The Edge of Logos

It’s a gorgeous Sunday afternoon and I’ve been outside enjoying it. This year’s wet spring has caused an botanical eruption in all of my gardens. Check it out.

The front terrace. When Heather and I moved in, this had been a dehydrated little green lawn. We tore it out and planted pineapple sage, rosemary, thyme, lavender, cycads, an orange tree, heather and morning glories. The three rosemary plants along the front are flowing over the front of the terrace like waterfalls and are ready to take over. (In case you’d been wondering, we’ve been developing a combination of Mediterranean and semi-tropical gardens front and back.) This terrace now takes a tiny fraction of the water the original lawn did, thrives in the blazing sun, and unlike the lawn, it’s beautiful.

This is in the side alley next to the house. We planted this sapling Mexican lime tree just a couple months ago, and it’s covered with tiny blossoms. We planted the surrounding clumps of lemon thyme the same afternoon, and each is now easily twice the size it was that day. We haven’t watered it; it just grew. The thyme is delicious.

This is the back patio, just behind the pool. When I bought the house in 2006, these queen palms were hardly shoulder height, and the dwarf palms were thin little things hardly a foot tall. Now the palms are 2-3x taller and the dwarf palms are so lush you can hardly see the terrace anymore.

This year’s basil crop in the herb garden. I planted it in March, but only three plants. Another seven germinated unattended; I just noticed them growing all over the place. (See the tiny ones in the back?) Presumably they came from seeds produced from previous years of basil. I expect we’ll be having a whole lot of pesto with seared ahi this year, but we can’t possibly eat that much basil, so I’ll give a lot away. The plant at the bottom right is garlic. It germinated by itself as well, I found it growing in the compost–it had been discarded from dinner one night–and seeing its success, transplanted it. Aside from that and a little watering it now and then, I’ve done nothing; and it’s tripled in size.

When we moved into the house, this strip of land out front was encased in severe, soulless concrete. I asked Brutus to jackhammer it off and then planted a line of seven fan palms. These were originally growing as tiny weeds along Scott St. in Point Loma, so I dug them out with a spade, took them home and grew them in the herb garden till they were big enough to thrive on their own. I have room for two more at the end and a couple more I can transplant; I may do that another time. I can’t believe how much nicer this is than concrete.

The valencia orange tree. We brought this with us when we moved from Solana Beach. For years it had struggled, producing no oranges. And this year–bam! I see the start of at least 10 oranges.

Cycad, lavender, and a monster rosemary bush. In the back, the pineapple sage and a pine tree that I discovered in the terrace out back a few years ago.

You know, until I took that botany class a few years ago as I pursued my philosophy degree from UCSD, I really had no idea what a green thumb I was blessed to have. I love watching these natural, evolved, elegant machines build themselves with such subtlety and grace, reacting to the environment, follow cycles of light and dark, wet and dry. As yet there is no engineering or technology as sophisticated as a single cell of these plants, nothing nearly capable of taking photons from the sun and applying them to dirt and water to build and reproduce themselves. I’m not sure if it’s common knowledge, but the full breadth of photosynthesis is still not fully understood by science, and no one is capable of building a truly photosynthetic technology. Think of that. I’m surrounded by literally mind-boggling beauty.

nature, photography, uncategorized

I’ve been back in San Diego for a few days now, and it’s astonishing to have free time as Christmas approaches. Dad was in town with my uncle Tom on the 20th, so we had an early family dinner at my grandparents’. Tomorrow he heads off to Boracay for a month long trip. Since then I’ve occupied myself in fairly prosaic but seriously neglected things. I transplanted two fan palms I’d been nurturing from the garden in the back to the front, and actually met a neighbor that I’d never spoken to before. And I’ve been doing a *lot* of reading in general and more specifically, continued research for the book. Also getting back in touch with friends and family that I normally never seem to have time for. This is a good time of year for that, maybe the best.

Here are a few photos from the Big Sur trip. This was on the journey back south on the US 1. Happy Holidays.

big sur, family, friends, nature, san diego, travel

Day 1 of my adventures took me up to LA to visit Sharon. Turns out by coincidence she had a party that evening, so I caught up with a bunch of other friends in LA, and made a few new ones, which was great. But the plan was never to go no further than LA, so the following morning I needed to decide where to next. Sharon suggested: why not Big Sur? She’d done a ton of research on the area for a trip she’d taken earlier and knew where I could get a little cabin with no advance reservation. I made a few phone calls that morning, and voila. All set. I’m here till the 17th.

The Big Sur drive from LA would be over 6 hours factoring traffic, according to the Google, so I needed to get moving if I wanted to get there at a reasonable time that night. I quickly reloaded the van and after goodbyes, headed up the 101.

The rain was torrential, as expected. Traffic existed but wasn’t as bad as it could have been. As I got distance from LA, the scenery got better and better. I happened to time driving through Pismo Beach just as the clouds broke briefly and a gorgeous sunset emerged.

Darkness came on fast thereafter, and the rain got heavier and the road windier. There had been many little rockslides and rocks ranging from golf ball to beach ball sizes were on the northbound lane of the US 1, sometimes in both lanes. In the dark rain they came on fast, and I dodged. I hit one with a wheel. It was about the size of a tennis ball and when the van hit, it made an impressive WHAM. Rocks, not mud. Got it.

