Unbecoming Levity

A Message Sent to a Creationist

Abacquer — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:05:33 -0400

If I get an answer, I'll post it here.

You said "I believe in Creation. I have a few questions for those of you who don't. If we came from monkeys, where did the monkey come from? If we originated from one-cell creatures that evolved over time, where did they come from? No matter how far back you go and say we evolved over time, there is always that question. Where did that organism come from that started everything?"

This is basically all one question, and it's what we call a question of infinite regression. One can always ask "well where did THAT come from?" One can even ask that question about God. Fortunately that question falls outside the bailiwick of the Theory of Evolution. The theory of evolution does not speculate on where the first life form came from. The abundant evidence for evolution makes clear that evolution happened and is still happening. But none of that precludes a deity. If you choose to believe that the first life form was the product of the divine, that's fine, evolution makes no assertions either way to challenge or support such a belief.

Which is why it's a little misguided to argue that one must choose between creation or evolution. There are literally billions of religious people the world over who accept the evidence for evolution and continue to believe in their deity of choice. There's no necessary conflict between those two beliefs.

Regarding the rest of your post "I have even heard some one say that we evolved from non-living rocks. Unbelievable."

Now you are getting into a different subject, and it's not part of evolution, you are speculating on what in science is referred to as abiogenesis (life from nonliving matter). The reason why it has that name is that there is no argument (among those familiar with the evidence) that the planet existed before life did. At one point there was only nonliving matter here, and then there was living matter. How?

It's an interesting question... how do you get from nonliving matter to living matter? Abiogenesis isn't a theory, there isn't enough evidence for us to know for sure how the first life forms came into being (and honestly there probably never will be)--there are a number of competing hypotheses, and many of them have points both for and against. But the belief in divine creation is also an example of abiogenesis... if it was a god, he must have created life out of something. Surely it is within the power of a supreme being to take some raw chemicals and assemble a living thing. I doubt you would claim "God couldn't do that".

The most likely conclusion is that the first life form was molecular, a simple chemical compound that could make imperfect copies of itself. At the lowest levels it becomes impossible to distinguish between biology and chemistry--and it's quite likely the first "life" would be something we would barely recognize as alive. You may find it unbelievable that we evolved from "rocks", and that is a mind boggling proposition. However that a simple duplicating chemical compound might have formed in a sea of chemicals bathed in solar radiation and sitrred by tides isn't all that mind boggling at all. Once you have anything that copies itself with errors, then natural selection kicks in and begins to result in changes to that "organism" over time.

All very interesting, but when it comes to the genesis event, whatever it was, we'll never have an eyewitness or a fossil that will allow us to know the nature of that event. Fossil molecules, I suspect, would be rather hard to find. :-)

Therefore I don't concern myself with it, and I concern myself with what we DO have evidence for. The notion of a supernatural being that actively affects the universe and created anything is an interesting notion... a pretty spectacular claim. But for a person with an evidentiary worldview I can't possibly just accept such a claim without evidence. Since the evidence is lacking, I'm not going to adopt such a belief (pending further evidence of course)--that's the reasonable assumption to make. So there we are.

What I do note of the "God Hypothesis" is that historically it has been supplied as an explanation for the unknown for any number of questions and phenomena. As science has advanced the answer to each of those previously divine phenomena (planetary motion, earthquakes, thunder, lightning, volcanoes, rainbows, etc, etc, etc) the divine has been found to be unnecessary, and the God Hypothesis simply moves to a new unknown, filling the gaps on the shelves of knowledge, to be perennially relocated when the books that explain those gaps are written and shelved.

The unknown is mundane. There will always be unknowns. And since the supernatural has been invoked to explain every single unknown in the history of humanity, the fact that it is invoked to explain the origin of life isn't very compelling to me. The hypothesis doesn't have a very good track record, and the mere fact that something is unknown is not evidence for a supernatural agent.

So while I do not know what the original life form was, or how it got here, I'm inclined to think it was some sort of entirely natural event. That's the more reasonable assumption based on what we know about the world. I'm not going to make assumptions based on what we DON'T know... that would be imprudent in my opinion.

That said, I bear no ill will to those who do. There are many great things religion has brought humanity (including, ironically, science itself). So if you want to believe in a divine being, an afterlife, redemption--more power to you I say. Especially if it brings you happiness or comfort in difficult times. I don't share that belief, but I see no reason either of us should condemn the other.

Obviously I tend to get quite angry with people who ignore evidence and spread disinformation. That's to be expected from someone who holds an evidentiary worldview. (And of course, I am as human as the next guy.) Which is why you could sum up my opinion on the subject at hand like so:

"To believe in the divine is a personal choice, and there is nothing wrong with it. To ignore the evidence for evolution is to be willfully ignorant."

And that's all I have to say about that. I hope you found this message to be a useful answer to your questions. I'm actually not interested in debating theology (I think debating things for which there isn't any evidence is fairly pointless), but if you have any questions about evolution, I'd be happy to try and answer them if I know the answers.

Photos from the Ice Storm in Fitchburg

Abacquer — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 17:30:40 -0500

Last week's ice storm really socked us here in Fitchburg. We lost power for seven days, but fortunately had access to a generator so we could run our furnace. Finally got my pictures from the storm uploaded.

Juncos are Back...

Abacquer — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 10:37:43 -0400

Just saw some Juncos outside when I was looking out the washroom window. Yet another sign that colder days are upon us.

I really should get some birdseed... it's been awhile since I've just sat and watched my feathered friends.

What's With That Big Glowing Ball in the Sky?

Abacquer — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 09:36:06 -0400

Oh I remember now... that's the sun! I saw that the day we left to go on our vacation here in Rainland. How nice that it has decided to grace us with its presence... on the last day. Well I'm not going to be cynical today (I mean, after this point). Clark's Bridge was a bust yesterday... rain dumping down and you have to pay to get in to the tourist trap it is ensconced in... a veritable fortress of phony, brightly-painted, dreck. So I'm not going back there. But maybe I can get to the Flume Bridge today. We'll see. Either way there should be something to shoot.

Unless it starts raining.

Okay, starting from now, I mean...

Watching Ants

Abacquer — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:04:49 -0400

Yes I know, first I'm writing about the likelihood of contacting alien civilizations, then I'm talking about immortal humans who have sex for three days straight and write books in their sleep, and then about creepy flickrites, and now I am writing about watching ants. You don't come here for consistency.

I was leaving my office around lunchtime the other day for a brief walk. The front of the building has a raised garden with some azaleas and a really nice looking stone wall bordering it. As I walked out I noticed the wall was swimming in tiny black ants. Not the big ones you see wondering solo, but hordes of teensy ones. Usually that means that a tasty food item has been discovered and the colony is out to disassemble it and carry it back. I could see where the ants were clumped up, but didn't notice anything there that I recognized as anything ants would want to eat. But I figured maybe somebody had spilled a soda and they were gobbling up dried sugars right off the rockface. I went off to my walk and didn't think any more about it.

Later that night when I left work, I glanced at the wall and noticed the big cluster of ants was still there, but it had moved a few feet to the right. Again no food was evident. Just ants in a big tangled mass. So I leaned close to peer at them and noticed that ants were bunching up around other ants, and apparently biting each other. Other ants seemed to be carrying away dead (or dying ants). I leaned back and noticed that unlike a typical feeding situation where you see a river of ants leading from the colony to the food and back, this was the meeting place of two rivers of ants. One from one crevice about 5 feet to the left, and another from a crevice about 4 feet to the right.

