Programming DNA

A team at UW has developed a programming language for chemistry which can be used to "program" how DNA molecules interact. They speculate this will make creating synthetic DNA easier to create, but will also allow programmers to "combine them [DNA] into a network that realizes, at the molecular level, an algorithm used in distributed control systems for achieving consensus between multiple agents." It's hard to think of a closer connection between the aesthetics of new media and interventions or control over life than what they're proposing!

Stealing three to seven milliseconds

So this just hit a few major news medias and it seems relevant to what we've been discussing. It takes 7 milliseconds for a message to be sent from Washington D.C. and Chicago. However, somehow in only 2-3 milliseconds after the Federal Reserve announced it would not be tapering its bond buying program at 2pm in Washington, several huge orders were made in Chicago based on that decision. No one is quite sure how it happened yet, maybe someone was just extremely lucky, but the news reporters discussing it seem to think it more likely there was a leak and algorithms setup to exploit the few milliseconds necessary to send and receive the official message. Not sure if that counts as a stratagem, since it relied on a stable system of banking and communications networks, but it is certainly sophist-icated in Fuller and Goffey's sense of the word.

This line from Archaeology of Knowledge had me thinking about the problem with the legitimizing power of the word science:

“Mathematics has certainly served as a model for most scientific discourses in their efforts to attain formal rigour and demonstrativity; but for the historian who questions the actual development of the sciences, it is a bad example, an example at least from which one cannot generalize.” p. 189

He goes on to say that math is also unique in that it can tell its own history. Math is unique, yet so many disciplines feel insecure about their inability to achieve the repeatable results and the level of abstraction (among other things) found in mathematics. It seems like these sciences deal with their insecurity by trying harder rather than rethinking the viability of imitation.

I was thinking about this again especially in the last few pages with the discussion of recursion. Where computer sciences were once more or less coextensive with mathematics, they seem to have flipped inside out. Computer sciences born of abstraction are now trying to imitate or understand humans. Meanwhile, humans try to make math of politics, society, environment, etc. This is kind of off topic from the chapters we read, but it is just a thought I had.  

Also, Jairus, I didn't get the Whitehead comment that the trick of evil is to insist on birth at the wrong season. I remember you said once that he is one of your favorites.

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