It's funny to me (not ha-ha funny) that the founding fathers were prepared for the eventuality that the people would elect a bad President, but they didn't predict that both of the mechanisms they put in place to prevent this - the electoral college and Congress - might also be bad at the same time.

There a great book called Systemantics about how systems fail, and in it the author talks about how catastrophic failures happen when one safety mechanism fails and only then do we discover that all of the backup safety mechanisms have been failing for years and no one knew it because that last one was holding. In this case, that last one is our Presidents being basically good people and holding to the traditions of the office, and for that matter to basic human decency.

All of which is a long way of agreeing with you: We need to codify in law a lot of the things that Presidents (and candidates) have traditionally done voluntarily. For example, releasing tax returns.

The book Systemantics (1st edition) is a fun read on how systems become their own problem, and provides many of these insights in a lighthearted way. It is interesting to me how much of this was observed 40 years ago...

I joined the USAF in 1981, became a contractor in 1986, joined the Air Force C-17 program office at Wright-Patterson in 1988, and I've been there as a Unix sysadmin ever since. Everything you've seen here about gov't IT is true.

I wrote a how-to on something many years ago and mentioned that I'd been an admin for around 20 years. The best comment I got was someone saying "If I'm still an admin after 20 years, would someone please write a program to kill me?"

How to avoid strangling the person in the next cubicle? These two links made a big difference for me:

• Don't do the default
  
• How systems work and how they fail
  
  Once I understood that the DoD (and any other large system I have to deal with) acts the way it does mainly because of size rather than malice, my job got a lot better.
  

It isn't a book about programming, but The Recursive Universe by William Poundstone is a fascinating book about Conway's game of Life and it's implications of complexity from simple rules in the universe in general.

Alas, it's long out of print, and even the used copies on Amazon are going for high (>$20) prices.

It's about time I re-read it...

Take a look at Nexus. I'm reading a library copy right now. It's about how and why you would build a graph that has the 'small world' property. 'Small world' is defined as a large graph that has a small number of links between the two points most remote from each other. Think six degrees of separation. It's a good layman's book, I'm not sure how well it stands up to someone with a lot of graph theory background. He does cite sources, though, so if you have the desire, you can dig into the theory underpinning the book.

The social branch of network science studies this kind of thing and would have some good uses for the data set, I'm sure.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=social+contact+network&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=

http://barabasilab.com/pubs-socialnets.php

http://barabasilab.com/pubs-humandynamics.php

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/pubs.html

With respect to looking for happiness, you might look for studies on sentiment analysis and the spreading of emotion in social networks. I know people have looked at how positive and negative emotion traverses the graph of twitter followers and retweets.

There's a small lifetime's worth of reading in those links. If you want a fairly comprehensive introduction that balances well between theory and examples, check out Mark Newman's book.

For the type of graph (network) theory that is currently hot in neuroscience contexts, [Newman's book](http://www.amazon.com/Networks-An-Introduction-Mark-Newman/dp/0199206651
) is a great compendium (quite readable, but fairly comprehensive).

For bedside reading about mammalian cortical networks in particular, Networks of the Brain and Discovering the Human Connectome, both by Olaf Sporns, are well worth a look.

From there... it's already becoming a pretty big literature. If you have some specific areas of interest, I can do my best to point you to resources. Take my suggestions with a grain of salt, though... I'm a pure mathematician who kinda got seduced into applied maths... which means I probably don't know as much about either discipline as I should.

This book is a pretty good start:

The Perfect Swarm: The Science of Complexity in Everyday Life - by Len Fisher

Thanks! Just bought a used copy of the original hardback. What’s changed in the second edition?

