I am … unhindered by talent

PeeZed has a cool column in the latest issue of Seed that describes some recent experiments that nicely illustrate how development can both expose and mask genetic variation, thereby allowing or preventing selection from acting on that variation. Very cool stuff, and nicely written.

It seems that this might be good material to share with the evolutionary computation (EC) crowd. Since there’s rarely any sort of interesting developmental process in EC work, there would be no way for development to expose or mask genetic variation like this. There are some examples in EC that could be seen as examples of this, but not many, and I’ve never really heard someone discuss it in these terms.

One issue the piece raised for me is the need to have some mechanism to create and maintain genetic diversity in these loci that aren’t under heavy selective pressure. In EC systems (which usually feature haploid genomes, strong selection pressures - engineers want answers! - and panmictic mating), most genetic material tends to fix across the population quite quickly, even if it’s not being selected for. Consequently there’s typically no variation left after even a few generations. This suggests (to me) that if we want these kinds of interesting behaviors in our EC work (and I realize that may be debatable - it depends a lot on what your goals are), then we’re going to have to move past the the simple models that have historically dominated the field.

The image above is from a paper that Andy Korth and Tyler Hutchison (both UMM ‘07) and I just finished yesterday looking at the impact of local mating (which is rarely used in EC) and some sort of “geography” where the fitness function varies across the space the individuals populate. The paper’s pretty rough in places (we ended up being really rushed for various reasons), but the results are nice. The short version is that local mating can definitely help maintain diversity across a population, especially when fitness varies according to one’s location. The image shows different sub-populations forming and persisting as the initial pool of individuals (which started as a little group in the center) spreads out to fill the space. Not earth shattering, but it’s nice to have some quantitative results to support my intuitions on the subject, and it opens up several doors to further work that could be more significant.

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Misty, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

Sub-Evil Boy and I went over to Joe Alia’s house Sunday to practice as part of preparations for the big concert Sub-Evil and I will be hosting in 3.5 weeks. I brought my camera along and took a few shots of the two of them playing. I’ll probably post several over the week on flickr as I sort through them, but this is definitely one of my favorites.

Joe has worked up a chart of "Misty" for the two of them (Joe on sax, Sub-Evil on battered cornet), and here they’re working on playing it together for the first time. This is a special song in my family, and especially between my dad and sister. Its popularity in the 60’s led to my parents calling my sister Misty (even though her "official" name is Mary), and the song has become part of the powerful jazz bond between my father and sister. Given that the concert is (for me) largely about family and friends (and to raise a little money for cancer charities) to have Sub-Evil play this song is really wonderful. Joe gets huge props for working with us on this; having Tom play with him is essentially private lessons with an excellent musician, and I’m extremely grateful.

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It is truly remarkable how little we know about the deep oceans, and having the ability to constantly monitor and report, even if in only a few areas, would be an enormous step forward!

The piece below also talks about a permanently tethered ocean floor rover, but the possibility exists for a more flexible detached rover (or swimming robot) that could go out and collect data, returning “home” to recharge its batteries and download it’s data. Now that would be a cool project!

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk

This week, a team from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) will lay 52km (32 miles) of electrical cable from a research station on shore to a shelf 900m (3,000ft) below the sea’s surface.

Much of the deep ocean is opaque to our senses; radio waves quickly attenuate. For this reason, we know more about the far side of the Moon than we do about much of the deep sea.

“We’re taking the enormous communications and power infrastructure we have on land and extending it to the deep ocean,” said Dr Jim Bellingham, director of engineering at MBARI.

 

And, obviously, I’m trying out clipmarks for the first time. I like the idea of it at some level - it certainly has the potential to make it much easier to blog random tidbits one runs across. Unfortunately it also encourages a certain kind of mindless copying of people’s work without any particular reflection or additional analysis.

