Thinking about the 1st law of thermodynamics today on my run. I think the seed was planted from article at Brain Picker that I read yesterday.  Specifically about Aikido and energy:

Aikido embodies the idea that when we stop resisting something, we stop giving it power. In aikido, an uke, the person who receives an attack from the thrower, or nage, absorbs and transforms the incoming energy through harmony and blending. There is no word for competitor, only for the one who is giving or receiving the energy.

and

The first law observes that the internal energy of an isolated system obeys the principle of conservation of energy, which states that energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but cannot be created or destroyed.

I’ll have to come back to this idea, but it was really around the context of extracting performance from a system. On my run I was the system – my 5th mile was under 7mins That’s really fast for me and it takes a lot of energy (and a good slope) to get the system moving that fast. The energy for that performance was in the system the entire time though.

Another systems thought that I’ve kicking around is the idea of leaky systems (this time not me, but I guess it could apply). Not only leaky systems, but “purposefully leaky systems”. The ones that come to mind the big social networks and what they leak is personal information…on purpose. Think of LinkedIn recommending people they mined from your Gmail account. Gmail is leaking, and LinkedIn is participating in information arbitrage. The more I think about it… I think this is the rule, not the exception.