Links for Thursday, October 2, 2008

• Hank Williams: You Really Can’t Get Something for Nothing – “We have a market that is driven by debt that no one understands, and by trading activity run by software programs that no one understands. We have created a hive. It operates with a collective mind, but a mind like that of an adolescent or teenager, that cannot be reasoned with. No, it is worse than that. The hive is not even a collection of just people, but also of very inhuman software programs that operate based on rules that are, when executed en masse, totally unpredictable.” – My son Stephen and I were talking about this very thing, but Hank says it a lot better than I would have. The computers took over but it was a financial takeover instead of the military one that we had been conditioned to expect from sci-fi.
• ReadWriteWeb: 5 Great Science Books to Expand Your Mind – “The recently discovered science of complex systems is about common patterns that spawn diverse disciplines from physics to biology, from ecology to economics. This recent science of patterns is directly relevant to what we are doing around the Web. In this post we will discuss 5 different books that will get you fired up about modern science.” – I just ordered two of the five.