Alex Wright has been reading Michael Pollan’s “Botany of Desire”.

“Pollan, an environmental writer and frequent contributor to the New York Times magazine, has constructed a dark and slightly unsettling drama of our species’ relationship with so-called “domesticated” plants.

The book poses a radical conceit: that much as our species likes to think of itself as masters of the natural world – as evidenced in our invention of agriculture – it may just be the other way around: perhaps it is the plants who have domesticated us?”

Rocks are slow life – plants are slightly faster – but everything’s in charge of us.

» Alex Wright: The Botany of Desire

“”When a dog loses a leg it’s got a clever enough brain to allow it to adapt,” says computer scientist Peter Bentley at University College London. But robots still lack this adaptive ability and so tend to give up the ghost when circumstances change.

Bentley and his colleague Siavash Haroun Mahdavi borrowed a trick from evolution to allow their robot to adapt to damage. The snakebot is made up of modular vertebral units that “snap” together to form a snake-like body

…The software for making a robot wriggle like a snake is fairly straightforward. But ensuring that the snake will keep moving even if a segment is damaged is trickier, and relies on different segments taking over from the damaged ones.

So Bentley and Mahdavi have created a genetic algorithm (GA) – a software routine that takes a “survival of the fittest” approach – to produce a system that continually evolves to improve itself.”

» NewScientist: Robot spy can survive battlefield damage

If you join the Planetary Society, they will put you name on the solar sail of Cosmos1.

I’m holding out till they promise I can affix my plaque. Safety first!

This favourite suspicion of mine is explored in a new book reports Teledyn.

It’s gaining popularity with those hip holographic universe physics kids, but leaves those famous music compilations in a bit of a fix doesn’t it.

File under “paradigm-spanking”.

Anno found a story on BBC News on the lowering costs of 3d-printers:

“We don’t feel our technology is expensive,” said Mr DeHart. “Our entry level system starts at $30,000 and that system can support all powder types and all the geometric models.”

From the age of fourteen to eighteen I worked in a print and design shop in my hometown. The colour photocopier that we charged customers at about 1GBP a copy cost more than $30k. At that price they could find their way into copyshops and local emporia like the Lucky Dragon franchise of William Gibson’s books.

Beneficial applications of colour photocopiers are wide enough to grasp by people to be able to charge 1GBP an operation. What would the breakthrough consumer applications of 3d printers/copiers/faxes be?

» Flambingo: Sintering*
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* Dictionary.com: Sintering

After purchasing the Super Furry Animals new album “Phantom Power” last week – one line, from one song has been reeling around my head. Singing itself into my mind and my mouth over and over.

It’s from an epic, sinister and beautiful track called “Slow life”, and the line is “Rocks are slow life”. Reflecting on it’s resonance, and thinking that the band had plucked it out of the (probably quite smokey) air, I decided to type it into google.

It’s a chapter heading in Kevin Kelly’s “Out of control”.

Which, also, happens to be the name of Track 9.

I mentioned this to a friend who’s not averse to chewing over The Supercontext now and again, and he mentioned it reminded him of something he’d read once, that all evolution, the biosphere of carbon based life, was just a catalyst for silicon-based evolution on a grander, longer scale.

We’re just part of the process of turning mountains into computers.

From “Out Of Control”:

“A pair of coevolutionary creatures chasing each other in an escalating arms race can only seem to veer out of control. Likewise, a pair of cozy coevolutionary symbionts embracing each other can only seem to lead to stagnant solipsism. But Lovelock saw that if you had a vast network of coevolutionary impulses, such that no creatures could escape creating its own substrate and the substrate its own creatures, then the web of coevolution spread around until it closed a circuit of self-making and self-control.”

And perhaps we’ll end this run of Filth-inspired finds, with this, from “Out Of Control”:

“…if Earth is reduced to the size of a bacteria, and inspected under high-powered optics, would it seem stranger than a virus? Gaia hovers there, a blue sphere under the stark light, inhaling energy, regulating its internal states, fending off disturbances, complexifying, and ready to transform another planet if given a chance.”

Ah.

Good.

The nurse seems to be here with today’s dose of Key 23.