Motorcycle Safety Training
Wednesday, July 18, 2007, 08:46 PM - Personal
I just completed my motorcycle safety training. I used totalrider.com . The course consisted of 1 day of class room instruction and 2 days of riding instruction. The classroom instruction explained the safety issues involved in riding a motorcycle with cars. Plus it covered the controls of a motorcycle.

I really enjoyed these last two days of riding instruction. This part of the course covered all the important skills in controlling a motorcycle safely. Like stopping using both front and back brakes. Like perfoming tight U-turns when going very slow. Like how to ride over a debris on the roadway.

I also learned how to shift gears and stuff like that. The most enjoyable drill we did was the highspeed turning in which you had to steer by leaning into the turn. It's amazing how far you can lean the bike without it hitting the road.

I just got my 'M' class drivers license. Guess what's next?



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Evolve 4.0 Server
Tuesday, July 17, 2007, 09:59 AM - ALife
I am thinking of creating an Evolve4 server. It will be a special kind of batch simulation which allows new creatures to be added at any time, and snapshots/statistics of the current simulation to be obtained at anytime. It will allow multiple strand. An unlimited number of strands - not just 8.

The idea is to let users submit a KFORTH creature and see how it does in the always running Evolve4 ecosystem. It would combine the qualities of darwinbots FTP server and the technosphere project.

This Evolve4 Server would allow more people to test out thier hand written KFORTH (or evolve KFORTH) to see how great (or sucky) the creatures are. Special servers could be started up for regular competitions, etc...

The "One Year of Alife" would become a special case of this server mechanims.


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one year of alife restarted
Tuesday, July 17, 2007, 09:26 AM - ALife
one year of alife restarted. sim is bigger 1500 x 1000 and has less barriers and has a little more energy than before. This one has a larger population (1,500) instead of the previous one which had barely 400 organisms.



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Is this a Skyhook or Crane?
Sunday, July 15, 2007, 07:39 AM - Philosophy


I think Daniel Dennett would especially love this image.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin ... erous_Idea



http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/542500748/



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My Moon Watch
Tuesday, July 10, 2007, 05:41 AM - Culture


This is the Omega Speedmaster watch that the Apollo astronauts were issued and eventually was worn on the moon.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwatch


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Dominohenge
Tuesday, July 10, 2007, 05:37 AM - General



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My seven wonders of the world
Tuesday, July 10, 2007, 03:41 AM - Culture
1. the microchip
2. the Internet
3. the laptop
4. the cellphone
5. unix
6. OS X
7. iPod Nano (8 GB)


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The Evolve 4.0 Discsussion Group
Sunday, July 8, 2007, 09:39 AM - ALife
Using google groups, I created a discussion group for the Evolve 4.0 software. It's not as fancy as the Invision board, but its free!

Here's the access link:


http://groups.google.com/group/evolve-40-discussion

My thanks to 'scood' for the idea. It looks like google groups lets us handle stuff like file uploads etc... Let's make this as good as the previous forum was. Cheers, Ken



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One Year of Alife Restarted
Thursday, July 5, 2007, 07:22 PM - ALife
I restarted the "1 year of alife" simulation. The previous simulation ran for 200 days and gave boring results. But that's good. Any result is a good result. I have been playing with XY simulations (sexual reproduction), and have restarted the project using the XY sim mode.

By "boring" I mean the simulation lacked the variety of creatures. And also over time the behaviors of the creatures didn't seem to get smarter (they stayed the same for months). There could be several reasons for this. One reason is the simple 2-dimensional grid may not offer much room for intellegent behavior. So the creatures that evolved were probably highly optimal for this kind of simple world. Another reason could be the asexual reproduction is too slow??? I don't know.

Anyway, this new simulation will show the difference between a sexually reproducing ecosystem from an asexual one.


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Evolve 4.8e released
Sunday, July 1, 2007, 08:37 PM - ALife
A new version of evolve has been released. The only change is the merge operation for sexual reproduction has been changed. A random bit string is selected and this controls which parent donates the code block(s) to the offspring.

In previous versions and odd/even scheme was used. New new method has been shown to result in much better XY simulations, which are more stable and give interesting creatures.



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