Lane lays out a “brief” history of the 4 billion years of life on Earth. Discusses isotopic fractionation and other evidence that essentially shows a bottleneck between bacteria and archaea (procaryotes) on the one hand and eucaryotes on the other, the latter of which all must have had a single common ancestor based on the genetic profiles we currently see. He suggest that while we should see even more diversity of complex life, we do not, and he hints at the end of the chapter that the reason is energy.
In general, it’s much easier to follow than I anticipated it might be. His writing style is lucid and fluid and he has some lovely prose not often seen in books of this sort. It’s quite a pleasure to read. Additionally he’s doing a very solid job of building an argument in small steps.
I’m watching closely how he’s repeatedly using the word information in his descriptions, and it seems to be a much more universal and colloquial version than the more technical version, but something interesting may come out of it from my philosophical leanings. I can’t wait to get further into the book to see how things develop.
The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane
Without all the jargon, we’re actually using our own websites to carry on a back and forth threaded conversation in a way that completely makes sense.
In fact, other than that our conversation is way over the 280 character limit imposed by Twitter, the interaction was as easy and simple from a UI perspective as it it is on Twitter or even Facebook. Hallelujah!
This is how the internet was meant to work!
A hearty thanks to those who’ve made this possible! It portends a sea-change in how social media works.
A quick, but interesting peek into where he intends to go. He lays out some quick background here in the opening. He’s generally a very lucid writer so far. Can’t wait to get in further.
Some may feel like some of the terminology is a hurdle in the opening, so I hope he circles around to define some of his terms a bit better for the audience I suspect he’s trying to reach.
The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane
This last section got pretty heavy into evolution and touched on ideas of information theory applied to biology and complexity, but didn’t actually mention them. Surprisingly he mentioned Jeremy England by name! He nibbled around the edges of the field to tie up the plot, but there’s some reasonable philosophical questions hiding here in the end of the book that I’ll have to pull into a more lengthy review.
It’s not the bigger Twitter quit I’ve been debating for a while, but I’ve just taken the intermediate step of removing the Twitter app and its notifications from my phone. I’m going to be using a handful of feed readers to more purposefully consume curated content in the coming year.
I’ll still syndicate content into Twitter and can use my own website to receive @mentions, comments, and likes, so I won’t really be going anywhere. But I will be leaving behind a lot of the curation, maintenance, poor trained/engrained behaviors, as well as a lot of content that really isn’t doing me much good.
In particular, leaving behind a lot of the toxic content makes me feel lighter and happier already.
Given Livefyre‘s origin as a commenting platform along the lines of Disqus and Intense Debate, this photo of their current offerings from Adobe makes it sound a lot like what the Webmention Open Spec does for my WordPress-based website.
After almost 19 hours of non-stop 15-30mph sustained winds, I’m glad that things seem to have finally calmed down!
I really love that I can post an event on my website and people can use their own websites to RSVP to it. It’s so simple, but it feels so magical.
Thanks David Shanske, Matthias Pfefferle, Ryan Barrett, and everyone else in the IndieWeb community who has either helped to create and/or supports the web standards that allow for the internet to work the way one expects it should.
In an effort to make my Twitter feed more useful (and hopefully less toxic), I’m curious what Twitter list you’re subscribed to that you find the most valuable?
What twitter list are you most honored to be a member of?
Your suggestions are appreciated!
It seems like ages since the move, but I’ve finally gotten all the pictures and artwork hung up on the walls now.
