What Is Evolution? — Evrim Nedir?

Another project of mine for “public understanding of science”. I intended this to be a web flyer to inform people about the most important yet the least known feature of evolution: that it is a general substrate-neutral algorithmic process, defined independently from biology and used for problem solving in a variety of areas.

Email me if you want a PDF for high-quality print-out.

See here for details and examples of non-biological evolution.

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Kanımca evrimin en önemli fakat aynı zamanda en az bilinen yanı, ortamdan ve malzemeden bağımsız, biyolojiden ayrı olarak tanımlanabilen ve bugün birçok alanda problem çözme aracı olarak kullanılan bir algoritma olması. Bu işi de, insanlara bunu anlatmaya çalışan bir web görseli olarak tasarladım. Türk halkının konuyla ilgili özel durumunu göz önüne alarak Türkçesini de yaptım ve bu bloga ilk defa Türkçe yazıyorum ki, iş amacına daha rahat ulaşsın.

Yüksek çözünürlükte çıktı almak için PDF formatında isterseniz bana e-posta ile ulaşabilirsiniz.

Detaylar ve biyolojik olmayan evrim örnekleri için buraya (İngilizce) ve şuraya (Türkçe) göz atabilirsiniz.

Nightmare

from here.

Consciousness Explained, Only Better!

I’ve just found out about this wonderful book title by Allan Combs: Consciousness Explained Better! Yes! A bold response to Dennett’s mischievously arrogant Consciousness Explained, isn’t it?

At first I was surprised that the name Allan Combs didn’t ring a bell for me because I happen to know lots of names from the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science (speaking of arrogance). Who was this Combs guy to challenge Dennett like that?

I got my first clue from the praise in the Amazon page talking about this book being like “Luke Skywalker’s torpedo headed straight into the Death Star of reductive materialism” by Michael Murphy, founder of the Esalen Institute (huh?). Then there was this other book of Combs’s, called The Radiance of Being: Understanding the Grand Integral Vision: Living the Integral Life, good enough to activate my mumbo-jumbo detectors. Finally I discovered that he was part of the Integral Movement (seriously), which is defined in Wikipedia as:

a worldview that seeks a comprehensive understanding of humans and the universe by combining psychological, social, and/or spiritual insights in a single framework. “Integral” might be said to have both a broad and a narrow meaning. In the larger, generic sense, Integral means whole, complete and holistic, such as body-mind-spirit and East-West. In the narrow sense, it refers originally to the Integral Yoga philosophy and psychology of Sri Aurobindo, as well as the Integral Psychology (the term coined by Indra Sen) and Psychotherapy that emerges from it.

Need I say more?

Okay, okay, let’s not go all judgmental on the guy without reading anything from him.

My Life Throughout Icons

This idea just sprung to my mind when I was staring at the TED logo and I immediately started to collect all the logos/icons which somehow had an influence on my life (at least for one year), be it a commercial brand, an institution, a tv series, a band, a software or a website. I spent a whole day searching, scanning, editing, sometimes recreating these things, and it was a strange experience full of surprises and nostalgia. It made me smile when I saw the chronological connections between some icons that I had not thought of before.

The final surprise to me was to see how good icons are at defining a person, and I’m not talking blunt capitalism here (the piece on its own takes care of that job plainly without any need for my blabbers). For one thing, just the commercial products wouldn’t be enough. And although I am fully aware of a more interesting definition of capitalism which includes all the modern mythologies from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Harry Potter, I think that there are icons there that you still can’t fit in that definition and without which this piece wouldn’t be strong enough; strong enough to make me want to look at this thing for hours like a vain girl looking at a mirror – this may sound weird, but you probably would understand what I feel if you were to look at your own version of this. It is also worth noting that towards 2009 appear some items that I myself created as a designer, which in turn started to define me – like the icon of my band or the logo of our design collective Fevkalade.

Some of the old items – like Cicibebe, Nutella or Remeron – are still wholly present in my life, by the way. I placed those things according to where they first made appearance. There are some old items I’m still looking for, so this is not the final version. I also plan to update it as years go by.

Update My friend Ece made her own with a clever twist on the layout. If you also plan to make your versions, please send me links so that we can build an archive.

One Favor For the Human Kind

“Guys, do me favor. Do yourselves a favor, do everyone a favor: don’t make video art. That’s the first thing I’d forbid if I was a dictator.”

This is a dear professor I work with, being the voice of the voiceless. I’m not giving out the name, in case he/she doesn’t want to draw the wrath of the video artists. “Wrath of the Video Artists”… Sounds like an horror movie title. Think about it, two hours of video art in theater…