In the catholic church the pope is elected in the conclave by the college of cardinals, and the cardinals themselves are appointed by the pope. Sounds corrupt? It is. A bit like politics: the leader or chairman of the political party appoints assistants, substitutes and secretaries, and usually one of them becomes the next chairman later..

To become a pope is extremely difficult. Look at the picture above: every single bishop and cardinal wants to be the next pope. How is it possible that the cardinals select a pope in a secret election if everyone wants to be it himself? The German Pope Benedict XVI for example was not very popular in his former career as Joseph Alois Ratzinger among the German people, and yet he managed to become elected as the new pope. A German cardinal became pope although he was unpopular even among the Germans. How did he do this? How did the controversial George Bush manage to become president of the United States of America? How did Angela Merkel become chancellor of Germany? Because she was chairman of a large political party. But how did she get chairman at all? If you look at some presidents, chairmen of political parties or chief executive officers of companies, then sometimes you wonder how they were able to become president, chairman or CEO at all. Every leading political member of a party or manger of a company wants to become chairman or CEO. And chairmen are elected. It is a constant power struggle of everyone against everyone. How is it possible in this situation that some candidates become and stay chairman or CEO who are barely suited at all? Klaus Kleinfeld for example was CEO of Siemens for three years, although he had no charisma at all and was very unpopular even among his own employees.

Obviously it is possible to become a president, chancellor, chairman, CEO or pope even if you have not many positive characteristics (for instance if you have no charisma at all, or if you are unpopular, dumb, arrogant or selfish, etc.). Often it is not the most suitable or the most popular person who wins. Despite the fact that there are others who are better qualified and willing to perform the job, someone else gets the job. It is the one with the best connections to the former leader. Connections decide. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. If you know the current chairman, CEO or pope, and serve him well, then you chances you become one yourself are much better. The recipe is simple: serve the powerful as well as you can. Be a servant to your current chairman, but remember to detach yourself if the time is right (i.e. if the time of the chief is over) to beat your opponents. It is an archaic form of organization, related to chiefdom, monarchy, nepotism, cronyism, patronage, corruption, dictatorship and tyranny.

Klaus Kleinfeld was a loyal ‘servant’ of the former CEO Heinrich von Pierer, and Joseph Ratzinger was a loyal ‘servant’ of the former pope John Paul II. Angela Merkel was a loyal ‘servant’ of the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl. The list goes on: the CEO of Deutsche Post World Net, Frank Appel, was a loyal ‘servant’ of the former CEO Klaus Zumwinkel, the CEO of Deutsche Bank, Josef Ackermann, had a very good relationship to the former CEO Hilmar Kopper.

They all did become the leader because they had good relationships to the former leader. Sometimes even less suited personalities can win in this way and be chief or chairman for a long time (which means we get the paradox effect that someone can be elected and accepted as a chairman even if he is unpopular). This form of power transfer is found frequently if the former chief has worked well, the state of the organization is good and if there is nothing crucial to decide. Then the organization is likely to accept a leader which is similar to the one before, and archaic forms of organization seem to prevail. It is a common pattern which can be observed in politics, even today in the age of democracy. It seems like sophisticated forms of organization can fall back into chiefdom and other archaic forms of organization under certain circumstances. Or have they always been there – only hidden behind the more modern forms or organization?

A Discovery Channel commercial:

The respected German research society MPG (“Max Planck Gesellschaft” – the society of the Max Planck Institutes), wanted beautiful and elegant Chinese classical texts to cover its journal “MaxPlanckForschung” in order to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, the editors got a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel. The message on the red cover of the journal is an ad for a brothel, and reads something like:

“Hot-as-jade housewives performing for the daytime visitor”

Apparently the editors thought the text was a classical poem, when actually it was from a flyer for a strip club in Macau, promising burlesque acts by pretty-as-jade housewives with hot bodies for the daytime visitor.

But the mistake got noticed, and now more people than ever have heard of the journal. The journal with a new cover can be found here. When someone pointed the error out, there were some red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany’s top scientific institutions, and the Institute put out a statement. The apology read:

“To our sincere regret … it has now emerged that the text contains deeper levels of meaning … by publishing this text we did in no way intend to cause any offence or embarrassment to our Chinese readers.”

The incident was covered in the news here and here

Stunning image from Apollo 8 which can be found in the NASA Earth Observatory: a vibrant, delicate, blue and white globe framed by the vast blackness of space. How fragile the earth looks from this distance.  The Earth Observatory says:

From space, we have learned that Earth is a complex system, its atmosphere, ocean, land, life, and energy melding together into a single organism. We have learned important lessons about our climate, and how it is changing. We observed the global sea level rise and Arctic sea ice melt in response to warming oceans. We have come to understand how pollution is transported around the globe. We watched the ozone hole develop over Antarctica and took steps to remedy it.

The Meditations from Marcus Aurelius read a bit like a blog, each paragraph is like an independent post. Although the text of this “ancient blog” is nearly 2000 years old, it is still worth reading. Will someone read the texts from our blogs and books in 2000 years? Marcus Aurelius speaks frequently about death and the brevity of life (the text can be found here and here).

“Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.” (IV. 17)

“Think of the universal substance, of which thou hast a very small portion; and of universal time, of which a short and indivisible interval has been assigned to thee; and of that which is fixed by destiny, and how small a part of it thou art.” (V. 24)

“Soon you’ll be ashes or bones. A mere name at most–and even that is just a sound, an echo. The things we want in life are empty, stale, trivial.” (V. 33)

Stress is a physiological response to (life-)threatening situations and events, where the risk of severe attacks is very high. If the stress reaction sets in, then a dangerous incident is probable, imminent, or has occurred, although it may not be possible to identify the specific threat. The control loops responsible for the stress reaction are a kind of security or alarm mechanism, which mobilizes all available resources for Fight-or-Flight situations.

