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Friday, 10:24 am, 29 April 2005 ApeScriptin' If you are wondering what ApeScript will look like, I have the introduction document currently betaing in the online Simulation manual; http://www.nobleape.com/man/apescript_intro.html Quite a URL! I am still working through practical debugging examples currently and the cleanest method to integrate the variable transfer. I am thinking the best bet is to have the variable input and output functions in the gui control.c code. That would make the interface cleaner. It will be interesting to work through the cases, particularly the multitasking aspect of the Simulation cycle. In Other Noble Ape News... I was working through the Noble Ape site a couple of days ago and I realised that a lot of the interlinks missed certain pages and a lot of the older information could stay old as no-one could reach it through normal use of the site. The answer; [ site map ] A simple sitemap link with the directory and the blurb. I'm not sure if it will help with the general stickiness of the site. But for me, it shows me which code needs a little tweak maintenance. The iON etoy for example needs a GPI Carbon version, from a time when the GPI Carbon version was the only GPI version. Good morning. Tuesday, 08:40 pm, 26 April 2005 I got the mailout out today. The section on the new scripting inspired me to write an introductory document which I hope to have in the Simulation manual and online in the next couple of days. Drafting text early and getting it online has been my hope with a lot of the Noble Ape development. Many of the documents get touched up a month to a year after it goes online. I'm going to get back to it. Good night. Sunday, 05:39 pm, 24 April 2005 Bird Sounds Over Water Together with a storage package of water logged books I left here, I had two CDs. A CD of Australian bird sounds which I stereofied and used in early demonstrations of Escape from Nervana back in 1997. Bird sounds, particularly tropical bird sounds, added a lot to the atmosphere of the initial simulation. I also got use rights back in 1997 adhering to some copyright due to poverty commitment with the original recorder. The brotherhood of small enterprise in Australia. The other CD was Australian surf sounds. I was having trouble sleeping a couple of nights ago and I put on the surf CD. It use to send me to sleep. But the more I listened, the more I heard Australian bird sounds. I subconsciously knew I wasn't there anymore and the bird sounds set my mind wandering back to Australia and also my travels in Sweden and Germany. I was crazy in my early twenties. The more I think about travelling around the world by myself, the more I realise it was something that was needed, but probably something I will never do again. Too much travelling. Too many memories left behind. Fly Away... I picked up a $20 RC plane at the local swap meet. The swap meet seems to be a family reunion. Every time my wife and I head down, we end up meeting family members. I put the plane together yesterday and went out with my father-in-law first thing this morning to fly it. The wind was really gusty and the elements put more control on the plane than I could. Finally the tail broke and the plane ran out of batteries. Both easily fixed upon returning to base. It was great fun. A-Political Is More Political than Party Political I have never felt close to the political system. My ideal system would be like the local council in the UK. The part that actually did things as opposed to the elected officials. Paying police, collecting rubbish, maintaining roads - these things are functions that can be fulfilled without nonsense. Where I live permutes my politics certainly. I was a different kind of jaded in the UK vs Australia. But all systems I have lived with, made me realise that the culture of a place is more important than the political system. In the west, under majority two party systems, there is always an apparent sinusoidal shift between two quite similar views. This delta change every three to eight years is nothing over a lifetime. But the long term culture of a place is fundamentally a-political and comes from the population. No country swings heavily to the right or the left based on a dynamic leader. They change because they want to change but more importantly they stay the same because of a generational agreement. In any case, I don't want to end on politics. Older Dogs Are Okay! I find myself reading or watching television with Charlie on occasion. He has become a comfortable companion remarkably quickly. It strikes me as really strange that there is no coherent appreciation of animal cognition and that there is some distinction between human cognition and animal cognition base on anything more than brain size. Charlie behaves for all intents and purposes like a quiet elderly gentleman. He has some lingering dog traits but it is very easy to anthropomorphise his grunts and facial expressions. Having not had a fulltime pet for about a decade, I'm impressed by how well Charlie and I get along. He's no destructive puppy. Mailout Brief I am just working through the tail end of this month's mailout. Shorter this month. Good afternoon. Saturday, 09:50 pm, 16 April 2005 Without the Board We went in to a Rite-Aid store today. I'm not much of a consumer. It concerns me sometimes that my consumption relates to very specific items but if I am not in the market for