Gene Pool

very funky - i've been fantasizing about a SimLife type game like this for the longest time.

From the page: "Gene Pool is an artificial life simulation in which populations of physics-based organisms evolve swimming capabilities over time. These organisms are called "swimbots". You can set mate preference criteria and thus influence what the swimbots consider as attractive qualities in potential mates. The most attractive swimbots get chosen most often and so their genetic building blocks propogate to future generations. Eventually, swimbots get better at pursuing each other, competing for food, and becoming babes to other swimbots. Local gene pools emerge which compete for sex and food (for energy to have more sex). Eventually a dominant sub-population takes over.

And sometimes, everyone just dies (but you can help keep them alive, by moving food bits and swimbots around, and constraining the migration of competing populations by using the "Great Wall")

Gene Pool is best appreciated as a virtual Darwinian aquarium in which you initiate a primordial soup, and then occasionally check up on what Virtual Mother Nature is up to - about every fifteen minutes (or every few days, if you are interested in long-term evolutionary experiments!)

The strange and unexpected strategies for swimming (and being sexually attractive) that emerge can sometimes be amusing, and a bit reminiscent of that brand of creativity known as Darwinian Evolution."


[tagged with evolution]

Python Sidebar

something useful for FireFox users/Python hackers:
Edgewall Software: Python Sidebar

algiers by flickr

seeing as we're so crap at taking photos, here's some links to other peoples' shots of algiers.

algiers by sea

wanted to test blogger's picture hosting, so here's a pic from our trip back into algiers via ferry. it was taken sometime in august, at sunrise, as the ferry docked.

progress report ..

on understanding life, the universe, and everything:
most of the very broadest brushstrokes are there. just some nagging bits like: the very start of the universe (and what possibly framed that event), the neurophysiological basis of consciousness, the assymetrical predisposition to baryonic over non-baryonic matter; and how to get along with other people.

there's no time like, for instance... 'now'

"There's no such thing as an instant in time or present moment in nature. It's something entirely subjective that we project onto the world around us. That is, it's the outcome of brain function and consciousness."

In the paper, "Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity", Peter Lynds, a 27 year old broadcasting school tutor from Wellington, New Zealand, establishes that there is a necessary trade off of all precisely determined physical values at a time, for their continuity through time, and in doing so, appears to throw age old assumptions about determined instantaneous physical magnitude and time on their heads. ...

read more here. The article doesnt provide enough meat, but i like the basic idea.

UPDATE: the actual article can be found here, and Wikipedia has some info and links to discussions on the piece, including the possibility of a hoax, here.

my feeling is that it does contain a bit of bad science, but that the idea itself is diggable.

my del.icio.us tagroll

the del.icio.us tagroll shows your del.icio.us tags as a weighted 'cloud' that can be displayed in any webpage - the more links contained within any tag, the larger it appears in the cloud. checkout del.icio.us help for tagrolls to get the code for your tagroll
For those that dont know, del.icio.us is an online bookmarking service that allows you to sort your sites by tags.

UPDATE: i moved the actual del.icio.us tagroll to the sidebar on the right as a permanent fixture

a follow-up on the glen and raj saga..

the class worrier blog has a follow-up post of last weeks march here.
mentioned there, is another article worth checking out:

Democracy took a beating in Foreman Road,
Richard Pithouse, November 22, 2005, The Mercury

Class worrier: Fucker stole my camera and shot my mates

extract from Raj Patel's excellent blog..

" It was an ordinary mugging. The bastard had a gun, a swagger, a gang and didn’t seem to want to me to take his photo when he was roughing someone up. So he came up to me and told me to hand over the camera. Timid as I am, and not wanting much further trouble, I handed it over. There were witnesses.

“What’s your name?”

“Nayager”, he said, pointing to his badge.

Superintendent Glen Nayager, it turns out...

...
read on

Google Site Search Bookmarklet

finally got tired of having Firefox's google toolbar just sitting there doing nothing... so i dumped it, and scratched up this bookmarklet for the only thing i really do use the toolbar for anyways - quick searching a site with google

javascript:void(site1=document.location.host); void(srchstr=prompt('enter Search String :','',' Google Site Search'));{if(srchstr!=null) {location='http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A' +site1+ ' + '+srchstr}};

to use this bookmarklet on firefox :
- just right click the bookmark toolbar and select 'New Bookmark...'.
- then, in the dialog that appears, enter something like 'Google Site Search' for the Name and copy the short piece of script above into the Location field.

Now from any site, clicking the Google Site Search button wll prompt you for a Search String and find it on that site using google.