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Winning the Casual Games Arms Race

Phillip Alvelda — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 13:59:43 +0000

I’m a big fan of disruptive technologies, and I love it even more if there is a nice basis in applied physics. So check out the Jenga Pistol.

It will allow you to instantly crush your old-school opposition using the simple principles of impact and inertia. It’s also instructive to consider some winning Jenga strategies using finger flicks even when you are forbidden the latest technologies! Video after the break.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9BmTmMEOhQ&eurl=http://i.gizmodo.com/5168295/diy-pistol-shoots-out-blocks-so-you-can-win-at-jenga-every-time&feature=player_embedded]

Live 3D Graphics With Excel

Phillip Alvelda — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:32:00 +0000

Every time I get a chance to watch one of our finance folks over at MobiTV wield a spreadsheet, I learn some new tricks. Those financial analysis folks steeped in the arcane features of Excel seem to be able to make the software package produce ever more astounding and useful models of increasingly complex systems.

But this one takes the cake. Check out this really cool implementation of a 3D graphics rendering engine. IN EXCEL! Peter Rakos over at Gamasutra outdid himself.

This image and video pair shows the rendering system using a simple display that colors the native Excel spreadsheet cells as the calculations are being performed.

This image and video pair shows the same program using the Microsoft Office Graphics Abstraction Layer to do the rendering instead of using writes to the spreadsheet cell.

Even better, some of the spatial layout and cell computation models of spreadsheets turn out to be very useful in designing and presenting very compact and elegant representations of the rendering pipeline. This design and layout in the 2-D spreadsheet grid is massively easier to see and understand than all the simple linear text files that I coded up in my college graphics course. It also makes the interrelationships and cell/function dependencies immediately obvious, and debugging is trivial with live previews of the calculations while the program is running. High cool.

“The yellow color marks the user-defined parameters and green color indicates the engine-calculated values. Numbered areas contain the following data:
Parameters of the perspective projection
3D coordinates of the objects’ points (relative to their center)
Shift and rotation matrix (further details can be found e.g. at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_projection)
Parameters of the rotation
3D absolute coordinates of the points after the shift and rotation
2D coordinates of the points after the perspective projection
Screen coordinates of the points
End points of the objects’ edges
Formula of an element in the shift and rotation matrix. Simplicity and compactness are clearly visible.”

Now I don’t think anyone currently expects this to evolve into a real 3D simulation system, but it does point to some very interesting 2D layout programming paradigms that might very well turn out to be VERY useful in developing more complex software. It wouldn’t surprise me if the professional code development environments evolve towards this sort of thing within the next few years. And of course, 3D environments are just a step away.

And I have a whole new animation tool for my next presentation!

Check out the whole post here.

Abstinence-only Driver’s Ed

Phillip Alvelda — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:08:00 +0000

Don’t miss reading this link at McSweeny’s. Hilarious.

We Are What We Drink

Phillip Alvelda — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:22:00 +0000

Cerling and Ehleringer over at the University of Utah just published a paper in the online journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” describing their new forensic technique, which uses Hydrogen and Oxygen isotope concentrations from local water tables in your hair to determine where you have spend your time.

The two maps here show predicted average hydrogen (top) and oxygen (bottom) isotope levels in human hair across the continental United States — isotopes that vary with geography because of different isotope levels in local drinking water. The ratios of heavy, rare hydrogen-2 to lighter, common hydrogen -1 are highest in red and orange areas in the top map, and lowest in the blue and darker green areas. The ratios of heavy, rare oxygen-18 to lighter, common oxygen-16 are highest in red and orange areas of the bottom map, and lowest in the blue and darker green areas. Credit: University of Utah

“You can tell the difference between Utah and Texas,” Ehleringer says. But, Cerling adds, “You may not be able to distinguish between Chicago and Kansas City.”

So in case you’re considering a life of crime, you might want to

Consider a new bald or buzz-cut look so the encoded travel history you carry along with you is limited.
Drink only bottled water
Shelve any green tendencies and eat at only imported meat and produce.

How Grandma Sees the Remote

Phillip Alvelda — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 17:51:00 +0000

via Gizmodo.

