Web Log 2010
In around 3 weeks, I am taking off on a 10,000 mile 7 week, cross country road trip. I recently sold my 645 setup to get Fuji’s sleek new retro rangefinder style digital the X100. It’s 12 megapixels with ISO up to 12800, and a tack sharp f2 fujinon lens. It takes some getting used to, but it produces some terrific files. Hope to keep the blog updated along the way.
I am always blown away when a teacher tells me that something, that I would have previously considered heresy in the scientific sense, is now being considered as plausible due to new innovations of modern science. It really completes the circular nature of things. These ideas that seem common sense, we complicate a little bit. Then they become impractical. But we study further, and then they become inevitable. It’s a remarkable testament to human ingenuity that so many ideas follow this pattern.
Just last quarter Jean-Baptiste la Marck was someone who we looked at just last quarter as someone who imposed a foolish idea on our modern scientific view of descent with modification. He proposed that traits and attributes acquired by an individual would then be passed on to it’s offspring. We learned that this was not the case according to modern evolutionary theory. Evolution happens because a gene pool withing a species becomes sufficiently varied and eventually part of the species is split and isolated from the rest of the population. Through inbreeding, traits emerge over generations in an event called speciation from genes already present in the gene pool. If these traits are beneficial then these populations will survive and a new species is created.
A very specific notation was made here noting that traits acquired after the initial gene combination that results in the organisms DNA is inconsequential in the traits of the offspring. LaMarck was proven incorrect. But my teacher told me about an emerging field in genetics called epigenetics in which genes can be turned on and off in response to the environment, and this can be passed on to future generations. Now he warned that this does not really mean that someone who has an arm cut off is not going to have 1 armed off-spring. If that were the case, LaMarck would never have been discounted. The idea is that stimulus that effects plascicity and neural connections, can in fact be directly passed down.
I looked into it and an interesting experiment was performed at MIT and published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Mice were genetically modified to have decreased brain activity and memory. They were then placed in a stimulating environment and given excersises to increase their memory. Now obviously this helped the mice as singular organisms, but the unexpected result was that the offspring which shared the genetic predisposition to decreased mental activity actually had retained the increased mental activity acquired by their parents.
I think that this has broad implications on the importance of nurture in conjunction with nature to give traits to organisms that are capable of lasting generations.
His voice reminds me of the guy from Danielson Family. The album is pretty terrific.
I really like what this RSA is doing with animating illustrations of philosophers ideas from lectures. This one is from one of the great thinkers of our time Slavoj Žižek. You can see the entire, but admittedly less entertaining lecture in it’s original form here. He has a way of bringing a lot of important and complex ideas to life.
Just updated my project for the first time after retrieving a roll of film shot over the summer that I thought I lost. I now have 9 pieces that I am fairly happy with, which I am going to pair in contrast with images of affluence that I plan on taking on the day after Thanksgiving (Black Friday). Here are a few from the project so far. I really like the first one taken of the Restaurant RumpSpankers in Portland after it closed. The writing on the chalk board at the bottom is so ominous in its implications.
Just saw this guy last night at Paper Tiger’s Annual party “Culture Control.” He’s an eccentric looking guy, spends most of his time on the stage turning nobs, and some of his songs are pretty terrific, reminiscent of Of Montreal, and on his opening song of the show he broke out a singing voice almost completely identical to Dan Bejar from Destroyer and The New Pornographers. His name is Jon Timm and you can download his album for free here. Check out “Drawing Snails” below, track 10 from his debut album “Pareidoli-A-Matic”
