Mr. & Mrs. Otton.
Wow.
These entries are about my life, more-or-less. That’s why they’re so cryptic.
Romeo & Juliet, Wordle Cloud
Apropos nothing, Wordle tagcloud for Romeo & Juliet. Click to view.
This reminds me I really need to play with Processing at some point. Too many tools, not enough time.
Still, right now I’m more concerned with getting my head round Erlang, and the new closure mechanism that’s coming in PHP 5.3 (I really, really wish they’d stop trying to shoehorn the kitchen sink in there).
George, British Giant Rabbit
This is George, the smaller (and more photogenic) of our two house rabbits. No, he hasn’t been photoshopped, although he is a bit foreshortened. That’s a normal-sized broom in the background - I’ve seen him pick up a broom by the handle and throw it to one side rather than walk around it. The two rabbits now weigh a shade under 30lbs, combined.
M&M Glider
I’ve been reshelving books recently, which caused me to pick out and re-read Karl Sigmund’s Games of Life. It’s a great book - unashamedly playful, accessible, pun-dense prose (”Do lynxes let their hare down?”, “Y all those boys?”), which still provides enough detail on a whole raft of biological simulations for you to code up your own versions.
Anyway, a passage at the end of the chapter on John Conway’s Life struck a false note for me this time around. The chapter presents the argument that Life is capable of supporting self-replicating universal Turing Machines, and therefore evolution.
[Aside: It's interesting to note that the "given probability" mentioned below doesn't matter - it could be 0.000001 or 0.999999; all possible patterns will still turn up. Infinity is weird.]
Now let us stretch our imagination somewhat more, and ask about the origin of life in the Life-universe. Conway’s answer is that it is inescapable. Inescapable, at least, under certain rather mild assumptions. If the game board is totally empty, of course, then nothing will ever happen; if, conversely, every cell is occupied then all will be polished off in the next instant; and similarly, there will be countless other initial positions yielding no self-replicating patterns. But these are all special cases. We should not try to tamper too much with Life. The simplest way to distribute matter randomly in the plane would be to have every cell, independently of its neighbours, occupied or not with some given probability. In this case, every conceivable finite pattern will certainly occur somewhere in the infinite plane. (It will even occur infinitely often.) Self-reproducing patterns will therefore also be bound to occur; very sparsely, to be sure, but present nevertheless. In this sense, the world of Life contains life almost as soon as it contains matter.
Many very different configurations will have the property of self-reproduction. They will be submitted to a natural selection of sorts. Some will multiply faster than others. Some will be quickly destroyed by Gliders happening to pass by, or by other patterns crawling across the plane. Some will be more resilient, or simply more lucky. Some will end up suffocated by their own offspring. Some will move too slowly, and some too fast. The proportion of successful patterns is bound to increase. The lifeless environment will change too.
Some automata will evolve rudimentary sense organs to obtain information about their surroundings. Some will develop the faculty to move into the direction which appears the most promising, or to flee from dangers. Some will withdraw into shell-like structures, and some will evolve offensive weapons. There will be species exploiting others, and species set upon cooperation. In due time, multicellular beings are apt to emerge - huge colonies of automata, obeying a common program and begetting other colonies. In order to discover better blueprints, such automata may start to recombine their instructions, using some two-dimensional forms of sexuality. There will be complex types of social interaction, and sooner or later some kind of intelligence too. These patterns will learn to feel and to think.
Only a mathematician could consider an infinite plane a “mild assumption”. This requirement, along with the randomised starting grid, means that simple self-replicators aren’t the only patterns present at t=0 - every possible pattern is already represented. Every possible single-celled organism, multi-cellular organism and intelligent creature that Life can support, and every possible thought and memory that each of those creatures is capable of having - they’re all right there on the plane; infinite copies in infinite combinations. Every future state that a region can evolve into is already out there somewhere else on the plane, so running the simulation at all seems a little pointless.
