Video Feedback Loops vs. Life and Memetics
January 28, 2010
Here are some stills from Talysis - a short film that Paul Prudence made for the Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture held in Utrecht, Holland in Autumn 2005. The film explored elements of self-organisation and crystallisation - autocatalytic replication and recursive symmetry using digital video feedback.
I vividly remember seeing my first “video feedback loop” (VFL) some 18 years ago while I was round at Mike and Penny Leander‘s home on Devonshire Street in London. Basically I knew their sons Luke and Rudi via school and, because we shared that mangled lust for “living-it-large,” we kindled a friendship that was forged over many good times, wild experiences and grooves of saturnalia. Though while I won’t divulge too much about our hedonistic escapades, lest I digress into a wild nostalgic stroll down memory lane and thereby forget the reason for my writing, I will “briefly” set the scene… As it seemed that an array of natural events were conspiring to posit an idea about the way in which the universe functioned as a whole. For it was this very idea that became a powerful defining aspect which shaped the rest of my life…
To be precise, my first “VFL” experience occurred about three or four months after our G.C.S.E. exams had finished. Summer was over and it had became very clear that winter was prematurely reaching out through autumn’s colorful spectacle, dragging us reluctantly back into her dark and frosty embrace. The 92₃ term of A-Level studies was already well underway by then, and notions of chemistry, physics, economics and math were weighing more on the mind than they normally did. Every morning, while drawing the curtains, I couldn’t help but notice the varying circadian patterns of wild ice crystals that has grown in the cold of night before over the single paned windows… And, as I marveled at their structure before heading off to the gym, I couldn’t help but notice how similar they were to ferns… These in turn resembled many other structures that I had recently become aware of through my studies. So I began to wonder whether there was some kind of mold that interlinked everything together in an intricately ordered, yet probabalistic way. As a direct result of viewing these ice crystals, I felt compelled to do some research into why these beautiful structures came about. And having just studied the phsyical chemistry of water in class i.e. hydrogen bonding, I had found out that chaos was beating at their heart. Thus I went to the school book store and ordered the first book that appealed to my senses: “The New Scientist Guide To Chaos,” which had been published earlier that year.
Having read both Darwin’s “On The Origin Of Species” and “The New Scientist Guide To Chaos”, much began to spin through my mind… Was there really a key to the order of the universe, one that could give rise to infinite diversity? Could there be such a rich and complex divergence of natural chemistry so that it never quite repeated itself exactly, giving credence to Darwin’s “theory” of evolution, allowing natural processes to slowly generate new wondrous bio-mechanical machines that were interlinked from the dawn of life to the present moment in a long chain of progeny and modification? All my teachers were saying “nonesense” to me. But still these ideas came back even stronger… Then all of sudden, almost as a tonic to this internal philosophical monolog, one of those much needed half term breaks sprung up… Needless to say it provided me with a deep sigh of well earned relief… So off we all scampered, heading to wherever and/or whomever would have a marauding mischievous teenager, or two, for a week!
I myself went home to see the parents. And having spent most of the week in their sanguine company, eating and walking our way through the country side, I began to grow restless for some company of equal stature to my own growing appetites. I needed to put family business to one side and reclaim the reigns to the torrent of the questions I had been pondering over before this holiday. Thus, at the end of the week, I rang Luke and Rudi to find out what they had planned for their “last weekend of freedom…” And the very next day I found myself on a train heading up from the country side to the great city of London, where an assorted company of “friendlies” awaited my arrival before the games and revelry of the weekend began. All the journey I began to imagine fractal patterns in the bustle of human life. And any conversation that I overhead began to yield shapes of self-similarity through out their syntax… Self-referencing was key to the transition of conversational subject matter. Could this be associated with the M-Set too? Churning over these ideas in my mind, I marched down from Baker Street tube in a gleeful stride of exuberance, and pressed the intercom on the front door of the Leander’s residence. Eventually the silence gave way to that electric crackle, and I could hear, behind the muffled inquiry as to who it was from Luke, a clamorous wild cheer of a salute! No doubt the day’s events spiraled beautifully upwards from there on in with an updraft of good company and vivid imaginations. As I launched some of my ideas into the general conversation’s flow, I was inspired by new insights and suggestions from the others.
