Brent's Two Cents

Artificial Life

This morning I downloaded a piece of software called breve which is a development environment for writing and running simulations, and which is (apparently) pretty good for running 'artificial life' simulations. This stuff is pretty cool.

Right now I've been running a simulation called "Walker" on my computer since this morning some time. It's running a genetic algorithm that tries to evolve a set of parameters for the legs of the creature pictured above so that the creature can walk. What it does is start with four randomly chosen sets of parameters -- the genome of the walker -- and then use these parameters to try and walk the creature across a flat surface. The two that make it the farthest survive to the next generation, and the bottom two are replaced by a combination of the winning two plus some random 'mutation'. After watching this thing on and off all day, I'll be damned if this thing isn't working out how to walk.

It started off looking pretty pathetic. It would just lay there and flail it's legs around looking like an injured, flipped-over turtle or something, making some modest progress across land. But now -- after a half day of evolving -- these things are getting much better. They still look like injured turtles, but no longer flipped-over. And they look like they're less injured, non-flipped-over turtles with a purpose. That purpose, of course, is moving across this artificial surface as fast as they can.

One interesting thing about this is how transfixing it is to watch. This reminds me of a drinking party I went to some years ago at a friends house. He had just got an aquarium, and we sat around all evening drinking beer and watching the fish. The fish were interesting to watch because they were alive and therefore acting predictably, but with some randomness. When I watch these little virtual creatures crawing across the surface I wonder what makes them so transfixing. Part of it is that they look injured, and you feel sorry for them. You almost want to help them to get wherever they are going. I suspect, though, that the real reason that they attract our attention is because injured things are easy to catch and eat.

Mounting Anger

I recently made an attempt to de-spamify my life by switching my email addresses. Then, when buying some concert tickets I accidentally forgot to "uncheck" the 'contact me with spam' box. Now I'm on Clear Channel's spam list.

When I got the first spam from them, I tried to unsubscribe from their mailing list using the link provided for this purpose. That didn't work -- the link was broken or something. I tried again the next time and was forwarded to the a page at 3592.com where I clicked a 'remove' button and was assured that my address has been removed. (I usually heed warnings not to do this, but I figure that Clear Channel is a legitimate business and wouldn't behave like a rank spammer).

Well, I got another spam from them today. I replied to it with a note saying that I didn't want any more mail from them, and that I plan to boycott Clear Channel until they correct the problem.

You'll Go Blind!

You have to love the web.

Anyone who knows me more than very casually knows that I'm something of a skeptic, and that ever since reading the Demon-Haunted World I've been devouring skeptical literature. Over the past few years I've developed a love for the non-intuitive: which I define as any true claim that makes you sit up and say "No way!" Very often, these claims are old wives-tales, or things that make some sort of sense so we accept them uncritically. Until today, my most recent favourite was the fact that reading in dim light doesn't cause eyestrain. At present, I have pretty good vision, and for whatever reason seem to prefer reading in a little bit dimmer light than most people. I can't count how many times I've been told I'll go blind from reading in not enough light. Whenever I'm reading over at Stella's parents' place, one or the other of them is guaranteed to turn up the brightness of the light I am using. (To be fair, your eyesight does get worse as you get older, so the light may very well be insufficient for them, but I can see just fine.)

Which brings me to why I love the web. This morning, a trivial discussion with Stella on the reason that the sky is blue* led me to a discussion of the Green Flash, an interesting set of phenomenon that can sometimes be observed at sunrise and sunset. While reading the pages describing how to see and photograph the Green Flash, I felt slightly uncomfortable. It seemed weird that on this page there was no huge warning disclaimer of the sort that we are so accustomed to seeing in our society, admonishing the reader to not look directly at the sun.

Well, it was there, but not at all what I expected. On a page that began with a discussion of Galileo's blindness (which was not caused by looking at the Sun), the author makes the startling claim that casually looking at the Sun won't make you blind. He doesn't just make the claim, he discusses various types of eye damage in detail and summarizes with:

Is it possible to injure your eyes by looking at the Sun? The answer is "Yes, but you have to work at it under normal circumstances."
Can you become totally blind from looking at the sun with the naked eye? The answer according to Mulder, and from the cases of solar retinitis in the literature, is "No".

There's even a story about a researcher who asked some folks who were going to have an eye removed for medical reasons to stare at the sun with their doomed eye for a few minutes and report the effect on their vision, which were not extreme.

This resolves a mystery that has plagued me for decades: "Why am I not blind?" I vividly recall sitting on a swing at the park near my house one day when I was in elementary school and staring directly at the late afternoon sun for at least a couple of minutes. It never really felt uncomfortable and I suffered no permanent damange — I just saw spots for a while afterward. At the time I thought that maybe I was Superman or something, but I guess I'm just normal.

* And by the way, the sky isn't blue. In Vancouver it's usually grey. At night it's black. At sunrise/sunset it can be orange or pink. The question should be amended to "Why is the blue sky blue?"

Dreams Answered

I had a very pleasant software experience today. Someone wrote some software than I had been mentally designing myself because I thought it would be nice to have. I do that a lot -- designing useful software in my head and then not writing it. What's better, is that they added a lot of features that I didn't have the inclination to include in my plans, and still better, they sell the thing for only twenty bucks.

It's called Hog Bay Notebook, and it's essentially a souped up version of TextEdit with the following features:

• A notebook consists of a number of pages. These can be arranged hierarchically if you like
• Each page is an RTF document. Really. You can open up the notebook document (it's really a 'package' folder) and browse around in there and find your data. This is cool in case you wind up with a Notebook document and no notebook app.
• As an RTF document, you get full text styles, colours, embedded graphics and media, etc.
• It provides a full text search. This is killer, and the main reason I think it rocks.

I probably shouldn't be so excited by this, but I really am. I'm mainly excited that I can get rid of all the RTF files that are cluttering my home folder, and just copy them into these searchable notebooks.

Check it out!

Reselling iTunes

The past few days there has been a little buzz here and there about the guy who tried to auction a song he bought for $0.99 from the iTunes music store. The price got up to some ridiculous value before eBay deep-sixed the auction. Today, there is this BusinessWeek article carrying a comment on the matter from Apple. In a nutshell, the Apple spokesman said "it might be legal, but it's probably technically not feasible".

I have a couple of things to say about this. The first is that I really like how Apple spokespeople so rarely sound like mindless corporate business robots. They understand that consumers don't take well to billion dollar companies whining like babies. I'd go so far as to say that it almost seems as though Apple likes their customers, and at times takes steps to protect their customers' interests, not just their own.

But the real thing that I want to say here is that the position that Apple took on this issue is short-sighted. Sure, it might be a little tough for me to sell you a song I bought at the iTunes store, but not if Apple got involved. They could charge a small license transfer fee and revamp their DRM to allow a license to be revoked (although wouldn't a lot of people get up in arms about that. I think it makes good sense. Not necessarily one song at a time, but if I have several albums worth of tunes to sell, I'm sure I could find a buyer at 50 cents per track. Why shouldn't I be allowed to sell it?

Update: Read the end of the story here. Great quote from the guy: "If digital distribution is the future of music it needs to start acting like it."