My Flying Skills are Unstoppable

Smart-Winged Pterosaurs, an article in nature 425 (20 oct 2003), pp 910-911, shows not only a neat reconstrution of a basal (archaic) and a derived (innovative) pterosaur and how they moved on land, it also remarks on the incredible flying abilities they had. The authors conclude,

Equipped with their 'smart' wings, pterosaurs would have had excellent flight control. Despite their antiquity, they could even have outperformed modern birds and bats.

The link is to the 'science-stupid' version of the papers included in nature, a kind of summary for those who don't have any background in science. It is also this month's free offering.

You should read it.

Our minds trick us. They are little glands sitting on a massive mammalian-reptile base, a tiny GUI on a great Darwin kernel whose guts speak a strange tongue that in turn is translated into the machine-speak of electronic pulses that really makes up our beings. We funny wingless primates are like macs: wonderful things with great software, but we don't have the slightest goddamn idea how the programming actually runs to make the interface we call consciousness.

We don't realise how it constrains our minds to think of the world as a giant Friendster or Tribe.net web. We like to think the entirety of our world is the mumble-bumble masses of henrys and emilys and get lost in our social environment - to a large degree, this isn't an inaccurate depiction, because our species has covered every inch of the world, Munchkins and Gillikins crawling over the surface of the planet.

There are worlds of beauty and brilliance beyond that GUI, and there are other GUIs. Some of that is understanding the programming languages, how UNIXy subsurface processes appear as click- and draggable notions and emotions. There is understanding how programming works in the first place, how simple patterns repeat and how other systems are brilliant even though they are unfamiliar and ancient.

Enough computer stories. The world isn't all interpersonal relationships, despite what your furry brain is screaming at you all the time. It is mostly nonhuman, even though we live in giant constructed artificial networks that run by primate social requirements. It is wild and addictive and amazing and there are portals to it that other curious folks have built. We are like chimps in that we are obsessed with other two-legs, but we are also like orang-orang-hutan in that we have a curiosity about things other than two-legs. Here's your time to carpe the diem.

This little gem is flotsam on the beach: pick it up, savour it, take it home with you & put it on your shelf to remind you that you need to turn off the social networks for a while and think about the astounding ways the world functions OUTSIDE of Munchkins & al.

So stop reading me and go read that article already!