FULL SPECTRUM CULTURE

Brother David (a bit burnt out on blogging for now) just sent me an amazing webpage that profiles a vegetable that is a living, breathing fractal. Check it out, it is truly amazing. Here’s a funny, money quote from that page:

Nearly exact self-similar fractal forms occur do in nature, but I’d never seen such a beautiful and perfect example until, some time after moving to Switzerland, I came across a chou Romanesco like the one above in a grocery store. This is so visually stunning an object that on first encounter it’s hard to imagine you’re looking at a garden vegetable rather than an alien artefact created with molecular nanotechnology. But of course, then you realise that vegetables are created with molecular nanotechnology, albeit the product of earthly evolution, not extraterrestrial engineering.

But of course, then you realize that some people look for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence out in space for their entire lives, when the signs of such stare them right in the face right here on earth every single day. Want more? Okay…

It seems like the universe just wants to compute. Of course, there’s a tendency for thinkers in every age to model the universe in terms of the predominant technology of the day. To the Pythagoreans, all was number and geometry. In Newton’s time, the universe seemed an intricate clockwork mechanism. Later, in the age of steam, thermodynamics and heat death dominated models of the universe. Today, surrounded by computers evolving more rapidly than anything in natural history, what could be more natural than regarding the universe as a great automaton performing some kind of cosmic computation?

The universe is computing something. It is calculating us, and with much trouble and strife, it is gradually coming to an answer. So don’t be part of the problem, be a part of the solution. [Okay, that's enough for one day. I'll be quiet now. Until tomorrow.]