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20181002 The pears
20181001 Life Science
I went to visit Dave in Stonehaven on Saturday. We had a great time, and talked a lot about cameras, because I’ve been planning to get a new (“new”) one to replace our old Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200. We walked out past the war memorial and to Dunottar Castle, which is just absurdly scenic. Dave came up with the idea of doing an October photo-a-day challenge to exercise our picture muscles!
My new camera plan came together yesterday in the form of a second-hand Panasonic DMC-FZ1000 in perfect condition. The photo above was still just from my iPhone, because I happened to see a lovely bright rainbow just after I dropped Fiona at school yesterday. I snapped it in haste while I was stopped at a traffic light. In the live photo version, the window wiper comes along a fraction of a second later.
Mouse mats
On the left, the Wallace and Gromit mouse mat that, based on photographic evidence, I have had since at least December 2002. I think it was a Christmas or birthday present from “Alex” (via Abi). It is literally crumbling at the edges, and I regularly stab my wrist with the sharp edges of broken plastic.
On the right, a Fnatic Boost Pro Gamer mouse pad that I’m moving to. I’m not a pro gamer and never will be. But Alex was getting a new keyboard from them, and the mouse pads were on sale, so we threw one of them in for me as well. Will it last 16 years as well?
For reference, here is Alex sitting at my desk back in December 2002. Custom-built PC in a heavy steel tower case from QuietPC.com in the background, with a Microsoft mouse resting on the mouse mat. (That was a good mouse. I’ve always liked MS hardware.)
Magpies like peanuts
Holedown
I’ve been playing a lot of Holedown recently.
It tickles my brain in so many ways. I love particle systems, reflections, and bouncing. (It was fun to introduce Alex to snooker when we were at Archerfield in June. While everyone else was enjoying the loud party, Alex and I snuck off to the snooker room and spent a hilarious couple of hours failing to pot balls.) The paths the balls take through the blocks sometimes have the pleasing symmetry of juggling patterns, and sometimes they devolve into something that looks like chaos, but which is actually a playful visualization of a Dynamical System. (My favourite maths course at university.) And then sometimes the balls will get stuck bouncing back and forth faster and faster in an almost perfectly horizontal or vertical cascade between two parallel walls, similar to the resonating cavity of a laser.
But best of all, they’re a constant reminder of one of my favourite physical objects: the corner cube reflector:
Geometrically speaking, they’re so simple and obvious, but I’ve always found their behaviour magical and charming: no matter what angle you choose, any ray you send into it is guaranteed to be reflected back exactly parallel to the original. There are arrays of corner reflectors on the moon. If you shoot a laser at them, its light will bounce straight back at you. A lot of the light is absorbed or deflected along the way, so it’s a tricky experiment, but it allows us to measure the distance between the earth and the moon down to the millimeter. Science!
Holedown is very nicely designed, with lots of subtle animations and effects, and elegant mechanics. It’s simple and addictive, but it’s also really easy to pause and walk away from for a while. As you progress, the game gets harder and more intense, but it doesn’t get faster. You can think about your moves for as long as you like, and resume whenever you want. It doesn’t use microtransactions, either. Just buy it and play. It’s adorable.