SCADA is Elephants and Turtles all the way down

We had just moved some of our SCADA engineering to the Invensys facility in West Durrington, Worthing, UK. Worthing is down by the beach not far west of Brighton on the English channel. Not far from Worthing, if you go up past Arundel, is Goodwood, the home of the famous racing circuit among other things.  I found the Cass Sculpture park there and wandering around on a weekend. I stumbled across Tony Cragg's public sculpture. I like this one in particular for it's topology, and for today's post I think it relevant in the discussion on the general form of SCADA systems. This post includes a Turchin style dialog on SCADA, what is it and what does it mean. It also includes a general discussion on metasystems and holons and how SCADA architectures themselves include aspect of these higher level concepts.  So if you are brave... read on...