I recently posted the trip report and video from our trip through Claustral Canyon on TDMSKP. I'm really happy with the video, and I would be really happy if everyone could rate and favourite it for me! It has already got two honours for being most favourited and rated (but only second page) this week, so if there are a few more, then hopefully we can drive it onto the front page (of most favourited and rated this week)!
Oh an of course, digg, stumble and delicious etc would really help too! :)
Claustral Canyon Trip Report and Video
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Scam Compensation!
I'm so happy! After all this time, all of those emails requesting my name and bank details so that I could be 'benefacted' several million dollars, or because I had won the Euro-Online-Special-Puppies and Kittens-Lottery, or because I helped someone all those years ago (whos name I just can't quite place...) - But they were all Scams! Did you know that? Bunch of scammers! All that money....gone...*sob*
But it's OK now! I just got an email which will rectify all past scams! It is from the "Nigerian Security Department" More importantly than that, the opening to the email reads:
FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA
CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA/
NIGERIAN SECURITY DEPARTMENT
FEDERAL HIGH COURT OF NIGERIA.
Can you get any more official than that? No way can that be faked.
It goes on to say:
"Attention Beneficiary,
This to acknowledge you that your contact information was found among the list of foreigner that have been scammed by Nigerian Fraudster. It might interest you to know that we have signed an agreement with your COUNTRY FEDERAL GOVERNMENT during our first meeting last month with our PRESIDENT Commander In-Chief Federal Republic of Nigeria,ALHAJI UMARU MUSA YAR'ADUA and the AUTHORITIES to fight against this and to return all contract funds that has been stolen and people who has been scammed too."
Finally, someone in Nigeria is doing something to combat these evil scammers. It must be legit, otherwise how could they know that I was scammed? Well, they have convinced me.
now where are my bank details?....
But it's OK now! I just got an email which will rectify all past scams! It is from the "Nigerian Security Department" More importantly than that, the opening to the email reads:
FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA
CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA/
NIGERIAN SECURITY DEPARTMENT
FEDERAL HIGH COURT OF NIGERIA.
Can you get any more official than that? No way can that be faked.
It goes on to say:
"Attention Beneficiary,
This to acknowledge you that your contact information was found among the list of foreigner that have been scammed by Nigerian Fraudster. It might interest you to know that we have signed an agreement with your COUNTRY FEDERAL GOVERNMENT during our first meeting last month with our PRESIDENT Commander In-Chief Federal Republic of Nigeria,ALHAJI UMARU MUSA YAR'ADUA and the AUTHORITIES to fight against this and to return all contract funds that has been stolen and people who has been scammed too."
Finally, someone in Nigeria is doing something to combat these evil scammers. It must be legit, otherwise how could they know that I was scammed? Well, they have convinced me.
now where are my bank details?....
Friday, November 16, 2007
TDMSKP Progress
My latest website, TDMSKP.com.au is coming along very nicely now. I am actually very happy with the progress I have made with it. A few more tweaks and I will be happy enough with what is there (there are always super tweaks which I would love to implement but which are beyond my coding capabilities), and then the real challenge will be to bring in the people.
As TDMSKP is half wiki-guide, and half forum based community (and half trip reports), most of the content on the site is dependent on user interactions and additions. So now is the gargantuan task of bringing in enough people so that some of them add to the site, as well as working on the site full time myself to grow the content as much as I can.
As TDMSKP is half wiki-guide, and half forum based community (and half trip reports), most of the content on the site is dependent on user interactions and additions. So now is the gargantuan task of bringing in enough people so that some of them add to the site, as well as working on the site full time myself to grow the content as much as I can.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
TDM SKP
I've started to make the first moves on yet another website. This one I am very excited about. http://www.tdmskp.com.au is the URL I have for it, and the website will be called TDM SKP (Tedium Escapee) and I aim to make it the number one resource for outdoor sports information in Australia. I'm starting with canyoning, but it will grow from there.