That's when I realized I wasn't watching a feeding frenzy. I was watching a war. It was an epic battle between two colonies of ants that had both claimed this rock wall as their territory. Thousands upon thousands of ants continually poured from both crevices, and converged in the center to engage in a massive melee. It was mesmerizing to watch the supply lines bringing in fresh ants as the wounded or the dead were hauled away (presumably as food). They moved in tides and complex whorling patterns as they made war... it was so intricate it was actually mesmerizing. I checked my camera bag but I had neglected to bring ANY macro lenses with me that day, or I would have had pictures of all-out insect warfare and abject carnage to upload to my photostream.

It made me a little sad to think of these ants fighting for hours over a few feet of turf. After 15 minutes I suddenly realized the time and made a mental note to bring my macro lens to work today.

But when I arrived this morning, the battle was over, and the battlefield had been swept clean. Had I not noticed it, the day before, I never would have known it had happened. In my inner thoughts I could not help but make the connection between the affairs of the ants and the affairs of humanity. In 100,000 years, if humans are still here, what great battles and wretched suffering of ours will have passed into the unknown? Will we forget World War 2? Will we forget the Holocaust? Will we repeat it? Big thoughts from the tragic ant war of June 25, 2008.

Das Rad

Abacquer — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:46:54 -0400

Here's a funny animation I caught on Pharyngula, the excellent science blog by P.Z. Myers. The audio is German, but there are subtitles. I got a kick out of it, perhaps you will too?

Das Rad

Soil Bacteria of Antibiotics: "Delicious!"

Abacquer — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:17:03 -0400

I was listening to NPR Science Friday on podcast a few nights ago and caught an interesting segment detailing a recent discovery regarding bacteria found in soil. It has been demonstrated (for example, by the discovery of the nylon bug) that bacteria in the presence of an abundance of one substance or another may evolve to be able to metabolize that substance... even if the substance is synthetic. It's also been shown that bacteria in the constant presence of antibiotics will evolve immunity.

These newly discovered soil bacteria have done both. That is, not are they only immune to a disturbingly long list of known antibiotics, they have evolved to the point where they can actually eat antibiotics. The Royal Society of Chemisty has an article on this recent discovery:

[...] The soil samples were taken from many different places [in the USA] including public parks and farms, pristine forest, and land treated with wastewater.

'The increase of multiple-antibiotic resistance in human pathogens is continuingly weakening our ability to fight infectious disease, and any accessible reservoir of resistance mechanisms that could transfer to pathogens could exacerbate the problem,' say Dantas and Sommer.

So far, the researchers haven't found any known human pathogens among their antibiotic-consuming organisms, but they say that some are closely related species. This might make it rather easy for pathogens to acquire antibiotic-resistance and antibiotic-metabolising genes from innocuous bacteria. [...]

Scary stuff! But rather unsurprising since antibiotics get into the environment every day through their continued use.

The segment on the antibiotic-munching bacteria was followed by another segment on an alternative form of antibacterial treatment called phage therapy. Phage therapy, instead of using chemical substances to combat bacteria, uses viruses, specifically bacteriophages--viruses that only infect bacteria. This sort of therapy was predicted shortly after the discovery of bacteriophages in 1917. Once antibiotics were discovered (in 1941) phage therapy wasn't pursued further in the west, but continued to be studied in Russia.

The advantage of phage therapy is that the anti-bacterial agent is also a living organism, so as bacteria evolve to become immune to it, the phage species also evolves to continue to prey on the bacteria. Antibiotics, being chemical compounds, do not evolve, hence eventually bacterial evolution will defeat an antibiotic unless you can rapidly deplete the bacterial population to the point where your own immune system can fight off the infection successfully. As bacteria with antibiotic resistance can be found in the environment, and people have been infected with resistant strains, there is apparently renewed interest in phage therapy.

No human phage treatments are presently approved in the USA, though the use of phages to prevent bacteria from growing in food have been approved here. Phage therapy on humans is used in some states of the former USSR, especially Georgia. In the NPR podcast linked above the scientists interviewed spoke of a patient with a resistant bone infection that was successfully treated using bacteriophages after being told here in the USA that amputation was his only recourse. Interesting!

Hope Never Dies

Abacquer — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:12:08 -0400

Well it's been a little over a year since my Dad passed away, and it's been a sad time. Work has not been going very well, and it's hard sometimes to stay motivated. But good things happen too, which cheer me up some.

Dad loved Spring, especially when the birds returned.

Today as I was driving to work feeling a little blue I spotted some red-winged blackbirds in a small marsh still specked with ice.

Spring returns. Hope never dies.

Saving the Sky

Abacquer — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 10:45:23 -0400

I really need to learn how to use exposure lock on my camera, then I might not need to do this to my pictures in order to get the sky to look properly exposed. I suppose this would work better if I shot at the waterline instead of above it, but that wasn't possible in this case, and this modification was an afterthought. Maybe today at lunchtime I can get out and experiment with exposure lock for a few minutes.

Took this shot while in the (now public) portion of Devens, MA, and contemplating the sacrifices of our military for our nation. It's a sacrifice we should never squander. I feel so badly about supporting the Iraq war these days when I think of all the lives lost in it, considering what we've learned in the meantime. I refuse to "update my rhetoric" and take to heart all the new excuses for our presence there. I was lied to, but I refuse to lie to myself. I couldn't call myself a patriot if I did.

ID Please - The Power of the Internet (and flickr)

Abacquer — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 09:30:39 -0400

Here's a little something neat I found on flickr. Like most big internet repositories, flickr has had a virtual community of photographers that have sprung up around it. One way it facilitates this is through "groups", also called "pools". A group is simply a collection of photos that you can submit your photo to. Typically groups have some sort of theme (like landscapes, cities, cats, clouds, water, or highly specific stuff like "Fitchburg, Massachusetts"). Some groups are intended to help you become a better photographer, in that if you submit a photo, you must critique the N photos that were submitted before yours. This guarantees input from other people which can be very useful if you are trying something new.

But one of the most interesting groups I've found is called ID Please. This is a group for submitting photos you took of things you can't identify. The group members have specialized knowledge, and if they recognize the thing you posted, they'll tell you what it is. The primary submissions seem to be pictures of flowers, insects, and birds. But I have seen pictures of all sorts of things go by and get identified, airplanes and vehicles, antiques and apparati, cityscapes and locations, even one person who had taken a picture of something on the ground from the window of an airplane at high altitude and wanted to know what it was.

Since I discovered this group I am rapidly becoming familiar with the local plants and animals in my area. In exchange for their help, I try to offer information on pictures of birds that are submitted to the group.

All in all, it's pretty neat! If you've got a picture of something you can't identify, perhaps you should upload it to flickr and submit it to the ID Please group.

Kansas School Board to Elect Creationist President

Abacquer — Sat, 19 May 2007 23:01:32 -0400

The National Association of State Boards of Education will elect officers in July, and for one office, president-elect, there is only one candidate: a member of the Kansas school board who supported its efforts against the teaching of evolution...

-- Evolution opponent is in line for schools post, Austin-American Statesman

Come on Kansas, don't let this happen again.

Mark Isaak's Index

Abacquer — Wed, 16 May 2007 09:58:34 -0400

Wow, I just stumbled across The Index to Creationist Claims by Mark Isaak. What a great resource!

