A story going around at the moment is how Microsoft Exchange ran into a problem with the new year – somewhere the time was being stored as an integer that reads in base 10 like YYMMDDHHMM, so once YY became 22 it exceeded the maximum of 2147483647 available to a signed 32-bit integer, drama ensued. […]
read moreAs a quick interlude to the colour stuff, because there’s more where that came from… Last year wasn’t great for my arbitrary “at least once a month” posting schedule, but was rather productive in terms of drawing. Below is a collection of most of those doodles and art-adjacent depictions, arranged roughly chronologically in English reading […]
read moreWhere “alternate” pretty unambiguously means “better,” but I couldn’t pass up the alliteration. Previously I’ve shown how human cone cells certainly do not peak at red, green and blue frequencies. But those colours are only associated with the peaks; what would it mean to depict the entire range of responses as a single colour? The […]
read moreObservation: red and green lights make yellow; green and blue lights make greenish-blue… Hypothesis: additive mixtures of lights average out the wavelengths to an intermediate colour. Prediction: red and blue together will produce green. Experimental: nope – it made purple. Now, audience participation time – choose your own Conclusion! colours add by a mechanism somewhat […]
read moreInternet assertion: Humans see colour with red, green, and blue cone cells, named for the colours they best detect. Human cone peak sensitivities: This is part of the reason why the labels L, M, and S (for “long”, “medium”, and “short”) are used exclusively in the literature: the traditional names for cone cells have almost […]
read moreInktober is a yearly event where participants are encouraged to spend the month of October making an inked artwork every day. Or every week, or anything else really – it’s nothing official and there’s nothing to penalise, but the idea is to work on “positive drawing habits” and frequency is almost all of that. Last […]
read moreA common, if not ubiquitous, necessity in platformers or other real-time videogamey applications with a vertical dimension is some sort of jumping mechanic. The essence of a jump is straightforward – press a button and launch upwards, reaching an apex and returning to the ground. Was that introduction even required? In terms of the engine […]
read moreIn any “discussion” concerning the “merits” of degrees Celsius versus degrees Fahrenheit, there’s an even chance someone will joke that we should all be using kelvins instead. Well I’m that guy, but without joking. Two principle reasons: it makes more sense, and nothing useful is lost. more sense There’s a lot of talk over how […]
read moreThis video was too good to not share. It covers the entire history of Earth from 4.5 billion years ago to today, showing notable geological and biological events the whole way. There’s a fair abundance of available information on continental drift, atmospheric composition, evolution etc. changing over time, but it’s great to see it together […]
read moreThe riffle shuffle is one of the best card shuffling methods. Mathematicians have done maths to determine that just half a dozen riffles usually provides acceptable randomness throughout the deck, if done properly. A lot of people don’t like it because it bends the cards. It’s worth pointing out that while the “showy” shuffles with […]
read more