Autopoiesis in Action

"In Denmark, Dr. Rasmussen is seeking to design the most stripped-down minimalist suggestion of a functioning cell. As he sees it, there are three basic capacities that a living cell must possess. It must have a means of channeling free energy in the environment to meet its demands: that is, it must have some form of metabolism. It must have an enclosure: a cell membrane. And it must have the informational wherewithal to reproduce itself: a genome. Dr. Rasmussen and his co-workers have devised reasonable if crude facsimiles of the three cellular non-negotiables, and they’ve managed to merge two of them together in any given experiment — and in one case even all three of them. The goal of contriving a self-replicating and autonomously metabolizing protocell, however, continues to elude them. “We have the instruments,” he said, “but it doesn’t sound like an orchestra yet.”"

From the Science Section of the NYT.

Are Physicists the Inspiration for Artificial Life?

Today in the science section of the NYT you can read:

"The harmless nucleic interjections include encrypted versions of the researchers’ names and three apt if self-conscious quotations: “See things not as they are, but as they might be,” from a biography of the physicist Robert Oppenheimer; “What I cannot build, I cannot understand,” by Richard Feynman; and “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, and to recreate life out of life,” by James Joyce, which, when taken together with the fact that the physicist Murray Gell-Mann named the fundamental particles of the atomic nucleus “quarks” after a line in Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” suggests that scientists are at least as fond of the nougaty Irish novelist as is the average English major."

Oppenheimer, Feynman, Gell-Mann: Here in Memory and Respect, Artificial Life is Coming.

I would've put some lines from Erwin Schrodinger's "What is Life?"

Reading Papers

Besides the obvious grammar errors, I am finding out that the students copy each other. I explicitely asked them to write their own papers, nevertheless I am finding out repetitions from one paper to the next. Maybe since the classes were for all the students, one can imagine that they just repeat what they heard. Nevertheless there was an emphasis on finding out more information, and writing it in their own words.

The need to work in groups should be recognized, but I believe students should be encouraged to be original. Originality though, comes after one knows the work of other creators. I just have to find out a happy medium to grade them.

Teacher Satisfaction

"Principalmente el objetivo de la materia es leer  y escribir mucho, como la había comentado al principio. A mi en lo particular me parece muy bien que el maestro Cantoral nos impulsó a utilizar este lenguaje de programación por el bien de nosotros. Porque más adelante vamos a necesitar de este lenguaje de programación para entregar buenos trabajos con presentación diferente a como lo hemos hecho.

Quiero aprovechar para  darle gracias al Maestro Cantoral por impartir este curso.

Tambien darle gracias a mis padres por darme esa oportunidad de estar en la institución en donde me encuentro ahora.

Gracias padres por darme esa oportunidad, yo les prometo echarle muchas ganas por aprender más. "

Taken from Edith's final paper.

Translation:

The main objective of the class is to read and write a lot, as I wrote in the beginning of this book. I think it is very good that our teacher, Mr. Cantoral invited us to use this program language , for our own good. Because in the future we will need this programming language to publish in different formats.

I want to thank Mr. Cantoral for teaching this class.

I also want to thank my parents for giving me the opportunity to be in the institution where I am now.

Thanks folks, for giving me this opportunity, I promise to work hard to learn more.

End of translation.

It feels well to be appreciated.

This Organism is Feeding on Itself

Prof. Michael Wesch has a program at Kansas State University. He has produced a set of videos that grabbed my attention. As always I found this Internet jewel through a young person. My dear student Edith Tomás Sánchez, you can read her blog in Spanish, here.

Recently I wrote on the effects, symbols are having on culture, now I see that we are looking at ourselves through the Internet, and we don't seem to get enough of it. I feel a new super organism  being born.

Given the enormity of problems we face, think Gulf of Mexico oil spill, this tool got here not too soon.

Thanks Edith.

Michael Wesch

Lucid Mind

Noam Chomsky is in DN! today. You can watch him here.

The Center cannot hold.

I am looking into the Chinese company Huawei. They took over from where Lucent left the communications business. Chomsky mentions that some expect China to take the role Europe and the US have now. He sees similarities in China and the US in their treatment of workers.

Here I write some ideas on the structure of society, and possible future scenarios. Like Chomsky I have been following world events since childhood, unlike Chomsky nobody knows my ideas.

My great grandfather told my grandmother, our lives end, but the world keeps going. After the USSR fell, the US gloated triumphantly, we won! What now, will China have the last laugh? Definitely if the US falls, the Earth will keep on spinning.

I was hired in 1998 to join Lucent, I started working on January 1999. By December 2001, I was out of there. Legacy telephony was the milk cow of the company, they didn't seem to be particularly concerned by the tsunami that hit the communications world in 1994, the Internet.

