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Tuesday, 08:45 am, 22 February 2005 http://www.barbalet.net/pictorial/ Thursday, 08:05 pm, 17 February 2005 If You Aren't Seeing Updates... As I'll be flying and arriving over the next few days - possibly months - I have put up a pictorial file of my travels which I will update progressively. I have put in an initial holding picture of me and the packing boxes back in January. http://www.barbalet.net/pictorial/ Leaving Wilmslow Sitting in the skeleton of a house. Only a couple of days to go until we head down to London. The train times seem to indicate we will be de-training for a bus somewhere along the route. But they haven't told us explicitly. Trains in the UK are a somewhat depressing affair. It's sad really. When you think of trainspotting - not the drug use but the actual hobby - the UK comes directly to mind. But the UK rail network has died a privatised death. Investment comes in short, sharp, investment reduced shocks. A once great rail nation, no more. Fred Reed emailed me a couple of days ago and said that I must be saying 'Not my problem!' as a mantra. It's pretty true actually. Divorcing yourself from your locational problems by moving around the globe. It does wonders for the mind. Liberation. One thing that concerns me, a final mocking, is the level of aggressive driving I am seeing walking around town currently. They have closed Muddy Lane briefly and I had to walk through town to get into work. Two near misses in cars not slowing down around corners and in some cases speeding up. From stepping off the curb to coming leg to bumper with a BMW, the driver misses the huge and aggressive nature of their vehicle vs the pedestrian. It chills me actually. Not indicating and turning at speed. I guess the sense is that the car in all circumstances had right of way. Irrespective of signals and signalling. The main build up of aggression comes through a large scale roadworks in the centre of town. It isn't really disrupting traffic in a practical sense but there is a lot of orange work placards. It seems strange that pleasant Wilmslow is offering one final sting. I'll be happy to arrive home t'row evening. Follow Up I received a brief email from Justin Hall passing on his telephone number. I let him know that I wouldn't be heading in to USC anymore. I might get to meet up with him and the Darwin@Home crowd at USC at some time in the future. But I think a little recharging and a little holiday would be wonderful. I'll be doing some work on Noble Ape. I have a mailout almost ready. I plan on getting it online maybe tonight. I'm not too fussed. The main issue is getting off without any hitches. Good night. Tuesday, 10:51 pm, 15 February 2005 The End of a Monochrome Era Working through the Noble Ape Simulation updates I decided to remove the GPI code. The GPI code is useful for compiling the Noble Ape Simulation in a monochrome version for Linux. Both Windows and Mac now use the colour Ocelot code. Removing the GPI codebase reduced the code size substantially but it also exposed conditional flaws in the ifdefs around the natural ifs. This wasn't a problem to the released simulation but working through the threaded code, it seemed too much information when better optimisations are available. In many ways it is the end of an era for the Noble Ape Simulation. A lot of the old GPI code maintained the original monochrome vector graphics code which predates the Simulation. I suspect the misty eyes will last for all of about five minutes. How Does Location Change Identity? One thing I have noticed moving, is how a change of location, a change of circumstance, effects the coherent narrative that is supposed to be identity. I don't think I could be put into circumstances that would change me too fundamentally. But the edges of identity change. Earning money, having hobbies, living in one of the world centres of technology, living in isolation, living surrounded by supportive friends, being married - all these components effect identity. Modelling identity in a simulation sense familiar traversing, walking similar routes, effects the identity of the Noble Ape. The things we least suspect could in fact effect us more than macro descriptive circumstances. But the two are clearly inter-connected. Good night. Sunday, 09:10 am, 13 February 2005 It looks like it will be logistically impossible to get into USC so soon after our arrival. I'm disappointed in one hand because I was looking forward to meeting Bruce Damer. But at the same time, a month on from the launch of Darwin@Home, I'm still not completely clear what it is. Ideally these kind of questions should be resolvable electronically. I have a theory that; (1) There are at least two generations of ALife developers - active project ALife developers - one generation comes from reading call to arms (code?) books in the early to mid 1990s. These folks still use the term ALife to refer to what they do. The second group came after this. ALife to them - at best - is a meaningless term. At worst, it is a term like virtual reality which was