However, one presentation tried to tackle the immensely challenging science of networking and attempted to explain the academic difference between complex and complicated.  Whilst the explanation of ‘complicated’ was good, ‘complex’ was almost just left as being ‘not like complicated’  – the explanation didn’t really explore the concept due, most likely, to a lack of time.  I’m going to try to touch on it here.

(Update:  This is about complexity theory, rather than the normal English use of the words.  Sorry for any confusion!)

Complicated was described using the Boeing 747 example.  This one often pops up in popular literature as being an example of something that has a huge number of parts that fit together in a staggeringly intricate way.  View a plane as a whole you don’t see the myriad parts of the engine for example.  “Wow, that looks complex!” you might exclaim.  Well, no, it looks complicated.  You could, with sufficient time, completely dissasemble a 747 and lay out all of the constituent part.  You also could understand the purpose and of each and every part and how they fit together.  With time, there would be no mystery why the engine’s fan blade is shaped a particular way.

Complex on the other hand, describes an entirely different set of phenomena.  The Boeing 747 is an example of a complicated system, where system is used to describe a set of components which together achieve a purpose.  The trouble with analysing complex systems is that looking at the parts tells you almost nothing about the system.  That is, you have to look at the interactions and feedback between the parts and the emergent behaviour that the interactions and feedback bring about.

It is probably easier to take a few examples.  Birds flocking and termite colonies are examples complex systems as are organisations and society.

Birds flocking is a bit of a classic and programs have been written to simulate it.  Each agent (or ‘bird’) only has a small set of behavioral characteristics or rules when flocking and completely analysing a bird does not give an inkling of the beauty of the motion that a flock of birds draws in the sky.  The behaviour of the flock emerges from the interactions of the whole and, critically, cannot be predicted by looking separately at the behaviour of each of the birds.

Termites are interesting in that they are quite simple and can be examined from a physical and biological perspective of the individual termite.  However, again, their social functions and mound building can only be studied at the level of the colony the social behaviours only emerge from the non-linear interactions and feedback between the termites which is one of the features of a complex system.

When humans are part of a system, each agent can make their own decisions and they will only do that based on their own partial perspectives of their own understanding of the system.  Hence society and politics.

So complex systems are non linear, involve feedback loops and resist reductive analysis; they can only be analysed at the macro level where the behaviour of the system emerges from it parts.

I had the ‘pleasure’ of travelling through Heathrow T5 twice during my holiday to Thonon les Bains on Lac Leman which is reached via Geneva.  On paper, the flights look fine; catch the BA plane to Heathrow, two hours at Heathrow and then catch your onward flight to Geneva.  On the return journey, three hours are offered at Heathrow – little did I know it was to clear security.

On the way out to Geneva, the plane was delayed by nearly an hour waiting at the gate.  However, desipte a 2 hour transfer time (not including the extra delay) our bags failed to make the connection from Newcastle and didn’t travel with us.  That’s everybody who flew from Newcastle to Geneva, six in total; not one of us was joined by our bags on the flight.  The bags did eventually turn up on the next flight and were delivered to us after a 5 hour delay. The baggage company at Geneva were not surprised; it seems that bags are far more frequently delayed from T5 than any other airport in the developed world.

However, it only got worse on the way back.  First we were delayed in Geneva because there was no slot available at Heathrow.  Then, even when we were given a slot at Heathrow, when the plane arrived at the airport’s airspace we were delayed again.

Then the plane was parked away from the terminal as there were no stands available.  Normally buses await to take the passengers to the terminal.  Except there weren’t any.  For 30 minutes.   None of the ground staff seemed to have any sense of urgency.  The bus driver even seemed to wait with the bus full despite several panicked American passengers on short transfers – they didn’t stand a chance with T5.  But when we were finally delivered to the terminal the fun really began.  We didn’t get to the T5 shopping centre for another 30 minutes.