Storms Rolling Through

Abacquer — Tue, 15 May 2007 23:40:12 -0400

It's approaching midnight and the patter of rain is filtering into my house, along with the drawn out, low, gut-vibrating rumble of thunder. An approaching storm is on the one hand exciting, but on the other hand serves as a reminder of just how powerless we all are. It's not hard to understand why primitive man would look at the angry sky and imagine a rampaging god.

Balmy Antarctica

Abacquer — Tue, 15 May 2007 21:49:21 -0400

...A new analysis of satellite data showed that an area the size of California melted and then re-froze -- the most significant thawing in 30 years, the U.S. space agency said...

-- Big area of Antarctica melted, satellite finds (Reuters via Yahoo! News)

Now might be a good time to sell off your beachfront property.

Various

Abacquer — Fri, 11 May 2007 15:34:24 -0400

Okay, here's a bunch of little things I want to talk about. None of them really deserves its own article but I want to share it anyway. I suppose I should caution you that I am on percoset right now, so I am a little loopy... I apologize if this is a scatterbrained.

Eating

I still can't chew, and won't be able to for another week at least. So I am exploring different things that I can eat without chewing. Stuff that has worked out well has been jello, applesauce, soup broth, rice in thick gravy, spagettios, small bits of bread soaked in broth, yogurt, pureed fruit mixed with yogurt and juice, and so forth. Pureed baked beans is really grainy, and I don't like it. Gonna try baked beans again sometime soon where I just try to swallow the beans whole, unchewed. I've found I can eat Italian Ices, but all the acid in fruit juice is making this bothersome.

All this nigh-liquid food combined with drugs that mess up my sleep schedule, and amoxicillin (to avoid infection) is making my stomach pretty upset. But I'll get through. (It's not like I have a choice!)

NPR Podcasts

When I go to bed I like to listen to music or speech on my MP3 player. I find that listening to the same stuff every night helps me sleep. But eventually I get tired of the same stuff. The NPR website has always been a great place to go to stream shows you've missed, but at some point they began offering these shows as podcasts. (The difference, from my perspective, is that you can download old shows as MP3 files, drop them on your MP3 player or your computer, and listen to them anytime.) You guys were probably aware of that, but to me it's big news... streaming is great, but it is much nicer to grab the last few episodes of my favorite NPR program and listen to it whenever (in my case, when I go to bed.) NPR has a huge podcast directory with shows from all their member stations. Here's a link to the directory... you can subscribe to these shows as feeds in Google Reader or just hit the URL directly and save the MP3 files.

The podcasts (shows) that I am most interested in are:

Stem Cells

So I was listening to one of those podcasts of NPR Science Friday where the topic matter was stem cell research. A guy called in who equated a 14-day-old blastocyst with a person. He was in the crowd that considers a fertilized human egg to be a human being, what he framed as "life begins at conception". Obviously holding that view, there was no way he could get behind stem cell research since it involved killing embryos.

Then one of the guest experts offered the caller a challenge which I committed to memory because I never wanted to forget it:

Imagine you are a fireman dealing fighting a fire in a fertility clinic. You enter a room and find in it a six year old girl, and a tray with 20 frozen embryos. You can either save the girl or the tray of embryos. Which one do you choose?

In my opinion, the caller chickened out. He said something like "that would be a call I would have to make as a fireman... it would depend on who was closest to the door and who was most likely to survive." I felt his answer betrayed that he couldn't really equate 20 embryos with 20 people... if he could, the decision should have been both straightforward, and patently ridiculous... as if anyone could ignore a 6 year old girl screaming for rescue from a fire and instead choose a rack of test tubes.

Although it isn't clear exactly when an embryo becomes a person, it seems downright obvious that a 14-day-old blastocyst is far less a person than a six year old girl. I'm going to remember this challenge. It really made me think.

Birdies

I've been feeding the birds in my yard again lately. I stopped many years ago, but started up again after my Dad passed away. It's funny, I sort of got him interested in birds and birdfeeding years ago, and now he has sort of gotten me back into it. Things haven't changed much. Regular wild bird food doesn't have enough millet in it, and has some other seeds that most of the birds don't eat. So I went back to one of my old recipes and it worked like a charm, but it involves buying parakeet food and mixing that into the seed, which is expensive. I have to find a place where I can get millet cheap. Anybody know a place?

Dawkins Discussions... on Amazon?

I've been following some discussions on Dawkins which are popping up on Amazon. Apparently any product for sale on Amazon gets its own discussion forum. So at the bottom of the amazon page for The God Delusion are the hot forum topics related to that book. It's amazing what lengths some people will go to in order to discredit Dawkins. Check it out, if you dare. This is where I found out about the "Dawkins Pause" video... this particular discussion links to the video (it's something of a relief to see that the theists seem to be in the minority on this forum.)

If you need more Dawkins, here's a feed for RichardDawkins.net which you can drop in your news aggregator.

I'm about halfway through The God Delusion myself. Having trouble reading it right now... mostly because of the percosets.

Topix.Net

Don't know if I've recommended this before, but topix.net is a nice source for regional newsfeeds for small towns. They incorporate feeds for local newspapers and blogs, and all you do is enter the zip code of the town you are interested in, and topix.net will generate a feed for that town that you can plonk into a feed reader like bloglines, Google reader, and so forth. (It's my understanding that IE7 has a feed aggregator built right in.)

My Shared Shite

I've been regularly flagging articles in the feeds I read as shared so that other people can enjoy them. You can access the GoogleReader page devoted to my shared articles here.

3Hive Decency

Some fairly decent stuff has cropped up on 3Hive since my last article about indie music. I recommend The Autumn Defense and Lymbyc Systym.

Digital Camera Binoculars

Abacquer — Mon, 07 May 2007 23:11:19 -0400

This weekend, while gazing on the gorgeous colors of the Yellow Warbler, a veritable "wild canary" in appearance, an odd thought occurred to me. Why doesn't someone make binoculars with a built-in digital camera?

It's exceedingly difficult to photograph birds with conventional digital cameras... you really need expensive equipment and prohibitively expensive lenses. And yet the image in my Bushnells is crisp, bright, clear, and wonderful in every respect except that I cannot record it in any easy way.

Why hasn't someone done this? Then I wondered, maybe someone already has. So early today I went poking around on the net for binocular cameras. Sure enough, there are some, but not quite what you think. All digital camera binoculars are simply two components fashioned together, binoculars and a camera. The camera has its own objective lens, and uses a digital zoom to take the picture (which results in as grainy a picture as you might expect.) Furthermore, what I've heard from people reviewing these things is that sandwiching the camera into the unit ends up meaning quality lost in the optics... so they end up not being very good binoculars either.

The primary problem with all such units is that the camera uses its own objective lens instead of using the high-quality lenses of the binoculars themselves, so buying such a unit is simply using binoculars to point a camera. Furthermore the camera has no idea what to focus on in whatever you are looking at. If you are looking at birds through brush, you may be focused on the birds, but the camera is focusing on the brush.

But if you think about how binoculars work, I think it's easy to see why digital camera binoculars are built the way they are. The light reflected by whatever you are looking at passes through the objective lens on each side of the binocular, passes through a pair of prisms which correct it (otherwise it would appear upside down and backwards) and reflect it back toward the eyepiece. When you adjust the focus you are moving the eyepiece lenses in and out, changing the distance between them and the prisms. This diagram should make it a little clearer:

Each eyepiece has two lenses, I've drawn four to represent the eyepiece changing position based on your focus. But this is problem number one. Focusing happens at the eyepiece, not at the objective lens. In order to capture the image as you have focused it, the camera would need to capture the image exiting the eyepiece.

