I suppose this might appear to be in questionable taste, given how close we are to Christmas, but I came across a fascinating YouTube video (via Metafilter) which shows the results of a program designed to reproduce the elements of evolution — using rudimentary clocks and clock-related mechanisms as the building blocks of life.

The person who wrote the program intended it as a refutation of the argument that evolution must be wrong because complicated mechanisms such as clocks (and eyeballs) don’t just emerge by themselves. I don’t know whether it solves that debate or not, I just thought it was a cool video — given a supply of hands, gears, springs and other elements that are endowed with affinities similar to biological entities, and an evolution-like system, it seems that clocks eventually emerge.

Just a quick post to mention that I was approached awhile back by the folks from Internet Evolution — the blogging and discussion-forum site set up by CMP and some of the team behind Light Reading (which I’m a fan of) — to see if I would contribute articles from time to time, which I agreed to do. Their list of contributors includes Cory Doctorow, Craig Newmark and infamous former hacker Kevin Mitnick (I come right before Quincy Jones on the list, which I must admit is kind of cool).

My first piece went up last week, in which I talk about the clash between the open nature of the Internet and the traditional walled-garden approach of content providers such as the major TV networks and broadcasters — sparked by my inability to watch any of the clips posted by Comedy Central at the new Daily Show site. The post is entitled The Flow of Digital Media is Unstoppable, and there are some smart comments on it already.