zompist bboard

I had a really nice trip to DC with my daughter and my parents, and got to meet up with two old friends whom I hadn't seen in ages, which was wonderful, and we got to see the National Zoo (my daughter is obsessed with pandas) and a couple of the Smithsonian museums. Aside from one day, where it rained a bit, which gave us an excuse to go to a museum rather than going to the National Zoo a third time, the weather was decent (that it was overcast did not hurt), with some of the overcast days being not quite as hot as some of the sunny days.

My cousin and her fiancé had their bachelor party yesterday. Both are fans of zombie fiction. And their friends had prepared a cool surprise: a real-life zombie game! So we were a dozen people dressed up as zombies. The couple had to explore a house they had never been to, equipped with dynamo torches and Nerf guns, to find the key to a "bunker".

Highlights included:
- A dying message, written in fake blood on the bathroom wall.
- A code to be found in a cellphone. Except that the phone's battery was flat. So the players had to go to the basement, turn on the electricity, and plug the phone.
- I had a gas mask on. I didn't even had to growl: the wheeze made me sound terrifying enough.
- As soon as the players found the final key, some frantic music blared out, and every zombie rose up for the final rush.

Lowlights included:
- The players going through every zombie's pockets for ten minutes, instead of just looking on the one table that had candles on it.
- A tape recorder malfunctioning. One of the zombies (actually the event's director) tried to fiddle with it to get it to work, and when it didn't, he had to re-enact the recording to give the players a vital clue.

I went outside to catch the solar eclipse (88% here in Chicago) and found an impromptu viewing party in progress. Unbeknowst to me, my colleagues had constructed viewing boxes and brought glasses and snacks. At the point of greatest coverage, we had nearly a hundred people out there and I played a cover version of Klaus Nomi's "Total Eclipse" for the benefit of all and sundry.

Sounds fun! My sister and I had a little party that was just us (and my mom's chickens) and really enjoyed it. About 77% for us. I was worried it wouldn't be cool, but it VERY MUCH WAS.

Apparently the difference between even 99% and 100% totality was substantial. My friends in St Louis were like, "That was cool." My friends in the path of totality were like "OMG THAT WAS LIFE-CHANGING!" I think I need to make plans to travel for 2024.

It was a rather cloudy day here in the Milwaukee area yesterday, so the eclipse only made it seem a bit cloudier than it already was, even though apparently the birds noticed, because they started chirping...

We had an eclipse here a few years back. It made the sky darker and you couldn't see the sun, which is a condition we call "living in England". [actually it was an OK day, iirc, and it was sort of cool, as natural phenomena go. Though I remember being perplexed by the "don't stare at the sun during the eclipse" advice, since back then I used to stare at the sun all the time anyway...] Anyway, ours had a cool time: it was due to hit the UK at around 11 minutes past 11 on the 11th of August (women wanting to conceive nine months earlier had sex at 11 past 11 on the 11/11). I wasn't actually in the UK, but that was cool anyway.

I saw it - drove about four hours from where i'm staying to a tiny town in the line of totality on the border of KY/TN. Really amazing

I found in a bargain bin an obscure 70's hard rock record : Gospel According to Zeus by Power of Zeus, for only €1.40; I even asked an employee to know if it wasn't a mistake. I had been looking for this record for ages.

I just got my new computer after my last one died a death (which didn't matter much outside of losing the text document for my latest Algonquian sound changes, which can easily be rebuilt) and now I'm busy getting stuff done which I couldn't/wouldn't do on my phone.

EDIT: So it turns out I've also got my Cambridge uni IT info today and now I'm busy downloading the free Microsoft Office that gives me

My genetically-programmed robot fighting arena (written in Haskell of all things) is actually working, which is like my first programming project outside of work that I have gotten working in ages (especially if one limits such to things that are self-contained programs, rather than things that are libraries meant to be used by other programs), so I am really happy about this. Now I just need to fine-tune its settings and the details of its simulation so that it encourages robots to evolve to be "smarter" and more effective at fighting rather than "dumber", as in many cases it has caused the robots to eventually evolve to not fight at all, which is not what I have in mind.

Pacifist robots? Sure sounds like they're smarter to me.

Travis B.: That is an awesome project!

rotting bones wrote:Travis B.: That is an awesome project!

Yeah, I am really excited about it. I did a similar project in college (on my own, not for class), but that was not as well-designed or flexible as this implementation, and that implementation had the deficiency that the robots would all ultimately end up stationary, spinning constantly, and shooting constantly, which to me is non-ideal because it does not embody that I'd expect of a "smart" robot. Since then I had really been wanting to make a better implementation of the same idea, and on a couple occasions I had made starts on such, but only now have I done so, previously not having the motivation to complete what I had started.