When our ancestors lived in caves, it was certainly helpful to have an alarm system which mobilizes all bodily resources in case you meet a cave bear. In order to fight the bear or run for your lives, the stress response increases the heart rate and the tension in the muscles. The immune system is inhibited and there is a decrease in resources directed to the digestive system. If you are in a life-or-death situation, it really doesn’t matter if your body is digesting the sandwich from yesterday or fighting a minor microbe.

It was certainly an evolutionary advantage to have an alarm system which activates all physical resources on demand. Therefore stress can be considered as an adaptation to uncertain and disruptive environments where large peaceful periods are sometimes disrupted by extremely dangerous threats which require immediate reaction. Stress is an adaptation to terror (similar to the threat levels of the Homeland Security Advisory System, which are an adaptation to the terror attacks of September 11th). Every security system which must react to accidents or catastrophes has similar levels of alertness, for example the coast guard which has Maritime Security (MARSEC) Levels, or the ACT Emergency Services Agency in Australia which has Bushfire danger levels.

“Terroristic” environments are in general too peaceful to pay the price of constant alertness (which would lead soon to total exhaustion), but they are also too dangerous to neglect the possible threats completely. Stress is an efficient trade-off between high resource usage and low reaction time for the security or alarm system. The higher the threat level or the alertness, the lower the period of time where protective security measures can be maintained without high costs.

P.S. Vigilance can be considered as an adaptation, too. Suricates and antelopes for instance have high vigilance, they spent a large proportion of their time looking around for possible threats, which is useful because they are in their position at the low end of the food chain constantly threatened by dangerous predators. Lions sleep most of the time, which also makes sense because they are not threatened at all.

John F. Kennedy said in a speech in the Pauls church (Paulskirche) in Frankfurt, Germany, 1963, a few months before his assassination:

..we reject the idea of one nation dominating another. The mission is to create a new social order, rounded on liberty and justice, in which men are the masters of their fate, in which states are the servants of their citizens, and in which all men and women can share a better life for themselves and their children. That is the object of our common policy.

Sounds nearly like Obama, or even like Confucius. He also cited Thucydides and the History of the Peloponnesian War:

Thucydides reported that the Peloponnesians and their allies were mighty in battle but handicapped by their policy-making body–in which, he related “each presses its own ends… which generally results in no action at all… they devote more time to the prosecution of their own purposes than to the consideration of the general welfare–each supposes that no harm will come of his own neglect, that it is the business of another to do this or that-and so, as each separately entertains the same illusion, the common cause imperceptibly decays.”

If you like him or not, he was certainly well-educated and smart, like Obama he graduated at Harvard University. Hopefully Obama will not share his fate. We need more politicians who are like him to cope with the current crisis and the coming ones.

Biological Principles of Swarm Intelligence
Guy Theraulaz speaks with french accent about swarm intelligence and social insects, see also the paper here

Mathematics is certainly a kind of abstract reality independent from our physical reality. It is a platonic world of its own. We have axioms and well-defined mathematical elements, and from these elements everything is built-up in a strongly logical way. Does this mean that our physical reality must be some kind of mathematical structure? No. The world of programs for example is also a world of its own, see the Wolfram Atlas of Simple Programs.

From the very beginning, humans believed in the religious concept of the soul apart from the body, in a mental substance which is independent from this world. The ancient Egyptians, one of the first civilized cultures of the world, were obsessed by this idea. The basic reason for this belief could be that the idea of the soul belongs to an reality largely independent from our daily life, just like mathematics. It is an imaginary reality, a reality that mirrors the real life but which is a world of its own.

In fact, each evolutionary system can be considered as a world of its own or even as an own universe. Evolutionary system here means simply a system that is based on kind of code which is subject to evolution. The code is based on certain elements and describe what substances, species, forms and structures are possible in the corresponding universe.

We have for example

* genetic code: the world of biological structures (plants, animals, organic lifeforms, ..)

* alphabetic code: the world of alphabetic structure (words, books, articles, ..)

* mathematical code: the world of mathematical structures (equations, theorems, ..)

* religious code: the world of belief structures (commandments, behavior rules, beliefs, ..)

* psychological code: the world of mental structures (ideas, beliefs, desires, intentions, illusions, concepts,..)

* computational codes: the world of programs (cellular automata, turing machines, ..)

Codes can be nested, for example an alphabetic code can contain an ordinary language, which is a nested code in this case. Another example is the hox gene code within the genetic code which defines the segment structure of the body (i.e. the body plan).

The interesting things (for example synchronization patterns, shadow emergence or strong emergence) happen if two different worlds or universes meet: if one emerges in another, or if one can be described by another, for example if our visible universe can be described on a certain microscopic or macroscopic level by some kind of mathematical law. In this case one universe can be explained at a certain scale by another, and describing one universe is possible in terms of the other. This gives us a deep feeling of understanding, because our thinking is based on metaphors and analogies.

A code itself can be the connection of two worlds, if it implements the basic blocks of one world in terms of the other. Strong emergence is related to the emergence of a new code. A code can be used to root one system in the other, if it is the gateway and interface between both. It often separates and unites two systems at the same time. The binary code for instance can be understood by hardware and software, and it separates and unites both at the same time.

Randall Munroe has drawn another nice xkcd comic. The NKS blog has noticed it, too, you can find a post about it here.