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February 27, 2006
Escape to Obion V: The Chemisphere
Episode 5: The Chemisphere (beta latest revision: 2006/2/27)
length: long
difficulty: hard
This game is more linear than the others, which is necessary because we've added level codes for the 4 levels in the game.
The levels represent junctures in the game that tell you that you've solved everything necessary to get to that point.
The puzzles get increasingly complicated in the game, but should not require taking notes in the way that #3 required.
Still, you will need to jot down a few things.
There is one musical puzzle in the game, but you should be able to get through even if you are unable to hear it, relying on the symbols instead.
Still tracking down any last bugs. If you find any, please report them below.
Posted by mslaybau at 09:33 PM | Comments (43)
February 21, 2006
Conversations with my Mailman I
I first met my mailman when I happened to go out at the same time that he was putting in the mail, and I wasn't sure whether I should just ask him to hand it to me or leave it for later.
But he saw me and asked, "you wanna take it?"
So I did, and we exchanged pleasantries before I left, carrying my mail with me around town for the next 9 hours or so.
(4 credit card offers, 1 bill, 1 other thing)
The next time I met my mailman was at the liquor store around the corner. The store probably has a name, but the sign outside just says, "Liquor" so I don't know what else to call it.
I always see a mail cart outside there, sometimes two (one time three), and inside they're just shooting the breeze with the guy behind the bullet-proof glass.
I walk in to get some gin or something, and my mailman actually recognizes me and says, "hey man".
I say, "hey", and I turn on my recorder. There's a lot of meaningless nonsense at the beginning of the tape, but then someone says something about satisfaction.
Me: What have you done lately that you've found satisfying?
MM: You know, I was at home, eating raisin bran and smoking a cigarette. We've got, well, what am I saying, I've got... there's a bit of a roach problem where I live, and one guy got up on the table, and I'm looking at him with milk dribbling down my chin, and I try to stab him with my cigarette.
He runs off the first time, but I see how they operate, so I feint, and I know just where he's going to run, and I get him right between the wings - or whatever those are, pseudo-wings that those guys have.
Me: You get him?
MM: Yeah, right between the wings. I wasn't pushing hard enough at first, but I just dug in there and twisted the cigarette and got him good. I was never too good at sports or video games, but I was just in the zone there, I knew where he was going to go and I got there first.
Me: Do you think he was in pain?
MM: Oh yeah, I think so, I mean, I hope so.
Posted by mslaybau at 04:10 AM | Comments (1)
February 19, 2006
Roy G. Biv is Dead
Whoever came up with 'Roy G. Biv' as a memory aid for remembering color names had to scratch for vowels.
Red, Green, and Blue are necessary, of course as those are the three colors our eyes are 'tuned' to perceive, with all other colors being combinations of these primaries.
Yellow is a good addition, since although it isn't a true primary, it is the brightest color we perceive since both red- and green-sensitive retina in our eyes are stimulated by it, making it appear nearly twice as bright as red or green alone.
So with RyGB we have three primaries and one secondary formed by combining red and green.
If we combine red and blue we get purple, which in some ways isn't a true color since it doesn't appear in rainbows or when white light is shone through a prism.
There is a third secondary color, that appears after mixing blue and green, aqua, teal, cyan, indigo are all in the same ballpark of the spectrum.
Indigo starts with a vowel, so let's use that.
Now we have RyGiBp.
We need more vowels, though.
Orange is a tertiary color, made by combining primary red with secondary yellow, but it's a common-enough color and everyone knows its name, so let's add that.
Roy Gi Bp.
Doesn't look right.
Let's assume that no one remembers what indigo actually looks like since most people aren't involved in textile dyeing nowadays, and let's pretend that indigo isn't a greenish blue but a purplish blue.
Roy G. Bip
And let's change 'purple' to 'violet'
Roy G. Biv
The point is that indigo is actually closer to a teal color and is between green and blue in the spectrum.
In computer color systems, more and more color names are added to libraries so that people don't have to remember RGB hex values, but I've noticed that indigo is being mapped to RGB: 440088, which looks purple to me.
| #440088 |
If you look at actual indigo-dyed cloth, as in the undoctored image above, you get a hex value closer to one of these:
| #2D3E61 | #263961 | #2F3D5C |
Posted by mslaybau at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2006
My Robot Can Kick Your Robot's ASCII
Nitinol - Muscle Wire: The Mauling
(sort of like muscle cars, except long and very skinny)
After World War II, the U.S Navy conducted research on alloys. Given the large amount of salt water to which ships are exposed, they were looking to create electronics on ships that were resistant to corrosion.