I am totally thrilled, next month I'm going to be switched to a new team at work! I'm just so sick of the complete lack of organization on my current team, and luckily management took notice of it and is moving me and one of my coworkers to other teams. Best of all, I'll be on the same team as my best work friend.

The downside is that I've built up soooo many bad habits and so much laziness on my current team. Because I never know what I'm supposed to be working on or when things need to be done by, I have a tendency to slack off and spend a lot of time browsing the internet, conlanging, etc. Meanwhile, I know the new team can be high-pressure. So I'm a little scared I'll crack under pressure. (and everyone will know I'm actually not very good at my job, yadda yadda yadda, all that imposter syndrome stuff)

But who cares! I'm gonna try anyway.

Congratulations on your new position!

So my local youth orchestra TVYO has just had their leaver's concert for those who have reached 18 and are going off to university. I myself had the honour of performing in it as a cellist, and it was a lovely programme (Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, pieces from Bizet's Carmen Suites, Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet (2nd Suite - the one with the famous "Montagues and Capulets" march in it) and Borodin's Polovtsian Dances) performed to a very high standard (and I'm not exaggerating with that, we are among the top youth orchestras in the country). What was even more incredible though is that I was one of the leavers, after only having been there for a term - yes, one term! - making me the shortest serving member ever as far as I or anyone else is aware of (compare that to the lead cello, one of 3 who are leaving after 5 years there), and yet I still felt like I'd been part of the orchestra for ages. I don't know what ele to say really, I just cant find the word to express how I feel right now.

Just bought a new stereo. Now I won't have to open and close the lid three times to get my CDs to play properly.

My genetically-programmed robot fighting arena, and its set of settings, has reached the point where it seems pretty stable, where it does not explode memory or CPU usage too much, and where the robots keep on fighting rather than devolving into either pacifism (yes, I know you'll argue that that's not devolving at all, but within the rules the simulation runs by it is) or devolving into the robots just spinning in circles firing randomly without making any attempt to actually shoot at other robots in particular. Now that I have the memory and CPU usage pretty stable, I can ease up the restrictions I have put upon them confident that it won't completely occupy all the CPU time or memory on the system. Also, now I can experiment with introducing other sorts of mutation, e.g. cond-removal or bind-removal, in addition to leaf-replacement, node-replacement, bind-insertion, and cond-insertion. Also, I can go and modify the UI so as to make it more user-friendly now that I have fewer more overriding concerns (even though this is still pretty low on my list of priorities).

I actually had a lot of fun visiting with my buddy from Virginia over the last five days even if 90% of that took place in the hospital with him in various states of lucidity.

Submitted an article for (hopeful) publication in PNAS last Wednesday, got some experiments to surprisingly and unexpectedly work on Friday, and had a lot of fun at MTG pre-releases on both Saturday and Sunday. So a good last week in all, despite the looming specter of my thesis supervisory committee meeting next week...

As I mentioned in the creativity thread, my robot fighting arena is coming along well. It is great getting it to do new things, which I am finding really exciting. Now that I have implemented pausing and unpausing, changing simulation speed, stepping forward and backward, rewinding, and saving mid-stream I just need to figure out more exciting stuff for it to do. Probably the easiest (and therefore first) thing to do would be to revamp the graphic display a bit, e.g. tag which robot is which so the user can keep track of them while the simulation runs. However, more elaborate things would include adding a debugger for the robots enabling the user to actually see what a given robot is actually doing, but that would be a lot more work.

I have also found a use for my old tower which I replaced with my new laptop - to be an around-the-clock simulation machine on one hand, and also be a machine for my daughter to use (because her only exposure to computing has been in the form of tablets so far, and I do hope to expose her to programming, and even if she is not interested in that she will have access to tools like the Gimp and Inkscape as she is already into art).

How old is your daughter? Muss her hair for me.

rotting bones wrote:How old is your daughter? Muss her hair for me.

She's eight.

My two-and-a-half-day management training was unexpectedly enjoyable. The presenter was a hoot. She liked me so much that she insisted on giving me a hug afterwards. She also encouraged us to move around so we got to work with almost everyone in the group and there wasn't a single person there that I didn't like.

My favourite moment might have been when we were doing a word association game with the entire group of about three dozen people. She said [bɛˑɚ] and encouraged us to shout out responses. I yelled "GAY!" and she had no idea what to make of that. About half my classmates were in the same boat and the other half were some degree of scandalised that I'd actually said it, even if it had been their first association, too. (Of the dozen men in the class, at least four others were also gay.)