Crimson Crux

Actually, it’s not artificial at all. At least, it uses a single cell from an animal to culture the meat!This Gizmag article is old news, and I just wanted to post my thoughts on it, albeit belatedly. Large scale production of laboratory-grown “meat” — beef, poultry, pork, and so on — is a distinct possibility in the near future, a scientific paper has claimed. Certainly, this isn’t lunacy; after all, small amounts of edible “meat” were laboratory-grown in NASA space experiments. They’re now chasing after the technology which allows large-scale production. Read the article for the details. Better yet, read the Tissue Engineering paper itself.

If you’d ask me, I’m all for this venture. People will be apprehensive about eating something which popped out of the test tube (well, not exactly like that), and there will be both scientific and ethical concerns. But then, I believe trading in the slaughterhouses for meat culture factories is all for the good of the world.

Just ask the turkey above if he’d prefer to celebrate Thanksgiving alive or served on a plate. I’d really like to eat my sumptuous steak without my conscience nagging me, thank you. Cultured edible meat might just prove to be the savior for guilt-stricken people who love meat but don’t have the willpower (or the stomach) to be vegans — people like me.

“With a single cell, you could theoretically produce the world’s annual meat supply,” the article quotes a scientist. “Cultured meat could also reduce the pollution that results from raising livestock, and you wouldn’t need the drugs that are used on animals raised for meat.”

One amusing ‘problem’ with cultured meat is how to give the meat a natural, appetizing texture:

“The challenge is getting the texture right,” says Matheny. “We have to figure out how to ‘exercise’ the muscle cells. For the right texture, you have to stretch the tissue, like a live animal would.”

I wonder how they’re going to do that. Anyway, you can support the technology by visiting the website of New Harvest, a nonprofit research organization for the advancement of meat substitutes.

I tell you, once this technology hits full stride, abattoir and livestock farm owners will rise up in arms, but animal rights activists will spread their love among them and nullify their anxiety, all in the name of Gaia.

Or not.

That is, if the deal between Verisign and ICANN pushes through.

Under the deal, Verisign will drop lawsuits filed against the Internet regulatory body in exchange for the power to increase .com prices by 7% a year starting in 2007. According to the CBR Online article, current domain price stands at $6, but if Verisign took advantage of the price hike every year, we would end up paying $12 by 2012!

So unless you foresee a wage hike in your country in the next few years, then maybe it’s time to buy that .com domain you’ve always wanted. (Though you’d still have to renew it, and with a price increase every year…damn.) Or at least, fervently pray that this nightmare of a deal between Big Internet Company and Big Internet Body crumbles.If you’re lamenting this impending development (as I am), feel slightly comforted by the thought that we’re not alone — already, the proposed deal is coming under heavy flak, both from consumers and small registrars. You can read the whole story here.

…But not necessarily to have excelled in it!

Lisp ranks up there among the most difficult languages I’ve tried. The UP Diliman BS CS program exposes its students to a wide array of programming languages and paradigms (object-oriented, expression-oriented, and so on), and Lisp was one of those ‘heavyweights’ in CS 150. Other languages were Perl, Tcl, Haskell, Python, Smalltalk, and Prolog.The good and bad memories of Lisp:

1. GOOD. Of course, hurdling a language most programmers would find alien always feels good.
   
2. BAD. “Give an overview of the Lisp syntax” was the question I drew for a 5-minute oral exam. It was the only topic I wasn’t prepared for out of a dozen.
3. GOOD. Sophia and I managed to finish LUKIM: A Pure Lisp Interpreter in Java on the deadline, evading an Incomplete grade!
4. BAD. Have you tried coding a Lisp program by hand in a pressure-packed exam?

Even steven, I guess!

*Those nice Lisp logos come from Lisperati.com.

Is Bioware’s Infinity Engine, the workhorse behind the epic Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale RPG series the best gaming engine the world has ever known?

Reading an ancient back issue of PC Gamer (December 2002, the Doom 3 issue), I stumbled upon Steve Klett’s Alternative Lives Column, in which he declares Infinity to be “the greatest game engine in the history of the PC.”

