How did I miss this before????

Unintelligent Design
A monstrous discovery suggests that viruses, long regarded as lowly evolutionary latecomers, may have been the precursors of all life on Earth
by Charles Siebert, Photography by Jörg Brockmann
From the March 2006 issue, published online March 15, 2006

Now the viruses appear to present a creation story of their own: a stirring, topsy-turvy, and decidedly unintelligent design wherein life arose more by reckless accident than original intent, through an accumulation of genetic accounting errors committed by hordes of mindless, microscopic replication machines. Our descent from apes is the least of it. With the discovery of Mimi, scientists are close to ascribing to viruses the last role that anyone would have conceived for them: that of life’s prime mover. …

The discovery of Mimivirus lends weight to one of the more compelling theories discussed at Les Treilles. Back when the three domains of life were emerging, a large DNA virus very much like Mimi may have made its way inside a bacterium or an archaean and, rather than killing it, harmlessly persisted there. The eukaryotic cell nucleus and large, complex DNA viruses like Mimi share a compelling number of biological traits. They both replicate in the cell cytoplasm, and on doing so, each uses the same machinery within the cytoplasm to form a new membrane around itself. They both have certain enzymes for capping messenger RNA, and they both have linear chromosomes rather than the circular ones typically found in a bacterium.

“If this is true,” Forterre has said of the viral-nucleus hypothesis, “then we are all basically descended from viruses.”

Claverie says, “That’s quite a big jump in our thinking about viruses—to go from their not even being organisms to being all life’s ancestor.” …

“The general public thinks genetic diversity is us and birds and plants and animals and that viruses are just HIV and the flu. But most of the genetic material on this planet is viruses. No question about it. They and their ability to interact with organisms and move genetic material around are the major players in driving speciation, in determining how organisms even become what they are.”

We have been looking for our designer in all the wrong places. It seems we owe our existence to viruses, the least of semiliving forms, and about the only thing they have in common with any sort of theological prime mover is their omnipresence and invisibility. Once again, viruses have altered the way that we view them and, by extension, ourselves. As it turns out, they are not the little breakaway shards of our biology—we are, of theirs.

So it’s not only language…. I’ve been thinking along these lines for a long, long time. It’s so fun to see that I haven’t been the only one. Maybe there’s a contagion-effect among minds, too?

This is very, very exciting scientific research.

Please comment if you know of any new developments!

Messy Folksonomies: The Uses of Metanoise for Better Organizational Collaboration

This presentation will consider the uses of bottom-up, co-evolving folksonomies for better communication and collaboration across disciplinary lines.

For reasons of efficiency, semantic technologies often focus on terminological control. However, where several types of discourse exist within the same organization, a layer of bottom-up vocabulary provides a space for the change and difference that is always part of language. Language, like life, thrives on the border between order and chaos, and even the noisiest and most undifferentiated meta labels can serve a function.

Update 2-18: Actually, it looks like I’m not actually speaking after all. My proposal was accepted by the conference, but my support funding didn’t come through. Oh, well. Maybe next year.

Preview The Allure of Machinic Life at Google Books.

I’m a little annoyed about the title, since I preferred “The Lure of Machinic Life” to “The Allure of Machinic Life.” However, the absolutely wonderful bit on me me me in the acknowledgments almost makes up for it. The book cover is extra-special, too, because it features a suggestive artwork by our friend Joseph Nechvatal.

John Johnston

I’m biased, but I’m also a pretty good critical reader – and this book is fantastic. I think it’s been mislabeled by the marketing people, so I’m afraid that it won’t be read – and that would really be a shame.

Review
“John Johnston is to be applauded for his engaging and eminently readable assessment of the new, interdisciplinary sciences aimed at designing and building complex, life-like, intelligent machines. Cybernetics, information theory, chaos theory, artificial life, autopoiesis, connectionism, embodied autonomous agents—it’s all here!”
—Mark Bedau, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Reed College, and Editor-in-Chief, Artificial Life

In The Allure of Machinic Life, John Johnston examines new forms of nascent life that emerge through technical interactions within human-constructed environments—”machinic life”—in the sciences of cybernetics, artificial life, and artificial intelligence. With the development of such research initiatives as the evolution of digital organisms, computer immune systems, artificial protocells, evolutionary robotics, and swarm systems, Johnston argues, machinic life has achieved a complexity and autonomy worthy of study in its own right.

