tim_hutton

The value on pi approximation day (22/7) is closer to pi than the value on pi day (3.14).

Is anyone else a bit sick of these 'pi days'? Every year we get the same old shtick.

Pleasingly, under the one true date format [0] there are no pi days. (Well there are, but long past the heat death of the Universe.)

[0] https://xkcd.com/1179/

The source code (mines.c) is here:

https://git.tartarus.org/?p=simon/puzzles.git;a=blob;f=mines...

There is code for solving a grid using deductions in this section:

https://git.tartarus.org/?p=simon/puzzles.git;a=blob;f=mines...

And below that is the code that generates grids and checks that they are solvable without taking risks.

A similar approach is used to analyse the difficulty of Sudoku games here:

http://hodoku.sourceforge.net/en/index.php

with different names for the different types of deduction.

It seems odd to say "Mr. Turing" (referring to a period in the 1950s), given that he got his Phd in 1938. The article uses "Dr." for other people.

The phone next to it is vibrating?

Exploring how to do the same thing for the Mandelbrot Set:

https://github.com/timhutton/mandelstir

In computer vision there is a well-known problem of estimating the color of the lighting.

I worked on detecting the player's skin color for a recent computer game. We decided not to use an RGB camera for pretty much the same reason as seen in the strawberry illusion - the computer would see those strawberries as gray. An image with unknown lighting might look fine to a human but it's hard for a computer to estimate the actual color of objects without also seeing objects of known color, such as a color card.

Surely now we can agree that it is FINALLY time to adjust our planet's orbit to correct for this problem once and for all.

Pretty much. The XML is mainly used to specify the 'mission' that you want your agent to perform. You write your agent in Python (or a few other languages), and it can be as simple as this: https://github.com/Microsoft/malmo/blob/master/Malmo/samples...

We talk to the Minecraft Mod over TCP.

I often think that this is what Minecraft should have used instead of redstone.

This design requires a rail down the middle of the tube? Am I reading that right?

Another intermittent engine (that you really can make at home): the putt-putt or pop-pop boat: http://blog.jgc.org/2011/06/making-ponyo-or-putt-putt-boat.h...

The root cause of this is the influence of money on our politicians.

Symptoms include laws written for the rich and the corporations rather than for the people, causing the continued growth of inequality and a drag on the economy.

Support Lawrence Lessig in his efforts to solve this root problem!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g

He departs on the second of his New Hampshire Rebellion walks on Sunday.

The 122 in particular should be almost halfway between 100 and 150 but theirs is much lower.

The numbers in the polio graph doesn't match the positions! Comparison: http://i.imgur.com/3kGXyRA.png

Not a massive problem in this case but worrying.

The social benefits from free software are positive externalities and thus not naturally dealt with by the free market. Compare with the negative externalities of air pollution, for example.

Summary: Nitrocellulose (gun cotton) doesn't need oxygen to explode but it turns out that it doesn't work in a vacuum. We only found this out in 2013. A Rosetta scientist saw the Wired article and sent a comment in April 2014.

Also, it's not just about the angles. It's about the number of connections between vertices too. There just aren't any other solutions.

To convince yourself, here's a fun game you can try with pencil and paper: http://ferkeltongs.livejournal.com/28364.html (disclosure: that's my blog)

I feel bad for the poor heptagon, which has neither a flat tiling nor a solid. At least on the hyperbolic plane everyone gets to take part in a tiling.

Sure. Download the index.html and run it locally. Comment out line 259: //setInterval( animate, 20 );

Fixed: "The Person Who Will Build Google's Quantum Computer"

I wish Wired would only mention the sex of the person if it was relevant.

Edit: Do we casually mention someone's skin color, when it's not relevant?

I spoke to Glen Ropella of Swarm about him in 2009 when I was writing a paper and Glen said this: "Most of the people I know related to Swarm refer people to me when they're looking for Chris. It's no mystery, though. He decided awhile back to leave the Swarm/SFI community for personal reasons. So, he's out there. He just doesn't want to work on that stuff anymore, at least as of the last time I talked to him. ... He may well want to interact. I don't know. All I know is I haven't heard from him in awhile."

Chris, if you're out there: Hi!

Glyphosate was banned in Sri Lanka on the basis on this. The ban was lifted two weeks later: http://www.newslaundry.com/2014/07/14/exploring-gm-foods-par...

Another example: the common meaning of words. These strings of letters only mean what we want them to mean. You'd think it would lead to chaos without a central authority but it doesn't, it's perfectly stable. In fact more stable over time than it would be if centrally specified, because it is adaptive to change.

Another example: truth itself. We might not be able to nail it down in a written document or prove it mathematically but it will emerge unavoidably in a community as a tight consensus.

Randall, are you stalking me? I posted about this a few days ago: http://ferkeltongs.livejournal.com/36976.html

More information:

Analog clocks have always annoyed me, so I decided to make my own. This is the logical solution I think. There's only one hand, which moves round once a day and shows where the sun is on the map. In the photo it is nearly 10pm in the UK so the sun is over the Alaska timezone. The 6am-6pm line is your horizon, so the top half is your daytime.

This one is for GMT/UTC - you'd need to rotate the map for different timezones, to put your location at the top under the noon marker.

The map is an azimuthal equal-area projection, made with NASA's G.Projector: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/gprojector/

I bought a 24-hour clock and simply inserted the printed map in place, after removing the minute and second hands.

Make your own!

Here is the thing I made: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUbOQjEiI9A

As a Ready file: https://reaction-diffusion.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Ready/Pa...

Oh, that's a nice idea. I'm going to go and implement that in Ready. (https://code.google.com/p/reaction-diffusion/)

I managed about half of his final puzzle, from November 16th. Even solved the "nil by mouth" one without making the connection. Now I am sad.

There's a great talk about the coming "War on General Purpose Computing": http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html