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laodan

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laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA

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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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  • The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | The Failure of...

    Rated May 15 2008 • 1 review • systems, complexity, collapse • theoildrum.com

    The Failure of Networked Systems
    by aeldric in TOD Australia & New Zealand

    Oil appears to be at or near peak capacity - exports are dropping. As for the food network - world grain reserves are at historic lows, and expected to drop a little more next year. And the environment? Climate change is clearly with us, indicating that the environment has already gone past its capacity.

    When looked at in these terms it appears that the network is already in decline. Each of these three parts of the network is at or past capacity. If a span of years is the natural time-frame for a crash in this system, then it seems quite plausible that we are watching a very broad-based crash of our energy systems - right now.

    Our actions in increasing the connections to the food and environment networks will not help, and may simply speed the crash.

    The Failure of Networked Systems
    Australia: What to do, what to do about our energy situation?





    In the first article Aeldric argues that interconnected networks engender higher levels of complexity that eventually could lead to the collapse of the entire system.

    In the second article he turns his mind to defining some "thought-starters" of possible solutions adapted to the conditions of Australia.

    The comments on these 2 articles are fascinating and in an answer to one of those comments Aeldric states the obvious "Contrary to popular opinion, the job of a democratic leader is to be elected, not to take actions with a view to the long-term good of the people. Getting elected is about appearance, not substance."

    Urgent societal decisions need to be taken at the political level but if "getting elected is about appearance and not substance" then we logically are driven to the conclusion that democracy is not the right political system for solving crises that are threatening societal collapse. Political systems based on meritocracy would assuredly be far more efficient. But when faced with cascading crises threatening such a collapse of our societies it is a little late to start thinking about changing the decision making process. In such times we can only expect doing something with the system we have... and "So we march forward SimplyHoping...."




    175 views
    The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | The Failure of Networked Systems

  • Beyond hope and doom: Time for a peak oil pep talk |...

    Rated Mar 03 2008 • 2 reviews • economics, collapse, complexity, change • energybulletin.net

    Beyond hope and doom: Time for a peak oil pep talk
    in Energy Bulletin by Richard Heinberg

    Awareness of Peak Oil, Climate Change, impending global economic implosion, topsoil depletion, biodiversity collapse, and the thousand other dire threats crashing down upon us at the dawn of the new millennium constitutes an enormous psychological burden...

    Planetary worries can be even more debilitating. What if there simply is no hope?

    Beyond hope and doom: Time for a peak oil pep talk

    The search for knowledge, in our times of word abundance, unmistakeably drives us straight to a wall of doubt that sends to us flash-back questions such as "where are the answers to the knowledge we gain about the sheer misery that we and our modern societies are inflicting upon the principle of life on earth?".

    in "Beyond hope and doom" Richard Heinberg is asking that kind of question but he is not giving us any plausible answer. Writing that "We're all in this together. Let's rely on one another's reserves of psychological strength when we need to, and provide strength for others when we can." only envisions a psychological remedy to forget about the enormity of the misery that we are inflicting upon the principle of life on earth.
    Sharon Astyk writes that "we must find a way to hallow, or at least apply meaning, to our descent".
    Hallowing the descent
    The only meaning I can see in humanity diving into its own collapse is that humanity is only a necessity for itself. The principle of life does not need humanity to sustain its own existence but humanity, at least at its operating level, needs the consciousness about itself as it relates with the whole to assure its own reproduction.

    This kind of finality in the conclusion generates another set of question: "If humanity is of no particular necessity for anything else than itself than perhaps we its conscious particles, functioning as its operating principle, have a vested interest to protect it from itself". This it seems to me constitutes the ultimate intellectual rejection of modernity and the principle of equality that it generated as an invisible strategy to maximize the expansion of economic demand so that the logic of capital could generate ever more surplus of capital.
    But then how do we stop this societal cancer?
    For Dmitry Orlov "Rather than attempting to undertake the Herculean task of mitigating the unmitigatable-attempting to stop the world and point it in a different direction-it seems far better to turn inward and work to transform yourself into someone who might stand a chance, given the world's assumed trajectory". This is the start of the answer on how to stop the societal cancer. But it is not the end of the answer! Communities and neighborhoods will inevitably address the end of the answers. Or at least they will try to do just that, for, without communities the individuals simply die.
    Review of Dmitry Orlov's Re-inventing Collapse

    I personally like the optimism of James Lovelock""There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism.""
    'Enjoy life while you can'
    James LOVELOCK's website
    We're drunk and we're at the edge of the roof.




