I just walked through Wise Choice Coffee with a clown smile painted on my face.

With the last swig of Americano, the mug's rim left an imprint on my face: a perfect semicircle running through the corners of my mouth and up to the cheeks.

I can't take me anywhere.

Tschoon Kyung Bae has made a C version of Pollen to display on a portable stand-alone screen; see the pictures and video on his blog. Gorgeous. Where do I get one of those things?

Trigen's Windows screensaver port of Pollen is still around, too. He has updated it further with more behaviors and options.

Testing Darwin (via Julia Set) — a fantastic article on the artificial life and evolution research being done with Avida at MSU's Digital Evolution Laboratory.

The ultimate goal of the instructions in DNA is to make new organisms that contain the same genetic instructions. "You could consider a living organism as nothing more than an information channel, where it's transmitting its genome to its offspring," says Charles Ofria, director of the Digital Evolution Laboratory. "And the information stored in the channel is how to build a new channel." So a computer program that contains instructions for making new copies of itself has taken a significant step toward life.

I made some progress with the sketch evolver tonight. The next steps are a user-friendly demo applet and documentation.

The screenshot above shows a 500th generation sketch of the photo. The population (bottom) includes mutated copies and crossovers of the two best sketches from the previous generation.