New Facts of Life
I read this short article in Wired -- it's a nice, concise article about the convergence of biology and technology -- the treating of technology as if it was alive and watching as behaviour emerges from what wasn't and isn't necessarily alive. Makes you think all phylisophical about it -- what is life? This is all about technology adopting what practices that were once solely the domain of life -- such as (co)evolution, reproduction, self-organization, etc. The article is by Christopher Meyer -- co-author of It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business -- a book I am now interested in reading.
The first chef
First came fire ... and then, as the camera shifts to the soon to be late-village idiot, you're left wondering -- just what was going through that mind -- and food is put on the fire, for the first time, and cooking is accidentally discovered by humanity. The first chef is ridiculed by grunts, then the local thug tries a sample of the burnt carcass, and soon, everybody gets queued at the McDonalds drive-thru. What happened? Richard Wrangham of Harvard believes there's more to cooking than evolutionary history would have you believe. Wrangham points out that there is no way homo sapiens could survive on just raw food. Raw food just doesn't give up calories as easily as cooked food -- and raw food makes the digestive system expend more energy to get at those calories. Cooking on the other hand breaks complex molecules down, allowing the digestive system to make easy work of them -- and cooking also softens food, allowing the body to get to the calories with less effort...
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