18 April 2008

I am cranky: tightened braces = lack of food = cranky Niamh

I read today: "The more we know about genes the less we understand". It could easily read: "The more I know about Virtual Worlds the less I understand". Or "The more I know about doing a PhD the less I understand". For the longest time, I had a nice neat conceptualization of virtual worlds. Then I discovered the SL community blogs, mailing lists etc. I started reading what's been published so far (not much). Now I'm confused.

Terms like social media and social networking are a puzzle. I find myself thinking about the nature of my activities here in my little office. A reflexive thinking, I suppose. 12 windows open at a time. Haphazard searching for material. Lists of notes indexing my other notes. I think of Brown and Duguid ("The Social Life of Information") - they talk about contemplating indexing their help indexes. I just read a WIRED article about E. Coli. It talks about the DNA being organized by "transcription factors". It goes on to say: "In the latest issue of Nature, scientists reported an experiment in which they wreaked havoc with E. coli's network. They randomly added new links between the transcription factors at the top of the microbe's hierarchy. Now a transcription factor could turn on another one that it never had before. The scientists randomly rewired the network in 598 different ways and then stepped back to see what happened to the bacteria. You might expect that they all died... About 95 percent of the rewired bacteria did just fine with their new networks... Some even performed better than microbes with the original wiring, under some conditions... scientists don't quite know why a network like the one in E. coli can handle this rewiring so well. The source of their strength lies not in a single molecule -- DNA -- but in a complicated web of relationships. The network itself is the mystery for biologists in the 21st century" - this seems to be significant in some way. Hmmm.

I have decided to embrace the research process today. Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins describes herself as one of the 'digirati'. It's a nice word. I need to be one. I need to embrace del.ic.ious or whatever it is. Twitter. Etc. I need to figure out how to label my blogs for instance so that I can mine them.

... "It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change." - Charles Darwin

Combine with Wagner Au who talks about "Bebop Reality", p. xvii ..."fundamental laws of physics and identity are open to constant improvisation by its inhabitants".