interesting breakfast

I had breakfast at the Cosmos Club this morning with two friends
(I’ll identify them in a future blog entry with their permission) and
the topic revolved around two very interesting ideas. The first was
the notion that how the human body reacts to trauma or surprise might
be a very useful metaphor for understanding the reaction of of social
networks to the same. This echoes some of the ideas put forward by
Stephanie Forrest (http://www.cs.unm.edu/~forrest/) with regards to
the immune system and defense of computer networks, but goes beyond
it to include other reactions such as fight/flight. The second idea
was that of social ecological systems (think Hollywood or Boston’s Rt
128) and how such systems might be manipulated, both from the bottom
up and the top down. I was interested to learn of the idea that a
nation’s defense might in fact be designed to be such a social ecology.

It’s not surprising that the breakfast extended for 2 hrs. It was a
lot more interesting than the scrambled eggs.

Jim