Second problem: there is a third lens involved in this process, the lens of your eye. When you adjust the binoculars to focus an image, you are focusing the image on your retina using the lens of your eye. Even if the camera could capture the image as it exits the eyepiece, it might still be blurry because the camera isn't capturing the image that landed on your retina, using the lens of your eye.

You could attempt to solve the second problem by allowing the camera to auto-focus, but this introduces the final problem, the camera doesn't know what to focus on. I look through my binoculars at three fence posts nearly lined up in the distance. The the optics I see post 1 in the foreground, post 2 peeking out from behind post 1, and post 3 peeking out from behind post 2. Whichever post I want to focus on is totally up to me, but I can only focus on one at a time. Needless to say I'll pick the one with the bird on top, but the camera can only guess. Depending on how complicated the image is (looking through brush, etc) the camera will probably guess wrong.

Digital cameras solve this problem by giving you an LCD screen to work with. When you look at the LCD screen, any focusing you do happens between the camera's image receptors and the lenses, not between the lenses and your eye. In other words you are focusing for the camera's "retina", instead of your own.

Trying to do that with binoculars results in a pretty different sort of binoculars. Ones that place all of the focusing inside the equipment, and then render a digital image in the eyepieces... somehow--sounds tricky, and really expensive. Easier to forgo the binoculars altogether and use a monocular which has a big fat LCD display instead of an eyepiece. Such a device has already been invented... it's called a digital camera. All you have to do is get one that can take lens attachments and buy a ridiculously expensive lens...

It sure would be nice someday to have a camera built into binoculars that somehow captures the image from the eyepiece, and renders it on a top-mounted LCD so you can focus there, but still have a natural view through the eyepieces. Not sure how such a thing would be done. Heck for all I know it may already exist and I just haven't heard of it. Does anybody else know?

I thought that perhaps image-stabilized binoculars did digital manipulations of the image, but actually they use gyros to detect the motion of your hands and make micro-adjustments to the prisms to stabilize the image--the image itself is still analog.

Ah well. For now I'll have to enjoy the birds as I see them, and rely on words to convey the images.

Sheeps and Stones and Lilting Tones

Abacquer — Mon, 07 May 2007 10:58:14 -0400

This week's gonna be rough because I'm having my teeth taken out and replaced with dentures. Therefore I'll be spending most of the week out of my head on pain meds. It was important to me therefore to do some things I haven't done in a long time this weekend, and just to enjoy myself.

Saturday

So on Saturday morning, me and the family went to Wachusett Meadow in Princeton, MA for birdwatching and other attractions. The sanctuary administrators were shearing a ewe when we got there, so we watched some of that. Lynnea really enjoyed the sheep, especially the little lambs.

The birding was good, we racked up 35 species by 11 AM. The highlights were extensive views of a Rose-breasted Grosbeak (hadn't seen one in 10 years), an Eastern Phoebe on the nest (never seen one on the nest before), and my little friend, the Yellow Warbler, who found me while I was resting on a bench and sang to me from a nearby shrub. The Bobolinks aren't back yet. I'll have to go back sometime soon to see them.

The complete list was:

House Sparrow
Blue Jay
European Starling
Northern Cardinal
White-breasted Nuthatch (heard only)
Dark-eyed Junco
Downy Woodpecker
American Crow
American Robin
Common Grackle
Red-winged Blackbird
Black-capped Chickadee
Rose-breasted Grosbeak (A rare treat for me! Was feeding at the sanctuary feeders.)
Barn Swallow
American Goldfinch
Mourning Dove
Brown-headed Cowbird (at least three pairs of M & F)
Red-tailed Hawk
Tree Swallow
Eastern Phoebe (saw one nesting!)
White-throated Sparrow
House Wren
Song Sparrow
Eastern Bluebird (what a nice surprise, got to see a couple)
Common Merganser (pair, M & F)
Hooded Merganser
Canada Goose (pair, presumably M & F)
Yellow Warbler
Northern Flicker
Bufflehead (pair, M & F, took awhile for me to identify, male not in full breeding plumage)
Chipping Sparrow
Tufted Titmouse
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Northern Mockingbird
Flycatcher, Empidomax Species (Beats me, I can never tell these guys apart. Its eye-ring was very pronounced so I'd venture it was either Acadian, Alder, or Least, or maybe even a Yellow-bellied migrating through. Probably not a Willow.)

After heading back home and eating leftovers for lunch, the family rested. I was sore and tired from the hiking. So I spent the afternoon reading The God Delusion by Dr. Richard Dawkins. It's very dry, and so far there are no surprises (most of the content therein I've heard from watching Dawkins speak, so it's largely an expansion on arguments I've already heard), but I am getting some reasonable enjoyment from it.

My neighbor Mark came over to ask if I would be able to help him move a giant boulder he had unearthed while working in his yard. He wanted me to come over on Sunday when he would have another person to help, but I told him I was visiting my Mom on Sunday. He didn't know my Dad had passed away and expressed his condolences.

Around dusk I decided to head out to L.A.N. Games in Leominster to play some Magic: the Gathering with friends I hadn't seen in a long time. I can't remember the last time I made it out there. Certainly before my pneumonia set in (February 5) and probably not in January because I was on the project from hell at work. I'd say I probably got out there sometime in December so it has been quite a while.

My old friend Rich was there, as well as my friend Dave (who is also the proprietor). Later on my friends Dillon, Mike, and some others showed up and we all played cards. I had a really good time. Before I knew it, it was coming up on 10 PM, and I needed to get home and get some sleep because I was heading out to see my Mom in the morning. Once I got home I read a little more Dawkins and then went to bed.

Sunday

I discovered Patty was sick when I got up Sunday morning. It might just be allergies, but she was very uncomfortable, so I planned on going to my Mom's alone. After I took my shower I decided to shave off my beard. It was getting quite thick, and I didn't want it to get in the way of the oral surgeon this week. While I was shaving my wife brought my cell phone to me in the bathroom. My Mom was calling to tell me she had a lot of work to do today, and why don't I just stay home?

So after chatting with my Mom, I decided to stay home. I finished shaving and went next door to tell Mark and Heather that if they needed help moving the boulder, I was going to be available after all.

Around 11 or so, Heather's Dad John came by with his pickup truck and various chains, and winch-like contraptions with which we got the stone out of its hole in short order. It was a huge boulder, roughly triangular, perhaps about 3 feet wide by 2.5 feet long by about 2 feet thick in the thickest spot. John felt it was around a thousand pounds or so. Heather wanted to stand it up in front of her house and build a small rock garden around it, so we spent the next 2 hours or so getting it from the backyard, around the house, up onto the driveway, across the front lawn, precariously around the front walkway railing which was very old and rickety and up to the spot where the garden was going to be. It was hard work and it took all four of us to move. We kept laying down planks of wood and plywood for it to slide across so as to minimize the damage to the front lawn.

We were all exhausted when it was finally close to where it needed to be, and we were too tired to jockey it the last couple feet and stand it up. Project for another day, I think. Moving a thousand pound boulder really makes you think about how people long gone moved far bigger stones to make the pyramids, stonehenge, or other ancient structures.

I thought I was tired the day before, but after helping to lug around that fat-ass rock, when I got back home and sat in my comfy chair I immediately passed out. Later I got up (ow) and trief to play a little Oblivion on my xbox 360 but fell asleep again. Eventually I recovered and became incredibly hungry. I just couldn't get enough to eat! I had some toast, and then some baked beans, and then some beefaroni, and finally ate a few rice cakes with peanut butter. I washed this down with alternating glasses of apple juice and ginger ale and followed it up with a pair of fig newtons for dessert.

