Life blog

Redefining the concept of organism

A while back, I stumbled upon an article by Freeman Dyson on Carl Woese. Carl Woese is a long time scientist studying the origins of life and revolutionized thinking around early life, microbiology, and phylogeny.

Freeman Dyson's article is a great overview of the discussions around pre- and post-Darwinian evolution*. Darwinian evolution is what we are used to, a standard "fight for survival" of non-interbreeding species that slowly evolve their fitness to the challenges in the environment.

What really flipped me was Dyson discussing pre-Darwinian evolution, an idea postulated by Carl Woese back in 2004 in an article titled "A New Biology for a New Century." The thought is that early life was a time of promiscuous gene swapping. That, as I see it, an organism was a sack of molecules and genes that worked together to propagate a collection of "features." Then, at some point (Woese suggests at least three) an organism stopped, found a good set of genes, and brought this lateral gene transfer down to a trickle. And there you have a "species."

The three times Woese mentions were the times that gave rise to Archaebacteria, Bacteria, and everyone else. This free mix and match with a sudden stop makes sense of why there are three large groups of cell structures, yet that they are related in some way.

This idea really hit home for me when listening to Penny Chisholm, a microbiologist, talking about Prochlorococcus on Science Friday. This small cyanobacteria might be the most abundant photosynthetic organism, but Chisholm and colleagues only discovered it in the 80s.

What was interesting was her answer about different species of Prochlorococcus: she called them "genomic variants."

This ties back to what Woese was implying about lateral gene transfer and pre-Darwinian evolution and sacks of organisms with a collection of genes. If all organisms are in the possibility-space of all arrangements of genetic elements, then a particular strain of organism would be a peak of variation in that particular area of arrangement of genetic elements (but still part of a continuum of possibility-space).

Micro-organisms still do a lot of gene transfer (witness the spread of antibiotic resistance across species). But I suppose at some level they mix up everything and can have a large amount of variation across a single species. Hence, Chisholm's observation that Prochlorococcus species are best viewed as variants than distinct species. Promiscuous lateral gene transfer across Prochlorococcus "species" deflates the definition of species as non-interbreeding organisms.

As microbial biology has a renaissance due to the rise of synthetic biology (humans effecting lateral gene transfer in micro-organisms at a scale we haven't done before), understanding "speciation" in terms of "genetic variants" will go a long way in understanding how and what genes are to be used.

*Dyson also compares the way cultures laterally transfer as the post-Darwinian era.

Image from If you dream it...

Cool animation by 23andMe on Human Prehistory

For various reason I've been lurking around 23andMe, a personal genetics social service thingy out of SFO (I follow them on Twitter, of course). One big part of what they do is basic education on genetics, what it means, how its done, and its place in our understanding of who we are.

They've made a really cool animation of human prehistory, from chimps to homo sapiens (link below).

Looking forward to the next chapter.

Link: 23andMe - Human Prehistory: Prologue

Image from the animation

Bacteria still rule: Great Long Now seminar by Craig Venter (and Bonus!)

I finally got to listen to the Long Now seminar by Craig Venter. And, wow, was it great.

If you've been a regular reader of mine, you know that I think Venter deserves the Nobel many times over. He's been the big disruptor in genomics for decades, taking technological risks that made the industry jump forward farther than our prejudices would have expected.

The talk followed a thread through his disruptions, providing a foundation for why he's doing what he's doing now, which is to define the genome of an organism for practical purposes, such as creating biofuel.

One thing that he made me think about was bacteriology. When I was a scientist, we studied mammalian genes, proteins, and diseases. A bacteriologist always felt like someone from the distant past, with a lab full of smelly slimy plates, studying a 'boring' organism. A real microbiologist was studying fungi, like brewer's yeast, the laboratory workhorse and a model system for mammalian genetic and cellular processes.

Well, after listening to Venter, and aligning my perspective with his, it's clear that bacteriology is the domain to be in.

His recent Sorcerer II expedition has re-ignited interest in bacteria and bacterial ecology. With the recent rise in metabolomics (the analysis of all the metabolites in the body), we're starting to realize that our mammalian cells are an even smaller part of the body functions we have than we previously suspected. And as, I hope, the antibiotic era starts to wind down and people start redefining our relationship with bacteria, understanding bacteria has become ever more important.

