Enzymind Labs

David Brooks wrote a spot-on opinion column in the NY Times today, "The Alpha Geeks ". Brooks is an influential journalist, button-down political pundit, and cultural commentator.

 A second hand posting for a drupal developer at Institute for the Future, a nonprofit thinktank in Palo Alto:

Craig Venter talks about synthetic life and the complexities of the modern world. http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=fywt65vl52 He talks about making science learning/education more engaging which is a general ambition I have for enzymind.

I disaggree with his statement that human-directed biology design is replacing darwinian evolution. I think mom nature will always have the edge over our pidly little brains.

And a nice video on relativistic gravitational lensing:

http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=nbgvogt9gb

A creation science vs evolution debate video. The desire to argue for the exististance of a creator appears to me to be primarily motivated by emphasizing the psychology of fear of death and that by accepting creation science and god that you (the creation science proponent's soul) may be able to be immortal. A slight aside, one of my early motivations for pursuing science and biology was ...fear of death...and the belief that through scientific understanding I might someday be able to find a way to -significantly- increase my lifespan.

The following symposium planning document hits on several areas relevant to Enzymind's goals, particularly items 1 and 5 for the upcoming conference:

 

Message to Potential Symposium 2008 Attendees and Contributors

Google's opensocial social netoworking strategy looks interesting. I may end up trying to integrate various api's such as these into enzymind rather than trying to roll something myself. Maybe I should make an enzymind myspace too...

2007-09-03 18:31:31

A nice paper on anological thinking: Metaphor is Like Analogy.

A topic of interest in terms of analogical reasoning being pretty cetnral to the creative process.

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I'm thinking about starting a writing project based around using fractal software like apophysis as 'system' or model for thinking about multidisciplinary computational creativity. There was some interest on the apophysis mailing list in creating documentation for IFS math and the fractal flame algorithm that would be more easy to understand and I thought it might be fun to extend the math theory into the full spectrum of relevant topics. I think presenting the topic like this might be particularly relevant to the current Enzymind proposal. This is a rough outline:

2007-07-15 17:44:54

A really nice information visualization system called we feel fine by Jonathan Harris. Well done.

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An interesting paper on Web 2.0 based collaborative content creation environments:

Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation

2007-07-10 14:59:14

I added topic tags for complexity, metphor and community. When creating new content, mulitple terms in a vocabulary can be selected -but I wish that could be done without using the control key...

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