Now that some friends are working for Huawei, and listening to Chomsky I am very touched.

October 1, 1949: Mao Zedong asked the Chinese people to build a country based on Chinese traditions and modern science. First everybody was taken off dope; opium was destroying the country with the satisfaction of the English, which earlier fought the Opium War. Second everybody was taught how to read and write, even simplifying the script to achieve this goal. Finally we have harvest time. This is the only country I know, where one billion people of an age to read and write do so.

Will China take over? I say, yes it is possible; will the US let them? I say no, the US will fight. There are over thirty thousand American soldier fighting in Afghanistan, and I am sorry, I do not think they are fighting the Taliban. America is hitting his chest like the world Alpha Male.

I see two possible scenarios, continuation of business as usual, with a British American financial World structure, or a wholesale investment by China, Brazil, India, and Russia.

Which one will it be? If I knew I could profit.

The first one seems more likely, at least in the short run, in the long run, the rational scientific approach of the Chinese seems more realistic.

I've Been Trying to Write This

Since my mother died almost two months ago, I have something I want to write. I feel that this is a time to move on; one reason I came back to Mexico was to be with her. She had not been feeling that well, even if her stoicism prevented her to show more. Her life was going away. Now that she is dead, less strings keep me here.

The last time I saw her, we both knew that she might have cancer, but neither of us wanted to live with that weight if it was not confirmed by doctors. As it turned out, it was never really confirmed, the casue of death was cancer. Nevertheless I was not thinking that she had cancer, and was going to die. A few hours before she died, my brother told me that very likely she was not going to make it. I was not there with her when she died.

Going back to the last time I saw her, we looked at each other's eyes half knowing that that could be the last time we saw each other; it was.

That is not what I want to write though; it is the preamble.

I feel the presence of death more now. We were close, and she helped making me the way I am. I take risks, like she did.

She married a man that nobody knew in town, and went to live with him in a city where she hardly knew anybody.

She was courageous, and she made me like that.

Now I am planing to leave Mexico again. This time it seems harder. I have to take this part of my life in a new way, which I don't quite know how to do.

Miguel de Icaza

I have been following this Mexican creator of Gnumeric, the free SpreadSheet, in Twitter. Tonight all of a sudden he starts tweeting about the Gaza Blockade by Israel.

I guess I am not the only Mexican, that cares about math, and the world. Of course he is famous and I am not. Mexico has been attacked several times during the past two hundred years, so it comes naturally to us, to feel sympathy for invaded peoples. Judging by the US media, one gets the impression that nobody invades anybody anymore. Neverhteless since the end of WWII, diaspora Jews started to go back to the Middle East.

Palestinians feel invaded, and tonight a flotilla of friends of Gaza is being attacked by the Israeli state. As a formerly invaded Mexican, that looks to me as an injustice.

Maybe my readers know which country invaded Mexico last. I am not going to tell you, go to Wikipedia.

Logistic Map Potentials

Prof. Curtright has published a new physics paper with a connection to the logistic map, which has inspired so much work. 

After more than thirty years that this simple equation entered in physics, we do not seem to get enough!

 

We can read Curtright and Veitia's conclusion:

"V. CONCLUSION
 

The point of view supported in this paper is that the logistic map, and other discrete time-stepped dynamical models, may be regarded as continuously evolving Hamiltonian systems sampled at integer times. For this view to be valid, the continuous system must be allowed to undergo a series of switchbacks whereupon the potential affecting the dynamics changes when the evolving particle encounters a turning point. From a perspective of configuration space covering manifolds, in the case of simple one-dimensional motion, the particle moves from one sheet of a Riemann surface to another, to experience a different branch of the underlying analytic potential.
 

The methods of this paper may be used directly to determine such branches of the potential for the logistic map, for any value of s, as well as other one-dimensional maps. A more extensive study of other examples is underway [9]. While peculiar behavior is possible for exceptional maps (say, for special values‡ of s), so far as we are aware, any such behavior can always be analyzed using the potential framework presented here.
 

In total, for all parameter values governing a particular map, the collection of potential sequence families constitute what we may call a “potential fractal” with self-similarities qualitatively evident in the various graphs, as visible in the above. Perhaps such potential fractals have a significant role to play in continuum physics. Applications might involve any of the usual systems exhibiting chaotic behavior [7], including accelerator beams [10], or perhaps cosmological models [11]."

High School Graduation

My son finished high school with honors. His grades are not all As, but I know that he liked some of the work he did at school. Next Saturday I hope to be there with him, a new stage of his life starts.

I love life, some people go, new people come. We are a stream weaving beautiful rivulets in some ethereal substance.

