Daily Archives: June 9, 2010

Understanding Artificial Life

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You’ll remember the recent announcement about the first synthetic life form, created by team Venter. But what does that mean, really? How truly synthetic is it really? What aspects of Nature needed to be input in order for it to be viable? Too much for it to be called truly synthetic? What dreams are out there to do better? What’s the science behind such a challenge? How did the mechanisms for life that we know know actually evolve, and what steps are adjustable or reproducible?

These questions and many more are addressed in a lovely special edition of BBC […] Click to continue reading this post →

Search Results

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Googling people is often interesting. One thing I’ve noticed is that in the search results it seems people are showing up a lot more on various kinds of databases, business networking groups, social networking groups (of course) and so forth. Is this a growing phenomenon? Are people joining more of theses, or are various network entries automatically generated? (I ask this as someone who walked away from facebook, for example. Perhaps I’ll talk more about why some other time…)

In this vein, I forgot to mention that a little while ago I discovered that I have a Wikipedia entry. I am not sure how I feel about this, but it is (I suppose) flattering that someone took the time to add this to the things out there on the web about me. (I don’t think it was automatically generated.) I’d previously assumed that if an ordinary person had a Wikipedia entry it must mean that they wrote it themselves. After all, who would be interested enough to write one about someone else? Seems […] Click to continue reading this post →