Drawing on the publications of scientists as well as a range of work in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory, but always with the primary focus on the “objects at hand”—the machines, programs, and processes that constitute machinic life—Johnston shows how they come about, how they operate, and how they are already changing. This understanding is a necessary first step, he further argues, that must precede speculation about the meaning and cultural implications of these new forms of life.

Developing the concept of the “computational assemblage” (a machine and its associated discourse) as a framework to identify both resemblances and differences in form and function, Johnston offers a conceptual history of each of the three sciences. He considers the new theory of machines proposed by cybernetics from several perspectives, including Lacanian psychoanalysis and “machinic philosophy.” He examines the history of the new science of artificial life and its relation to theories of evolution, emergence, and complex adaptive systems (as illustrated by a series of experiments carried out on various software platforms). He describes the history of artificial intelligence as a series of unfolding conceptual conflicts—decodings and recodings—leading to a “new AI” that is strongly influenced by artificial life. Finally, in examining the role played by neuroscience in several contemporary research initiatives, he shows how further success in the building of intelligent machines will most likely result from progress in our understanding of how the human brain actually works.

Language is not only a virus (grin) but also an essential bit of the block of the discourse network that co-evolves with technological change and human action to give rise to the computational assemblage; or, machinic life is always already within you (and without you) but here are some of the details.

Now – go forth and buy many copies, and tell all thine friends (and thine enemies as well) to read and discuss.

Try these too!

• Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation
• Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays by Friedrich A. Kittler (Critical Voices) – (introduction, edited and translated)
• Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis’s the Recognitions and Postmodern Theory (Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction)
• Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961-84 – (translated)
• In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents) – Jean Baudrillard – (translated)
• On The Line (Foreign Agents) – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – (translated)

Dell Inspiron i530-111B

• Intel Core2 Q9300 Quad-Core Processor (6MB L2 cache, 2.5GHz, 1333 FSB)
• 6GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM Memory at 667MHz – 4 DIMMS (2×2GB, 2×1GB)
• 750GB Hard Drive (7200 RPM)
• DVD+/-RW (Plays and writes CDs and DVDs)
• 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
• Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio/Dell Speakers
• 19-in-1 Media Card Reader
• USB Keyboard and Mouse

Samsung 22″ Wide-Screen Monitor

This was thrown in so they could call it a package deal:

Canon PIXMA MP470 All-in-One Printer, 22 PPM, 4800×1200 DPI, Color

And I got an HP webcam too.

It just barely topped the limit required to get 2-year no interest financing. I’ll pay it off in 6 months or so.

Of course, I was home with everything opened before I remembered that I could have saved a bit of money if I had been able to wait until the tax holiday at the end of the month…. nah!

The system comes with Vista Home Premium installed, and so far it’s fine. I bought WinXP Professional a few days ago, but I may stay with Vista for while and see how it goes.

1) So, I blew a couple of capacitors on my motherboard and now I’m looking for a deal on a new computer. I’d like a dual- or quad-core processor and 2-4G RAM and lots of disk space. I also need a monitor because mine is snapping and crackling and it’s only a matter of time. A built-in webcam would be kind of neat, too. Post links if you happen to see anything. No Celeron anything.

2) To keep myself busy this weekend, I purchased a pressure washer and started in on the layers of mold and other crud on the deck. It was like painting a house with a calligraphy brush. I spent… oh… six, seven hours on the first pass – just with water. I don’t want to use bleach on wood, and I also want to protect the plants and the fish in the pond, but I also want to kill the mold. Recommendations?

3) Besides monkeygrass and pachysandra and vinca, what other groundcovers do well in drought, and on a hillside, and in scorching sun or mildrew-y shade?

4) What color should I paint a room that has orange couches in it? No yellow.

5) Is this a really bad time in Atlanta to trim back azaleas and other shrubbery, or can I do my Kali dance with the hedge-clippers?

Here’s what it looked like at about 8:45 or so:

It’s already June 30th now – I have to go to sleep! – but the data is for the 29th.