    479 views
    Beyond hope and doom: Time for a peak oil pep talk | Energy Bulletin

  • Frozen Bacteria Repair Own DNA for Millennia

    Rated Aug 28 2007 • 3 reviews • complex systems, complexity, genetics, microbiology, life • nationalgeographic.com

    Frozen Bacteria Repair Own DNA for Millennia
    in National Geographic by Mason Inman

    Bacteria can survive in deep freeze for hundreds of thousands of years by staying just alive enough to keep their DNA in good repair, a new study says.

    Frozen Bacteria Repair Own DNA for Millennia



    Speaking about resilience...
    The principle of life seems to be hard wired for resisting extreme conditions. Advanced forms of life such as the human specie, for example, do not benefit from the same kind of resilience.

    It seems to me that the more advanced the level of development of a specie (the more diverse its components and the more complex their interactions) the less resilient that specie becomes. If this is correct it would mean that complexity engenders higher levels of fragility.

    Each new component engenders a flow of interactions with the other components. And a single interaction among that flow has the potential to destabilize the whole flux of interactions...

    There is a deep lesson of philosophy hidden in this mechanism of complexification - fragilization. I bet that the study of that mechanism shall gradually impose itself on a humanity discovering that it is at risk...




    1 view
    Frozen Bacteria Repair Own DNA for Millennia

  • The Oil Drum | &Energy Resources and Our Future& - Speech...

    Rated Jun 30 2007 • 1 review • economics, energy industry, society, energy, complexity • theoildrum.com

    "Energy Resources and Our Future"
    in The Oil Drum - a 1957 Speech by Hyman Rickover

    We live in what historians may some day call the Fossil Fuel Age. Today coal, oil, and natural gas supply 93% of the world's energy; water power accounts for only 1%; and the labor of men and domestic animals the remaining 6%. This is a startling reversal of corresponding figures for 1850 - only a century ago. Then fossil fuels supplied 5% of the world's energy, and men and animals 94%. Five sixths of all the coal, oil, and gas consumed since the beginning of the Fossil Fuel Age has been burned up in the last 55 years.

    Looking into the future, from the mid-20th Century, we cannot feel overly confident that present high standards of living will of a certainty continue through the next century and beyond. Fossil fuel costs will soon definitely begin to rise as the best and most accessible reserves are exhausted, and more effort will be required to obtain the same energy from remaining reserves. It is likely also that liquid fuel synthesized from coal will be more expensive. Can we feel certain that when economically recoverable fossil fuels are gone science will have learned how to maintain a high standard of living on renewable energy sources?

    I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants - those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age.

    Energy Resources and Our Future

    Written in 1957. Amazing is it not? Societal change is always slow and always has prophets who are not heard by the decision makers and the citizens.

    1. Societies are like very large ensembles containing smaller ensembles that in turn contain other smaller ensembles at the image of Russian dolls. The difference between Russian dolls and societies is in the quantities of sub-ensembles each of them contains. Russian dolls contain 6, 10 or some more while societies contain an unknown number, not infinite in absolute terms, but surely infinite in term of human comprehension.

    2. Each ensemble and sub-ensemble constituting the whole is composed of a series of factors that inter-relate upon one another.

    3. Societal change emerges out of the complexity made up by all the interrelations between the multitude of factors at work in human societies. Force is to observe that we do not till this very day master the knowledge to understand such complexity and perhaps never will...