One of the alloys they came up with was a combination of roughly equal amounts of nickel and titanium, which they dubbed nitinol for NIckel TItanium Naval Office Laboratories.
Nitinol is one of a class of alloys called shape-memory alloys in that they return to their original shape after being deformed by bending or heating.
One use of shape memory alloys is in eyeglass frames. If you sit on them, they'll return to their propoer shape.
I had thought using nitinol would be a great way to get robots to get their lazy butts moving, but it turns out that nitinol only shines, so to speak, when it is inserted into a penis.
History
Sidebar |
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Nickel has a melting temperature of 1,453°C and titanium's melting point is 1,668°C (3,034°F).
So the fabrication of the alloy requires melting the two metals together at the higher temperature. For comparison, the surface of the Sun is around 5,800°K (~5,500°C, ~10000°F). The Greeks called the Sun Helios. The Romans called it Sol. There's a guy named Sol in Brooklyn. He sells fish. |
Nitinol is interesting to us, however, because of its reaction to changes in temperature. Normally, metals expand (slightly) when heated and contract (slightly) when cooled. That's why jar lids open more easily after running them under hot water. Nitinol however, shows the reverse property; shrinking when heated. Once cooled, it can be stretched back to its original length.
Since nitinol has some electrical resistance, simply running a current through it causes it to heat, and thus to shrink. This mimics the musculature of animals, which require an electrical signal to flex - hence the name 'muscle wire'.
Mark Tilden was an early advocate of using muscle wire in robotics, specifically those that rely on legs rather than on wheels.
Each manufacturer's brand of nitinol (Flexinol™ is a common one) is composed of a slightly different mixture (or admixture, if you will) of nickel and titanium. A common mixture is called 55-nitinol and is composed of 55% nickel and 45% titanium. Each type shrinks and expands at different temperatures, so you can select a type that actuates in a cold environment, such as on a satellite in outer space, or a warm environment such as the human body.
Unfortunately, the percentage of contraction is typically limited to between 4% and 8%, and the wire must cool before it is able to be stretched back into place and then heated and shrunk again. This means any robot that has its mobility dependent on muscle wire will likely move rather slowly compared to its motor-driven brethren.
Nitinol is not able to convert electricity into motion as well as motors can, but is much lighter than even a small motor and is appropriate for small, light-weight robots.
Many companies now fabricate nitinol for use in robotics and medical devices. The latter is probably the best venue for nitinol-based robotic devices, such as prosthetics, stents, shunts, or other small valves. Because it is non-corrosive, nitinol is an appropriate material to use within the human body.
Problems
One thing about muscle wires is that if you drop a piece, you're unlikely to find it. You're more likely to search on the floor and pick up one of Yan-yan's hairs, only to hook it up, put voltage to it and see smoke. Yan-yan's hairs do not make good actuators.
Penile Code |
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One use of nitinol is as a stent in penile implants, jokingly referred to as the "Autoboner".
Best when used with the AMS Sphincter 800™.
If you have the 650 or 700 series, you may want to upgrade. I wish I were kidding. More info here |
Another issue is that in every schematic I've seen the nitinol does double duty as actuator and current-bearing wire. The problem here is that they can't be insulated since the insulation would hinder their contraction and stretching. So we had to be very careful to not allow the exposed wires to touch any other metal contacts.
Problem #3 has to do with the extrememly specific power requirements of nitinol. It was easy to get a single wire to contract off of a 9V battery, but trying to power multiple wires did not result in less contraction, it resulted in zilch. Similarly, after we ran out of 0.1mm wire, we were unable to get any of the 0.05mm or 0.15mm wire to do anything. I couldn't tell how much the volatge mattered, but thinner wire can't tolerate much above 80 milliamps, and thicker wire needs at least 300. We tried putting 9V batteries in series and again in parallel in order to try higher voltages and currents but got nowhere. We may have toasted the 050 and not had enough for the 150. DC motors, those gentle souls, are so adaptive when it come to variability of current and voltage. But muscle wire is high-strung.
Which leads to p4: since the wire only has about 5% contraction, they must be taut to have any noticeable effect. Compounding that, they do not spring back when cooled unless a force acts on them to stretch them back to their original length. So we had to discover an entirely new art form of stringing nitinol wire to be under the precise tension to keep them taut at rest and under tension when flexed, yet not under so much tension that they are unable to perform. That sounds like a metephor for giving technical presentations.
The bottom line is that this tempered metal is temperamental (tempura-mental?) and although I imagine many future ITP students struggling in the exact same way we did, I don't think we'll be playing with it much.
