Saturday, July 30, 2005

Evolve-o-Matic The Evolve-O-Matic demonstrates some principles of evolution. The table above contains a bunch of gibberish words. Click the WORD that looks most like a real word. The Evolve-O-Matic will then display a new page of words which are mutated versions of the word you selected. Mutations are shown in uppercase. With the Evolve-O-Matic, you are the selecting force. In real evolution, various natural forces do the selecting. Another way to look at it is that the organism themselves do the selecting, by either dying before they reproduce, or reproducing before they die. (Via ollapodrida.) 1:22:09 PM    comment []

It's easy to be an atheist in America (Via Pharyngula.) 1:12:34 PM    comment []

Books of the Week I didn't write up any books last week, I have two. First, Nick Toshes' The Devil and Sonny Liston. Probably reading two Toshes books in a row is too much, but this biography of the heavyweight champ was very different than the bio of Arnold Rothstein. It's a pretty amazing story, it starts out dark, as it says, and just keeps getting darker till there's only one way it can go. I guess I'm a bit naive, but I was pretty amazed to find that the first Liston/Cassius Clay fight was apparently fixed. This story is just right for Tosches style, and he really punches it home, amazing stuff. I got the Dean Martin bio from the library, but I'm going to return it, unread, at least for the time being. As 500 pages of Tosches and Dean Martin would be too much for me now. In the library last week, I spotted Rodney Dangerfield's It's Not Easy Being Me, and brought it home. It was a fun read, kind of a typical book of its ilk, with a lot of short stories about the famous people he's known. But it's good, if a bit sketchy, on his early life; his mother was so inattentive that he never received a birthday card or present from her. It's also, not surprisingly, a very funny book. I've read 27 books this year. The pace has been good the last couple months with a long BART commute, but now that I don't have that -- happily! -- it'll most likely slow down. I'm half way through the new Harry Potter, and have John Crowley's newest on my plate, plus Mark Reisner, a book on the early history of baseball, and a couple books on object programming. Plus, I'm on my way to the library in a few minutes, so who knows what'll turn up then. 10:22:24 AM    comment []

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