    2,409 views
    The Oil Drum | &Energy Resources and Our Future& - Speech by Hyman Rickover in 1957

  • How to Save the World

    Rated Jun 07 2007 • 1 review • evolution, chaos, complexity, order • salon.com

    The Immune 'Setwork': Our Body's Other Brain, and What It's Telling Us
    in How to Save the World by Dave Pollaerd

    Varela's point is that the immune 'system' is actually a combination of:

    * a relatively simple, mechanistic system (called clonal selection, illustrated at right, by which stem cells form into lymphocytes ready to respond to many types of antigens, and then, when they actually encounter antigens, neutralize them and clone themselves to be ready for reinfection by the same antigen), and
    * a more complex, dynamic network (a learning, evolving, self-regulating network with the intelligence to, as Varela puts it, "know and select what it should pay attention to")

    He calls this a 'second generation network', but there should be a name for a combination of a system and a network, integrated together. Since there isn't one, I'm coining one: a setwork.

    ... when environmental changes occur faster than setworks' ability to adapt to them, the result is called Extinction.

    Perhaps Gaia will learn from the mistake of "letting the apes run the laboratory for awhile". Perhaps the next evolution, after our extinction, will be a creature with a smaller brain, or at least without an opposable thumb, one that will evolve 'culturally' at a pace that its physical evolution can keep pace with.

    The Immune 'Setwork': Our Body's Other Brain, and What It's Telling Us

    This tempest in the tea-cup of immunity appears strangely similar to the foundational rule described in the Tao: "all have 2 sides" like 2 sides of a coin. And "all change" as the tension, resulting from the balancing of the interests of the 2 sides, accumulates into chaos where appears a point of bifurcation leading to... well change. (no good, no bad)

    In his conclusion Dave posits that the re-balancing of the side-effects of modernity shall be concluded in favor of Gaia the whole, The apes, its rebellious constitutive particles being mutated into submission to the whole....

    I suggest that there is another way of seeing this drama unfolding. Gaia has innumerable particles and the "apes presently running the laboratory" are only one of this multitude. I posit that the re-balancing of a particle gone out of order happens at the level of its own sub-ensemble and not at a higher systemic level. The human particle functions as its own polar system: individual particles and societal groupings. And what do we observe presently? Human societal groupings (societies) have completely lost their capacity to auto-regulate. They have been overtaken by a mechanism that lays out of the will of their human particles. The loss of auto-regulation at the level of the human ensemble will not go far, for, the adjacent ensembles will freeze it in its steps leading it in chaos till it reaches a point of bifurcation where humanity rediscovers societal auto-regulation through the interaction between its polarities.

    And for sure the bifurcation point from chaos to order emerges out of disruption and pestilence bringing about their lot of mutations in the multiple sub-ensembles of the human ensemble.




    42 views
    How to Save the World

  • Columbia Magazine

    Rated Jan 20 2007 • 4 reviews • neuroscience, complexity, consciousness • columbia.edu

    Minding the Brain
    via 3QD, Samir S. Patel in Columbia Magazine

    Our minds are made of countless tiny connections between neurons, through which ions, proteins, chemical messengers, and electrical signals travel. At one time this language of the mind was mysterious and impenetrable, but now we see that the workings of the brain are complex, understandable, and based in natural laws.
    ...
    Among the important concepts that Kandel established was that short-term memory is created by changes in the function of cells, while long-term memory comes from changes in the structure of the cell, and requires gene expression. The resulting patterns of connections are products of the genetic hardwiring of our brains and environmental influences \u2014 decades of learning. Genes provide the fixed mechanisms and architecture, and superimposed on that is a malleable, plastic network of strong and weak connections, the overlay of a lifetime on a mind. "Our adult repertoire represents a combination and interaction of these two sets of behavioral inventories" says Kandel.
    ...
    "People are worried that if you really understand the mind, you'll take the mystery out of it"
    For all the questions neurobiology can answer, it will inevitably create more.

