Branko quotes Wells:

Of a Book Unwrit­ten

Accom­plished lit­er­a­ture is all very well in its way, no doubt, but much more fas­ci­nat­ing to the con­tem­pla­tive man are the books that have not been writ­ten. These lat­ter are no trou­ble to hold; there are no pages to turn over. One can read them in bed on sleep­less nights with­out a can­dle. Turn­ing to another topic, prim­i­tive man in the works of the descrip­tive anthro­pol­o­gist is cer­tainly a very enter­tain­ing and quaint per­son, but the man of the future, if we only had the facts, would appeal to us more strongly. Yet where are the books? As Ruskin has said some­where, à pro­pos of Dar­win, it is not what man has been, but what he will be, that should inter­est us.

What will a book be, when it has been pub­lished? Some­thing new, I think. Many peo­ple don’t seem to under­stand that. Branko, some oth­ers — they do.

Let’s see what we can do about spread­ing that understanding.

Manorama writes on self and other, in “I can’t believe she’s wear­ing that”.

I’m afraid I had to miss Arti­fi­cial Life X this year — the last Alife con­fer­ence I attended was Alife III, in Santa Fe many many years back. I regret my indis­po­si­tion not least because I missed an appar­ent attempt to take this impor­tant field of com­plex sys­tems research and sim­u­la­tion sci­ence, and drive it into becom­ing a talk­ing point for pansper­mic pseu­do­science and what seems a quirky inter­stel­lar off­spring of Intel­li­gent Design:

The Klyce agenda makes claims such as:

• life can never emerge from non-​​life
• there was no Big Bang
• genetic inno­va­tion comes from space
• there has never been an exam­ple of an advan­ta­geous muta­tion (other than a gene becom­ing disabled)
• open-​​ended evo­lu­tion in a so-​​called closed sys­tem is not possible

I have to say, it would’ve been fun to watch. Takes me back to the days when a vis­it­ing “researcher” down the hall at SFI was seek­ing impor­tant cru­ci­fixes in cel­lu­lar automata. Or the first time I actu­ally saw Dembski’s No Free Lunch and thought, “Oh, good! Somebody’s pop­u­lar­iz­ing Macready and Wolpert’s impor­tant results.” Or the ubiq­ui­tous self-​​aggrandizing mar­ket­ing of the Gene Expres­sion Pro­gram­ming cabal.

We form dynamic com­mu­ni­ties with soft bound­aries. Look to Tom Ray’s ear­li­est results on par­a­sitism in Tierra for intu­itions of how this plays out.…

micro­ecos reviews recent mus­ings on minia­tur­iza­tion, pansper­mia, and redis­cov­ery. With pic­tures, which I’d not seen in all cases.

A stun­ning account of John Bolton’s unpro­fes­sional behav­ior at his sem­i­nar at Oxford:

Dur­ing the ques­tion period, Bolton rec­og­nized a law stu­dent who politely asked him to jus­tify the appli­ca­tion of a dou­ble stan­dard in the Mid­dle East that favors Israel over Syria or other Mus­lim nations. Detect­ing the student’s accent, Bolton point­edly asked, “Where are you from?” The stu­dent was Syr­ian. On that note, Bolton refused to answer the ques­tion, and instead he crit­i­cized Syria for what he deemed to be its unwar­ranted inter­fer­ence in the Mid­dle East and Lebanon even though they with­drew their final 15,000 troops last year. From a his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive, it is ironic that Bolton would have cited this case, for Syria was invited to pro­vide secu­rity oper­a­tions in Lebanon by the Maronite Chris­tians with the tacit approval of the United Nations and the sup­port of the Arab League. The hypocrisy at the heart of his own case — since he rep­re­sents a hege­monic power with more than one hun­dred and thirty thou­sand unin­vited troops on the ground in Iraq, thou­sands more unin­vited troops in Afghanistan and which now threat­ens to launch a new war against Iran — was lost on Bolton. But, Bolton’s hypocrisy was not lost on his per­cep­tive audi­ence who now zeroed in on him with a bar­rage of pointed questions.

(Via Danny Yee.)