One year ago today
Schooling a reader who doesn’t like female, middle-aged, black pirate captains: A reader of Scott Lynch’s fantasy novels upbraided him for daring to have a black, middle-aged woman running a pirate crew, calling it a “politically correct cliche” and went on to say “Real sea pirates could not be controlled by women, they were vicous rapits and murderers and I am sorry to say it was a man’s world (sic).” Lynch’s response was appropriately scathing, and rather wonderful.
Five years ago today
Genetic algorithm evolves a better car in Flash: This is a GA I wrote to design a little car for a specific terrain. It runs in real-time in Flash. The fitness function is the distance travelled before the red circles hit the ground, or time runs out. The degrees of freedom are the size and initial positions of the four circles, and length, spring constant and damping of the eight springs. The graph shows the ‘mean’ and ‘best’ fitness.
Ten years ago today
How many years does an Azeri have to work to buy a copy of WinXP? Rishab Aiyer Ghosh has published a table showing how many years an average wage-earner in various countries around the world will have to work if they are to buy a copy of Windows.