I wasn’t sure I was going to write about this article. As I’m trying to write and my wife is trying to nap, there is a lawn mower out there somewhere nearby. My closest neighbors have two Harleys. I’m reminded of the time I was doing contract work for a game company. I was really sick, really tired, and I had gone in on a Saturday to try and get caught up. They had a sound booth there which wasn’t nearly as sound proof as the one in that article. Some sound engineers had come in to work too and they were recording a woman screaming over and over and over…

I just need to relax, sit back and watch the Dalek relaxation tape.

I mentioned I bought a graphics tablet recently. I got to thinking how cool it would be to control music with it. It occurred to me someone probably has done that. After a short search I found a couple programs to do it. One of then I couldn’t get to work and the other one I can’t seem to pipe through anything other than the default synthesizer. My tablet senses gestures and has some other control features that Wmidi (the software) doesn’t take advantage of but it’s fun to play with. If you have a tablet, you can find the free software here.

I was laughing when I read this Wired article about the Navy making a real life laser cannon wondering what it actually sounds like. Because if you are going to spend a fortune on a laser cannon, it absolutely must sound cool.

This is another one of those ‘free energy‘  things that make you think if it were true it would completely change the world. There is a lot of discussion about whether it would violate the laws of thermodynamics in the comments. It’s kind of like these people. I’m pretty skeptical but it doesn’t mean I’m not rooting for somebody out there to make some sort of breakthrough. On the other hand, solar power in its various forms keeps advancing. You wouldn’t think about it, but making a better salt could make concentrated solar more affordable.

There seems to be a lot of nostalgia going on at kickstarter. I guess bringing back Leisure Suit Larry was to be expected.

When I think of Iran, I think of something desert like. I guess I’m not that well-informed. It’s a pretty big country. These pictures are absolutely beautiful and amazing.

And finally, something to make you say awww…

I mentioned kickstarter in my last post. Until recently I would look at it and people would have projects there for games they wanted to write but often they were trying to raise ridiculously small amounts of money compared to what it takes to actually produce a game. The past month that seems to have changed with a few projects raising millions of dollars. Of course, these are well known people. I’ve had a game in mind for ten years or so I’ve wanted to write, but it’s hard to imagine doing it without large resources.

I ran across the site petridish the other day. They are attempting to crowd source science in the same way kickstarter does. I remember reading about DRACO, a project to create a broad spectrum anti-viral at MIT. It holds the promise to do to viruses the same thing that antibiotics did to bacterial infections. Those people should definitely get their project on petridish.

We occasionally have wasps building nests in our grill. At least they aren’t two and a half inches long!

This place is a good example of somewhere I would go a lot more often if I owned a self driving car. It’s about eight hours away and spectacular. You could just settle in for the night and wake up there. I had not thought about the point he makes in that link where people would probably own a lot less cars because most families could get by with one car. I disagree with his point in the last paragraph though. I think once most people have them, the insurance costs for driving your own car will become so high most people will not be able to afford it.

This is not a caterpillar.

Apparently there are glowing jellyfish in Japan.

And finally, something to make you say awww…

I was watching this TED talk today on machine intelligence.

It always strikes me how people say the singularity or omega as he calls it, is twenty or thirty years out.  I guess I should point out, that is when machine intelligence will exceed human intelligence (in case you didn’t watch the video). As he mentions, no politician is talking about it.  However, I think the impact will come much sooner. It got me thinking about the Jeopardy where the computer ‘Watson’ competed.

When I was looking for that video, I ran across this explanation of the really big mistake Watson made. Yesterday we were sitting outside after going to the vet to get more fluids for our cat, (giving them has gone very smoothly so far in case you were wondering). I said to my wife “Did we remember to get the needles?” She said “Noodles?” It was totally out of context, of course, as we weren’t talking about the vet or the cat. Anyway, humans do this too and machine intelligence has already progressed to the point where most of us could be replaced it’s just a matter of it being more cost effective.

Writing a game for Androids and iPhones really makes me think how odd it is that suddenly everyone is walking around with a supercomputer in their pocket. BashTheBankers wasn’t really the game I wanted to write. It was a game I felt I could write given the resources at my disposal. I think it’s a fun game but I haven’t yet published a free (advertising supported) version and there is so much free stuff out there. It’s hard to get noticed no matter what you do. If you have never seen kickstarter it is a site where people crowd source their projects. I suppose in hindsight I realized if you can’t get a large number of people excited and funding your project there, you might as well come up with another idea because people are not going to see your game unless there is some internet buzz about it.

Speaking of kickstarter I thought this was funny. [Edit] Oh well, it appears that link no longer works. It was a kickstarter project to buy kickstarter; maybe they didn’t think it was funny.

And, finally something to make you say awww…

This site has been getting a lot of traffic lately and I keep meaning to post but I’ve been so busy. We have been working on an updated version of our game (more on that later). I’ve been talking to clients about mobile apps, and I’m working on web pages for people. On top of that I’m constantly learning new skills, and trying to retain and improve the old ones. And there have been distractions, the weather here in the central U.S. has been simply amazing for this time of year. Also I’ve been worrying about this girl.

Kelly

We had some blood tests run last week and she has some liver problems. Her kidney levels are high too, but I expected that as she had been sick a while back and  lost a bunch of weight. We starting feeding her the food she wanted instead her kidney friendly diet and her weight came back. I’m giving her antibiotics hoping her liver problems are due to an infection and not cancer. Later today I’m off to the vet to pick up fluids we will have to give to her. I know we have done it before but I’m not looking forward to sticking a needle in her and keeping her from moving around while we wait for the solution to drip into her. The good part is she seems to be feeling OK. Earlier we took a walk in the yard and she stalked a rabbit that was about her size. I don’t think the bunny had much to worry about but it wasn’t bad for a cat who will be 21 years old if she makes it to June.

