Pascale Soleil: artificialNaturewhat we make of lifeBigger is Much Hotter- June 25, 2002 Get your mind out of the gutter! Bigger is definitely hotter, but not necessarily better. Sometimes small and nimble and cheap is good. Q and Green Destiny are the respective champions in the debate. The bottleneck in parallel processing is communication speed, getting information from one part of the machine to another in a timely fashion. Do it with proximity and you get heat and huge energy consumption to keep things from melting down. Do it with fiber cable and things stay cool but slow..http://radio.weblogs.com/0100595/categories/artificialnature/2002/06/25.html#a131 Giving New Meaning to the Term 'Assisted Living'- June 24, 2002 Why waste valuable wage-earners' time taking care of elderly, forgetful Mom or Dad, Grandma or Gramps, when you can get a handy-dandy AI in a box to do ithttp://radio.weblogs.com/0100595/categories/artificialnature/2002/06/24.html#a129 Another Piece in the Puzzle- June 23, 2002 I'm thinking that this book, Linked: The New Science of Networks by Elbert-Laszlo Barabasi, should be sold in a matched set on Amazon with Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. We're going to see this convergence more and more often as time goes by we're at the right place technological, socially, and economically to start thinking about networks in this way. The algorithmic, rules-based functioning of DNA is just the tip of the iceberg. A New York Times article points to economics as another...http://radio.weblogs.com/0100595/categories/artificialnature/2002/06/23.html#a124 Write Your Own Ticket- June 11, 2002 Don't look now. The future is charging up on us in the most alarming the most exciting way. One of the major obstacles to building molecular-sized biomachines looks like it's been overcome, at least for some applications. Scientist Chad Mirkin and his colleagues have turned an atomic-force microscope into a 21st century quill pen, which "dips" into DNA ink and can write onto a variety of substrates. This Wired article has more.http://radio.weblogs.com/0100595/categories/artificialnature/2002/06/11.html#a113 Last words from Gould...- June 2, 2002 This interview could make a person melancholy. Stephen Jay Gould talks about books he plans to write, religion, and pattern. My first book, ''Ontogeny and Phylogeny,'' was about organisms. My new book is about theory. I need to write one about pattern, which I think will be called ''Life's Direction.''...Q: ...many people associate you with the idea that there may not be as much pattern in the world as we think. A lot of the patterns we see are entirely contingent. Most of them would not be...http://radio.weblogs.com/0100595/categories/artificialnature/2002/06/01.html#a103 |