anything I wouldn't shop. Following my wife heading through the isles I was looking at her items whilst queuing and I saw the magazine rack. I had to purchase a magazine. US magazines are a difficult purchase item. Scanning through the rack I found a Skateboarder magazine. I was a huge fan of Dogtown and the Z-Boys and I like the aesthetic. My familiarity of Skateboarder came through that film and reading friends skating mags in the late 1980s. Thinking about this time seems to have a Guns'N'Roses soundtrack playing through it. I was impressed that the aesthetic in Skateboarder maintains to this day. Rushkoff once commented that my development was xtreme development - indy skateboarding in code. It is something that has stayed with me. I understand the mentality. Dude! C&W Fakers My wife reviewed the Log recently. Her main comment was that the narrative seemed like the person she met in 2000. A Tom of old narrative. The real Tom had progressed beyond the Log. I remember when I used to read the Source in the mid-1990s there was often pseudo intellectual analysis of middle-class white teens who would buy rap music. Current stats show about seventy plus percent of rap music purchased is from this demographic. Staying in this part of the world, I am struck by the number of C&W stations in the area. In fact the popularity of this music - as a reaction to rap - seems to break all geographic sense. As we were driving today, a station caller from southern California had a southern accent even though she was from southern California. Clearly the caller was a C&W faker. The equal of middle-class white kids to rap music. What name could exist for C&W fakers. Fountry? Cakers? Good night. Thursday, 08:25 am, 14 April 2005 Science vs Religion in the US Through the project formerly known as DarwinAtHome's mailing list a debate sprang up about the temperature of the word Darwin. Interestingly enough, many folks jumped in boots and all talking about how the religious right (in the US?) deserved to be taken down and DarwinAtHome should take a stand on this issue. Here's a spell-checked version of my response. (... indoct-o-rination - what was I thinking!) ...my own view is that education is the answer and rather than setting up encampments. The issue with the science vs religion debate is that they are actually incompatible quantities. Science in no way replaces religion and religion in no way replaces science. If you see that this is the issue, and you use this as an explanation with folks that may view them as being opposing philosophies of the same 'space', you get far further than opposing a view without exploring the root cause. Many in the US have a very clear view of what religion means to them. Many of these people don't understand what science is. In part through bad religious practices and indoctrination, but also because the debate hasn't been expanded past encampments. Read Scientific American vs New Scientist, see the contrast in reporting in these two popular science magazines. The Science vs Religion debate in the US is fuelled by a poor public perception of what science is. The science media in the US causes some of that too. I've met a lot a folks through my travels in the US. Many whom I have grown to respect to find out they had discounted science not because they were stupid, but because their science education had been lacking and the first to get to them, who similarly didn't understand what science was, had past on views which failed to understand the problem. So my view is rather than setting up encampments you should educate through integration. I'd like to see anyone use Noble Ape, if it gets them thinking about ANat issues, so much the better. I don't want to exclude any group. And for a little dessert, some more Fred Reed. You have to admire a cat lover.  Good morning. Wednesday, 08:10 pm, 13 April 2005 Text Interpreting I had a thought in bed last night. If the Simulation accepts text, it should interpret text. The current method has; Parser Interpreter This distinction allows the smallest memory footprint however as the Simulation contains both halves, the simplifications seem redundant. My new method is; This will give the execution of more code but use less memory and less code if it is done right. The issue is the implementation. Always fun. Darwin Has Left the Building After about six weeks of the DarwinAtHome mailing list and associated development, the decision has been made to change the project name to BiotaAtHome in part to allow the original DarwinAtHome name to be used by the fellow who coined the term for his own project. I fixed up a new page on the Biota.org site together with a draft of the white paper. I don't know what will be done about the existing mailing list. Bruce Damer is in a virtual Mars experiment until the last week of the month. Whenever I think of NASA in a US context, I think of my first meeting with Wozniak. Some how NASA came up, and Wozniak said, 'The only good thing NASA has done is inspire a series of theme park rides!' My somewhat idealist response was, 'I don't think you can underestimate the importance of the moon landings.' The US perception of NASA isn't the same as the international perspective of NASA. This aside, I have been through the uses of DarwinAtHome online. Very few folks are writing about it. Even the participants aren't writing about it online. Good night [ Previous Log ]
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