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How do we measure fitness of a technology startup as a function of time/stage? Rapid positive changes in fitness would be considered value inflection points.

Also, rapid changes in fitness due to new entrants can be easily detected. For example, in the Three Little Pigs story, the appearance of the wolf impacts fitness distribution and as a result changes ROI of house-construction tech.
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“We can no longer be satisfied with the old stimulus/response model, according to which animals (and other organisms) passively respond to prior, incoming stimuli, and learn by means of conditioning (or associations among these stimuli). For this is only one part of the story. In addition, and much more importantly, biological entities are active reality-testers. They are always busy “probing the environment with ongoing, variable actions first and evaluating sensory feedback later (i.e., the inverse of stimulus response)”. Rather than just responding to stimuli, they exhibit ongoing activity that is self-generated, and only secondarily modulated by stimuli. Output tends to come first.”

Steven Shaviro. “Discognition.”
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Because the epistemic value of drawing in science is generally understood in terms of the drawing as an object and not, as is argued at various points in this volume, in the drawing process itself, the unique epistemological value of drawing has become increasingly under-appreciated (Anderson 2014; Tversky 2010; Wittmann 2011). Educationally, this has had costs in terms of student engagement, a deeper understanding of the conventions of scientific representations, and the development of ‘creative reasoning’ (Ainsworth et al. 2011).... A unique advantage of drawing is its double nature as a tool for deepening understanding and for communication. Drawing helps to consolidate ideas, clarify concepts and bring visibility to thought. Drawing can extract and highlight salient information from what is discussed, observed and witnessed, and can be used to communicate and analyze an idea or a concept within a research team or to the broader public.

Drawing Processes of Life, 2024.

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The development of computerized simulations and techniques for real-time imaging at microscopic scales provides a partial solution to the problem of visu- alizing such n-dimensional entities, by providing, in effect, 4D projections of them. With these techniques, the scientist or any other viewer of the imagery is removed from the production of the representation, however, which negatively affects the quality of insight and inference.

Quoted from Drawing Processes of Life, 2024.


One purpose of going from viewing to insight development would be discovery of transition points in the process of change, see e.g.





For example, the emergence of new opportunities and related decision forks can be represented as a critical point within the Morse-Smale theory.
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Contrary to the common belief that moving images help us to see change, we contend that stillness that helps us to see movement and change. Change is constituted through the relationality of the picture series. The series is a synthesis and analysis of development at once. Development is both the individual form and the series of forms – it is stasis as much as flow. locating development in the images we have created is to imagine development as a pictorial relationship. It is the relationship between the visual forms that produce both the individual stage of development and development as a whole – simultaneously and in mutual dependence (Wellmann 2017: 233).
...
The ‘fishness’ of the fish is maintained through the transformations; each stage bears a unique gradation of colour, repetition of the same form seen from different angles and scales, moving forwards, backwards and sideways, creating a feeling of emergence from a dark background. Klee’s watercol- our washes elevate the forms to a resonant poetry.
...
The essence of rhythm is the fusion of sameness and novelty; so that the whole never loses the essential unity of the pattern, while the parts exhibit the contrast arising from the novelty of their detail’ (Whitehead in Wellmann 2017: 25).



Quoted from Drawing Processes of Life, 2024


Simultaneity of images seems to be key for this representation. Current AR tech is going that way, which might help develop a new way to describe life processes and in general adopt process philosophy-based view of life. Generative AI might help too.
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Following our previous collaborations, it had been our intention from the start to make a connected image that would permit us to visual- ize the previously disconnected sequence of changes in topology all at once. This is completely unlike making an animated movie from a sequence of stills, because the movie still unfolds in time, whereas our image is timeless. ‘The whole is no longer subjected to time but rather possesses time within itself’ (Wellmann 2017: 83).

Quoted from Drawing Processes of Life, 2024.


Here, the intent to include time into the whole is articulated so succinctly that I'm going to steal it in its entirety. From now on, all categories should include time by default (see e.g. Lawvere's take on Hegel.)
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emphasized communicability:

But a second, especially crucial role of models, drawings, and computer graphics is to make explicit a relationship that you have found, enabling other people to see it as well. This often can be done just by making the relevant part a heavier line or a brighter color, or by deleting most of everything else, but it always requires explicit effort.

