Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple) - Softcover

Kluger, Jeffrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1401309933 ISBN 13: 9781401309930

Publisher: Hyperion, 2009

Synopsis

"Sure to be a deserved hit among the ever-growing Freakonomics crowd."
--Booklist

"Kluger makes the modern world comprehensible."
--Publishers Weekly

"A fascinating journey."
--Library Journal

Sometimes a complex problem has an easy solution. And sometimes there's more to a simple thing than first appears.

In Simplexity, Time senior writer Jeffrey Kluger shows how a drinking straw can save thousands of lives, how a million cars can be on the streets but just a few hundred of them can lead to gridlock, how investors behave like atoms; how arithmetic governs abstract art and physics drives jazz, and why swatting a TV indeed makes it work better.

Kluger adeptly translates newly evolving science into a delightful theory of everything that will have you rethinking the rules of business, family, art--your world.

About this title

About the Author

Jeffrey Kluger joined TIME Magazine in 1996, mainly writing science stories, and was named a senior writer in 1998. With astronaut Jim Lovell, he wroteLost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, on which the 1995 movie Apollo 13 movie was based. He's written several other books, most recently Splendid Solution, which is about Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine. Mr. Kluger and two other colleagues won the 2002 Overseas Press Club of America's Whitman Bassow Award for their "Global Warming" cover package (April 9, 2001), garnering first place for the best reporting in any medium on international environmental issues. Before joining TIME, Mr. Kluger was a staff writer forDiscover Magazine and a writer and editor for the New York Times Business World Magazine,Family Circle, and Science Digest.

From Publishers Weekly

Frustrated by the traffic on narrow bridges? Stunned by the number of buttons on a remote control? Saddened by the lack of basic medical care in the developing world? Kluger (Splendid Solutions) makes the modern world comprehensible, analyzing social and technological systems to reveal that things that seem complicated can be preposterously simple; things that seem simple can be dizzyingly complex. He compares cells to cities to stock markets, renders quarks and fractals accessible and draws parallels between Wal-Mart and AIDS clinics in Tanzania. Although Kluger is prone to hyperbole, his astonishing discoveries require no exaggeration: the book describes how even the most technologically advanced manufacturing plant is infinitely simpler than a humble houseplant with its microhydraulics and fine-tuned metabolism and dense schematic of nucleic acids—and baseball fans will be dismayed to discover that football is, in fact, the more complex of the two games: the possible number of starting configurations before the play even begins is... 31.4 billion. Kluger's findings are likely to incite controversy, confirming his contention that explaining simplicity and complexity is never as straightforward as it seems. (June)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1401309933
• ISBN 13: 9781401309930
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 336