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The lowly, yet complex, neuron Finally done with natural history, today we start talking about the brain. It is extremely complicated. Even a single brain cell, one neuron, is an intricate little machine. Today we take a look at the neuron, and how it sends signals.
I’m sitting on the edge of a binary ocean, casting hyperdimensional nets into the infinite waters of possible programs. My digital creatures, which I call “figures,” will run on my computer for hours, until I finally catch something.
Written on Wednesday October3, 2018 Small sample sizes and all those caveats. I’m tossing out the number of figures being born as a threshold. That will pop out of any of them at any time, and it’s just luck. One of them starts reproducing very quickly, and happens to find a window of relatively few …
Written on Tuesday October 2, 2018 It seemed like a good idea. Let evolution solve the mutation problem for me. This is procrastination, as what I really need to do next is update the documentation and archive this version. It’s time to clean up the code and concentrate on making the system run faster. Still, …
Written on Thursday September 27, 2018 mutation each extinction figures1 skipcom 5.pop average 73 figures just fat 6.pop average 48 x.pop average 460 just fat longest with mu 131616 without only 38453 61.pop keeps doing too well to tell I was trying to make s.pop into a six figures steady pop size stable population. I …
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The Pleistocene Ice and rat poo For our final episode on the topic of natural history, we take a look at the Pleistocene. This epoch was the most recent ice age, and toward the end of this time, lots of the largest land mammals went extinct, while in the middle of the epoch, humans finally …
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The Pliocene: big bears, big cats, and a really big flood I managed to talk Phil into co-hosting again, even though he’s far away. Thanks to the internet, we talked about the Pliocene. At the beginning of this time, a nearly dry Mediterranean basin was flooded by the sea, causing a global drop in sea …
It was raining. Safe from the downpour, I stood on the porch and enjoyed the weather. Fall is one of my top five favorite seasons, especially if I don’t have to be out in the rain. It was really coming down too, the air filled with the hissing roar of all that water smashing against …
Picking it up from yesterday’s entry, I needed to confirm that the quick populations, those that produce new figures quickly, were as fragile as I thought, and for the reasons I thought. I started with m1.
This might solve everything. I’ll need to do some testing to make sure I’m right, but there’s a beautiful way around the mutation problem. It’s not the type of mutation; it’s the type of population. We’ve got two main types: the quick and the slow. The quick ones, like m1.pop, do their best to fill …