Month: March 2016

Life over 9 orders of magnitude

The size of things in our universe runs all the way from the 10^-19m scale of quark interactions, to the cosmic horizon 10^26m away. In these 45 orders of magnitude, life is confined to just 9 orders of magnitude, in the middle of the universal range: Bacteria and viruses can measure 10^-6m and the height of the largest trees reaches 100m. The honey fungus is 4km across. Known sentient life is 3 orders of magnitude.

Does Stress Speed Up Evolution?

Skepticism hasn’t kept Rosenberg and Austin from seeking medical applications of their findings. 1 application is cancer. His experiments suggest that putting too much stress on cancer cells by hitting them with high doses of cancer drugs could accelerate their evolution to develop drug resistance. “We give the patients as much as they can tolerate, guaranteeing the emergence of resistant cancer cells”, adding that the current aggressive approach to cancer treatment has largely failed.

Galaxy-size creature?

One could, in principle, imagine “creatures” that are far larger. If we draw on Landauer’s principle describing the minimum energy for computation, and if we assume that the energy resources of an ultra-massive, ultra-slothful, multi-cellular organism are devoted only to slowly reproducing its cells, we find that problems of mechanical support outstrip heat transport as the ultimate limiting factor to growth. At these scales, though, it becomes unclear what such a creature would do, or how it might have evolved.

Cyborgization after UBI

Instead of pursuing a strategy of increased externalisation, perhaps we could pursue increased integration. In other words, perhaps we could merge ourselves (our bodies; our minds) with technology. Perhaps we could become cyborgs. That way, the systems that I lamented towards the end of the previous section would no longer threaten to sever the link between what we do and what can be achieved. They would be integrated into who we are. We could have the best of both worlds: the benefits of the enhanced capacities of technology along with meaningful participation in the outcomes the technology facilitates

Architecture contests are concept cars

“New York Horizon” is a prime example of Contestism—a trend in architecture that flows from the convergence of open-design competitions, cheap rendering software, and viral media. The eVolo Skyscraper Competition is hardly the only game in Contestism, but the winning entries tend to follow the same model. Contestism means spectacles that are neither straightforward nor satirical. Instead, they’re shallow and excessively social.

FBI regroups its going dark cosplay

So it appears that the mainstage event over the DOJ’s ability to force Apple to help it get around the security features of an iPhone is ending with a whimper, rather than a bang. The DOJ has just filed an early status report saying basically that it got into Syed Farook’s work iPhone and it no longer needs the court to order Apple to help it comply by writing a modified version of iOS that disables security features.

DOJ drops Apple encryption lawsuit

So it appears that the mainstage event over the DOJ’s ability to force Apple to help it get around the security features of an iPhone is ending with a whimper, rather than a bang. The DOJ has just filed an early status report saying basically that it got into Syed Farook’s work iPhone and it no longer needs the court to order Apple to help it comply by writing a modified version of iOS that disables security features.