Archive for August 12, 2006

lunching

August 12, 2006 at 2:01 pm · Filed under Me

at  lunch today we had baked ziti, heirloom tomato salad, caesar salad, and ice cream.  my sweetie exclaimed after we overstuffed ourselves (dangerously high statistic of this when eating with crowds) "this was really good!". I automatically said, "no, not really.".

the take home is comfort food is just that, and purposefully not made with no need of much talent or superb raw materials (ok the tomato salads had really good tomatoes). it’s not necessarily GREAT FOOD, it’s just very comforting.

here’s a profound yet honest quote: I think Mr. McGee was the most pleasurable person to meet. There are so many people attending that have moved the world with technology or science, but without food there would be nothing!

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Notables Part 1

August 12, 2006 at 1:49 pm · Filed under Current Affairs

De-evolvement is cool!

self-organization vs natural selection: need both

emergent evolution- complex parts develops by relaxation of selection

lazy gene Fibonacci spirals – fix the parameters and just keep going

random walk – spatial relation vs temporal relation

segmentation: duplicates. parts are then becomes specialized because other parts picks up the slack – i.e.lobster, all segments start with legs, but a couple is now used for oxygen– nature allowed the duplicated segments to change

redundancy allowed for degradation: LOSS OF AUTONOMY the parts were duplicates and all different but then they get stuck next to each other they degrade, specialize and now are dependent on each other.

Masking certain functions allows other functions to compensate for the lack of something natural: feral bird’s songs are less diverse than domesticated finches – because domesticated mating depends more on color than any other attribute.

self assembly – autonomous things getting together and becoming non autonomous

auto-catalysis + self assembly

- gerbil experiments : gerbils can change selection (rewiring the brain) while being domesticated

Niche contruction

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