Year on year

My Mathematica programs are biting back today and undocumented interpolationpoints commands are laughing at me every time I turn away. Still, answers are converging in hoped for directions and all should be well soon.

Anyway, I haven't had a chance to write up much more about my trip to Porto, but I will put up a couple more photos from this splendid city.

On the Sunday as I walked around the city with some friends from Couchsurfing, and waited for my midnight bus, I had a chance to go to a few wonderful viewing areas to see the city as the sun was setting. In particular the rather charming Crystal Palace gardens (no longer with a Crystal Palace, but a somewhat less attractive auditorium) gives a great view over the river, with the Port Cellars peppering the opposite bank:

Further along the coast the scenery changes considerably and you get a real view of the ocean and the smell of the sea replaces the smell of ancient city life:

A few more photos to process at some point too, but they will have to wait.

Anyway, everything is busy as ever at the moment, with a short trip to Dublin to give a seminar in a couple of weeks, and a semi-public lecture on atmospheric optics to give at the beginning of December. I'll be heading to Madrid to give a talk at the Christmas meeting too, before heading back home for a few days over Christmas and the new year.

Today we had a fascinating talk on the use of Turing machines to study evolution and I spent lunch quizzing the speaker on many things which have been on my mind since the amazing talks by James Glazier on morphogenisis back in 2007 in Beijing.

On a side note, I've now been living outside China for almost exactly a year. I never imagined how much I would miss the place, and although I'm extremely happy here in Spain, in the department, in the city and in my current position, there is something unreplacable about life in that sprawling, dirty, glorious city of fourteen million, which is at the same time undescribable and unforgettable. I was hugely lucky to have the chance I had in China, and am equally lucky now to be here in Santiago, in a very different, but equally stimulating environment.

Anyway, Mathematica seems to be giving me better answers now, so I should get back to it...

Sucker!

The lamprey it seems is not only a curious looking creature but an interesting organism to help biologists understand the evolution of the jaw. I am told that it also makes a fine dinner, something which Henry I would at one time have attested to, before it was too late! I caught the following guy mournfully looking at the passers by in the old town of Santiago de Compostela last week.

lollamprey suggestions will be accepted.

Evolving clocks

I've always had a fascination with genetic algorithms, and have played around with them a good deal in the last few years. This started when a good friend wrote a simple logic based game where one could play the computer. He set the computer going against itself and evolved it through a simple genetic algorithm. Soon enough we weren't able to beat the computer and it would play moves that we simply couldn't understand until later in the game.

The following is a lovely example of a relatively simple genetic algorithm used to create a time keeping device from its constituent parts:


(Noted on Pharyngula)