I am … unhindered by talent

Much chops to Bad Science for pointing out Phun, a simulation environment/game/construction engine thingie that (judging from the videos) is just super fun (ho, ho, ho) to fiddle with. It seems a wonderfully open-ended platform for making stuff, which is of course the great strength of a pad and paper, or a bucket of Legos. This demo video gives a sense of the range of possibilities:

There’s a YouTube group devoted to this thing, and the number and variety of little clips there also speaks well to the Phun’s flexibility. We even have one person building a binary adder, and another a working pinball machine. Very, very cool.

The sad, sniffle, miserable bit is that Phun doesn’t run on Macs at the moment. It supports for Linux and Windows, though, and there are people working on a Mac port, so my fingers are crossed. It just seems like it would be too damn much fun to play with.

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Sometimes you’re just minding your own business, trying to get a little science done, and a little art pops out at you all unexpected.

What?!? You want to know where this comes from? All is revealed beneath the fold…

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It’s pretty cool when you update your repository and see

At revision 400

We just hit that on the genetic programming book that Riccardo and Bill and I are working on; we’re currently averaging close to 10 commits a day here in the final stages. We hope to wrap it up in the next 1.5 weeks and then off to the printers for fun (and no profit in the traditional sense)!

P.S. Anyone want to proof read a few pages? Get in touch and we can work something out.

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Just finished my GECCO reviewing, and I must say that is seriously sucks when people don’t attend to even the most basic of issues. Two things almost guaranteed to majorly annoy a reviewer:

• Weird random floating fragments of text that are obviously the disemboweled remnants of some cut and paste action.
• Only 8 entries in the bibliography on a subject that has been heavily researched for over a decade.

And just guess the average publication date of 8 fine references.

1985.

Yeah, over 20 years ago.

3 entries were books (two of which were over 10 years old), and the only 2 journal articles were from 1938 and 1964 respectively.

Strangely enough, I didn’t encourage acceptance of that paper.

The really depressing thing is that most of our (undergraduate) students at UMM would do better than this.

No, maybe that’s the uplifting thing.

Maybe the really depressing thing is that I see papers with this kind of bibliography fairly often. I’d almost recommend some sort of automatic rejection system for obviously stupid bibliographies, but then people would just start padding their bibliographies with random citations to get past that blockade.

Sigh.

photo credit: markopoulos

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This is what Naples has become through a combination of mismanagement and a complete lack of any sort of recycling system. (Apparently GreenPeace came in and set up a demonstration recycling system in one neighborhood had showed that over 70% of the trash there could be recycled if people would just get it together.)

And I’m going there in a month for EuroGP.

Here’s hoping that the situation gets resolved and/or the weather doesn’t get too warm…

Thanks to Roger Taylor for the very cool poster shot of the situation on the ground. It was interesting that when I search for “real news articles” on news.google.com I got some useful stories, but very few decent images. A search for Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr, however, turned up a bunch of excellent images (including this one).

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It actually took me a second to get it - how annoying that a web comic would actually be subtle enough to challenge a little :-).

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I realize that I’m fashionably late for Darwin Day (12 Feb), but I offer cool-scary dinosaur skeletons and flesh-eating beetles in apology!

We were in London Friday to see the Kildegaards who (a) are friends of ours from Morris, (b) are living in Denmark this year on sabbatical, and (c) were in London for a week. We had a wonderful day, which included time in both the Natural History Museum (NHM - where the photo above was taken) and the V&A.

As part of our time in the NHM, we toured the wonderful Darwin Centre. (See the nifty connection? See? See? :->) This included amazing cool things such as a giant squid in a tank, loads of great big animals (mostly fish) preserved in equally big custom-made glass jars (including a Coelacanth and a whole jar of platypi), and flesh-eating beetles! They have a whole room of incubators of flesh-eating beetles that they use to clean specimens without damaging the skeletal structure. And to top off this festival of biological delights, they have a real-time beetle-cam where you can watch the little critters roaming around over the carcass of the moment (in a grainy, low-res format, to be sure), busily contributing to the scientific process. I suspect, in fact, that they will, in their oblivious fashion, will probably contribute more to science than someone like Huckabee.

I want to thank our tour guide (whose name I, sadly but predictably, have forgotten), as she did a great job. She was full of useful information, and handled our numerous questions gracefully and informatively.

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Chris posted some cool questions on my earlier post about decentralized behavior in social insects:

so what kinds of things do computer scientists do w/this idea? is sort of what evolutionary computing is about? i picked up the evolution of cooperation recently (tit for tat wins prisoner’s dilemma) you must be familiar w/this, yes?”

There’s really three different (but related) ideas in this question:

• Decentralized and emergent behavior
• Evolutionary computation
• Game theory and cooperation

I’ll take them one at a time, with more on the first of the three, at least for now.

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Almost had an alliteration in the title, but then lost it at the end. Sigh.

I’ve finishing dumping all my Dagstuhl photos (uncleaned and unedited) to my event account on Flickr, so those with more time than sense can rush over and gaze upon them all. Over the next week or two I’ll work on cleaning some of my favorites and posting them to my “real” Flickr account, but who knows how long that will take.

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Which of the following was written by (a) me, (b) William Shakespeare, and (c) Charles Darwin?

“I would have sent to Rome that’s worthy death?”

“The naturalist looking at species as he might succeed from a fork low down in the separation of the species of any species in a more or less from their sap this is unimportant for the instincts already possessed by certain plants so that natural selection of mere piles of superimposed strata and watch the sea separating an island even if we believe that pure water can effect little or no offspring.”

“The troubling aspects of a building block semantics in a given tree in the context and false.”

The answer and (much) more is below the fold.

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