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Stu Kauffman just gave a fascinating talk at the Almaden Institute on Complexity.
I would bet that his discussion of cells and genetic signaling networks will also apply to the brain and synaptic networks. The evolution of evolution itself moves up a hierarchy of abstractions to act at the network topology level.
Here are my rough notes from Kauffman’s talk:
Cells are dynamically critical because being critical is the best way to coordinate complex behaviors. (critical meaning the edge between chaos and order)
We have been taught that natural selection is the only source of order. What if there was a law that governs all of biology? It would be profound and would alter our view of biology. There are organizing principles that biology “obeys” because it is selectively useful. It’s like finding one of Newton’s law of motion for cells.
Cells are very complex. Genetic regulatory nets:
Transcriptome in yeast regulates 6500 genes, Humans: 25K
Transcription factor -> promoter or enhancer. Protein signaling cascades.
Transcriptome+protein signaling network is a parallel processing non-linear stochastic dynamical system.
Huge web. Nobody knows structures and dynamics.
Systems biology is trying to look for general laws
10^8000 genome state space.
Percolate: order, all fixed states.
Derrida deconstructionist. Mafia+deconstructionist = make you an offer you can’t understand
Hamming distance. Fan-in of K=2 or less. Take a Random network. Take 60K logic gates at random. Each gate has 2 inputs. The system Behavior is simple. It spontaneously goes to ordered regime. Nearby states converge. Dt = Dt+1 is the critical line.
Being critical is very, very rare. If it exists, it must have been selected for over 3.8B years of evolution.
Why cells should be critical?
Cells must bin past discriminations to future reliable actions
• Order: convergence in state space forgets past distinctions. Info-lossy
• Chaotic: small noise yields divergence in state space trajectories precluding reliable action
• Critical: near parallel flow optimizes capacity to bind past and future
Bacteria: operons for different food and different enzymes
Critical Boolean networks maximize robustness to mutations
Cell types correspond to attractors
Critical networks maximize the probability that such mutations leave all existing attractors intact and occasionally add new attractors.
Thus, critical networks optimize robustness of cell types to mutations and the capacity to evolve new cell types.
Mutual information: correlation between 2 variables. Entropy of variable A + B – joint entropy. Between 0 and 1. 0 = no correlation.
Ways to go from order and chaos. Inputs: order until K=2, peak for criticality.
If k greater than 2, then put lots of 1’s in there. P-bias of .15
Model of floral development shows criticality.
E.Coli: apply random 1500 values on real network; also to Yeast medusa network, 200 regulatory genes in medusa head, rest are regulated 3500 genes (humans 2500 regulating genes in medusa head, 23K regulated). If apply random Boolean functions to the yeast network, why would it be critical? This is about the dynamics of the networks. Cells do thermodynamic work. Work is constrained release of energy in few degrees of freedom, but it takes work to create the constraints. Cells do this, but we don’t have concepts for it in physics.
Hela 48 hourly time point. Affy gene array data. Lempel-Ziv analysis. Cells clearly are not chaotic; they are either ordered or critical (data lie on top of each other)
Avalanche size distribution. Deletion – see how many other genes change. Log-log straight line power law. Slope -1.5 power law (critical branching process). 250 yeast deletions, measure how many alter their activity. Ilya’s work.
NCD: normalized compression distance. Analysis of toll-like receptors on surface of macrophage. Ideal compressor. Take random length n, concatenate 2 of them. Ideal compressor will compress to n. 2 random ones, won’t be able to compress it. The more you can compress, the more similar they are. Regression gives a diagonal line, indicating it is critical. Nature, Dec 2006 Max Planck. Binary and ternary discretization leads to line that is critical. It’s breathtaking.
This is self-organization in nature via natural selection. If this is right, it may be a general law, one of the few laws in biology (e.g., Darwin, a few in ecology and population genetics). We will create life anew in the next 15 years. My bet is that life anywhere in the universe will be critical because it is the best way to coordinate complex behaviors.
