Archives for the 'Evolution' Category
Making Things Talk
Published on 3 Apr 2008 at 2:20 am.
1 Comment.
Filed under Coding, Entrepreneurship, Evolution, Exploration, Fun, Gadgets, Information, Intelligent Systems, Internet, Inventions, Research, Robotics, Technology.
Looking back, I am surprised at how electronics has quietly advanced to the point where we can buy small programmable computers on chips for a dollar or two. These are microcontrollers of course, and in my lab we are working on programming them to handle the tedious tasks in our robotics projects.
At makezine.com, I stumbled on this gem of […]
Judgement Day Online
Published on 4 Dec 2007 at 3:45 am.
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Filed under Biology, Evolution, Philosophy.
Intelligent Design.
That phrase alone should ignite a firestorm of controversy.
The NOVA special, Judgement Day, on the recent Dover Pennsylvania trial now can be viewed online.
Let us begin with two moral principles: HONESTY and CONSISTENCY. I know of no one who can disagree with the importance of these ideas. These ideas are central to religions all over […]
Nature Abhors a Gradient
Published on 27 Nov 2007 at 3:54 am.
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Filed under Biology, Climate, Energy, Evolution, Philosophy, Physics, Social Justice.
I recall back to my first days in physics class where I read the quotation “Nature abhors a vacuum”. The phrase was accompanied by an image of two teams of horses trying to pull two hollow hemispheres apart after the air was pumped out from inside.
These were called Magdeburg hemispheres and the experiment was performed by […]
Read ‘Nature Abhors a Gradient’
Robots and the Coming Creation
Published on 13 Oct 2007 at 1:43 am.
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Filed under Astrobiology, Astronomy, Computation, Evolution, Exploration, Intelligent Systems, Inventions, Philosophy, Research, Robotics, Space, Technology.
‘Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race? and will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms, giving out the effluvia of the laboratory, and performing with infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?’
- George Eliot,
The […]
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Plants and Animals: Chemists and Engineers
Published on 8 Aug 2007 at 2:26 am.
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Filed under Biology, Evolution, Philosophy.
Last winter I went to the Galapagos Islands. While there, I was wondering why plants have all sorts of medicinal properties, but it is rather rare that animals do.
A naturalist explained to me that plants evolved to use chemistry as their main defense; whereas animals developed locomotion. Two different kingdoms adopted two distinct technologies for survival: chemistry […]
