Everything You Always Wanted to

Know about Animals but Were Afraid to

Ask Vegetables

Cantor Set Cantor Dust

Timothy Morton
 Fractals

Cantor Dust Sierpinski Carpet

 Fractals

Cantor Dust Menger Sponge

 Fractals

Koch Snowflake Menger Sponge

Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
 
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 4.272–281
 Life forms as textuality
the whole of the gene pool of the biosphere is available to all
organisms
Kwang W. Jeon and James F. Danielli

Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype

genotype phenotype

Rows of chromosomes spider web

Life forms as textuality
ERV-3 (endogenous
DNA retrovirus)

ribosomes
RNA world Sol Spiegelman
 Life forms as textuality

Henkin sentence
(“there is a version of me in your sytem)”

Potato Tuber Spindle Viroid

(contains 359 nucleotides)
Time-lapse animation of a geranium flower opening
Photograph © Andrew Dunn, 31 July 2006.
The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the light-house top.
 
The sun now rose upon the left
Out of the sea came he
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1.21–28
 Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and Aristid Lindenmayer, The Algorithmic Beauty of
Plants, with James S. Hanan, F. David Fracchia, Deborah Fowler, Martin J. M. de
Boer, and Lynn Mercer (Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, 2004);
algorithmicbotany.org/papers/.
 Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and Aristid Lindenmayer, The Algorithmic Beauty of
Plants, with James S. Hanan, F. David Fracchia, Deborah Fowler, Martin J. M. de
Boer, and Lynn Mercer (Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, 2004);
algorithmicbotany.org/papers/.
 Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and Aristid Lindenmayer, The Algorithmic Beauty of
Plants, with James S. Hanan, F. David Fracchia, Deborah Fowler, Martin J. M. de
Boer, and Lynn Mercer (Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, 2004);
algorithmicbotany.org/papers/.
 A comparison of the last
developmental stage with a
validation photograph of a real
gametophyte (Figure 7.14) [a
species of Australian fern] shows
good correspondence between the
model and reality with respect to
structure topology, the relative sizes
and shapes of cells, and the overall
shape of the thallus. This result is
particularly interesting from a
biological perspective, since it
indicates that genetically controlled
cell division patterns play an
important role in determining the
shape of a structure. (p. 160)

Prusinkiewicz and Lindenmayer, The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants

algorithmicbotany.org/papers/
 Algorithms

Set of instructions
Like a recipe
Automated

Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-

Khwārizmī
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 4.272–291