My high school was in Mexico City, his is in Wheaton, but it is the same flow, exactly the same flow.

When I was his age I wondered why was I around; what is the purpose of life?

I did come up with several answers, one was to have him so he could graduate from high school: how lame; he may think. To me though, it made and does make a lot of sense.

Now I see that there is only one planet in the Solar System, where I, and he can be. From  over two hundred known star systems with planets, not a single one has intelligent life, as far as we know.

Given this planet, there is only a sliver of space, called the biosphere, where we can be. This huge Earth empty of life.

Finally inside the halls of Wheaton Warrenville South High School, very few instances of intelligent life, and my son is one. Isn't that amazing?

Congratulations Lev!

Mexican Politics

If a politician is accused of wrong doing: that must be true, right?

Not in Mexico, the mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) was accused sometime ago of illegal land seizure for city works. Guess what? He became more popular, and it became clear that his political enemies were behind the accusations. Now a candidate from the same party, the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), running for the governor's office in Quintana Roo, where Cancún is located, is accused of illegal relations with drug dealers. Maybe he was doing so well in that election, that his political enemies decided this was a good time to make these accusations public.

All I can tell you is that in Mexico, things are not how they appear to be.

I guess Eliot Spitzer did have a good thing going on with those high paid whores in NY, somehow though; I believe somebody in Wall Street, didn't like him prodding into those "obscure" derivatives shananigans. Just saying.

Symbols and Culture

I went downtown Chilpancingo today. I see babies and little children looking around to symbols that did not exist several thousand years ago when the first humans strolled around these lands. They will think different when they grow up, than their ancestors did when they got here so many years ago. There is intention, only insofar as people built what they think they need. Nevertheless nobody was thinking in teaching something to these toddlers. The result is the same. These Mexicans will be different than those older Mexicans. Symbols and Culture.

The new symbols, once understood by the kids, become part of their culture.

What symbols am I talking about? McDonald's, Oxxo, Cybercafe, newspapers and magazines, handicrafts, three hundred year old church.

You can see some of that by one of my students here.

Symbols are culture, and produce new culture.

Huawei v. Alcatel-Lucent

This Chinese Co. already passed the company I used to work for. Friends of mine are joining a company Wikipedia describes as authoritarian.

Is that it? Under pressure should we become like an Army?

Just asking.

Mr. Obama: Solve the Unemployment Problem With BP Money, Please

This is a proposal. BP just failed its last attempt to plug the hole it opened at the bottom of the sea.

Obama has the authority to propose an Americans to Work Bill, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in the forties. To really clean the mess, I assume there will be a lot of busy work to do, unskilled workers may be able to do it. Whoever caused the problem, should solve it. BP has billions of dollars, and many Americans don't have any.

Simple proposal: BP just pay Americans to clean up.

In 1938 then Mexican President, General Lázaro Cárdenas told foreign companies, pay more to Mexican workers, the bosses said no; and Cárdenas told them to leave the country; that is how PEMEX, the Mexican Oil Company was created.

Big problems, need big solutions.

What is Google Up To?

I live in Ubuntu land right now. I am avoiding Microsoft products and OS. I see that Google is working overtime to please me, below you can see one test of Chrome v. FireFox, and one site with JavaScript Experiments.

I am pleased.

I believe Google is run by more apt and involved leadership at this time. It seems to me that we can forget about Bill Gates, and maybe soon, of Steve Jobs.

Welcome Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Chrome Experiments - Detail - Liquid Particles

Chrome v. FireFox

TEST                   COMPARISON            FROM                 TO             DETAILS

=============================================================================

** TOTAL **:           *8.53x as slow*   781.6ms +/- 3.3%   6667.0ms +/- 6.4%     significant

=============================================================================

  3d:                  *5.76x as slow*   125.8ms +/- 7.0%    725.0ms +/- 2.4%     significant
    cube:              *6.44x as slow*    40.8ms +/- 9.0%    262.6ms +/- 2.3%     significant
    morph:             *5.61x as slow*    43.8ms +/- 18.7%    245.6ms +/- 5.0%     significant
    raytrace:          *5.26x as slow*    41.2ms +/- 22.5%    216.8ms +/- 4.1%     significant

  access:              *11.2x as slow*    73.0ms +/- 8.3%    815.4ms +/- 3.7%     significant
    binary-trees:      *25.1x as slow*     4.0ms +/- 38.1%    100.4ms +/- 5.2%     significant
    fannkuch:          *12.1x as slow*    28.0ms +/- 8.3%    339.2ms +/- 4.7%     significant
    nbody:             *7.01x as slow*    34.0ms +/- 6.8%    238.2ms +/- 9.5%     significant
    nsieve:            *19.7x as slow*     7.0ms +/- 17.8%    137.6ms +/- 19.3%     significant

