Visualization

“Freudian Value Semiotics”

The Adjacent Possible

Stuart Kauffman has a concept called the Adjacent Possible which I find incredibly useful in understanding the world.  Simply put, if you think of the space of possibilities from the present moment forward and just concentrate on those that are achievable today — adjacent to the present moment — that’s the Adjacent Possible.

What’s interesting about possibility-space is that tomorrow’s Adjacent Possible depends on the actions and choices we make today; it’s not symmetric and it’s nonlinear.  Certain actions generate more future possibilities than others.  In my experience, those actions tend to be the cooperative ones, ones that produce network effects: financial, social and otherwise.

Due to our evolutionary heritage, having come from a resource-constrained world, we may be predisposed to see the more competitive actions which tend to shrink the Adjacent Possible.  Whether or not this is a bias or an actual state of affairs, much of our thinking is based on scarcity, so we are drawn to actions that become self-limiting.

Here’s …

A Meditation on Biological Modeling

This is not my meditation, it was created by Cellucidate:…

Foldit

Has anyone played Foldit, the protein-folding game that is designed to advance the science?  This Wired article makes it sound like Ender’s Game meets biochemistry!  Sounds like the Poehlman kid is the protein-folding equivalent of Stephen Wiltshire.  I love the crowdsourcing, the meta-evolutionary algorithm of it (to find the savants), and the implications for science.…

Amazing Feats of Memory

From time to time we hear about people with “photographic” memories who supposedly can remember every detail of something they experienced.  When you look into what’s really going on though, it becomes clear that this is not really the case, and their capabilities are actually limited to certain segments of their experience.…

Microcosmos

There’s a cool little coffee table book called Microcosmos that features super magnified images of (mostly) living creatures.  Here’s a sample:

Macrophage (yellow) chomping on e. coli (red) [3000x magnification]

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The Emergent Universe

In a previous post I asked what you thought this was:

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Here is the same system at different resolutions (lowest to highest):…

Living Things

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Without looking up the term Mpc/h, do you know what the above photo is?  I’ll give you some hints.…