I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again “I know that’s a tree”, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: “This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.”
— Ludwig WittgensteinOn Certainty

Archive for October, 2009

iRobot’s Soft Mobile Morphing Robot

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Because in the encyclopedia of nature, wheels are rarely mentioned.
 

Ockham’s Broom

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

The Journal of Biology has begun an interesting thematic series entitled “Ockham’s Broom“[1], which they describe thusly:
Ockham’s broom is an implement conceived by Sydney Brenner as the device whereby inconvenient facts are swept under the carpet. This is common practice in biological research where the facts often cannot be explained all at once; but in […]

Errata for More Than Life Itself

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

This PDF [1] contains the currently known errata for Aloisous Louie’s More Than Life Itself [2]. Aloisius has confirmed these. Fortunately, they are few, only typographical in nature, and none of them are too serious. If anyone happens to find any others, please let me know and I will update the PDF.
 
References
[1] ML Errata.pdf
[2] Louie, […]

Paper: A Top-Down Approach to a Complex Natural System: Protein Folding

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

Alan Levin has published the paper “A Top-Down Approach to a Complex Natural System: Protein Folding” in Axiomathes. The abstract:
We develop a general method for applying functional models to natural systems and cite recent progress in protein modeling that demonstrates the power of this approach. Functional modeling constrains the range of acceptable structural models of […]