Had a cloudy afternoon to spare in Como, Italy. As it turns out, this is the home town of Alessandro Volta (1745-1827), the famous Italian scientist who invented the electric battery, and after whom the unit of electric potential (Volt) is named. And his legacy is still very visible in this small town!
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One of the main reasons evolution can be difficult to grasp, or even accept, is the time scales involved. Biological evolution does usually not occur right in front of our eyes (other than in laboratory experiments), but happens over many generations. Most people, especially in increasingly urbanized environments largely disconnected from the natural world, will never get to see any significant evolutionary change during their own lifetime.
Read the full piece in ORBITER magazine…
Kurt Gödel was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. He made many important contributions to mathematical logic and philosophy, but is best known for his incompleteness theorems. Loosely speaking, the theorem states that the dream of phrasing all of mathematics in terms of a formal system, based on a set of axioms and the rules of logic, is bound to fail: there will always be statements that are true but whose truth cannot be proved within the axiomatic system itself. This abruptly ended a longstanding quest by some mathematicians to construct a set of axioms sufficient for all of mathematics.
Read the full story in Plus magazine…
What’s in a name…
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A beautiful sunset (and moonrise) in Millstatt, Carinthia, Austria.
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This year we celebrate Stuart Kauffman’s 80th birthday. Kauffman was one of the early proponents of the view that the complexity we see in biological systems is not necessarily a consequence of natural selection alone, but could result just as well from spontaneous self-organization.
Read the full story on the EES blog…
My 3-part series of popular science articles on the history of origin of life research has been published in ORBITER magazine. Part 1 presents a “pre-history” of how the origin of life became a real scientific problem in the first place (for many centuries it actually wasn’t!). Part 2 presents a brief overview of 20th century scientific progress on origin of life research, from the idea of a primordial soup to that of an RNA world, and beyond. Finally, part 3 presents a brief history of autocatalytic sets, from Stuart Kauffman’s original idea published in 1971, to some of the most recent insights.
I’m staying in a little village called Lackenberg, to do some hiking in the area. After arriving, I walked around a bit in and around the village, and then watched a beautiful sunset from the balcony of my hotel room.
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On Tuesday 16 July, 2019, there was a partial lunar eclipse visible from most of Europe. I decided to spend the night in a hut halfway up a mountain near Vienna to watch this eclipse, and invited some colleagues to come along. We were lucky that it was a mostly clear sky that evening, making for excellent viewing from just over 1200m up.
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The unresolvable error.
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The graves of greats…
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Theresa’s Brexit dance…
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When the movie Avatar was released in late 2009, a strange thing happened with many people who saw it. They got depressed, even suicidal. It wasn’t because they disliked the movie, but because they liked it so much, they wanted to live in a gorgeous, almost utopian, world like Pandora, rather than on planet Earth. Pandora, the fictitious alien moon portrayed in the movie, has an amazing natural beauty, and human-like inhabitants (the Na’vi) living in peaceful harmony with it.
Read the full piece on ORBITER magazine…
A particular mathematical relationship known as a power law has been observed in many day-to-day situations, from the frequencies in which words are used in natural languages to the connectivity distribution in Facebook friendship networks. As it turns out, though, such a power law can also be found in snooker statistics. And if the amazing Ronnie O’Sullivan continues to produce centuries at the same rate, the mathematical correspondence will be even better!
Read the full story on Plus magazine…
Crime alert: theft of bicycle
A “supermoon” happens when a full moon occurs around the same time that the moon is at its closest point to the earth (perigee) in its elliptical orbit around our planet. This means that the full moon will appear extra large and bright. In fact, it can appear up to 30% larger and brighter compared to the opposite, a “micro-moon”, when the full moon occurs around the same time that it is furthest away from the earth (apogee). Last night happened to be the brightest supermoon of 2019.
Lost in translation (once more…)
Predator publishers vs. beautiful birds.
Two years ago I published an article in Plus magazine debunking claims buzzing around on the internet about a supposed recent increase in earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and so on. In that article I showed in detail how anyone can analyze publicly available data to put such claims to the test. In the current post, as I did last year, I present another update on earthquake statistics.
My good friend Charles Tichenor has been playing the piano since he was a little kid. And he’s still going at it tirelessly at his weekly Chat Noir Cabaret show at the Los Magueyes Mexican restaurant on Burro Alley in Santa Fe, NM, USA. Here’s a short slide show to give an impression of his performances.
A hike with humor…
Another spectacular sunset viewed from the Fort Marcy Park in Santa Fe. Click each pick for a full size view!!
In complex systems science, the notion of complexity is often summarized with the phrase “the whole is more than the sum of its parts“. This expression can be traced all the way back to the early Greek philosopher Aristotle (Metaphysics, Book VIII, 1045a.8-10) and mathematician Euclid (Elements, Book I, Common Notion 8). It was therefore appropriate to have a conference on complex systems in Greece. As part of a delegation from the Institute for Advanced Study of the University of Amsterdam, I attended this conference to learn more about recent advances in complex systems science, and about some ancient Greek history. Read more
Thanksgiving full moon…
“Developmental bias is a manifestation of a much more fundamental principle, and is the norm rather than the exception”, according to one scientist. “Developmental bias is a misleading term and we should get rid of it”, according to another. Both were in the same room, at the same time. So what is developmental bias, what role does it play in evolution, and why do we even care? These questions were the focus of an interesting and spirited workshop, the third in a series of EES project meetings, held recently at the Santa Fe Institute. As with the first meeting, I was able to sit in on this workshop, like a fly on the wall, and listen to the presentations, arguments, and debates. Here’s what I learned…
Read the full piece on the EES Blog…