That makes me think that the kinds of professions that will be on the rise in the post-genomic age are bacterial ecology, bacterial genomics, bacterial virology (phage therapy to replace antibiotics, is a new one for me), and bacterial biochemisty.

Questions I now would like to see answered: what are there bacteria who are exclusive inhabitants of humans, what is the total genomic signature of a human (the sum of human and microbiological), how can we live in a sceptic world (the rise of super-bugs is partly a consequence of our cleanliness).

I don't know if it's just me, but it seems like there's been a phase shift in biology on the order of the early days of molecular biology, with the excitement and promise of a very interesting future.

BONUS: One thing that I heard about that was intriguing was the Personal Genomics project, an open source community kind of project to not only get more genomes to sequence and analyze but also to drive the technology to cheaply sequence genomes (see X Prize, too). Indeed, I've been reading about the biological parts registry and wondering weather we are at a stage of garage molecular biology. But that's a later post. :-)

Old calculators and future steampunk

Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Cambridge
Originally uploaded by blackbeltjones

Heh. My Dad also had some of these types of clunker calculators. Uh, I was curious to see how it worked and opened it and, well, destroyed the whole thing. It was expensive, but my Dad was kind.

Funny, also, to see these photos today. Earlier I was wondering what would be the 'steampunk' version of my grandchildren's generations, as they look back at how backwards were were.

What got me thinking was a segment from Science Friday about folks who are reviving a pre-antibiotic anti-bacterial treatment (bacteriophage).

It also dovetalis with a recurring thought of setting up a bio-lab at home and trying to remember all I learned about early genetics labs and such. That's my 'steampunk' - milk bottles with fruit flies (I used to use them), capillary tubes with rubber hoses to measure microliters, funky autoclaves, light microscopes, different stains, and ... ah, it's so cool.

The turkey and the butcher

Just wanted to get this little ditty out:

I was listening to a very interesting Long Now seminar by Nassim Taleb, about his insight into randomness, predictability, and the like.

If you don't know who he is, Taleb wrote a very popular book called 'The Black Swan', which takes it title from an old English saying that equated something impossible with seeing a black swan. Well, that saying got messed up when black swans were seen in Australia in the 18th century.

A great anecdote, created by his brother, he brought up to illustrate the overall point of the 'black swan' was the story about the turkey and the butcher.

Basically, the turkey views the butcher as this benevolent person, who constantly attends to the well-being of the turkey. And when the butcher comes one day to kill him, the turkey is astounded at the unpredictability of the butcher's behavior. Of course, to the butcher, it was all very predictable. Down to the chop.

Moral of the story: You can't always predict things based on past trends.

Corollary (for me at least): There are views that do make these 'black swans', these amazingly unpredictable events, predictable.

One other thing he mentioned that keeps me thinking and ties to the Long Now perspective is about the wisdom of old folks being a resource in how to deal with black swan moments. Hm...

Thoughts on the Journey of Mankind

A Long Now post pointed to a cool animation showing the migration of humans over the past 160,000 years, since modern humans arose in Africa.

There's a lot the gets me thinking when I read about ancient human history, such as what was life like, or what did the world look, smell, and sound like.

The post references an event that made my head spin when I found out about it long ago - a massive volcano eruption that caused a 6 year extended winter and left an estimated 10,000 humans alive. That's one heck of a bottleneck.

In 'Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan suggested that our myths and fears of reptiles might be some genetic memory of the age of dinosaurs (there were only teeny mammals back then). But, that has always made me wonder what deep ingrained memory we might have from events 10-, 20-, or 100-thousand years ago. Might we have some sort of recollection of this massive volcano eruption, some memory encoded in our culture, way of living, or language?

And looking at this animation, I was reminded how much of the human population was along the coastlines. Yeah, I read that many time before, but seeing it in an animation made the point stick.

All this beach-combing reminded me of one of the many questions I have been carrying unanswered: 'Why are children so in love with water - pools and beaches?'. Might the extreme psychic draw to play in water that children exhibit be to learn some sort of critical survival skill for a coastal species?

Entropy is over-rated. Long live Complexity! (Bonus: The Venter)

Does everything tend towards Entropy?

One of the first things we learn in chemistry is that everything tends towards entropy.

How can that be? Whereas Steven Johnson calls it the Long Zoom (in that you can zoom up and down levels of complexity) we constantly are seeing lower-order networks yielding a new level that itself begets new levels.