All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I like this one best; )
Unnecessary complexity, chaos, financial woe and a gradual erosion are all symptoms of a sick NHS in the UK. However, most of us who reside in the UK already know this, so I opted for a more subtle conceptual approach that can be compared to a mechanism of infinite complexity, that cannot do the job that it was originally created to do.
I also attempted to address abitrariness and the intrinsic nature of the NHS to British culture/society, both conceptually and actually. I won't expand on these ideas any further in written form, because the perception of the viewer is intrinsic to the arts, particularly to abstract art.
The idea of inserting text into the already complex visual forms, was to attempt to render the text partially unreadable and to partially cohere text with the visual forms. Some words retain an identity seperate from the visual forms and "shout out" phrases, some that appear to be abitrary and others, such as "Whistleblow" "Car Crash" "Corporate" and "illegal" that have a direct relevence to the overriding concept of the work.
Simon
Sometimes complexity is preferable to simplicity, but I’ve tried to simplify the forms in this shot to create some kind of order in the tangled branches. For me the shot is about the overall composition and you should have seen me moving from side to side trying to give the trees space. For anybody that has tried this shot, I’m sure you will know what I’m talking about. Anyway, I also love the way the fog has helped give this shot some depth into the forest, but also in colours. I love the blues in the distance juxtaposed against the oranges, greens and yellows of the foreground. Anyway, hope you find the shot interesting if nothing else...
An interesting little building I see every morning on my way to work. It is one of my favourites of its size. The more I study it the more I understand about the complexity and contradictions of todays local society. Eager to go forward and yet so pre occupied with traditional symbols and values.... — at Riyadh, Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia.
VAR_4432T
Dopo le falesie, e spiagge non molto attraenti ma con un negozio di articoli da mare che mi ha riportato alla mente le mie vacanze jesolane (colpa dell'odore. Tutti i negozi che vendono salvagenti e affini hanno lo stesso odore. E io quell'odore, per anni l'ho sentito solo a Jesolo. È tranquillizzante, comunque trovare potenzialmente un po' di Jesolo in tutto il mondo), dopo il porto des Minimes con le sue banchine e le centinaia di barchette ormeggiate; dopo tutto ciò, finalmente, si vede La Rochelle, quella iconica. Con le torri che stanno all'imboccatura del porto vecchio e la chiesa metà chiesa e metà torrione.
A vederla un po' da lontano, sulla diga (non molto diga, veramente, molto più passeggiata buona per passeggiare a piedi e in bicicletta, portarci il cane e pescare), c'è ancora una volta quel senso di dejà vu che hai quando vedi dal vero qualcosa che hai sempre visto in foto o alla tv. Un po' come sul ponte di Rialto o davanti alla Tour Eiffel.
Ed è bello cominciare da una diga che si protrae verso l'oceano, perché così l'approccio è quasi lo stesso di un navigatore che finalmente, via mare, arriva al porto vecchio, con l'entrata, le torri e tutto il resto, come era stata pensata e immaginata da chi ha costruito tutta La Rochelle. Entrare dalla porta principale pur non essendo in barca, insomma.
Così a La Rochelle, in qualche modo, ho potuto arrivarci via mare, vederla avvicinarsi piano piano e immergermi in essa gradualmente, come sempre si dovrebbe fare, per lasciarsi conquistare.
Pacer 142 014 forming the 14:17 from Manchester Piccadilly to Chester, at Skelton Junction. The derelict line to the left was the Cheshire Lines to Glazebrook, with a further connection to the LNW line to Broadheath and Warrington. The Pacer is about to bear left, and join the MSJA, now Metrolink, into Navigation Road. 3rd July 2017.
the absence of evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence. For the type ofestimation problem, see Fermi problem. For the music album, see Fermi Paradox (album). For the short story, see The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model.A graphical representation of the Arecibo message – Humanity's first
attempt to use radio waves to actively communicate its existence to alien civilizations. The Fermi paradox (or Fermi's paradox) is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilization and humanity's lack of contact with, or evidence for, such civilizations.[1] The basic points of the argument,
made by physicists Enrico Fermi and Michael H. Hart, are:
• The Sun is a young star. There are billions of stars in the galaxy that are billions of years older;• Some of these stars likely have Earth-like planets[2] which, if the Earth is typical, may develop intelligent life;• Presumably some of these civilizations will develop interstellar travel, as Earth seems likely to do;• At any practical pace of interstellar travel, the galaxy can be completely colonized in just a few tens of millions of years.According to this line of thinking, the Earth should have already been colonized, or at least visited. But no convincing evidence of this exists.Furthermore, no confirmed signs of intelligence elsewhere have been spotted, either in our galaxy or the more than 80 billion other galaxies of
the observable universe. Hence Fermi's question "Where is everybody?"
