I had insomnia the other night after some clod (I think it was the automatic telemarketing machine of “Brian's Garden Services”) rang our phone at 1 AM and then I lay awake till 3 AM, and I started calculating how many seconds old I am, inspired by Charles Stross's computer-think gimmick of discussing periods of time in gigaseconds in Accelerando.

And I realized you have your gigasecond birthday — well really its billionth birthsecond — in your 31st year of life, and that before too many more years my two-billionth birthsecond will be rolling around.

Rudy, Jr., wrote a nice little web page that helps you compute your billionth birthsecond. If you're 30 or just turned 31, check this out so you don't let your gigabirthsecond slip by uncerebrated! This is a photo of Rudy taken precisely at his billionth birth second, by the way.

I recorded another lecture in my “Philosophy and Computers” class yesterday, about evolution and artificial life (a.k.a. alife). The picture above is from the amazing alife Galapagos program by the supernal Karl Sims.

The sound came out better than before, because reader Lisa Williams tipped me off about Audacity, which is free. This ware has a nice visual display so I can edit the files. And it has a very good feature “Equalization.” I'm loading the preset “Acoustic” equalization curve and applying it, which cleans up the sound a lot. And you can get a free plug-in so that Audacity saves WAV format into MP3.

I posted the link to it on Gigadial as usual.

The demos are mostly from “Boppers”, which you can get with the “Software Downloads” button on my page for The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul.

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