I stopped by the Art Center Design Conference last night. They have all sorts of big names: the Segway guy, the vacuum cleaner guy, the swimming and galloping robot guy, the crazy Walt Disney Concert Hall guy and the Computers as Theatre lady.
Saw David Baltimore's keynote, which wasn't bad.
One thing in his speech confused me a little bit, though; He said that just two things enabled the evolution of self-organizing bits of stuff into the complex living organisms we have today: Random variation, and environmental selection. I wondered why he didn't mention the exchange and combination of genetic material through sex, i.e. sexual crossover. But I guess even though it's an important means of speeding up evolution, it's not strictly necessary if you have mutation, and it's true that sex itself hasn't been around as long as life. I should have known that the guy with the Nobel prize probably knows what he's talking about.
Afterwards WIRED threw a reception. Free drinks and coconut shrimp is a good Thursday night for me.
Posted by jjwiseman at March 19, 2004 11:41 AM