Queues seem to be the norm at T5.  Firstly, there was a ludicrous queue after getting to T5.  It transpired that at the head of this queue was a small woman asking people whether they were transferring to local or international flights.  She was completely pointless because the hall immediately behind her was full of signs directing you where to go if you were transferring to a local or international flight.  She had no purpose whatsoever.  Utterly unbelievable and the first 10 minutes of waiting.

Next we queued to have our boarding passes checked.  After that another queue to have our passports checked.  Finally, both the local and international passengers were shepherded to yet another security check.  Together.  Why we were split up into different queues is anybodies guess as both the national and international passengers had boarding card and passport checks.  The final security check is the one where you take your belt off, take your laptop out, etc.  This took another 15 to 20 minutes.  Why?  Why?  Because the staff were just slow.  Inept too, probably, but generally very, very slow at staring at the computer monitor that displays the innards of cases, jackets, purses and other assorted bags. Incredibly slow.  In Newcastle this queue usually takes about 5 minutes.  The queue for our machine was on 10 or so people long yet took nearly 20 minutes …  I dispaired.

All told from the moment of touching down to getting into T5 took over an hour; it would have been 30-40 minutes at best even if we had got to a stand.  What a disgraceful way of treating people arriving at supposedly the most advanced passenger terminal in the world.  I imagine the American passengers on short transfers missed their flights.  There bags almost certainly will have done.

However, once in T5 proper you understand that it isn’t for passengers to relax waiting for their flight.  No, it’s only purpose is to extract money; it’s simply a glorified shopping mall.  All we wanted to do was get some lunch and then find somewhere comfortable for our next flight.  Instead, there are precious few places to eat and virtually no where to actually sit.  Unless you have an executive lounge pass that is.  T5, which because of its size, should feel spacious, yet feels claustrophobic, cluttered, noisy and generally unpleasant.

Even when we boarded our flight to Newcastle the madness of Heathrow didn’t end.  We ended up staying a further hour at the stand and taxiing before we finally took off.  Because they are operating at full capacity.

That seems to be the problem.  There are simply too many passengers.  They don’t need another runway; they need less passengers.  The current ’systems’ at T5 don’t seem to be able to cope.  Most of the staff have a ‘learned helplessness’ air around them.

Heathrow needs proper competition.  Maybe BAA needs to be broken up so that Gatwick and Stansted can offer real competition to Heathrow to force it to buck its ideas up and provide a proper service to its passengers.  The security theatre is a joke; I don’t feel more secure, just that I’m having my time wasted.  We are paying customers; yet we pay to be treated like cattle.  I’m not sure why we put up with it.  Yet another reason for competition, but perhaps in a different way.  If there was an airport that didn’t treat you like cattle and actually treated you like paying customers then I would definitely fly through there, even if it was a bit more expensive.

BAA is bad for Heathrow and bad for British Airways.  The sooner it is broken up the better.

My Dad lives in Ontario, Canada, and is retired.  He has always enjoyed anything to do with water having been a keen sailor in the past, and has two windsurfers which he uses on Lake Ontario during the summer.  During the winter he tends to X-country ski, snow-shoe and generally keep very active.

About two years ago I got an email out of the blue which said that he was thinking of buying a canoe and described the ‘Indian’ style canoe that he was thinking of getting.  I thought, ‘oh, the windsurfing must be getting a bit much’ and emailed back a gentle question to that effect.  I got the following reply:

“No, on some days it isn’t windy.”

I also arrived for the GTi breakfast event at 7.30am which I felt was quite an achievement because I didn’t go to bed until 11.30 the night before which brings me back to the first day of TDC.

Day 1 was very good with only a couple of ‘blooper’ presentations.  The highlights for me were:

Harry Drmec, Former CEO of Red Bull.  A drinks company CEO at a digital event?  Yes, and it worked very well.  The guy leaked of leadership and capability and this is of course reflected in his amazing work at Red Bull.  I particularly liked his story of how he stood up to Tesco and won.