I will be canyoning pretty much every week over summer, filming and photographing the canyons around sydney. The website will have a blog with trip reports, video footage from each canyon, and then a wiki guidebook where users can edit and over time we will hopefully have a complete guide for every outdoor sports venue - track in Australia.
There will also be a forum where the community can get together and chat about whatever, ask questions about safety etc, as well as find groups to join and go adventuring with.
It shall be fun.
I will be canyoning pretty much every week over summer, filming and photographing the canyons around sydney. The website will have a blog with trip reports, video footage from each canyon, and then a wiki guidebook where users can edit and over time we will hopefully have a complete guide for every outdoor sports venue - track in Australia.
There will also be a forum where the community can get together and chat about whatever, ask questions about safety etc, as well as find groups to join and go adventuring with.
It shall be fun.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
My Utopia
This is a final draft of the opening section to the first chapter of the book I am working on. Criticism will be gladly accepted, as will any advice.
My Utopia
The early years of this child’s life, let’s call him John, is much like they have always been: feeding, changing, bathing, playing, (crying, tantrums, strange smells,) and bedtime stories. As the first few years pass, the parents will start taking the John out to play groups so that he can interact with other children. They will take him to parks so that he can play outdoors, and they will expose him to the world around them.
During this time and for the years that follow the parents will also start educating John. They will teach him how to read, write and do arithmetic as well as teaching him right and wrong, cultural values, and all of the general life lessons that are passed on from one generation to the next. The parents will play the primary influence in their young child’s life, but they will also expose him to the influence of trusted family, friends and respected members of their community. They will ensure that their child is not raised with a narrow perspective of the world, and they will do their best to broaden the information sources it has access to. To this end Johns parents, their extended family and friends will each take John to museums, science fairs, art galleries, dramatic plays, operas, car races, extreme sports demonstrations, various expos and anything else which could introduce his mind to the possibilities of the world around him.
School as we know it no longer exists. The parents do everything they can to provide John with the best start on education possible. They teach from their own knowledge and understanding as well as regularly involving friends and family in the process to help fill in the gaps. They also have ready access to a large number of tutors with experience should they feel the need. In addition to those resources, the internet has a wealth of knowledge, curriculum style courses, methodologies, educational strategies, ideas about what parents should teach their children and other support material of that nature, all designed to make the average parent a proficient teacher. The crucial function of the parent during this time will be to enable their child to learn, discover, and understand things for themselves. Instead of force feeding facts and providing answers, the emphasis will be on how to learn. The parent will learn from readily available materials that they don’t need to force their child to learn, it is natural for children to be inquisitive. The task is to turn that inquisitive behavior into a method of teaching the child how to learn about and understand its world. Thus answer questions with simple and obvious answers is discouraged, while a proactive “How would we find the answer to that?” approach is encouraged. This not only empowers the child to achieve more than those who preceded him, but also overcomes any ignorance held by the parents themselves.
As part of this process it is inevitable that John will find a topic of particular interest and thirst for more knowledge of that topic. Having exhausted basic investigation methods of the topic (internet search and libraries for instance) and with a child wanting to know more the parents will then simply search for a local teacher with specific knowledge of that topic and then enroll John to attend a course on the subject. There is no need to force him into this course because he chose the topic himself and is genuinely interested in learning more about it. This could be repeated numerous times and probably will be.
There is no structure to this system of education and that is precisely the point. It is a free spirit approach to education where the individual child decides what it would like to know next, and then engages with that topic while it otherwise carries on being a child. There are no rules (other than the normal rules imposed on a child by their parents), there are no timetables, and there are no age based restrictions on what they can and cannot learn. They can learn as fast or slow as they want or need to. Most importantly, there is no deadline for when this education ends. It could produce children with a thorough understanding of Molecular Biology by the age of 12, or the child could continue learning a little bit of everything well into their twenties. This system caters to individual capabilities, needs and desires.
