The geometry of fair dice

The geometry of fair dice

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It turns out that the geometry behind fair dice is more interesting and complex than you might first guess.

Professor Persi Diaconis discusses all kinds of interesting properties of fair dice as well as his interesting paper on the topic.

Getting fair dice for any number is very hard, if not impossible. But it turns out level-up dice have a unique ‘unicorn dice’ that you change the end cap and then roll in a circle. They’re pretty overpriced at $110 for a whole set – when a regular set will cost you $5, but a dice in this configuration can get you a fair roll for any value range.

Black Unicorn Horn Dice
Make a Netflix documentary on $70

Make a Netflix documentary on $70

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Paul E.T. shows us how easy it is for anyone to make a Netflix quality documentary. How cheap and how easy? Using just a few basic photography tools, some stock footage, and basic editing skills on software available to almost everyone – Paul shows us how you can make your own documentary that rivals anything you’ll see out of Hollywood and Netflix.

With such a low bar of entry one should be very critical of documentaries as a information source – no matter how slick it looks.

I’ve sure notice more documentaries – is it because they’re becoming the reality shows of today? One of the biggest reasons reality shows caught on may be the same reasons you are seeing more and more documentaries. Namely, they’re now super cheap and super easy to make (orders of magnitude cheaper than a regular TV show).

Blurring the walls between games and film

Blurring the walls between games and film

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PAX 2021 was an online event for me as COVID cases keep rising. One of the better streamed sessions was about the Blurring Lines between Games and Film. Definitely worth a watch as they cover a number of topics: difficulties in embracing the immersive nature of VR/AR, using VR/AR in advocacy work to immerse viewers into environments or as an alternative to zoos/animals in captivity, digital character design, virtual production with LED stages and Unreal engine, massively evolving digital production pipelines, and interactive VR environments. While these are some well known topics in the field, it’s still worth giving it a listen to hear how production folks are dealing with the massive upheaval of changing pipelines.

I still find LED stages instead of greenscreening with post-shoot CG one of the most amazing recent developments – something I’ve written about before with the Mandalorian.

Some panelist links:

On their topic of AR/VR environments, it was noted that COVID has decimated many in-person VR/AR experiences. One casualty was the VOID – and even their website is now gone. the VOID had interesting setups mixing VR, haptic feedback systems, and real-world props. Sadly, their setups in Las Vegas an other places are no more (like Venetian Las Vegas). Still, their legacy lives on in YouTube footage and some installations still hanging on through COVID.

Footage from the now defunct VOID:

Fight with some zombies in Zero Latency at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

As well as overseas, such as some of the interesting installations in Japan.

Peak Fall Foliage Tool

Peak Fall Foliage Tool

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My favorite season is fall. The air turns cool, there are hay rides and pumpkin patches, one curls up with a good book in front of a fire, reading scary tales, and, of course, watching the leaves change.

Japan has some very good, live updating of fall colors on a few websites.

The folks over at this website have a nifty little tool that predicts when fall colors will change this year. How do they predict the trends this year? With a little bit of data (and possibly a touch of pretentiousness):

The company uses a model that ingests a multitude of data sources including historical precipitation, NOAA precipitation forecasts, elevation, actual temperatures, temperature forecasts, and average daylight exposure to develop a baseline fall date for each county in the continental United States. Next, the model consumes hundreds-of-thousands of additional data points from a variety of government and non-government sources and layers this data over its own historical data from past years and, finally, with a high degree of accuracy, the algorithm produces nearly 50,000 date outputs indicating the progression of fall for every county in a graphical presentation that is easy to digest.

Split-flap displays

Split-flap displays

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Some of my fondest early foreign traveling memories were going to places in Europe and traveling from city to city where the train and airport arrivals/departures boards used these amazing electro-mechanical split-flap display boards. The last place I saw one still in use was at Frankfurt airport in Germany a year or so before covid (and I believe it’s still there):

Scottbez1 walks us through how they work with a demonstration of his single-digit Arduino-controlled display.

Even better, all the parts, software, 3D print resources, and information you need to make your own can be found on his github page: https://github.com/scottbez1/splitflap

But be forewarned, his estimates run around $200 to make only 4 of these wonderful digits.