Also, the damn thing won’t post to my blog automagically. I had to use the embed feature to get this, which wasn’t exactly wonderful. Not sure how much I’ll use this, if at all, but it was fun to try once. We’ll see…

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Why I have no pens, originally uploaded by Richard-.

After we lost both our cats last year, we then fostered a couple of cats in the fall, conveniently adopting out the second just before we left for Arkansas for christmas so we didn’t need anyone to look after any pets while we were away.

We are now happy to be fostering Paco, an incredibly fiesty little black cat that looks remarkably like the devilish fellow in this excellent shot (which is totally not my doing). Paco loves to scatter our bits and pieces (pens definitely included), not to mention climb every vertical feature with any sort of purchase (curtains, bookshelves, us). She loves human company, is a total cuddle bug, and is quite fond of wandering around on top of you while you’re sleeping, purring madly, and rubbing her nose in your face.

Hopefully they’ll be able to find a permanent home for her before too long. She’s a sweetie and deserves a good family.

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OK, it took forever, but thanks to the joys of Spring Break I finally found a few moments to clean the shelf with the dead bat bits stuck to it [earlier story][photos of said bat]. A huge thanks to all the people who left their suggestions as to how to sort out the problem both here and on PeeZed’s blog.

Goo Gone was the most common suggestion, so a trip was made to the local hardware store and said cleaner was acquired. And it worked beautifully! I dripped a little on, let it soak for a few minutes as per the instructions, and then wiped it off. It took a little rubbing in places, but it all came off, and without too much effort. There is much rejoicing!

Huge thanks too everyone who was kind enough to share their ideas, and especially to those who coveted the new character that our bookshelf had acquired. I’m sorry to say that the Goo Gone has completely removed that character without any markings on the wood whatsoever.

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I really needed Spring Break!, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

Happily it begins tonight. Now I have to remember to balance the desire to sleep a lot and goof off on Flickr against the need to do grading and course prep and sorting out other things that need attending to.

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It’s definitely a sign of how strange and intertwined the world has become that I:

1. Get an IM from a student (Brian Ohs) pointing me at an article on RichardDawkins.net linking to a 2 hour talk by Ken Miller on what a dangerous crock ID is.
2. Decide while I’m there to check out the front page on Dawkins’ blog.
3. Whereupon I find a banner advertising PeeZed’s 50th birthday!
4. Which takes me to a post complete with a honorary poem penned by Dawkins himself and an audio clip of well wishes.

So I had to go through this bizarre round-a-bout collection of dominoes to discover that the guy down the hall just turned 50. Of course if I’d been keeping up with Paul’s blog, I’d have seen this post where he announced as much, and even requested poems in his honor. Keeping up with the the craziness in the blogsphere is completely beyond me. Bad poetry, on the other hand, is right up my alley :-). To whit:

In person he’s a nice, quiet guy.
Some might even say shy.
But keyboard in hand
he’ll gladly take a stand.
So stand back and watch the fur fly!

It might have been better if there’d been a celebratory celephapod, but there’s just not time for that now - I have a detailed outline from a senior seminar student (Brian, in fact) to go over.

Also, a big happy BD to Kristin Lamberty, who tomorrow turns something slightly more than half of PeeZed’s advanced age!

For both of them, a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday” (as I learned it from WeatherGirl’s family):

Happy birthday to you!
Squashed tomatoes and stew!
Bread and butter in the gutter!
Happy birthday to you!

Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense to me either, but it’s a blast to sing :-).

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It may be 460 miles from Morris to Wall Drug, but it’s only 28 days from here to The Mutant Variety Show!

Yup - Thursday, 5 April 2007 at 7pm, in the HFA Recital Hall right here on the UMM campus.

This will be a crazy evening featuring all manner of music and fun, all for the good cause of supporting cancer-related charities. Roughly half the program will be Sub-Evil Boy and me, doing both originals like “Taco Man”, “Fat fly”, and “Crabgrass”, as well as covers goofy and serious (”Looking for my leopard”, “Strange fruit”, “Personal Jesus”, and “I’m so lonesome I could cry”).

