It really is the return of the ecology blogosphere!

After posting yesterday that we were ramping up the blog again, my RSS feed let me know that arguably the most impactful ecology blog of all time, Dynamic Ecology, was doing the same thing! We also heard from Terry McGlynn who has recently moved and renamed his really important blog, now a newsletter named Science For Everyone. And we heard from multiple other folks that they are in the process of spinning up new…

https://jabberwocky.weecology.org/2024/01/09/it-really-is-the-return-of-the-ecology-blogosphere/

Twelve Thought-Provoking Papers

On the 12th day of ALife Xmas, the newsletter gave to me: Twelve Thought-Provoking Papers! Here is a selection of ALife papers with a slightly philosophical edge that have (mostly) featured in the Artificial Life journal over the years.

A common refrain is that the web is _turning into_ garbage because of LLMs.

But that's not really true. It's just that the garbage is _drowning out_ everything else, especially in search engines that themselves have decided to go into the garbage generation business.

What can we do? We can promote the #IndieWeb right here. Highlight the good, perhaps obscure websites and blogs you come across, especially the ones that aren't loaded with ads & trackers.

The web is still full of awesomeness.

Fun summertime activities: this week I have mostly been enjoying hanging out with colleagues in Oxford playing with ecosystem engineers in evolutionary simulations.

Orange tips == ecosystem engineers, a novelty which evolved at 4000 iterations (why yes, I did put the grey line in the wrong place)

#nature #science