{"id":171,"date":"2005-10-07T09:25:14","date_gmt":"2005-10-07T17:25:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/wordpress\/?p=171"},"modified":"2005-10-07T09:25:14","modified_gmt":"2005-10-07T17:25:14","slug":"your-gigasecond-birthday-evolution-and-alife-lecture-posted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2005\/10\/07\/your-gigasecond-birthday-evolution-and-alife-lecture-posted\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Gigasecond Birthday, Evolution and Alife Lecture Posted"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had insomnia the other night after some clod (I think it was the automatic telemarketing machine of “Brian's Garden Services”) rang our phone at 1 AM and then I lay awake till 3 AM, and I started calculating how many seconds old I am, inspired by Charles Stross's computer-think gimmick of discussing periods of time in gigaseconds in Accelerando<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And I realized you have your gigasecond birthday — well really its billionth birthsecond<\/i> — in your 31st year of life, and that before too many more years my two-billionth birthsecond will be rolling around.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Rudy, Jr., wrote a nice little web page that helps you compute your billionth birthsecond<\/a>. If you're 30 or just turned 31, check this out so you don't let your gigabirthsecond slip by uncerebrated! This is a photo of Rudy taken precisely at his billionth birth second, by the way.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I recorded another lecture in my “Philosophy and Computers” class yesterday, about evolution and artificial life (a.k.a. alife). The picture above is from the amazing alife Galapagos<\/a> program by the supernal Karl Sims.<\/p>\n

The sound came out better than before, because reader Lisa Williams tipped me off about Audacity<\/a>, which is free. This ware has a nice visual display so I can edit the files. And it has a very good feature “Equalization.” I'm loading the preset “Acoustic” equalization curve and applying it, which cleans up the sound a lot. And you can get a free plug-in so that Audacity saves WAV format into MP3.<\/p>\n

'GigaDial<\/a><\/p>\n

I posted the link to it on Gigadial as usual.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The demos are mostly from “Boppers”, which you can get with the “Software Downloads” button on my page for The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had insomnia the other night after some clod (I think it was the automatic telemarketing machine of “Brian's Garden Services”) rang our phone at 1 AM and then I lay awake till 3 AM, and I started calculating how many seconds old I am, inspired by Charles Stross's computer-think gimmick of discussing periods of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}