This is absolute Misc stuff, just a bucket of paragraphs.

Digital Fabrication

A few days ago I listened to the Neil Gershenfeld episode of Lex’s podcast. It’s extremely inspiring! Highly recommend. A few highlights (please excuse the lack of details):

  • Digital Fabrication, where “digital” is understood not as “binary” computer stuff, but by it’s deeper meaning. The concept is rooted in Vannevar Bush/Claude Shannon/Von Neumann Analog computer age and the transition to Digital as a way to get a grip on accumulated error. Actually, better just read his awesome article in Foreign Affairs here: “How to Make Almost Anything - The Digital Fabrication Revolution”.
  • Multi-scale fabrication
  • The stories of quantum compute
  • 99 of 100 students: “i really admire your work, would love to join the lab”. 1 of 100: “here’s where you’re wrong, here’s an alternative”
  • Ready Fire Aim - love the line as well as the stories behind it.
  • There is no trash in nature - a quote which I heard not long ago in a John Baez talk on Math of 21st century.
  • many more…

As a result, I ordered his book https://designingreality.org/.

Other news

Browsing Transalational Control in Biology which I bought not because I’m studying medicine, but because it was extra cheap and a pity not to have around. Last chapter is about future drugs based on engineering around the mRNA translation mechanism which converts mRNA into proteins. Says here that “some viral mRNAs frameshift during translation, an event that requires two components: a ‘slippery sequence’ followed by an RNA secondary structure which is usually a -hairpin or pseudoknot-” . It’s lovely when biology and computers meet as this reminded me of a NOP sled. Ofc, the two patterns are similar in that they are structures over which a certain process “slides”. They’re both Hacks. But differ in function. In exploits, NOP slides are used to increase the probability of success of jumps to unknown/uncertain code addresses. In mRNA translation, the function is to break the abstraction: “Its use in viruses is primarily for compacting more genetic information into a shorter amount of genetic material.”

Oh yes, I should highlight the link above: Complexity Explorer Lecture: David Krakauer • What is Complexity? Beautiful!