modes of paradigm shift

1. Incremental
"Quantity has a quality all its own"
- Joseph Stalin
This is the kind of paradigm shift where a large number eventually becomes a mass. Often it involves emergence (where relationships or patterns form that weren't visible or present with a smaller number), but that's not strictly necessary.
Examples could include:
- the shift from "our strategy is to deny and ignore" when the number of customers/patients/citizens dying is negligible, to "our strategy is to accept and apologize" when that number gets to be noticable
- shifting from seeing the trees when you only understand a couple of pieces of a business's process to seeing the forest after you are aware of almost all of them.


2. Punctuated Equilibrium
This involves a quick shift, a sudden departure from the norm, an avalanche of change. This is most common in densely networked (i.e. highly interconnected) systems, and in systems with a lot of friction or resistance to change. If there is a significant force keeping the inside of an organization (physical or corporate) in the same state despite changing external conditions, then any failure is more likely to be a catastrophic one.
Examples could include:
- avalanches, especially as studied by physicist Murray Gell-Mann in the form of sand dropped onto a hill from a point (as in an hourglass) in "The Quark and the Jaguar"
- political revolutions
- the breaking of a dam

3. Replacement
An entity of organizational primacy or centrality is replaced by another, but the original isn't completely destroyed nor removed from the system. This indicates that the system as a whole is more structurally stable than any of its parts, and implies that the new central entity will, itself, be replaced.
Examples could include:
- the cultural centrality of radio shifts to TV in the mid-1900s, and newspapers to web-based news in early 2000s
- control of the planet's surface and atmosphere quality was determined by bacteria, algae, and other single-celled organisms for most of history, then was set by plants, and is now in control of humans.
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refactoring

Just occurred to me that my idea of refactoring - showing the same set of components (in different arrangements, or better: from different perspectives) as different objects - is probably born from the interactive tesseract visualizations I played with as kid just beginning to explore the internet.

this isn't the exact one but fairly similar: http://www.cut-the-knot.org/Curriculum/Geometry/Tesseract.shtml
and wolfram alpha has a decent one too: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Tesseract.html

Props to Owen Schoppe for helping me see the value of the idea by showing me the video of garrett lisi at ted.

standing in the future

As we try to step into a stable-state society (does it exist, or will it be more of a slow crumbling?) I wonder: how long does a buried fiber-optic line continue to function without maintenance?