Of course, he wrote that a few years back, but his points are still undoubtedly valid. Read on.

He states:

“[Infinity] has given PC gamers more entertainment (and more entertainment value) than any other, and that includes any 3D first-person engine. In both quantity and quality of gameplay hours provided, I don’t think any game engine can touch Infinity’s contribution.”

That coming from a guy who says he enjoys both first-person shooter and RPG genres.

I’ve more or less spent hundreds — nay, thousands — of hours playing all the major genres, but I’m biased towards role-playing, so I’m inclined to agree with Klett’s bold proclamation. No doubt there will be gamers who’ll (vehemently) disagree, especially Unreal/Quake/Doom fans. Who says those games weren’t damn beautiful? They were, especially Doom 3. John Carmack is a genius, I tell you.

But the amazing depth that the Infinity engine posseses is simply a dream come true for both die-hard and garden variety pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons fans. The three games and one expansion pack I’ve played which run on Infinity — Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, BG2 Expansion: Throne of Bhaal, Icewind Dale, and Icewind Dale II — were not by any means flashy, but they were revolutionary.

New game engines have arrived since the last use of Infinity (which was in Icewind Dale II), such as Bioware’s own Aurora Engine used in Neverwinter Nights. But still, this pretty recent Gamespot article written by Matthew Rorie praises the timeless Infinity engine. “RPG engines just don’t get any better than the Infinity engine,” he writes. “…the Infinity games were perhaps the perfect marriage of form and functionality when it comes to computer RPGs.”

As an aside, I’m currently addicted to Rome: Total War. Damn, I have never seen gaming goodness such as this. Epic real-time battles, deep Civ-like campaign, gorgeous graphics, astounding music. If I’m starting to sound like I’m advertising the game, don’t worry — I am. I utterly love it. (Gamespot Review)

I quote from a TechnologyReview.com article:

“In a report for the National Science Foundation in 2000, the Carnegie Mellon researchers showed that freshmen in CS1 who used Alice [a program to teach programming through a game framework] average a B grade, while those in the control group who didn’t use Alice averaged a C.

Furthermore, retention rates — the proportion of students using Alice in CS1 who moved on to CS2 — rose from 47 percent to 88 percent.”

Several universities around the world are also using gaming-related courses to reverse the alarming slide in computer science enrollees.

I wonder when will UP Diliman’s DCS have a course on gaming or gaming development. Closest to such a course might be CS 176 (Computer Graphics) and CS 174 (Mobile Computing — mobile phone games, anyone?). Here’s a confession: as an avid gamer in high school, I took BS Computer Science because I wanted to create my own games.

Fortunately, our student organization, UP ACM, has two Special Interest Groups (SIGs) related to gaming — the Gaming Guild and the Graphics SIG. I really hope the SIG Heads present more exciting and informative projects for the second semester.

This article reports on a certain Harvardian’s belief in “Homo digitas“, the next step on the evolutionary ladder for the Homo sapiens species.

If you come to think about it, just how much information does your brain process day in and day out? If you’re reading this blog, then chances are you’ve spent a considerable number of brain cells in absorbing, organizing, and judging the veracity of gigabytes of data from the Net, usually on the fly.

As a student, for years I’ve mused about one challenge facing people of our times — to learn the world’s past and present knowledge, which has been expanding with each new day, year, decade. Every generation learns the knowledge of their predecessors, adds to it, and passes it to the next generation.

Admit it — even just once you had thought that “I’m smarter than my parents; I know more things than they do.” If your computer scientist dad had to learn the basics of algorithms and operating systems in college, you now have to learn all of that plus pervasive computing and complex network protocols. (Might be an exaggeration, but you get my drift.) We have to learn the basics — be it about science, humanities, and the arts — and then progress to more complex topics.

And indeed, it might be true that each generation of humans is smarter than its predecessor. The same article states, “A New Zealand researcher named Jim Flynn discovered in the 1980s that the average IQ test scores were ticking up by three points–a full standard deviation–every decade since the beginning of the 1900s.”

Which might mean that when my (future) son boasts to me, “Hey Dad, I’m waaay smarter than you are!”, I’d just have to smile and accept the truth.