Comments on: Are Cities Just Very Large Organisms?

By: City Come A-Walkin’ | blacksundae

City Come A-Walkin’ | blacksundae — Tue, 05 May 2009 02:57:56 +0000

[...] West, courtesy of Cosmic Variance: [T]o what extent are cities or corporations an extension of biology? Are they “just” very [...]

By: lluis

lluis — Sat, 02 May 2009 11:27:07 +0000

pd. regarding George west with whom i had a long talk at Sonoma’s 50th anniversay of ISSS, i believe his approach relies excessively in mathematics and power laws, without fully attack the conceptual changes of paradigm from mechanism to organism that are required to fully grasp this theory, that is why his team on the view of some of us, has not advanced much in the past decade… though in the 90s he made some interesting discoveries

By: lluis

lluis — Sat, 02 May 2009 11:22:50 +0000

This theory has been long ago published, explained and developed in International Systems Sciences congresses, here is a good article on my conferences on a theory of super-organisms based in the extension of non-euclidean geometries to the description of the morphological elements of those superorganisms, food for thought

http://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings50th/article/view/29/200

By: Gavin Flower

Gavin Flower — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:48:51 +0000

“- if someone says the Universe always existed, then we are not happy it had a beginning.”

should be:

“- if someone says the Universe always existed, then we are not happy it had no beginning.”

Sorry!

By: Gavin Flower

Gavin Flower — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:46:05 +0000

# Tobydyd Says:
April 29th, 2009 at 4:19 pm

[...]
Hearing about the similarities in organisms makes me think that there might be a designer behind it
[...]

The basic problem with postulating a master “Designer” who is responsible for the complexity of life and its similarities – is that the logic used to justify there being such a designer, requires the designer to be designed by yet a greater being! Whereas, Evolution provides a much simpler answer as to why there are so many similarities, and how complicated organisms arose.

Hence, suggesting a “God” designed everything is is self contradictory. This is usually glossed over by saying that “God” is beyond “space & time” or that it is “too complicated for mere mortals to fathom”. One could use the same logic to say the Universe always existed in one for or another, and that it is beyond our comprehension to ever understand – without having the complication of postulating a “God”.

Perhaps, space & time no more have a beginning, than there is anything North of the North Pole! I am not saying that is a “satisfactory answer”, but reality may not be what we would like it to be. If someone says that the Universe has a beginning, we want to know what happened before – if someone says the Universe always existed, then we are not happy it had a beginning.

Note that the Universe may be finite yet unbounded, just as the Earth’s surface is finite yet unbounded (restricting ourselves to 2 dimensions).

By: PTM

PTM — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:56:24 +0000

[quote]It’s not that bad…neither is off by an order of magnitude, and if you consider how much medical advances and current comfortable lifestyles have contributed to the average human lifespan, 32 years really isn’t that far off.[/quote]

The errors are bad: -54% for humans (average 70) +86% for horses (average 30).

You can say that all organisms with heart live exactly 10 years and you won’t make an error of one order of magnitude for the vast majority of them.

By: One billion | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

One billion | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine — Fri, 01 May 2009 02:33:33 +0000

[...] out of every seven people in the entire world downloading an application. It’s one download every time your heart beats for your whole life. It’s one application download for every hundred stars in the galaxy. Or one application [...]

By: Links for 30th April 2009 | Velcro City Tourist Board

Links for 30th April 2009 | Velcro City Tourist Board — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:01:06 +0000

[...] Are Cities Just Very Large Organisms? [...]

By: jackd

jackd — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:17:24 +0000

West should borrow the title of Samuel Delaney’s never-to-be-written novel, The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities.

By: Metre

Metre — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:07:01 +0000

I’ve often thought that the rate at which the heart beats sets the mental impression for the rate at which time passes. Even though a mouse lives maybe two years (if he doesn’t get eaten), he gets about the same number of heartbeats that we do – so his life seems as long to him as ours does to us.