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.

the coolest market segmentation ever

"Sure, they might own an LCD television, but to them the advantages are that it's flat, easy to dust, and matches the curtains."

"4) Kids

Like people, but smaller."



the article

scarcity

is defined as a condition of limited resources, where society does not have sufficient resources to produce enough to fulfill subjective wants.

The backbone of human civilization

till now. Internet does not operate with scarcity. It operates with abundance.
If throughout history the main economic motor was the ability to acquire as many scarce resources as possible, in the internet world the main economic motor will be the ability to harness as efficiently as possible the overwhelming abundance of everything.
If gold is everywhere, it does not matter how much you have, it matters what you do with it and how you do it. Because gold, both in scarce quantities and in abundance has value in itself: it's a very good metal to use.
Simple, no?

The Days of Swine and Roses

apart from the best title I've heard in years, this tells a gruesome story.

The pigs have gone mad, the world has gone mad!

show me the world

Art in the 21st century is a bit like the internet: abundant and heavily reliant on technology.
from installations that engulf entire blocks to minimalist house music, art is everywhere and just like old Japanese Kabuki plays with our senses by constantly transporting us from bits to atoms and back.
Plus we are now in a key position to access the huge database of past centuries art. Plane tickets have gotten so cheap and the internet along with the advent and plenitude of "beautiful technology" (lcd's, plasma, surround sound, entertainment software)became so ubiquitous , that almost anyone, anywhere, can enjoy the Grand Dutch Masters, for instance. The same is valid for a score performed by the St. Martin In The Fields orchestra, or a Kraftwerk show. From Chinese millennium old pottery to 90's trip-hop albums and back to Olympian tragedies , everything is yours for the taking.

The usual approach of 21st C. artist is (as it has been the case throughout history) to scrape away with the past and start afresh. Take your cues, learn your lessons and move on.
Let's not forget that progress in art is largely dependent on new perspectives, on constant reinventing the means of expression, on denying the establishment in order to build nu art forms.

However, there is one fundamental question that gets asked time and time again. Not because we don't know the answer but because asking it makes us truly human.
The question is, of course: What is the purpose of art? And the answer has always been: 42!
Well, not exactly. But 42, has always been a very good answer to fundamental questions :)) .

No, seriously now, the answer as I'm sure you very well know is that art's first purpose is to stir emotion. To make you feel things. To touch your soul and then leave a lasting impression that will later create ripples of nostalgia that would in turn, create more emotion.

So right from the beginning, art was aimed at our lymphatic systems. Your chemical releasing glands know, far better than you do, how to feel a Monet sunset, or when to produce a much needed tear at the end of a movie.
This would hardly be possible without the aid of our highly evolved central nervous system, but the brain is in art's case, more like iTunes if you will: a hardware/software architecture that enables you to enjoy good music. And, processing information is always an enhancement as it is in any other human interest field.

But in order to create and transmit emotion, the artist must first feel the emotion himself. This is the sine qua non condition in a seemingly ruleless world of art.
Enter the oldest "trick" in the book: the muse. Servicing artists since the dawning of mankind!

What is the muse? the muse is a combination of 2 largely opposite dimensions that battle for supremacy in the artist mind. The first one is the woman, Eve if you like. The most basic human emotion: sexuality. It is common denominator in all human beings and thus serves the utmost important purpose for art: the woman is the vessel through which the artist transports us into the second dimension, which is the realm of the ideal. The land of the ineffable. The platonic world of pure light. The truth. They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This may be so, but beyond that we will always find, paradoxically, something that always make us tick. Maybe because of those same pesky chemical substances that get secreted in our blood lines every minute.

In an art world dominated by self-generated graphics and augmented realities, getting back to the basics in a fresh and contemporary way, while still adhering to old rules and surfaces of display, feels, oddly enough, refreshingly new and touching.

Roq la Rue Galley in Seattle is doing it this summer with their collection entitled VENUS

And I've chosen my favorite.

yours?

-dedicated to mng

imagining the tenth dimension

I know it's a bit far fetched, since even thinking about the fourth dimension makes most human minds bubble (including mine), but you just don't get a better view of the entire theory than this one

One might ask: what is the purpose of all this scientific mambo jumbo, in a time when CO2 levels rise 3 times faster than predicted, the gulf stream is literally vanishing into thin water and basically we will all get our photo op of the apocalypse using our Cannon SLR digital cameras?