Other books about symmetry:
Symmetry (review, Princeton Univ. Press, archive.org, amazon)
The Symmetries of Things (review 1, review 2, CRC Press, errata, lecture, amazon)
Structure in Nature is a Strategy for Design (amazon)
Patterns in Nature (amazon)
Handbook of Regular Patterns (amazon)
Shape, Space, and Symmetry (review, amazon)
Symmetry in Science and Art (amazon)
Crystal Structures I: Patterns and Symmetry (amazon)
Space Groups for Solid State Scientists (amazon)
International Tables for Crystallography (site)

Bibliographies:
http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/symmetry/symmetrybib.pdf
http://www.georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/references.html

You can easily write scaling blocks that will filter noise. Also most AI cards come with features for this.. this is explained in Hans Bergers recent book Automating with SIMATIC: Hardware and Software, Configuration and Programming, Data Communication, Operator Control and Monitoring https://www.amazon.com/dp/3895784591?ref=yo_pop_ma_swf

He has written a lot of stuff and it's the best. Consise, accurate, thorough. German. Haha

A six-foot tall single women told me today that fat people are simply using food to replace love...she is 20 pounds overweight.

I held my tongue, but really, isn't it easier for her to lose 20 pounds than an obese person to lose 100 pounds?

Fat people are fat because their ancestors were better at conserving calories, if we ever face a famine, the fat people will be "normal weight"--everyone else will die. And the next generation, given ample resources, will be even fatter.

If you "believe" fat people are pigs and "normal" people have great "Self-Control", I invite you to read a new book, The Watchman's Rattle.

The end of societies begins with replacing "fact" with "belief".

Senior Level Software Engineer Reading List

Read This First

1. Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment
   
   

   Fundamentals
   

   
   

2. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
   
3. Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions
   
4. Enterprise Patterns and MDA: Building Better Software with Archetype Patterns and UML
   
5. Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail
   
6. Rework
   
7. Writing Secure Code
   
8. Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries
   
   

   Development Theory
   

   
   

9. Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
   
10. Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications
    
11. Introduction to Functional Programming
    
12. Design Concepts in Programming Languages
    
13. Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective
    
14. Modern Operating Systems
    
15. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
    
16. The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
    
17. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
    
    

    Philosophy of Programming
    

    
    

18. Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It
    
19. Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think
    
20. The Elements of Programming Style
    
21. A Discipline of Programming
    
22. The Practice of Programming
    
23. Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective
    
24. Object Thinking
    
25. How to Solve It by Computer
    
26. 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts
    
    

    Mentality
    

    
    

27. Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
    
28. The Intentional Stance
    
29. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes In The Age Of The Machine
    
30. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
    
31. The Timeless Way of Building
    
32. The Soul Of A New Machine
    
33. WIZARDRY COMPILED
    
34. YOUTH
    
35. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
    
    

    Software Engineering Skill Sets
    

    
    

36. Software Tools
    
37. UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language
    
38. Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development
    
39. Practical Parallel Programming
    
40. Past, Present, Parallel: A Survey of Available Parallel Computer Systems
    
41. Mastering Regular Expressions
    
42. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
    
43. Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C
    
44. Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book
    
45. The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security
    
46. SOA in Practice: The Art of Distributed System Design
    
47. Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques
    
48. Data Crunching: Solve Everyday Problems Using Java, Python, and more.
    
    

    Design
    

    
    

49. The Psychology Of Everyday Things
    
50. About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
    
51. Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty
    
52. The Non-Designer's Design Book
    
    

    History
    

    
    

53. Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality
    
54. Death March
    
55. Showstopper! the Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
    
56. The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
    
57. The Business of Software: What Every Manager, Programmer, and Entrepreneur Must Know to Thrive and Survive in Good Times and Bad
    
58. In the Beginning...was the Command Line
    
    

    Specialist Skills
    

    
    

59. The Art of UNIX Programming
    
60. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
    
61. Programming Windows
    
62. Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
    
63. Starting Forth: An Introduction to the Forth Language and Operating System for Beginners and Professionals
    
64. lex & yacc
    
65. The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference
    
66. C Programming Language
    
67. No Bugs!: Delivering Error Free Code in C and C++
    
68. Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied
    
69. Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#
    
70. Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit
    
    

    DevOps Reading List
    

    
    

71. Time Management for System Administrators: Stop Working Late and Start Working Smart
    
72. The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services
    
73. The Practice of System and Network Administration: DevOps and other Best Practices for Enterprise IT
    
74. Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale
    
75. DevOps: A Software Architect's Perspective
    
76. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
    
77. Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
    
78. Cloud Native Java: Designing Resilient Systems with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Cloud Foundry
    
79. Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
    
80. Migrating Large-Scale Services to the Cloud

Added to wish list.

