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| Saturday |
the Twentieth of September, 2003 |
"Also, claiming I was interpreting abstract criticism as a personal
attack seems to be a personal attack in itself."
BlogNomic has just burnt
through its shortest Dynasty to date, when a newly-appointed and
somewhat paranoid Emperor managed to anger the masses through
consistently heavy-handed use of his Imperial Veto, and refused to back
down. A Flashmob assassination plan was drawn up (the core bloc of
malcontents logging on at a specific time to propose a revolution, and
vote it through to quorum before the Emperor could do anything), but in
the end we just exploited a loophole in judgment-calling and booted him
out. Insane dictatorship is fairly doomed, when your oppressed masses
can just choose to stop playing.
The Nomic has now rebooted to its core ruleset, anyway, and is reforming into
what looks like being a Robot-themed game ("Replace 'Citizen' with
'Robot'") - we've also dropped the requirement for players to own
their own weblog, if any lurkers want to drop from the ceiling at this
point.
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| Friday |
the Nineteenth |
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| Terrible but unshakable analogy: music file-sharing software as a
parrot on the shoulder.
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| Wednesday |
the Seventeenth |
"Surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine
systematically, we may say that it has a reproductive system. What is a
reproductive system, if it be not a system for reproduction? And how few
of the machines are there which have not been produced systematically by
other machines? But it is man that makes them do so. Yes; but is it not
insects that make many of the plants reproductive, and would not whole
families of plants die out if their fertilisation was not effected by a
class of agents utterly foreign to themselves? Does anyone say that the
red clover has no reproductive system because the humble bee (and the
humble bee only) must aid and abet it before it can
reproduce?"
The
Book of the Machines from Erewhon;
a startlingly prescient view of machinery memes. Humanity as gut flora.
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| Tuesday |
the Sixteenth |
Disappointment: global warming may now be killing
giant squid, rather than aiding their biomass domination. (Rather
prematurely, Reuters then goes on to describe giant squid as "mythical".)
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Attack of the vaguely-attributed science meme; "aoccdrnig to a
rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy", anagrams of words which
keep the first and last letters intact are still surprisingly easy for the
human brain to parse. Of course, the
quoted paragraph has been written with some care (genuinely randomised text is rather
more toothsome), and the process is heavily dependent on predictable
context, but it's still quite a revelation. Be interesting to know if
there actually was any rscheearch. And whether it can improve
my Scrabble backhand.
Somewhere along the line, someone decided to
mutate
the text for their own purposes, making it easier to track and
source the meme's distribution; if everyone did this every time they
quoted something online, it'd become possible to derive hazy ancestry
for a piece of text (but simultaneously quite hard to find all the
copies of it).
I think I might have to put some junk-DNA hidden-variables in my next
viral web toy.
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| Monday |
the Fifteenth |
Good state of Bayesian
filtering address, in the ongoing war against spam - the hopeless
monstering of killer subject lines and the rise of modest, self-defeating "spam of the future".
My own internal filters are kicking in - typing up a database structure
from a printout, earlier, my eyes kept skipping past lines beginning with "Enlargement" because they were spam.
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