The Theory of Nevolution: The Natural World

November 21, 2008

Bring on the Super Organism

I want this in my flat. Just excavate it, brush it off, and give it to me. Hell, I'd settle for a simulation game of this. I don't care for car racing games and sports games. Let's just sidestep that whole genre and give me ant simulations. I'd be willing to carry sand and twigs for hours on end keeping the colony alive just to wander it's halls and caverns.

Speaking of super organisms, does anyone else find this eerily awesome? Google.org, the philanthropic arm of and title holder of the better google logo, announced Google Flu Trends the other day. By tracking flu related searches they're able to pinpoint flu outbreaks. They even have a two week head start on the Center for Disease Control due to the almost immediate nature of googles data processing. They've been doing this sort of tracking for some time with Google Trends, but they've put this to good use here.

Not only does this sort of tracking change the way that outbreak awareness can be used (and not just to the flu) but also allows us as a species to work together in a decentralised method. I wonder how this would change if the knowledge were to become more ubiquitous. If more people knew of this, they might be more inclined to announce things via their search queries. Google could act as an aggregator of the sum distributed knowledge of human awareness if people saw it as a duty to let those in the know what was happening on the ground.

Bring on the super organism!

Update: Bees were just voted the worlds most invaluable species at the annual Earthwatch debate

Posted at 10:06 AM in The Natural World | Permalink | Comments (1)

September 26, 2008

The Queensland Museum

Trying something out here and we'll see how they work, but it's been on the cards for some time. Welcome to a new obscurely named category - The Natural World. I'm hoping to make it a regular occurrence. Starting from my own flickr and moving on to other people, but each instance will look at museum displays, dioramas, panoramas and the like.

This one comes from my visit to Brisbane a few weeks ago (yes, I know, but like I said: broken keyboard). Despite the poor lighting that always make it tricky to get some good shots inside museums, I managed to photoshop the hell out of them to get them up to quality. Besides, the small sizes here always cover up my camera's inadequacies. Most of the Museum had a particular old school presentation method: low on the computer touch-screen wizardry and high on glass cabinets, latin taxonomies on foam-core, and kids running around getting their fingers on everything (and squeals of delight/disgust at mother nature).

You can check out the originals on flickr.

Please leave some comments and tell me if this pictobrowser thing is working out or not.

Posted at 04:51 PM in The Natural World | Permalink | Comments (0)

Elsewhere

The Play’s the Thing
A “biocultural” approach to art and literature doesn’t entail any Just So stories about how humans came to love Just So stories, or any triumphant tales of how self-replicating molecules persevered over a few billion years until they reached the telos of existence, at which point they were capable of producing Everybody Loves Raymond.
Lost in Time
I have a theory about this: The characteristic "indy" esthetic of ironically adopting some bit of retro culture, or overinvesting in a film or music or art genre, not because it is popular but because it is obscure, these tics correspond to the situation of a very specific audience -- an overeducated one. The social background for such a style is the mass of people who have been churned through liberal arts programs, and have emerged with lots of detailed knowledge of interesting cultural things, but quite limited real prospects, and consequently little to do with that knowledge.
Animal Spirits
Epidemiologists have developed mathematical models of epi demics, which can be applied to the spread of stories and confidence as well. Just as diseases spread through contagion, so does confidence, or lack of confidence. Indeed confidence, or the lack thereof, may be as contagious as any disease. Epidemics of confidence or epidemics of pes simism may arise mysteriously simply because there was a change in the contagion rate of certain modes of thinking.
We May Be Born With an Urge to Help
An interesting bodily reflection of humans’ shared intentionality is the sclera, or whites, of the eyes. All 200 or so species of primates have dark eyes and a barely visible sclera. All, that is, except humans, whose sclera is three times as large, a feature that makes it much easier to follow the direction of someone else’s gaze. Chimps will follow a person’s gaze, but by looking at his head, even if his eyes are closed. Babies follow a person’s eyes, even if the experimenter keeps his head still.
The invisible city
Today's intelligent maps don't just represent spatial relationships, they reveal conditions in the city that were previously hidden in spreadsheets and databases. Many of these maps are challenging, some are utopian, and a few offer a sort of urban catharsis whereby the visualization of previously latent, unseen urban conditions manages to alter the conditions themselves. By revealing the city in maps, a new city is made.
Markets and Anti Markets in the world economy
The basic idea is that the systematic properties of an ecosystem arise from the interactions between its animal and plant components, so that when one dissects the whole into parts the first thing we lose is any property due to these interactions. Analytical techniques, by their very nature, tend to kill emergent properties, that is, properties of the whole that are more than the sum of its parts. Hence the need for a more synthetic approach, in which everything systematic about a given whole is modeled as a historically emergent result of local interactions.
Exposure Time
The contradictory “double image” is cubist; reality has no single truth. The additional photograph asks the question “Is this for real?”. “Readers — and especially television viewers — must understand the Heisenberg principle before they can understand the news. What is actually happening that is being described by the media?
Mind the Map
Beck’s map posits a city whose associations are limited and superficial but quickly assimilated. The tube diagram, like most diagrams, offers a tantalizingly powerful shortcut to comprehension. In the absence of other proposals for unraveling the complexity of urban life, the abstracted representation of a transportation system has shaped the collective understanding of the city.
She is beautiful, and I love her
The new Nintendo video game Duck Hunt is a game about hunting ducks, right? Wrong! It is so much more. In this deep, rich cultural narrative, we are the ducks and society the gun. Simply try to lift the pistol to the screen and you will have an existential crisis of conscience. Why kill? Is it because we are told to? Or is it because we are designed to? This video game has bested Nietzsche and trumped Sarte, all within the confines of its tiny plastic cartridge.
A Manifesto for Postindustrial Design
Mass production, as we know it, will soon be extinct. So say goodbye to heavy metals, huge warehouses, and durable goods. And say hello to the bearable lightness of living networks, metabolism, and code.

