From E. Coli to Chestnut Tigers

This saturday morning, I chatted with Dr. Ueda of Riken about his research on biological clockes, in the editorial office of Nikkei Science. While we strolled in the corridor of interesting facts and ponderings, he mentioned a ongoing research in which the investigator cultured E. Coli for 20 years. Apparently these small chaps "adapted" to the new environment. Wild types of E. Coli, when put into a new environment, do not start dividing until after some delay period, consistent with the idea that the primitive biological forms are "probing" the environment to see if it is fit. The cultured E. Coli, on the other hand, somehow learn to start reproduction "straight away". Presumably they have figured out that the environment they are in is fit for proliferating, and no initial probings are necessary. The underlying molecular mechanisms behind this adaptation are still to be elucidated.

That story somehow reminded me of the butterfly Chestnut Tiger (Parantica sita). This is a beautiful but poisonous species. The birds, after learning that these creatures with inviting appearances actually taste nastily, do not bother them. Chestnut Tigers therefore fly very slowly, with a certain air of elegance, as if they know they wouldn't be chased by birds. When an ignorant enemy tries to attack them, however, for example by the small boy that was I thiry-something years ago, Chestnut Tigers would suddenly shoot up into the high air.

When, however, I waved my hands towards the artificicially cultivated Chestnut Tigers in the Giant Glass Insect Dome of Tama zoo, they could be hardly less perturbated. They have somehow learned that they were now enclosed in a space with a ceiling, and that shooting up into the air did not make any sense. They just kept flying in a slow-motion elegance, after some irritated movement induced by my hands.

The adaptabilities of biological systems, from E. Coli to Chestnut Tigers, never ceases to amaze me. The wonder is how the system and molecules work together to make it happen.

Creative Concessions

Recently, I met with the architect Kengo Kuma for intervew on the weekly "The Professionals" program that I am hosting for NHK with Ms. Miki Sumiyoshi. It was not the first time that I met with this famous architect. However, it was the first proper and long chat, lasting for more than 4 hours, which unfortunately would be compressed into 15 minutes in the actual broadcast.

Kengo's architectural philosophy is that of "creative concessions". He criticizes the modern approach of steel and concrete for the very freedom that these materials have given the architects. When you use alternative building materials such as wood, there are numerous restrictions to which you are obliged to make concessions to. True creativity arises from these restrictions and concessions, Kengo says.

When asked what kind of architecture he would build if there was no restriction arising from the environment, materials, or budget, Kengo answered after some moments of pondering that he would discover a restriction somehow even in that case. I realized why Kengo is considered as one of the key architects in the 21st century.

Whiskey time

We are supposedly living in a "dog year". But certain things take longer time. Take the maturation of whiskey, for example. If you would like to make a fine whiskey, you need to allow for at least ~ 10 years of maturation time. In order to stage a good aging of the liquid, a fine oak barrel is an absolute necessity. An oak tree takes a hundred years to grow to a size appropriate for use as a barrel. Peat, traditionally used in Scotland to give that peculiar flavor, is an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation matter which takes ages to form. Whiskey time, in contrast to the dog year, is a symbol of painfully slow processions of things.

When it comes to the maturation of a personality, it takes all of life to materialize. The synaptic plasticity in the brain takes a few weeks to be molecularly completed. We learn very slowly as a molecular machine, but the accumulation hopefully would lead to a non-trivial transformation of character.

Even the computer, when deciphered in terms of the atoms that make it up, lives in a whisky time. The heavy atoms can only be transformed through cycles of galaxies being formed and then perished. The dog year can only flourish on top of the atomic whiskey time.

We sometimes become too enthusiastic at the cost of ignoring the whole picture. Information technology has not freed us from the curses and blessings of the cosmic whiskey time.

When we look up to the cherry blossoms

We love the cherry blossoms in spring because of their short existence on earth. If these flowery manifestations of the power of life stayed for months, our enthusiasms would be greatly diminished.

When you think about it, everything in the universe is in permanent motion. A tiny stone on your desk, which, after being forced out of the earth and transported and gradually destroyed and frictioned by the workings of water, seems finally to be at rest. However, inside the cool and still image of the stone surface, electrons are swirling around the nucleus in an eternal zitterbewegung, the positrons and neutrons and the quarks that make up these particles are in constant motion, even being destroyed and created from nothing in the poignant void of space-time.

Life is based on the perpetual motion of things, and therefore changes and deaths are inevitable. When we look up to the cherry blossoms, and witness their rapid demise from the prime of beauty, what is happening is nothing more than a result of the universal passage of time which affect life and non-life in the cosmos alike. The fact that we are affected and feel a sweet pain in our soul is ultimately an enigma, albeit so natural from the point of life's common senses, as nothing is changing in terms of the fundamental ways of things when it happens.

Homeostasis

Homeostasis, the maintenance of the status quo, is an important aspect of all biological processes. Evolution deals with a long time scale, so that it appears as if everything is possible, supposedly depending on the random mutations and natural selections. Development of an organism, on the other hand, happens in a much shorter time scale. When a fertilized egg develops into a multi-cellular life-form, there is not much new information being generated through an interaction with the environment. So that we need to consider the multi-cellular development as an instance of homeostasis.

