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Corante Blogs examine, through the eyes of leading observers, analysts, thinkers, and doers, critical themes and memes in technology, business, law, science, and culture.

The Press Will Be Outsourced Before Stopped

Vin Crosbie, on the challenges, financial and otherwise, that newspaper publishers are facing: "The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn't that your content isn't online or isn't online with multimedia. It's your content. Specifically, it's what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you're giving them, stupid; not the platform its on."
by Vin Crosbie in Rebuilding Media

Travels In Numerica Deserta

There's a problem in the drug industry that people have recognized for some years, but we're not that much closer to dealing with it than we were then. We keep coming up with these technologies and techniques which seem as if they might be able to help us with some of our nastiest problems - I'm talking about genomics in all its guises, and metabolic profiling, and naturally the various high-throughput screening platforms, and others. But whether these are helping or not (and opinions sure do vary), one thing that they all have in common is that they generate enormous heaps of data.
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline

Disrobing the Emperor: The online “user experience” isn't much of one

Now that the Web labor market is saturated and Web design a static profession, it's not surprising that 'user experience' designers and researchers who've spent their careers online are looking for new worlds to conquer. Some are returning to the “old media” as directors and producers. More are now doing offline consulting (service experience design, social policy design, exhibition design, and so on) under the 'user experience' aegis. They argue that the lessons they've learned on the Web can be applied to phenomena in the physical and social worlds. But there are enormous differences...
by Bob Jacobson in Total Experience

Second Life: What are the real numbers?

Clay Shirky, in deconstructing Second Life hype: "Second Life is heading towards two million users. Except it isn’t, really... I suspect Second Life is largely a 'Try Me' virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use."
by Clay Shirky in Many-to-Many

The democratisation of everything

Over the last few years we've seen old barriers to creativity coming down, one after the other. New technologies and services makes it trivial to publish text, whether by blog or by print-on-demand. Digital photography has democratised a previously expensive hobby. And we're seeing the barriers to movie-making crumble, with affordable high-quality cameras and video hosting provided by YouTube or Google Video and their ilk... Music making has long been easy for anyone to engage in, but technology has made high-quality recording possible without specialised equipment, and the internet has revolutionised distribution, drastically disintermediating the music industry... What's left? Software maybe? Or maybe not."
by Suw Charman in Strange Attractor

RNA Interference: Film at Eleven

Derek Lowe on the news that the Nobel Prize for medicine has gone to Craig Mello and Andrew Fire for their breakthrough work: "RNA interference is probably going to have a long climb before it starts curing many diseases, because many of those problems are even tougher than usual in its case. That doesn't take away from the discovery, though, any more than the complications of off-target effects take away from it when you talk about RNAi's research uses in cell culture. The fact that RNA interference is trickier than it first looked, in vivo or in vitro, is only to be expected. What breakthrough isn't?"
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline

PVP and the Honorable Enemy

Andrew Phelps: "Recently my WoW guild has been having a bit of a debate on the merits of Player-vs.-Player (PvP) within Azeroth. My personal opinion on this is that PvP has its merits, and can be incredible fun, but the system within WoW is horridly, horribly broken. It takes into account the concept of the battle, but battle without consequence, without emotive context, and most importantly, without honor..."

From later in the piece: "When I talk about this with people (thus far anyway) I typically get one of two responses, either 'yeah, right on!' or 'hey, it’s war, and war isn’t honorable – grow the hell up'. There is a lot to be said for that argument – but the problem is that war in the real historical world has very different constraints that are utterly absent from fantasized worlds..."
by Andrew Phelps in Got Game

Rats Rule, Right?

Derek Lowe: "So, you're developing a drug candidate. You've settled on what looks like a good compound - it has the activity you want in your mouse model of the disease, it's not too hard to make, and it's not toxic. Everything looks fine. Except. . .one slight problem. Although the compound has good blood levels in the mouse and in the dog, in rats it's terrible. For some reason, it just doesn't get up there. Probably some foul metabolic pathway peculiar to rats (whose innards are adapted, after all, for dealing with every kind of garbage that comes along). So, is this a problem?.."
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline

Really BAD customer experience at Albertsons Market

Bob Jacobson, on shopping at his local Albertsons supermarket where he had "one of the worst customer experiences" of his life: "Say what you will about the Safeway chain or the Birkenstock billionaires who charge through the roof for Whole Foods' organic fare, they know how to create shopping environments that create a more pleasurable experience, at its best (as at Whole Foods) quite enjoyable. Even the warehouses like Costco and its smaller counterpart, Smart & Final, do just fine: they have no pretentions, but neither do they dump virtual garbage on the consumer merely to create another trivial revenue stream, all for the sake of promotions in the marketing department..."
by Strange Attractor in Total Experience

The Guardian's "Comment is Free"

Kevin Anderson: "First off, I want to say that I really admire the ambition of the Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free. It is one of the boldest statements made by any media company that participation needs to be central to a radical revamp of traditional content strategies... It is, therfore, not hugely surprising to find that Comment is Free is having a few teething troubles..."
by Kevin Anderson in strange
In the Pipeline: Don't miss Derek Lowe's excellent commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry in general at In the Pipeline

The Loom

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August 24, 2005

Deepak Chopra Explains It All For You: Conscious Photons!

