Block thing walking
Posted 24 Jul, 2006 at 18:14 by matt in /Science | Permanent link
Via Good Math, Bad Math: want a screen-saver that leans how to walk? My fellow OS X users should check out breveCreatures, developed in an A-Life simulation package called breve.
It's an evolutionary simulation: twenty-five critters made out of between two and many blocks (I've never seen one with more than eleven parts) are dropped onto a featureless plane, and each one in turn tries to walk (or, well, perambulate). Success is defined as maximum distance from the starting point; the more successful critters breed to populate the next generation, the less succcessful die out. Pretty standard genetic-algorithms type stuff.
The soon-to-be-released game Spore that Blue wrote about a while ago plays around with evolutionary ideas, but (from what I've read) does so in a particularly unscientific way. It's got player-designed organisms and a "march of progress" from simple aquatic creatures to planetary civilizations; those are great for a strategy game, but pretty much entirely against the spirit of the modern understanding of evolution. breveCreatures functions nicely as a demonstration of those same principles.
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Nice Bed
Posted 03 Jul, 2006 at 22:48 by kael in /Science | Permanent link
I try not to talk about $WORK[0] on here anymore, and this sort of qualifies, but in an interesting way.
And I love the 2001 reference.
[x-posted to my LJ.]
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Things which are awesome, part 1
Posted 06 Apr, 2006 at 19:13 by matt in /Science | Permanent link
The fishapod.
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I know what my next monitor will be
Posted 27 Feb, 2006 at 12:20 by brent in /Science | Permanent link
This is so cool, I almost went outside and simulated one using yellow dots in snow. 3D in air image generation
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Octopus Attack
Posted 29 Jan, 2006 at 12:08 by brent in /Science | Permanent link
CBC has the article describing what happened. Here's the video it was referring to.
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Evolution Oppressed
Posted 17 Nov, 2005 at 09:23 by brent in /Science | Permanent link
An amusing little short on the oppression of evolution. BTW: There's an exhibit in New York on Darwin's life and the theory of evolution. Getting an itch to go...
http://movies.lionhead.com/movie/1168Comments (1 comment so far)
Face Recognition
Posted 31 Oct, 2005 at 13:52 by blue in /Science | Permanent link
I came across an interesting little test (about 15 minutes to do it... including 10 minutes of breaks) that demonstrates how well you remember faces and talks about the effects of sleep loss and aging on this type of memory.
How did you score? I found it exceptionally easy and assume everyone else will to, but I'm curious if anyone finds it hard?
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Space Elevator?
Posted 27 Sep, 2005 at 06:10 by blue in /Science | Permanent link
Apparently someone missed Tenti's Applied Math course. I may have failed miserably, but I do remember the discussion over why a space elevator is not currently possible. DIdn't stop these guys from trying though.
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Life at Low Reynolds number
Posted 26 Jun, 2005 at 10:06 by wendy in /Science | Permanent link
Here'a a lovely transcript of a talk given back in 1976 about how the world works if the medium you're moving through is more like molasses than air or water. Life at low Reynolds number
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Monkeys & Money
Posted 06 Jun, 2005 at 14:29 by wendy in /Science | Permanent link
A couple of economics researchers are busy teaching Capuchin monkeys about money, basically giving them silver coins which they can trade in for food. It seems they also, accidentally, set up the first ever incident of one monkey paying another monkey for sex...
Go check it out, just the fact that monkeys can be taught to deal with money is interesting, but they definitely seem to have grasped the concept: article
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Deep ancestry
Posted 16 Apr, 2005 at 14:44 by matt in /Science | Permanent link
The National Geographic Society is sponsoring what they call the genographic project: a broad study to confirm or disprove the out of
Africa
hypothesis of human development. That's pretty cool; what's even cooler is that you can participate by sending in a buccal DNA sample and have your deep ancestry
traced.
I know that at least some of the folks hereabouts are interested in genealogy, so I'm wondering what the general reaction to this is. It costs 100USD; will you do it? Would you do it if it was cheaper?
One thing which kind of puzzles me about it: they do one of two tests on the genetic material, one for men (Y-chromasome) and one for women (mitochondrial DNA). I understand why the first is infeasible for women, but is there a reason that one can't study the mitochondrial DNA of a man? Or maybe it's possible, and they're trying to keep the workload reasonable by only doing one analysis per sample?
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Will it work?
Posted 30 Mar, 2005 at 12:50 by wendy in /Science | Permanent link
So I've spent the past several months trying to get an MR pulse sequence working. I understand the theory behind it, and at this point I think I'm even beginning to understand why things aren't working quite as well as they, in theory, should. I've just received a sequence in the mail from another group who has got it working. At least it works on their scanner. I'm going to test it in about an hour...then I'll know if I've just been wasting my time for these past several months, or if we have some hardware problems that are causing things not to work. I'm holding my breath...and trying to figure out which I'd prefer. Of course it would be great if their sequence works...then I can move ahead with my project and put these frustrations behind me. On the other hand, if it doesn't work...I'll feel a little better about myself...maybe.
Someone remind me why I want a degree again?
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Backup DNA
Posted 23 Mar, 2005 at 10:54 by wendy in /Science | Permanent link
I found this on BoingBoing this morning, scientists have discovered that some plants appear to have "backup DNA", the mutated part of the DNA they received from their parents had been overwritten by DNA from their grandparents, apparently stored somewhere as RNA. Link