I lost my notes long ago, but I remember trying to grapple with the way sub-atomic particles glommed on to form atoms to form molecules to form auto-catalytic systems to form cells to form organisms to form societies to form <ad infinitum>. I tried to recapture that thought in an earlier essay, but there are a ton of other folks like Steven Johnson and the folks at the Santa Fé Institute who are also trying to understand the properties of complex systems.

But if all tends towards Entropy, how to we form these complex emergent systems in the first place? Do we have to Zoom all the way down to the fabric of the Universe to understand that single simple little principle that allowed a slight formation of a complex network that caused the domino effect that leads to today, a little principle that has been at War with Entropy since the formation of Everything?

Ufa!

A lot to think of. And I know I am way over simplifying somehow.

Bonus! The Unit of Measurement for Complexity
I don't know if it exists (but I am sure Hugo can find it), but, in the course of writing a script for a graphic novel set in the far future (which I am set to overhaul under the 'show-don't-tell' principle), I started thinking about how reductionist we are and that we have no way for describing complexity in a system (that I know of).

And, as you probably know my fascination (fanboi?) with Craig Venter, I thought he'd be an appropriate label for the measurement of Complexity - he's re-written the books on the Genomic Age so many times and has ushers in the Age of Meta-Genomics.

Venters (Vn), a logarithmic scale of biological complexity. A virus is 3Vn, bacteria 3-10vn, fungi 10-30Vn, single cell 10-20Vn, complex 20-50Vn, planaria+ 50-100Vn, social athropods 100-500Vn, reptiles, birds, fish, mammals, social netoworks...

My original thought was that the Venter would be a logarithmic scale of _biological_ complexity. But I suppose it could be a measure of complexity in general. Complexity can be measured by nested levels of networks, levels of connections between networks, and level of energy to maintain network (the inverse of Entropy, I suppose).

The symbol for Venters would be Vn, as V is widely used and taken for Voltage or Volume.

Any takers?

Heh, really being a geek.

On the balance of top-down and bottom-up

Kevin Kelly is on of the founders of the Long Now Foundation, which you all know I am pretty fond of. He wrote an article (link below) recently on the balance of bottom-up emergence and top-down guidance (not necessarily 'control', more like 'leadership'), that has tipped my hand to finally writing down some thoughts.

Top-down or botton-up?
This topic of balance has been on my mind quite a bit - I have followed emergence (I call it 'complexification') for many years now (heck, I'm a scientist at heart); just finished Steven Johnson's book 'Emergence', heard some great talks by Juan Enriquez and Alex Wright, and had my own personal struggle trying to understand megacorporations (aka 'The Borg').

Kevin revisits (and discusses through the many comments on the article) his 10-year old book 'Out of Control', a book on swarm theory, hive mind, bottom-up emergence. One thing he has learned is that bottom up is not enough.

He uses Wikipedia as an example of something that might seem bottom up - people 'randomly' contributing and editing encyclopedia articles, forming a global encyclopedia of knowledge from the collective actions of a collection of individual. Kevin points out that, actually, there is some level of top-down control in Wikipedia through a set of über-contributors who do have a modicum of editorial control.

The book 'Emergence' relates in many example how 'dumb' local behaviour in a network leads to a 'higher-order' behaviour. The famous example is an ant colony, where the sum total of the colony members' behavior, based on simple rules, leads to a a comlex colony-level (colony as organism) behaviour.

Networks within networks
Alex Wright and Juan Enriquez point out, in their work, that one level network leads to members that then operate at a new level. My example for this is the body. Our cells go about their single-minded business, creating a higher order network that is the body. The body then is the unit item in a network that is our social network.

Yet, Kevin struggles with his interaction with the world of user-generated-content, the swarm of content that leads to something like Wikipedia. Coming from a publishing background, he sees the need for the editor. And I think that's fine. The editor is actually from one level up in the network and not on the level of the swarm. As with the body, the control does come from the next level up, what ever the selected forces on the next level up are.

Global control from above
Drawing a parallel back to ants, Steven Johnson points out that the colony would be in trouble if one of the ants took a global view of the colony and tried to take over. That's because the ants are part of the swarm and should not have global control. The colony has that global control, a control that comes from the selective pressures on the colony, not the ant. The selective pressures of the colony are its survival, interaction with other colonies, its relations with the environment.