Well, I say: I'll just let other people blog about whales and amazonian rain forests. yawn

BTW, here's a self-fulfilling prophecy that's been circulating around these days: Al Gore will (this time) become president, Steve Jobs will become the administration's mastermind and the world will be saved. Of course China and India were unavailable for comment.

truth and beauty

the mathematical answer: fractal structure created with apophysis

human nature

Glucoza este elementul responsabil
pentru intregul flux energetic din organism.
Un fel de Electrica muntenia!

ENDOCRIN.

Spune Moartea: "SENTIMENTELE SUNT O CHESTIE DE GLANDE. DUPA CE TRECI PRAGUL TOTUL TI SE VA PAREA MULT MAI CLAR!" (Moartea vorbeste intotdeauna cu litere capitale).


Un diavol razvratit impotriva lui Lucifer pentru ca ii placea prea mult pe pamant. Iata cea mai libera fiinta din univers. Cand iti pot lua totul, de fapt nu-ti mai pot lua nimic.....pe puscarie direct.

Face vreun zgomot un copac cazut in padure, daca nu e nimeni in jur sa-l auda?

Papilio Tempestae- the quantum weather butterfly. Singurul animal care poate influenta cursul istoriei. O specie cu un sistem de aparare impotriva pradatorilor foarte eficient.


o testoasa, 4 elefanti si o lume disc- poate unul dintre cele mai marete trippuri din viata mea. Eterne multumiri Terry Pratchett.

phoenix or poultry? time will tell

cubecast.net



rising from ashes is harder than acra macabra !

monkey sees, monkey does

a brief theory of geniality.
Premise A: Genius is not created. It may develop later in the human life cycle but it is not a synergy of 'cause and effect' moments, nor it is transmittable.
Premise B: Genius is not debatable. This is a zero sum game.

demonstration:

Let ∂ be a free subatomic particle that obeys no laws of physics. It travels at great speeds throughout the known universe and interacts with no other particle in its path. Not even with antiparticles.
However, there is one place (hence the reason of existence of ∂ ) where it does make a difference: Here. Passing through the synaptic cleft, it's only purpose is to mess up the Calcium Ions.

This phenomenon is extremely rare. By producing quantum-polarity (+, - or +-) the particle, in effect, recreates the basis for synaptic chaos. The following entanglement phase is commonly perceived as displaying this symbol

conclusion:
We have just explained the basic principles behind each and every act of geniality in the universe.

Now, this does not explain however why there is such a big diversity among geniuses. And also why there seem to be 2 major types
One possible explanation might be the wave theory: ∂ particles organize in waves that hit simultaneously one central nervous system. The length of the wave and the frequency are strictly determined by randomness.

Some people call the ∂ particle God. Not many though.

fight club's first rule

Individuality in 2007.
there is no such thing. Special is what never happens to other people.
You are the other person and there is nothing special about you. Your shorts that you put on the Tube are not very funny. The blogs that you create are not at all interesting, the feeds that overload your screen daily are the same that i get.
You are not a creator, you do not posses talent, you do not have the means or the will to produce something worth lasting. You can not switch sides, you will never see life through somebody else's eyes. You will not expand your horizon. You will not learn a foreign language. You can not read more than a few paragraphs.You will not know the difference between good art and junk. You will, however, speak your mind much to often, you will want your needs fulfilled and you will cry the battle anthem each time you feel the world, for whatever unknown reason, is punishing you.
The thoughts you think, the feelings you feel, the actions you take, even the dreams you dream are no more special than the next person's.

Do you agree with me?

you'd better. because this is where informational communism is taking you.
Just because Marx's theory bumped it's pretty little head on atoms does not mean that bits have the same resistant elasticity towards utopia. You loath DRM? Open Source makes you dream of perfect harmonious spherical free worlds? Do you wish Apple would finally let you share the music on your Ipod (in an user friendly manner, biensur)? Bummer. This is how it all begins, my technologically proficient friend.

For better or worse, you and I are going together on this journey. Sometimes on the same side. Sometimes not.
But for the love of whichever deity you happen to fancy, please DO NOT consider yourself special. Trust me on this one. 0 is the best place to start.