    Minding the Brain




    Systemic complexity involves the idea that the more you know about something the more fields you discover you don't know. The mystery of reality is contained in this notion of our inaccessibility of the whole through the accumulation of bits of knowledge or knowings. It's simply too vast.
    This does in no way imply that the bits of knowledge (knowings) that we can gain are not significant. They are functional. That means that they give us a better understanding of ourselves and the environment we are in, at least so far as we can perceive.
    Kandel's work sheds new light on the old question "free will versus determinism".




    2,441 views
    Columbia Magazine

  • The Hope of the Web - The New York Review of Books

    Rated Apr 19 2006 • 3 reviews • networks, complexity • nybooks.com


    Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics
    Networks and politics, this could well spell a radically morphing system of democracy
    via 3QuarksDaily, in NewYork Review of Books by Bill McKibben
    """ When we consider Kos's own Web site and its numerous links to other blogs, we see something like an expanding hive of communication, a collective intelligence. And the results can be impressive. A writer with the pen name (mouse name) Jerome à Paris, for instance, organized dozens of other Kossacks interested in energy policy to write an energy plan that I find far more comprehensive and thoughtful than anything the think tanks have produced. It's been read and reshaped by thousands of readers; it will serve as a useful model should the Democrats retake Congress and have the ability to move legislation. The blogs began as purely reactive and bloggers still spend much of their energy responding to the "mainstream media." But a kind of proto-journalism is emerging, and becoming steadily more sophisticated. If you want to understand (albeit with plenty of spin) the ins and outs of Scooter Libby's defense in the Plamegate trial, for instance, the place to go is Firedoglake. """

    URL: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics
    URL: The book


    223 views
    The Hope of the Web - The New York Review of Books

  • Resources | Cooperation Commons

    Rated Apr 18 2006 • 1 review • complex systems, complexity, networks • cooperationcommons.com


    Cooperation in loose networks
    We have the centralized version of societal organization that is being "like" imposed on all of the world nowadays and then there is the Cooperation model or the loose network cooperation model that is "like" our present utopia...
    via WorldChanging by Alex Steffen...
    """ Cooperation Commons, the single best source for information on the emerging science of studying what makes cooperation work has posted the video from all their Literacy of Cooperation lectures at Stanford. If you're serious about understanding the phenomena of online citizen action, tech bloom cooperation, distributed collaboration and open source behaviors which we discuss so often here on Worldchanging, you really couldn't do better than watch these lectures. """

    URL: Literacy of Cooperation lectures at Stanford.
    URL: what makes cooperation work
    URL: how best to help cooperation and collaboration flourish. (Free 8 pages PDF)


    116 views
    Resources | Cooperation Commons

  • http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003368.shtml

    Rated Apr 15 2006 • 1 review • networks, complexity • lessig.org


    The Weath of Networks by Yochai Benkler
    This is about one of the fundamental shifts in paradigm that we are witnessing nowadays... The old paradigm was that societies were best organized hierarchically with a central power garanteeing the preservation of the system. The new paradigm is about loose networks that somehow "quantically" and spontaneously organize.
    in Lessig Blog by Boris Lessig
    """ Yochai Benkler's book, The Weath of Networks, is out. This is -- by far -- the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years. If there is one book you read this year, it should be this. The book has a wiki; it can be downloaded as a pdf for free under a Creative Commons license; or it can be bought at places like Amazon. Read it. Understand it. You are not serious about these issues -- on either side of these debates -- unless you have read this book. """



    URL: Benkler's book is out
    The Weath of Networks
    Free PDF downloading
    The book's wiki
    An older book by Benkler: Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm


    90 views
    http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003368.shtml

  • Partial Ingredients for DNA and Protein Found Around Star...

    Reviewed Dec 30 2005 • 1 review • science, life, complexity • scienceblog.com

    NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered some of life's most basic ingredients in the dust swirling around a young star. The ingredients - gaseous precursors to DNA and protein - were detected in the star's terrestrial planet zone, a region where roc
    1 view
    Partial Ingredients for DNA and Protein Found Around Star | Science Blog