Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:43 — 9.3MB) | Embed
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 …
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:51 — 11.8MB) | Embed
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 …
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:36 — 9.8MB) | Embed
A few fragments Though Phil is gone, his voice is not. Not quite yet. We spoke much more last time than made it in the episode. Some of what we talked about was interesting and/or amusing, so I stuck together another episode with it.
I’ve come up with a mixed bag of modifications to my artificial life system. I’m trying to get my digital creatures, which I call “figures,” more stable, quicker to emerge from randomness, and better able to tolerate mutations. As far as quicker emergence and greater stability goes, the tricks are working out. The system as …
22 :: Sunday September 2, 2018 I need to jot this down before I forget. I only just yesterday got the fat ports to work. I’d been calling inner write on the baby figures before they were added to the realm. That meant there were no trackers connected to the baby figures when their safe …
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:45 — 12.6MB) | Embed
The Miocene, the right teeth for the right job Today we chat about the Miocene. During this epoch, kelp forest spread along the shoreline, creating habitat for otters and pinnipeds. The climate cooled and forest gave way to open grassland. Those grazing animals without the right kind of teeth died out, and the early apes …