As John enters his late teenage years he has a solid basis of knowledge from a diverse range of topics explored throughout his developmental years. As with many kids he gained a fascination with dinosaurs at a young age and that fascination has stuck with them into his teens so he has decided that he is interested in becoming a paleontologist. He registers at a university and has to take some short entrance courses which ensures that he has adequate background knowledge to undertake the rest of the Paleontology course. Failing any of these entrance subjects would preclude entry into the course, but only on that intake. Someone dedicated to a subject could easily go away and do some more private study, take more community college courses and private tuition and then reapply in the next intake very easily, so there is no real exclusion in this system. After a few years of studying paleontology though, John starts to find that he simply doesn’t enjoy the process nearly as much as he imagined he would. As the course progresses he actually finds it more boring and even starts to lose interest in the whole idea. He completes the course anyway, but decides to not pursue the career further. He goes back to living his life as before; exploring the ideas around him and the options available to him, until one day his parents decide that they want to start sailing around the world and so start urging him to find something which means they won’t have to support him anymore.
At the age of 26 he decides to become a police officer. The progress of his career is much like it is today; he goes through the academy, receives training, advances through the ranks always acquiring more experience and regularly undertaking additional training courses. The years seem to pass quickly and after 34 years on the force he has started to reach the end of his patience for the legal system. He is tired of always watching hardened criminals get off with lenient sentences while some of the more innocuous crimes are punished with strict malevolence. The system just doesn’t seem fair and he is sick of it. He makes a big decision and at the age of 60 firmly decides that he is going to start a new career as a judge.
He starts taking some educational courses on the law in his spare time while working and after a year or two actually quits his job and enters full time study of law. Within 4 years he is a lawyer working his way up through the ranks, creating networks of colleagues, learning more about the legal system than he ever understood as a police officer, and generally enjoying this exploration of how to prosecute criminals to the full extent of the law. After 30 years of experience in the legal system, increasing his influence the whole time as well as his understanding, his application to become a judge is finally accepted.
At the age of 95, John, the child from the beginning of this story, finally enters the stage of his second career that he was aiming for all those years before. His illustrious career will end up lasting over 50 years before he willingly retires from it on account of something which happened only 3 years after he became a judge, he met his first wife. He had had 3 long term relationships prior to this point, the longest one lasting 30 years, but for the first time in his 98 years he met a woman which he knew he could spend the rest of his life with, however long that will be. They don’t rush anything though, nothing is really rushed when you are 100 years old with no definite lifespan, and they aren’t married for another 20 years. It isn’t until he is 148 that they both decide to retire from their present careers and have a child. They both have savings accounts which will provide more than enough income for them to both live very comfortably while providing full time care for their child and even still re-invest most of their interest back into savings. They are in fact eternally funded by their own savings.
At 149 years of age John has his first daughter. She is raised by both parents full time with all concerns taken care of. Both parents have extensive life experience and education and they both pass their wealth of knowledge on to their daughter the best they can; not by giving her all of the answers necessarily, but by enabling her to find the answers for herself, and enabling her to pursue the knowledge that she wants to pursue.
After 25 years of raising his daughter, John starts to consider giving paleontology another go. With no need of money, and with a great deal more patience and respect for silence the idea of quietly sitting and working on a dig site seems a lot more appealing to him now than it did all those years ago. Whatever he does though, he chooses to do so freely, without concern for time or money. He is respected in society from his history as a fair judge, and he is as physically capable of being as police officer as he was when he was 26. His years of experience make him one of the most valuable assets in society, and he charges nothing for his time or his advice. He regularly helps out new parents with the education of their children, providing the older kids with lessons on morality and the law, or just helping the younger kids with their reading and writing.
Just as John’s parents were not particularly wealthy or particularly special for dedicating themselves to his fulltime care; his freely offered assistance to those around him is not special or abnormal. In a society full of people who have no limitation on their time and already have two lifetimes worth of savings to support their own needs, there are a lot of people who gain a lot of pleasure out of being able to help other who need it.
