"emergence" archive
Friday 2 July
- A meme by any other name - Interesting story on people's given names as memes. I think The Economist blows it, however, in its main point: they suggest that the vicissitudes in naming children seems to be attributable to random drift, and that this casts doubt on... Posted in emergence
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Wednesday 30 June
- Zed was wrong? - Ah, here's a fascinating TNR article about this book I was thinking of reading called The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations. (First of all,... Posted in emergence
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Monday 24 May
- Fun With Fascism - Okay, it's been a long time, but thinkness is back in the saddle. Last week was just too busy, and this weekend pulled me to New Orleans for a bachelor party. I'm still alive, surprisingly, and ready return to blog... Posted in emergence
, political currents
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Friday 2 April
- Biomimetics is cool - Don't have much to say about this summary of biomimetics by David Pescovitz. I suspect there's about a million other biomimetics efforts out there, no?... Posted in emergence
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Wednesday 31 March
- Justified bias - This is an old thought I wanted to catalog a while ago. I had been reading a few screeds from conservative types bitching that academia has such a terrible liberal bias, blah blah, same shit they say about the media.... Posted in emergence
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Thursday 18 March
- Science's shame - This blog-post title works for big-S and little-s science. One of the most pathetic episodes in the recent annals of science was this study published in Science that claimed that ectasy (MDMA) was incredibly bad for your brain, much of... Posted in emergence
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Thursday 4 March
- Emerging biological truths - Leaf stomata and ants both show complex emergent behaviors based on pretty rudimentary rules, sort of like the simple computer simulation Game of Life. Neato.... Posted in emergence
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Thursday 29 January
- Genius in a small package - Could rabies be any smarter? Animals get it, they go crazy, bite other animals, and pass the disease through their saliva. It's frickin' genius! I thought of that after I saw 28 Days Later, a great movie. Why I thought... Posted in emergence
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Friday 9 January
- Meta-evolutionary competition - mindtangle involves an interesting factor regarding thinkness' first criticism of The Red Queen, in which I said that Ridley was substantially underestimating the importance of culture for humans, which turned out to be a big part of my criticism of... Posted in emergence
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Tuesday 8 July
- The production of intended effects - Okay, I'm back now in the Bay [not the land part -- the actual Bay [blub, blub]], frittering my days away in front of a computer. So breathe easy, more posting to come. I just encountered one interesting theme and... Posted in emergence
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Tuesday 24 June
- Let's get 'em, Larry - Some corporate asshole recently tried to tell Lawrence Lessig that every good idea coming from the 'open' and 'free' movement will be co-opted by corporate assholes and exploited. This is an affront to my faith in and hope for cooperative... Posted in emergence
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