06.29.09
Posted in Philosophy, Creative Writing, Cultures at 12:58 am by SigmaX
Fireflies over a wooded lagoon at midnight. Absolutely beautiful. Absolutely ominous. The amazing context of the world I rarely see, the real world. It’s like the music behind an epic movie, deepening, defining, and enriching my everyday experience. It reminds me of all I have not seen, from the formation of the moon by a vast interplanetary collision to the world of the dinosaurs to prehistoric man to ancient civilization to, well, to the modern civilization I don’t fully appreciate until I put it into a wider context.
Fireflies over a wooded lagoon at midnight.
SigmaX
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Posted in Philosophy, Religon, Science, Creative Writing, Cultures, Physics at 12:05 am by SigmaX
Can you imagine the sense of mystery and confusion that surrounded 18th & 19th-century exploration of physical principles we now take for granted? Consistent & intriguing results surrounding chemical mixtures and the speed of light demanded explanation, but how do you know your brilliant model is true, instead of a bogus idea that just happens to fit the data? Dalton revived ancient Hellenistic atomism, equipped with better evidence than Lucretius could have dreamed of (the ancients’ arguments depended heavily on questionable cosmology, while Dalton was interpreting local experimental results), and the wave nature of light was taken to imply the existence of an invisible medium through with electromagnetic disturbances propogate. Dalton’s intuition proved more sound, and we still teach his view to our children today. Read the rest of this entry »
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06.26.09
Posted in Literature at 2:25 pm by SigmaX
Code is to codify as confluence is too…. ???.
Pfft. Language. It really needs a formal grammer without exceptions!
SigmaX
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Posted in Literature, Biology at 2:20 pm by SigmaX
My world has been turned upsidedown yet again. Zacchaeus didn’t really climb a sycamore tree. From good ol’ Merry Webster:
sycamore
1: a fig tree (Ficus sycomorus) of Africa and the Middle East that is the sycamore of Scripture and has edible fruit similar but inferior to the common fig
2: a Eurasian maple (Acer pseudoplatanus) with long racemes of showy yellowish-green flowers that is widely planted as a shade tree
3: a very large spreading tree (Platanus occidentalis) chiefly of the eastern and centrual U.S. with 3- to 5-lobed broadly ovate leaves.
The third one is the definition I’ve always assumed was absolute truth. But no. Entirely different trees. Entirely.
*twitch,* *twitch*
Siggy
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06.04.09
Posted in Life, Religon, Science, Biology, Cultures, Physics, Geology at 7:05 pm by SigmaX
Would you believe that not one week after my
last post, in which I described a naive fondness for geology and biology/ecology, I coincidentally had the opportunity this morning to go hiking with two experts, one each in both areas? And not just any hike — but an Italian Alpine hike.
Jim Gibson and Ben Clausen (pictured) are from the
Geoscience Research Institute (The SDA organization that deals with the science that makes believers most uncomfortable — i.e. geology and paleontology) and are here (as am I) in Bobbia Pellice (It’s pronounced Babbbbbbio Pellllllllliicheh — I don’t know how Italians manage to speak so fast with so many draaaaawn out syllaaaaables, and I still haven’t figured out how to “draw out” double consonants) for the
Gloria Patri conference on science and religion. I’ll be the fourth presenter tomorrow morning out of twenty-four or so total over the course of the weekend (wish me luck! The title is “Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Design”). It’s somewhat unique of a conference in that it’s academic, but yet very friendly and comfortable. I’m nervous, to be sure, but this is a group that I would feel comfortable looking like a dummy in front of if I have to.
Also, Google seems to have decided that I speak Italian now, based on my IP address.
Read the rest of this entry »
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06.01.09
Posted in Science, Mathematics, Physics at 9:03 pm by SigmaX
Prepare for mind popping:
Imagining the Tenth Dimension
Siggy
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05.31.09
Posted in Science, Biology at 11:56 pm by SigmaX
Right on topic with my last post, I went to the beach today. When I got there my dream-meter was in its usual stable state, labelling my future as complex systems and/or AI and/or neuroscience directed. Small perturbations from this equilibrium frequently occur, but I always drift back to it with a fairly strong Lyapunov exponent.
Within half an hour I wanted to be a biologist. Something about the crickets, foliage on the dunes, and some beach grass that looked like small bamboo and which a friend told me has been around virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. I could get down with poking at this stuff and figuring how it all works together. Especially if I could do it while listening to crickets and feeling the wind blow. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Science at 2:03 pm by SigmaX
So it hit me the other day that I haven’t a clue how the age of sedimentary rock (and thus the fossils therein) is determined. C-14 barely gets us past the neolithic, and other radiometric dating methods only work with original rock, i.e. igneous and (to a certain degree) metamophic samples. But dating a sedimentary rock would tell you the age of the igneous/metamorphic rock that makes up the particles in the sediment, not the time it was actually laid down.
Strangely enough this turned out to be somewhat difficult to Google for. Eventually I figured out that “layers” was the keyword I needed, and “dating rock layers” led me to the Smithsonian’s site on paleobiology, which confirmed that the matter is much more interesting than straight-up measuring of Uranium-235 ratios. “Relative dating” is quite the puzzle to be fit together.
Cool beans!
SigmaX
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05.30.09
Posted in Religon, Politics, Theology at 6:27 pm by SigmaX
Blogs on politics are usually ridiculous. Having spent a summer programming for and moderating Blogster.com, I can say first hand that the Internet is fully of wacky, unsubstantiated mudslinging against political figures. A popular one used to be that Bush was on a “holy war.”
I’ve never given it a moment’s thought. Vehement epithets against your demon-in-office of choice mean nothing. It just means your an angry person with little skill at critical thinking. But what if a journalist claims to be quoting Chirac himself as being “stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq.” And here’s the supposed Bush quote that’s been floating around the web:
“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”
And we’ve spent the next how many years making the French the butt of our jokes? If this is true, then of course they didn’t join us. This is dog gone scary. Scary enough to get my attention, even if the evidence so far is slim (what advantage would it be for Chirac to go public?)
This comes at the same time Adventism is caught up in a growing bruhaha over how much evolutionary thought to allow in their colleges, with many clinging to the idea that evolution is 100% opposed to their faith and must be fought with tooth and claw (i.e. theistic evolutionists termintated from church employment or kicked out of the church).
Dude. Fundamentalism sucks.
Siggy
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05.28.09
Posted in Computing, Science, Biology at 1:40 pm by SigmaX
Have codons in the genetic code always been three nucleotides long? Why is it that almost all life we know of sticks religiously to a three-nucleotide system? Is it conceivable that the number could have changed, or would it require too big of an evolutionary leap to do so?
These questions are addressed by a team of Irish scientists who have developed a computer model that seems to show not only that the length of codons can conceivably change with plausible mutations, but that it necessarily converges to an optimal three-nucleotide system. The number “three” is small enough to be managable and prone to editing, but large enough to allow full expression of the 21 amino acids (and the STOP codon) that life one earth utilizes.
Read the paper, published yesterday. They even hint that their research can help elucidate where the complex DNA machinery came from in the first place:
“Our findings suggest a plausible scenario for the evolution of the triplet genetic code in a continuous manner. This scenario suggests an explanation of how protein synthesis could be accomplished by means of long RNA-RNA interactions prior to the emergence of the complex decoding machinery, such as the ribosome, that is required for stabilization and discrimination of otherwise weak triplet codon-anticodon interactions.”
Siggy
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