My Utopia
I would like to share with you a vision that I have for our future. This future requires no political revolution to happen, nor is any great social movement required. Its realization should be gradual in nature, causing no great disturbance or war. I believe that this future, or something like it, will come about through the creation of a particular medical intervention which the rest of this book will be dedicated to. The world of my vision is one where a child is born and both parents are able to raise it full time without needing government support, handouts, or financial assistance from family and friends. The parents are not part of the wealthy elite; their financial status is in fact quite average for people at their position in life. They choose to raise their child full time in order to provide him with all that they can, without having to worry about work commitments, lack of time, and fatigue from other responsibilities. They chose to have this child, and they have chosen to dedicate a few short years to doing the best job they can for it.
The early years of this child’s life, let’s call him John, is much like they have always been: feeding, changing, bathing, playing, (crying, tantrums, strange smells,) and bedtime stories. As the first few years pass, the parents will start taking the John out to play groups so that he can interact with other children. They will take him to parks so that he can play outdoors, and they will expose him to the world around them.
During this time and for the years that follow the parents will also start educating John. They will teach him how to read, write and do arithmetic as well as teaching him right and wrong, cultural values, and all of the general life lessons that are passed on from one generation to the next. The parents will play the primary influence in their young child’s life, but they will also expose him to the influence of trusted family, friends and respected members of their community. They will ensure that their child is not raised with a narrow perspective of the world, and they will do their best to broaden the information sources it has access to. To this end Johns parents, their extended family and friends will each take John to museums, science fairs, art galleries, dramatic plays, operas, car races, extreme sports demonstrations, various expos and anything else which could introduce his mind to the possibilities of the world around him.
School as we know it no longer exists. The parents do everything they can to provide John with the best start on education possible. They teach from their own knowledge and understanding as well as regularly involving friends and family in the process to help fill in the gaps. They also have ready access to a large number of tutors with experience should they feel the need. In addition to those resources, the internet has a wealth of knowledge, curriculum style courses, methodologies, educational strategies, ideas about what parents should teach their children and other support material of that nature, all designed to make the average parent a proficient teacher. The crucial function of the parent during this time will be to enable their child to learn, discover, and understand things for themselves. Instead of force feeding facts and providing answers, the emphasis will be on how to learn. The parent will learn from readily available materials that they don’t need to force their child to learn, it is natural for children to be inquisitive. The task is to turn that inquisitive behavior into a method of teaching the child how to learn about and understand its world. Thus answer questions with simple and obvious answers is discouraged, while a proactive “How would we find the answer to that?” approach is encouraged. This not only empowers the child to achieve more than those who preceded him, but also overcomes any ignorance held by the parents themselves.
As part of this process it is inevitable that John will find a topic of particular interest and thirst for more knowledge of that topic. Having exhausted basic investigation methods of the topic (internet search and libraries for instance) and with a child wanting to know more the parents will then simply search for a local teacher with specific knowledge of that topic and then enroll John to attend a course on the subject. There is no need to force him into this course because he chose the topic himself and is genuinely interested in learning more about it. This could be repeated numerous times and probably will be.
There is no structure to this system of education and that is precisely the point. It is a free spirit approach to education where the individual child decides what it would like to know next, and then engages with that topic while it otherwise carries on being a child. There are no rules (other than the normal rules imposed on a child by their parents), there are no timetables, and there are no age based restrictions on what they can and cannot learn. They can learn as fast or slow as they want or need to. Most importantly, there is no deadline for when this education ends. It could produce children with a thorough understanding of Molecular Biology by the age of 12, or the child could continue learning a little bit of everything well into their twenties. This system caters to individual capabilities, needs and desires.
As John enters his late teenage years he has a solid basis of knowledge from a diverse range of topics explored throughout his developmental years. As with many kids he gained a fascination with dinosaurs at a young age and that fascination has stuck with them into his teens so he has decided that he is interested in becoming a paleontologist. He registers at a university and has to take some short entrance courses which ensures that he has adequate background knowledge to undertake the rest of the Paleontology course. Failing any of these entrance subjects would preclude entry into the course, but only on that intake. Someone dedicated to a subject could easily go away and do some more private study, take more community college courses and private tuition and then reapply in the next intake very easily, so there is no real exclusion in this system. After a few years of studying paleontology though, John starts to find that he simply doesn’t enjoy the process nearly as much as he imagined he would. As the course progresses he actually finds it more boring and even starts to lose interest in the whole idea. He completes the course anyway, but decides to not pursue the career further. He goes back to living his life as before; exploring the ideas around him and the options available to him, until one day his parents decide that they want to start sailing around the world and so start urging him to find something which means they won’t have to support him anymore.
