For tens of thousands of years our ancestors understood the world through myths, and the pace of change was glacial. The rise of scientific understanding transformed the world within a few centuries. Why? Physicist David Deutsch proposes a subtle answer.. Here is the video from TED.
Occasional Musings
by Murali Jayapala
A Life of Its Own Where will synthetic biology lead us?
Synthetic biology is a new field of biological engineering which aims to make biological engineering easier, by taking a more engineering approach – build’em and test’em.
A recent article in NYtimes explores this issue. Here is an excerpt:
“.. Scientists have been manipulating genes for decades; inserting, deleting, and changing them in various microbes has become a routine function in thousands of labs. Keasling and a rapidly growing number of colleagues around the world have something more radical in mind. By using gene-sequence information and synthetic DNA, they are attempting to reconfigure the metabolic pathways of cells to perform entirely new functions, such as manufacturing chemicals and drugs. Eventually, they intend to construct genes—and new forms of life—from scratch. Keasling and others are putting together a kind of foundry of biological components—BioBricks, as Tom Knight, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped invent the field, has named them. Each BioBrick part, made of standardized pieces of DNA, can be used interchangeably to create and modify living cells.”…
More about this here: [The Link]
Another related article in the New Atlantis: [The promises and perils of synthetic biology]
More about Synthetic Biology: [www.syntheticbiology.org]
Everything you wanted to know about E.Coli
E. Coli are fascinating creatures. They live everywhere, even within our bodies. In addition to being part of our daily lives, they also play an amazing role as a scientific tool in biology. Read/hear more about this fascinating creatures in sciam’s podcasts.
How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer: A story about networks, 6 degrees of seperation
Interesting videos about complex networks and degrees of seperation.
More about this here: [The Link]
The End of Theory: Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete
According to Chris Anderson, we are at “the end of science”, that is, science as we know it.” The quest for knowledge used to begin with grand theories. Now it begins with massive amounts of data. Welcome to the Petabyte Age.”
“At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later.”
More about this here from Edge.org: [The Link]
With various responses to that article: [The Responses Link]
Singularity: Special Report in IEEE
In 2008, IEEE brought out a special issue on Singularity. Anybody who is interested in developments of technology will probably be familiar with the term (Technological) Singularity. Perhaps popularized by futurist Ray Kurzweil (author of “Singularity is Near”). Discussion about what is singularity, is this really happening, who are the players..etc – are collected in this IEEE portal.
More of this here: [IEEE Singularity Page]
35 People, Place and Things that will shape the future
As appeared in 2008 EE times article. IMEC is named as one of the places!
More about this here: [The Link]
Why -> how -> what. talk by Simon Sinek
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers — and as a counterpoint Tivo, which (until a recent court victory that tripled its stock price) appeared to be struggling..
Below is the talk from ted.com.
Also worth checking his website: http://www.startwithwhy.com/
Reading in Digital Age
Recently there was an article from Nicholas Carr titled “Is Google Making us Stupid?” and there was much debate and arguments about it, which I am sure it can be googled very easily 🙂
But the following article I found quite interesting. Especially about contemplative thought vs analytical thought. Here is an interesting snippet.
“…This starts me wondering about the difference between contemplative and analytic thought. The former is intransitive and experiential in its nature, is for itself; the latter is transitive, is goal directed. According to the logic of transitive thought, information is a means, its increments mainly building blocks toward some synthesis or explanation. In that thought-world it’s clearly desirable to have a powerful machine that can gather and sort material in order to isolate the needed facts. But in the other, the contemplative thought-world—where reflection is itself the end, a means of testing and refining the relation to the world, a way of pursuing connection toward more affectively satisfying kinds of illumination, or insight—information is nothing without its contexts. I come to think that contemplation and analysis are not merely two kinds of thinking: they are opposed kinds of thinking. Then I realize that the Internet and the novel are opposites as well….”
More about this here: [The Link]
The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton
Recently came across the review of the above book. Seems like an interesting book to have a look into. Below is an excerpt from the book.
“…. here we stumble upon another hurdle – escapism. Isn’t ‘elusiveness’ just another term for avoiding the question? Eagleton considers the question of the meaning of life to be an ethical one: but it’s doubly hard to find the core values of life and struggle toward living them out without singling out any ideology from which to make ethical judgements. Ethics aim at bringing integration and harmony to human life, not vagueness, and so measuring one’s life against some kinds of ethical standards or values is central to the pursuit of life’s meaning. In this sense the question cannot be prevaricated. And ultimately, the author considers two core values as the defining features of a meaningful life: love and happiness. Readers are of course free to come up with their own values by which to measure their life’s meaningfulness (or meaninglessness). Yet the most precious advice that we get from The Meaning of Life is that using values, even the most positive values, as means to an end, is a dangerous road to travel if you really are setting out for the meaning of life. Rather, attaining meaningfulness requires that positive values be ends in themselves, not the road to some hidden destination. Practicing good values is the ultimate treasure, and no meaning surpasses it.
The Meaning of Life is an important work for all readers of serious issues, in that it invites discussion on one of the most difficult questions which concern everyone. At the end of the book Professor Eagleton reminds his readers that his discussion is not supposed to provide a final answer to the mega-question of life, nor does he expect any other treatise to do so. He does, however, succeed in reminding us that the question is there; that it is worth contemplating; and that engaging in the quest for meaning is an exciting adventure which itself constitutes part of the meanings of life as much as breathing is part of physical life.” … Ernest Dempsy.
More about this here: [The Link]