The Myth of the Ant Queen

“The Myth of the Ant Queen” by Steven Johnson was an interesting essay on complex systems. It is so true how every part of a complex system has its own way of working and it doesn’t need any one or thing to tell it how to do its job. Such as the example of the ants all doing their little jobs that may seem worthless but without the ants doing these jobs the colony won’t survive. Because of a joined team effort they all get food. It is weird that the ants do these jobs without being told to do them and that everything all seems to have been organized by the governing ant such as the Queen, who made the plans for the jobs or that, controlled the colony. When really they are just doing these things by instinct of what their genetic genes tell them to do. I also thought it was interesting how the ants had a cemetery for their dead. It shows that they respect their dead just as humans do. It was crazy that they put the cemetery as far away from the colony as they could and also as far away from their trash pile. And they did this without seeing what they were doing or being told how to do it. They just did it naturally.

In the essay when he started to talk about the town of Manchester he was describing this city as a chaotic place with no rules or form of government. The city did not have people organizing how life should be or how to get things done. They just did what they thought was right and natural to do. It was growing so fast that they wouldn’t have been able to govern in if they wanted to. The town was composed of people just doing what they wanted when they wanted to. Yet in all its chaos it managed to be the city that defined the future of urban life. And it wasn’t really even a city until the great explosion took place.

Both of these examples showed that a complex system can function and survive just as good as a system with rulers and people being told what to do. The way that the two examples are kind of linked together is that they both just functioned by doing things naturally. They didn’t have anyone bossing them around and they didn’t have an organized way of getting things accomplished. They just did what they thought was right naturally.

The Library of Babel

In the short essay, “The Library of Babel”, was a comparison of a huge never ending library that had hexagonal floors with a stair case, and the humans trying to figure out how life and the universe works. In the library there were books that would only contain curtain letters that would be in a language that couldn’t be understood, or it would repeat a curtain set of letters over and over. There was a book in the library that would be written exactly the same as another but with only one microscopic difference. There were an infinite amount of books that were all written with the twenty five orthographic symbols. In this essay, man was the librarian of the library and was trying to decode the books. The information that was in the books was the key to how the universe works and how to live a successful life. There was one book that nobody could ever find that contained hints on how to decode the books and man was always looking for this book but could never find it. This is what I got from the essay which was kind of hard to understand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

Power and Context

In the short essay “Power of Context” the author Malcolm Gladwell did a good job in showing how people will act differently in curtain environments. It is really true that if the building you are in or the classroom that you have to go to will make you not want to go to it just because of how it looks. I thought it was interesting how he talked about the crime rates declining in New York City just because of a subway car being cleaned and not full of graffiti. It is kind of weird to think that just by changing something as insignificant as graffiti will have an effect on something as big as the crime rate.
I used to think that crime was an unusual thing that never happened here in Montana. Then I took a trip to Phoenix Arizona one summer to visit my aunt. While I was there I saw how crime is a really big issue in larger cities. We were just sitting out in her yard on evening, and in the hour that we were out there I probably heard eight gun shots go off that weren’t close to us but they were towards the main part of the city. At first I didn’t think anything of it because here in Montana when you here a shot go off it’s usually somebody hunting in a nearby farm. Then it hit me that the shots I was hearing weren’t hunting shots. And it really shocked me.

When the author talked about the experiments of when the university took the volunteers to do a study, if made me think of how these people would change do to the kind of people they were around. This I thought was a bit much of an experiment to find out how they reacted, but it proved that in prisons some people are probably good and just act nasty do to the bad guys that are around them.

I would have to agree with one of the statements that the author said and it is” A crime is relatively rare and aberrant event. For a crime to be committed something extra has to happen to tip a troubled person into towards violence, these tipping points could be as simple as graffiti.” I think that if a person is really mad about something that has happened to them, that they are already on the verge of freaking out and if something simple that would normally not make anyone mad would cause this person to go off the hook.

In the essay, I thought it did a good job in having curtain examples of how people will act differently in curtain places and situations. Just by changing the appearance of a building or whatever will have some sort of affect on the entire picture no matter big of an issue it is.