At the age of 26 he decides to become a police officer. The progress of his career is much like it is today; he goes through the academy, receives training, advances through the ranks always acquiring more experience and regularly undertaking additional training courses. The years seem to pass quickly and after 34 years on the force he has started to reach the end of his patience for the legal system. He is tired of always watching hardened criminals get off with lenient sentences while some of the more innocuous crimes are punished with strict malevolence. The system just doesn’t seem fair and he is sick of it. He makes a big decision and at the age of 60 firmly decides that he is going to start a new career as a judge.
He starts taking some educational courses on the law in his spare time while working and after a year or two actually quits his job and enters full time study of law. Within 4 years he is a lawyer working his way up through the ranks, creating networks of colleagues, learning more about the legal system than he ever understood as a police officer, and generally enjoying this exploration of how to prosecute criminals to the full extent of the law. After 30 years of experience in the legal system, increasing his influence the whole time as well as his understanding, his application to become a judge is finally accepted.
At the age of 95, John, the child from the beginning of this story, finally enters the stage of his second career that he was aiming for all those years before. His illustrious career will end up lasting over 50 years before he willingly retires from it on account of something which happened only 3 years after he became a judge, he met his first wife. He had had 3 long term relationships prior to this point, the longest one lasting 30 years, but for the first time in his 98 years he met a woman which he knew he could spend the rest of his life with, however long that will be. They don’t rush anything though, nothing is really rushed when you are 100 years old with no definite lifespan, and they aren’t married for another 20 years. It isn’t until he is 148 that they both decide to retire from their present careers and have a child. They both have savings accounts which will provide more than enough income for them to both live very comfortably while providing full time care for their child and even still re-invest most of their interest back into savings. They are in fact eternally funded by their own savings.
At 149 years of age John has his first daughter. She is raised by both parents full time with all concerns taken care of. Both parents have extensive life experience and education and they both pass their wealth of knowledge on to their daughter the best they can; not by giving her all of the answers necessarily, but by enabling her to find the answers for herself, and enabling her to pursue the knowledge that she wants to pursue.
After 25 years of raising his daughter, John starts to consider giving paleontology another go. With no need of money, and with a great deal more patience and respect for silence the idea of quietly sitting and working on a dig site seems a lot more appealing to him now than it did all those years ago. Whatever he does though, he chooses to do so freely, without concern for time or money. He is respected in society from his history as a fair judge, and he is as physically capable of being as police officer as he was when he was 26. His years of experience make him one of the most valuable assets in society, and he charges nothing for his time or his advice. He regularly helps out new parents with the education of their children, providing the older kids with lessons on morality and the law, or just helping the younger kids with their reading and writing.
Just as John’s parents were not particularly wealthy or particularly special for dedicating themselves to his fulltime care; his freely offered assistance to those around him is not special or abnormal. In a society full of people who have no limitation on their time and already have two lifetimes worth of savings to support their own needs, there are a lot of people who gain a lot of pleasure out of being able to help other who need it.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
What If We Had More Time?
I have decided to write a book. I think this decision has been a long time in the coming, and it actually feels like it pulls everything together. My molecular biology, my philosophy and my History and Philosophy of Science. Two fields of study which develop my ability to rationally explore objects and communicate complicated ideas, and one area to understand the cutting edge science. So I think I am capable of doing it. The task will be to actually write something the public will want to read, because that is the real objective here: reaching the people.