Your reward for sitting through the two of us, though, is all the other wonderful performers that have agreed to join us, again doing a mixture of (brilliant!) originals and (great!) classics. Huck Brock on the many problems with Barbie Dolls! Joey Iverson drifting out through the solar system and beyond! John Hanson’s love song, complete with bats! Brittney Stone and Eagan Heath leading us in a round of jigs! And, of course, the mighty Jazz Stylings of Joe Alia!

Oh, yeah, it’s gonna be fun :-).

There will also be some cool spoken word (Athena Kildegaard’s excellent “Dirt: A poem in four voices”), a possible short film, and various improvisational silliness! There might even be a celebrity appearance!

All this is free and open to the public, with donations gladly accepted to benefit cancer-related charities.

So mark your calendars now: 7pm, Thursday, 5 April 2007, in the HFA Recital Hall! And then get out there and pass the word!

Props to PeeZed for the most excellent octopus, and thanks to Ellery Fischer for the photo of our performance of “Taco Man”.

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Honey jar, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

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When Sub-Evil Boy was a younger lad, a favorite publisher in our household was Dorling Kindersley. Cool concepts, solid information, and excellent graphics and layout made them a hit with both him and his parents. When your 7 year old starts getting metaphysical on you, for example, it’s awfully nice to be able to pick up a copy of “A young person’s guide to philosophy” to lend a hand :-). He’s outgrown a lot of their children’s line now, but they were a definite win at the time and much appreciated.

Imagine my surprise, nay complete shock, when today I received an e-mail via Flickr from that very same DK asking if they could use one of my photographs in an upcoming book! They’re apparently putting together a book entitled Viking in their Eye Wonder series. This series is aimed at ages 5-8, and aims to combine “exciting facts and bold photography” to take children to “the heart of each subject”.

And, in that heady atmosphere, they want to use the photo below that I took in Reykjavik! Wow, that’s pretty darn cool, and I’m quite chuffed. I realize it’ll be one little picture amongst zillions of images in one book amongst even greater zillions, but still, to play a role in the development of the reading skills of children is a pretty excellent thing. All the evidence says that if you can get them reading, most everything will work out, but if you lose that battle early, you’re in serious trouble. Given that I’m unlikely to start cranking out Horrible Histories anytime soon, this is probably as close as I’ll get in the near future to contributing in any broad way to that worthy cause.

The photo itself continues to surprise me. It’s nice enough, but it seems a really “obvious” photograph to take from the bell tower of Hallgrímskirkja, and it doesn’t seem to be blessed with particularly excellent light or a terribly interesting sky. I keep feeling like someone local ought to be able to catch dozens of shots as good or better sometime when the light’s really cool.

Still, people obviously like it. It’s currently my 16th “most interesting” photo (out of 954 posted to date) according to Flickr’s mysterious algorithms. And DK wants to put it in a book.

Ain’t life strange.

Oh, and I also was asked last week if the sundial photo at left could be used in an entirely different book. This is a picture I really like, and which is one spot lower on my list (17th, which is still really good and makes me happy). The book in this instance is, as far as I can tell, an Italian religious text as part of a program aimed at bringing young people (back) into the church there. Not being a big fan of evangelical behavior of any stripe, I’m less excited about this (hence the lack of an earlier post). Still, one of the realities of a Creative Commons license is that you don’t get to (pretend to) control all the possible uses of your work. And, as Mike pointed out, their use of my photo doesn’t imply any sort of support on my part, anymore than their use of something like Firefox would imply any support on the part of the contributors to that project.

Now I just need to get the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to use one of my photos to balance the scales. Maybe this wonderful fellow? I’ve long thought that I see the mighty FSM in this, and wondered if there was a lucrative retirement to be had in promoting pilgrimages (and charging followers a pretty penny for the appropriate paraphenalia and special FSM rose water). Hmmmm…

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