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Norman Mailer’s Lego City of the Future
So, this is sort of crazy. Apparently, Norman Mailer built a giant city out of Legos, and it remained in his living room for decades: If you had to name one American, for instance, who clubbed...
View ArticleA Drunken Moose and the Problem with Homonyms
An article on msnbc.com details how rescuers worked to free a drunken moose that was trapped in a tree in Sweden. Weird and slightly disturbing, but not as much as one of the sentences in the article:...
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The Nanny and Aural Sexual Selection
Sexual selection, like many evolutionary concepts, was first anticipated by Charles Darwin and has since been elaborated in great detail. It is a powerful concept, explaining everything from the...
View ArticleMesofact: World Population will hit 7 Billion this Month
As many of you are probably aware, the estimated world population is set to hit 7 billion at the end of this month, according to the United Nations Population Fund. And of course, this milestone came...
View ArticleAmerica’s Age, Empires, and Mathematics
I had a piece in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe this weekend about understanding the nature of empires and civilizations, seen through the lens of mathematics, entitled How Long Will America...
View ArticleMechanical Turk, Dynamic Networks, and Cooperation
In a fun paper recently published in PNAS, Dynamic social networks promote cooperation in experiments with humans, Dave Rand, Nicholas Christakis, and I explored how a dynamic social network affects...
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Bill Miller’s Mutual Fund Streak
With the recent announcement that Bill Miller will be stepping down from running Legg Mason Value Trust fund, a number of people have used this as an opportunity to re-examine his incredible fifteen...
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The Greatest Intersection
In Ithaca there exists the best intersection ever — where Penny Lane meets Lois Lane: It turns out that this is not the only Lois Lane. There are others, such as this one, in the suburbs of Detroit. My...
View ArticleNow Blogging Over at Wired Science!
Until further notice, this blog is going into hibernation mode, as I have started blogging over at Wired Science! The new blog is called Social Dimension and is about how to quantify the anthropic part...
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Welcome to the website of Samuel Arbesman. I’m a complexity scientist. I examine the future of knowledge in our age of scientific and technological change and what that means for society. My book The...
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