why doesn't intelligent design work

It all starts from a very asked around question (at least in Romania): Do you, believe in God?
Usually the answers comes like a Gallup Poll: yes, no, don't know.

Humanity has dwelled in the realms of perfection ever since man discovered numbers (which is btw the second thing we know about development of human thought after the flint axes)
and we use mathematics like some sort of filter through wich we look at the world.
Classical philosophy, exact sciences, pozitivism, technology, everything depends on the fact that 1+1=2. This is the TRUTH
However, the world, the very fabric of reality that we happend to live in is not run, or made up by numbers alone.
Perfection, or what we think perfection is, does not exist. There is no Grand Design behind the evolution of life, nor does it exist in the skies above.
So whenever we look at a tree, or a rock or a human being and start thinking: Wow, it's such a complicated and amazing system, it must have been built somehow. Even across millions of years, it must have been built", take into consideration the fact that everything that there is (in life) is a mutation from something else.
A poplar is just some DNA that decided to go a different path. Noize in DNA (as Ikegami puts it)is the main engine driving the evolution forward, of course, but there is also another very important lesson that quantum mechanics and the latest advances in genome research can teach us:
The world is not set to operate on perfection. Equations can only take us so far(As Popper explains, on this path, the limits to human knoledge are always in sight). Behind it all lies the realm of chaos, the realm of probability, the realm of everchanging transgressions between to be or not to be.
We now know that the so called junk DNA (97% of it that did not seem to do anything)
actually does more than we thought. We found out this when we realised that decifring the DNA is only the tip of the eisberg. The rules and permutations between genes is a much more complicated and bewildering affair.
So is the realm of the atom. the 'God particle' (dubbed by a
scientist with a sense of humor), the Higgs Bosson is nothing more than the human mind's atempt to understand one of the most elusive questions of all time: why is there mass? that is: why we are here? why is there a we? why is there a here where we
are in?
And what did we found out? By using math (because empirical proof is still pending) we realised that at the very bottom of everyithing there is nothing except the chaotical and very fast movements of this particle. This in turn creates a field in which all other particles exist. The drag generated by this field applied to the movement of everything else is supposed to give them mass.
Daunting thought isn't it? To find out that underneath it all there is nothing but chaos and mutations and self-replicating results of the two which in turn integrate and desintegrate by rules we don't seem to understand. This may no longer be the order of numbers that we seem to cherish so much, but if we look at the results (a tree, a rock, a human) there is only one word that springs to mind: BEAUTY.



So while I don't think there's a God that created the world in seven days, LET ME BELIEVE IN A GOD THAT BELIEVES IN BEAUTY

thanks to [+_+] for providing the balcony and the view that insipired this rant.

want to make music? it's all about inserting silence

3d friendship: my best friend is an average of 5.2 persons
meta-emotions: feeling about what you feel
layer cake: horizontal aperture towards pleasure but vertical encasing through thought framing. One could not function without the other.

book review

Bill Bryson- A Short History of Nearly Everything

It's a very big book. My mother's bible looks puny in comparison. And it's also a book that's very hard to pin down. Both in terms of subject matter and in terms of style. Instead, since I've just finished the chapter about DNA i'll write about something that i think i've figured out.

I don't want to have offspring. For a long time I knew this on a very deep level.
And while, as I grew up, everybody around me thought about this attitude of mine as a youthful folie, I kept trying to understand why I was the exception and why people from different backgrounds still have this common denominator. People that are different in all aspects of life want kinds, or at least are not questioning this universal trait of species (or individual) perpetuation.

So why do modern folk still consider kids as part of their life plan?
This may be one of the questions with the most multiple choice answers, ever.

But the one I really like, and it seems to be the right one, is that because our DNA just wants to replicate itself.

It basically goes like this:
DNA is the utmost strangest inorganic substance in our body. It's like an alien
acid that lives right in the center of every cell.
DNA writes software for genes. Genes like good working robots produce proteins. Proteins pretty much control the rest of our bodily functions and the rest is history (or biology) Ok, so we all knew that.
The funny part is that most of the genes don't do squat for our (or any other lifeform's) body. Only very few are in charge of doing stuff like metabolism, eye color, number of limbs, etc. The vast majority is just self self-replication.
It's like a software written for an application that uses 99% of CPU to copy itself onto the hard drive, over and over again, and 1% for that particular application.
Now, read that again and tell me that's not the definition of a virus.

The usual counter argument to the fact that our DNA is only 3% different from that of a bacteria, or that our DNA is less that 1% different from every other human on the planet, is that it's meaningless to think of the tings we have in common with drosophila melanogaster since it's the small single digit percentage that makes all the difference in the world.

But what if it's not? What if the remainder 99% does not belong to us no more than it belongs to the poor fly? What if all life is just a protective and nurturing shell in which DNA can survive and replicate itself. If so, we are nothing but interesting byproducts instead of pinnacles of evolution. Hell, every life form on earth is an interesting byproduct.

And to finish of with the book's leit motif: "Life wants to be. Life does not want to be very much. Life goes extinct."

read it. It gives you head munchies :)

ze frank

I really don't want to link ze frank, because he's a pompous dude anyway. (not that this post is going to change anything)
But respect and admiration should always be given when it is due.
And boy, is it due in this case.
So ladies and gentlemen without further a due, here's the comedy for our generation:

what's so funny about the web?

And here's my short appraisal for everything TED stands for.

uber

Self-publishing galore!

Everybody is a fucking author these days. Including me:

My Kinda



Nothing good will come of this :)

movie

Once again the best fiction is provided by life and a good pen.

It lays the foundation for a digital universe where there is no discrimination — nothing is walled off. In this unified space, all things can be known.

+ context->super = super;
+ context->magic = context_magic;

+ murder.

death is a complex process.

_end.

value

This is the manual I would like my children to learn.

Warning: only for the dedicated.