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Posted by Carl Zimmer

Well, Dr. Chopra has given us part two of his ruminations on evolution with a post that will make physicists cringe as much as biologists.

My favorite line: "Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe."

Excuse me while I chat with my flashlight.

Comments (12) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Evolution


COMMENTS

1. darwinfinch on August 24, 2005 05:40 PM writes...

How spiritual! How profound! How SMUG!


How utterly, painfully ridiculous!


People seem to desire literature that speaks to them, or simply confounds but impresses them, to be proven LITERALLY true, which in this age means that it interpret "science" as proving by experiment its own Truths as being objective, scientific truth. This has often been done cleverly and with reasonable honesty, and is sometimes interesting (I liked Capra [Copra?], as well as that "noosphere" or something Frenchman, as a teen), but finally is entirely besides ANY point, reality being what it is.

That things like ID and the above are offered, and paid for, as "explanations" proves only that a lazy, vain sucker is born at least every minute.

Permalink to Comment

2. Greg Peterson on August 24, 2005 06:56 PM writes...

The idea that photons carry "all the information in the universe" would probably come as quite a surprise to Dembski. What would become of his brand of pseudo-information theory in (unavoidable pun) light of this notion?

Permalink to Comment

3. Juke Moran on August 24, 2005 07:26 PM writes...

I rue the day that sees me even faintly begin to defend Mr. Chopra's artificially-sweetened pop-metaphysical tidbits, but...
The idea that consciousness is an electro-magnetic cloud of amorphous and shifting architecture that arises spontaneously in the neuronal interstices of the brain?
As I understand it that's the consensus, or close to as much of a consensus as there is.
There's a nifty sleight-of-hand whereby the susceptible can be almost convinced of their own non-existence by a careful explanation of the illusion of selfhood produced by the body's need for a brain to regulate its actions.
Defying that is more an act of faith than it is a reading of the evidence.
"I am, by golly."
And nobody really understands exactly what photons are.

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4. Robin Turner on August 24, 2005 07:44 PM writes...

Here in Turkey we have a saying: one lunatic threw a stone into a well, and ten people couldn't get it out. I get that feeling whenever I come across statements like "If we came from monkeys, how come the monkeys are still there?" or "Why have sharks stayed the same for zillions of years?" Anyone who read a book about dinosaurs written for ten-year-old kids would be able to answer that question.

The only other case where I have seen such repetitive arguments in the face of the evidence is when I used to hang out with people who took amphetamines and couldn't remember what was said to them five minutes earlier.

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5. Juke Moran on August 24, 2005 08:49 PM writes...

On the other hand there's Paul Erdös.
And then on still another hand if I could find one there's Chopra's third leading "principle":

3. The primary evidence for intelligence in the universe isn't design but consciousness. In some mysterious way Nature knows what it is doing.
which is scary.

Permalink to Comment

6. cats on August 24, 2005 11:30 PM writes...

Buddha says: there're 84,000 bugs in a drop of water.


Chopra says: Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe.


Oh, give me a break...

Permalink to Comment

7. James Hrynyshyn on August 25, 2005 08:39 AM writes...

Don't we all have something better to do read Chopra's drivel?

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8. ruidh on August 25, 2005 09:26 AM writes...

The assertion that photons carry consciousness is disproved by the existance of Talk Radio.

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9. Les Lane on August 25, 2005 04:55 PM writes...

Photons?

No surprise - what comes out of your flashlight isn't much different from Deepak Chopras's thoughts (except for the frequency).

Permalink to Comment

10. hoopman on August 25, 2005 11:22 PM writes...

Actually, you all misunderstand poor Deepak. As you should be able to tell by his name, he is a Vulcan. What he is saying, essentially, is: Photon torpedos were very intelligently designed.

Many people have tried to reason with Deepak in the past two days. While he clamors for reasonable discussion of his ideas, all he does is toss them forth and then run from them to his next quickly posted message as soon as it "gets hot". He discusses nothing. There were nearly 100 highly insightful answers to his "questions"
and one might have hoped he would make his next post a response to some of the best arguements. Instead, in just slightly over 24 hours, he put up 3 different posts.

Permalink to Comment

11. reevej on August 29, 2005 10:26 AM writes...

test

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12. Antonio on August 30, 2005 12:55 AM writes...

In a very simple way Capra may be right. think about it this way...Using logic: Scientists all aggree that (for the most part) all life on the earth is powered by the sun. Science roughly equates life being defined by the presence of consciousness. If we strictly adhered to the principles of evolution from the primodial soup. Life occured when inorganic material in the presence of sun light mysteriously "sparked" to life. Logically, life (consciousness) must come from the Sun (light energy). If this is so can not we conclude photons (packets of light) are directy related to consciousness? Draw your own conclusions, I haven't read Chopra's book, but it seems he must have tried to hard to explain this very simple and appearently evident relationship.

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