Around the web (week of 9 June)

Reading

• The Simply Complex: Trendy buzzword or emerging new science?, by John Casti, available in “Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight”.

A more direct reason for trying to create a science of the complex is to get a handle on the limits of reductionism as a universal problem-solving approach.

• A Twisted Path to Equation-Free Prediction, by Gabriel Popkin for Quanta

Empirical dynamic modeling, by contrast, seamlessly incorporates new data and is always improving. Takens’ theorem works best when there are enough data points to make a dense attractor, making it easier to find times when a system’s present state is close to a past one. Any new data points will help users to see where a system is going to go next.

• Many Anti-Vaxxers Don’t Trust Big Pharma. There’s a Reason for That., by Teresa Carr for Undark Magazine

There was “a sense that medicine was all about business and all about money,” she says. “And that they were now consumers of health care rather than patients who had a doctor who cared for them – cared about them as well as cared for them.”

Listening

• Masta Ace on NPR Tiny Desk
• Rang de Basanti, from the movie of the same name
• When will Indian food be American?, on Sporkful.