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LE_CANTIN - FWD DJ MIX (Minimal)
“Well, I hope you’ll enjoy that one as much as I did to make it. Sit back and relax for the first hour and a half and then you can start moving you body around for the rest of it!”
“ Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks - when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought.
— Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan (2006)
12.12.08
“ Treating certain systems (computers, brains) as mechanisms working towards potentially meaningful results by purely formal procedures has proved to be a fruitful research program. Think of a jigsaw puzzle. The shape of its pieces contains no information about the content of the representation that has to be retrieved. Finding out how the pieces fit together is a syntactic activity that can be performed according to formal principles. All those pieces just fit together in the end; but, remarkably enough, a picture of something has been assembled by this process. Evidently it is possible, by appropriate construction, to integrate formal procedures and the more complex relationships between signs and their interpretation. A puzzle illustrates semantic machines insofar as it leads to representation of reality in the absence of any prior semantic information.
— Herbert Hrachovec, Irreconcilable Similarities. Man and Semantic Machines (1986).
12.01.08
“ If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order. Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.
— Stuart Kauffman At Home in the Universe, Oxford University Press, 1995, p 112.
11.27.08