Later in the evening I read more Dawkins and tried not to think about my upcoming oral surgery. And that was my weekend. It was a pretty good one as weekends go, and nice weather to boot. Hope everyone else enjoyed theirs!

Good Grape, Bad Grape

Abacquer — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 08:25:43 -0400

As my teeth have declined recently, I've been switching to softer and softer foods (no more apples and ginger snaps... boo hoo). Grapes on the other hand can be reduced to mush with relatively little pressure so I can still consume them, and while not the healthiest of the fruity snacks, are still marginally better for you than say, spice drops. At least that's what I tell myself. I try to eat a banana every day too... lots of potassium and stuff.

Anyway, the thing with grapes is some of them come off the bunch looking pretty nasty, and sometimes I end up throwing away grapes that might still be good. The sorts of defects I've noticed are:

Raised whitish puffy areas, usually at the stem-end of the grape (overripe?)
Brownish bark-like scabs (healed injuries?)
Brownish discoloration under the surface in regions (bruises?)
Cracks in the skin that seem to have separated and pulled back (overripe?)
Bore holes in the surface, usually round and extending a few millimeters inside (eaten by an insect?)
Shriveling (grape is dead and drying out?)
Slime/fungus (yechhh!)
Portions have turned to brown mush (rotten)

For pretty much any of these defects I tend to toss a grape away. Although for the first three, if the affected area is very small or effected in only a slight manner, I may still eat the grape, possibly avoiding the affected area. But I don't know what really causes any of these things and possibly all of them are safe to eat (except maybe the slimey, fungus-covered variety). Does anyone else know?

It occurred to me I may be worrying too much. After all I eat raisins, and it's a fair bet that a grape with any but the last two defects probably shrivels up into a decent raisin where the defect would be much harder to detect. Therefore, I probably have in fact consumed many a raisin which came from a grape I would have discarded.

How do YOU tell a good grape from a bad grape?

Weekend Activities

Abacquer — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 19:59:33 -0400

On Saturday we went to see my Mom and took her to the park for a little while. Lynnea had fun playing on the park playground. She particularly enjoyed the rock climbing wall. (pictures: 1 2)

On Sunday we had a freak snowstorm. Never seen anything quite like it. The snow fell in the largest puffy clumps I have ever seen falling from the sky. They were each like 2-3 inches in size. Sometimes you have a storm and there are a mix of all sizes of snowflakes. These were all huge. They covered the ground extremely rapidly. Later in the day it switched over to rain and by the next day the snow was gone again. (pictures: 1 2 3 4 5)

I had Monday off (Patriot's Day) and around the middle of the day we looked out our front window and couldn't see the street. Pat said "is that fog?" Then we smelled it... smoke--the house across the street was on fire. The police cruisers and fire vehicles were there almost immediately after we noticed there was a problem. The house was belching whitish-yellowish smoke. The firefighters got it under control quickly but the interior was all contaminated with smoke so the family that lived there couldn't stay. I went over to make sure everyone was alright and loaned one of them my coat. None of them were dressed to be outside and it was cold and raining, and I felt pretty bad for them. Thankfully everyone got out unharmed. The lady of the house told me that someone had lit a candle and had tossed out the match into a trash basket. I guess the match wasn't completely extinguished. Personally, we always run a match under the faucet before we toss it out, just in case. (pictures: 1 2 3 4)

Equal Night

Abacquer — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 20:07:00 -0400

8:07 PM EDT today, March 20, marks the Vernal Equinox and the official start of Spring 2007. Today at that time the sun will pass over the equator from the southern hemisphere to the northern. This is what you probably already know.

But I learned a couple of things today that I didn't know. First is that "equinox" means "equal night", which makes sense because on the equinoxes the length of day and night are exactly equal. Here in the northern hemisphere the days will continue to get longer until the Summer Solstice at 12:06 PM EDT on June 21, 2007. Since the last Autumnal Equinox we in the northern hemisphere have been getting less direct light than the southern hemisphere. As of 8:07 we will officially begin receiving more direct light than the southern hemisphere.

The other thing I should have known is that, for the southern hemisphere, this time will mark the Autumnal Equinox. I mean, I was aware that the seasons of the south are the reverse of the seasons of the north, winter here summer there, fall here spring there, but it just never occurred to me that the solstices and equinoxes were similarly flipped. Silly that should never have occurred to me.

Oh, one other little thing I learned is that "solstice" means "sun stands still". Since the solstice marks when the sun stops moving north or south and reverses direction, that's a very sensible thing to call it.

Another interesting tidbit, apparently the great Sphinx of Egypt is oriented so that it exactly faces the sunrise on the morning of the Vernal Equinox.

Heralds of Spring

Abacquer — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:48:37 -0400

A couple days ago, as I was coming out of the doctor's office, I finally caught on the air the scent that I knew was coming. For me, Spring is heralded by a smell. I can't really describe it... it's damp, a little pungent... it smells like the world thawing out and coming back to life. For me it is typically the otherwise unnoticed boundary that marks the transition from Winter to Spring. And, as with every joyful moment these days, I was immediately filled with a tremendous sadness that my Dad couldn't be there to enjoy it, that I couldn't phone him up or send him an e-mail about it.

This year I got the feel of Spring approaching even before detecting the scent of it. We had some unseasonably warm days, lots of snowmelt, and the appearance of robins and other birds I associate with Spring. A couple days prior to catching the scent I told my wife that I was depressed that Dad didn't get to see the coming of Spring this year. She smiled and said "don't you remember the robins?"

She was right. I had forgotten about that. When I was laid up in bed with pneumonia, my Dad sent me the last e-mail I would ever receive from him, about something he knew I would enjoy. I'm going to share it with you:

Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2007 11:59:16 EST
Subject: Hey

Hey Chuck,

How are you feeling? Hope your sickness is dissipating. Wanted to tell you about a strange (strange to me) event that took place here last Thursday. You know how robins show up in pairs usually, well we had a flock show up. I don't ever recall seeing such a thing. Grackles, yes, but not robins. Must have been 50 or more birds in the back yard. In fact our neighbor called to inform us. What they came for were the berries on the holly bushes. They just about cleaned them off. They are still, even today, coming by for more, but there's very little left and only a few birds at a time. The unfortunate aspect is the mess they left behind, it's every where. Have to watch where I step outside.

Pictures aren't great. Was hard to get them all without scaring them away, especially through the windows against the afternoon sun. I think I've seen just about every type bird I'm familiar with around these parts already.

Love you, Dad

In a way, these are my father's last words to me. And upon reflection hearing him say he had seen all the spring birds already, gives me some small solace that Dad got to see this spring. I can't tell you how much I miss him, and how much it hurts to be without him. But at least he saw the birds he loved so much one more time before he passed away. I've started my Spring 2007 photo album, and the first 3 pictures are Dad's robins... some of the photos he sent me when I was sick to help cheer me up. Have a look, I thought they were pretty good pictures actually.

A Few Random Items

Abacquer — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 21:35:41 -0400

Continuing in the vein of yesterday's post, I have a few more random thoughts to share...

