Comments | paulhope: LIfe 2.0

paulhope

LIfe 2.0

Sep 04, 2006 13:12

"One of synthetic biology's most radical spirits is Drew Endy. Dr Endy, who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to the subject from engineering, not biology. As an engineer, he can recognise a kludge when he sees one. And life, in his opinion, is a kludge." - "Life 2.0", in The Economist ( Read more... )

playing god, kludge, synthetic biology, life

Leave a comment

Back to all threads

anonymous September 6 2006, 13:57:54 UTC

Hey, just had my first philosophy of computational modelling class. cellular automata all the rage. we sat around and played with Life 3000 for 15 minutes.
then my professor grumbled about Wolfram.

howre things?

Dave

paulhope September 6 2006, 21:45:48 UTC

Oh man. I spent the summer of '05 grumbling about Wolfram. What a wanker.

I've just been swamped shopping classes. I checked out a Literary Theory class that made me sick, but a Sociolinguistics class that was surprisingly welcoming. I may post on these later.

How do cellular automata get used in modelling...what are you modelling?

anonymous September 7 2006, 00:55:18 UTC

well, basically as of yet (one class in) we've just looked at cellular automata and how they demonstrate that comlpex shit can arise from painfully basic rules and operations ( ... )

paulhope September 9 2006, 15:34:41 UTC

how they demonstrate that comlpex shit can arise from painfully basic rules and operations.

How is "complexity" defined?

I think the thing about apparently-racist social organization resulting as a kind of emergent property is a key point. My feeling for a while has been that in, say, victim studies, there's a lot of inferring from observed social patterns to subconscious intentions on the part of the individual players. The inference is bad...

anonymous September 10 2006, 00:29:24 UTC

Wanna talk about bad inference?
More evidence that literary criticism is shit:

(in an article on 'time and form, my professor muses about 'aesthetics' and why we find beauty in things. his answer : fractalization. this is his explanation of how that plays out)

"This fractalization in beauty, nature, and ourselves suggests an explanation for our preoccupation with art: Evolution tends towards beauty; we are the most most advanced product of evolution; therefore, we also tend towards beauty. In beauty, we rediscover and reproduce ourselves. The repetitive, rhythmic nature of fractalization motivates other aspects of art, too--its intensity, memorability, permanence, formality, clarity, particularity, complexity, etc. "

kill. me. now.

between this and Roman Jakobson, this class has been trying to say the least.

off to see Ratatat tonight.

Back to all threads