I found a book a few days ago in a bookstore from Martin Nowak about evolutionary dynamics. It is one of the best books I have browsed through. I bought it in amazon.com 10 minutes later. I’ll do a review here when I read it. It’s called: Evolutionary dynamics: Exploring the equations of life. This is a must for anyone interested in alife. The math is really accessible but the subjects are really interesting and relevant.
I just finished the last level of Halo 3 and I wasn’t disapointed. I know it’s more than a month after the release but I had a thing to do called “midterms”. It was the best ending ever. It’s like the ending in Halo 1 but better. It was really well done.
For people that don’t play Halo or want to see the last level and the ending again, here’s a good quality video of it on youtube:
What do the WikiScanner tool, the website Romanpoet.org (that I wrote about in this post) and Chris Adami have in common? Virgil Griffith! The is suposedly the best known hacker in the US. He wrote WikiScanner, his online name is romanpoet (hence the website name) and he is now at caltech working with Chris Adami, the author of the avida software. It’s weird how these three things I’ve been following are connected.
Here is his website:
And here is a “Colbert report” about him:
Dr. Gaurav Khanna made a supercomputer with 8 Playstation 3s . Here is his site:
http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/ps3.html
He didn’t use the main processor for this, he used the graphics card! This and other projects point to the trend that consumer electronics are gaining performance faster than any other computing devices.
Here’s a good link on scientific computing in the playstation 2:
http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/
This can also be a good choice since the Playstation 2 costs around $100 US compared to the Playstation 3 that costs $500 US. This could really be a nice project to try out. Not that I need to run anything fast (Avida maybe?), but just to learn about computers and to be able to say: I have a supercomputer.
A few days ago I found this really interesting book by Russell Standish called theory of nothing. The book talks about achieving a theory of everything but as he explains it’s a theory that can’t explain much. He is not refering to a theory of the vacumm or zero-point energy. He also talks about complexity and stuff related to artificial life. There is some math in the book but most of it is straight-forward and he also has an appendix explaining it. He does a good job in explaining hard subjects. He even goes into the definition of the derivative and the integral in case the people that read this blog don’t know what they are 
. You can get it either in amazon.com or as a free pdf file. Russell Standish is a computer scientist doing experiments on Tierra and on his own model EcoLab in parallel computers. There is also a free pdf file of the Complex Systems ‘98 conference organized by him.
It depends on what on what you mean by “ecofriendliness”. In my thermal energy conversion class the professor came to the conclusion that since a gas turbine is less efficient than a piston engine a car is more efficient and “ecofriendlier”. But what about the friction, the CO2 produced and all those other factors? There are various metrics for measuring ”ecofriendliness” but I think this is the most apropiate: equivalent warming potential (in CO2e)/[# of people transported * distance (in miles)] . I didn’t include speed so guess which one produces less global warming potential? The official global warming potential is explained here. A simpler but adequate explanation without integrals is here.
Here are the calculations:
Average number of people per car (in the US): 1.3 people
From: http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_404.html
Warming potential of average US car per mile: 1.192 CO2e lbs/mile
From: http://www.google.org/recharge/dashboard/calculator
“Ecofriendliness” of car: 1.192/1.3 = 0.917 CO2e lbs/mile
Warming potential of Boeing 747 per passenger in a 5177 km trip with 100% occupancy: 1815 CO2e kg
From: http://www.chooseclimate.org/flying/mf.html
“Ecofriendliness” of airplane: (1815/5177)*(0.62137)*(2.20462) = 0.480 CO2e lbs/mile
So airplanes carry more people faster and produce less greenhouse gases (based on the data).
The guys at Cornell Computational Synthesis Lab have a started a wiki about building modular robots.
The site is at: http://www.molecubes.org/
If they look familiar, and older version of the robots were used for their experiments on robotic self-replication.
They also have new interesting papers in the site like: Curius and Creative Machines and Printing Food.
I always hear people interchanging the terms and confusing them so here’s a definition of each: a scifi story happens in the future and it’s remotely possible and fantasy is a thing happening in the past or in a “parallel” time and it didn’t or will not happen. But there’s an issue there: if in the fantasy story they mention a time in the past it’s 100% fantasy but if they don’t mention the date it might be some time in the future. So in theory scifi and fantasy are the same if the date is not mentioned in the story. Since we constantly have more and more control of nature; what’s going to stop some people in the future from making dragons and castles and stuff like that? Or maybe more likely they can just have some kind of huge computer like in The Matrix where they can live in The Lord of the Rings world for example. Here or course I’m assuming that if you can’t distinguish it from reality then it’s also a reality (physics-wise). All fantasy stories told today could be used. But who wants to do that? Who wants to settle with dragons and medieval buildings when they are going to have technology “Indistinguishable from Magic” as Robert Forward’s book is titled? Oh wait … those 8 million War of Warcraft users … So yeah: all fantasy is science fiction.
One of the most compelling arguments supposting intelligent design these days is the so called SETI analogy. It basically says that if SETI is considered a science then ID can also be a science. That’s not a bad argument and for some time I didn’t have a good argument against it. Then I thought what if they are correct? Then they have to accept that anything they say is designed could also have been designed by extraterrestrials! And chances are they were evolved, not made by other aliens. After that we can use Ocam’s Razor and just say that we evolved since it’s less likely that the aliens lived long enough to be able (and wanted to) create us. So that’s why the SETI analogy is groundless.
Here is a website that supports and expands on my argument:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/pennock_design.html
Now this is a good ID argument (by a computer scientist?):
http://www.mit.edu/%7Ehooman/ComputersAndGod.ppt
from this website:
This is probably the most up to date and simplest (no graphical user interface and not a lot of data gathering tools) version of Tierra on the internet. Here is the link:
http://koti.mbnet.fi/korsu/tierra.html
Here are some other hard to find versions and implementation information on Tierra:
