There is an innovative writer who goes by the name of Steven Johnson (no relation to me) who has written another book, this one titled "Where Good Ideas Come from". Steve's latest work continues to delve into emergent-like concepts.
There's a cute video of Steven talking about his new book at You Tube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb0ssmoXG1I&NR=1 I first got wind of Steve years ago when I accidentally stumbled across one of his earlier publications "Emergence: The connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" while browsing through Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon. It was one of the strangest moments of personal serendipity when I reached up and took the used book off the dusty shelf - where I noticed the author's name and then the fact that the word "ants" was in the title of his book. Here was an individual (with my name) who had for a spell studied the social behavior of ants, just as I had done when I was a young teenager back in the late 1960s. Steve's Amazon page is: http://www.amazon.com/Steven-Johnson/e/B000APC0M6/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0 The basic premise of Steve's latest book is on the nature of how we tend to arrive at transformative ideas - ideas that have the potential to transform our world. What interested Steve was the fact that most of these transformative ideas rarely popped into someone's head suddenly one day. More likely the idea had been gestating undercover for years. The idea more likely transformed and morphed along the way. The next step in the development process is that the idea needs to "accidentally" come in contact with other innovative ideas. Steve made the interesting comment that often the original idea (or vague concept) literally has to collide with other transformative ideas in unexpected ways. The "collision" gives it the necessary impetus to evolve (or mature) to the point that the originator of the gestating concept begins to grasp what it is that he has in front of him. I can certainly attest to that. The personal research I've been doing in Celestial Mechanics simulations for the past several years has been a long transformative journey for me. My initial desire to delve into CM research originally came about due to an ulterior desire to learn how to program in Visual Basic and C# using Microsoft's Visual Studio platform. I always had an interest in developing computer simulations involving the manipulation vector values. Working on a vector "problem" involving Celestial Mechanics seemed like a good programming exercise that I could sink my teeth into. Several years later, I came to realize that I got it backwards. My tentative practice-run Research into the algorithms associated with CM and related chaos had dug its teeth into me! It has never let go. PS: It's stories like this that might help some understand why I tend to use my full name "Steven Vincent Johnson" when posting something formal to a public forum like Vortex-l. Helps distinguish me from the rest of the distinguished. ;-) Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