overused before it became mainstream consumer reality. Dave Kerr's AIPlanet is a good example of this second group. He sees, in some regards like Noble Ape, that you need to have AI entities in a simulated environment rather than ALife tricks to emulate life in a free and infinite space environment. (2) If you took both groups of active ALife developers - people who were making current software people downloaded online and tinkered with - you could probably put all of them in a room that seated forty. (3) If you took a group of people who took an active interest in ALife and had at least two different pieces of ALife software. Possibly owned a couple of the aforementioned books on ALife, you might have a couple of thousand people. (4) The broadest group of people who have downloaded an ALife program once and tinkered with it and thought about the ideas in the software, maybe a couple of tens of thousands of people. My point is that ALife is a small community. It's not a popular culture movement. Small communities have different properties to larger communities. I feel my task with Biota.org is to find the small community of developers still developing active ALife projects. Good morning. Thursday, 11:02 pm, 10 February 2005 No Old Comics for You! Cleaning up at work I found an old CDROM back up containing the Comics Journal interview with the late Mad magazine publisher, William Gaines. A large part of the interview deals with his horror and war comic publishing legacy from the early 1950s. Looking at these comics on eBay, I became fascinated with the American psyche over this period. I don't know how deep these comics got. But dealing with real historical content in the case of the war comics and Gothic horror seems to bring two things to mind. The US was probably undergoing an awaking interest in European culture from the Second World War. So many American men went over to Europe and their families in the US, their sons who consumed the comics would want to see what it was like in Europe. What a better way to view the Gothic period that the ruins of old European buildings. The theatre of the American Second World War experience. The American public was clearly receptive to both horror and war titles to present these to children in a way which is totally impossible today. It is funny thinking of the 1950s as a period of particular right wing liberty. Of a time when graphic depictions of war was seen as being a productive part of childhood. In fact, legislatively the reverse was true and the US government began classifying and cracking down on comic book publishers for encouraging delinquency. I suspect this related solely to the Gothic horror and not to the war stories. Popularly revered the science fiction of the time seems to be less topical. But from this soup came Batman and Superman. These characters and their related publishing mates bred four generations of interest. But the war and the horror comics didn't remain. They died a popular death and now inhabit the golden age of comics. I went out to lunch with my wife today and I started this narrative. Before I could get a paragraph in my wife stopped me. ''You aren't going to collect comics too. Miniatures OR comics. Not both. I'm not having both in my house.'' I suspect old comics would hold very little interest to me. I suspect, like many things, that the idea - the intellectual idea - is very different to the reality. Winding out... I'm winding out my time in the UK reworking more of the Noble Ape Simulation in the evening and griding through my 9-5 during the day. In fact I am working up until the Friday before we fly out. Keeping busy is keeping my mind clear of the big move. I'm looking forward to going in to USC soon after we arrive and meeting Bruce Damer and the USC Darwin@Home team. I don't know whether I am at the grizzly old end of ALife or whether I am still an appropriate cheerleader for independent ALife development. My biggest concern is defining Darwin@Home early. It is impossible to have teams progress without a written specification. Even a white paper. The central theme in my visit to USC is pragmatism and definition. It is difficult to see how big Darwin@Home is from the outside - from the website. The difficulty is the idea of community vs individuals. ALife - the kind of ALife Darwin@Home should be supporting - is about building communities. I would like to see some initial collaboration in the D@H spec before the teams go off and form their own ALife communities. So the model of individual open source vs collective open source and open source reinventing the same tired solution to the initial problem without looking out and finding similar projects to collaborate with - to mutually build on - is the theme. Having said that, I'll probably be too jet lagged to make any coherent sense. With Justin Hall (formerly of links.net) at USC, I was hoping to meet him too. Even after an introductory email from Doug Rushkoff, no word from Justin. It might still come together on the day. Good night. [ Previous Log ]
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