Life and the Meaning of Everything
Life and the Virus
- In no form of life is directive activity wholly absent. ... We can no
more fix the earliest appearance of a recognizable self in organic evolution
that we can fix the earliest appearance of conscious activity. Indeed, the
recent study of viruses is apparently making it difficult to draw a
definitive line between the behaviour of living and non-living matter.
[Charles S Myers, The absurdity of any mind-body relation, L T
Hobhouse Memorial Trust Lecture #2, delivered 19 May 1932, at University
College, London]
What is Life? (1)
- Something capable of reproducing itself and evolving - that is the
sort of definition Charles Darwin would have accepted ~ Professor Colin Pillinger, chief
scientist to the European Space Agency's unsuccessful
Beagle 2 Mars exploration, as reported speaking at press
conference in December 2003. (Which begs the question,
how do you judge something as being
"capable" of "evolving" - surely that
capacity is a feature of the environment as well as the
organism? Obviously you need to find evidence for a
regular, reliable and robust mechanism for reproduction -
but not too regular, not too reliable and not too robust;
whilst the process depends upon sufficient stability to
ensure a reliable inheritance, it also needs just the
right degree of instability to offer a swatch of future
selectables.)
What is Life? (2)
- The Biologists' Answer: Life is a sexually-transmitted
terminal disease.
A joke from Belgium
- Three engineering students were gathered together
discussing the possible designers of the human body. One
said, "It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at at
the joints." Another said, "No, it was an
electrical engineer. The nervous system has many
thousands of electrical connections." The last said,
"Actually, it was a civil engineer. Who else would
run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational
area?" (Source: Pierre Janssen)
How to remember the value of Pi
- How I like a drink alcoholic of course after the heavy
lectures involving quantum mechanics....
Letter from Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 28 January
1754
- I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes
of Serendip; as their highnesses travelled, they were
always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of
things they were not in quest of: for instance, one of
them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had
travelled the same road lately, because the grass was
eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on
the right - now do you understand serendipity?
[Cambridge University Library 457.d.97.46 / page 54 /
"Horace Walpole"]
4-Thought
- I gather that there is a 17th Century Church in Oxford that was recently able to repair its roof because the elders planted a
grove of oak trees at the same time the church was built, which furnished the wood required to make the repairs.
How to distinguish between knowledge and wisdom
- Knowledge ~ the tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable
Wisdom ~ you don't put tomatoes in a fruit salad