On the whole, the night went very well… Luke, Rudy, Clay, Amy, Lucy, Cheds and myself were all smiling hard through out. But as all good things do, the adventure finally came to an end as twilight began press through the gloomy neon glow from the clouds above… We had foraged deep into the city’s heart and explored the myriad of lives unfolding in the realtime rhythm of London’s never ending pulse… Swaying from fatigue, we were justly full of sumptuous new experiences, feeling content and alive from all the noctural action. Home was on our minds… And the idea of a comfortable pad to hide from the harsh “reality” of the coming day was a warming thought. So when we arrived back inside, it was with a hearty sense of lightheaded and youthful joy that we declared it was now time to chill out and relax… Somewhere in between putting the kettle on and the cups of tea that followed, we decided that the Orb’s “Adventure’s Beyond The Ultraworld” and the KLF’s “Chillout” would provide the perfect soundtrack to our morning’s laid back groove. And so it was…
But as young restless minds go, banter never ceased for one moment, and wacky ideas, games and practises kept coming out… The party, it seemed, didn’t take well to lying down. Eventually some of the energy did dissipate, and Rudi decided it would be a good idea to interview us all with their new video camera while we all lounged languidly into the “sofa Sunday” that lay ahead. What insights these interviews yielded into our states of mind, I cannot honestly remember. But after our parley, we decided it was a good idea to play back the footage to check our responses for any incriminating evidence that might give us away to any parental veiwing. And it was here that the magical moment unfolded… Sometime in between connecting the camera up to the television and playback, Rudi managed to point the it’s lens back at the flickering screen. And something amazing happened… Patterns started cascading across the television’s screen… Light, reflected from the sparsely lit room, was being picked up and thrown back into the screen’s gliding image… Like a kaleidoscopic array of lights that flickered through interlinking present moments to form a familiar spiraling shape, they slightly modified their position into nearby zones of similarity, evolving into ever changing eddies of wondrous delight in a dream like sequence of order. Every tilt of the camera cast a direction for new pattern to follow, and I was instantly hooked on these beautific arrangements… Nothing could tare away my gaze from the majestic tapestry of Escher-esque delineations that ran across the screen like rain glitters from leaves while streaming down through bright sunlit forests. I had fortunately seen the M-Set for the first time earlier that year, when Emily Mander had sent me three postcards, containing various assorted zooms into the M-Set, down from Manchester. I still don’t quite know what inspired her to send them to me but, as all good friends do, she knew they contained something that would allure me… Thus I immediately recognized the similarity between the two patterns and all the thoughts about evolution, ice crystals and ferns joined to together in one big loop. After that moment, rarely did those images leave my mind… I came back to them time and again, wondering about their beauty and familiarity. It was almost as though the universe was offering up this obvious pattern to which many were so oblivious.
Many years passed as these trains of though grew and grew into an ever deeper understanding about the whole… And it wasn’t until I finished university and had moved into my own home, that I got a chance recreate these mesmerizing visual patterns for myself. After a landing a steady job and a lot of saving, I eventually I got myself a secondhand television set from the local sound and vision centre in Epsom, Surrey. And after a few months more of penny pinching, I purchased a cheap, but decent, digital video camera off eBay… On the day that the camera arrived, I switched off my cellphone and set up my first VFL! Not once did the thrill wear off… And over the next few years, right up until I sold my television set, I would get up in the middle of the night and film new footage of heterogeneous self-organizing patterns, using nothing more than the “cathode ray tube” (CRT) television as a canvas, a mirror and a Canon XL-1 video camera for the visual feedback “brush.” The “reams” of looped feedback patterns that were generated all resembled the fractal structures I had witnessed in the M-Set and throughout life’s journey so far. No doubt it was a key to understanding nature’s process.
