Yo La Tengo (Album 8)

Listening to Spiritchaser by Dead Can Dance

Well I am as speechless as the researchers themselves over this article which describes how hearts grown in the laboratory can actually function without intervention. The fact that the heart started beating spontaneously when it had reached a certain stage of development is a bit like having a program which "grows" based on the bare skeleton of the spec. Maybe there is some scope for a development system which takes a spec and after having the programmatic equivalent of stem cells thrown at it starts running of its own accord. Of course some development will always be heuristic but I wonder if we could formalise the approach. I of course link this to the anti-evolutionary argument regarding the hurricane in the junk yard building a working aeroplane (usually a Jumbo-Jet for some reason). Systems design does already sometimes refer to black boxes which means that a piece of software created by the above method would not be open to scrutiny to check how efficient it actually is. Biological processes have until recently not been open to scrutiny and I wonder if the deep workings of the mind - the actual point where consciousness meets neurons - ever will succumb to analysis. Computers can of course out perform humans when the spec is rigid but for fuzzy logic our gooey brain stuff is always best.

Other worrying things going on this week :-

- Daughter seems to have all the women in her SIMS pregnant at once, though the comment that "At least this one is a human baby." made us wonder if we should be keeping more of an eye on her progress. Still I suppose it will assist in the forthcoming "talk" at school.

- My email inbox seemed to turn into deep water this morning, as if the messages were sinking and rising depending on how heavy they actually were. Must be the weather.

- Some c++ Cyclic Redundancy code I was asked to describe last week appeared in the sample code for the APIs that are used by our rinky-dinky new PVR. Yes I know it is sad to want to do MORE programming at home but at least it does not involve sitting at the end of a wet and windy railway platform with a notebook and anorak. Anyway, for a moment I thought that my recurring idea of breaking through the virtual shell of the real world and hitting the machine code underneath had actually come true. Let me know if any of you get there, I would be interested to run it in debug. Of course I cannot understand the maths for CRC but I could at least describe each line and actually get a working executable going.

- Aforementioned PVR has added to the previous feeling of unreality by allowing me to pause live TV which for you Sky plussers will be old hat but for an old luddite like me is a bit akin to witchcraft though not as much as for the Foggy Dew Men who got a bit spooked when I first dragged something off one screen onto another. I was warned that I should keep it quiet as I would probably have been in danger of being burnt at the stake. Tip - a binary search is great for skipping adverts - it goes 5 minutes forward instantly - then 2.5 minutes back - then 1.25 minutes forward and so on. Almost instant skipping of adverts I feel like a thief. There is what I suspect is an urban myth regarding the presence of the technology in PVRs etc to skip adverts automatically and that it has been removed at the advertisers request. I suppose the reason I downloaded the APIs was to see if I could find a way of automatically detecting the start and end of advert breaks but I think we might have to file this one under the 100 mpg carburetter.