The concept of homeostasis is accompanied by (some) invariant parameters. Development on the surface appears to be a generation of new order de nuvo, but in actuality it must be sustained by the invariance of some structural properties, turning the implicates into the explicits. Learning, accompanied and resulting in personality changes, can too be regarded as an instance of this generalized concept of homeostasis.

Rage

Recently I met with Mr. Mochio Umeda, the famed visionary based in Silicon Valley, in the headquarters of the IT venture "Hatena" in Tokyo. In the talk, we touched upon the subject of "rage".

Mochio described how rage directed towards the status quo has driven technological innovations in the United States. Experience has shown that whenever people with visions for a (in their view) better future clash with those who have established interests in the present system, the futurists on average have scored victory in the long run.

In the beginning, naturally, people with visions are stuck with the present system, friction from several directions preventing their every move. Their rage towards the status quo then erupts, and kick-starts a series of movements that eventually lead to the breakdown of the present system.

Mochio described a particularly impressive anecdote about one of his mentors. This visionary, who have advocated the concept of life-long computing long before the technologies which would materialize the concept, once mail-ordered a software. That software came in a floppy disk. When the mentor saw the disk packed in a box with filler materials, he was so outraged that he tore open the box and destroyed the filler materials, crying that the only essential thing in the box was the "digital bits", and everything else was redundant and superfluous.

We all know how digital information has come to be distributed in the modern world.

It is reported that the BBC has come to an agreement with youtube about the distribution of its content in the newly emerging internet video site. No matter whatever legal reasons you might cite to explain why a particular change would not happen, things that serve people's interest in the long run would materialize. And behind the rapid development of technologies and social structure are the rages of the visionaries and digiratis.

Fads

Fads are interesting social cognitive phenomena. Something becomes popular, and loses popularly and wanes in its push. I suspect many trends on the internet are actually fads. They flame for sometime, and are then gone. They would not disappear completely, but would lose significance they were once supposed to carry.

When people subscribe to new things on the internet, they do so out of their curiosity and neophilia. Then the homeostasis of life takes over. Those that provide truth values stay, and those that don't go away.

I find myself increasingly drawn to those information of long standing values. I have and am subscribed to social network services, but these do not in general provide something of eternal significance. I am more and more yearning to read the classics, for example the original texts of the philosopher Henri Bergson, rather than reading the casual entries of people whom you barely know.

The time spent on the internet is a precious portion of life. If there is a double standard as to the quality to be expected between real life and internet time, then the discrepancy would eventually disappear, although no trends in life happens in completeness.

Okinawa

This week I went to the southern island of Okinawa to give a lecture in front of 100 or so people involved in pharmaceutical business. The subtropical island is about two and half hours flight from Haneda airport which serves metropolitan Tokyo.
My physical condition was not particularly well on that day. I had symptoms of a cold, most probably that of an influenza, and I slept during most of the flight. My sleep was heavy and troubled.

Transportation was pre-arranged. On the way, I talked to the driver of the car designated by the pharmaceutical company. I had lots of stuff to do, and was working on my laptop computer despite the poor physical condition, but somehow I felt that he was in a mood for talking, so I put away my computer and let the conversation flow.

First he talked about how clumsy he felt about girls. With the help of alcohol, maybe he can conjure up some courage, but that is not always so, he went on. He was a bachelor at the age of 35.

Then he started to mention about the war, about Korean and Chinese people who stayed in Okinawa area, how his parents escaped the worst part of the battle of Okinawa which claimed heavy casualties. After the war, Okinawa was occupied by the United States until its reunion on the 15th of May 1972.

These are very sensitive and difficult issues, and the best I could do was to listen very carefully, with my whole existence. Listening to is a very precious act, in this modern age of superficial glamour. By listening, one can regain the implicit and the
forgotten, the spirit of the gone, the forsaken.

When I got out of the car, the driver smiled and just went away. It was nightfall, and I could hear the laughter of people enjoying the peace on the street. The whole apparition would have seemed like a swarm of frivolous luminosity floating on a wide, dark ocean, to those who are in the know.

The news is

Ms. Miki Sumiyoshi, co-presenter of "The Professionals" show on NHK, recently said something which set me pondering. During conversation off the studio, when we were chatting about things with the chief producer Mr. Nobuto Ariyoshi and several directors, she mentioned in passing how she disliked the news programs. Current affairs are surely important, but the daily news shows tend to capture brief moments of trends which need to be treated on a longer time scale. The news programs focus on visually dramatic happenings, sensationally reporting accidents and issues but completely forgetting what happened and moving on to new stimulants the next day. The average "attention span" of news programs is getting shorter and shorter. Ms. Sumiyoshi did not actually say that much, but that was the gist of her remark.

In short, the news is that the news programs are not really worth watching, folks!

I find myself increasingly being attracted by things set in a much longer temporal context than the "now this, next that" approach rampant in much of the modern media.

Einstein once remarked how people who are interested only in today's affairs are as well as short-sighted. I would like very much to see far away, hear distant sounds. Consequently I become less interested in the short-attention-span bonanza.