Only tangentially related, but I recently read the "Can a biologist fix a radio" piece which was recommended by a colleague as a must-read, curious if you have also read it? It's a cute thought experiment, but obviously as you mention, biological systems are not artificially engineered and organized like a radio or the internet, despite the parallels.
Awesome, these mirror some of the thoughts I had after reading it; I did feel that the paper was perhaps not generous enough to the biology field, but then again I am coming from the perspective and hindsight of someone that started doing research almost 20 years later :)
I should have added that I like it because it brings together both science and humanities: architecture/engineering, human organization, and contemporary condition. It seems the statement could be the beginning Master's or PhD in interdisciplinary studies.
Great sentence: "A theory of architecture canāt neglect a theory of human organization. Both artificial structures work together to create the complex infrastructure underneath our contemporary condition."
Coming out swinging with an apropos of nothing side-swipe at theory of computation lol! Imo depends on what kind of "impact" you care about. In my areas of research, ToC has had a huge impact on the cryptography used in many everyday contexts and differential privacy has changed the way that the US Census data is released, and in general the field has had extensive impacts on combinatorics, graph theory, spectral theory, Boolean function analysis, number theory, algebraic geometry, lattice theory, topology, category theory, logic, formal methods, optimization, computer security, quantum physics, statistical physics, computational chemistry, computational biology, economics, social computing, and more...
ā Indeed, Iād rather look at recurring patterns in artificial structures to identify commonalities and general principles.ā
This is why I keep propagandizing this stuff:
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/3384
I am but a simple man: I see DEVO reference I must like
Thank you for finding a serious typo in this post: I corrected the capitalization upthread.
I have finally contributed something of value š«”
Case in point: https://betheresoon.substack.com/p/single-threading-how-to-organise
Andy Chu has some excellent discussions of how this appears in software engineering, especially "The Internet was Designed with a Narrow Waist"(https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/02/diagrams.html) and "A Sketch of the Biggest Idea in Software Architecture"(https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/03/backlog-arch.html).
Only tangentially related, but I recently read the "Can a biologist fix a radio" piece which was recommended by a colleague as a must-read, curious if you have also read it? It's a cute thought experiment, but obviously as you mention, biological systems are not artificially engineered and organized like a radio or the internet, despite the parallels.
Yes, I love that paper.
I referenced it here in a discussion here about simulation and engineering complexity: https://www.argmin.net/p/monster-models
Awesome, these mirror some of the thoughts I had after reading it; I did feel that the paper was perhaps not generous enough to the biology field, but then again I am coming from the perspective and hindsight of someone that started doing research almost 20 years later :)
I should have added that I like it because it brings together both science and humanities: architecture/engineering, human organization, and contemporary condition. It seems the statement could be the beginning Master's or PhD in interdisciplinary studies.
Great sentence: "A theory of architecture canāt neglect a theory of human organization. Both artificial structures work together to create the complex infrastructure underneath our contemporary condition."
Coming out swinging with an apropos of nothing side-swipe at theory of computation lol! Imo depends on what kind of "impact" you care about. In my areas of research, ToC has had a huge impact on the cryptography used in many everyday contexts and differential privacy has changed the way that the US Census data is released, and in general the field has had extensive impacts on combinatorics, graph theory, spectral theory, Boolean function analysis, number theory, algebraic geometry, lattice theory, topology, category theory, logic, formal methods, optimization, computer security, quantum physics, statistical physics, computational chemistry, computational biology, economics, social computing, and more...
Alsoāever wanna communicate over a noisy channel (like we are right now)? Error correcting codes...