A recurring puzzle of evolution is the persistence of certain entities or behaviours that - at first glance - seem to harm the reproductive fitness of individuals. From the naive standpoint, an individual worker ant makes a mockery of evolution. They’re sterile; a reproductive dead-end.

One way of conceptualizing the answer is the unit of ( Read more... )

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There is a possibly apocryphal story about a conversation on the subject of the solar system between Wittgenstein and a student. Wittgenstein asks the student why early people thought that the sun went around the earth. The student says that it’s because it looks that way. Wittgenstein asks, “And how would it look if the earth went around the ( Read more... )

There is an arms race in progress between humans and bacteria. It started in earnest just before World War 1 with Salvarsan and really got going during World War 2 with the wide-spread use of Penicillin. In response to human aggression, resistant strains of bacteria evolved. Superbugs.


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In the dream, I had managed to get invited to one the sessions of the Quarantine studio that BLDG BLOG and Edible Geography were running in New York. City of Sound’s Dan Hill (who I’ve never met, so apologies Dan, for bringing you into this) had the floor and he was engaged in a spirited discussion with Nicola Twilley about how the Internet could ( Read more... )

((Hi there, how’s your weekend going? This is slightly off-topic for Quiet Babylon, but it’s about the future of journalism which is one of my side-obsessions.

It concerns this hilarious opinion piece to which Jay Rosen linked on Twitter. Douglas Rushkoff is afraid that journalism (and by extension all content creation) can’t survive what he sees ( Read more... )

A little while ago, I was sitting on a bus, considering the invisible infrastructure of cyborgs (like you do). Meaning, all of the things that needs to be happening behind the scenes or have happened in the past to allow the independence of the self-sufficient super-being.


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Excerpts from “Ashphalt Veins - The Freeway States” Published in NEWStream and syndicated to all ReutAssoc membersites (retrieved December 21 2012 @ 13:34).


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