Friday, October 23, 2009

The Amazing Bouncing Pebble Toad

(via Maikelnai’s blog : BBC One)

Sunday, October 18, 2009
Creationism Algorithm

(via Neosprockets)

Creationism Algorithm

(via Neosprockets)

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The only way to break from the past is to kill it off along with all those who prefer to live there. Nature has devised a grandly elegant way to do this by giving us clocks that coldly kill us so that are children are limited in what they can learn from us while making their own way forward, rather than forever living under our perceived notions of what is true and right. Without death, there would be no revolutions, no exploring beyond the flat edges of the known earth, and no attempts made to leave a lasting legacy behind. There would also be no hope of escaping from under the current dominations of the less qualified.

Death kills everything that does not regerminate with a fresh mix of DNA and rise from its former ashes to try new things. In the mid 90s, Apple had to die to live again. And today, Microsoft is a large cancerous parasite being leached to death by a series of attacks launched by quicker and more innovative rivals.

Today’s Microsoft will die, just like the old IBM monopoly and the British Empire and the Caesars and the dinosaurs. The only question is, will Microsoft reinvent itself and live on in a new form, or sink into history as one of the most troublesome diseases to ever hold back the progress of our society’s technological advancement?

Daniel Eran Dilger at RoughlyDrafted Magazine
Friday, September 25, 2009
The pessimistic view is that the urge for this holistic understanding is offset by man’s desperately myopic determination to maintain his superiority as a species. As each criterion for uniqueness turns out not to be unique, then it was the (more difficult to prove) capacity for abstract thought. The ability to use tools was considered unique, until it was demonstrated that other species used tools, and then the criterion became the making of tools … and so on ad absurdum. What is the problem? Perhaps man’s only unique attribute is a self-conscious obsession with uniqueness. And for what is this supposed uniqueness and superiority used? For the mass murder and torture of his own species, for the keeping of other species under atrocious conditions as a living larder, for the deliberate and conscious destruction of the non-renewable resources and fragile ecosystem of our plane. Homo sapiens is arguably the only species to carry out these acts conscious of the fact that it is possible to behave differently.

John Frazer

Themes VII: An Evolutionary Architecture (page 21). The Architectural Association, 1995