

This view is facing north. The downtown skyscraper rooftops of the city of San Francisco can be slightly seen in the top center behind the distant ridge. Click on the image and look closely.
Cells in embryos make their way across a steep “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate.
Embryonic cells continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments, optimizing as development proceeds, locking in on their planned identity relatively late.
Processing positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. (Some cells unfortunately take the wrong paths and are unable to get back on track.)
All the information is there in the landscape and processing that information effectively may be the phenomenon that makes a bunch of loosely stuck-together atoms behave like the thing we call life.
Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.”
-Leo Tolstoy
Flag Hill at Sunol Wilderness is a slab of ancient sea floor which, in response to pressure from below, was tilted up more on one side than the other, revealing a cross-section of its sedimentary layers.
The hill shows a vegetation pattern typical of the inner coast ranges. During summer, the hot sun dries the south-facing slope. Only grassland and soft chaparral can survive under these conditions. On the north-facing slope where moisture lasts longer, trees thrive.
Sunol is one of the most beautiful parks in the Bay Area.
Doomed to do it again & again, no choice but to play a Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise & fall.
Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome: ground to dust; plowed with salt.
Spain, France, Britain, America – burned into the oblivion of centuries.
A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)