Survivorman
Perhaps you've never seen this show, it's on The Science Channel (not to be confused with Discovery Channel or The Learning Channel). I really enjoy it. The premise is simple. In each episode they take Les Stroud and dump him in the middle of nowhere with meagre supplies and about 50 pounds of camera equipment. His only mission is to survive for seven days before the crew returns to pick him up. He's not allowed to break down the camera equipment and use it for survival, and he does all the filming himself. I can only imagine what an incredible amount of effort is involved in shooting himself walking past the camera or trudging off into the distance, only to have to return and get the camera. This show strikes me as one James would enjoy. I've seen this poor guy dumped in the arctic tundra, the swamps of Georgia, some desert out west somewhere, even one episode where he had to survive in a life raft at sea for seven days. You can order season 1 of the show on DVD if you are interested. I discovered this show during my many days of bedrest over the last month or so.

North and West of the City...
I'm sick of this phrase. I hear it all the time during weather reports, as in "2 to 5 inches of snow are expected in the Boston area, while areas North and West of the city could receive as much as a foot." It's snowing today. Unlike those in and south of the city, there's no rain following the storm here... it's just piling up. Day before St. Patrick's day and the snow is just dumping down. *sigh*

Cosmos and Carl
I miss Carl Sagan, and I loved Cosmos when I was a kid. One of my best memories of childhood is sitting in the living room with my Dad watching Carl explain history, other dimensions, outer space, the doppler effect, and various other intriguing things. Pat and I both talked recently of trying to find the Cosmos series on DVD to watch with Lynnea (though it might be too slow paced for her.) Amazon has it, if you are interested. One of my favorite segments of that series was when Carl explained what it would be like for two dimensional creatures to encounter a three dimensional one, as a way of explaining what a fourth dimension might be like, as a mechanism for explaining the concept of a curved universe as it relates to the big bang. The two dimensional creatures were called "flatlanders" because they lived (appropriately enough) in Flatland. I finally found that segment on YouTube, but it is included in a larger 10 minute video. You can watch it here, the part about Flatland starts about 3 minutes in, after a discussion of Hubble's discovery that the universe was expanding. In the next segment, Carl ties in the curved universe and questions about the existence of God. It's slow paced but wonderfully done. I really should pick that series up and watch it again as an adult--I've no doubt I'd learn more this time.

Destroying a Career
As you probably know, Valerie Plame testified today before House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and finally had a chance to speak out on her cover being blown by an administration with hopelessly misplaced priorities. One of the saddest things about this, as far as I can see, is that her CIA career as a covert agent is basically over at this point. That's got to be infuriating for her. I can't imagine what that must be like. From her testimony today:

..."My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior officials in the White House and State Department. [...] I could no longer perform the work for which I had been highly trained." [...] Under questioning, Plame recounted feeling "like I had been hit in the gut" on the July 2003 morning when she saw a newspaper story by syndicated columnist Robert Novak identifying her...

Pace and the Unbagged Cat
Smooth one General, really smooth. For those of you who haven't heard, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, stepped in it on Tuesday by saying he supported the Pentagon's ban on gays serving openly in the military because homosexual acts are "immoral". Way to go, dickhead. There are thousands upon thousands of gay people serving in our great nation's military right now, many of them putting themselves in harm's way. Thanks for telling them that they're a bunch of immoral perverts. General Pace, for his part, has refused to apologize for the remarks, and has only gone as far as to say that he regrets making them. I'll bet he does, but only because it is inconvenient for him now that the cat is out of the bag. As far as offending the gay troops who've been valiantly serving over the last four years of this misguided war? It's clear what Pace thinks of them. I never understood the ban on gays in the military, and I understood don't-ask-don't-tell even less, except that it allows good soldiers to serve a country that needs them, regardless of their sexual orientation. And the same people that screeched in 1993 that we couldn't let gays in are screeching today that we can't let gays serve openly, for the same stupid reasons--because it would cause a breakdown in unit cohesion on the battlefield. What a bunch of bullshit. I'm sorry but a guy brave enough to crawl across a battlefield under fire while trying to avoid landmines isn't going to be worrying if the guy behind him is checking out his ass. Give me a goddamned break, PLEASE. Here's a thought, I won't ask then next time something as stupid as that enters your mind, and you don't tell, okay? (As a sad but not unexpected sidenote, conservatives are leaping to the General's defense.)

Too Much To Talk About

Abacquer — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:36:39 -0400

I'm sorry I haven't been able to blog in awhile... there's just been so much going on my life. I've got a lot of things I'd like to talk about, but any one of them would be a full blog article I don't have time to write. So here's the "Cliff Notes"...

My Health
I visited the doctor about 2 weeks ago. My TB test came back negative, as expected. I woke up with the area around the injection on my arm completely flat and showing no reaction other than a slight redness. I could tell it was a negative result, but still I had to get to the doctor and have a nurse stare at my arm for two seconds and say "yep, negative." Did I mention it was snowing? A lot? The doc informed me that the plan at that point was to let the antibiotics run out, and then monitor myself very carefully, watching for fevers. I was to take it easy and not exert myself once off the antibiotics. I took my last pill the day my Dad had his aneurism. So I was getting almost no sleep, no regular intake of food, a high amount of exertion and stress, exactly at the time we were hoping my body would be able to cope with the remaining infection. By March 7th I was having fevers and my doctor extended the antibiotic. By March 8th the fevers had reached 102, and I was having painful chills in the night. On March 9th the fevers subsided and I haven't had any since. I had another visit with the doc today and she began to speak very frankly about having a surgeon go in and "break up" the scar tissue, or using a needle to drain out the infected area so it could heal. I spoke very frankly about how disturbing those prospects were to me, and if sixty days of antibiotics would solve the problem, I'd rather go that route. For now, we are on a middle ground. The doc has given me a script for 10 more days of the antibiotic, but I am to repeat the "wait and see" experiment when the current batch runs out (Sunday). If the fevers return I can start the next script. Next week I will have another CAT Scan, and then based on the results we will make a decision. The doctor said I could come in and speak with the pulmonologist at that time if I liked. At this point I'm beginning to feel resigned that a surgical solution is going to be necessary.

Mr. Deity
If you haven't seen the "Mr. Deity" videos yet, check them out, they are hilarious. A warning to my theist readers, these movies are created by humanists, and are therefore pretty irreverent. Don't check them out if that is going to bug you.

RSS & YouTube
Why doesn't YouTube support RSS in any obvious fashion that I can detect? Why do I have to go to my subscription page on YouTube to see what is new. If they are tracking what is new, then they have the information necessary to provide an RSS feed. Bloglines tries to "fake it" for you, building an RSS feed out of a YouTube search, but that doesn't work well. Partly because old videos keep popping up on it, and because jerks post movies on YouTube with the usernames of popular YouTubers in their keywords simply to bring in viewers. The only YouTubers I subscribe to are ImpyTheRap (i.e. Nobody's Watching) and SuttSteve. Yet my Bloglines is constantly telling me they have new videos when they don't, simply because the RSS feed is built from a keyword search, and some people are not capable of getting viewers on their own talent. Does anyone have a good way to get a YouTube subscription as an RSS feed? It's really bugging me. I had to discontinue my YouTube "feeds" in Bloglines because it was a waste of time.

