So I get bored easily and seeing I have no life to speak of I end up writing pointless programs that demonstrate arbitrary points of evolutionary theory that only people who don’t understand it actually argue with in the first place. The first program I wrote, which attempted to show how mutation and natural selection could make a “bug” better suited to its environment, garnered a number of great comments as well as some helpful constructive criticism and as such my initial plan was to go back and rewrite that program taking those issues into account. However I ended up doing away with that idea and starting completely from scratch.
The most common complaint about the original program was that it took too long to run. Even sped up to run at around a generation a second it could still take a number of minutes to get anything approaching a definitive result. As such when I started writing this new program I put considerable thought into this issue and, well how can I put this, decided to ignore it completely. This new program is, I am afraid to say, a good bit slower than the last one. In fact it can at times take several hours to run, which believe me makes bug testing it a real pain. On top of that both selection and reproduction work differently in this program and as such there is no simulated predation or mating in this one. Yes people that’s right. I have written a sequel that is vastly longer than the original and which contains no sex or violence. Clearly I must be mad!
13 years ago, on this day, Carl Sagan lost a long struggle against myelodysplasia and passed away at only 62. His tragic death left the global community of astronomers and scientists of all fields with an immense feeling of loss. Never has one person brought to so many, with so much enthusiasm the grand story of our origins, and of course, the origin of the Universe. Thankfully, he left us an incredible legacy and continues to inspire with every passing day through the multitude of outstanding books he authored, and perhaps most important of all, the Cosmos television series.
David Cumming, CEO of Intelligent Earth and self-proclaimed “scientist” does not know what numerology is. Or perhaps he does, but is unable to identify it. To the lay person, it’s the occult-driven obsession with trying to find significance in numbers. To the sceptic, it’s a rash that comes and goes, at its peak when watching Deal or No Deal and best treated with a topical dose of statistics. To David Cumming, it’s a trap. A big hole in the ground with very steep walls, which he willingly threw himself into with the publication of