Thanks to a stroke of genius by Joseph at ImmInst, I think I am going to call the book "What if we had more time?" and the current plan is to launch it alongside the flyer posting idea I wanted to run for ImmInst back in June which never happened. This time there will be a reason for it, and we will have a landing page. I have registered the WIWHMT domain and Joseph is working on flyer and graphic designs to express the sentiments of that question. The website will be a simple step by step guide into the world of the immortalist movement, also inviting them to read my book, and then to participate at ImmInst and become involved with the community.
The goal is to get the attention of the global community and get them more involved, and of course have that happen in a positive light.
I will continue to post in here occasionally, as I write things which may be interesting as stand alone essays or stories from the book as I progress.
Thanks to a stroke of genius by Joseph at ImmInst, I think I am going to call the book "What if we had more time?" and the current plan is to launch it alongside the flyer posting idea I wanted to run for ImmInst back in June which never happened. This time there will be a reason for it, and we will have a landing page. I have registered the WIWHMT domain and Joseph is working on flyer and graphic designs to express the sentiments of that question. The website will be a simple step by step guide into the world of the immortalist movement, also inviting them to read my book, and then to participate at ImmInst and become involved with the community.
The goal is to get the attention of the global community and get them more involved, and of course have that happen in a positive light.
I will continue to post in here occasionally, as I write things which may be interesting as stand alone essays or stories from the book as I progress.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Kurzweil - Law of Accelerating returns and Evolution
Thanks to Stumble Upon, I finally found my way into reading one of Ray Kurzweils essays a couple of weeks ago, and I can honestly say it is by far the most compelling essay I have ever read in my entire life. I have never been so compelled to just keep reading ever before. So, needless to say, I highly highly highly recommend reading this paper:
The Law of Accelerating Returns by Ray Kurzweil
There are so many interesting insights in it, and far more incredibly interesting exponential graphs (better than that, the exponential logarithmic graphs) all demosntrating the accelerating rate of improvements that we are undergoing.
One of the points made in this essay, which isn't in anyway particularly new, but which struck me at the time as a lesson worth repeating, is the idea of how technological advance is constantly building on its predecessor technology. That is, no new peice of technology ever comes out of a vacuum, it is usually made possible because of other pieces of technology which were created before it. Penicillin probably wouldn't have ever been invented if it wasn't for microscopes. Microscopes probably would never have been invented if it wasn't for teh technology to smelt metal ores and create fine glass. Smelting and glass making wouldn't be possible without the invention of fire... etc. Each step up doesn't just happen, it builds ON TOP OF all of the technologies which preceeeded it.
I think that this is quite self evident.
The paper makes another connection as part of its flow (it doesn't make a big deal out of this, it is just assumed to be a natural progression), and that is of the progress from biological evolution, through single celled organisms, to multicellular organisms, to tool using organisms, to intelligent conscious organisms, to extensive tool innovation and upwards throughout the numerous technological innovations that we have seen leading to today.
Whether you agree with biological evolution being another phase of the same progress which we now see in technological innovation or not is irrelevent to what i want to say: i think the 'building on top of' idea of technology, the concept which seems incredibly self apparent to most of us, is indeed identical to the same sort of thing we see in evolution.
Let me explain...
When a cell 2 billion years ago, one in trillion trillion trillion cells perhaps...just one is all that is needed, when that one cell randomly finds itself mutated so as to produce a particular protein which say, provides a better digestive method of nutrition, then that protein is done. It is MADE. Unless killed by accident, that protein will last forever and serve as the scaffolding upon which every single following biological innovation after it will be built upon.
We can see the results of this early period of development in life all around us. There are some genes which are ubiquitous - that is they are in every life form on earth. Heat shock proteins, Polymerase, histones(?)...I don't know all of the proteins/genes which are completely ubiquitous in biology, but there is no doubt a huge collection of genes which are present in every single life form on earth in one form or another, and they all show a common descendency in their code (as opposed to convergent evolution where the same thing (EG the eye) has independently evovled many times over with no common descendency).
I'm having a great deal of trouble explaining this easily. It all works so clearly in my head but I think I need to dedicate a number of days studying some topics in order to find good practical examples of what I am saying so that i can tell the 'story' of this idea.
