"If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Most people shy away from simple math. In fact, publishers demand that no equations, however simply don't appear in popular books. From this perspective, the simple graphs and equations that appear in introductory textbooks appear sophisticated. In particular, these tools have a hard time presenting anything but a super simple, static picture of the world. If you approach the same situation with different tools, a very different picture emerges. Even simple computer simulations can show complex behavior that can't be reduced to equations of any sort. I played around with this idea a bit but abandoned it because it would have involved an unrealistic effort to implement it. However, even while simply drawing up a specification, you can see the kind of things a model could address. Most important is the question of stability or even a stable pattern of oscillation. Model specifications seem t...

A Popular Fairy Tale Comparing human brains to computers has become something of an industry lately. Like nuclear fusion, an emergent silicon mind seems to be always just around he next corner. The poster boy for this idea is Ray Kurzweil . If you want to watch a movie imagining precisely this vision, take a look at Transcendence . Transcendence is a tolerably good movie but brain capture fails in the movie for truly stupid reasons (plot spoiler) because it apparently fails to capture the "soul" and not due to any fundamental difficulty involved in creating a mind in a machine. The monstrously expensive and spectacular failure of the Blue Brain project was conceived by Henry Markham. You can view his  version of this fairy tale on TED.  [1] So How Big a Computer Do We Need? The 19 million volumes in the US Library of Congress represent about 10 trillion characters - 10,000,000,000,000 characters. To make the analogy even approximately apt, we need to imagine each character i...