I'd claim that what Kevin is struggling with is the publishing process of Wikipedia taps into the swarm perfectly. Contributors are elements following simple rules to just spew content into Wikipedia. But, WIkipedia as an organism needs to compete at another level, which gives Wikipedia a global mandate to force a selective pressure upon the members that constitute its internal network. Yet, this will only work if 1) the network one level down subsumes itself to the collective, and 2) that none of the members of the network one level down try to assume a global view or impact.

Corporations can learn from this
This all leads me to why large corporations are so dysfunctional: too many people taking the global view.

For a network to function, there needs to be rules of action for the members and rules of interaction between the members (think of workers as cells, departments as organs). In corporations, this is done through role definition. Indeed, I think it is wonderful how much individual responsibility my corporation give the workers. And that should be sufficient for emergent behaviours to be visible. And they are, as one can see with how products and services are created.

But, the impact of the corporation (think of it as the body) is at the corporation level (bodies in a social network) and the selection is at the corporation level. Hence, the members of the corporation should not have a global view, or attempt to commandeer the global view. And It think in corporations, the members tend to know the rules, do what the corporation asks, but never return and make sure that what ever potentially global effort they have been asked to do by the corporation does not violate the original rules of being a member of the collective. Likewise, I do not see the corporation exerting its global view in culling activities that violate the network rules and try to act on the level of the corporation (the global level).

I suppose that's my long winded way of saying that employees keep screwing things up by taking on the role of the corporation and the corporation keeps screwing up by not exerting its influence on its employees who try to commandeer the global direction. (I've seen this happen too many times)

Summary
Yeah, global top-down works if it comes from the next layer of network above. It won't work from within the network.

Do folks in the open source world (or others) agree?

Link: Kevin Kelly -- The Technium:

Judged from where we start, harnessing the dumb power of the hive mind will always take us much further than we can dream. Judged from where we hope to end up, the hive mind is not enough; we need an additional top-down push.

Craig Venter giving a Long Now seminar today (25feb08)

Dang, I was not able to finagle a trip to SFO to see this talk. But, if you live in the Bay Area, don't miss this!

Link: Long Now Seminars

Craig Venter is on a roll these days.  He has revolutionized science twice already---with the human genome project and with metagenomic analysis of whole microbial populations.  He is about to do it again by creating a new life form with a wholly synthesized genome.  His memoir, A LIFE DECODED, is a thrilling read.  He has shocking new perspectives to report every time he speaks in public.

Last month in Germany he said, "In one milliliter of sea water, there's a million bacteria and ten million viruses.  In the air in this room---we've been doing the air genome project---all of you just during the course of this hour will be breathing in at least 10,000 different bacteria, and maybe 100,000 viruses....  This is the world of biology that we live in, that we don't see, where evolution takes place on a minute-to-minute basis.... The air that we breathe comes from these organisms. The future of the planet rests with these organisms.  And the question is: If we take over the design of these organisms, does that really shift the balance in any way?  Or is it such a small portion of what's out there that we'll only affect industrial processes, not the living planet?"

"Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention," Craig Venter, Herbst Theater, San Francisco, 7pm, MONDAY, February 25.  The lecture starts promptly at 7:30pm.  Admission is free (a $10 donation is always welcome, not required).

The Herbst Theater is downtown at the Civic Center on Van Ness at McAllister (inside the War Memorial Veterans Building).

Another great Long Now seminar: Juan Enriquez "Mapping Life"

Saying that the Long Now seminars are great is starting to feel repetitive. So, please go out and listen to ALL of them.

I've caught up with all the seminars that have been made available. One that I want to point out is Juan Enriquez's seminar on biology, politics, evolution, and science (link to post on seminar, below).

Wow.

He's such a low key speaker, but delivers such strong points. (though if you look at some of the comments in the post linked below, some folks were not as pleased)

There were a few items he mentioned that were pretty interesting:

1) He's friends with Craig Venter and traveled for a time on Venter's yacht, Sorcerer II, which was traveling the oceans, sampling micro-organisms every 200 miles by sequencing the whole she-bang. It's one more amazing Nobel-worthy thing Venter has been doing that has absolutely upended biology, genomics, and science. Enriquez called it the age of Metagenomics.