Also, there are now companies around that will make these displays for you:

But be ready to pay $2800 for even a basic model. This guy does a decent job summarizing the current offerings.

The Difficult World of Relays

The Difficult World of Relays

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Before transistors were created in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain and vacuum tubes in 1908, electric circuit switching between on and off was a purely physical, mechanical process done via relays (invented in 1809). Some people have made whole computers from relays. But as ElectroBOOM comedically describes, there are a lot of difficult problems that relays had to be overcome which leads to an amazing number of trade-offs of speed, heat, longevity, safety, etc.

While we consider flipping circuits on/off in the GHz range (1,000,000,000 times per second) common on today’s modern transistor-based circuits, many of the same problems he describes here exist in some form in transistors (switching time, etc). Instead of the more mechanical issues/solutions relays use, transistors solve related problems with the types of substraits, power properties, etc.

At any rate, it’s a great trip back in time and a reminder that engineers know that while a concept looks very simple on paper, the devil is in the details – and sometimes those devils take decades to work out (if ever).

Magnetically Levitating Power Generation

Magnetically Levitating Power Generation

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Tom Stanton, maybe unintentionally, walks us through the entire industrial revolution’s worth of power generation technology in under 15 minutes as he demonstrates his desktop toy sized magnetically levitated flywheel. He then uses it to generate AC power for some LED’s and motors. Again, maybe unintentionally, he educates people on how power is generated today from turbines. The technology is the same whether it is a hand crank, steam from a nuclear reactor, or a spinning windmill.

Bonus points for the most clear explaination of a full bridge rectifier I have ever seen.

Incorruptibility

Incorruptibility

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Let us drive another nail in the tired and completely false Hollywood/pop culture trope of science vs religion shall we? Because, in case one forgets, a huge number of the world’s greatest scientists, mathematicians, and Nobel Prize winners were Christians that saw no conflict of science and religion but as two paths equally seeking truth. One path via the created world, and the other path via divine revelation of the human condition – and not in conflict but in harmony with each other.

Delayed Decomposition

“It’s definitely happening, and it’s definitely weird”. Scientists are increasingly agreeing something is going on, but in the centuries it has been happening, no science has come forth to explain it. Most recently, scientists have noted that after the death of some Tibetan Buddhist monks, their bodies remain in a meditating position without decaying for an extraordinary length of time, often as long as two or three weeks. A fascinating account of the phenomenon was written by Daniel Burke for the publication Tricycle.

The Thukdam Project of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds is now studying the phenomenon. For Buddhists, thukdam begins with a “clear light” meditation that allows the mind to gradually unspool, eventually dissipating into a state of universal consciousness no longer attached to the body. Only at that time is the body free to die. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson first encountered thukdam after his Tibetan monk friend Geshe Lhundub Sopa died and then saw him five days later: “There was absolutely no change. It was really quite remarkable.”

But this isn’t a new phenomenon, incorruptibility and long delays in decomposition of particularly holy individuals has been well known in the Christian world for centuries.

Faith and Science together – as they always have been.

As Fides Et Ratio and other Catholic documents point out, faith and science are two sides of the same coin of seeking truth. This isn’t just a Catholic idea, here’s a particularly interesting quote from Dalai Lama from the article:

What science finds to be nonexistent we should all accept as nonexistent, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter. An example is consciousness itself. Although sentient beings, including humans, have experienced consciousness for centuries, we still do not know what consciousness actually is: its complete nature and how it functions.

Dalai Lama

Links:

8GB vs 16gb Mac M1

8GB vs 16gb Mac M1

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I dabble around in Mac development semi-regularly, and was recently looking to update my Mac Mini to an M1 mac. Finding real data on whether you should buy the 8gb or 16gb version has been difficult. Despite many articles, very few do this kind of excellent side-by-side comparison.

I will say that some of the comparisons done early in this side-by-side video aren’t quite representative. Just opening an app and switching tabs isn’t super representative of performance since a good stack will just cache the image. To do a real test requires you make the app render something: scroll, select a dialog, or do a minimal interaction with the app to see if it snaps back to life or is just showing a static cached image (like the iPhone often does).