Thinking about Sex.

So, I've been trying to form an opinion on why sex evolved anyway. A quick review of the literature shows that there are at least 15 competing theories on the matter. Some facts I have learned are:

• Sexual reproduction is quite "expensive" compared to Asexual methods.
• sex accelerates the rate of gene mixing within a species.
  
• There are MANY species that are asexual, so its clear that sex is not always a winning solution.
• The rise of multicellular life happened not long after sex was invented.
• Many asexual species seem to have remained unchanged from the dawn of life.

Putting all this together, it looks to me like sex is an expensive adaptation that allows a species to track changes in its environmental niche that would otherwise occur too rapidly for asexual adaptation to track. Thus, in those environmental niches that have remained essentially unchanged for the last few billion years, asexual life has a reproductive edge, and dominates. In niches that depend on 'fast' changing events, like the positions of the continents, sexual life if better able to adapt and thrive.

I'm still not sure what this has to do with single- vs multicellular life but it may simply be that most niches that are more easily exploited by multicellular forms are the kind that change too rapdily to be survivable in the long term by asexual forms.

Or am I out to lunch?

Heraldry == Profit?

Holy Fuck-a-duck, but I think I just found a profitable business model based on _sps_ and my proposed Active Heraldic Extensions for Internet Browsers. Not only that, I can see how to integrate it with my design for the Intelligent Heraldic Database and with a points-of-difference engine that an SCA member once asked me to look into for him.

I don't know how much money I could make off of this idea, but considering that Active Heraldic Extensions were a joke and the Intelligent Heraldic Database was an idea I had when I was still in High School some time around 1980, I'm amazed.

I doubt that the details would make sense to anyone else but _sps_ so I'll just put it this way:

Imagine a website that can let you interactively design a piece of heraldry. Either a standard shield, or the whole full thingamy with supporters and mottos and crowns and whatnot. It would allow both old-school static heraldry, or the new active kind that can move and is designed for video displays. For a small fee you can register the thing with the New Internet Guild of Heralds and be presented with its heraldic description as well as a rendered image in one (or more) file formats of your choosing. Once its been registered, folks can look up your name and find your heraldic symbols, or can do searches for various symbols and find your identity. As in days of old, no one will be allowed to register an image that comes within a few points of similarity of your own. For a small extra fee, you can order it embazoned on a mug or cap or something.

Now, the REAL money making scheme is that, just as in days of old, there are combinations of colors/patterns/symbols/whatever that are forbidden except by express permission of the king (which am I). So, you convince an RPG video game company to license a set of icons/patterns/symbols/whathaveyou and forbid anyone from using them unless you are presented with a cryptographically-signed unlock token that was issued by the game and bound to that registered user. So, if you want to get the skull-with-meteors-for-eyes symbol on your personal mug, you have to defeat the second-level warlord in the game, etc. You can cause envy and awe by having symbols and patterns on your mug that indicate you had to frag 7000 other gamers to unlock it...

Finally, since we put the active heraldry in there at the moment, the instant someone has a way of wrapping an OLED screen around a mug and making it dishwasher safe, you can buy a mug with an animated version of your heraldic symbol.

The Return of the Evil Daystar.

It just took me 5 minutes to remember how to call up my LJ client so I could say I was awake, so mabye I'm not.

Coffee is dripping, so I'ma gonna get me some!

Self Improvement for Dummies.

I just realized that the smarter version of me would go to bed already, and not stay up past 4:00 am for the 4th day in a row.

So, in order to cause as much possible confusion in identities between him and me, I'm off to bed as well.