Emergence (part 2)

I finished reading Emergence last week and I wasn't so impressed. The book started off making me very excited to learn about what he was describing but he never went into too much detail with the slime mold. He did go into detail describing Ants, which really sparked my interest and now I want to read all 732 pages of The Ants. He also discussed how cities have patterns that seem to come out of nowhere. That's another thing that I'm very interesting in, but again he didn't go into as much detail as I wanted. But he did mention two more books that I now want to read: The Image of the City and The City in History.

Another thing I didn't like about the book was that it was writen in the style of a magazine article, which is certainly reasonable for a magazine article, but doesn't work so well in book form. It's similar to, but much better than, Thomas Friedman (who turns what would be a 10 page magazine article into a 300 page book).

While the book wasn't as great as I had expected it was certainly worth reading, especially since it was a quick read. It made me start thinking about higher order patterns again. So I'm now ready to pounce on some juicier papers and books.