Mid-20th century scientists envisioned a new Panama Canal blasted down to sea level with thermonuclear explosives. (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) This month officials will formally open the new, expanded Panama Canal. The "inauguration," as it's being called, marks the largest modification of the canal since it opened in 1914. The expansion took nearly a decade to complete and required moving 130 million cubic meters of e...

First, The Basics. Cascades are the standard readjustment for complex systems. There is an *essential* distinction between the conditions that allow crises to emerge, and the particular events that trigger the cascade into crisis. — Joe Norman Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity, and little whirls have lesser whirls, and so on to viscosity. — Lewis Fry Richardson, (1922) Interdependence. Strong Interdepende...

Summary: How to deal with risks dominates our headlines, usually driven by single-interest groups that see only their favorite threat. Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s latest work offers a way to identify the most serious threats facing us, and determine how much we should spend to fight each of them. It has received much attention. Is it useful? Part one of two. A series of papers by Nassim Nicholas Taleb et al made a large co...

In April, Brian Eno wrote to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, asking, "how can we even think about designing for a future that we can’t imagine?" The letter he sent was the inaugural Longplayer Letter, the first in a series of letters published by ArtAngel and Jem Finer’s Longplayer – a project to compose and perform a 1,000 year-long piece of music (running now for 13 years). The letters are to be written in relay-style: in responding to Eno’...