Texas and the HPV Vaccine
The Republican Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has mandated that all girls entering the sixth grade in Texas schools must receive the HPV vaccine Gardasil, produced by Merck. HPV, or Human papillomavirus, is a virus that can be carried by both men and women, but some strains of which are shown to cause cervical cancer in some women. It is primarily transmitted sexually, but can be contracted in other ways (skin on skin contact, or being born from an infected mother). Under Perry's plan, parents could choose to refuse the vaccine for their child, but it is not clear if the child would then be allowed to enter the public school system (any more than they would be allowed to refuse, say, Mumps and Rubella vaccines and still put their kids in school.) The Texas legislature voted 118-23 to basically overturn this order. The primary complaints were that (a) there are questionable connections between Perry and Merck, (b) parents should have the right to choose whether their daughters will be vaccinated, (c) the drug is new and needs to be further tested, and (d) Perry circumvented the legislative process. On (a) and (d) I can't really comment, on (c)... well the FDA has approved it, so it has to have undergone some testing at this point, and on (b) I'm just mystified. The mandate clearly has an opt-out clause... so what's the diff? The thing I can't shake is that the early complaints about the possibility of making this drug mandatory that came out of Fundie USA was that it would encourage young women to have sex. Which is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. But I can't help feeling that because those who said it are realizing how stupid that sounds, we are now getting other excuses like a through d above. I find myself wondering if HPV was transmitted in a nonsexual manner, would there be any outcry at all?

These are the Same People Who Said...
Tell me you haven't heard this one before: confronted with the latest news from climate scientists about global warming, a politically motivated skeptic will claim "These are the same people who said the world was headed for another ice age back in the 1970's... why should we believe them now?" Like so much politically motivated rhetoric, there's little merit in it. Between the 40's and the 70's a cooling trend was noted in the data available at that time. Scientific journals noted that although such a trend could be the precursor of the cyclic ice ages that our planet goes through, there was not enough data or understanding of the climate to accurately predict when the next ice age would come. The popular press on the other hand (i.e. those journals which are not peer reviewed) took the story and made a sensation out of it. The scientific community never said another ice age was imminent, period. Needless to say I hate hearing this stupid argument, especially when it is delivered by people who unfortunately are accorded undue credibility... like Michael Crichton for instance. But if you want details refuting this particular bit of rhetoric, check "The Global Cooling Myth" on Real Climate.

Guess that's all I have for now. Hope everyone else is well and happy...

Weelanders Show How Evolution Leads to Extinction

Abacquer — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 22:12:45 -0500

Okay this is going to be a lengthy article with a lot of graphics, so I am going to use an excerpt today. Basically it's a summary of the first run of my Genetic Factoring sim, and how it demonstrates that evolution can lead to extinction. It also includes a summary of the most efficient (and robust) genome to be generated by random mutation and natural selection, and how it compares to the original genome. Let's begin with a graph...

Genetic Factoring -- Weelanders Run Amok

Abacquer — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 10:00:00 -0500

I'm sure you remember the Weelanders... artificial life forms which lived on a grid and helped demonstrate that evolution through random mutation causes natural selection to kick in something fierce. At the time I originally ran tests with the Weelanders, I hypothesized that the Weelander concept could be adapted to do more than just demonstrate natural selection.

And, a few months ago, I did just that. I built a new version of the Genome application called "GeneticFactoring", and stripped out a ton of Weelander support code. I wanted to make Weelanders that factored numbers and then reproduced based on how successful they were at factoring. As a result they didn't need to search for and consume food, they didn't need sexual reproduction, they didn't need the ability to move, heck they didn't need chromosomes in pairs, as a result, all of the "critter emulation" code was unnecessary, resulting in a simpler Weelander support system.

What they did need was the ability to compute square roots, find primes, and factor numbers... this was the new code that needed to be added, and it was all going to be written in the native Weelander instruction set. It took me awhile to code the genome "Facto-f", but eventually I had it working. Then I modified the container and world code to invoke the Weelander factoring code in the following manner:

Populate: at the beginning of time, populate the grid so that it is completely full of the starting Weelander genome "f".
Setup: build a list of 50 numbers to factor, then factor each number using internal container code and store the results.
Execute:
1. for each critter on the grid
2. run through the 50 numbers
3. call the Weelander's Execute method and pass it the number to factor.
4. The Weelander factors the number and returns the results.
5. If the Weelander goes into an infinite loop without returning results, terminate it.
6. Otherwise, compare the Weelander's results to the original results.
7. If they do not match, terminate the Weelander for inaccuracy.
8. If they do match, note how many execution steps the Weelander needed to compute the result, and proceed to the next number.
9. Once all the numbers have been factored, compute an efficiency value for this critter (total number of steps divided by total number of tests).
10. Proceed to the next critter and repeat.
Cull: examine all the living critters on the grid and gather the top ten percent based on efficiency, and terminate all the others.
Repopulate: for the most efficient critters, allow each one to reproduce asexually (possibly with mutation). If after processing them all, the grid is not filled, go back and run through them again. Keep doing this until the grid is filled.
Loop: Jump to step 3.

An immediate problem which cropped up was that Weelanders would mutate in ways that made them faster at factoring this specific set of test numbers. So if by random chance, none of the test numbers was a multiple of say, 7, the Weelanders might make themselves faster by throwing away the "divide by 7" test somehow. Which is great until you hand them a multiple of 7 at which point they die from inaccuracy.

I solved this problem somewhat by changing step 6 to jump to step 2 instead of 3. Thus on each "tick" of the world, a new set of test numbers would be created and then all the Weelanders would be tested against that set. Makes sense really, and automatically weeds out Weelanders that made the grade last tick by "cheating". I improved this further by making the first 10 test numbers a fixed set that didn't change and which exercised a lot of the conditions I wanted to make sure were covered. The remaining 40 were random.

But another problem appeared, one that completely flummoxed me because the system appeared to drift toward less efficient creatures over time, instead of more efficient ones. How could that be possible? Natural selection should continue to hold true, and the creatures should be *more* efficient over time, not less efficient.

But nothing prepared me for the worst problem at all... hardware. My computer, wonderful though it is, is experiencing a hardware problem. The cooling system is no longer operating, or not operating well. As a result, any operation that pins the CPU usage at 100% for a period longer than 10 minutes or so will cause an audible heat warning alarm to begin issuing. It's an alternating two-tone klaxon which doesn't come from the computer speakers, it comes from somewhere inside the computer case. And it is, needless to say, very alarming. I like my CPU. I don't want to cook it.

Needless to say factoring numbers is CPU/FPU intensive. And I've got 230 Weelanders factoring 50 numbers each, over and over, ad infinitum. After 10 minutes or so of runtime, the CPU gets too hot, and I have to shut the simulation down or risk damaging my computer. This problem cropped up immediately after building the new GeneticFactoring code and caused me to terminate the experiment permanently months ago.

Then last night I broke the code out again and tried to figure out a way to get it to execute without pan-searing my CPU. Eventually I came up with a rather simple solution. The simulation executes for 20 ticks, pinning the CPU at 100% for about 60-90 seconds. Then the simulation pauses, basically issuing a call to Thread.sleep for sixty seconds of downtime. This drops CPU consumption to 0% or close to 0% for a minute, giving the CPU a chance to cool. Resulting in a usage pattern like this:

I'm happy to say that having made this change I've been running the simulation for 3 hours with no overheat alarms. At this point I feel safe walking away from the computer and letting it process the simulation.

Regarding the other problem, the problem of the population drifting toward inefficiency, I also managed to solve that. I observed the changes to the Weelander genome over time. After awhile I began to observe what I thought was the culprit. Creatures weren't being selected based on their efficiency at factoring *all* numbers, just the 50 test numbers they had to factor.

So let's say a mutant does something weird like tests factors out of order... instead of 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 it goes 5, 3, 2, 7, 11. It's still accurate, but it tests a different factor first. If more of the numbers in the test set are multiples of 5 than 3, and more are multiples of 3 than 2, then this critter will in the end rate more efficient than the basic Facto-f genome, which is suitable for factoring any value. As a result, genomes which aren't really more efficient at factoring any value, get selected ahead of the f genome, and over time, this exterminates the f genome. After which the population becomes less efficient over time as more and more test sets are produced.