Additionally, since the system is deterministic, I see no reason why some regions wouldn’t be set up, purely by chance, to “run backwards” (complex creatures de-evolving into single-celled organisms, then into random blocks), make major jumps from one point in the phase space of possible lifeforms to another (equivalent perhaps to a chicken giving birth to a dashchund, which in turn gives birth to a clown fish), or behave in any other way we can imagine. In a system that can and will produce all these outcomes, considering evolution to be noteworthy smacks of observer bias. Yes, it’s probably happening, but so are the dashchunds.
Postscript: Borges’ meditations on infinity.
The rabbit is now 5.5 kilos (~12 pounds), and 83cm (2′8″) when stretched out. That is all.
Slipper, the day we first got her
Madeline just found the baby giant rabbit in the washing machine. Just a head sticking out.
She was evicting the socks; every few seconds another one would go flying.
I guess she’s big enough now that a washing machine looks like a reasonable place to hang out. That’s kinda scary, as she has another six weeks of growing to do. I wish she’d stop eyeing the kitchen bin so speculatively.
Christ Pantocrator, Hagia Sophia
Madeline tracked down a set of torrents for a documentary I regularly obsess over - John Romer’s Byzantium - The Lost Empire (episode 1, episode 2, episode 3, episode 4). Awesome stuff, but terrible copies - the series was only ever published on VHS and I think these AVIs are lifted from tape - the colour gamut is very poor, and those mosaics deserve better. I’d buy a DVD reissue in a heartbeat.
Byzantium gets overlooked in Europe; in school I learnt about “The Romans” - the guys in togas who took over in England about 40AD, built Hadrian’s Wall and some roads, and left at the end of the 4th century.
In some ways that’s a very traditional, “Decline and Fall” view of history, but at the same time I was taught in a British state school in the 80s, so social history was all - I learnt how Roman roads were made and how a legion was organised, but couldn’t name a contemporary Roman emperor if my life depended on it. Diocletian’s Tetrarchy, The Eastern Roman Empire, The Eastern Orthodox Church, and Constantinople as a seat of art and learning went completely unmentioned. When I first realised that the Roman Empire existed right up until the middle of the 15th century, almost contemporary with the Wars of the Roses, I was stunned.
Then a couple of days ago, in a classic case of serendipity (or maybe observer bias), 12 Byzantine Rulers cropped up on MeFi. I guess you could call it a podcast, but it’s really a set of lectures centred around twelve of the most important Byzantine rulers, and the quality matches the best of The Teaching Company’s output. I’m burning them out to disc and listening to an episode whenever I have half an hour completely free to concentrate.
Finally, a couple of links on the art of Byzantium: Byzantine Coinage, the Deesis Mosaic at Hagia Sophia (flickr).
(By the way, I know it looks like I’ve been lazy because so many of these links go straight to Wikipedia, but it seems that the best overviews of historical subjects tend to be found there.)
I never really thought about where these came from. If pressed, I probably would have guessed that they’re artificial, or some kind of scaffolding for a microscopic sea creature like a sponge:
I’ve got to try that next year.
The car blew up on me today while driving up the M27 to work. Most likely it’s the head gasket, and hence a write-off. Clouds of white smoke as the radiator emptied itself into the engine.
It’s not even like I was speeding.
So… the search is on for something new, probably a generic, boring Japanese saloon car.
On the up-side, I’ve been playing with a Bluetooth GPS unit that a client passed to us. It’s pretty neat - their software runs on a Symbian phone, pairs with the GPS unit and alerts you to upcoming blackspots, speed cameras, etc. It does the job it’s designed for very well within the limitations of its environment (you can’t hear a Nokia phone over road noise without amplification), but the software shows some rough edges - it’s obviously been designed by a programmer rather than an interface designer, and the commercial constraints show through (800k install, it appears to pull the entire UK database from the server, instead of just the database for the local area).
Technically it’s about as good as you could hope for, but I still think dedicated hardware would produce a better experience (larger screen, map data) for less money in the long run (the mobile software has a subscription model).
But still, mobile + GPS… hope nobody asks for the hardware back :) I’m on the lookout now for something that will tag a pic with lat/long as I take it, upload to a URL, and bundle the uploaded photos as a KML file.