I would recommend Frequency Identification, which is explained quite well in Schoukens et al. (http://www.amazon.com/System-Identification-Frequency-Domain-Approach/dp/0470640375) Their accompanying Matlab examples are free to download and actually explain the procedure quite nicely.

Basically, one puts noise on the input, and measures noise on the output. This will give you the transfer function. More interesting things happen if you want to do this while the quad rotor is flying.

Basic Economics - Thomas Sowell

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age - Duncan Watts

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means - Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks - Mark Buchanan

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

Sperm Wars: Infidelity, Sexual Conflict, and Other Bedroom Battles - Robin Baker

Motley Crue: The Dirt - Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band - Neil Strauss

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference - Malcolm Gladwell

The Wisdom of Crowds - James Surowiecki

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster - Jon Krakauer

The Climb - Anatoli Boukreev

Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner - Dean Karnazes

Not really; this is a new area for games (in terms of approaching it with any degree of theory at all). That's one of the reasons why we tackled it at Horseshoe.

In addition to a few sources listed in the Constructing Emergence paper, John Holland's books Hidden Order and Emergence are theoretically useful, but not so much directly (and they're pretty dense). I hit some of this in my game design text, but I'd like to go back and add more to it now!

Well, as an IR scholar that applies inferential network methods to substantive IR questions, I think the previous findings show promise for a thriving research agenda. Send me a PM if you'd like to talk about anything in particular. If you're looking for IR-substantive references, here are some favorites:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1287857
https://www.dropbox.com/s/fwzlmae58fx1fax/Cranmer-CV.pdf?dl=0
http://ps.ucdavis.edu/people/maoz/MaozCV.pdf

For networks specific texts, it depends on what level you're at. I'd recommend Wasserman and Faust as a foundation:
https://www.amazon.com/Social-Network-Analysis-Applications-Structural/dp/0521387078

But this is also a favorite:
https://www.amazon.com/Networks-Introduction-Mark-Newman/dp/0199206651/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475112947&sr=1-1&keywords=newman+networks

From that, I'd recommend reading this:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12263/abstract

Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:


amazon.co.uk

amazon.ca

amazon.com.au

amazon.in

amazon.com.mx

amazon.de

amazon.it

amazon.es

amazon.com.br

amazon.nl

Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
I currently look here: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, amazon.in, amazon.com.mx, amazon.de, amazon.it, amazon.es, amazon.com.br, amazon.nl, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.

It seems like he got it from this book.

Try this one http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquity-Science-History-World-Simpler/dp/060960810X

[2 of 4]

• How curious are you? Do you have more ideas then you can execute? What are your curiosities about? What are your ideas about - is it environmental or conceptual, and can you please elaborate?
  
  • I think this is something I struggle with on a daily basis. I like many things, or so I like to believe. Like I feel that everything’s interesting and everything is connected somehow through symbols. I like thinking about these symbols and connections constantly. So my ideas are about concepts mostly. I can’t remember facts if I can’t attach them to concepts that make sense to me.
    
  • This has been my latest conflict I have to say. I started a career in EE, and then I shifted to computer science. I’ve wanted since I was an undergrad to start a research path, but I’ve been struggling to find something I really really love. I am not good at taking decisions, but an academic path looks now like my best bet for not working in a desk never again (I like having my own desk at home, though).
    
