The cockroach of writing

This 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 […]

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The 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 […]

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This took shape after a series of tangents during some discussion. Not much to it, but exploring the consequences could be interesting. One nation, not entirely confident about its relationship with another, wishes to install some armaments in close proximity to the other. To avoid any suspicion, materials are discretely transported by diplomats to the […]

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When it comes to measuring time, the metric prefixes are commonly used for periods less than one second long, but longer than that it becomes the mess that is minutes, hours, days and beyond. But have you ever wondered what the proper, SI, power-of-1000 equivalences are? Here’s are some handy conversions. SI unit Rough equivalence […]

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Last week, I played universal paperclips. It’s quite interesting and, if you have some time to spare (because you’re not doing anything important, regardless of whether you should be), I recommend you play it. The basic idea is that you control the actions of a superintelligent AI, and your goal is to manufacture paperclips. I […]

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First of all, if you haven’t seen Crossbow Endurance, you might want to do so now. Here I’ll be dealing with the second version of this… unique video: You’d be forgiven for not noticing, amongst the constant barrage of crossbow shots, that there are a few coded messages spread throughout the video. So, naturally, I’m […]

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Grammar. Something many people seem to lose all concept of when typing ideas through their computers, but also occasionally when speaking. So here I’m going to catalogue a few common mistakes people tend to make. First, let’s start with basics: the differences between “your” and “you’re”, “its” and “it’s”, and “their”, “they’re” and “there”. I […]

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You’ve got a flickering light, but can’t change the model’s skin to match? You want it to, but can’t work out how? Well, you can’t. Sucks, right? But don’t worry, it can be faked (and convincingly too)! What we’re going to do is set up timers to control the flickering instead. This is, in some […]

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I believe the canals of Half-life 2 are a pretty good example of intelligent level design. It’s a perfect location for that part of the game for a few reasons. (Warning: possible spoilers) First of all, Half-life 2 is linear. There’s no denying it. And placing the two chapters (Route Kanal and Water Hazard) in […]

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