Coming up the stairs from our apartment, I spied a couple of palm trees sprouting from the seeds that had dropped. There is a large Date Palm right at the top corner of this walkway. The walkways was recently covered in sand (decomposed granite actually), and apparently it provided proper conditions for the dropped dates to germinate. A few days ago they were just thin little green fingers, plain and straight, sticking up. Now that first vertical leaf is starting to develop the typical palm folds - the ones evolved over millions of years to survive wind and tropical storms.

It hit me: That all the amazing structure, all of a large tree, or any other organism, is contained within molecules within that seed. So much information unfolds, from a molecular scale, into a large creature.

Do we have anything to match this in a computer chip? Nature out shines all our technology, using atomic and molecular machinery. Though it’s not really machinery is it? An atom is captive vibrations, and a molecule is a structured collection of those.

Cycad plant with cone - from a walk around the neighborhood

A thought that occurred to me on my walk this morning (maybe reading this interesting biography of Philip K. Dick, and this interesting article - Divine Interference - about him last night influenced me):

How does biological information differ from computer information?
How are they defined in those respective fields?