brainu.org/files/wikipedia_fermi_paradox_information.pdf
Frank Drake in 1961 in an attempt to find a systematic means to evaluate the numerous probabilities involved in the existence of alien life. The speculative equation considers the rate of star formation in the galaxy; the fraction of stars with planets and the number per star that are habitable; the fraction of those planets that develop life; the fraction that develop intelligent life; the fraction that have detectable, technological intelligent life; and finally the length of time such communicable civilizations are detectable. The fundamental problem is that the last four terms are completely unknown, rendering statistical estimates impossible.There are two parts of the Fermi paradox that rely on empirical evidence—that there are many potential habitable planets, and that we see no evidence of life. The first point, that many suitable planets exist, was an assumption in Fermi's time that is gaining ground with the discovery of many exoplanets, and models predicting billions of habitable worlds in our galaxy..The second part of the paradox, that we see no evidence of extraterrestrial life, is also an active field of scientific research. This includes both efforts to find any indication of life,[36] and efforts specifically directed to finding intelligent life. These searches have been made since 1960, and several are ongoing?Those who think that intelligent extraterrestrial life is (nearly) impossible argue that the conditions needed for the evolution of life—or at least the evolution of biological complexity—are rare or even unique to Earth. Under this assumption, called the rare Earth hypothesis, a rejection of the mediocrity principle, complex multicellular life is regarded as exceedingly unusual.The Rare Earth hypothesis argues that the evolution of biological complexity requires a host of fortuitous circumstances, such as a galactic habitable zone, a central star and planetary system having the requisite character, the circumstellar habitable zone, a right sized terrestrial planet, the advantage of a giant guardian like Jupiter and a large natural satellite, conditions needed to ensure the planet has a magnetosphere and plate tectonics, the chemistry of the lithosphere, atmosphere, and oceans, the role of "evolutionary pumps" such as massive glaciation and rare bolide impacts, and whatever led to the appearance of the eukaryote cell, sexual reproduction and the Cambrian explosion.This is the argument that technological civilizations may usually or invariably destroy themselves before or shortly after developing radio or spaceflight technology. Possible means of annihilation are many,[68] including war, accidental environmental contamination, or poorly designed artificial intelligence. This general theme is explored both in fiction and in scientific hypothesizing. In 1966, Sagan and Shklovskii speculated that technological civilizations will either tend to destroy themselves within a century of developing interstellar communicative capability or master their self-destructive tendencies and survive for billion-year timescales.Self-annihilation may also be viewed in terms of thermodynamics: insofar as life is an ordered system that can sustain itself against the tendency to disorder, the "external transmission" or interstellar communicative phase may be the point at which the system becomes unstable and self-destructs.Another hypothesis is that an intelligent species beyond a certain point of technological capability will destroy other intelligent species as they appear. The idea that something, or someone, might be destroying intelligent life in the universe has been explored in the scientific literature. A species might undertake such extermination out of expansionist motives, paranoia, or aggression. In 1981, cosmologist Edward Harrison argued that such behavior would be an act of prudence: an intelligent species that has overcome its own self-destructive tendencies might view any other species bent on galactic expansion as a threat It has also been suggested that a successful alien species would be a superpredator, as are humans.New life might commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets.On Earth, there have been numerous major extinction events that destroyed the majority of complex species alive at the time; the extinction of the dinosaurs is the best known example. These are thought to have been caused by events such as impact from a large meteorite, massive volcanic eruptions, or astronomical events such as gamma-ray bursts.[76] It may be the case that such extinction events are common throughout the universe and periodically destroy intelligent life, or at least its civilizations, before the species is able to develop the technology to communicate with other species.
