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 …
I fear them. Not obvious bugs, but the sneaky ones—the ones where your code will compile and run just fine, where the program can pass all the tests you thought of; but there it sits—the bug you didn’t think of testing for.
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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 …
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. …
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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 …
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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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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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 …