jeremy_m's Journal

The Reverse Alternative Life Meme
Here's a game you can play at home: keep your actual date of birth but project your life from there backwards instead of forwards, thinking how you'd have been affected by the different background. It's surprising how close history is to your life, at least if you're old.

( here's mine )

Going down to Yasgur's Farm
I feel like I retired again tonight, letting go of the two things that have plagued me for six months like work, but more self-inflictedly - online gaming and academia.

( Read more... )

Eastercon Doings
This year the hotel was more topologically conventional than last year, compact and simply-connected, though with the first and second floors curiously only three feet apart vertically. It was also far too cold (except in the too hot bits), to the extent that I got Cold Illness that could only be cured by putting my jumper back on, though I've now made a full thermal recovery basking on my home rock again.

( Read more... )

Dark the Unsurrendered Night
Rather than learn to write poetry the old-fashioned way, with rhythm and metre and things, I thought I'd just use javascript timing and dynamic web pages. Here is the result, which may only work in Firefox.

Don't have nightmares.

Critical Sexology Seminar on "Non-monogamies"
Just the highlights, and no spoilers for anyone who hasn't tried non-monogamy yet.

( well, just a few )

LJ treeview friends network browsing tool
I fell off the not-programming wagon and produced a web page for browsing networks of LJ friends, which you can play with here (as long as you enable javascript and use Firefox, Internet Explorer doesn't work - hooray!) for the bargain price of suggesting improvements.

( more detail than you want )

Most badly plotted sequel ever?
Here's the blurb from a 1970 film, with some names changed, which follows up the earlier story of an evil super villain who tried to conquer the world but was defeated by a suitable hero overcoming all odds. As he does again in the sequel (oops, spoiler alert).

"Evil Super Villain returns from exile and once again seizes control of his former minions in a bid to reclaim his empire, and the Super Hero leads the opposing allied forces in the fateful battle to come. Drama, starring Rod Steiger, Christopher Plummer, Orson Welles and Virginia McKenna."

( What's the film? )

NewCon 4 Flashing Results
We're just back from an SF Con in Northampton, unwisely held in an open-plan space called the Fishmarket, which has the acoustic properties of a fishmarket, but otherwise mostly good. The highlight was the flash fiction competition (meaning stories shorter than some people's sentences, rather than ones necessarily about flashing), in which

pogodragon won various prizes for her creation of a new crossover genre combining science fiction with jumble sales. She's so clever!

Game design is too important to be left to the politicians
I don't usually post about the fascinating hobby of financial engineering, but last week's astonishing antics have pushed me beyond my ranting elastic limit - Bad People Need Chastising.

( a tale told by an idiot, full of government intervention, signifying a worrying lack of background in mathematical game theory )

Are all car menders suicidally stupid?
When you have a broken motorbike, someone comes around with a truck and takes it away. I sort of assumed it was the same with cars.

( enter the twilight zone )

Er, my childhood got revised, that's odd
I tend to think of the malleable nature of history and pre-history as just something that happens to other people's pasts, but now someone has written a book about my best friend in secondary school, putting me into a parallel universe which Looks Different.

( enter the Twilight Zone )

Current Mood: surprised

Time for a Schism with St. Dawkins?
I've rashly watched the latest television show by Prof Dawkins, despite it being described as "a defence of the theory of evolution by natural selection", and am now considering him a heretic, which is one of the reasons why. (Rewind, reparse and reinterpet, it does make sense in a recursively self-referential way.)

( the case for burning the witch )

World View Overturned Alert! Again!
Unusually, television seems to have overtaken the web in reporting results from the Neanderthal Genome Project, which revolutionise my view of the world, again. See Sex and the Neanderthals if it's still around for download when you read this.

( What did you do in Genesis, Daddy? )

Romance and other relationships - a game theory analysis (Aspie, what me?)
Considering the significance of relationships such as romance and friendship to most people, it's odd they don't make more use of all the conflict analysis paid for by the US government during the Cold War. Admittedly that analysis produced the worrying strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction, but even that relationship pattern works well for some people.

( everything you always wanted to know about love, but lacked the mathematical background to calculate accurately )

Pixie Contraception - throttling Biomass Imperialism at source
The previous post from Pixie World ended with the hope that we may not be doomed to the low efficiency fate of carnivorous pixies because we can control the expansion of our biomass (and hence food/energy gathering needs) with contraception. What happens if we give this solution to the pixies too?

( Look away now if you don't want to know the result )

Where's my super-sonic eagle?
A previous post on the software-emulated biology of Pixie World covered the way plants reduce their own efficiency to avoid being nutritious enough to fuel a herbivore boom and bust cycle that would exterminate them. This might seem a desperate defensive strategy of last resort, but adding carnivorous pixies shows they do the same thing even as top predators, which has worrying implications if you happen to be Earth's current apex predator, the talking ape.

( The evolutionary arms race, hominid extinctions, brain size reduction, language, and other things we've misinterpreted )

Pixie and Super Pixie
Watching other artificial life programs it's easy to suspect Intelligent Design, that the emulated creatures' behaviours are so sophisticated that they must have been written into the code by a Creator. But when you write your own trivial code and complex life-like things emerge from it, it's just spooky.

( the spooky stuff )

In the beginning was the Pixie
Biologists writing computer simulations of evolutionary worlds are notoriously surprised to find complex processes and behaviours appearing before they've been implemented. I knew this, and I'm quite clever, so after one day writing two pages of simple code I was doubly surprised to find myself surprised by my pixel pixies taking on lives of their own. But at least it means I can rest on the second day.

( Pixie World, shocking emergent behaviour - with pictures! )

Eastercon Doings
An unusually autobiographical entry, as I'll log highlights of an SF Con here rather than tell people about it one at a time.

( Read more... )

What I did in the holidays
It was a strange time for a holiday, on the border between my old and new lives: my long plans to retire early came to fruition on the Friday afternoon, too late to resign before going away, so seven days to stress about it instead.

( Read more... )

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