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That was scary!

That was scary!

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There I sat, after longer than usual. I was waiting for the small population to stabilize. I’d just fixed a problem that had been there for weeks and months, a subtle bug I just hadn’t noticed. Fixing it meant that my little digital creatures, called “Figures,” would behave differently. Maybe the fix would break the system. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to stabilize anymore. Maybe the entire concept has been fundamentally flawed from the beginning. Maybe it’s all been a waste of time.

And then…
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Ep 180: “Ridge” not “Trench.” Correcting and expanding episode 179

Ep 180: “Ridge” not “Trench.” Correcting and expanding episode 179

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“Ridge” not “Trench.” Correcting and expanding episode 179

We blame the sickness. Both of your hosts managed to catch, and were suffering from, a rather nasty little chest cold. In episode 179, on the Triassic period, we mispronounced, misspoke and mistook. Since we were recording on a holiday and didn’t want to do that much research for this week anyway, we corrected our mistakes from the last episode. While we were at it, we got to expand on a couple of things, and add a couple more.
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Accidentally reading without sight

Accidentally reading without sight

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Once I had the vOICe installed on my smart glasses, I put them on and played with it. The vOICe is an app that takes images from a camera, and turns them into sound. If one is blind, which I am, it can provide a way to send visual information through the sense of hearing. It takes time and practice to learn. For more information, or to download a copy to play with, you can check out the seeing with sound website.
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Ep 179: The Triassic period

Ep 179: The Triassic period

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The Triassic period

Today, despite your hosts suffering from a nasty cold, we talk about the Triassic period. During this time, the first flying reptiles appear, along with several reptiles that returned to the water. We also get the very first dinosaurs, though they were still rather small, and the very first mammals, which were even smaller rodent-sized animals.
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Ep 178: Phil joins the show

Ep 178: Phil joins the show

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Phil joins the show

For the summer, “The Lab” has a co-host. My brother Phil hops onboard. We’ll be putting out a ten to twenty minute episode each Thursday night. In this episode, we attempt to cover the last 177 episodes in just one.
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Ep 177: The one-year anniversary of The Lab

Ep 177: The one-year anniversary of The Lab

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The one-year anniversary of The Lab

It’s been a year since the first episode of this podcast came out. To celebrate, I had my brother Phil join me. We talked of the show and science and a little bit about sensory substitution and the vOICe. The conversation lasted for about a half hour. I edited it down to roughly ten minutes. It’s a little disjointed, but then again, so are we. I hope you have at least half as much fun listening as we had recording.

Ep 176: The Permian period

Ep 176: The Permian period

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The Permian period

During the Permian, the land vertebrates grew to large sizes, the ancestors of some families of coniferous trees began to dominate the forests, and some small reptiles learned to glide from tree to tree. At the end of the period, the most devastating mass extinction event in Earth’s history happened, wiping out most of the life on land and in the oceans, and setting the stage for the next period, and the rise of the dinosaurs.
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Ep 175: the Carboniferous period

Ep 175: the Carboniferous period

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the Carboniferous period

During the Carboniferous, the sharks took over the sea. On land, a new kind of egg was invented that could be laid and hatched on land, instead of in the water. The world was covered with swampy forest, there were giant bugs, and more oxygen in the air than at any other time.
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The first thing I learned, was to turn on the light

The first thing I learned, was to turn on the light

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I don’t use light in my house. I can’t see it, sometimes it doesn’t occur to me until someone comes over and asks for the stuff. Then I can tell an old joke that still gets a chuckle one time in ten, and go turn on the lamp I keep for just such occasions.

I put on this pair of smart glasses. They’re sort of like having a smart phone strapped to your face. I’m told the display is rather nifty; though of the two people who have checked it out, one complained of eyestrain, stinging in his eyes from the very close, slightly too bright light; and the other wears prescription glasses, so the display ended up rather blurry for him.
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