antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 9:40 am on August 10, 2026

announcing The Necessary Tangle – a living evidence atlas of systems | cybernetics | complexity

Update — 24 October 2026. The Necessary Tangle now has developed reading guides on OrgLens, 42 The Systemic Review, and systems leadership and action, alongside current events and calendar subscriptions. You can send a rough thought or correction through Quick contribute, without an account, with an optional private email for follow-ups. Read the 0.34 update. The announcement below describes the August launch; the atlas itself carries the current coverage and its limits.

I’ve been wanting for years to do a ‘better map’ of systems | complexity | cybernetics, having strongly criticised the Castellani ‘complexity map’ and seen some others – and been involved in the SCiO SysBoK where we tried to map key concepts, their necessary antecedents and dependent thingummies, people, meaning, and so on (- and always inspired by ‘rock family trees’ and the way it’s the constellation of influences and people around individual practitioners that actually makes the difference, as David Ing says).

So with the assistance of ChatGPT, and I’ve been building The Necessary Tangle – a living, evidence-backed atlas of systems | complexity | cybernetics.

At the August launch, it mapped 411 public entries and 32 developed profiles from 93 registered sources.

The key difference from the usual family tree is that every line has to say what sort of relationship it represents: logical antecedent, historical precursor, documented influence, teaching, collaboration, practical use, and so on.

The eventual ambition to: trace the human as well as conceptual lineages; connect theory to practice; distinguish espoused intellectual genealogy from the clusters the evidence actually produces; and let categories emerge from the resulting network rather than deciding the schools in advance.

It’s very much a public alpha. Some areas are already quite deep; others are little more than markers saying ‘this belongs here’. I’m putting it out now precisely because corrections, missing connections, rival genealogies and ‘surely you can’t say that’ responses are part of building it.

AND I’m very happy to share, collaborate or whatever….

Have a look
https://transduction.systems

Benjamin
www.antlerboy.com

Jon Awbrey 5:18 pm on November 11, 2026

Riffs and Rotes • Overview

Riffs and Rotes are two species of graph-theoretic structure giving visual representation to the primes factorizations of integers, specifically looking at “doubly recursive factorizations”.

The Core Concept

When a number is broken down into its prime factors, those primes can themselves be broken down based on their index (e.g., the 2nd prime, the 3rd prime, etc.). By recursively expanding these prime indices, an integer can be completely represented as a nested tree or string of prime structural indicators.

These mathematical structures may be mapped into two types of visual diagrams:

Riffs: A family of directed graphs (digraphs) that map out the recursive step-by-step structural relationships.
Rotes: A corresponding family of undirected graphs that visualize the overall underlying network.

Example: The Number 2025

An example will serve to demonstrate how numbers translate to these forms:

2025 is factored traditionally as $81 \times 25 = 3^4 \times 5^2.$
Because $3$ is the $2^{\text{nd}}$ prime $(p_2)$ and $5$ is the $3^{\text{rd}}$ prime $(p_3),$ this is rewritten using prime indices as ${p_2}^4 \times {p_3}^2.$
The indices $2$ and $3$ are then recursively broken down into their own prime structures: $2 = p_1$ and $3 = p_2 = p_{p_1}.$
By dropping terminal 1s, the number collapses into a pure, loss‑less recursive form:
$2025 = {p_p}^{p^p} {p_{p_p}}^p$

This exact string configuration generates a completely unique geometry — its corresponding Riff and Rote — giving every positive integer its own complex, visual “fingerprint”.

Reference

The above text is adapted from the Google AI Overview for “Riffs and Rotes” (Nov 8, 2026).

Resources

cc: Academia.edu • Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Mathstodon
cc: Research Gate • Structural Modeling • Systems Science • Syscoi

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 1:23 pm on November 11, 2026

VSM Renderer – Krasikov

Arseny Krasikov’s VSM Renderer is a TypeScript library for drawing interactive Viable System Model diagrams in applications. Built with Konva, it supports nested systems, navigation between recursion levels, individually selectable communication channels, zooming, panning, and click interactions.

The repository includes documentation and a browser demonstration. The package is published as @captador/vsm-renderer under the EUPL-1.2 licence.

