Cool, weird dream

I don't usually post my dreams here. This one, however, was too good to pass up.

Like most of my dreams it was narrative. I had a first person POV (as myself) and also a third person (viewer) POV.

The scene was some kind of amusement park. A new ride had just opened. It was one of those fake rollercoaster rides where you watch a screen and the seat moves with the action to provide a sense of motion. It was called "The Temple of Dagon." Pure fun. Scary entertainment. But no one told Dagon.

Dagon shows up, and panic and chaos ensue. Enter the heroes. Me, Mark (a friend from High School) and two other guys (I'm pretty sure they were people I knew at some point, but I can't remember who they were).

Most of the dream was us fighting our way through the crowd. My alarm went off just as we reached the ride. Dammit. Okay, I guess there isn't much to it, but it was still way cool.

I used to play paper-and-dice RPGs with Mark and some other guys in High School, but I didn't get into Call of Cthulhu until I was in the Navy.

Later,

February...February...hmm.

There's something happening next week. But I don't...

Oh, yeah! Phil's birthday is next Thursday.

Well, that's settled.

Later,

Weird

I use IE at work. Occasionally I go to my blog to use the links in my sidebar.

Since Jan 1^st, IE has not displayed my front page properly (It displayed fine on Firefox). Others have commented on this, too. Now that it's Feb 1^st, the front page displays properly.

Very strange.

Later,

Oh no!

Via Sporadic Maunderings comes Net Disaster. It's pretty cool.



Later,

Dr Myers debates a creo

Dr PZ Myers debated a creo named Geoffrey Simmons on a Xian radio station this afternoon. I was unable to listen to it live, but followed the running commentary. It seems Dr Myers laid the smackdown on poor Geoff. The debate is supposed to be available for download by tomorrow evening, but I hope that someone out there made a separate recording. 24+ hours is plenty of time for editing.

Later,

Robots and Evolution

Having returned from vacation Sunday night, I have been catching up on my 'blog reading. A post on The Panda's Thumb from Jan 21 caught my eye. Like a previous post I made back in November '05, this sits at the intersection of my interest in electronics/computers/robotics and my interest in evolution.

The object of this experiment (.pdf) was to test the evolvability of communication. The setup is pretty simple. The selection pressure is based on foraging efficiency in an environment with one source of food, and one source of poison, which are indistinguishable from a distance.

The robots in the test groups had the ability to flash a blue light. There were four test groups.

• Closely related, colony selection
• Closely related, individual selection
• Unrelated, colony selection
• Unrelated, individual selection

There was also a control group that was tested in the same environment but without the ability to flash a light.

All groups started with random 'genomes' in individuals. In three of the four test groups, communication evolved which provided a higher foraging efficiency than the non-communicating control group. Interestingly, some rudimentary altruistic behavior evolved, too.

Even more interesting was the fourth group: Unrelated, individual selection. It also evolved communication, but was slightly less efficient than the control group. Why? Its members evolved deceptive behavior.

That's pretty cool.

The thread quickly became a discussion of moral sense. Which is also interesting, but not something I really want to go into right now. However, one commenter provided a link to this article at the New York Times, about moral instincts. It's long, but well worth the time. Here is the concluding paragraph:

Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, ''Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

Later,

Eye update

The doctor called the thing by my eye a stye. It is an infection, probably staph or strep. I'm pretty conscientious about washing my hands, but I do have a habit of rubbing my eyes. He took a culture to test it and prescribed some antibiotics, which should clear it up in a few days.

Later,