Jay McGavren's Journal

My Scratch talk at Ignite Phoenix 5...

Huzzah, they posted my Ignite Phoenix presentation on Scratch!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSHTLuQqAtE

Couple slips, but I’ll be the main one to notice those. If RubyConf goes this well, I’ll be really happy.

ZOMG giant cat!

Gave a talk on Scratch at Ignite Phoenix 5… Well received, and it seemed to spark a lot of interest. (Heard from Brian Carson that his kid downloaded it as soon as he saw the talk on the video stream.)

Photos by Sheila Dee: <div>http://www.flickr.com/photos/sheila_dee/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0</div>

Life simulation ideas...

Just watched the Nature episode “Born Wild: The First Days of Life”, and got a dangerously large number of ideas for an artificial life simulation.

Here are (some of) the forces that seem to be in play:

• Food and energy affect all aspects of birthing strategies. All these make it more likely at least some young will survive, but take energy in return:
• Producing more than one fetus.
• Long gestation periods.
• Making yolk inside eggs.
• Producing milk.
• If you're not top of the food chain, your babies need to be born ready to run. A longer gestational period is in order.
• A baby can be left to fend for itself, if it's born smart enough to find food. This means no milk production or babysitting, but probably also means longer gestation.
• Birds let the strongest infant feed first - it's most likely to survive. The others get the scraps and if they live too, great. Sometimes the strongest sibling kills the weaker ones. Sometimes the parents themselves do.
• If the father stays to help, it brings extra food energy into the equation - he feeds the kids or sometimes the mother. Sometimes this means bigger litters, or in the case of emperor penguins, it simply means survival.
• Sometimes the mother herself is the food energy - one species of spider willingly lets the babies eat her alive.
• For males, killing the cubs of your rivals is a good way to get their harems ready to mate with you. Of course, you have to prove your genetic superiority by fighting off the father first.
• Social animals help defend each others' young, IF they're from the same father. Children from other groups get attacked, though.

Ruby on Acid: YAML says it all...

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Hi-res Ruby On Acid wallpapers...

Went back and re-rendered some of my favorites at 1080p resolution (should scale down to widescreen monitors nicely).