Frogger’s BBQ

I went to a great get-together yesterday – a barbecue for folks who keep and breed poison dart frogs. The food was great, the host’s frog room was amazing, and as always the company was wonderful. Some pictures…

Dendrobates imitator intermedius:

One of my favorite frogs – the black blotches seem to float above the metallic orange undercolor. They tend to be bold; out hopping around without a care in the world.

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The map:

G just got back from kicking around Central America. He pulled a map of Panama out of his wallet and I had to take a picture. I love maps, and this one has everything – it’s been used, marked on and now serves to document an interesting trip.

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My new frogs:

It was a good chance for folks to trade, buy each other’s frogs, give plant cuttings away, etc. I did a trade with a friend – some adult D. pumilio ‘Man Creeks’ for some D. fantasticus froglets. The Man Creeks have produced some froglets for me, but I haven’t been able to bring them past the critical 4 to 6 month old window. My plan with pumilio is to start keeping them in larger enclosures, where I can get a better population of springtails and woodlice established; in the meantime, the Man Creeks ought to be with a breeder who can do right by them. Fantasticus are aptly named – they are in a grow-out tank now, but once they’re in a nicely planted enclosure – yowzah!

More pictures here.

Fruits of the season

or
Sam Gribley grows up and gets responsibilities
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Results of a little foraging:
Some nice blackberries from my patch.
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And some hickory nuts from the woods.
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Perhaps a tiny bit of cooking with a small amount of sugar for the berries, then over ice cream?
Update – a little sugar to pull out some juice, let stand during dinner, then use to top peach ice cream. Good.

Are we The Sims?

An interesting article in the NYT got me thinking… The story is about a paper written in 2003 by Nick Bostrom, entitled “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” The abstract:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a posthuman stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

So – if humans (or our weakly godlike AI progeny) survive long enough and the predictions of continuing computing power increases are true AND the entities with access to the computing power decide to run any significant number of evolutionary simulations, then we’re very likely to be living in one of those simulations (1 ‘real’ world, large number of sims – not a bet I want a piece of).

This is not a new observation – a reader on BoingBoing pointed to a 1995 interview in Wired where Hans Moravec waves off the idea as obvious. Charlie Stross has incorporated the idea of simulations into more than one of his yarns; in “A Colder War” Cthulhu runs simulations on the people it absorbs.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that we are indeed living in a simulation. Are there implications for how we should behave or live our lives? Not that I can think of – if I hurt someone, their experience of pain is not diminished or mitigated by being perfectly simulated rather than real. There are a couple things that I have been thinking on though – one serious and one not as.

The less serious consideration could be classified as belonging to the Turtles All The Way Down group of speculations. We’re sims, our simulation navigates the posthuman transition successfully and we start – yes, you saw this coming – running evolutionary simulations. How deeply are we nested? Would we run into hardware constraints back in the real world?

The big question – and one I’ve been thinking about for quite a while – is how should we treat software entities? I code up a high fidelity version of a housefly’s nervous system. Then I run in the same signals from the sensorium that a fly would experience when it’s wings were pulled off. Why? I don’t know – why do folks pull wings off real flies rather than just smushing them? Calm down, it’s just a simulation of a fly, you say. Okay, a couple years pass and I code up a puppy… Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth… implemented in software. When do we cross the line from disturbing silliness (I googled ‘the sims torture’ and found this pretty quickly) to real evil?

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

Lotus liveblogging

I think the blossom will open today – will post pictures as it happens.

8:30 AM

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10:30 AM

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Noon

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2:00 PM, and done

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Another bud – there’s a bigger one that will bloom earlier, but this one had the best light.

For a certain design student

Mr. Jalopy says,

Unbelievably Elegant and Savage Design – This is an easy one. Monkeys can do this. Look at the Ferrari at the top of the page and figure out how it appears so elegant and fine boned while still having the demeanor of a bloodthirsty savage. Decipher that simple formula, update it in a respectful way, carve a many-cylindered engine block out of a single chunk of billet and, with the hammer of Buddha, pound aluminum fenders over Italian stumps that have Enzo’s initials carved in the base. Eat prosciutto for lunch and truffles for dinner, bathe in cognac, drink espressos during victory laps, road test at midnight, change tires for thunderstorm wet practice, whisk baguette crumbs from the oxblood leather seats with a boar bristle brush, keep sterling flasks of courage in the glove box, smoke cigars with the commitment of Mark Twain and feed your chickens at dawn.

Yep, that just about covers it…

Tuesday morning potpourri for $500, please, Alex

Stray thougts and links…

On The Pony Rule – like Ms. Phasmid, I have a full dreamspace. There are many classification schemes I apply to the dreams when I’m feeling meta – one that is actually useful is to divde dreams into Pony Rule/not Pony Rule. Not Pony Rule items are those that, with effort and a little luck (and maybe some sacrifice) are attainable – my ‘move into an Airstream‘ idea/dream/plan is a perfect representative of the genre. Pony Rule dreams involve either the suspension of physical laws (superpowerz!!1!) or factors completely outside my control. The ‘what would I do if I hit the lottery?’ fantasy is a good example – I have no control over it and it’s so improbable that it’s right on the edge of suspension of physics (someone does win, so it’s not over the line, but probability-wise, pretty darn close). Thus, that fantasy can be improved by application of “and a pony!”. It occurred to me this morning as I puttered around, that The Pony Rule has a theme song: Lyle Lovett’s If I Had a Boat.

The mystery masked man was smart
He got himself a Tonto
‘Cause Tonto did the dirty work for free
But Tonto he was smarter
And one day said kemo sabe
Kiss my ass I bought a boat
I’m going out to sea

And if I had a boat
I’d go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I’d ride him on my boat
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean
Me upon my pony on my boat

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Great APOD today – not so much for the picture; rather for the links to papers on Martian life. Extremophile bacteria using a hydrogen peroxide/water intracellular fluid mix! (Warning – .pdf link) More investigation will be required!

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It’s the time in the northeastern US when athletic fields start to be used by high school teams – practicing and, soon, playing. Here, women’s varsity soccer and men’s cross country have been in evidence. We do not have a football team, but the boarding school I used to work at sure did. I found this compare and contrast post very interesting – concussion vs. smoking dope. I am a fan of NFL football, but as you work your way back down the feeder system (NFL -> NCAA -> high school) things get a little more questionable; the risk/reward variables change pretty dramatically.

Birds ‘n bikes

This looks like an interesting CD for dreamers like me. “I really need to get this, just in case I end up in Siberia in the next year or so!” Yeah, right…

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How much do you want to bet that the motorcycle in the picture above is a Ural? I don’t think I could fit 3 dogs, 1 hawk, 1 falcon and a yurt into the sidehack, but who cares? Wishes are free! And a pony!

A bit of suspension trivial – until a few minutes ago, I thought all forks like the ones on the Urals were Earles forks. The great Wikipedian oracle tells me that all Earles forks are leading link forks, but the converse is not true – location of the pivot point is the key criterion.

CD via Birding Mongolia.

Fun with maps

I just discovered (via Make:) that one can now embed Google maps. By way of a test, here’s a local landmark – the old prison over at the Navy Yard.


View Larger Map

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My dad served in the Navy – his recollection was that Portsmouth was the end of the line – it’s where people served serious terms for serious crimes. On the other hand, Jack Nicholson headed to Portsmouth with a sailor convicted of pretty minor offense …