Some of the things I’ve been meaning to write about are the many tools we used to write our game. Sometimes you wonder why there are so many games out there when you have to  program, do 2d and 3d art, produce sound effects, music, animation and on and on. One of the things I have been determined to do lately is to really learn to use Photoshop. I don’t like Photoshop! I find it very frustrating and often just give up and use a paint program I wrote years ago because, I wrote it so I know how it works. However, I recently bought a graphics tablet and decided to just grit my teeth and just plow into it. I have learned a fair amount of it over the years but some of the new tools are pretty amazing. I’m not going to do a tutorial here as there are already a ton of them out there. I was just going to mention content aware fill because it’s really cool.

Original

Altered

This isn’t a particularly good picture. I took it because I wanted to use the content aware feature to remove the blue tarp and the telephone pole. I used the quick selection tool to select the tarp. Now, even if you know nothing about Photoshop I just want to make a point. I did not tell the program how to fill in the area where the tarp was. I just told it to figure it out, and in this case it did a pretty good job. In the case of the telephone pole, I simply used the healing brush with content aware selected and brushed over it.  I’ve used this tool enough to know sometimes it doesn’t work and gives you completely ridiculous results but more often than not, it works and saves you a bunch of time.

All those smart phones are definitely cool, but once in a while, you see something that makes you go wow we live in amazing times! Check out the videos at the bottom of this page about a coating that repels liquids.

from Matt

We have published a game on the App Store! It’s a physics/cannon shooter universal app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

Check out the website and play the demo here bashthebankers.com

Just a short post testing to see if everything works after the upgrades and such. Stay tuned for a real post soon.
J

I’ve had a number of emails asking if I had stopped writing this blog. I really never meant to stop. It’s just that spring came and in addition to all the normal things to do like putting in a garden, everything around here started breaking. I mean my lawn mower, refrigerator, garage door, and computer just to name a few. Also, I’m getting a lot of web design work. Anyway, since people have been asking I thought I would say I’m still here but since the frost is coming, I have a lot of things I need to do before we squeeze a ton of houseplants in here. I’m probably not going to get back to writing at least for a few weeks yet. You might check back and hopefully see something then. I don’t know if I will get the chance but I was also hoping to do a site re-design based on some of the things I have learned or at least fix some of the things I have learned to fix which appear differently depending on your browser.

So, check back in a while and thanks for the nice emails and comments.

J

Unless you haven’t been on the web lately, you surely have seen one of these articles about a group of scientists at Cornell who developed a machine which was able to deduce the basic laws of motion from “observation”. While I don’t know much about their work, one of the questions which come to mind is how the A.I. is structured. I mean you have to give it something to work with and to get some sort of generic intelligent device you need to be careful not to ‘guide’ it towards the results you want. Not that machines can’t be terribly good at sorting through amounts of data no human could handle. I just wonder if you wouldn’t get a lot of  this kind of thing comparing lemons imported from Mexico with the U.S. highway fatality rate. As they point out, correlation is not causation. I can see where the lab robots they talk about later in the article would be very useful for doing a bunch of grunt lab work and summarizing the results. The other thing you would expect whether the thing is actually working or not is revealed later in the article when they point out after having it work on some problems of metabolism in biology, the machine kicked out some equations they are still trying to understand. I personally have always believed the day is coming when machines will be smarter than us and it will be a lot sooner and far more disruptive than people realize. Somewhere in one of its circuits that machine is just smirking and thinking “Stupid humans, don’t even try to grasp my wisdom”. Sigh, computers have come so far.

This isn’t really a game, it’s just a physics simulation of sand that is fun and fascinating  to play with. You can make barriers to the sand flow as well as make it flammable and so forth.

Yesterday we were sitting outside watching a squirrel walk down an electric line towards some birds. I joked to my wife maybe I should grab my camera in case it turned out to be a “YouTube” moment. I didn’t have time but instead of what we expected; the birds giving way to the much larger squirrel, the birds started dive bombing the squirrel nearly making it fall before it scampered off. This photo reminds me how you just never know how animals will interact.

If you read the comments at the bottom, apparently a number of these beautiful wildlife photos aren’t photos at all. Oh well, they are still striking.

While we are on the subject of illusion, check out this amazing magic act.

You may have to be a bit of a scientist to get this one. Light behaves as both a particle and a wave.

I guess Mythbusters will be coming back on the air this Wednesday. If you have ever watched the show you know they often blow things up. Apparently one of their ‘experiments’ was a little more intense than they realized. Kids, don’t try this at home.

We did a lot of things with liquid nitrogen when I worked in a lab but we never made ice cream using it. That’s one pricey ice cream maker.

Great, another way we could all die; from a massive sun storm that wipes out just about everything electrical.

I’m not sure why I found this description of a 40 year long experiment of breeding tame foxes so interesting. By the way, NOVA is available on Hulu now but not the episode about dogs mentioned in the article.

This is pretty cool. It’s a shot of the space shuttle lifting off taken from the International Space Station.

I got a laugh out of this.

Who would have thought bats could be cute?

This is just another silly dog photo.

Just the other day I was thinking about a program a friend of mine once wrote to generate names and I ran across this.

Here are some very stunning examples of infrared photography.

I would love to eat at an underwater restaurant. Seafood anyone?

I was completely blown away at how colorful crabs can be. O.K. now I’m hungry.

And finally, usually when I walk with my cat Kelly she takes the lead and I follow but if it has snowed she lets me lead and then jumps from one of my footprints to the next. Here is a cute little photo essay of a cat dealing with 15 inches of snow.