Mike Southon, who did an inspirational talk about entrepreneurship using the Beatles (as in the Group) as a metaphor or simile.  It was great and the use of music and old b/w photos of the Beatles helped hammer his points home.

Dan Lyons (a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs) who, after a shaky start, pulled off an amusing and informative talk.

But the outstanding session for me on Day 1 was the final session entitled “Stop Making Sense”:

Dr Michael Shermer took us on a tour of skeptism, gullableness, its biological and evolutionary roots and some techniques to combat the category errors that we all make when faced with the unknown.  Essentially, how to ensure that we address the unknown with “we don’t know” rather than attributing it to some supernatural entity or God.  Preaching to the converted for sure, but still a timely and funny reminder of how our biology and sensing systems can trick our brains into believing things that simply aren’t there.

Then, completely unexpectedly, Chandler Burr, a Perfume critic at the New York Times, gave an exhilerating tour of scent culminating in an exploration of the structure (and smells) of a boutique fragrance called “Silver Mark”.  A simply stunning perfume and a delightful speaker who is clearly massively enthusiastic about scents, the sense of smell, and the way in which they can be manipulated to produce emotional responses to, well, scent.  Who Knew, huh?

But the star of the show was an independent toy designer called Caleb Chung.  He designed the Furby which, we were told, sold 50 Billion.  That’s about 7 Furbys for every single person on the planet!  Who was buying those things.  More to the point, who bought my seven and probably your seven?

Mr Chung then went on to demonstrate his new toy which was the Pleo from Ugobe.  An amazing robotic toy which had real lifelike attributes – basically it is a very cute toy which evokes empathy.  Pleo is a learning robot and reacts to how you treat it – and it’s aimed at kids!

He extols the virtues of using C# and mono (an implementation of .net) whilst disregarding any dissenting voices in the community.  Still, when he comes out with stuff like this:

I find Silverlight incredibly appealing – you get C#, you get a DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime), you get a fantastic graphics engine with a fantastic animation framework, you get video, you get audio, multi-language compatibility and so on and so forth.

Well, that’s great.  It’s lovely technology.  Shame it comes from a convicted monopolist that has repeatedly called Free and Open Software (FOSS) ‘cancer’ and keeps trotting out patent threats against the free software community.  So what’s the sensible thing to do?  That’s right build technology based on Microsoft ideas and try to get it into as much FOSS as possible.  Perhaps not.  But then he goes on:

The business side explanation is that we want to make sure that Linux remains a first class citizen on the web. As websites start using Silverlight we don’t want Linux to be in a position where you can’t access those websites.

Perhaps it would be better to not to use Silverlight in the first place.  This is like the whole ActiveX thing all over again.  This is why we want OPEN web standards not driven by ONE company.

Please read the rest of the article. One thing is very, very clear to me.  Miguel de Icaza seems to be several things:

• In love with all things Microsoft.  He even went for a job there; perhaps he did get it.
• Care’s not one jot about the damage that he might do to the community by validating and pushing Microsoft technologies into the FOSS community.

Still, the above is an ad hominem attack.  But, I have no respect for the man; I personally think that he is doing a very bad thing by developing Mono, by his blind desire to replicate .net, and with his completely naive attitude to Microsoft.  He wants to push mono in GNOME.  Which is a shame, because I like GNOME.  Still there is always KDE. Now, what can I use to replace TomBoy and F-Spot.

Suddenly, Nick can’t access his Gmail account, can’t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can’t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can’t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.

Nope, my data is safely locked up in my own mail server, my own web-server, my own backups, etc.  I’ve always felt slightly uneasy about using Gmail for all my mail.  Now I know why.

After all, you don’t need a passport to take the train to Bristol. Or a coach, for that matter. And I’ve never needed a passport to drive my car to Bristol. This is inside this country. These are internal flights. Next time you travel inside the country and have to show your passport, ask yourself why?

PS I know people are going to say “Because they mix International and Internal passengers.” I don’t care about that; they also check your boarding card and passport at the gate before you get on the plane.