So much to read this week! Here are a couple of quick links of interest:
Carl Zimmer on comparing the E. coli genome to Linux code:
A number of scientists have begun to compare natural and manmade networks. A lot of the same rules appear to be at work in the growth of the Internet, airport connections, brain wiring, ecosystem food webs, and gene networks. But very often, scientists are finding, it's the differences between natural and manmade networks that are most revealing, offering clues to the different ways in which people and evolution build complex things.
And the NYT Magazine has an article by Gary Wolf on people who are WAY more organized than I could ever be:
Another person I'm friendly with, Mark Carranza -- he also makes his living with computers -- has been keeping a detailed, searchable archive of all the ideas he has had since he was 21. That was in 1984. I realize that this seems impossible. But I have seen his archive, with its million plus entries, and observed him using it. He navigates smoothly between an interaction with somebody in the present moment and his digital record, bringing in associations to conversations that took place years earlier. Most thoughts are tagged with date, time and location. What for other people is an inchoate flow of mental life is broken up into elements and cross-referenced. . . .
Ubiquitous self-tracking is a dream of engineers. For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves. A hundred years ago, a bold researcher fascinated by the riddle of human personality might have grabbed onto new psychoanalytic concepts like repression and the unconscious. These ideas were invented by people who loved language. Even as therapeutic concepts of the self spread widely in simplified, easily accessible form, they retained something of the prolix, literary humanism of their inventors. From the languor of the analyst's couch to the chatty inquisitiveness of a self-help questionnaire, the dominant forms of self-exploration assume that the road to knowledge lies through words. Trackers are exploring an alternate route. Instead of interrogating their inner worlds through talking and writing, they are using numbers. They are constructing a quantified self.
Finally, at the top of the post, some real bioart: snail graffiti by artist Slinkachu, from the blog Inner City Snail. (See also his great Little People street art series). Thanks to Josh at TFK for sharing!
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That Carranza dude sounds like a fucking nightmare. Who would ever want to interact with someone like that?
Graffiti snail mail! Traditional graffiti is intended to carry some 'messages' actually; territorial, gang affiliations and what not. So that's neat :D
that tiny people was unbelievably cool, and I really want to start leaving messages on snails now.
Snails need to release ammonia through their shells. If you block that ammonia release they die.
Although I only dimly remember this, my understanding is that land snails excrete less ammonia than aquatic snails, and ammonia release through the shell is not a major excretory process for them. So I doubt Slinkachu's graffiti tags block enough ammonia to do any harm. Anyone want to collect a bunch of garden snails and do a clinical trial? ;)
"constructing a quantified self"????? I gotta say, I'm with CPP on this one. I would not want to spend 5 minutes with that dude.
Sometimes while I'm doing something or talking with someone or watching a movie or play or concert, I'll catch myself thinking, "I should blog about that!" And I'll actually start writing a blog post in my mind while I am interacting with the person or watching the event. Then I have to remind myself that life is supposed to be lived and experienced, and is not just fodder to be bookmarked, processed, reviewed, and regurgitated for someone else.
What happens if that dude has a thought and doesn't feel like notating it in his fancy system? Does he then have to notate "I didn't feel like notating Thought X at 5 pm on Friday May 14th but I did it anyway"? How dull and sad.