It’s Not Happening

I just finished Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a Notre Dame physicist. Plenty of good, chewy stuff for folks interested in social behavior, with interesting forays into cell biology and math. Occasionally, his explorations of implications are a bit shallower than I would like, but his explanations for how networks function are clear and engaging.

It seems that network theory has largely rested on the assumption that nodes hook up randomly, which is almost obviously absurd — but mathematically convenient. Barabasi and his team explored real-life networks (thank you, internet) and confirmed what we all know to be true: that most networks consist of a small number of hubs with zillions of links and many nodes with only a few links (it’s a bit more complex than that, of course, but that’s the basic framework). This gives rise to behavior that is quite different from the homogenous networks of the old models. In some ways such networks are more fragile; in others they are more robust.

It’s all new still, and the avenues of research opening up look promisingly cool. He mentions the possibility of the pharmaceutical industry using genomic research to develop systems for individualized, near-instantaneous silver-bullet drug research which sound too good to be true — but nobody wants to be the guy who said that airplanes, etc. are impossible. So sure, ready-by-lunch personalized common cold zappers, why not?

There is certainly enough material that’s new and counter-intuitive to make Linked a good read for non-nerds. Barabasi makes a real effort to reach out with engaging stories and examples — the Vernon Jordan stuff toward the end is way more provocative than was probably intended, e.g. Ask me about it and I will loan.

But that means more for you.  Good old Kate Wing has a “lens” (seems to be someone’s try at neologistic playfulness, not Kate’s word) that is all about fish.  It’s called Fish and How to Eat Them, and you will surely find it amusing and enlightening and endearing, just as you would find the writer herself.  She name-checks the sarcastic fringehead, which is more than enough reason for you to go and look now.

So Dalton thinks he can shame me into posting?  Hah!

Here’s the new blog.  Sorry, not funny.