  • I’m confident everything will be good at the end, and I am confident I can do almost anything. Not trying to be cocky, is just that I know I’m physically and mentally capable of learning anything (in the realm of normal stuff, of course I won’t build a heavy falcon myself), so unless that does not change, I’m good. On the other hand, being so certain about that backfires at me, filling my head with “what ifs”
    
  • I have this bad habit of reading (and most of the time not finishing) books in parallel, now I’m reading about
    
    • Carl Jung (https://www.amazon.com/Jung-Short-Introduction-Anthony-Stevens/dp/0192854585 mostly motivated by understanding this mbti thingy)
      
    • About network science (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/complex-network-analysis/9781680505399/ and https://www.amazon.com/Networks-Introduction-Mark-Newman/dp/0199206651 because network analysis can be applied to almost anything)
      
    • Machine Learning (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920052289.do) because is what the cool kids do in IT now or so I’ve learned, I’m more into software architecture though, and
      
    • EGB (https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567) which is a beast and I wanted to get my feet wet about cognitive science and semiotic. I am at about 40% of all of them,
      
  • I pick a chapter until I finish it, and then I move on to the next book, when I have time. I’ve lost interest in reading fiction, I get that from reading graphic novels and manga, mostly. If it matters something, currently ongoing mangas I like are Hajime no Ippo, One Piece, Vinland Saga and The Promised Neverland.
    
• Would you enjoy taking on a leadership position? Do you think you would be good at it? What would your leadership style be?
  
  • I’m not very good at getting stuff done so I would probably suck as a leader of anything. But hey, I am good listening to people and helping them improve. I also don’t think I’m a good teamplayer. I’m bad at following instructions if I don’t trust them. During college I was the guy that ended redoing the work of others during group assignments, because I either I was not satisfied with their work or I was not good at giving instructions. I didn’t know at that moment I was being a dick and I know now, and it’s not something I’m proud of. I'm working on it.
    
• Are you coordinated? Why do you feel as if you are or are not? Do you enjoy working with your hands in some form? Describe your activity?
  
  • I used to draw more when I was younger, and did a bit of woodwork also. I had plants. I like to cook, and have strong opinions on food. I like creating stuff with my hands, I consider myself a creative person. In short, I am coordinated, but not so with team activities like team sports.
    
• Are you artistic? If yes, describe your art? If you are not particular artistic but can appreciate art please likewise describe what forums of art you enjoy. Please explain your answer.
  
  • It’s hard to pin down what kind of art I like, I just know I like something after I’ve seen it or told about, with no particular topic. I don’t understand sculpture, and I vaguely get poetry. Regarding drawing, I appreciate the flow and light in shapes. I was into human figure for some years, and I did a lot of drawings that were good.
    
  • I know a bit of guitar and ukulele, but I never played for others than girls I like. I am too shy of my voice, my singing and technique, I know it needs improving. I took singing classes once but with only the gist of it I got it’s something that requires more discipline and time than what I’m willing to spend.
    
• What's your opinion about the past, present, and future? How do you deal with them?
  
  • uhm, now I strive to live a life that maximises happiness and minimizes regret. At my age I think I know enough about the things I can control, and play along with that hand, always with the best intentions, and I am optimist about the future.
    
  • Sometimes I regret not being like this in the past, however, and I see myself revisiting things I would have done better, like studying more, eating better, loved more.
    
• How do you act when others request your help to do something (anything)? If you would decide to help them, why would you do so?
  
  • I always help, I believe in karma as a thing (I mean, not religiously) and that life has been really good to me. I don’t help when I know I can’t help, or when I’m being ordered to or asked in a bad way i.e. makes me feel bad. I have trouble noticing these situations though.

MacKay: Information theory, inference and learning algorithms and Newman: Networks for the latter.

Consciousness is an information processing algorithm. Like any algorithm, it's substrate neutral and can be implemented in any number of substrates.

There is no distinction between "physical property" and "emergent property." The entire notion of an "emergent property" has been so distorted by philosophers that it's lost all meaning. It doesn't mean that something magically becomes non-physical. Read some Complexity Theory (John Holland is a decent place to start) if you'd like to understand what an "emergent property" actually is.

Again, look into reductionism. Sociology is psychology is biology is chemistry is physics. We just don't have a complete set of bridge laws yet.