I now have a home page over at the University of Bath, where I’m doing my PhD. It’s just for academic things and lists of publications. Find it here: cs.bath.ac.uk/~cajw20.

I watched this interesting talk on game design by Jonathan “Braid” Blow and Marc “Miegakure” ten Bosch. They espouse and explore a particular design aesthetic where the designer essentially plays the role of a mathematician. “Good design” then becomes a selection of orthogonal mechanisms (axioms), and an exhaustive-yet-minimal mapping-out of what’s derivable (theorems), and then demarcation of the boundary. Since it needs to be fun, the real art has to come from crafting surprise and tweaking axioms to capture exactly what you want. They both make some very interesting points, and I thought this comparison with mathematics was a particularly cool and apt way to frame the ideas.

This aesthetic is particularly apparent in the examples they use in the talk, including Braid, VVVVVV, Ikaruga and the as-yet-unreleased Miegakure.

Read this recently. From the article:

Beginning September 1 ... helicopter hunters can fly over Texas ranchland, rifle in hand and shoot as many hogs as pass through their scopes. While hunting from helicopters was previously outlawed, the “pork chopper” law makes it easier and more cost effective for land owners to fight Texas’ wild hog over-population problem from the air where low-flying, fast-moving helicopters can keep up with the 400-pound animals, which can run as fast as 35 miles per hour, over terrain that is often inaccessible by vehicles.
...
“flying below 50 feet at high speeds and shooting semi-automatic rifles from helicopters” is “inherently dangerous” said the president of Vertex Helicopters.

Top of the food chain, baby!

Don’t think they thought this one through...

Having apparently abandoned former principles of simplicity and unintrusiveness, Google now punishes account holders by sticking coloured icons next to every Google search result and, worse, animating them on a mouse-over of the result. Obnoxious! There currently seems to be no setting to remove these that I could find, but I figured a way to use AdBlock to hide them away.

Read more…

This is a good paper but the choices of variable names are making me sad :(

Ah well... at least sometimes variable names lead to happy consequences. This is from the same paper:

This is a bit of an old video (the “decade” in question is the one before this one) but you should still watch it. I love this guy.

link if the embed doesn’t work

You should go watch all his videos on the TED site.

This comic has been pinned up in my lab for a while, I love it.

Via spikedmath.com.