[FRIAM] Snowmen design ideas
If anyone is thinking of making snowmen today, here's some inspiration: http://www.chase3000.com/userpages/calvinhobbes/ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Snowmen design ideas
Hilarious! thanks. I'm beginning to get cabin fever. Maybe I should build a snowman. P. On Dec 31, 2006, at 1:20 PM, Stephen Guerin wrote: If anyone is thinking of making snowmen today, here's some inspiration: http://www.chase3000.com/userpages/calvinhobbes/ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org "My idea of good company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well- informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company." "You are mistaken," said he gently, "that is not good company, that is the best." Jane Austen, Persuasion FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Calendar design: Just strange enough to appeal to FRIAM
Here's something for non-football lovers on New Year's Day: http://infosthetics.com/archives/2006/12/creative_calendar_design.html --tj -- == J. T. Johnson Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA www.analyticjournalism.com 505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h) http://www.jtjohnson.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." -- Buckminster Fuller == FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Open Source Project?
Owen Densmore wrote: > Just a poll of sorts: > > 1 - If you/we were to start an open source project, what would it be? > 2 - What open source project would you like to see happen? > I'd like to see an interactive functional language like Haskell improved to quickly compile and distribute code across a set of compute nodes, and to at the same time support either homogeneous or heterogeneous node architectures while minimizing the cost of using either to the best extent possible. I'd like to be able to checkpoint very large computations with minimal overhead and be confident about the integrity of live jobs migrated between machines as well as jobs that were restarted from hibernation.I'd like maps over sets, tree searches, etc. to all parallelize automatically and adaptively depending on the compute fabric provided.Basically, I'd like features of Chapel or X10 reworked into a purely functional type of language and I'd like it to WORK and not just be an academic exercise. I'd like a language that could support use cases like ABM or Genetic Programming such that evolution of agents and objects was completely natural and very efficient. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Open Source Project?
> 1 - If you/we were to start an open source project, what would it be? Well, from our side of the world, obviously a killer simulation environment. This would include a "pipe" or "port" interoperability amongst many useful components including the agent modeler, landscape/gis agent environment, visualization, graphing/plotting, analysis and statistics, inference engine, and more. And to cap it off, a visual composition editor letting you hook all this together with drag 'n drop and form based agent behavior. It would be multi-lingual where possible: java for multi-platform and performance, python and other agile languages for scripting. The pipe/port interoperability should have specific goals like being able to run on top of Google Earth, for example. > 2 - What open source project would you like to see happen? EZ Java: a preprocessor/IDE which makes Java less programmer antagonistic .. to remove the "syntactic salt as Steve sez. It would simply preprocess a python/ruby-like front end, but simply be a syntax converter .. not another scripting language for the JVM such as JRuby, Jython, Groovy etc. It would be independent of the particular version of Java .. thus inherit the improvements within Java. But like Processing, it would remove the absurdities of Java. Examples: - First class functions, without the need for a class for "main()" - Less redundant type declarations: String s = new String() is a little noisy. - Simple syntax for Functors .. which make easy on-the-fly "closures". - First class citizens for maps, arrays and strings with very flexible literals. One obvious string improvement, for example, are multi-line strings, strings with substitutions, and most of all, "raw" strings for regex use. This could easily be done with ANTLR, I think. Integrating it into Eclipse and other programming editors and IDEs would be important. -- Owen Owen Densmore http://backspaces.net On Dec 30, 2006, at 10:39 AM, Owen Densmore wrote: > Just a poll of sorts: > > 1 - If you/we were to start an open source project, what would it be? > 2 - What open source project would you like to see happen? > > -- Owen > > Owen Densmore http://backspaces.net > > > > > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Open Source Project?
> > Well, from our side of the world, obviously a killer simulation environment. I recently watched an interview on the Research Channel with Anders Hejisberg, inventor of Turbo Pascal and C#. A former project manager of his at Borland was talking about their abandoned visual programming project, Monet, that Anders was involved in before joining Microsoft. Anders remarked that sometimes "a single line of code is often worth a thousand pictures. You die a slow death of a thousand lines going from here to there." [An example of the "lines" being the object/message connections i.e. MacOS X Interface Builder.] It's all fine and good to try to lower the cost of entry to ABM, but to get science done ABMers need a way to say something precise and have it understood by theorists. Pretty visual programming systems, GIS, etc. don't necessarily accomplish that. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Which side of the road do they drive on?
Well, a bit frivolous, but we were having a new years conversation on which side of the road various folks drive. Here is the answer we found .. quite interesting. http://www.brianlucas.ca/roadside/ Sweden and a few other countries have actually switched from left to right. What a mess that must have been, but according to the article, the changeover was fairly orderly, all things considered. The article includes "natural" sides for walking, horse riding, jousting, wagons and so on. Also stories about Napoleon changing most of Europe to the right. -- Owen Owen Densmore http://backspaces.net FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