The Gentleman's Library

Steven Johnson: The Ghost Map

A street, a city, an epidemic and the hidden power of urban networks

Traversing through four different modes of experience the book centres around a cholera outbreak of 1854. Acting as the unifier, the map provides a visual thesis to the long zoom approach taken with both the story and the solutions needed to understand not only the disease, but germs in general.
Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody

The power of organizing without organizations

As the printing press and radio had profound changes by amplifying the flow of one way communication, the internet is now having even deeper changes in the amplification of group communication. The impact that new modes of communication will create won't be properly felt until the technology ceases to be exciting and becomes banal and invisible.
Thomas De Zengotita: Mediated

How the Media Shape Your World

A sophisticated and highly inventive look at the affects of the saturation post-modernity has had on our daily lives, and possibly the last great book to do so. Immersed in options and unable to discern the authentic from representations, we're helplessly self conscious and unable to prevent ourselves from treating our lives as performance. Thankfully the book is loaded with satire and irony to help navigate the self-referentially loaded book.
John Man: Alpha Beta

How our alphabet shaped the western world

Tracks the history of the latin alphabet as it trickles down through history. At each transitory phase the alphabet is given new meaning and power, and in turn provides the culture with a new set of tools to define themselves with. The strength of the alphabet lies in it's simplicity and it's ability to adapt to new circumstances and environments.
Steven Johnson: Everything Bad is Good for You

How Popular Culture is Making us Smarter

While many show open contempt for the perceived dumbing down of culture by mindless entertainment, the book argues the opposite. Instead of looking at the content, the book looks at the increasing complexity and thinking needed to participate with today's video games, movies and tv shows. Our brains are happiest when searching for increased intricacy, adding to the feedback loop making our amusements much more interesting.
Steven Johnson: Emergence

The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software

The metaphor for the world has previously been viewed through the prism of the tree, mechanical clockwork and the atom. Now the humble slime mould with it's bottom up organisation will prove a fitting image for how we see the world in coming decades. As simple rules can account for breathtaking complexity that can be viewed across diverse disciplines, this book acts as a massive precursor to his theory of the long zoom.
Daniel Harris: Cute Quaint, Hungry and Romantic

The Aesthetics of Consumerism

A fairly thorough critique at not just the visual aesthetics of consumerism but the hidden nuance of scent, tactility, sound and many other details usually lacking from books of this kind. While limited to the low brow the book is scathingly sardonic across all fronts, not just those covered in the title.
John Henry Clippinger: A Crowd of One

The future of individual identity

Acknowledging the progress brought on by the Enlightenment, the author contends that its overbearing legacy of the Individual needs reconsidering. Looking at evolutionary biology,
game theory, self organising social networks and neuroscience, he makes a considered case for the need for a new type of commons; one that takes into account our ability and need for social emotions and interdependence.
More of his work can be found here.
James Surowiecki: The Wisdom of Crowds

Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations

While a bit of a love in for free markets, the book successfully manages to argue the assumption made in the subtitle. Looking at wide ranging anecdotes, he breaks up crowd wisdom into three distinct advantages – cognition, coordination and cooperation. Coupled with the four fundamentals needed for an intelligent crowd – diversity, independence, decentralisation and aggregation –
the central thesis seems more prescient as time goes on.
Robert Kinross: Unjustified Texts

perspectives on typography

Fairly heavy reading. The author deals with the ubiquitous yet hardly recognized or understood aspects of typography. More a series of readings and essays than a cohesive book; topics range from newspapers, paperbacks and road signs, while dealing with the notion of what constitutes a typeface.
Mark Buchanan: The Social Atom

Why the rich get richer, cheats get caught and your neighbor usually looks like you

Following the premise that it's the patterns, not people that dictate group behaviour. As physicists are able to anticipate patterns that emerge when looking at atoms, social trends can be viewed in the same way. While other books look at the connections between groups, this is a refreshingly scientific look at the forces and movements of human action.
As expected the author has set up a blog to further the ideas in the book.

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