Alt-BEAM Archive
Message #13881
To: small-gods@egroups.com, beam-elite@egroups.com, bicore@egroups.com, alt-beam@egroups.com
From: "John A. deVries II" zozzles@lanl.gov
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 10:47:18 -0700
Subject: The Anti Ground Rules of the New Mailing Lists
-----Ground-----Zero-----
Discussion on ANY of the items brought up in this note SHOULD NOT be
directed to beam@egroups.com so make sure your email headers are right
before you push the Send button. No kidding -- people will get really
peeved at you if you start discussing this note in beam@egroups.com -- send
mail to me directly instead.
You Have Been Warned!
----------------------------------
Anyone who applies to the new lists will be approved as a member as soon as
I see the message and have a chance to go do it. Some lists (alt-beam)
have moderation, but that is an anti-spam measure.
Remember: you can always have a list sent as individual messages, as a
daily digest (if anything was even sent on a given day) or MOST IMPORTANTLY
not at all -- in the last case you are still subscribed but you go to the
web site to look at the messages. This last option is incredibly useful
for keeping your mailbox tidy.
I am definitely NOT proposing total anarchy... I want everyone to know that
now, at the beginning, there is pretty much no such thing as an "Off Topic"
conversation in any of the lists mentioned in the "To" field. Each of the
lists have their own general area of discussion so that if that area
becomes sufficiently well defined then "off topic messages" could be very
tolerantly nudged to another (or new) mailing list.
In other words, for the moment this is like several classical
brain-storming sessions. We are to throw out any and all ideas that come
to mind and attempt, at least for the now, to suspend ALL judgement. We
can get around to being critical later.
Just as a reminder -- sort of kind of what the new lists are about:
beam-elite: "Once upon a time, long long ago there was a beam-elite
emailing list. Perhaps this will be its reincarnation."
To be more exact, the regular beam@egroups.com list is a vibrant,
lively place to discuss newbie and intermediate stuff about BEAM -- how to
get your first solar engine working, what are the very basics of nervous
nets, what the heck is a bicore, which way do I put the resistors in?
B-} However, "higher level" (if you can call it that) discussions keep
coming up and keep getting squelched. Here is a place where these
discussions can go (like spiking integrating neurons and stuff).
small-gods: "A group for people who think that BEAM is about creating
artificial life. Not merely robotics nor cybernetics nor all of that stuff."
Well, ok, I know that the original small gods (with due respect to
Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" [tm]) were those closest to Mark Tilden, both
literally and in the BEAM sense. I hope that I'm not insulting them by
using this term: on the other hand, I seem to remember it coming about
because once you got your first walker going your really felt like you'd
created a biomorph -- a "life-form".
So, now if you want to discuss the more life-ish aspects of BEAM (and
to a lesser degree kinds of robotics), here is a place to do it. So far
the first notes have been about all of the "artificial pets" that seem to
be springing up everywhere: http://www.robotbooks.com/
has five "dogs" on
its pages, there is already a successor to Aibo, there is the infamous and
fairly irritating Furbie and so forth. Do these robots really "learn" (and
show nearly individual characteristics) or do they merely follow a preset
path that is determined by how many times the batteries have been replaced?
bicore: "This group is a to keep the word "bicore" available for any future
BEAM group that might wish to discuss such robotic designs."
There is a huge amount of basic bicore information in the
beam@egroups.com list (back messages can be found by looking at either
http://www.egroups.com/group/beam
or http://www.egroups.com/group/alt-beam
and a lot of people's web sites). Some of it, for example master-slave
bicore setups, have gotten pretty hairy technically speaking. However,
sometimes folks want to discuss topics that are beyond simply building your
first m-s bicore walker: for example, bicore lattices, Rubik's brain, and
so forth. Here is a place you can do that.
alt-beam: "The purpose of this list is to act as a "corporate memory" for
the BEAM community. It does so by storing all of the messages sent to the
"regular" emailing list owned and managed by Mark Dalton. Its particular
usefulness comes from being able to search for information in any of the
messages from the list back to January 27th, 1999."
And it stopped collecting messages when beam@egroups.com was formed,
about April of 2000. However, it still has a HUGE amount of BEAM information.
I am seriously considering going through the 13,880 messages and
throwing out the ones that have absolutely nothing to do with BEAM and the
meaningless flame wars and the ones that have gargantuan attachments while
attempting to keep useful stuff intact. Anyone who wants to help, please
tell me! I've changed the posting policy to moderated: if you want a
message saved as part of the "corporate memory" (which is actually better
served by just sending it to beam@egroups.com anyhow) then send it to this
list & I'll probably approve it.
-----------------------------------------
Particularly, I would like to mention gratitude to Mark Tilden for bringing
BEAM to us, Mark Dalton for keeping the mailing list alive, and Dave
Hrynkiw for providing a place where we can buy quality hardware. No doubt
I've made some incredible errors somewhere in all of this. If I've
offended anyone, please forgive me. If you notice any errors in how I've
set up the lists, please email me (privately).
Regards,
John deVries
Home