Rick: "the difficulty of understanding 'systems' at all"
I once designed a class for the study of primates. This was in San Diego. It was a 101 anthropology class. The kids had free access to the SD zoo, and they were required to read all of the field studies on any primate of their choice. The assignment for the semester was to write a paper based on an "interaction grid". They had to account for the behavior of each kind individual in a group of primates: Adults, males and females, sub-adults, males and females, children, males and females, and infants.
What we found out as that you can pretty much define a system, by observing what all of the individuals within it do on a routine basis: identify the significant parts, then specify how they interact. For this assignment, that strategy worked very well.
Sorry Dave, for being off-topic in your thread.
