Complex adaptive systems are all those special cases when you put a bunch of simple elements together and they interact and adapt and learn and work as a whole. Social insects, the free market, evolution, all the single cells in your brain that create a single consciousness; they’re all complex adaptive systems. Scientists are starting to realize the importance of these systems, and how understanding them can give us insights into all sorts of seemingly unrelated things.

It can help us understand human phenomenon like traffic congestion and the stock market, all sorts of social issues, biological issues, everything really. It has practical applications too. Scientists can use genetic algorithms to help find solutions to complex problems. Basically like evolving a solution. And that’s just what this guy did, he put together a simple flash program with an evolving car. Check out the program and a description here:

Akira has always been popular with anime freaks and film buffs, but recently there’s some renewed interest because the 2 part live-action version has been announced. Supposedly the new version will be less of remake of the film, and more of an interpretation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s graphic novel series. Each film will be based on three of the six volumes of the original novel.

Warner Brothers paid seven-figures for the rights to the movie, so there should be an adequate budget fitting for the scale of a film like Akira. The studio’s describing the film as “Blade Runner meets City of God”, which sounds pretty freaking outstanding. Hopefully it won’t disappoint.

BTW, check out cartoonist Harry Partridge’s hilarious spoof of the mistakes an American Akira might make:

The new Cooper and Cooper S Convertables will make their official debut at the Detroit Auto Show in January. MINI says they’ve made “incremental” improvements, and apparently they’re too small to see. The one very visible change is the price, at $24,550, the new Cooper Convertable is $2,600 more than the 2009 model. The Cooper S was bumped up $2,050 to $27,450.

So, very few changes to the car, but major changes to the price. It makes sense though, the market wants this car right now, and they sold like hotcakes at the previous price; supply and demand, up goes the new price. Check out the pictures and the press release for all the other details.

At RideLust, we’re all big fans of cartoons. So we decided to have some fun and put together this list of the most incredible cartoon cars of all time. The reason we use the term “incredible” here is that some of the items on this list wouldn’t be classified as “great” or “amazing” - some of them are incredible for other reasons (i.e. they are obnoxious, or major FAILs compared to the show they were featured in).

With that brief introduction, let’s raise a toast to the great memories of cartoon past…

Cartoon: Super Friends

Although Batman’s Batmobile went through more design changes then Michael Jackson (yeah, I went there) the most impressive of all the (animated) Batmobiles was the winged, wheeled avenger seen in the Super Friends cartoon. Like all the Batmobile models before it, the Super Friends Batmobile came heavily equipped with several on-board computers and a military-grade weapons artillery rivaled in coolness only by the machine-gun equipped Jeep in the The Rat Patrol.