Virtually indistinguishable from magic

This is a pretty video-heavy post. I wanted to keep the numbers down but it's nice to be able to directly show what I am talking about. Sorry about that! Keep that tab-opening finger on the trigger! I recently realised that my younger self spent a lot of time  in some  very  interesting virtual spaces . If you'd followed those links you'd have found that they are all different games which involve sitting in a spaceship, zooming around and blowing things up. They belong to a fantastically nerdy game genre, 'Space Sims'. The wonderful coincidence that space is very empty and that 90's video cards could only manage a few thousand triangles meant that these sort of games were everywhere. As the 00's rolled in, and as Star Trek stopped being shown on TV for the first time in decades, this genre died out miserably leaving only few poorly translated games coming in from the East. Time's moved on still, and very recently mysterious market forces (crowdfundin...

I post a lot of videos and links onto my facebook page. I don't really know how many people watch or follow those links but I just do it anyway. I post stuff partly so that I can remember the things I find and go back to them one day. It's like fancy bookmarking. I've figured maybe I could collect everything here as well for convenience, and maybe put down some thoughts while I'm at it. Maybe I'll make this a weekly thing! Here is a fantastic link about direct observation of evolving species.  Several generations of colonies of bacteria were growth in a 20 year ongoing experiment, observing how bacteria with any useful mutations win out against the others. These researchers found that after about 30,000 generations the bacteria evolved to eat an entirely new sort of food! As usual, there's a bit of technical debate about what the observations mean but I can't say I understand it. I also actually always wondered if this was a study that people did befo...