  bitops:              *8.33x as slow*    65.4ms +/- 11.0%    545.0ms +/- 3.8%     significant
    3bit-bits-in-byte: *27.6x as slow*     4.0ms +/- 38.1%    110.6ms +/- 9.0%     significant
    bits-in-byte:      *11.1x as slow*    13.6ms +/- 8.2%    150.6ms +/- 11.3%     significant
    bitwise-and:       *4.50x as slow*    25.0ms +/- 41.9%    112.4ms +/- 5.7%     significant
    nsieve-bits:       *7.52x as slow*    22.8ms +/- 14.6%    171.4ms +/- 5.7%     significant

  controlflow:         *16.9x as slow*     5.0ms +/- 30.5%     84.6ms +/- 5.0%     significant
    recursive:         *16.9x as slow*     5.0ms +/- 30.5%     84.6ms +/- 5.0%     significant

  crypto:              *7.85x as slow*    49.0ms +/- 5.1%    384.6ms +/- 2.7%     significant
    aes:               *5.88x as slow*    20.4ms +/- 5.5%    120.0ms +/- 4.1%     significant
    md5:               *8.81x as slow*    15.0ms +/- 15.5%    132.2ms +/- 4.5%     significant
    sha1:              *9.74x as slow*    13.6ms +/- 21.0%    132.4ms +/- 4.9%     significant

  date:                *5.42x as slow*   126.2ms +/- 6.7%    684.6ms +/- 1.0%     significant
    format-tofte:      *7.91x as slow*    48.8ms +/- 9.1%    385.8ms +/- 1.5%     significant
    format-xparb:      *3.86x as slow*    77.4ms +/- 8.6%    298.8ms +/- 1.3%     significant

  math:                *8.46x as slow*    91.0ms +/- 3.6%    770.2ms +/- 4.1%     significant
    cordic:            *12.5x as slow*    26.4ms +/- 7.1%    328.8ms +/- 5.2%     significant
    partial-sums:      *5.88x as slow*    49.2ms +/- 7.9%    289.2ms +/- 8.3%     significant
    spectral-norm:     *9.88x as slow*    15.4ms +/- 18.6%    152.2ms +/- 5.7%     significant

  regexp:              *19.1x as slow*    33.2ms +/- 16.8%    635.4ms +/- 6.7%     significant
    dna:               *19.1x as slow*    33.2ms +/- 16.8%    635.4ms +/- 6.7%     significant

  string:              *9.49x as slow*   213.0ms +/- 2.9%   2022.2ms +/- 19.3%     significant
    base64:            *8.65x as slow*    24.2ms +/- 23.7%    209.4ms +/- 11.1%     significant
    fasta:             *10.9x as slow*    31.6ms +/- 2.2%    343.8ms +/- 3.4%     significant
    tagcloud:          *6.23x as slow*    55.0ms +/- 7.8%    342.4ms +/- 7.9%     significant
    unpack-code:       *13.3x as slow*    66.2ms +/- 4.1%    882.0ms +/- 36.5%     significant
    validate-input:    *6.79x as slow*    36.0ms +/- 9.5%    244.6ms +/- 12.1%     significant

Chrome is Better for JavaScript. 

Reconquista?

Americans are afraid of this word.

I just posted a note (below) which could be considered incendiary, I explain here.

In Mexico we never lost sight of the millions of Real Americans that inhabit these lands. Somehow Anglo Saxons want to live under the illusion that the Indian Problem is solved.

I don't think so.

Usually reconquista brings memories of the Spanish English war. As a "witty" California Senator, Hayakawa, once said: We stole Panama Fair and Square. Past wars are past wars, right? Wrong.

There was never a declared war to the original American people, and therefore there is no statue of limitations. The sooner we Mexicans, and Americans recognize that the Indian population is not happy with us, the sooner we will be as powerful as we can be, one people, one land.

Recognize your Olmecs, Zapotecs, Aztecs, ..., brothers and sisters, and we will be better off. Wake up America!

Foes and Supporters of New Law Gather in Arizona - NYTimes.com

Foes and Supporters of New Law Gather in Arizona - NYTimes.com

Fun and Games. On this corner we have real Americans, on the other whoever came later (mainly Europeans). I go for the locals, they've been around these lands long enough. They know every canyon, creek, and cave.

Actually this game has been going on for four hundred years now.

Long Live Geronimo and his Mexican Friends. Time to move out Europeans, you never properly asked permission to move in here, you just sent your General Custer, and other killers. Get out of there Texas and Arizona Rangers. Maricopa Police Officer Arpaio, time to move out.