While talking to a friend this weekend, he mentioned that he has been learning to solve rubiks cubes. What struck me as interesting is that he had learned fundamental techniques and the relationships to how the pieces move, instead of memorizing patterns. At that point, he had no need to memorize patterns, he could derive them himself. It reminded me of statistics.

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I just found out my old MSU site is still up. Looking at it was amusing. I remember putting a lot of time into that site. The look and feel is a bit atrocious, but the way it works is actually quite smooth. The main content is loaded dynamically with an inline frame and the two menu bars allows the user to navigate a lot of options easily. The obvious piece that I overlooked was that when choosing an option from the top level bar, the content should change to an overview page. I would have written this page some time in late April or early May of 2006, so it’s less than 3 years old. In retrospect, I’m pleased with how far I’ve come in that time. I am a professional web developer now, however, my employer has the good sense to keep me far away from any design decisions.

Ideas fit almost any definition of life ever conceived. They reproduce by being spread from person to person. They manipulate their environment (via their host, us). They mutate and evolve. They are tested for fitness, not actually in if it’s ‘a good idea’ but in that it competes with all the other ideas you’ve ever seen or heard for your neural paths, to be thought, to be remembered. Then it spreads, it utilizes speech, writing, electromagnetic radiations, the internet and anything else it can control to try and spread. Ideas even have sexual reproduction, like bunnies. New ‘thoughts’ are product of sexual reproduction among ideas. Two ideas (or more) that you are host to, meet up inside your head and they intertwine, and when they are done, you still have the two original thoughts, but you also have a hybrid. But this goes on constantly, thousands of times a day in each persons head. Trillions of new thoughts each produced and tried for Darwinian fitness. And we are the host, just like to bacteria. Weak, harmful bacteria is easily eliminated. Strong harmful bacteria can lead to illness, and strong harmful ideas lead people to endanger themselves, hurt themselves or others. But just like bacteria, the really successful ideas develop a symbiosis with their host. They are no more using us than we are using them. These ideas thrive by helping their host to thrive. So remember, every thought, every human interaction that communicates data, is, very literally, a form of life.

(Based on the TED talk by Dan Dennett, with whom I think I disagree)