Of note, off all the organisms that they sequenced, about 75% were absolutely new. That's 75%. New. It really made clear the prevalence of microorganisms in the ocean and points to microbes being half the biomass on Earth. And these organisms are critical to the health of the planet and we are risking up-turning the cart through warming and acidification of the oceans.

2) In his lateral thinking way, Enriquez pointed out that the gas in coal mines is due to bacterial digestion of the coal. He said that mining is so dangerous, why don't we just use bacteria and pipe the gas out safely? It sure would be better than strip-mining. Heh.

3) He went off on superbugs, bacteria that are resistant to every antibiotic we can throw at it. He blames it in part to our (inevitable) cleanliness in hospitals. As we wipe everything down, only the hardiest can survive. And then, we provide these bugs a great chance to infect people as we hack them open in the very same areas.

Made me pause and think about how we do medicine.

4) He also had a good comment on the decrease in the number of new drugs pharma has been able to come out with. He ascribes that in part to the mounting difficulty in passing safety standards. He called it the 'Precautionary Principle' - we are forcing pharma to make drugs that kill no one. But, how many thousand will die without the drug? He called on folks to weigh the needs of the very many versus the needs of the very few.

Kevin Kelly, a Long Now founder, suggested Enriquez call his view the 'Pro-actionary Principle'.

Link: Long Views » Blog Archive » Juan Enriquez '€œMapping Life'€:

"All life is imperfectly transmitted code," Enriquez began, "and it is promiscuous."€ Thus discoveries like the one last month of an entire bacterial genome inside the DNA of a fruitfly is exploding the old tree-of-life models of evolution. The emerging map replaces gene lineages with gene webs.

Are Kosovars Albanians or Serbians?

I grew up thinking that nations should be the scale at which people are governed. I could not understand why Israel didn't just make all the Palestinians Israeli, why the Irish and British couldn't just let Northern Ireland be part of the Republic of Ireland. And, as the Balkans, well, balkanized, and the Soviet Union collapsed, why was everyone moving towards smaller units of government centered around cultural lines?

Well, I'm past that. I am beginning to see that the end of the last 10 years has been more about the end of nations, much like the end of the 19th century was the end of empires.

Taking this logic to a further level, I really think current national governments will lose their power as cities and regions (city-states, anyone?) rise in political and economic strength.

For example, many states in the US are clashing with the federal government, making stricter environmental laws. Cities like London and New York are no longer really part of their nation, becoming true city-states, their mayors meeting heads of state for political and economic reasons.

And, empires fell apart as a sort of national identity arose. But, now, there are regional identities that are stronger still, and cut along cultural lines.

So, are the Kosovars Albanian or Serbian? Neither. They are Kosovar, much like the Austrians are not German, but Austrian, or the French Swiss are Swiss, not French.

It'll be interesting to watch Kosovo form a real government and economy now that the question of their identity is resolved (at least for them). There's a lot a work ahead for them and the global economy was not set up for tiny states to prosper in.

Link: Frenzy greets the new Kosovo - The Boston Globe:

In a move that inflamed tensions in this volatile region, the ethnic Albanian government of Kosovo yesterday proclaimed the province independent from Serbia, forming a new and very troubled country in Europe.

Something about the Clock of the Long Now chimes

The Clock of the Long Now will have chimes that play 10 tones, in unique combination, every day over the course of 10,000 years.

I tend to listen to a bunch of Long Now seminars in a row and noticed something about the chimes played at the start and end of every recording: they are the same.

So that got me thinking. They should be playing different chimes every day. And, I am not sure about the algorithm, but if you can calculate the chimes for each day, then why not play the chime particular to the day of the seminar?

I also started wondering if there was somewhere I could hear the chime for a particular day. And indeed there is. Seam M Burke, on his site Interglacial, has built a generator of MIDI chimes for any date. Brian Eno, in his exploration of the chimes (he was a big part of the idea behind the 10 notes and chimes) came out with a CD, too. The folks at the EMUSIC-L site also have been toying with this, trying to make better tones through their own chimes generator (MIDI is a bit ugh), but I haven't played with it.

from: Clock: Chime Generator (Long Now Foundation site)

Alex Wright and the history of information systems over the past few billion years

I got through another amazing Long New Seminar (long dog walks are great for that). This one was by Alex Wright, author of 'Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages'.

