After doing my exams I’m going on vacation (where I plan not to touch any electronic devices) and I’ll be back Jan 12. I hope the latest postings and the two new blogs keep the regular readers of this blog occupied until I came back.
The laboratory of intelligent sytems in EPFL (run by one of the founders of evolutionary robotics Prof. Dario Floreano) has very good multipurpose c++ libraries for artificial life; they are in the Software link under Resources.
There are also more general science libraries from GNU.
Here is a good unfinished primer on molecular biology (it’s still being written):
Here is an interesting New Scientist article about a computer simulation of dust in interstellar plasma that groups itself into DNA-like structures (coincidence?) and has a lot of features similar to living systems. This is the first example I have seen of people writing a computer program that is not biologically inspired and getting something like an alife program. And I’m sure this might happen again as physics simulations become more realistic, then we can really start generalizing about life-like processes. Here is the paper the article was based on:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1367-2630/9/8/263/njp7_8_263.pdf
Here is a good article from New Scientist about black holes and the paradoxes that their existence causes when you take into account information. It’s an article with some conceptual information for a change; New Scientist has been getting more sensationalistic over the years with titles like: “The quantum secret of water” and just crackpot things like the Relativity drive; a microwave version of ”reactionless propulsion” (this might be possible but not in the way the article describes it) . Some comments from the editor about the last article are here. I remember reading popular mechanics and popular science when I was younger and learning something instead of reading 100 advertisements.
I just found a good paper from the Entropy Journal called: Self-Organization of Template-Replicating Polymers and the Spontaneous Rise of Genetic Information. When I read it I was surprised how original it is and how simple open-ended systems might be. It also makes you think that a sytem that displays open-ended evolution might not be possible in a computer but in a mechanical system. Maybe there is something about electromagnetic fields and fluid flow that can’t be recreated in a computer. Probably not and it’s more a question of when but it’s a possibility. It is obiously possible using chemistry because it happened already so I won’t be surprised when Mark Bedau does it.
This is one of the most original ideas I have seen in a while. It’s also an example of a usefull analog computer used after the 1950s. Below are parts 1 and 2 of the video in the website showing most of the information about the device (there are no papers or plans there) . The website is here.
After a lot of searching online I finally found a way to type a long command (or a series of them) on linux without actually typing it; you just type what you want to do like compile <program name> . What you do is this:
alias <theCommandNameYouWant>=”<TheCommand>”
If you want to add more commands to run at once use a ; sign in between the commands after the equal sign. More information is given in: How to use the alias command.
CAUTION: don’t overuse the alias command because you might forget the real commands and try not to use relative addressing unless you have copies of different folders and the stuff in the folders is similar (in that case it is more convenient to go into the folder you want to compile for example and then run the aliased command there).
UPDATE: I tried doing what I said in the article and it worked as long as I don’t shutdown my computer. For some reason it doesn’t remember the alias. What you have to do is get to the .bashrc file in your user folder and type it there. In Red Hat Linux the file is in the user folder but it’s hidden so you have to “unhide it” before being able to see it. If anyone has any information about why linux doesn’t remember the alias or where to find the .bashrc file in other linux versions please write it down in the comments.
After doing a thermodynamics lab where we had to measure the area of a graph I thought we where going to have to scan the graph and use some fancy program to find the area. And yes there are programs for this. You can even use MATLAB (check this journal intro). But what we used to do this is called a planimeter. It’s two or one articulated arms that by moving the end of it around the shape you can get the area. A good explanation of how it works is in this website: http://whistleralley.com/math.htm. It also has some other “cool” math explanations. If they were to use the kinds of examples in that website in school more kids might find math usefull. But instead (this is just my opinion) they don’t get interested and they miss the basiscs and they just memorize equations and math becomes a chore; a hard subject.
As I was arguing today with someone, the average value of a random walk is not 0. And he wanted me to prove it. Well here is the true value of the average: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk. The gambler’s ruin problem (in the article) is a good example of random walk phenomena in real life (except for brownian motion). Here is a proof that the distance from 0 actually increases as time goes by: http://www.krellinst.org/UCES/archive/modules/monte/node4.html. If you go up the previous website you find this excellent website on Monte-Carlo methods:
http://www.krellinst.org/UCES/archive/modules/monte/node0.html