To date I have amassed well over one hundred hours of video feedback loops, all recorded onto DV tape, using various sources for initiating the patterns i.e. neon lights, lava lamps, pictures, people dancing, etc… To initiate a pattern, all one does is simply place the light object in between the CRT and the video camera… And off they flow. One day I will get around to transferring these cascades onto my YouTube account for everyone’s viewing pleasure. But for the moment, the bulk of my feedback loops will remain in the musical domain.
The Alan Turning monument in Bletchley Park.
As a sort of note about the inspirational chord that was struck within me, I wanted to post the following video which discusses how feedback loops tie into what Alan Turing was working on between 1952 and his untimely death in 1954 i.e. morphogenesis and the math of pattern formation. Reason being is that I feel it ties into the essence of all things within this universe flow, including all the Life here on earth. In 1952 Turing published one paper on a then unique and previously unheard of subject. It was entitled, “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis,” which put forth the Turing hypothesis for pattern formation. However, it wasn’t until well after his death that the scientific community began to realize the full importance of his work within the domains of the biological and evolutionary sciences. Since then, science has realized that Turing himself single handedly set the foundations for a new and refined understanding about how Life might “simply” have come about as a result of nothing more than natural phenomena.
In my humble opinion, it is in this powerful realization that Life suddenly finds a new perspective of relevance i.e. that We, as human beings, are nothing more than the result of billions of years of pattern formation that has arisen from all the star dust found here on planet Earth. We are fortunate to be a part of this wild and unfolding universal beauty… And it is Chaos’ hand that makes everything similar and yet uniquely different. No doubt there are many planets/worlds where these wondrous moments of Life have never been fortunate enough to have had a chance to arise i.e. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. And it would do us immense good to remember this whenever/however we can i.e. whether we are reminded through feedback patterns from video art, OR through the more commonplace and daily memetic feedback loop created through the media industries’ reporting of current events which guide our minds into the current belief systems that we use to understand the world around us. For when we begin to see this humbling truth, we can then begin to realize the danger that a single story can pose from humanity i.e. one religious doctrine, and how it might exclude other important ideas from the evolutionary game of memes and natural selection. After all, mankind’s Life is currently highly dependent on ideas… And, if these ideas never evolved, then our memes/ideas/technology/art/language/etc… would be still very much like the single celled cyanobacteria of Proterozoic times.
Life is a loop… And it feeds back onto itself… Just like a VFL. Much in the same way that some leaves might use feedback regulation between the plant hormone auxin and its efflux carrier, which is a basic chemical feedback loop, to create the wondrously beautiful and varied leaf venation patterns that we all can see throughout the plant kingdom… So mankind uses the memetic feedback loop of media and current social modes of understanding to define its relation to the surrounding and ever changing enviroment. Always shifting, ever iterating, developing into new heady modes of survival and creative means of Being, we continually do our best to better ourselves as a part of the whole that we come from, so that we may realize our true potential for understanding and carrying on “healthy” patterns of creation.
If you would like to learn more about Dr Graham McDonald at Salford University, please click here.
Or to learn more about Bletchly Park and/or Alan Turing, please click here and/or here respectively.
Fractals in Science, Engineering and Finance (Roughness and Beauty)
January 27, 2010
Just the other day a friend dropped over this great little lecture by Mandelbrot which discusses some of the fractal aspects of the world around us… Thanks Martin!
Fractals in Science, Engineering and Finance (Roughness and Beauty)
Roughness is ubiquitous and a major sensory input of Man. The first step to measure and simulate it was provided by fractal geometry. Illustrative examples will be drawn from the sciences, engineering (the internet) and (more extensively) the variation of financial prices. The beauty of fractals, an unanticipated “premium,” helps in teaching and bridges some chasms between different aspects of knowing and feeling.
To view this video, please click here.
OR to learn more about Benoît B. Mandelbrot, please visit his home page here.
Expanding Those “Varied” Stances Of Perception
January 26, 2010
As Aristotle once said, “it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” As we have been discussing in previous blogs ideas about “illusion,” “percpetion,” “memetics,” “psychology of the masses” and read Edward R. Murrow’s infamous speech about the downfall of television… I think it’s high time we began looking at some of the uncomfortable truths behind our own “grass root” socio-political stances and world views.