No News is Good News?

Phillip Alvelda — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 16:37:00 +0000

I came across this graphic this morning, which really tells the story of the decline and fall of television news. Check out “30 Minutes with CNN.” What is worse, there are other “news” stations that are worse, having mostly replaced factual reporting with talking heads screaming at each other.

(click on image for larger version)

With all of the news now ad-supported, the key financial goal of the “news stations” has become to keep viewers watching as long as possible so they see as many commercials as possible. Sadly, Americans would rather be entertained than informed, and so departed the news, international first, and then almost everything else.

It would seem to me that there MUST be an opportunity for a next-gen CNN with more factual reporting, even if we real news wonks have become a tiny niche…

Fine Art Photoshop Contest

Phillip Alvelda — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 20:00:00 +0000

Yes, my favorites are all irreverent, but I just can’t resist. Check out the growing collection at the Fine Art Photoshop Contest posted here, where you can also see the un-retouched originals.

Only In Japan: Rice Paddy Art

Phillip Alvelda — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 17:13:00 +0000

You’ve heard of crop circles? Well, here’s the Japanese version made of living plants. By patterned planting of four different varieties of rice plants, each with different colored leaves, Akio Nakayam and friends grew these reproductions of the Edo-period prints. Wow.

How Nerds Eat

Phillip Alvelda — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 14:39:00 +0000

I just stumbled on a great post from Julieanne over at Cosmic Variance.

“My temporary officemate runs down to the vending machine and buys a bag of gummi bears. He dumps them on the desk, sorts them by color, and then proceeds to eat them in order of increasing bin size (i.e. the pile of 1 orange one, then the pile of 3 yellow ones, then the pile of 4 green ones, etc).
If I buy a bag of M&M’s, I sort them by color, then figure out a division that lets me arrange them in a triangle, with one color per horizontal row, but allowing colors to be repeated (i.e. it’s ok for 9 red M&M’s to show up as a row of 7, and then further up, a row of 2). I then eat off each diagonal, producing a progressively smaller triangle, but one that maintains the horizontal color structure till the tasty end.
My kids, who I suspect inherited a geek-streak a mile wide, also sort multicolored candy into patterns and make up an algorithm for eating it.
The non-scientists who I have asked about this habit look at me like I’m nuts. (So do people who grew up in large families, because someone was bound to snarf the candy before they could take the time to develop this particular neurosis.)”

One of my personal favorites on the candy consumption side is to conduct natural selection experiments with M&Ms. I like to take two M&M’s and squeeze them together until one fails structurally, and then I eat the failure, setting aside the victor to participate in the next round of trials. The winner of the single elimination tournament is the most fit M&M prototype for future generations. The superior M&M is always the last to be eaten.

I am also known to organize my French Fry consumption by waiting just until the smallest fries reach the perfect temperature, and then eating them in order of increasing size, catching each one as it passes through the optimal temperature (for the layman, the higher surface area-to-volume ratio of the smaller fries means that they cool faster.)

My wife does, in fact, think I’m nuts, though she seems to find it endearing in some odd way.

Peel an Egg in 5 Seconds, Updated

Phillip Alvelda — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 16:38:00 +0000

Update September 8, 2007:

I happened to walk into our kitchen the other morning to discover my wife and a friend chatting over a late breakfast. I said my normal hellos and good mornings but really intellectually engaged at the time. But as I was turning around to go back to my home office, our friend picked up a hard-boiled egg (the first hard-boiled egg I had seen since originally posting the video below) and was preparing to start peeling it.

I have to admit that she dealt with it rather well when I leaped across the kitchen to snatch the egg from her grip before she could begin to break the shell. When everyone had recovered from my surprise leap, largely I suspect in allowance of my somewhat regular odd (nerdly) behaviors, I asked her “how long do you think it would take you to peel this egg?”

“A few minutes,” she responded.

I then asked, “what would you say if I told you I could to do it in under 5 seconds?”

“No. Way.”

“Time me.” I used the technique pictured below. It took 3.5 seconds.

10 seconds of stunned silence followed, whereupon she shouted, “That was TOTALLY COOL!”

Ah yes. Nerd pride.