One reachier goal is to add an n-body physics system. […] RocketWerkz say there’s a “small chance” of RocketWerkz developing such a simulation internally - they’re currently trying to hire somebody with a PhD to apply the requisite high-density brain-magic - but it’s likely this will be left for modders to figure out.

The next Bethesda game is just going to have a bug dependent on solving the Reimann conjecture, smh, always waiting on the modders to solve the company’s intractable math mysteries.

P

Spudghetti

Bigger than Bieber, the old beaver brushed the broken lever while brandishing a bloody cleaver

Excalicar, of the High Ways

And they that can shift into the 6th gear shall be named King of the Road!

You might be part of the problem, but you WILL be part of the solution!

Going into physics was the biggest mistake of my life. I should’ve declared CS. I still wouldn’t have any women, but at least I’d be rolling in cash.

Honestly, there wasn’t all that much cash to roll in and there’s less all the time now. Plus, if you think busted equipment is bad, wait until I tell you about inheriting legacy code.

This is why we love the Saints. Terrible at football but at least they know how to party after the game.

I

I managed until university when I left calculus and entered “Linear Algebra” and man, I really don’t like matrices.

S

E

Several of these irritate me but ultimately evoke a solid

But fuck me playing with the person who came up with these would test my patience.

Pizza, V? I suppose cheese and meats are optional. One can. Some do. If we get into “It has minerals in it!” then we’ll have to argue about what atoms are, so fine, pass.

Guitar (!) Strings, A? I know about catgut, for violens in my mind, but let us wiki it. Huh neat, catgut is intestenal fiber from usually goat or sheep, sometimes cat-tle, but never actually cat. And, while still preferred for concert harps and classical instruments, guitars all mostly switched to steel in the 1900s (and nylon or mixed later). So when was this game printed, how old are you imagined-ghost-of-the-author?

Wouldn’t silk be Animal though? Are worm by-products vegetables? Were plant fiber parachutes a thing?

Reminds me of Diablo and how in the years after the original you’d see so many clones with “from one of the people who worked on the original Diablo.” I think Torchlight, Titan Quest, and Nox all got advertised this way at one time. I mean it’s pretty common in any industry. How many movies have you seen advertised as being directed by “the creators of hit movie whatever” and its like the 3rd unit DP in charge?

So photons, the particle of light, can interact with matter (atoms) in different ways. It could be absorbed by an electron, and then the energy transfered could knock the electron off the atom. That’s the photoelectric effect. It could also excite an electron into a higher orbital but not dislodge it, and often the electron will emit a new photon when it drops back down to ground state. That’s phosphorescence. The photon could also hit nothing and travel straight through.

If you shot a photon (using a laser) through a cloud of atoms, you could watch for these interactions. Normally, light seems to slow down when passing through a medium (air or water) because the photons get absorbed and re-emitted. In bulk, this causes light scattering and slows travel.

In this experiment, the cloud is made of ultracold rubidium. Rubidium is quite reactive and a pretty big atom, but i dont know specifically why it is used. What surprised the experimenters is that they could measure both the excited states of the atom and the emission of the photon. Sometimes, the atoms would seem to stay excited even though the photon had already been emitted, and also sometimes atoms would get excited even though no photon had been absorbed.

This is interesting but kind of makes sense to me. The quantum properties of reality don’t disappear when we move up to bigger scales and aggregates. Rather the quantum properties seem to just “average out.” But this has weird effects. Electrons, for example, aren’t little balls in orbit around the nucleus. They’re waves of energy that get probabilistically smeared out over an “orbital”, an area around the nucleus where that electron is likely to be located. When atoms combine into molecules, the orbitals also combine into complex orbitals over the entire molecule. And when lots of atoms get arranged into a crystal (like in metals) those orbitals smear out over the entire aggregate. That’s kind of what it is to be entangled with other matter, to be bound up in the same quantum probability function.

So to my mind, looking at how one atom reacts with a small number of atoms in a supercooled cloud doesn’t make sense, and gives weird results like negative time. The wave function of the photon must account for the wave function of the entire cloud. The single photon has infinitely many possible interactions through the cloud, which in aggregate always amount to taking longer to pass through while exciting some electrons along the way.

Great book, one of my favorites! Can’t comment on the movie it (apparently) inspired.

Thanks! I hate it!

A Call of Duty RTS? Only if they brought back WC3’s Heroes, and maybe gave you a whole Company of them to manage.

RTS’s need a massive new hit to redefine the genre. The starcraft style is stale and too slow for how most people game today. I’d kind of enjoy seeing people take another shot at where C&C4 and AoE3 were trying to go: something more tactically oriented with a greater emphasis on mobility. I think that era of RTS innovation got completely hamstrung by trying to force every game to not only have multi-player but also to be an esport and also to be a live-service endless money machine.

You may note that games today are still being ruined by the same forces.

Funny, the game I most associate with him is BoomBlox on the Wii. It’s a really great game, and I guess the wiimote is kind of mouse-like, particularly in that game.

He’s been involved in several games though, even had an office at EA for a while. Most famously, of course, is the original Medal of Honor. Arguably the success of MoH as a franchise led directly to Call of Duty and thus to the current state of gaming today.