Tag: Chaos Theory

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A Book that Changed My Life

I am proud to announce that I was recently a part of 9 Muses Photo’s A Book that Changed My Life project, “an open series focused on people and the books that changed their lives.” Dennis Sevilla took this photo of me with the book that changed my life:

Here’s my story:

James Gleick’s Chaos (Viking, 1987) changed my life. Quite simply, I was on a path, and after reading it I was on a different one. I was a music journalist. When I came across Chaos, I had spent a lot of time and effort becoming a music journalist. The book is about chaos theory. It’s about the disparate scientists who were working between the lines of different disciplines. It’s about sensitive dependence on initial conditions. It’s about how paths can change unexpectedly. Reading Chaos blew my head wide open. I was suddenly aware of so many other possibilities. I quit my job and went back to school. Now I teach college and write my own books. I still write about music, but now I write about a lot of other things. Also, after a few false starts with books that didn’t stick, Chaos turned me into a reader. I starting reading it 20 years ago this month, and I haven’t stopped reading since.

Having recently been interviewed about this book, I tried to focus on the fact that Chaos turned me into a reader. It’s the one that stuck.

You can see the rest of the series here. Many thanks to Dennis for including me in this project, my dude Tim Baker for hipping me to it, and of course to James Gleick.

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Bookshelf Beats Interview

Bookshelf Beats is an interview site run by Gino Sorcinelli. He interviews different authors and writers about their favorite books. For mine, I chose James Gleick‘s Chaos (Viking, 1987), a book that blew my head wide open during a tumultuous time in my late 20s.

James Gleick's 'Chaos'.

Here are a few excerpts:

My life while reading Chaos went through a total upheaval. The start-up company I was working for was purchased and shut down, I broke up with my girlfriend of six years, and I moved from Seattle to San Francisco to work as Slap Skateboard Magazine’s music editor. It seemed like a dream job, and one toward which I’d been working for a long time. By the time I finished reading Chaos, though, I knew I wanted to do so much more. After a month, I left Slap and worked my way into graduate school. I hadn’t been a heavy reader up to that point, but I haven’t stopped reading several books at a time since reading Chaos nearly 20 years ago.

…[T]he first tenet of chaos theory is “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” more commonly known as “the butterfly effect.” Small changes at the start of any dynamical system can have huge ramifications later on. If we apply that to the time of my discovery of Gleick’s book and its content, I can’t say whether or not I’d be here talking about it now if any of those factors were different. The book changed my life.

There are many major interests and introductions that have landed me where I am now, but reading Chaos was one of the biggest bifurcations. Chaos theory was largely borne of phenomena that had been filtered out by other scientific and mathematical methods. In part it teaches you to look between things and not leave anything out. Once I started reading other books about science and media, I spent a while trying to distance myself from my past in skateboarding, BMX, ‘zine-making, and music journalism. I eventually realized that it all goes together, it all has its place. Now I refuse to choose between being nerdy and getting my hands dirty.

Many thanks to Gino for the opportunity to talk about the book, Steve McCann for loaning it to me way back when, and James Gleick, of course, for writing it. Read the whole interview here.

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N. Katherine Hayles: Material Girl

Kate HaylesDigging deep in the texts of both literature and science, N. Katherine Hayles exemplifies the reconciliation of C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” better than anyone I know. Her refusal to concentrate on either side of the fence, instead insisting on plowing new ground on both sides, has lead her to some of the most intriguing research currently being done. Looking at texts from all sources and angles, Hayles is always seeing new things that others overlook. Continue reading “N. Katherine Hayles: Material Girl”

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Malcolm Gladwell: Epidemic Proportions

Malcolm GladwellMalcolm Gladwell’s applied epidemiology picks up where the overwrought meme metaphor breaks down. In The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Gladwell explores and explains complex social and market phenomena through a sturdy, methodical framework and with engaging, easy-to-understand language. Unlike many social theorists, Gladwell eschews grandiose postulating and sticks to good ol’ tried-and-true observation and acutely intuitive pattern-recognition. Ace journalist with an intellect to match, Malcolm Gladwell could just be one of today’s most important writers. Continue reading “Malcolm Gladwell: Epidemic Proportions”

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Investigations by Stuart Kauffman

Stuart Kauffman has been probing the “deep structure” of life for decades. He is one of the founding members of the Santa Fe Institute, the leading center for the emerging sciences of complexity. His work therein started in complex Boolean networks in which he found “order for free” in a void seeming to consist of nothing but chaos. This lead him to highly dynamical yet self-structuring autocatalytic sets (now known as “Kauffman sets”) which eventually lead him to search for a general biology from which all of life could extrapolate. Kauffman never was much for neo-Darwinism or natural selection, and here he continues his holistic approach to self-organizing biospheres. Continue reading “Investigations by Stuart Kauffman”

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Rudy Rucker [Part Two]: Game Theory

Rudy RuckerMy friend and colleague Tom Georgoulias let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.

When I last spoke with Rudy Rucker, his nonfiction collection Seek! and science-fiction novel Saucer Wisdom were just finding their way into bookstores. Since that time, Rucker has been hacking on a video game programming toolkit called the Pop Framework and keeping a low profile on the science-fiction scene. After bouncing a few emails with him, it was obvious that we needed to do another interview and shed some light on his latest projects. Continue reading “Rudy Rucker [Part Two]: Game Theory”

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Weasel Walter: Killing Music

Weasel WalterThe deconstruction of organized sound put forth by multi-instrumentalist composer and improviser Weasel Walter is fiercely aimed at destroying the complacency of music and musicians. This is nowhere more evident than in his rotating cast of characters known as the Flying Luttenbachers. He describes the working plan of the Luttenbachers thusly, “The nature of operations has been to utilize the most appropriate people available — pushing the resulting chemistry as far as possible — and finally to abandon the formation when creative stasis has been reached.” Though he renounces all classifications of genre, the Luttenbachers are a manifestation of the attitudes inherent in free jazz, death metal, and punk rock: a sonic maelstrom of hate and disdain tempered with skills in spades. And behind all of this cacophony is a broader worldview than most drummers can shake a stick at. Continue reading “Weasel Walter: Killing Music”

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Terence McKenna Meets the Machine Elves of Hyperspace: Struck By Noetic Lightning

Terence McKenna

Mark Dery contributed this piece to my book Follow for Now. I’m reposting it here for your enjoyment.

Terence McKenna died of brain cancer on April 3, 2000. He was 53. This article was originally published in the late, much-lamented Australian cyberzine 21C (“The Inner Elf: Terence McKenna’s Trip,” 21C, #3, 1996) and later reprinted in the 21C anthology Transit Lounge (Craftsman House, 1997). Its centerpiece is a lengthy interview with McKenna, conducted in two epic sessions in 1996. Continue reading “Terence McKenna Meets the Machine Elves of Hyperspace: Struck By Noetic Lightning”

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Manuel De Landa: ILLogical Progression

Manuel De Landa

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now. It was originally on Paul’s site, djspooky.com.

“The more consciousness is intellectualized, the more matter is spatialized.” — Henri Bergson, “Creative Evolution,” 1911

Manuel De Landa writes from a strange pataphysical world of disjunctions and fluid transitions — a milieu where writing about ideas becomes a fluid dialectic switching from steady state to flux and back again in the blink of an eye, or the turn of a sentence. His style of thinking is a like a landscape made of crystalline structures: rocks and lavas, magmas and tectonic plates that dance beneath our feet at every moment. Continue reading “Manuel De Landa: ILLogical Progression”