tiler

Do you ever suffer from sleep paralysis?

All this Oculus bashing makes me want to order my dev kit even more.

It could just be the case that we are at a point on the programming timeline where much of the work done by the deeply technical grey-bearded wizards from the past few decades has been abstracted away into APIs, programming languages, and design methodologies. These tools give people who have programming skills the oppourtunity to sacrifice a few months learning them to gain the creative power that not too long ago may have taken years. So this is not a period of time where the older programmers can rest on their laurels.

What we consider very basic geometry calculations today, so trivial we teach them in elementary school, would be beyond the capabilities of even some of the fabeled Ancient Greek Geometers. Again, this is only because many generations of mathematicians have refined and abstracted away much of the detail that at one point was necessary to perform these now trivial computations.

For some good hands-on intuition of the Sierpinski Triangle check out this tutorial on using some open-source (research) software to build a tile-set which will self-assemble the Sierpinski triangle: http://self-assembly.net/wiki/index.php?title=Sierpinski_tri...

Last summer I received an undergraduate research grant to work on ISU TAS (the above linked software). So I'd love to see more people using it outside of the research community!

For more information on algorithmic self-assembly in general http://self-assembly.net

"I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.” --Isaac Asimov

If the FBI's main objective was law enforcement, then wouldn't the general populace expect them to pursue other Federal agencies that are actively breaking the law? Where as, if the FBI states their main objective as 'National Security' they can turn a blind eye to the the other law breaking Federal agencies as long as these agencies are acting within the interests of 'National Security'.

And in truth, many citizens are law breakers. And many of the laws that are broken today may not even exist in a couple of years. Where as, ensuring 'National Security' is a non-transitory objective.