What I thought was really well done is how he charts the course of the evolution of social systems from bacteria to humans today and showed how such evolution influenced information systems. Very interesting. He also reveals some lost nuggets of history, re-introducing some information systems visionaries that are not well known (particularly Otlet's Mundaneum).

One other interesting thread of his talk was a discussion of literal and oral culture and information. In one of those Long Now kinda of twists, he points out that literal culture is actually not too old. But also, the way the Web is going, there are plenty of analogies to oral culture in terms of how we share and communicate in social networks.

Very interesting.

Link: Long Views » Blog Archive » Alex Wright, The Deep History of the Information Age:

That’s the pattern for the evolution of information, Alex Wright
said. Networks coalesce into heirarchies, which then form a new
level of networks, which coalesce again, and so on. Thus an unending
series of information explosions is finessed.

Elated with Saffo seminar

I finally listened to the Saffo's Long Now talk on forecasting.

What really excited me is that he said some things that I've been thinking about. I wonder if I picked it up from the same folks he's picked it up from. But, for sure, for me, these thoughts were all framed by thinking extremely long term.

Golden Age
One thing he mentioned was the hubris (my words) of folks in the present - we always think we live in a Golden Age.

Link: One night - a global story of one night in the mobile life (a story I wrote)

Granted, every generation thinks they live in the Golden Age, the height of their civilization. And, granted, later generations dwarf previous Enlightenments. Yet, the Dark Ages these are not, the inevitable trumping of our Age by some future Age in no way diminishes the Wonderment of our Hyperconnective Age.

I think it is natural for us to look back to earlier times and think that we've had it best. Of course, it's usually because we are accustomed to life in a certain way and can't imagine what life would be without all our 'accomplishments'. I find it a fun exercise to imagine 1) what it was like to live like in the past; 2) to think like someone from the past looking back and being proud of their 'accomplishments' and how folks in their past were 'behind'.

Acceleration
Which leads me to the other thing he mentioned that I like to throw out at parties - the fact that every generation thinks things are accelerating. He also managed to put in a swipe at the technopositivists who believe in the local exponential trend meaning that in 25 years we'll merge with machines.

I think every generation has seen an acceleration of invention and creativity. I like to think back thousands of years to the Stone Age and the old guy (maybe in his 30s) shaking his head at the pace of change in flint technology.* Saffo give me more material, quoting a guy from 1902 and also mentions records lamenting the rate of acceleration, one all the back from the 15th century. Heh.

City-state
One thought that came to my head while trying to thing way long term was what happens to our governments. I was thinking 5 thousand years from now (was writing a story, actually), so I looked back 5 thousand years. If you chart the arch of human social organization, from a corse perspective, you see tribes going to city-states to kingdoms to empires (collection of 'nations') to nations (especially in late 19th century) - which is where we are at.

But if you look closely, in the past 20 years or so, nations have been breaking up along cultural lines - think of the Balkans and the CIS. My favourite example is how Kosovo does not want to be part of Albania (any more than Austria wants to be part of Germany).

I then took it further, also keeping in mind the rise of the cities (half the world in urban areas), and figured there was a trend towards city-states.

Indeed, Saffo fills out the thinking by mentioning that cities are more relevant to the citizen than a large nation. He was bold to say that city-states would dominate already this century. Wow.

But, look at how in the US the states are becoming stronger (due to weak federal leadership). This is not bad (at least not any more to me, with this city-state thinking).

It was refreshing to hear Saffo. I was always intimidated by him, but finally hearing one of his seminars (especially with him touching on some pet issue) just made me a fanboi.

Heh.

*As an aside, I find humans to be pathologically inventive (hence all gods create the world) and I think, much like we sit around gabbing about mobile phones and the latest tech (in previous times it was hi-fi or cars or what not of the day), cavemen sat around gabbing about the latest flint or carving technology. As a species, we can't NOT invent.

Paul Saffo on the Rules of Forecasting

Saffo to me was always some sort of weird wizard who thought and saw differently than others. I've met folks who channel the future, and it's always wondrous and bewildering.

Saffo gave a Long Now seminar recently and here (link below) is the summary (alas, I am way way behind on listening or watching them).

A few things here I'd like to throw at the Singularity Techno-Optomists.