Weaving and meandering, and rediscovering the value of high beams, which are really awesome on the van now with the new composite beam headlamps, I got to the cabin. I was running on about 4 hours of sleep, so I basically conked out once I took possession.

And onto today. It’s really pretty out here and the cabin is just what I wanted, primarily: quiet. I’ve been incredibly productive writing all day; the words are just flowing out of me and I feel more confident about the success of this project than ever before. I made particular progress on the chapters applying semiotics to computer science and on the Antikythera mechanism. I’ve got a very good start on the outline of the book, so the overall structure and flow is coming along too.

I’ve been having trouble communicating out here; phone service is mostly nonexistent–I get a feeble bar of 2G once in a while–and WiFi is only in the cafe, closes at 2pm. I found a restaurant nearby that has WiFi now, which is cool. At the moment I’m eating dinner at the Fernwood.

Been missing Heather though. Being alone is just what I wanted and neededfor this phase of the trip, but I still do.

friends, nature, philosophy, technology, travel, writing

Ever forward moves the arrow of time, and in its causal wake, possibility becomes actualized. Call these possibilities guesses. A guess may turn out to be right if it results in success, or wrong if it leads to failure. Some guesses succeed, some don’t.

Evolution produces natural guesses. When a frog is born, nature has unconsciously guessed, as would be put in words, “this frog can succeed.” If it does–if the guess proves right–it reproduces and its offspring are new guesses. Via growth and reproduction, evolution rolls guessing into an ordering principle. The guesses are random but possibility is constrained by the starting conditions, by what is available this iteration, that is, the successful guesses of yesterday. Guessing is how you get iterative creativity, a creative process rather than a one-off event, using past outcomes as raw material.

This guessing is blind; there is no design or intent behind it. The energies coursing through the physical world evoked it. Evolution is just a powered mechanism, constructed physical causality that emerged for no particular purpose. Solar energy hitting the surface of Earth found physical expression in an complex form, but nothing intended it. It just started happening given what was possible. Evolution is a natural machine that forces rocks into hawks using sunlight and water. Why? Since it’s not the product of reason, the question can have no answer. The beginning was unplanned and the end is free of goal. It simply does what it does.

But now, things are different. with the advent of reason, there is a new form of guessing. A person makes guesses, but not the same way evolution does. Evolution has to roll the dice every time to determine success or failure. Every guess has to be acted upon in order for it to be a guess. No so with people. People can make guesses based on information rather than brute actualized fact. If there’s a sign warning of rockslides in the area, a person can change their plans and take a different route. A worm on the same route, not planning its journey or knowing of any danger, continues on heedlessly and gets flattened. The worm makes for a bad guess, but the person made a good one. The person saw two possibilities and actualized one of them; the worm saw neither, and actualized just its one. This is such a powerful advantage that it ultimately led to human empire, of humanity having monopolistic dominion over Earth, just as once dinosaurs did, and even before that, plants.

The rise synthetic biology makes my point more concretely. Here artificial selection–reason’s answer to natural selection–is elevated from the realm of rose gardening to something to be heralded as godlike power. Blind evolution is joined by designed evolution. Purpose and intent enter the biological arena, and now our guesses can begin to stand shoulder to shoulder with those made naturally. And then blast past them, for they are more highly ordered. (That’s not to say the guesses are infallible or even good! It’s just that they can be informed.)

This is the irony of evolution. We evolved naturally, equipped with a power that allows a single species–just us!–to run a parallel guessing game, but with different rules. The relation between these games is difficult for me to tease open, and it seems each contains the other. But whatever the relation is, it is clear a natural revolution of incredible significance is in progress; a natural Titanomachy. Or so it seems to me. A revolution from evolution. This dwarfs the ragtag battles between one tribe and another as breathlessly reported on CNN. We’re in the middle of a natural struggle of far greater importance, and I wonder if anyone really notices?

So the introduction of reason is new kind of guessing about the future, a new process born of evolution, that is, produced by the world itself, evolution’s nursery and theater. The world is making better guesses now, ones that are more likely to be right than before. (And through education, one that gets increasingly accurate.) One guessing process culminated in a new guessing process, the first based on do-or-die, the other based in objective and intent. Because purposeless guessing can be a massive waste of energy, as it turns out. The cosmos conserves guessing, and reason produces tighter results.

That is what having a mind gives. Reason is the guess-filter. It allows for much more success than just throwing darts. I aim for the bulleye, and in doing so, skip all the pointless throws across the room. I narrow down to what I think are the best guesses and actualized only the most promising. So do we all, every day. It’s amazing.

nature, philosophy

Thus I do declare. Why?

A quasicrystal. These things were first created in a lab in 1984.

First, a quasicrystal is something that…

• is orderly; it exhibits perfect translational symmetry (i.e. it can be divided by straight lines into a sequence of identical figures).
• is aperiodic (i.e. not defined by a unit cell that repeats itself over and over) and is therefore irregular. Which is why it is radically different from ordinary crystal.
• is produced by crystallization, which is very sensitive to initial conditions (i.e., it can grow in wildly different ways with only tiny changes in how it starts).

And something is a chaotic system if it…

• is orderly; not random, but it looks random.
• is aperiodic.
• has sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

So there you go. And apparently, I’m not alone in thinking so either.

logic, math, mind-stretching, nature, strange, visualization