Isegoria

Friendly fungi could revolutionize rice farming:

Mycorrhiza fungi are those that live in a mutually beneficial arrangement with the roots of plants. Found in just about every piece of flora on the planet, they form a mutualistic bond with the host — in exchange for sugar, the fungi adds a much greater amount of surface area to the root, which allows for better water uptake and the higher absorption of phosphate, which can be hard for plants to access in certain forms.

Unfortunately, many major food source crops don’t respond well to existing Mycorrhiza fungi, and don’t take advantage of these benefits. Rice — food staple to the most of humanity — is one such plant. Ian Sanders of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland has found what seems to be a way to get around this problem.

He took Glomus intraradices — a fungal strain with no benefit towards rice crops — and found that it had a much greater variety of genetic variation in it than was usually seen in a clonal fungi. By tweaking the genes of G. intraradices, they created a strain that activates the capacity of the rice plants to form the bond.

With this symbiosis in place, the rice experienced a five-fold growth increase. The benefits aren’t just limited to Syfy levels of gigantism, there are also major potential improvements for the plants mineral uptake. Mycorrhiza can allow plants to take up phosphate ions that are demineralized — which is usually inaccessible — like in soil that is particularly basic. Without the fungi, this phosphate would have to be provided externally, and this nutrient might be in short supply.

“Global reserves of phosphate are critically low, and because the demand for phosphate goes hand in hand with human population expansion, it is predicted that there will be major shortages in the next few decades,” says Sanders. By inoculating the plant with G. intraradices, the pressure on phosphate supplies could potentially be significantly lowered.

A young Stephen Wolfram thought he was being treated “increasingly badly” at the Institute for Advanced Study, so he wrote a letter to Richard Feynman, asking for advice. Feynman wrote back:

CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
CHARLES C. LAURITSEN LABORATORY OF HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS

October 14, 1985

Dr. Stephen Wolfram
School of Natural Sciences
The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, NJ 08540

Dear Wolfram:

1. It is not my opinion that the present organizational structure of science inhibits “complexity research” – I do not believe such an institution is necessary.

2. You say you want to create your own environment – but you will not be doing that: you will create (perhaps!) an environment that you might like to work in – but you will not be working in this environment – you will be administering it – and the administration environment is not what you seek – is it? You won’t enjoy administrating people because you won’t succeed in it.

You don’t understand “ordinary people.” To you they are “stupid fools” – so you will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience – but will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them in an effective way.

Find a way to do your research with as little contact with non-technical people as possible, with one exception, fall madly in love! That is my advice, my friend.

Sincerely,

(Signed, ‘Richard P. Feynman’)

Richard P. Feynman

RPF;ht

Wolfram went on to form Wolfram Research, the company responsible for releasing Mathematica in 1989 and, more recently, Wolfram Alpha.

Secular conservative John Derbyshire deconstructs folk metaphysics for his not-so-secular colleagues:

Folk metaphysics is the standard-issue set of notions our brains come equipped with to help us navigate our way around the everyday world, the world of what one philosopher called “medium-sized dry goods.”

For those purposes, folk metaphysics is excellent, and we all use it all the time. It includes cast-iron rules like “a thing can’t be in two places at once” and “the burning-up of a thing is irreversible.” There are more general principles like the living-nonliving division of matter and the slightly more sophisticated animal-vegetable-mineral one, or the “like can only come from like” rule (e.g. fishes don’t produce kittens) — in itself one instance of a bigger, more general group of folk-metaphysical ideas called “sympathetic magic.”

Then there are more approximate rules of thumb like “large solid objects are apt to be heavier than small ones” and “anything moving in a purposive way is an animal, or is pushed or pulled by one” (which is why Apaches, applying straightforward folk metaphysics, assumed there was a horse in the locomotive).

We all use these notions all the time, and are surprised, even sometimes disturbed, when they are violated — when, for example, a large solid-looking object turns out to have little weight. They’re terrifically useful, and are nothing to scoff at in themselves. Their instantiations in our nervous systems took hundreds of millions of years to evolve. Our thoughts are all wrapped around them, and our languages are wrapped around our thoughts. So really, nobody should be scoffing at folk metaphysics per se. You might as well scoff at your taste buds, or binocular vision. Folk metaphysics is just part of the neurological equipment.

As soon as you conduct a rigorous inquiry into reality, though, problems arise. This has been clear for a couple of hundred years, so stubborn resistance to it is, I think, scoff-worthy — the willful denial, for private psychological purposes, of something in plain sight.

Sodium is a poisonous metal; chlorine is a poisonous gas; put them together in chemical combination and you get sodium chloride — common table salt — which is neither poisonous, nor a metal, nor a gas. Whoa, what happened to “like can only come from like”? Evolution violates the same principle, which is why the mind resists it. Even Newton’s dull old laws of motion contradict folk metaphysics to some degree.