who wants to play?

a good opensource first person shooter nexuiz. anyone interested in joining me for a quick online game, can download the game from that site (its also available in the ubuntu repositories) and drop me a line in the comments.

blogmark sa

i've happenned onto yet another interesting and funny (very, very) blog at the south african blogmark, Andreas' blog - scary clever.

here's one of his good ideas i just couldnt help pasting here - in case i cant tempt anyone to jump thru the link - hope he doesnt mind.

Okay, university fees, right? Here's my idea: We make a student’s university tuition fee equal to like double whatever his or her school fees were. Awesome, huh? Check, it’s like if you went to a really good school where the fees were say 15k...then, uh, your ‘varsity fees would be 30k. Now our varsity fees are only about 7.5k, but if they were 30 grand, we could subsidise, um, 3 other kids who went to shitty township schools that only cost like 500 bucks a year and where they probably got a kak education and now they still have to work part-time and shit just to afford to be at university – I mean, Christ, that puts them at such a disadvantage right away, dudes. How the fuck are they meant to compete with middle-class mother fuckers like us who had all these opportunities...And the best part is that those fucken pricks who went to those ultra-expensive elitist asshole schools like St. Wanker’s College or wherever would have to pay like 200 grand for ‘varsity instead of just the same 7.5k as the poor kids do now. So they’d subsidise like 20 other dudes who really need it and their robber-baron fathers would just have to compensate by buying the little wankers BMWs instead of Porsches to date-rape chicks in. I mean, fuck it, they’d still be rich Ralph-Lauren wearing cunts, but they’d at least have to contribute to a slightly more egalitarian society...I went to a good school...I got no problem paying more for my tertiary education, man...it’s frikkin’ bullshit that some people have to pay like 10 times what their schooling cost and others only have to pay like a tenth...I reckon that’d work, man….fuck those date-raping elitist asshole preppy motherfuckin’ spawn of apartheid robber barons and gold-digging-trophy-whores...

* dissolve into helpless laughter*

Independent World Television

if ever there was a desperately needed initiative!
Check out Naomi Klein's clip

er. sorry DS for the blatant lift.

"if you removed all vertebrates from the Earth (including humans), the ecosystems would continue to work flawlessly.

Remove insects or even just a few of their important groups and life on Earth would collapse."

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.