Self Repair

Some random musings about how things go together. Why not? It's a blog ..

Systems that repair themselves are interesting. Living creatures self-repair. Things like bee-hives and termite mounds self-repair, in a sense. Even businesses and governments self-repair. What these things have in common is that a larger scale structure is maintained by the actions of its constituents. As long as a certain degree of organization is maintained, the collective entity can restore itself to some normal state of being. Your body can tolerate the loss of a few skin cells; a termite colony can survive an attack from an ant-eater; your company could replace a few people if it had to.

Structure: Suppose you have a set of elements that are the components of the system, and that the elements interact in various ways with one another and with the environment so as to ensure the continued existence of the system. It seems fairly obvious that the cells that make up, say, your dog have to keep some spatial relationship, or else you don't really have a dog. So structure is necessary, but not necessarily spatial structure; consider the business model. The structuring isn't in whose office is next to whose, it's in the inter-relationships of the defined roles of the workers, i.e., who interacts with who. This is structure like (I think) mathematicians think of structure: a set of parts and the relationships between those parts.

Energy: Of course it takes some energy to make things interesting. A brick wall has parts (bricks, mortar, a foundation, etc.), and relationships (bricks spatially situated relative to other bricks, mortar interposed, and so on), but it isn't really that interesting because it doesn't really do anything. One thing it certainly doesn't do is repair itself. That's where the energy comes in. Self-repair requires some means for the parts of the system to interact with the environment to use the energy that's available there to move old, damaged parts out of the system, to manipulate raw materials into replacement parts, and to get those new parts into place.

The Folly of Resolutions

Ok, here's my problem with resolutions - they tend to evaporate quietly, when no one is looking. Or, mine do anyway, so now it's time to drag them back into the light. I'm going to do that for my 2008 resolutions. Why am I doing this in March of 2009? Seems like that was one of the resolutions I posted here once - to post more (was that in 2007?) . Missed that one for 2008 anyway. Almost the only post I managed in 2008 was this list of resoltions:

- ride at least 4,000 miles outside
well, I got to 1500 and change - so that one's 37% satisfied

- ride at least one century ride, oh hell, let's say in under 5hr 45min
nope. started a century, but didn't finish it that fast ..

- learn to get on a CX bike using the flying leap
kind of did this a couple of times, but not at any kind of speed

- not break my arse trying to get on a CX bike using the flying leap
SUCCESS! I did not, in fact, break anything!

- or my neck. or my back. or my bike.
(see above)

- get more mud on my CX bike than in 2007 (should be easy)
Yeah, a couple of rides in the weather took care of that

- not complain about anything (not too likely)
What? Was I supposed to do everything on this list? Stupid list!

- build a robot and enter it in a competition (competition yet to be determined)
still in the 'analysis and design' phase. (that's engineering speak for 'not yet')

- do some kite flying
More success!

- teach the dog to talk
So far he can say 'ooeeoeoooowwoo awoohruhhrroo', which I think means 'you are doing my head in'

So, there's my revisitation of some old goals. I may not give up on the robot thing, or the mileage thing, or the CX bike stuff, but I don't think the dog will mind if we never finish his elocution lessons.