Posted by mslaybau at 01:16 AM | Comments (0)
February 15, 2006
Synesthesia
For eons, people have enjoyed mapping the musical scale to the color spectrum.
Despite knowing that music is waves in air and light is waves in electromagnetic fields, I decided to do a little research and math.
The color spectrum ranges from 384 to 769THz (terahertz)
By repeatedly doubling a note (say A, at 440Hz) we can find where it would actually fall in the electromagnetic spectrum.
In the case of A, we can find its relevant note many octaves (40 octaves, 240, or 1,099,511,627,776) up at 483,785,116,221,440 (~484THz) which puts it at the redder side of orange.
You can get comparable results by multiplying the original frequency by 1.1 to get it in terahertz.
| note | midi note | frequency in center of audible, euphonious range | frequency in visible section of electromagnetic spectrum | color |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| F | 65 | 349.23Hz | 384THz | infra-red/red |
| Gb | 66 | 369.99Hz | 407THz | red |
| G | 67 | 392.00Hz | 431THz | red |
| Ab | 68 | 415.30Hz | 457THz | red |
| A | 69 | 440.00Hz | 484THz | red/orange |
| Bb | 70 | 466.16Hz | 512THz | yellow |
| B | 71 | 493.88Hz | 543THz | green |
| C | 72 | 523.25Hz | 575THz | green |
| Db | 73 | 554.37Hz | 610THz | green/blue |
| D | 74 | 587.33Hz | 646THz | blue |
| Eb | 75 | 622.25Hz | 684THz | violet |
| E | 76 | 659.26Hz | 725THz | deeper violet |
| F | 77 | 698.46Hz | 768THz | violet/ultra-violet |
The abundance of red and green in the chart has to do with the fact that our eyes are most sensitive to those two colors, not because of any bias on the part of the spectrum. Color is, of course, entirely subjective.
These are the numbers that, when multiplied by 240 (ie are transposed up by 40 octaves) map onto the spectrum of visible light. Other notes, such as middle C would need a different multiplier, in this case, 2^41. Douglas Adams' number, 42, would be the exponent of the multiplier for the octave below middle C. Maybe that's what he meant by saying that 42 was the answer to the question of the universe.
The above is based on standard tuning. Other tunings wouldn't make much difference. When multiplying by 1.1 trillion, small differences get magnified, but not enough to matter here.
F is an interesting note in that it happens to match exactly with the upper and lower ranges of frequencies of visible light.
That could be a coincidence, but I wouldn't be surprised if our brains use some sort of hardwired math that results in the spectrum of sound and color having the same bounds, albeit separated by many orders of magnitude.
Either way, F really should be the start and end of the scale, not C. And I suppose D is the bluest note of them all.
Frankly, I'm amazed that the color spectrum maps onto the music scale so perfectly. I was expecting all the notes to map out between yellow and green, or perhaps all the colors to map out to the range between F and A#.
Posted by mslaybau at 10:22 PM | Comments (1)
Cybernetic
Etymology lesson:
cybernetic:
A thermostat is cybernetic in nature: There is a mechanism in place which keeps the room from getting too hot or too cold; it regulates things to ensure everything is in balance, that if something gets too far one direction, the system kicks on to bring it back in line.
Today, cybernetics is the "theoretical study of control processes, in electrical, mechanical, or biological systems, especially the mathematical analysis of the flow of information of such systems." However, the original meaning of cybernetic referred to the person who steered or guided the ship through dangerous channels.
Cybernetic comes to us from the Greek word, kubernetes, meaing "pilot, governor," which came from Greek kuberman, meaning, "to steer, guide." Hence, if something is cybernetic in nature, it steers or guides something so that nothing gets too far out of line one way or the other.
Norbert Wiener initiated the modern use of the Greek term "cyber" (originally meaning to steer or govern) around 1948 to characterize what he called "cybernetics:" an interdisciplinary science that investigates automatic control processes in biological, technical and social systems.
'Cyborg' ('cybernetic organism') was coined around 1962 to describe a human being linked to mechanical devices that assist the human's vital life functions.
