[http://metaphoricalweb.ning.com/profiles/blogs/future-proof-tornadoes-and]
When I was sixteen, I saw my first tornadoes. My family had decided to
visit some friends in Cheyenne, Wyoming, so we loaded up the van and
made the trip from Peoria Illinois, encountering unsettled weather
conditions all during the two day trek. As we were unloading our bags,
I noticed my father periodically staring up at the sky, which had taken
on a peculiar green cast to it. A few minutes passed, the sky became
darker and more ominous, then out of the maelstrom one, then two, until
finally six twisters came snaking down from the clouds. For nearly half
an hour we watched as the tornadoes ran along a couple of ridges,
occasionally flattening one house then hoping over the next, until
finally the storm lost enough strength and the twisters became wispier
and more tentative until they finally faded altogether.

By the end, the twisters had collectively destroyed 200 homes, flipped
numerous cars, caused significant damage to the governor's mansion, and
threw a commuter plane through the door of an aircraft hangar. It was
one of the most destructive tornadic storms to ever hit the state, and
gave me a healthy appreciation for the power, majesty and mindless
destructiveness of nature.

One of the most interesting facts about tornadoes is also one of the
least appreciated. Tornadoes come from thunderstorms - as anyone who
has seen the ominous green thunderheads can attest to, but they are
not, in fact, part of the the powerful circulating cyclonic cell of hot
moist air and cold dry air that make up most thunderstorms. Instead,
they arise due to turbulence along the edges of this large rotating
system. Thunderstorms can move quickly, and can rotate quickly. As they
do so, they drag the air around them, but this drag is uneven ... and
is influenced by such factors as the topography of the ground, the
overall viscosity of the air and the formation of wind sheers and
streams ahead of the storm - in other words, the environment external
to the storm itself.

Tornadoes are directly related to the vortices you get when you run
your hand through water in a trough or other constrained place - they
are islands of temporary stability within an otherwise unstable
environment. They also act to siphon off a lot of the potential energy
within the storm itself, converting that energy into kinetic energy,
which eventually dissipates as drag with the rest of the environment.
Once the tornadoes release their energy, this also typically pushes the
storm down a level of organization and energy to the point where it can
no longer hold the water vapor that it is carrying, which then causes
the heavy rains that usually follow such storms as the structure
dissipates.

Every system, including systems of abstraction, requires energy of some
sort to maintain it. Similarly, every system interacting with those
things outside of that system create drag on the system, resulting in
turbulence. Turbulence should be seen as the transfer of energy out of
a system into the environment, and as such is very closely linked with
thermodynamics. This holds as true of software and social structures as
it does of physical systems, as long as you understand that in both
cases what you are dealing with are systems of nested abstractions.

This doesn't mean that outside of every social structure there's a
giant whirlpool or tornado waiting to happen. Rather, it's worth
understanding that any system is made up of interacting parts that for
the most part have achieved a fairly high degree of internal
efficiency. One way of thinking about this is that the system has a
certain momentum associated with it - energy and information moves
through the system in such a way as to keep the system cohesive.

However, especially at the edges, this energy drags against the outside
world, and in so doing, it creates pools of resistance, and
counterveiling forces. Normally, such forces are comparatively small,
and in many ways can actually contribute to the underlying cohesiveness
of the primary system because they create a barrier of insulation
against external stimulae or impulses - the turbulent counterflows
absorb the attack, dissipating or at least blunting the impact upon the
system. One way of thinking about this is that people may have a
particular ambivalence about leader or political group, but they fear
change from outside more than they do the status quo ("better the devil
you know than the one you don't").

However, in the presence of other dynamic systems, sometimes the
turbulence that emerges becomes large enough and cohesive enough to
became stable in its own right, especially as one particularly
stable "whirlpool" merges with another.

A good example of this can be seen in the rise of Open Source software.
Microsoft in particular had managed to dominate the software sector by
the mid-1980s, and with it the proprietary software model become the
accepted mode of operation by the mid-1990s. However, Microsoft also
ended up stirring both resentment among other development groups and
concern among customers that were afraid of vendor lock-in.

This set up turbulence for Microsoft's "system". Any one piece of that
turbulence - Linus Torvald's invention of Linux, the rise of Apache as
an increasingly popular browser, the GNU GPL, Sun's releasing of the
Star Office code as Open Office, and so forth, individually bled small
amounts of energy from Microsoft, but nothing that seriously impeded
its own growth. However, each piece of turbulence would interact with
others, and after a while a new countervailing system emerged out of
that turbulence. A tornado or whirlpool is a cohesive system that draws
on the energy of the overall hypercell, and the larger or more powerful
the tornado becomes, the more it bleeds off energy from the main cell.
Open source soon began to bleed away the proprietary model that
Microsoft most clearly embodied at the time, pulling in more
developers, more investment, more potential users.

Up to a certain point, the energy entering into a system ends up as
more turbulence and more quasi-stable neo-systems, as well as providing
the necessary glue for smaller systems to merge into larger ones.
However, there's a certain balance here - too much energy into an
environment can prove disruptive overall as the turbulence makes it too
difficult for new systems to maintain cohesiveness - the turbulence
spawned subsystems are disrupted by their own turbulence (in essence,
the market is boiling at that point). Too little energy, and you get
systemic decay, where the least stable systems fall apart. Typically,
transitions from one stage to another of abstraction involve energy
exceeding or failing to reach a critical threshold for that system.

From the future analyst's standpoint, then one of the lessons to be
learned is that when you look at what appears to be a stable system,
look at where it is causing the most turbulence. At the moment, for
instance, the whole of desktop computing is being challenged by the
cloud, a universe of services that individually may not be a match for
the corresponding desktop app, but that collectively are reshaping the
programming paradigm dramatically. The traditional world of publishing
is under assault from a myriad of social media applications that
individually are not that threatening, but which together is forming a
cohesive interactive system of its own that has traditional publishing
on the ropes. In the near future, centralized power distribution is
being challenged not by a single new power source but by a whole
spectrum of technologies that each emerged in response to the problems
that the existing grid failed to answer, and that collectively are
creating a new system that is challenging most of the core assumptions
about power distribution that have been considered "holy writ" since
the 1920s.

In other words, when looking toward investing (whether time, money,
career involvement and so often) look toward areas where countervailing
technologies are emerging, and pay special attention to those that seem
to develop easy synergies with other complementary technologies. In the
energy sector, for instance, solar energy (photoVoltaics) including
beamed microwave energy, geothermal pumps, intelligent energy routers,
hypercapacitors, hybrid automobiles, maglev trains, recycled heat
systems and wind farms together make up a cohesive system of
technologies that are complementary to one another, and that
collectively make up a self-reinforcing system. Individually, they
won't replace the existing carbon-driven fuel system, but collectively,
they may very well.

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Posted By Kurt Cagle to Metaphorical Web at 5/07/2009 10:01:00 AM

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