07 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
Questioning Air Pollution
How should a living organism live?
When spring arrives, you open your doors, the wind blows in. The smell of flowers fills the airand colors come back to lifeSometimes when it rains or when it’s foggy out. You can’t help but breathe the air deep into your lungs and experience the feeling of small water droplets filling them up. Both piercingly cold but also pure and fresh.
In autumn, you would spend a whole afternoon with a loved one doing absolutely nothing, basking lazily in the sun.... 1 
notes
notes16 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
If Everyone is Altruistic
The day will come, says Spencer, when altruistic inclination will be so well embodied in our organism itself that people will compete for opportunities of self-sacrifice and immolation. When altruistic inclinations are implanted in everyone, how will opportunities arise to apply them? Either such a state presupposes the existence of persecutors, tormentors and tyrants, or else the general urge to sacrifice oneself will engender benefactors who will turn into tormentors and persecutors merel...
1 24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Umwelt
In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of the umwelt. He wanted a word to express a simple (but often overlooked) observation: Different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different environmental signals. In the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it’s electrical fields. For the echolocating bat, it’s air-compression waves. The small subset of the world that an ...Folksonomies: perception senses
Folksonomies: perception senses
1 David Eagleman on how each species of animal senses only a small portion of the world, and assumes that small fraction is the entire world.
23 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Plasticity is a double-edged sword
Plasticity is a double-edged sword; the more flexible an organism is the greater the variety of maladaptive, as well as adaptive, behaviors it can develop; the more teachable it is the more fully it can profit from the experiences of its ancestors and associates and the more it risks being exploited by its ancestors and associates. Folksonomies: evolution plasticity
Folksonomies: evolution plasticity
1 notes
notesQuoting Donald Symons: Too much plasticity and the organism can gain maladaptations, too little and it cannot adapt at all.
22 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Life Feeds on Negative Entropy
[A living organism] ... feeds upon negative entropy ... Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.It sucks the orderliness from its environment.
11 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Language is Alive
Language is simply alive, like an organism. We all tell each other this, in fact, when we speak of living languages, and I think we mean something more than an abstract metaphor. We mean alive. Words are the cells of language, moving the great body, on legs. Language grows and evolves, leaving fossils behind. The individual words are like different species of animals. Mutations occur. Words fuse, and then mate. Hybrid words and wild varieties or compound words are the progeny. Some mixed word... 1 notes
notesIt evolves, leaves fossils, speciates, etc.
30 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Homeostasis
The constant conditions which are maintained in the body might be termed equilibria. That word, however, has come to have fairly exact meaning as applied to relatively simple physico-chemical states, in closed systems, where known forces are balanced. The coordinated physiological processes which maintain most of the steady states in the organism are so complex and so peculiar to living beings- involving, as they may, the brain and nerves, the heart, lungs, kidneys and spleen, all working coo... 1 notes
notesOrigin of the word, meaning the tendency of animal life to maintain an internal equilibrium.
13 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Constant and Free Life
Constant, or free, life is the third form of life; it belongs to the most highly organized animals. In it, life is not suspended in any circumstance, it unrolls along a constant course, apparently indifferent to the variations in the cosmic environment, or to the changes in the material conditions that surround the animal. Organs, apparatus, and tissues function in an apparently uniform manner, without their activity undergoing those considerable variations exhibited by animals with an oscill...Mammals and other animals that maintain a constant environment within themselves are free of the changes to the world outside them.
03 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
All Technology is Social Engineering
Stanford University researcher Jeremy Bailenson has demonstrated that changing the height of one’s avatar in immersive virtual reality transforms self-esteem and social self-perception. Technologies are extensions of ourselves, and, like the avatars in Jeremy’s lab, our identities can be shifted by the quirks of gadgets. It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering.
[...]
When developers of digital technologies design a program that re... 1 notes
notesWhen a developer designs an interface for a user to interact with a computer, they imply you are a program. When they put up a wiki, they suggest humans ultimately have a single point of view.
09 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Genes and Their Effect are Cybernetic
The software, the program. is responsible for organizing hardware, the organism. Yet throughout the process, it is the organism in its various stages of development that has to run the program. In other words, the hardware runs the software, whilst at the same time the software is generating the hardware. 1 notes
notesWith the genes programming the biology, and the biology writing the genes.
