Sound patterns

Beware the gut feeling that like begets like and that we should thus be able to anticipate effects from their causes. This leads far too many of us to doubt that sentience can emerge from primal goo. Those of us (like me) who are enthralled by complexity know that like begets like is far too often untrue. I've constantly seen that nature creates elaborate macro patterns using only a dynamic process involving far-too-simple component parts. With that background, take a look at these sand patterns generated by nothing but sound waves. I knew what was coming and I still felt chills when the patterns emerged. There is a deep lesson in these shallow grains of sand. Here's a web page with further explanation.

Continue ReadingSound patterns

Introduction to your microbiome

From the NYT--most of the cells that comprise you do not contain your DNA:

I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the first-person plural — as a superorganism, that is, rather than a plain old individual human being. It happened on March 7. That’s when I opened my e-mail to find a huge, processor-choking file of charts and raw data from a laboratory located at the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As part of a new citizen-science initiative called the American Gut project, the lab sequenced my microbiome — that is, the genes not of “me,” exactly, but of the several hundred microbial species with whom I share this body. These bacteria, which number around 100 trillion, are living (and dying) right now on the surface of my skin, on my tongue and deep in the coils of my intestines, where the largest contingent of them will be found, a pound or two of microbes together forming a vast, largely uncharted interior wilderness that scientists are just beginning to map.

Continue ReadingIntroduction to your microbiome