So i'll just leave it with these closing comments: Just as technology has reached the sophistication that we now have because every step of the way builds upon foundations which have been developed for several thousand years, so too does evolution acheive the incredible sophistication that we see in biology simply because it has built upon foundations which were developed several billion years ago.
polymerase is like fire. Without that gene/protein forming, life would never have got anywhere.
The first heat shock protein is like developing an understanding of engineering. Without it cells wouldn't have had half as good a chance at surviving in diverse environments, jsut as humans wouldn't have been nearly so good at expanding into cold/hot climates through building climate controlled dwellings...
Each step of the way makes 'life' easier, and as life gets easier, more innovation is made possible.
And eventually you end up with monstrously complex entities like humans and the internet.
Shane
The Law of Accelerating Returns by Ray Kurzweil
There are so many interesting insights in it, and far more incredibly interesting exponential graphs (better than that, the exponential logarithmic graphs) all demosntrating the accelerating rate of improvements that we are undergoing.
One of the points made in this essay, which isn't in anyway particularly new, but which struck me at the time as a lesson worth repeating, is the idea of how technological advance is constantly building on its predecessor technology. That is, no new peice of technology ever comes out of a vacuum, it is usually made possible because of other pieces of technology which were created before it. Penicillin probably wouldn't have ever been invented if it wasn't for microscopes. Microscopes probably would never have been invented if it wasn't for teh technology to smelt metal ores and create fine glass. Smelting and glass making wouldn't be possible without the invention of fire... etc. Each step up doesn't just happen, it builds ON TOP OF all of the technologies which preceeeded it.
I think that this is quite self evident.
The paper makes another connection as part of its flow (it doesn't make a big deal out of this, it is just assumed to be a natural progression), and that is of the progress from biological evolution, through single celled organisms, to multicellular organisms, to tool using organisms, to intelligent conscious organisms, to extensive tool innovation and upwards throughout the numerous technological innovations that we have seen leading to today.
Whether you agree with biological evolution being another phase of the same progress which we now see in technological innovation or not is irrelevent to what i want to say: i think the 'building on top of' idea of technology, the concept which seems incredibly self apparent to most of us, is indeed identical to the same sort of thing we see in evolution.
Let me explain...
When a cell 2 billion years ago, one in trillion trillion trillion cells perhaps...just one is all that is needed, when that one cell randomly finds itself mutated so as to produce a particular protein which say, provides a better digestive method of nutrition, then that protein is done. It is MADE. Unless killed by accident, that protein will last forever and serve as the scaffolding upon which every single following biological innovation after it will be built upon.
We can see the results of this early period of development in life all around us. There are some genes which are ubiquitous - that is they are in every life form on earth. Heat shock proteins, Polymerase, histones(?)...I don't know all of the proteins/genes which are completely ubiquitous in biology, but there is no doubt a huge collection of genes which are present in every single life form on earth in one form or another, and they all show a common descendency in their code (as opposed to convergent evolution where the same thing (EG the eye) has independently evovled many times over with no common descendency).
I'm having a great deal of trouble explaining this easily. It all works so clearly in my head but I think I need to dedicate a number of days studying some topics in order to find good practical examples of what I am saying so that i can tell the 'story' of this idea.
So i'll just leave it with these closing comments: Just as technology has reached the sophistication that we now have because every step of the way builds upon foundations which have been developed for several thousand years, so too does evolution acheive the incredible sophistication that we see in biology simply because it has built upon foundations which were developed several billion years ago.
polymerase is like fire. Without that gene/protein forming, life would never have got anywhere.
The first heat shock protein is like developing an understanding of engineering. Without it cells wouldn't have had half as good a chance at surviving in diverse environments, jsut as humans wouldn't have been nearly so good at expanding into cold/hot climates through building climate controlled dwellings...
Each step of the way makes 'life' easier, and as life gets easier, more innovation is made possible.
And eventually you end up with monstrously complex entities like humans and the internet.
Shane
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