[HN Gopher] Reminder of Complexity
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Reminder of Complexity
        
       Author : azhenley
       Score  : 97 points
       Date   : 2020-06-07 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.johndcook.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.johndcook.com)
        
       | cxr wrote:
       | Half-related: Reality has a surprising amount of detail
       | 
       | http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020495
        
       | 0d9eooo wrote:
       | Related:
       | 
       | https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1362
       | 
       | At some point the complexity of a system becomes great enough
       | that it's impossible to simulate it perfectly.
       | 
       | The interesting question for me lately is how and under what
       | circumstances can you ignore the complexity for some purpose.
       | 
       | For example, underlying what is represented in that poster is
       | some set of physical processes that are ignored in that poster.
       | The system at that physical level of description would be even
       | more complex, probably too complex to represent on a poster. So
       | why the level of analysis of the poster? Similarlly, at some
       | point it's easier to talk about eating and fatigue than it is the
       | citric acid cycle. How and why do you move from one level of
       | analysis to another? Some of it probably depends on what is being
       | explained, but some of it might not.
        
       | WJW wrote:
       | I love that it comes with a piece of paper reminding the viewer
       | that this is a __small __selection of reality. Biochemistry is
       | much, MUCH more complex than even these two 26 square foot
       | posters.
       | 
       | I'd love to get a similar poster of the entire Linux kernel or,
       | alternatively, the total supply chain for an everyday item like
       | the proverbial pencil.
        
         | rantwasp wrote:
         | the complexity of the linux kernel (and in man-made things in
         | general) is usually really small compared to biological
         | systems.
        
           | WJW wrote:
           | I'm sure you could still fill a good-size poster if you make
           | a nice inefficient representation, like every function call
           | is a separate node in the graph and you include every single
           | device driver even for decades old stuff like tape drives. I
           | agree though, Mother Nature has an inordinate love for making
           | everything a global variable and She definitely hates
           | comments.
        
             | rantwasp wrote:
             | the analogy is good but i think it kinda breaks down when
             | you consider the machine the kernel runs on.
             | 
             | so you would mostly represent the machine the software run
             | on.
        
         | azhenley wrote:
         | I'd buy a similar poster of the Linux kernel.
         | 
         | I'm sure some astute HN reader could whip up a script that
         | generates illustrative posters of static call graphs given a
         | Git repo!
        
           | cmrx64 wrote:
           | https://makelinux.github.io/kernel/map/
           | 
           | my uni had some different, older posters about linux. one was
           | radial with most non driver files represented. can't seem to
           | find them on the web though
        
             | cmrx64 wrote:
             | http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project_details.cfm?id=2
             | 6... exists, not what the poster was, but WHOA way cooler.
             | also, old.
        
       | rantwasp wrote:
       | i independently ran across this when going through:
       | https://www.edx.org/course/principles-of-biochemistry
       | 
       | As someone who is formally trained in computer science I was
       | literally blown away by biochemistry. Once you see that any
       | organism that involved organic chemistry is in fact an insanely
       | complicated, biological computer you cannot unsee it. It's
       | amazing.
       | 
       | In case someone is wondering what the author of the blog post
       | zoomed in, that's the Krebs cycle - ie how we derive energy (ie
       | ATP) from the food we eat
       | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cycle). See:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juM2ROSLWfw and
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J4LXs-oDCU
        
       | nafey wrote:
       | This reminds me of Tesler's law says something quite useful about
       | how complexity works:
       | 
       | "Every application has an inherent amount of complexity that
       | cannot be removed or hidden. Instead, it must be dealt with,
       | either in product development or in user interaction."
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2020-06-07 23:00 UTC)