A couple of bugs delayed me for about a week. Once those were fixed, setting up the experiment was easy. I did that yesterday, along with cleaning up some sloppy code. I did a test run and ended up with a stable population. I haven’t seen that many of them since I increased the population …
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Life rocks To take a bit of a break from life and natural history, we talk about geology, which is part of natural history, and life, which is part of life. Specifically we talk about rocks that are formed by life.
Last time, we left our intrepid heroes—our desperate digital desperadoes—trapped—at the mercy of the extremely rare and apparently invisible 2,147,483,646! The villainous variable had been masquerading as 2147483, by all accounts a hardworking and kindhearted value, who wishes to say that she is in no way affiliated with that more nefarious number. 2147483646, at last …
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Cuddling Cretaceous dinosaurs Today we chat about the Cretaceous period, when some of the most well-known dinosaurs appear. In this period, birds became much more like modern birds. Flowering plants spread across the land, along with new insects like ants and bees. The mammals began to diversify. Then, a rock hit the earth, and it …
It was somewhere between first and fifth grade, closer to the former than the latter. Hanging around in the classroom, I was half listening to a couple of the teachers talking. One of them complimented the other on the decorations. “thankyou,” she replied, “I like to have something with color… you know, something cheerful for …
Here’s some disturbing output. “ Exception in thread “Thread-0” java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 2147483 646 at Figure.nextTurn(Figure.java:799) at Realm.cycle(Realm.java:83) at CyclerThread.run(CyclerThread.java:41) “
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What did Jurassic dinosaurs taste like? Today we cover the Jurassic period, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, growing large and being in charge. One group began, during this period, to evolve toward becoming birds, and we talk a little bit about some early mammals.
My robo-eye is sitting in my desk at the moment. It’s a pair of smart glasses, with a camera built in. I put these things on and run the vOICe, an app that changes what the camera sees into sound. With practice, blind folk like me can use such a setup to help navigate the …
In posts on this topic, I keep saying I’m about to get to the interesting part… posts, with optimistic titles like “Trembling on the verge.” Followed immediately thereafter by posts like, “How long has that been wrong?” Bugs and issues keep dancing out from between my lines of code, and they all demand their share …
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 …