Rules bandied about in Saffo's talk:

• Wild cards sensitize us to surprise.
• Change is never linear. (one discontinuity can derail your favourite singular optimism)
• Look for indicators- things that don’t fit.
• Look back twice as far.
• Cherish failure.
• Be indifferent.
• Assume you are wrong. And forecast often.
• Embrace uncertainty.

Go listen to it.

Liunk: Long Views » Blog Archive » Paul Saffo, “Embracing Uncertainty - the secret to effective forecasting”:

Rules of Forecasting
Reflecting on his 25 years as a forecaster, Paul Saffo pointed out that a forecaster’s job is not to predict outcomes, but to map the “cone of uncertainty” on a subject. Where are the edges of what might happen? (Uncertainty is cone-shaped because it expands as you project further into the future— next decade has more surprises in store than next week.)

Response to Christian's post: Fragility of Digital Life

Christian Lindholm has a rough end of year, electronics-wise (link below). Machines acting up, licenses expiring, and data at risk. It brings up an running discussion we've been having since I joined his Lifeblog team at the start of '04 - the future of memories.

Here's a note to Christian:
Ah, dear friend, some things never change.

Why is it that we cannot find a solution? Is it because we are all atomists migrating into the digital world, so we don't get it?

What do the digital natives believe? Or have they not accumulated enough digital baggage to care? Or do they not even have a concept of something digital vanishing?

Of can we not find a solution because the solution is to change the way we store digital memories, the way we need to put them in the cloud, the way we put more and more of our past into bits?

Heh, we've been wresting with this for some time, Cassandras of the digital future. Not to be dramatic, but Humanity must deal with this or we will have a past we cannot revisit.

After a chat with your British Library friends, go over and check out the Long Now Foundation projects to preserve things for millenia (and I need to find that seminar about it).

Link: ChristianLindholm.com: Fragility of Digital Life:

I am back on-line after a two week long outage. This was due to some old billing address with my provider coupled with a bit sloppy service at Saunalahti, my host provider. This combined with an upgrade to N95 8GB that went worse than expected, as I could not use the old Lifeblog 2.1 on it. This led me to export all my 30.000 items out of Lifeblog, make a back up, restore the back up. A full week-end of computing time. Soon the beta of Bootcamp expires, so I have to do another week-end of fiddling. The only thing I conclude is a digital archive is vulnerable, I have made decent back-up's of my Lifeblog, have some in London, some in Finland on several HD's etc. still I feel extremely fragile.

Following a thread on freedom, openess, and the evolution of business

I don't know how I came to find them, but I was listening to two talks from d.Construct 2005, a grass-roots Web 2.0 (splutter, ahem) conference held in November last year.

The first one I listened to, from Cory Doctorow, made a loud 'ker-chunk' in my head as it meshed with a few other lines of thought I had on how to take the mobile industry into the next level of growth.

1) Cory made a great story comparing Alchemists of the Dark Ages, who toiled individually, jealously guarding their science (and all dying from drinking mercury), to scientists of the Enlightenment, where ideas were shared, a wave which we are still riding. He then labeled the protectionist contortions of Big Media as 'Alchemists' and those who are hacking the media as 'Enlightenment'.

2) Cory also brought up an anecdote of John Philip Sousa wagging his finger at the government, asking it to heavily control the newly emerging sound recording systems that were threatening his sheet music business (the music publishing business back then). Imagine if he had won, there would be no recording industry (and no radio, and no TV, and no Cable, and no DVD, etc).

3) Elsewhere, Will Wright gave a great Long Now seminar with Brian Eno on Playing with Time - a lot about generative creativity. Really great. The generative music and art that Brian has been creating is usually based on simple rules that lead to rich outcomes. Will, of The Sims fame, has come out with a new game called Spore, which uses simple rules of life, ecology, and so on to create a rich game that is very very complex. The conversation went back and forth on complex and simple stuff. Fascinating, really. In short, Will said, he kept seeing places where complex rules only had finite range versus places where simple rules had an infinite range. As a biology geek, who played at the atomic, molecular, genetic, and physiological layers, I took this for granted.

4) Earlier, I heard Clayton Christensen talk about how many innovations seem to move the value to another layer. For example, open source is making software free, forcing the value to migrate to other layers, such as service (up) or technology (down).

