YHouse Blog

This week, exactly thirty years ago, Scientific American published a special issue on advanced computing.  There were ten articles, on ten different aspects of advanced computing...

A few days ago I gave a short talk, followed...

Breakthroughs in science are often triggered by a realization that one or more of our assumptions were wrong.  In the rapid growth of experimental and theoretical...

I gave a talk at a workshop on the topic of Universal Biology, a little over a week ago, at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) in Tokyo, one in a series provided by...

The International Society for Theoretical Psychology holds its main conferences every two years in a different country.   This year the choice was Japan, and last week its members came...

My first exposure to programming occurred in my freshman year, when I got access to the one computer available on the whole campus of Utrecht University, a Philips...

The question of the origin of life on Earth, and possibly elsewhere in the Universe, is a fascinating topic of study.  In order to ask how life first appeared in...

What is science?  In how far is it different from other human activities?  Several answers come to mind.  Some people may insist that the use of mathematical models is...

A couple weeks ago, I identified the origins of life with the first information revolution on Earth.  But if life had never got beyond the state it was in for the first three...

In my previous post I wrote that the relationship between matter and information is one of the great mysteries in all of science.  But what counts as a mystery?

When we see...