Richardson, Jane and Richardson, David C. (1992), ‘looking at proteins’, Biophysics Journal, 63, pp. 1186–209.

quoted from Drawing Processes of Life: Molecules, Cells, Organisms. 2024.

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Reason is feminine in nature; it can only give after it has received. Of itself it has nothing but the empty forms of its operation.

--- Arthur Schopenhauer.


Over millennia, the unique ability of women to conceive and bear children got interpreted as their only ability.
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Current efforts to understand human brain remind me of digging a tunnel from two opposite sides of a mountain. That is, from the first side, a community of researchers is trying to gather data by implanting sensors directly into the brain. From the other side, a different community is getting glimpses into the brain through getting data from "peripheral" organs, e.g. eyes, blood, limbs, skin, etc. I wonder when and where they are going to meet.
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In the end an edifice of knowledge was erected that nobody had really foreseen or intended. Indeed, it stood in opposition to the anticipations and intentions of the individuals who had helped build it. For Wassermann and his co-workers shared a fate in common with Columbus. They were searching for their own "India" and were convinced that they were on the right course, but they unexpectedly discovered a new "America.
...
What they achieved was not even their goal. They wanted evidence for an antigen or an amboceptor. Instead, they fulfilled the ancient wish of the collective: the demonstration of syphilitic blood.

--- Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
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I wonder how she puts her left leg like that. It seems physically impossible to bend it sideways even if you are Elvis.



https://foto-history.livejournal.com/18509639.html

upd. I guess it's something like that:

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A good checklist:

“... modules are task specific, problem specific, or opportunity specific as often as domain specific, if not more often. Still, ontology is a terrain that inferential modules typically exploit.”

--Dan Sperber. “The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding.”

I guess, "task" here is synonymous to "routine."
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“A learning instinct, as he[Peter Marler] meant it, isn’t an indiscriminate disposition to learn anything; it is an evolved disposition to acquire a given type of knowledge, such as songs (for birds) or language (for humans). A learning instinct not only targets a specific learning goal, it also provides the instinctive learner with appropriate perceptual and inferential mechanisms to extract the right kind of knowledge from the right kind of evidence.”
...
“How do learning instincts take advantage of experience to produce mature cognitive mechanisms?”

Dan Sperber. “The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding.”
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There should be a law against bad examples:
“However, artificial wheels are made separately and then added onto a vehicle, whereas biological wheels would have to grow in situ. How could a freely rotating body part either be linked to the rest of the body through nerves and blood vessels or else function without being so linked?”

Dan Sperber. “The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding.”


The shoulder joint can rotate 360 degrees. Somehow, biological evolution worked out a solution to the linkage problem.
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Physicist Susskind calls this state diagram "a bad law" because it doesn't preserve information. To generalize a bit: as scientists physicists study and teach "good laws." By contrast, most of what life scientists study and represent are bad laws because a living organism oozes information that's is never stored. If we think that a cell is the unit of biology, imagine how much data we'd have to record in order to preserve all states of e.g. a cancer cell in a living body.

People place so much hope into genetics because it appears to be one of the few "good laws" in biology and we, being taught as physicists, know how to study and teach them. Obviously, genetics is too coarse-grained to adequately represent a living organism. The nature, or at least the promise, of the current technological revolution is to move deeper into life, by capturing and recording(!) lots of biological data. This confluence of biology and computer sciences can enable us to discover new good laws and learn haw to make relevant predictions closer to the pulse of life. In an imperfect analogy, we are still inventing accounting methods that eventually revolutionized business practices.

Read more... )
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This study is a great candidate for this year's IgNobel in biology:

Japanese commonly describe a person frozen with fear as looking like “a frog scared stiff by a snake.”

A team of scientists from Kyoto University tested the notion that frogs freeze in place when faced with a snake by staging experiments that pitted the arch enemies against each other.

They found that frogs intentionally stay still at the sight of snakes as a means of escape.

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13263159

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