Thus, I would like to introduce to you a novel idea concerning the never ending violence that seems to be ever escalating between Israeli forces and Gaza. After all we’ve heard through the media, and bearing in mind how soft our minds can be to external influences i.e. television and general consensus, it might well prove for many to be a hard pill to initially swallow. However, we would be well advised to look at the world through as many perspectives as humanily possible, so that we might see all the aspects and angles on this multi-faceted dispute. For if we cannot put ourselves in “the other’s shoes,” then what hope do we ever have of truly understanding the world and developing a compassionate stance towards other fellow human beings?
Thus I would like to intorduce Avram Noam Chomsky, who is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics. Since the 1960s, he has become known more widely as a political dissident, an anarchist, and a libertarian socialist intellectual. Chomsky is often viewed as a notable figure in contemporary philosophy who, in the 1950s, began developing his theory of generative grammar, which has undergone numerous revisions and has had a profound influence on linguistics. His approach to the study of language emphasizes “an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans” known as universal grammar, “the initial state of the language learner,” and discovering an “account for linguistic variation via the most general possible mechanisms.” He also established the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power. In 1959, Chomsky published a widely influential review of B. F. Skinner’s theoretical book Verbal Behavior, which was the first attempt by a behaviorist to provide a functional, operant analysis of language. Chomsky used this review to broadly and aggressively challenge the behaviorist approaches to studies of behavior dominant at the time, and contributed to the cognitive revolution in psychology. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has influenced the philosophy of language and mind.
Beginning with his opposition to the Vietnam War, Chomsky established himself as a prominent critic of US foreign and domestic policy. He is a self-declared adherent of libertarian socialism which he regards as “the proper and natural extension of classical liberalism into the era of advanced industrial society.”
According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–92 period, and was the eighth most-cited source. He is also considered a prominent cultural figure. At the same time, his status as a leading critic of US foreign policy has made him controversial. And it is within a lecture of his, entitle “Chomsky on Gaza” that we will see his well researched critical flare come to light.
But before we embark on Chomsky’s two hour lecture and question time, perhaps we should prime ourselves with some knowledge of the Israeli vs. Palestinian conflict.
The Gaza Strip, having previously been a part of the Ottoman Empire and then the British Mandate of Palestine, was occupied by Egypt from 1948–67, and then by Israel following the 1967 war. Pursuant to the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in 1993, the Palestinian Authority was set up as an interim administrative body to govern populated Palestinian centers – with Israel maintaining military control of the Gaza Strip’s airspace, some of its land borders and its territorial waters – until a final agreement could be reached. As agreement remained elusive, Israel unilaterally disengaged from Gaza in 2005, saying it was no longer the Occupying Power there. The international community, citing Israel’s continued effective control over the area, continues to regard it as an Occupying Power.
With that out of the way… I present to you an alternative, but equally as valid, view point on the Israeli Palestinian conflict… One that many of us here in the West might never have seen/heard before. I hope, rather than arousing fear and disbelief, it will simply show one how their own world view about other country’s conflicts might not be as “final” as many of us would like to think. Once this is grasped, perhaps we can then begin to see past the egocentric bias of our own country’s medial spin… And in doing that, we might then become aware of the slant that our own government and corporate “powerhouses” place on reported conflicts that have their “monetary” interests at heart, thus justifying to “us” (the dumbed down masses) their continued economic exploitation of other countries via modes of war and civil unrest.
M.I.T. Lecture – International Affairs – Chomsky On Gaza
Bearing in mind Chomsky’s lecture above, I would now like to urge anyone who’s got this far to read and consider the following article, which was written by George Monbiot for The Guardian newspaper, published today, on the 26th January, 2010…
I provide this blog so that you can make up your own mind as to whether or not the war in Iraq was a just war… No doubt, to the many German nationals during the Second World War, the Nazi invasion of Europe would have seemed a just cause. Heavy thought, eh? If you can now begin to see an alternative perspective, then perhaps you might like to visit Monbiot’s Arrest Blair website and remind others that justice still hasn’t been done!
To find out where I sourced this lecture from, please click here.
