The mist thereafter

Yesterday, it was Earth Hour day, which is a WWF-supported event that urges people to turn off the light switch for an hour. While I didn’t join the call, I understand that this is a highly symbolic gesture (CBC coverage of the event). Related to this: I see that Europe finally went to Daylight Savings Time.

I have a whole bunch of older links sitting in my bookmarks and this is probably a good time to get rid of them, some of them related, some of them out of order.

Last month, I ran into the Worldfish Center, an organization that published a press release laced with pretty graphics that showed which fishing countries were vulnerable because of climate change (Summary report + PDF files).

Recently, an Edinburgh researcher came up with a number of intelligent alien worlds that may be out there. The researcher ran simulations in 3 scenarios: The first one assumed that it’s difficult to form life but that it evolves easy (361 intelligent civilizations). The second scenario assumed life was formed easily but struggled to develop intelligence. Under these conditions, over 31,000 forms of life were estimated to exist. The last scenario examined that life was passed on to planets during asteroid collisions, which led to 37,000 intelligent civilizations.

How are your GW-BASIC skills lately? Good I hope? I read this article and it threw me right back into BASIC. The article slams Dembski for not paying attention to the finer details of a BASIC program written by Dawkins to illustrate the difference between random mutation and random mutation with selection. Musgrave’s BASIC code can be found here and it’s remarkably not written in GW-Basic (oh the disappointment). However it features the use of those elegant GOTOs.

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