Self-Organizing Systems

Tomorrow I'll be making a major step toward self-organization. No, I don't mean starting my own company.

Instead, I'll be tossing away all my mismatched food containers with missing or ill-fitting lids, all of which take up inordinate amount of space in my pantry. This is something that's been driving me nuts for years! It was bound to happen.. years of frustration is finally coming to a neat, organized solution. I'm surprised no one thought of this before now!

Let me recommend to you the Rubbermaid line of food storage containers called "easy find lids." The lids snap onto the bottom of the container! No more lost lids! If you stack the same size containers on top of one another, they stick together! When I passed by these today at Walmart I didn't have to think even for a minute about making this investment.
------------


Organizing your kitchen just got easier. Featuring lids that snap together and snap to the bottom of the container it fits, this food storage system ensures that the right lid is always at your fingertips. Graduated sized containers nest to take up less room in your cupboard, and its square shape takes up less room in your refrigerator.


■Lids snap together and to container bases so you can always find the right lid
■Graduated sized containers nest for compact storage
■One lid fits multiple bases
■Square shape for optimal space utilization
■Super-Clarified base to easily see contents
■Microwave / Freezer / Dishwasher Safe
■Thick, durable container walls for everyday use
■Bases and Lids are BPA FREE



[link to www.rubbermaid.com]


I believe these satisfy the criteria thusly:


self-organizing dynamical systems: complex systems made up of small, simple units connected to each other usually exhibit self-organization.



Overview

The most robust and unambiguous examples[1] of self-organizing systems are from the physics of non-equilibrium processes. Self-organization is also relevant in chemistry, where it has often been taken as being synonymous with self-assembly. The concept of self-organization is central to the description of biological systems, from the subcellular to the ecosystem level. There are also cited examples of "self-organizing" behaviour found in the literature of many other disciplines, both in the natural sciences and the social sciences such as economics or anthropology. Self-organization has also been observed in mathematical systems such as cellular automata.

Sometimes the notion of self-organization is conflated with that of the related concept of emergence.[citation needed] Properly defined, however, there may be instances of self-organization without emergence and emergence without self-organization, and it is clear from the literature that the phenomena are not the same. The link between emergence and self-organization remains an active research question.

Self-organization usually relies on three basic ingredients [2]:

1.Strong dynamical non-linearity, often though not necessarily involving Positive feedback and Negative feedback
2.Balance of exploitation and exploration
3.Multiple interactions
[edit] History of the ideaThe idea that the dynamics of a system can tend by itself to increase the inherent order of a system has a long history. One of the earliest statements of this idea was by the philosopher Descartes, in the fifth part of his Discourse on Method, where he presents it hypothetically.[citation needed] Descartes further elaborated on the idea at great length in his unpublished work The World.

The ancient atomists (among others) believed that a designing intelligence was unnecessary, arguing that given enough time and space and matter, organization was ultimately inevitable, although there would be no preferred tendency for this to happen. What Descartes introduced was the idea that the ordinary laws of nature tend to produce organization[citation needed] (For related history, see Aram Vartanian, Diderot and Descartes).

...


[link to en.wikipedia.org]