And yet complex processes produce order and beauty when you zoom out and look at them from enough distance. I use the terms signal and noise very loosely in this book, but they originally come from electrical engineering. There are different types of noise that engineers recognize—all of them are random, but they follow different underlying probability distributions. If you listen to true white noise, which is produced by random bursts of sound over a uniform distribution of frequencies, it is sibilant and somewhat abrasive. The type of noise associated with complex systems, called Brownian
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