Little things acting together make music, molecules and ideas

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Posted on 17th October 2009 by Judy Breck in Biology, Connective Expression, Emerging Online Knowledge, Golden swamp defined, Music and Open Content

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The thesis of golden swamp is that what we learn and know emerges in network patterns from little pieces — and that can happen in the idea ecosystem of the open internet as it does in our minds. Big, static structures like curricula do not work well in the open ecology, and need to be unbundled into small pieces that can interact freely.

The two marvelous videos embedded above and below show the dynamics of small pieces emerging into music and molecules. That is very similar to what happens when you or I think. That is also what happens online when a learner connects interlinkable bits of knowledge.

The narrator of the molecule video says that, “Ribosomes can make any kind of protein. It just depends on what kind of genetic message you feed it on the RNA.” The music machine is also being fed a string of information code which it follows to activate the balls. Future curricula will include strings of information to activate online patterns of virtual bits of what is known by humankind.

Picture of molecule structure first of its kind

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Posted on 29th August 2009 by Judy Breck in Biology, Emerging Online Knowledge, Open Content, Physics and Subject Sampler

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moleculeMicro

It is stunning that this first of its kind image and description of how it was taken can be studied by anyone with an internet browser — almost immediately upon its discovery. It will be many months at least before this new insight into and picture of molecules will be delivered to students in a printed textbook.

The machine in the illustration is an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) explained by physicist Ethan Siegel at his StartsWithABang blog. Siegel describes how the AFM works: “Basically, you make a tiny, sharp, atomic needle that you move over the top of a molecule. When you approach different atoms in a molecule, the electric forces either attract or repel the needle. As the needle moves up and down, the handle that it’s attached to feels forces and torque. So, all you have to do is measure these tiny changes in force and torque, and you can image the molecule beneath it.”

The gray inset image is what the AFM let’s us see. Siegel comments that: “You can even see that the electrons like to live on the outside edges of the carbon rings, and that there are fourteen tiny hydrogen atoms bonded to the carbon atoms at various points. What an amazing picture; the entire molecule is only 1.4 nanometers across!”

The inset image is from BBC’s report of 8/28/09 titled “Single molecule’s stunning image.” Several developing concepts are highlighted in the BBC report, each of them offering potential for nano technologies where work will be done at the molecular level. A post at Gizmodo by Jack Loftus explains why what is displayed in the inset images is a stunning breakthrough: “That B&W structure is an actual image of a molecule and its atomic bonds. The first of its kind, in fact, and a breakthrough for the crazy IBM scientists in Zurich who spent 20 straight hours staring at the ’specimen’—which in this case was a 1.4 nanometer-long pentacene molecule comprised of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms.”