The ties that bind us

摘要

America's baseball superstar Yogi Berra has a sideline as a man-in-the-street philosopher. His epigram, "It's deja vu all over again", sprang to mind while I was reading Linked and Nexus. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and Mark Buchanan deal with the emerging science of networks - how they form, how information and matter move th rough them, how puzzling aspects of everyday life can be explained by understanding their dynamics. What's the message, then? Simply that all networks- the Internet, terrorist groups, multinational industries, interstate highways, Amazonian ecosystems - follow the same simple and powerful rules. The "science of networks" has sprung up to uncover these rules, and provide a firm foundation for the care and feeding of these interconnected patterns. Curious as to how Google came to be the most popular search engine on the Internet or what it would take to dismantle the Al Qaida terrorist network? The Barabasi volume will tell you. But if you want to understand the spread of infectious disease, how riots form or why the rich always seem to get richer, then Buchanan's treatment is for you.