Posted by mslaybau at 10:15 PM | Comments (0)
Synthetic Creatures
| Synthetic Creature | Material | Personality | Nature of Birth | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Talos | Bronze | Aggressive | Fashioned by Hephaestus | |
| Galatea (Pygmalion) | Stone | Not much | Aphrodite Intervention | "" |
| Golem | Clay | Creepy, vengful | Rabbis & God | 1579-ish |
| Gingerbread Man | Dough | Rascally, with hubris | ??? | ??? |
| Frankenstein's Monster | Dead people | Vengeful | Science | 1816 |
| Tin Man, Scarecrow | Straw, Tin | Kind | Witches | 1900 |
| Tik Tok | Metal | Stalwart | Witches again? | 1914 |
| Pinocchio | Wood | Impish | Fairy Intervention | 1914 |
| Marius, Sulla, Radius, Damon, et al. * | Metal | Hard-working | Science | 1921 |
| The Robot from Fritz Lang's Metropolis | Metal | Not much | Science | 1927 |
| Loads of B-Movie robots | Metal | Sometimes good, usually bad | Science | 1950s - 1960s |
| $6-million Man | Dead Steve Austin + 'Bionics' | Good guy | Science | 1974 |
| See-Threepio (C3PO) | Metal | Gay | Science | 1977 |
| Terminator | Metal | Jerk | Science | 1984 |
From these data we can conclude that creating synthetic creatures from organic materials result in more interesting personalities than we would get from inorganic ones.
Stone in particular yields sexy yet uninteresting girlfriends.
Synthetic creatures made from wood or plants tend to be spunky, while those made of rock or metal are true literalists, in that they adhere to Literalism.
Based on this theory, we can posit that an artificial man made of twine would be witty and urbane, at least in comparison to his metallic brethren.
We can also conclude that Science-generated creatures are in general scarier (or at least more powerful) than God-generated ones, especially when portrayed by Lee Majors.
Thirdly, female robots are boring.
It was really in the 20th century when the line between robotics and medicine began to blur, when it was possible to imagine a human being with mostly mechanical organs and limbs.
But, if you include Voodoo dolls in this list,
well then...
I'm not sure, but it's related.
* The first use of the word 'robot' is from this play: R.U.R. (ROSSUM'S UNIVERSAL ROBOTS)
Posted by mslaybau at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)
February 09, 2006
Escape to Obion IV: Closer to Zero
Episode 4: Closer to Zero (latest revision: 2006/2/10)
Week 4, Game 4.
Many found #3 too hard, and while we could edit that game, it makes more sense to move forward - though I may add more clues to #3 at a later date for future players.
In this one the standalone puzzles are straightforward, but you still will need to take some notes in order to get to the end.
We also advance the story more through found pages from a diary of one of the main villain's primary henchmen.
I had become fascinated with Turing's cracking of the Nazi's Enigma machine, and tried to replicate one for this game. It came off rather well, and it will be a pity if we can't use it again in a future episode.
We had thought that not using English (or any language) would make the game more accessible to international players, but we chose to do so anyway in this game just because that option opened up so many more possibilities for leaving clues and hints in the game.
edit: people were managing to get to the end through trial and error on the last puzzle, but now they have to figure out the rest of the game before they'll know what to do.
Posted by mslaybau at 06:03 PM | Comments (16)
February 06, 2006
Web Hosts
edit:
Johnny B told me about
www.top-10-web-hosting.com
which lists what seem to be some of the best hosts out there.
Lunarpages offers 400GB per month of bandwidth for $8/month.
I just signed on with them to host the Obion games since they've gotten so popular (100,000 players within three weeks)
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I've tried a number of web hosting services in the past 9 years and have two to recommend. A number of people have suggested dreamhost to me, but I've heard just as many complaints about them.
It seems the three key aspects of having a service are:
- uptime (amount of time that the server is running, 99.9% of the time is ideal)
- price
- support
Regarding these three, I recommend pair and lamphost.
Their prices are competitive (pair in particular has such an economy of scale because of the large number of sites they host that their rates are quite cheap) and they have effectively no downtime, but what separates them from other hosts I've encountered is that the service and support is excellent. Unlike so many other companies (whether web hosts or otherwise) pair and lamphost respond immediately whenever there's an issue that needs to be resolved - lamphost is particularly good in that regard.
In this modern age it seems that many companies abandon customer service in order to save money, or relegate it to foreign offices where the workers have trouble with English and don't have access to the systems they would need to make changes. But these two haven't.
Posted by mslaybau at 12:31 PM | Comments (1)
February 02, 2006
Escape to Obion: The Alchemist's Notebook
Obion 3 is out - quite a bit trickier than the other two. This is less about stand-alone puzzles in the game (although the initial map puzzle is clever, like a Rubik's Cube jigsaw) and more about comprehending subtle hints and gathering all the information necessary to get to the end.
You'll probably need pencil and paper to keep track of everything.
Note to everyone who completes this game (or who try and then give up). This is a new series, and future episodes will be designed based on comments on earlier episodes. So, please feel free to say what you liked or didn't like in the game - what you found too easy, or what you thought was too frustrating or complicated.
Posted by mslaybau at 11:51 AM | Comments (13)