The beach was full of small constructions an outdoor installation maybe, or somewhere that lured people into building, expressing themselves in stone.
This image appears in the current issue ( 12 ) of LIGHT LEAKS magazine, under the theme EVIDENCE!
THANK YOU !!
This exposed root system reminds me of neural tissue and the complexity of the human brain.
The stump looks like the cell body of a single neuron. The roots like axons or dendrites that lead away and interconnect with other neurons. The connections between nerve cells are called synapses.The average brain contains 100 trillion neural connections, or synapses. That is at least 1,000 times the number of stars in our galaxy.
Rover 3500SE SD1 (1976-86) Engine 3528 V8 OHV Production 37,900
Registration Number C 875 FJO (Oxford)
ROVER ALBUM
www.flickr.com/photos/45676495@N05/sets/72157623690660271...
Following the Rover P6 the SD1 was a revolution. The only carry over being the V8 engine with 155bhp at the begining and 190bhp from the Vitesse version, from 1982. After the complexity of the P6 the SD1 was simplicity, with McPherson struts at the front, live axle and drum brakes at the rear.
Initially built at the purpose built state of the art extension to the Solihull plant alongside the TR7, production shifted to Cowley in 1981 following the Ryder report, and Solihull concentrated solely on Land Rover.
Between 1976 and 1981 there were some very minor updates to the car including new badging (front and rear) and chrome backed door mirrors. A more comprehensive facelift followed in 1982 after the move to Cowley.
The SD1 was also a very affective and successful racing car Steve Soper and René Metge won the 1983 RAC Tourist Trophy driving a Rover Vitesse. Andy Rouse won the 1984 British Saloon Car Championship driving a Rover Vitesse. Jeff Allam and Armin Hahne won the Group A class and finished 12th outright at the 1984 Bathurst 1000 in a Tom Walkinshaw Racing (TWR) Rover Vitesse. Tom Walkinshaw and Win Percy won six rounds of the 1985 European Touring Car Championship driving a TWR Rover Vitesse. TWR Rovers won three rounds (Monza, Donington and Silverstone) of the 1986 FIA Touring Car Championship. in touring car races the 3.5 L Rover V8 engine produced approximately 340 bhp (254 kW; 345 PS) by 1986.
The car was also extremely popular with a number of British Police Forces
After its replacement in 1986 by the Rover 800 Series, the SD1 was produced very briefly in Madras, India as a Standard 2000, powered by an elderly 2 litre engine of 83bhp and with raised suspension – was a failure also due to its high price and Standard ceased car manufacture soon after.
Diolch am 93,075,837 o olygfeydd anhygoel, mae pob un yn cael ei werthfawrogi'n fawr.
Thanks for 93,075,837 amazing views, every one is greatly appreciated.
Shot 23.04.2022 at the Bicester Spring Scramble, Bicester, Oxfordshire 158-411
“A imensidão é o movimento do homem imóvel, é uma das características dinâmicas do devaneio tranqüilo”.
Gaston Bachelard, IN: "A Poética do Espaço"
I went out on to the balcony to water the plants when I saw the chap above sitting on my bougainvillea and not really moving so decided to try to capturing him, went inside, grabbed my camera, which fortunately had the macro lens on, went out and he was still just sitting there with the late afternoon sun shining on him. I was absolutely amazed at the complexity of its head. I lowered the green of the leaves to make him stand out a little more and cropped the shot.
Something different from me and hope you find it interesting.
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I'm calling this one "Complexity". I went to Portland Head Light this morning to hope that the sun would peep its head out from behind the clouds, only to be rewarded with some very complex and beautiful clouds, and no sun. But the image is an interesting one anyway, I think. You can see (and purchase) this here: cfwphotography.smugmug.com/…/Portland-Head-Light-M…/
RAW Conversion using Capture One. Photoshop has not been used in these images.
Copyright © 2009 Jacqueline Stewart Brown. All rights reserved. Photos may not be reproduced without the permission of Jacqueline Stewart Brown.
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