Learning to Culture the Uncultured
We can now sequence almost anything. That does not mean we can touch it. Most of the microbial world still sits on the far side of cultivation: named…
Essays · reflections · working ideas
Reducible Beauty
Writing about living systems, how we come to understand them, and what remains productively strange after the mechanism is known.
3D printers are inherently anti-developmental (but are huge fun and you should definitely get one)
I love 3D printing. I'm fascinated with it to the point where the stuff I make is, sometimes, almost meaningless. I love the designing part the most, all…
The Cell Dreams Wrong
At the edge of function and noise, when the core machinery breaks down, there is a kind of dream. Not the random twitch of unconscious molecules, but…
Memories all the way down.
Could memories be an emergent cellular property ? The 60s were a weird time, and no one was weirder than a group of scientists studying the transfer of…
Laplace and All His Demons.
The evening deepened. The games were played, the food was eaten, and the events moved along their planned course, drawn by invisible threads, traveling…
If it lives, it ignores
A while back, I was finishing an extremely challenging BJJ roll with an enthusiastic, overly athletic 22-year-old. We talked about injuries and movies as…
The task of optimizing.
Imagine we are space explorers. We are a board our craft, far from home, hyper-galactic vagabonds in pursuit of life and meaning. We land on an exoplanet…
This village has a secret that almost everybody knows.
And suddenly, the sound of a horn. The horn hadn't been in years. Maybe ever, but everyone intuitively knew its purpose. They were to stop whatever they…
The Art of Destruction (and the destruction of art).
One night in 2001, William Basinski sat on the rooftop of his apartment building in New York. I can only assume he was pretty tired. He had spent the…