Just chilling out tonight. I'm still staying in the AirBnb I wrote about here.

Like always smoking some herb and drinking coffee. Felt like taking a bath and listening to some tunes on the water-proof Bose Soundlink (I love this speaker).

I want to share 2 of my favorite bands. They both have videos I really like.

AIR - La Femme D'Argent

This is one of my top bands. I really enjoy the video because it reminds me of programming. Firstly their studio has a 1980s unix programming look to it. The old machines, computer screens displaying plain blocky text, yet the quality of sound, and visuals are not at all less in quality.

The less obvious aspect is actually in the sound itself. This song really builds from simplicity to complexity. In the beginning we have few sounds. Very low complexity with only the drum up till 24 seconds when the piano comes in. By the end of the song we have all sorts of sounds going perfectly aligned and at a fast pace.

This reminds me of the unix philosophy of micro-services. Each sound is very simple and can be imagined completely on it's own. As the song builds the sounds start to move together more.

Röyksopp - Remind Me

This is a band which has a lot of songs I love. I chose this one purely because it has an amazing music video. It actually won MTV Europe Music Award for Best Video in 2002.

The video essentially follows the day of a woman in the UK through the view of scientific diagrams and info graphics.

To me the video highlights the thinking style of the systems engineer. Turning every process in the world into a quantifiable system, which can be adapted to and possibly controlled.

These systems can interact with each other but mostly remain separate. For example consider the systems that govern atomic particles (quantum physics) as opposed to the systems that govern the orbits of planets (Newtonian physics). Mostly these plains of existence (systems) are completely separate only relevant at their own scale. Except in special situations where systems intermingle, take for example a black-hole which combines aspects of the Newtonian system and quantum system.

This is how it is in the video and how the systems engineer thinks. Each system becomes a simplified version of the real world process. Isolated, predictable, quantifiable, and useful ... yet not perfect. As the quantified system is an imperfect representation of the real.

That is where chaos theory becomes the worst nightmare of the systems thinker. Chaos theory is often summed up in the hypothetical butterfly effect:

"A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe."

The specifics here aren't important. It is the idea that several unlikely events occurring at lower level systems trickle up causing an unexpected and unpredictable effect in a higher level system.

One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a sea gull's wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever. The controversy has not yet been settled, but the most recent evidence seems to favor the sea gulls.

• Edward Norton Lorenz

In computer programming one of the ways this manifests is the heisenbug.

... heisenbug is a classification of an unusual software bug that disappears or alters its behavior when an attempt to isolate it is made. Due to the unpredictable nature of a heisenbug, when trying to recreate the bug or using a debugger, the error may change or even vanish on a retry.

When the programmer attempts to isolate the bug by dismantling the system into parts ... the bug disappears. It seems to exists in a hard to find place in between the layers of systems.

Thanks for reading, I will leave you with a quote from my favorite childhood author:

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable?

• Douglas Adams