OR to find out more about Noam Chomsky himself, and all the good work he’s doing here on Earth currently, please click here.
Self-Organized Adaptation Of A Simple Neural Circuit Enables Complex Robot Behaviour
January 23, 2010
As most of the blogs contained within these pages are relating to psychology, consciousness, chaos, behaviour and science, I figured that the following video, provided by Nature, would be of much interest to anyone who might be curious as to how consciousness might be optimized and updated efficiently using self-organizing (fractal) like behavioural patterns derived from chaotic algorithms.
Abstract for “Self-Organized Adaptation Of A Simple Neural Circuit Enables Complex Robot Behaviour”
Controlling sensori-motor systems in higher animals or complex robots is a challenging combinatorial problem, because many sensory signals need to be simultaneously coordinated into a broad behavioural spectrum. To rapidly interact with the environment, this control needs to be fast and adaptive. Present robotic solutions operate with limited autonomy and are mostly restricted to few behavioural patterns. Here we introduce chaos control as a new strategy to generate complex behaviour of an autonomous robot. In the presented system, 18 sensors drive 18 motors by means of a simple neural control circuit, thereby generating 11 basic behavioural patterns (for example, orienting, taxis, self-protection and various gaits) and their combinations. The control signal quickly and reversibly adapts to new situations and also enables learning and synaptic long-term storage of behaviourally useful motor responses. Thus, such neural control provides a powerful yet simple way to self-organize versatile behaviours in autonomous agents with many degrees of freedom.
by Silke Steingrube, Marc Timme, Florentin Wörgötter and Poramate Manoonpong
To find out where I sourced this video from, please click here.
Or to find out where I sourced the article from, please click here.
Cells Go Fractal
January 17, 2010
Sometime in early 2002, having just been to my first (and last) ever football match (with my then flatmate, Mr Ralph Pool) so as to watch Arsenal play at their “legendary” Highbury Stadium, a group of us dispersed into the nearby public house (The Highbury Barn) so that we might sit down and discuss the merits and faults about the way “WE” had just played.
No doubt Arsenal were victorious… So all was good! But, as the match had been against West Bromwich Albion, I could hardly find anything particularly radiant to enthuse about, as it couldn’t have been that tricky-a-match for the then “Dream Team” of football to clinch. It was more a case of Arsenal playing it defensive and warding off any attack from the Albion. Thus, after five minutes of over enthusiastic raving from everyone at the table (bar myself), I was somewhat numb to my core over this sort of narcissistic “bottle” chatter. Nonetheless, as I had made myself a promise to give this “football craze” a go for just one day (mainly because everyone I knew was into it), I felt obliged to stay on and do my best to get involved in the footie flow… After another five minutes I was very close to a state of Transmarginal Inhibition, mainly from the mind crushing boredom that I was experiencing over the slow-mo recapitulation on Arsenal’s “amazing” victory… And having still not had anything constructive spring to mind so as to “pitch” into the conversation with, I decided that the only way forward for these egocentric modes of footie babbling was to imbibe more of the good, inebriating organic solvent, “ethanol…” The final aim being that, at worst, my tongue might loose and I might disperse my then not-too-sunny disposition… Or at best I might push through the Transmarginal Inhibition and actually come to love football like I might a son or daughter of my own. !?!? After all, alcohol isn’t called “the social lubricant of the mind” for nothing now, is it…
Thus I marched up to the bar and ordered everyone another pint of whatever it was they were swilling. As you can imagine, the pub was heaving with good vibes from the victory just past, and the queue was long… While waiting I bumped into a somewhat sheepish looking gentleman with long hair and a maroon colored coat. And as his appearance was of the demeanor that he might be someone who enjoyed football for the essence of coming out together, without getting too overly caught up in the “beauty” of the play, I figured that it might perhaps be a good time to strike up a conversation and get into the groove of footie’s languid lubricious social flow. “Damn good game, eh?” I launched off with. And he turned to me, with his eyes lighting up and rambled on about some amazing tactic of play that Sol Campbell had used to deflect the ball back into midfield for the final goal… “ARSE!” I though, as the beautiful tapestry of eloquent prose which exploded from his mind simply trickled off my own like water from a duck’s back. Thus I stared at him with somewhat vacant eyes, pondering over what to say next from behind a forced smile… But all my mind could muster was, “YES! Marvelous wasn’t it!”
