beaty's Homepages)
William H. Calvin's Books and Articles
William of Ockham - Medieval History Net Links
Herman Daly, U.MD.
LDEO People Pages

Other Old Stuff

Other Data 
NYC My Neighborhood Statistics - Welcome
Access to Web history Internet Archive

US Econ Data:
U.S. Department of Commerce. Bureau of Economic Analysis
Data and Data Links Bureau of Labor Statistics Home Page
RePEc Research Papers in Economics

Issues:
All_Models_Are_Wrong - Sterman
Long Bets [ On the Record Bets ]
Capitalism or a habitable planet (email discussion)
seems familiar - conversation with Stan Salthe

Statistical Noise Supression & Curve Fitting

Wavelet methods - uses selective compression and decompression
Time Variable Parameter - curve smoothing using variable frequency filters, P. Young
findings in (Journal of Forecasting "Time-variable Parameter and Trend Estimation in Non-stationary Economic Time Series" V13 Mar 1994 p179-210 ) match DR method findings of second derivative cynchrony in GNP & Unemployment measures
Curve Fitting Alternatives -a general listing of mathematical methods Parameter-free smoothing - with splines, fast fourier transforms, convolution, non-linear curves.

Artificial Intelligence & Pattern Recognition methods

Iterative reconstruction in irregular sampling with derivatives -
Physical Simulation of Bone Joints,
Maximum entropy reconstruction using derivative information part 2: computational results
Shape Space - extensive 1994 bibliography
Multi-scale Image Representation, - an excellent list of state of the art AI & shape representation methods
Pattern Recognition - list of the journal's articles
Cellular Neural Networks - image recognition