Marc, himself, his blogs, and you reading them.
June 09, 2006
Information Biology
The commodity (in our world) of "being able to read" is hiding a tremendous natural wonder. For me personally it's at least the wonder bringing me one of my biggest joys. Give me letters and I'll enjoy reading, sucking up the memes contrived in them. By the way: It's fun to see how it's taking a similar place in the lives of our kids (even when the youngest is yet to learn how to make meaning of those funny marks, it's obvious he's already drawn to them)
My current read is Steven Pinker's - "How the mind works" (In Dutch translation and borrowed from a colleague who is now delving through my copy of Oliver Sacks' - "Uncle Tungsten"). I'm somewhere half-way enjoying the ride through smart insights, remarkable test results, funny anecdotes and clever mind-tricks. The mainstream of the shared ideas, although those require careful attention to grasp, are easily accepted into my postmodern view of the world. Since there is no eternal truth, this comes pretty darn close to it IMHO :-).
Pinker's view on "how mankind's step into the 'information niche' has been instrumental to its biological success on this planet" pins down the unbeatable advantage in our world of being natural information processors. Looking at the rest of the biomass out there it is by far our most distinguishing talent. It's great how we extended this into non living material that cooperates in the effort, and even more to see how we use our reflections on those machines to gain better insights in how the biological versions are working.
Apparently unrelated I'm receiving this week the invitation to join in on the presentation of Lennart Martens' PhD thesis. It's safe to state he's one of Belgium's most talented (Java) software engineers. More importantly to me however he has turned out to be one of those instant-click people I've had the pleasure to meet. Mostly due to a similar sense of humor and some joint interests in (reading!) life I guess.
Anyways, the man kinda left professional software engineering and went back to his biotech roots some years ago. His goal was to leverage his acquired professional software development knowledge into this extraordinary field of fundamental biotech research (which was predominantly inhabited by dedicated Perl-hackers at the time). To say he's been successful at that too would be an understatement. (Naah, there ain't that many people I know that had a publication in Nature, but YMMV). So yeah, I'll be happily joining in on the presentation next week, not in the least because I'll be treating myself: On top of things, he's quite an entertainer as well.
Anyways. This got me into skim-reading Lennart's work lately. Lennart is making quite an open source statement in his work as well and has been releasing the fruits of his labor under open source licenses. Quite a natural thing to do for government research if you ask me, but apparently important enough in his field of expertise to find some argumenting inspiration in some well chosen quotes:
In my current state of mind (being half filled up with Pinker's ideas) this last one reads like Darwin's mission to humanity :-). If ever you were looking for some reason of being, then why not actively work to exploit nature's selected gift to humans: "Process information" and maximize the effect by sharing it to others so they could do the same?
Well, having a new ubuntu release in the same week accompanied with the example Mandela Movie to explain what the word means is probably just coincidence? Or is there some growing spread of this new meme?
One final note in light of all this. Receiving a compliment for 'sharing your insights' is probably the nicest gift one can get. Thx mate, and happy to.
# Posted by mpo at 11:09 AM | TrackBack
The commodity (in our world) of "being able to read" is hiding a tremendous natural wonder. For me personally it's at least the wonder bringing me one of my biggest joys. Give me letters and I'll enjoy reading, sucking up the memes contrived in them. By the way: It's fun to see how it's taking a similar place in the lives of our kids (even when the youngest is yet to learn how to make meaning of those funny marks, it's obvious he's already drawn to them)
My current read is Steven Pinker's - "How the mind works" (In Dutch translation and borrowed from a colleague who is now delving through my copy of Oliver Sacks' - "Uncle Tungsten"). I'm somewhere half-way enjoying the ride through smart insights, remarkable test results, funny anecdotes and clever mind-tricks. The mainstream of the shared ideas, although those require careful attention to grasp, are easily accepted into my postmodern view of the world. Since there is no eternal truth, this comes pretty darn close to it IMHO :-).
Pinker's view on "how mankind's step into the 'information niche' has been instrumental to its biological success on this planet" pins down the unbeatable advantage in our world of being natural information processors. Looking at the rest of the biomass out there it is by far our most distinguishing talent. It's great how we extended this into non living material that cooperates in the effort, and even more to see how we use our reflections on those machines to gain better insights in how the biological versions are working.
Apparently unrelated I'm receiving this week the invitation to join in on the presentation of Lennart Martens' PhD thesis. It's safe to state he's one of Belgium's most talented (Java) software engineers. More importantly to me however he has turned out to be one of those instant-click people I've had the pleasure to meet. Mostly due to a similar sense of humor and some joint interests in (reading!) life I guess.
Anyways, the man kinda left professional software engineering and went back to his biotech roots some years ago. His goal was to leverage his acquired professional software development knowledge into this extraordinary field of fundamental biotech research (which was predominantly inhabited by dedicated Perl-hackers at the time). To say he's been successful at that too would be an understatement. (Naah, there ain't that many people I know that had a publication in Nature, but YMMV). So yeah, I'll be happily joining in on the presentation next week, not in the least because I'll be treating myself: On top of things, he's quite an entertainer as well.
Anyways. This got me into skim-reading Lennart's work lately. Lennart is making quite an open source statement in his work as well and has been releasing the fruits of his labor under open source licenses. Quite a natural thing to do for government research if you ask me, but apparently important enough in his field of expertise to find some argumenting inspiration in some well chosen quotes:
"If I have seen further, it is by standing
on the shoulders of giants."
-- (attributed to) Sir Isaac
Newton
"Information,
no matter how expensive to create, can be replicated and shared at little or no cost."
-- Thomas Jefferson
In my current state of mind (being half filled up with Pinker's ideas) this last one reads like Darwin's mission to humanity :-). If ever you were looking for some reason of being, then why not actively work to exploit nature's selected gift to humans: "Process information" and maximize the effect by sharing it to others so they could do the same?
Well, having a new ubuntu release in the same week accompanied with the example Mandela Movie to explain what the word means is probably just coincidence? Or is there some growing spread of this new meme?
One final note in light of all this. Receiving a compliment for 'sharing your insights' is probably the nicest gift one can get. Thx mate, and happy to.
# Posted by mpo at 11:09 AM | TrackBack
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