Read the documentation and source code · Try the browser demonstration.

The related VSM7 project, developed by Krasikov with Mark Lambertz, supports organisational design using the VSM. See its website for current access and registration. Lambertz’s VSM7 walkthrough explains the project’s origins and its adaptation of Martin Pfiffner’s seven-step design method; the walkthrough was previously shared on SysCoI.

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 1:22 pm on November 11, 2026

VSM simulation ‘Pasta Lasta’ – Lambertz (2026)

Mark Lambertz’s restaurant simulation for learning Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model, published on Intelligent Organisations on 17 October 2026.

Participants organise a fictional hospitality business, work through an eventful week, and examine their decisions using a VSM diagram laid out on the floor. The exercise explores operational autonomy, coordination, recursion, and the relationship between current operations and future possibilities.

Lambertz credits Allenna Leonard with the original storyline.

Read ‘Pasta Lasta’ and the facilitator guidance · Download the facilitator handout (PDF).

Related: VSM7 walkthrough, Lambertz’s developing software project based on an adaptation of Martin Pfiffner’s seven-step VSM design method. Previously shared on SysCoI on 17 August 2026. The source-code repository describes the software as a mockup under active development.

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 8:53 am on November 11, 2026

Foundations of a postmodern cybernetics based on Kabbalah – Burstein and Negoita (2011)

Two connected works by Gabriel Burstein and Constantin Virgil Negoita explore Kabbalah’s Tree of Life as a model for relationships between cognition, emotion, and action.

Foundations of a postmodern cybernetics based on Kabbalah (2011)

The authors propose a cybernetics grounded in the Tree of Life, interpreting its structure through feedback, hierarchical control, multi-valued logic, and category theory. Their aim is to model cognitive, emotional, and practical activity within a common framework for human and social systems.

Published in Kybernetes, 40(9/10), pp. 1331–1353. Read the paper on ResearchGate. DOI: 10.1108/03684921111169422.

A Kabbalah System Theory Modeling Framework for Knowledge Based Behavioral Economics and Finance (2014)

This chapter develops the earlier proposal for economics and finance. Burstein and Negoita combine their three-level model with emotional intelligence and Michael Polanyi’s account of tacit and explicit knowledge. They use system dynamics to explore how knowledge and emotional biases could enter economic models, including asset pricing.

Chapter 2 in Computational Models of Complex Systems, edited by Vijay Kumar Mago and Vahid Dabbaghian, Intelligent Systems Reference Library, volume 53, pp. 5–23. Read the chapter on ResearchGate. Publisher’s record. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01285-8_2.

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 4:14 pm on November 10, 2026

Systems of Traditional Knowledge, Pluriversal Design – Systems Thinking Ontario – 18 November 2026, 18:30 EST / 23:30 GMT – price not stated

Systems Thinking Ontario’s 148th meeting explores Indigenous knowledge, cognitive justice, and what different understandings of reality mean for systems thinking and design.

Herman Piʻikea Clark discusses Makawalu, a Hawaiian approach to seeing through multiple eyes. Roberto Pires considers how participatory futures work could help societies recognise different knowledge systems. David Ing moderates.

Wednesday 18 November 2026, 18:30 EST (Toronto) / 23:30 GMT (UK). The session ends at 20:15 EST, which is 01:15 GMT on Thursday 19 November.

Hybrid: OCAD University, 205 Richmond Street West, Room 115, Toronto, and online via Microsoft Teams. Register through Guild for attendance details and online access.

Price is not stated on the event page; check with the organiser.

Event and registration · Full programme and suggested reading

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 3:38 pm on November 10, 2026

Causal Assembly Theory: Assembly and Disassembly as Causal Processes – Challoner (2026)

John A Challoner’s November 2026 paper, Causal Assembly Theory: Assembly and Disassembly as Causal Processes, examines how entities become components of systems, how organised participation is maintained, and how systems change or break apart. His account connects these processes to physical interactions, transfers, and constraints.

The related free, self-paced General Systems Theory course now lists modules 92–106 on causal assembly. These follow the Foundational Causality paper and modules 81–91 covered here in August.