scr cross over media

[Simon Wistow <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fuck it. Time for another attemt at starting a thread. I'm worried this
is turning into a blog that's propogated over email. 


...

OH MY GOD! I'M JOEL SPOLSKY! KILL ME!


£$%@$SIGNAL TERMINATED .........


Oh yeah, that's what I was going to say.

Currently riding high on the 'things that give me an intellectual
chubby' is the cross over between disciplines. I think I attempted to
start a thread about this a while back but it was largely ignored and
the names of all subscribers were added to The List[tm] - you'll get
yours. Oh yes. [0]

This is partly inspired by reading around emergent behaviour - recently
I went to see Damian Conway do his 'Life the Universe and Everything'
talk in which he talks about, amongst other things, about cellular
automata. He recounted a story of a grad student of his who was working
on CA (or DFA - Discrete Finite Automata) and getting them to combine
and 'learn' how to swim.

He was surprised to find that his tadpole like creatures swam backwards
- with the wiggling tail at the front. At first he thought this was a
bug but, later, when he mentioned this to a biologist friend he was told
that this was fairly common since it's much more efficent unless you
have eyes (in which case a tail would get in the way of seeing).

Damian then went on to talk about using DFA and his
Quantum::Superpositions Perl extension (don't ask) to show how you could
solve a problem that had been puzzling physicists for years at the start
of the century. 

The other interesting thing was his discussion of mutating Perl so that
you program it in Latin. And Klingon. Before the arty farty types roll
their eyes and unsub and the Trekkies cream themselves what was
interesting was the way that language constructs change the style of
programming. Klingon is mostly accusative and infinitive - "do THIS to
THAT" - a language of threats and orders basically. This works
surprisingly well in a programming language which is, afterall, 90%
assignment and actions on data. 

I'd like to talk to more linguists about this sort of stuff.

Anyway, were was I going with this. Oh yeah, cross over media. I was
reading this interview 

  http://www.penny-arcade.com/lodjenkins.php3

with Henry Jenkins - the director of comparative media at MIT. He's
currently working on using games (proper games, not 'Barney teaches you
to Spell') as an educational tool.  

Games! Discipline cross over! How could I resist?

Home work assignment - read the interview and reply to this with
something interesting. Please. Validate me.

Simon



[0] OH MY GOD! I'M CHRIS LOCKE! KILL ME!


£$%@$SIGNAL TERMINATED ......... [1]


[1] Arrrgh. Self referential jokes. OH MY GOD! I'M ASHLEY POMEROY! KILL
ME! 

£$%@$SIGNAL TERMINATED .........  [2]


[2] Etc etc ad infinitum, ad nauseaum.




-- 
: third time's a charm