7:00 – 4:00 ASRC MKT

• Reza Aslan in conversation with Ryan Bauer (no podcast!)
  • Reza Aslan is an internationally acclaimed writer and religious scholar. His books include “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,” “How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization and the End of the War on Terror” (published in paperback as “Beyond Fundamentalism”), and most recently “God: A Human History.” Aslan’s degrees include a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies, a Master of Theological Studies, a PhD in the Sociology of Religions, and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, where he was named the Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction. Born in Iran, he now lives in Los Angeles, where he is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and a cooperative faculty member in the department of religion.
  • One could argue that the clash of monotheisms is the inevitable result of monotheism itself. Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god tends to be monomythic; it not only rejects all other gods, it rejects all other explanations for God. If there is only one God, then there may be only one truth, and that can easily lead to bloody conflicts of irreconcilable absolutisms. Missionary activity, while commendable for providing health and education to the impoverished throughout the world, is nonetheless predicated on the belief that there is but one path to God, and that all other paths lead toward sin and damnation. (source)
• COBBS – Collective Behaviour in Biological Systems – lots of good papers!
  • Finite-Size Scaling as a Way to Probe Near-Criticality in Natural Swarms.
  • Information transfer and behavioral inertia in starling flocks.
  • Starling Flock Networks Manage Uncertainty in Consensus at Low Cost
  • Emergence of collective changes in travel direction of starling flocks from individual birds’ fluctuations
  • Asja Jelic – theory, collective decision making
  • Silvio Duarte Queiros – theory, diffusion
• Back to slides – progress!
• While riding at lunch, I realized I should record agent velocity. I should be able to see a difference between average velocity by phase, which would bear Ardent out. I made changes that save out the velocity by agent, but realized that it wouldn’t give me the info. Instead I used the distance to origin data and synthesized from there. Turns out that Arendt  and Moscovici were right…