Everything seemed wild tonight.

Wow! The air quality went crazy! Look at that carbon monoxide burst! Did something happen?

Today’s AQI (Primary Pollutant) for Metropolitan Atlanta

1-8 9-16 17-24
01 43 (PM25 ) 09 44 (PM25 ) 17 128 (CO )
02 43 (PM25 ) 10 45 (PM25 ) 18 206 (CO )
03 43 (PM25 ) 11 45 (PM25 ) 19 236 (CO )
04 31 (PM25 ) 12 47 (PM25 ) 20 268 (CO )
05 31 (PM25 ) 13 48 (PM25 ) 21 53 (PM25 )
06 44 (PM25 ) 14 50 (PM25 ) 22 53 (PM25 )
07 44 (PM25 ) 15 52 (PM25 ) 23 53 (PM25 )
08 44 (PM25 ) 16 66 (CO ) 24 53 (PM25 )

Carbon Monoxide (CO) is an odorless, colorless gas that is a by-product of the incomplete burning of fuels. Industrial processes contribute to CO pollution levels, but the principal source of CO pollution in most large urban areas is the automobile. Cigarettes and other sources of incomplete burning in the indoor environment also produce CO. CO is inhaled and enters the blood stream; there it binds chemically to hemoglobin, the substance that carries oxygen to the cells, thereby reducing the amount of oxygen delivered to all tissues of the body. The percentage of hemoglobin inactivated by CO depends on the amount of air breathed, the concentration of CO in air, and length of exposure; this is indexed by the percentage of carboxyhemoglobin found in the blood.

Health effects
CO weakens the contractions of the heart, thus reducing the amount of blood pumped to various parts of the body and, therefore, the oxygen available to the muscles and various organs. In a healthy person, this effect significantly reduces the ability to perform physical exercises. In persons with chronic heart diseases, these effects can threaten the overall quality of life, since their systems are unable to compensate for the decrease in oxygen. CO pollution is also likely to cause such individuals to experience angina during exercise. Adverse effects have also been observed in individuals with heart conditions who are exposed to CO pollution in heavy freeway traffic for 1 to 2 hours or more.

In addition, fetuses, young infants, pregnant women, elderly people, and individuals with anemia or emphysema are likely to be more susceptible to the effects of CO. For these individuals, the effects are more pronounced when exposure takes place at high altitude locations, where oxygen concentration is lower. CO can also affect mental function, visual activity, and alertness of healthy individuals, even at relatively low concentrations.

Air quality levels
The air quality standard for CO, which is designed to protect public health with an adequate margin of safety, is 9 parts per million, averaged over 8 hours. EPA is required to issue a public alert when CO levels reach 15 ppm, a public warning when CO levels reach 30 ppm, and a public declaration of emergency at the level of 40 ppm. The significant harm level, at which serious and widespread health effects occur to the general population, is 50 ppm of CO.

–Condensed from Measuring Air Quality: The Pollutant Standards Index; Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards, US EPA; EPA 451/K-94-001; February 1994. Cited at http://www.air.dnr.state.ga.us/information/co.html.

The same site listed today’s air as healthy.

Health Advisory: The air quality is good and you can engage in outdoor physical activity without health concerns.

I think I’ll probably have to make a distinction between long-term interoperability modeling goals and short-term projects that address specific needs. I’ve got a lot more resources to add to my toolbox now, and a better understanding of the context and history of what’s happening with this kind of technology. It turns out that there is also an academic version of this conference, and a few publications, so I can probably start to follow some of the wider theoretical questions there. For what I need to do, I’ll have to be more practical.

I helped out at an informal book signing today. One of the authors had just finished an excellent presentation (two perspectives on ontology – big O and little o – “the Two Towers” – {grin}) and he was tied up in conversation. Meanwhile, the other author was trying to swipe credit cards and make change and sign books to each person. There was a long line of people waiting, so I jumped in and took care of the selling transactions so that he could just sign the books. I don’t think they expected such a response – two boxes of books sold out rather quickly. The book looks very helpful. Check it out at Amazon:

I had intended to blog on the conference in more detail, but I’m too tired. These have been long days – worthwhile, but tiring.