Cycle after cycle, they all do their next command, like the clicking of a master clock, beating out they’re digital days. Each little digital creature, called a figure, gets a turn. That’s just enough time to do one command. It’s been more than 13 hours, and the current population is somewhere just above 310,000,000. They …
The system has turned into a joy to work with. One of my populations, precodedshort.pop, isn’t acting how it used to. I have a vague memory of doing some experiment, and accidentally saving a population in that file, overwriting what was there. Yeah, I even recall how I could get it back, and thinking how …
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Jets and jet engines While doing the research for an episode on nuclear powered aircraft, I ran across a bunch of information on how jet engines work. I thought, gee, the history design and physics of jet engines would make a nifty episode. So today, we have an episode on the history, design, and physics …
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From television to nuclear fusion In 2005, a small team, headed by Robert Bussard, built a nuclear fusion reactor. The design was a descendent of a fusion reactor invented by the same man who invented the television. The program was chronically underfunded. Though they were able to build two more models after Bussard’s death, they …
The internal i/o is a mess—the methods that allow the digital creatures to read and write to and from themselves and each other. I’ve always planned on changing it. Each figure, (one of the digital creatures I created) gets a turn, one after another, enough time to execute one instruction. But, no matter how much …
I changed my mind and posted this, just because I like the last line. I tested a short-lived population, they made it to 923 in the name field, before dying out. I saved the first two figures of that line to play around with them.
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Nuclear powered aircraft In the 1950/s the United States Airforce and Navy considered nuclear powered aircraft. Instead of burning fuel to heat air and provide thrust, a nuclear-powered jet engine would heat the air from the heat generated by a nuclear reactor. If it had worked, the aircraft could have remained airborne for months at …
I started working on this project in December. Months later and, for certain values of the word “done,” it’s done. All this time, I’ve been building tools to make implementing various and sundry experiments easy, or at least, easier. Now that I have my tools, let’s play with them.
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Blast me to the moons! Once you’ve learned how to tap nuclear energy, what can you do with it? One proposal was to take a couple thousand nuclear bombs, drop them behind a spacecraft, and set them off to push the craft from the Earth’s surface, into orbit, and then around the solar system. Called …