That was my hypothesis anyway. To solve the problem, I decided to artificially inject the original genome into the list of critters during the repopulate stage, thus if the population ever drifted away from efficiency, there would always be some number of the original genome to tug it back. Basically I grab my ten percent most efficient, and then tack 10 copies of the original genome to that list before I repopulate. This makes sense since natural selection is only concerned about the environment you are in (i.e. the 50 numbers you happened to test) as opposed to my overall goal (more efficient factoring of ANY number.) Now the top ten percent must always compete with the baseline. If they drift away, the baseline will win and it will get selected for repopulation instead. The only way to stay alive is to consistently beat the baseline.

Makes sense doesn't it? Yes, yes, I know, brilliant.

It was right about that time I noticed that the code that was selecting genomes for propagation was selecting the least efficient ones instead of the most efficient ones. Y'know, it takes a special kind of mind to come up with a brilliant explanation like the one above and still be completely wrong. Needless to say selecting the least efficient members of the population will uh, tend to make the population drift toward inefficiency. It's amazing what happens to the code when you say "greater than" but you meant to say "less than". > versus <, baby... classic coding error.

Nonetheless, although the effect I hypothesized was ultimately not to blame for the drift, I still think the effect could occur, so I decided to keep the "baseline infusion" code in place.

So the factoring Weelanders are back in action, and I'm interested to see what they will do to become more efficient at factoring. There are a lot of simple things I can think of that would lead to slightly more efficient code, but the Weelanders are always surprising me.

What I can tell you is that given a test sample, the Facto-f genome generally requires (on average) 1500 to 2200 execution steps per number. After running the simulation for 3 hours, the top genomes are showing efficiencies on the order of 500 to 600 execution steps per number. Ok I'm impressed. Especially when you consider that these Weelanders have to produce accurate results to survive. If they fail any single factoring test, they're gone.

I'm going to let the sim run for awhile longer and then take a peek at these efficient Weelanders. I wonder what they are doing?

Tree Removal Pictures Are Up

Abacquer — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 14:12:12 -0500

Click here to check 'em out.

Holy Moly! It's C-C-C-Cold!

Abacquer — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 10:18:48 -0500

Stay indoors please, the coldmeister is on a rampage. Wind chill temps reported this morning were -17°F in Fitchburg, and -21°F in Worcester. ::everyone who uses Farenheit goes BRRR!:: For you Celsius types, that's -27°C and -29°C. ::everyone else goes BRRR!::

I'm sorry I didn't write anything all week. Work has been alternatively crazy and dead (my project is in it's final throes, where I am officially off the project, but as last-minute issues are found, I get pulled back in.) At present there is no new project to put me on so I am on the bench. Which is sometimes good and bad.

On Wednesday for example I had a whole bunch of things I wanted to write about. I had my downed trees removed, some politicial issues had me pissed off, I had some xbox games I wanted to post reviews for, some new Indie music to talk about, some movies to talk about, and some other random items. I was completely unassigned at work so I figured that I would write a bunch of things.

But I barely had my desk cleaned off when I got one of those emergency calls and I was sucked back in. When I was finally freed up again, I simply was in no mood to write. Everything I had wanted to talk about seemed unimportant and all I wanted to do was relax.

Blogging doesn't relax me, apparently.

Then on Thursday my kid woke up sick and so I've been looking after her between handling issues for work and working out of the house.

Anyway, I hope things will settle down soon, and I apologize to anyone who was disappointed that I hadn't added anything. My good friends have been busy on their blogs, so I invite you to peruse my blogroll at left and read examples of interesting content, rather than my rambling pointless blather.

Best thing I read all week was an article by an atheist mother on the wonderful blog Atheist in a Mini Van. Her daughter was annoyed by a teacher who gave her class a ten-minute "pop essay" assignment. The assignment was "What do you want for Christmas?"

Why would she be annoyed? Well duh, not everyone celebrates Christmas, and it's presumptuous of the teacher to just ask all the students in the class (including the Muslims, Jews, and atheists) to write about what they want for the teacher's religious holiday.

So that is what this young girl wrote about, that and her own atheist leanings, and the sad state of the poor. It was a wonderful essay, remarkable for the kid's age, and I encourage you to read it. Needless to say, a number of wacko fundies have commented on the article to communicate their Christian love for the atheist Mom and her daughter, by telling them they are going to Hell and whatnot. Assholes, the lot of them.

The teacher is definitely a mixed bag. She had the sensitivity at least to recognize that this young lady is observant and talented, and gave her an A+ on the essay. On the other hand, though, after class she told the girl that she couldn't possibly be an atheist because the ability to care for other people's feelings was not an atheist trait, but instead was a Christian attitude. So the teacher's both presumptuous and ignorant. Not an atheist trait... what a nitwit.

Temps Up and So am I

Abacquer — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 12:54:05 -0500

Well we got snow last night and the tree service is coming on Monday. Thankfully today, the temperature is up to 40 and the ice is finally being shed from the trees. That's a relief. I've taken a couple vacation days because my project-from-hell at work is finally over, so I actually slept in today and dozed gratefully until 10:30 AM. How wonderful to sleep late.

My one (somewhat amusing) disappointment for today has been in the food department. I went to the pantry to see if there was something I could heat up for luch, because I really don't want to go out. Alas there seemed to be nothing, until, what's that? YES! A can of Healthy Choice soup! Tucked away behind the cans of kidney beans at the back of the pantry! Italian Style Chicken with Roasted Garlic soup. Mmmm. Sounds yummy. Psyched. I'm gonna have soup! Yayyy!

So I opened the can, dumped it into a microwave safe bowl, and in the process noted the date on the bottom as I was shaking out the last few aromatic drops. BEST BY JULY 29 2006. Perhaps a little too aromatic at that. Damn. Now I have a dirty bowl to wash, and I didn't even get any soup.

Cleanup Continues...

Abacquer — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 09:32:44 -0500

Everything is still frozen in a sheath of ice! Just a couple weeks ago it was unseasonably warm, and today it's 4° F here. I'm really hoping the temperature will get above freezing, even if only for 6 hours, just so some of this ice will melt off the trees and relieve the stress.

The tree service came this morning to look at my property, and the property of my neighbor around the corner and up the street. It's going to cost $1200 to remove the damaged trees from my yard and another $1300 to address the trees on my property that threatening my neighbor's house.

In a word, ouch. They'll be getting started on the work on Friday.

Cleaning Up

Abacquer — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 09:25:02 -0500

Well this morning I set about clearing the big limbs that had fallen on my driveway last night. By morning light it was clear that there was more damage up back in and around my woods. I uploaded some clearer pictures that I took after I got up. My neighbor came over and helped Patty and I drag the heaviest limb off the driveway. And once Pat was off to drop the kids at school and head to work, I set about cutting up the limbs with a hand saw to get rid of as much of the debris as I could. It was hard work and took about and hour and a half. I'm sore as hell now!

Think it's time to bring in the tree surgeon again and have that old Boxwood Elder taken down.

UPDATE: One of my neighbors called to tell me limbs from one of my trees were down in her yard, and that one of the trees is leaning toward her house. I called my favorite tree service to come in and take a look. But they're so busy, they haven't even called me back. I hope they can get out here and take a look at it soon.