5) A while back, when Nokia was about to come out with the N-Gage, a friend and I spent a long time thinking about what we would do if we were Nokia and were entering the gaming industry. Our take was to be a game publisher, but extract value from other layers in the ecosystem (but not the device layer, which game companies do not extract value from). It was more to help the game publishers make more money and make more games, but also a hope that Nokia could, as a newcomer, flip the game industry on its head. Eh. Didn't happen.

6) And the last thread that's on my mind and fits this whole thought was a comment from Will Hearst, of the Hearst dynasty. He was giving a Long Now Seminar with Chris Anderson, getting into more permutations of the Long Tail. What was great was that Chris' stuff has been maturing and becoming less a descriptive concept and more an active predictive concept. Chris was saying how understanding the implications of the Long Tail should help one understand how to build upon it. And it was great to hear the ideas reflected off of Will, who, even though he could be considered Old Guard Media, gets it all quite in a New Guard way. Among the many great things he and Chris discussed, Will said, when you change the distribution and lower the barriers to entry, then you get an explosion of creativity (he gave some examples). Isn't that what the long tail is now accepted to show?

Now to tie it all together.

All of these are something mobile network operators need to be thinking about. When I review my notes I see that I have been asking myself in so many different contexts, how can we help the operators. How do we give them incentives to open one layer and then move money to another layer? How to we help them loosen control of one layer to enhance the value in other layers? How do we avoid an end-run around immobile operators (pun intended) and bring them in? How do we help them build a rich ecosystem for all to grow?

They are crucial to our success and we to theirs.

My suggestion is that operators spend more time trying to find other layers to get money from (not wring more money out of the same game), and make other layers a lot more free (can you say access?); that they open themselves up a bit in an enlightened way and not be over protectionist (as in locking phones, for one) like alchemists (who kept dying from drinking mercury); that they surprise us and reinvent the industry, getting out of century-old telco protectionist, the-user-is-an-idiot, thinking; that they understand that control restricts and that easier distribution and lower barriers to entry lead to new levels of creativity; that they remove the complexity making it hard for even them to grow, and to keep things simple - in technology, in services, in pricing, in access, in everything.

<breathe!>

I've been coming back on my pendulum of 'damn all network operators' to realizing that the harder we push, the harder they dig in. There are very smart people at operators who are burdened by so much. How can we help them turn their huge ships around such that when they succeed, so do we?

Weigh in, below.

Third thought for the day (way off topic): Are electronics a passing fad?

I was listening to Danny Hillis' talk for the Long Now Foundation, a foundation he created along with Stewart Brand and Brian Eno and other really interesting people.

If you don't know anything about the Long Now Foundation, then go now, then come back (listen to all the seminars!). In brief (ugh, won't they hate that), the Long Now Foundation is trying to get folks to think long term, not 10 years or 100 years, but 10,000 years.

Back to Danny.

Danny is building a clock to keep time for 10,000 years and, in wondering how to build it, thought that there might be a chance that electronics might be a passing fad and that in 10,000 years, there might not be any more electronics.

Kinda funny thought. It got me thinking about non-electronics and how electronics have affected what we have created in the last 250 years (mind you electronics did not exist 250 years ago, and weren't ubiquitous until the last 100). Of course, being the biologist geek that I used to be, I started envisioning bio-based tools of the 31-century.

Fun stuff.

Richard (whom I mentioned previously) and I were joined at lunch yesterday by Janne and, since Richard and Janne and I were having great brain waves, out of the blue I mentioned what Danny thought. We had a good run with that thought.

Janne then pointed out something that just might bring down electronics - the production of electronics has a heavy impact on the environment.

Whoa.

Think of that. We are so on a trend of proliferation of electronic devices and nano-gizmos (Can you say Ubiquitous Computing? No, didn't think so.). Think of all that solder, precious metals, plastic, energy, chemicals, and so on that will be need to make all that stuff.

Whoa.

Might that bring about the end of electronics as we know it? Might that liberate us to think of new types of tools that are not constrained as electronic devices are?*

*Hmm, so. Not necessarily the third business thought of the day, since this is way long-term. But, I have dabbled with writing a book** based on these ideas (long now trends, non-electronics, long now clock), most likely fiction. The Long Now seminars are very inspiring. Any publishers interested? Anyone? Anyone?

**BTW, I am a published author and have a book and an anthology I have never published. I ain't no newbie to writing. Ja?