Well… Standing in the awkward silence that followed my seemingly “banal” retort, I noticed the queue wasn’t getting any shorter, especially what with all the foul play that was unfolding at the bar’s brim i.e. queue barging, pushing in, friends taking orders for other friends who couldn’t be bothered to queue, etc… So, pondering on how a ref might bring some order to this bevey rush, I turned back to the maroon coated fellow and asked him how long he had been following Arsenal. “Ever since I was 12, to the present,” he said near enough. As I probed more, I stumbled on what he was currently doing as a job… Low and behold I found out he was doing a Ph.D. in “Fractal Topography” at UCL!!! “WOW!” I remarked… But he glazed over and said, “It’s boring as hell.” After this, I noticed we both tried to bring the conversation back around to what we enjoyed i.e. he tried to engage me in footie banter, and I did my best to reciprocate, after which I’d try to bring the conversation back round to fractals, only to find he didn’t want to talk about “work.” Alas the exchange didn’t last long. But I vividly remember asking him, “Might fractals play any role in evolution or biological diversity?” And he laughed, saying that all fractals were was just pretty mathematical patterns that had no other use what-so-ever. So I suggested that I would trade my football friends for his Ph.D. studies any day. To which the silence re-ensued.
To this very day, I know football is just not my thing… And where as some people ramble on poetically about “this” player touching that kind of defensive play and knocking the ball over to “so-and-so,” who dived and ducked inbetween the defence and then shot a scoring goal like some god… Well, despite the liguistic prose… To me, it’s still just a game where a bunch of talented, hairless monkeys run around a pitch kicking and nudging a ball into nets. Equally so, where some people see my varied ramblings about chaotic discourse within music and non-linear dynamical systems as pointless drivel about computer generated art, I know it touches my soul in a way makes me feel connected to the universe… But this is it. It’s about connection with what you are drawn to. No doubt there are many more footie fans than fractal fans in the world today. But that’s life! And it’s fine… This Ph.D. footie experience was in many ways a humbling reminder about how two people’s views of similar things can vary so drastically that we can sometimes see the beauty within each other’s dislikes. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
However… On some level, I found this brush with the Ph.D. unsettling… Something in me didn’t want to believe it. Hell… Something in me told me he was a “chump” who was more interested in footie than anything real or viable. And still… I had to listen to him. Here was this Ph.D. – a lad who had obviously been studying the math of complex numbers and iterative patterns/structures for quite some now – and, bearing in mind my then somewhat limited understanding about these aberrant beasts of divine simplicity and complexity, who was I to question his well informed personal view on the matter at hand? None the less, I carried on looking into this phenomenon for many years to come, following a sort of gut instinct that seemed to press me ever onwards, regardless of what others would/might say, and eventually I started to develop better modes of understanding about these wondrous forms of divine order and chaotic patterns. To be fair, my interest in this subject has never waned one iota. And despite the opposition to the idea that fractals are somehow locked deep into the very essence of our being, thus defining what and who we really are, it seems that now science is rediscovering these aspects within nearly all dynamical systems of the world. What more can anyone say!?
