Critterding, Polyworld (Evolutionary AI Sims)
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Visiting Bariloche (Balcones al Nahuel)
We just spent nearly a week in Bariloche - I thought I'd make some
notes here that might turn up in searches for people in a similar
situation.
Bariloche itself was better than I expected - I was thinking it would
be absolutely packed with tourists, but actually it's quite a nice,
small Argentinian town. There's certainly a lot of visitors, but it
still retains much of the character of a normal town (just with many
more restaurants and "mountaineering clothes" shops!).
We stayed in this flat / apartment -
http://www.balconesalnahuel.com.ar/ - and it was pretty much exactly
what we needed. It was close to the town centre (5 min walk), on the
same block as a decent restaurant, and the views really are as good as
they show on that website. In fact we almost didn't book because the
website photos were so "photoshopped" that we didn't trust them (one,
which has since been changed, had a view through a window that, if you
thought a little about the angle, should have looked at a building,
but instead showed clear blue sky). In fact, if you remove the gloss
of the photos, and add a little wear and tear (one wall, for example,
had a patch of flaking paint, apparently from an old leak), they are
pretty accurate.
The owners were very friendly - they even met my parents when they
arrived in town (the night before Paulina and I) and showed them to
the building, etc. The only negatives I can think of are that (1)
there was very little in the way of basic supplies (no salt, or spare
toilet paper, for example - all things that you can buy easily from
one of the nearby supermarkets) and (2) the telephone only made local
landline calls (the owners have cellphones, so you cannot call them
from their own apartment...).
I gather that most people who go to Bariloche stay away from the town
itself, in cabins. But if you don't have a car, it makes much more
sense to be in the centre. For us it worked out very well - we could
go for a meal of a coffee, while my parents could catch buses to
various sightseeing areas, etc.
Note that Bariloche was significantly colder than the equivalent
latitude in Chile (perhaps because of the altitude). We were there in
early February and I regretted not having a warm jacket (was wearing
two t-shirts, a shirt, a jumper and a soft shell, with scarf and
hat!).
Now some less positive comments about the crossing from Puerto Montt
to Bariloche. Various firms offer this trip, but as far as I can make
out, there's a monopoly that runs the actual buses/boats. The idea is
that you use, over a day, a series of boats and connecting buses to
travel from Chile to Argentina (or back again). In good weather, the
views would be pretty spectacular. However, there are also many
drawbacks - not the least of which is that we did the trip twice, and
it was cloudy both times. Also, you are dumped for lunch in a small
town that appears to be owned by the company, and which has three
non-competing restaurants (self-service, normal restaurant, and
gourmet). As a consequence, prices are double what you would pay in
Chile (and even more expensive compared to Argentina) and, unless you
do one of the "activities" (which cost more money), you have 3 or 4
hours to kill - not much fun in the rain (they kick you out of the
self service restaurant once everyone has finished eating....).
If you've got lots of money, or good luck with the weather, it *might*
be worth doing once.
Andrew
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UYKFD Description
I just posted this at reddit -
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/aydxd/reddit_how_do_you_cycle_through_your_music/
- and thought I might as well copy it here (UYKFD, the program I am
referring to is here - http://code.google.com/p/uykfd/ )
i wrote a program that generates playlists from related artists and
configured it so that the list slowly "drifts" over time. i use that
to generate lists of music that i then upload to my mp3 player.
for example the list i've been listening to recently was generated by
starting with a certain ratio (my music collection covers a lot of
years). it starts with the cure, joy division, echo + the bunnymen.
that drifts to siouxsie, the lsits, bikini kill. then sonic youth,
animal collective, xiu xiu, the national, the strokes, beta band,
dinosaur jr. later the foals, linertines, jamie t. a bit later still
it moves to some portuguese stuff (barao vermelho, os mutantes,
gilverto gil). then, via tom ze, to more experimental stuff (ground
zero, praxis) before returning to more listenable jazz (gianluca
petrella, astro can caravan, miles davis), back to slightly more odd
stuff (art zoyd, fred frith) then zappa, the mars volta, jane's
addicition, alan parsons project, genesis (oldies but goodies!),
police, supertramp. mellowing out with grateful dead, jimi hendrix.
after that it seems to decide to follow male vocalists - john cale,
jeff buckely, nick cave, elvis costell, david byrne....
i listed all that to show how it manages to cover a nice range of
music without sounding like it's on random play - the tracks that
follow each other usually sound pretty related (not always, because
the software only "knows" about artists, not individual tracks - given
an artist, tracks are selected at random).
it works out who is related to who using last fm tags. because these
can be almost anything it sometimes finds quite unusual connections.
although i am really happy with this, and the software is available
for download, i am not providing a link because it is (1) very very
rough around the edges; (2) extremely slow (takes a day on my quad
core to generate the graphs necessary); (3) a bit nasty to get running
(written in scala, uses mysql as a db) and (4) i don't want to put
effort into supporting it. but if anyone is intersted and smart enough
to get it working themselves, feel free to google it out and give it a
go.
ps i generate a pile of lists on hard disk and then have a script that
copies a couple of lists to the mp3 player (along with the playlists).
i can get 2 or 3 playlsists (200 tracks each) on my 8Gb player (fairly
high bitrate mp3s) and that's several hundred different albums (but
only a few tracks from each). the main drawback with listening to the
mp3 player is that if you like something you can't go listen to other
music by the same person. but if i'm at home playing form hard disk
(with squeeze server) that's not a problem of course.
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Google Social Search
Am I the only person to find this creepy? The advice they give, if
you don't want it, is to log out of your account - but then I lose
gmail. For now I have changed my default search on my browser to
Bing. But I'm thinking maybe I need to change to a different webmail
provider.
Anyway, if you don't know what I'm talking about, see here -
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165228
Andrew
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Pinera, Chile, Economist
A good article that I agree with almost completely (it's a pity it
didn't mention corruption, though).
One worrying thing that I hadn't thought of, and which the article
mentions, is Pinera's attitude to Chile's financial reserves. Chile
has weathered the recent crisis well, and those reserves will help it
with coming issues (we are a long way from safe).
Another, smaller, issue is drifting away from Lula, who seems to be
doing a very good job.
http://www.economist.com/world/americas/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15330886
Andrew
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