But besides all this, there were still many holes in the theory. Well… Until last year, that is, when sometime in November I managed to read probably one of the best articles I could have cared to have read, which I had by chance found in a copy of Nature magazine that I had randomly swiped from my doctor’s surgery one “chesty” morning. It suggested that cells were using fractal mathematics to regulate their own internal cellular biology. And, at the very moment of completion, my gut instinct began to feel vindicated. At long last science was beginning to see how “chaotic” flows can create marvels of ordered wonder that could easily give rise to something as marvelous (and “seemingly” impossible) as Life. Here was that link between the beauty that I had seen in the M Set and experienced in Life. This is how chaos’ beautiful flow caused a wondrous event which give rise to all of the Life here on planet Earth. Here lies the key to seeing how we came into being. This is the same powerful internal mechanism that drives our computers to generate the marvelous serpentine flows seen within the M Set… And which, if transposed onto organic molecular soups full of various compounds, also gives rise to the somewhat random, and yet specific, generation of structured internal cellular order. Don’t ask me about the logic there… Perhaps we have to give up understanding for a moment, and simply feel this essence…
How can we mere mortals ever hope to know the unknowable i.e. the shear and almost eternal complexity of “God, or Nature,” as we “supposedly” think we know ourselves? How can we hope to know what chaos will do next? There’s no point in lying to ourselves… We don’t! We won’t! All we need to know is that dichotomies/paradoxes and chaos are wondrous things indeed… Just as wonderful as the notion of “God.” In fact… If you want to still call these wondrous flows of chaotic pattern formation around us “God,” then I can dig that. I might not agree that there is a “God” as such… But I can trip with the notion of a divinely beautiful and somewhat unknowable force i.e. that of chaos, which gives rise to what Spinoza called “God, or Nature.” And it lies in the heart of all beings, whether we love football, or not. Perhaps it truly is the “Thumb Print Of God?”
So I present the article in question, which was written by Claire Ainsworth and was published on September 4th 2009.
Mathematical Patterns Rule The Behaviour Of Molecules In The Nucleus
The maths behind the rugged beauty of a coastline may help to keep cell biology in order, say researchers in Germany. Fractals — rough shapes that look the same at all scales — could explain how the cell’s nucleus holds molecules that manage our DNA in the right location.
In new experiments, Sebastien Huet and Aurélien Bancaud of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, tracked the movement of molecules within cells in a lab dish, then compared the pattern of movement against mathematical models. Large molecules, they found, moved according to the same rules as small molecules — suggesting that their environment was truly fractal. The team reported their findings this week at the EMBO meeting in Amsterdam.
“It’s a really interesting approach,” says Angus Lamond, a cell biologist at the University of Dundee, UK. “It’s very promising that the fractal model appears to be able to describe the [molecular] behaviour in this way.”
To find out where I sourced this article from, please click here.
Or to learn more about our fractal universe, please click here.
And for an amazing expose into how the chaotic and fractal world of math can show us how Life arose naturally i.e. without a divine creator, then please check this BBC documentary out, entitled “The Secret Life Of Chaos.”
For the more scientific minds among you, I also present some articles concerning the fractal dimensions of cellular formations that I have found very illuminating:
2. A comparative fractal analysis of various mammalian astroglial cell types
3. Fractal Dimension Characteristics Of Human Mesenchymal Cell Stem Cell Proliferation
Buddha’s Zen
January 14, 2010
Buddha said: “I consider the positions of kings and rulers as that of dust motes. I observe treasures of gold and gems as so many bricks and pebbles. I look upon the finest silken robes as tattered rags. I see myriad worlds of the universe as small seeds of fruit, and the greatest lake in India as a drop of oil on my foot. I perceive the teachings of the world to be the illusion of magicians. I discern the highest conception of emancipation as a golden brocade in a dream, and view the holy path of the illuminated ones as flowers appearing in one’s eyes. I see meditation as a pillar of a mountain, Nirvana as a nightmare of daytime. I look upon the judgment of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon, and the rise and fall of beliefs as but traces left by the four seasons.”
The Silent Temple
January 13, 2010
Shoichi was a one-eyed teacher of Zen, sparkling with enlightenment. He taught his disciples in Tofuku temple.
Day and night the whole temple stood in silence. There was no sound at all.
Even the reciting of sutras was abolished by the teacher. His pupils had nothing to do but meditate.
When the master passed away, an old neighbor heard the ringing of bells and the recitation of sutras. Then she knew Shoichi had gone.
A Drop Of Water
January 11, 2010
A Zen master named Gisan asked a young student to bring him a pail of water to cool his bath.
The student brought the water and, after cooling the bath, threw on to the ground the little that was left over.
“You dunce!” the master scolded him. “Why didn’t you give the rest of the water to the plants? What right have you to waste even one drop of water in this temple?”
The young student attained Zen in that instant. He changed his name to Tekisui, which means a drop of water.
