If you want knowledge from the same pool Ritter's drawing from, check out this blog post[1] about fr-041: Debris by ryg. Now, keep in mind, Ritter didn't do work on Debris as far as I know, but he's spent a lot of time with the people who did, and some of the ideas in NOWHERE have their origin in that scene (a lot of it is totes original, but you're asking about procedural generation, and procedural generation is definitely a demoscene thing).
Before game dev, Ritter was known as a musician and a demoscener (if you don't know what the demoscene is, do some googling -- it's deffo worth it). The demoscene group he was part of broke exciting new ground in the mid 2000s by releasing some productions that packed ridiculous amounts of content into a very small size by procedurally generating lots of things, like textures and geometry. The greatest of these demos is called Debris[2], and some consider it the best demo ever. Ryg's article is basically a big index of articles explaining how parts of Debris were written, as well as how they work.
On the subject of interesting magnetic effects, a lot of people don't know that pretty much all matter is magnetic, just that the strength of the interaction is a lot smaller than what we're used to with ferromagnets.
All materials exhibit a diamagnetic (pushes against the field) effect, but in many materials, that effect is overwhelmed by a competing paramagnetic (pushes in the direction of the field) effect. Most of the things we call "magnets" exhibit ferromagnetism, which typically produces much stronger forces than either of the previous two.
H2O is particularly interesting, because it's actually diamagnetic, and will push away from magnetic fields. Given a strong enough magnet, you can have a lot of fun with this effect by putting common water-filled objects in its field:
http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/
In my experience, the Thai restaurants around me (East coast US) like to make their sauces very oil/butter heavy, which contributes to the second phenomenon you alluded to. I've never been to Thailand, so I don't know if this is an exclusively American phenomenon or not.
I personally really like a good Lat na, but what I'm served is often noodles in a thick, chicken flavored grease (rather than stock or gravy).
I have a friend who used to keep excitedly showing me his crazy, impressive redstone ALU/CPU designs. I kept trying to get him to buy an FPGA and build out something with real hardware, but he maintained that a big part of why it was fun was because of the environment and community that came with Minecraft. That might go some way toward providing an explanation.
That video on their main page is mind-boggling to me.
I have a friend who's a regular on that server, and he would occasionally explain to me things like how they take advantage of how Minecraft's redstone handling works to shave precious ticks off the latest ALU design's return time, or how they created a fully vanilla-compatible "internet," to pass data through wires between different people's machines.
They've got mods set up to copy and paste blocks, so you can build modular systems out of components and avoid repetitive block-placing, but AFAIK, everything else is vanilla. It's incredible.
DeepFace's figures[1] also come from running it on the LFW dataset[2]. While Facebook's production tech will be more accurate because of what you say, the Deepface algorithm has a lot of raw power, too!
That was an interesting article/book summary. The main idea (that there exists a correlation artistic creativity and mood disorders) is something I've observed anecdotally.
I get the impression, however, that it serves the end of history and entertainment more than it does those of science. The examples in the article were light on sample sizes and heavy on speculation ("Is mental illness caused by creativity? Maybe it's the other way around! Who knows?"). I wonder if the book it's about offers more solid corroborating sources.
Actually, your timing is really fortuitous: Just yesterday, the aforementioned Farbrausch member/NOWHERE developer posted a progress report[1] for the game. Somewhere near the end, he mentions that they had to delay the game's Steam Early Access release to finish a few things, that they had factored the release into this month's revenues, and that they are now borrowing money to pay the rent on their home (the developer and artist are married).
Please check the game out and do consider supporting Paniq (apparently Patreon[2] is the most convenient way to do this). There really could be no better time for a small bit of exposure!
You know what they say: ASD -- Amusic's Soundtrack Dump
(That said, I'm actually part of the faction who likes aMusic's weird prog-rocky compositions. And, regardless of what you think of his work, you've got to respect aMusic for being one of the very few demoscene composers who incorporate real, acoustic instruments and vocals into their work. I really can't think of any others.)
I attend the College of William and Mary in Virginia. In 2009, the College dropped its speech codes and became one of the most free-speech-friendly schools in the US. This has its ups and downs (in my opinion, mostly ups).
We have a fairly diverse studentry, but I haven't seen that many people with incredibly strong opinions. Most people (myself included) don't really regularly say or do things that would fall under PC speech codes. That said, I do know a few activist types, and they relish the freedom they have at the College. I've known people who go to DC to participate in protests on the weekends, people who write articles on why the "government has failed its mandate to protect our right to privacy" or "how the liberal media uses misleading language to paint climate change as something that's actually happening" (obviously different people). We've got EFF activists, marijuana legalization activists, sexual health activists, hard-line family-values conservatives -- basically, what should be the regular college gamut. It's a shame that appears to be contingent on a free-speech policy that is relatively extreme.
Free speech also has its downsides. Earlier this year, we made state and national news when a fraternity member distributed this extremely misogynistic letter, that various headlines describe as "The most hideous thing I've ever read"[1] and "vomit-inducing"[2]. We drew censures from practically everyone, and many people I talked to around that time wanted the College to boot the offending fraternity. The College, of course, did no such thing, and the fraternity voluntarily suspended operations (there could have been some under-the-table coercion there, but I doubt it).
Anyway, the point is, if colleges allow free speech, they must also stand by while some vile, vile things get published. All communities result in emergent standards of discourse and systems of self-governance when those standards are violated (after all, the backlash from that letter was strongest in the student community), and these systems dull the effects of those vile things, but they affect the community regardless. I personally think the benefits outweigh the costs.
I remember playing a version of this game that was posted on HN a few weeks ago. Jennifer Dewalt (the person who learned to code by making a website every day for 180 days) made it! http://jenniferdewalt.com/lights_on/game
The mathematics behind this game are apparently pretty interesting. I'm not big on matrix math, but I bet a lot of you guys are.
Well, I started working at a place where I was regularly juggling 2-4 SSH sessions, 2 programs running and dumping logs in other tabs, plus a few more open terminals, and after a coworker introduced me to the wonderful zsh[1], I wondered what other great tools I was missing. That's what led me to iTerm2.
I stuck with iTerm because of the many, many little features and conveniences that make working with the terminal easier.
Tabs can be put at the bottom of the screen, which solves that pesky issue where changing tabs on a fullscreened terminal.app causes the OSX topbar to slide down and intercept your click. Tab titles change color depending on the kind of activity that's going on within. Hotkey mapping is a lot more powerful, and lets you send arbitrary hex/escape codes with hotkeys. There's a drop-down mode, like Tilda or Visor. This might just be placebo, but I'm pretty sure it also glitches out less often than Terminal.app.
All in all, everything is just a little bit nicer than the stock terminal.
> ...Reading the article, I think some of it is more of a "why?" than a "why not?", since the articles are factually correct but are mostly just lists of facts and not really something you couldn't find in any number of other resources.
The argument I'd make for "why?" is that Wikipedia is more accessible and more reliably available than most other resources. I mean, if the government of the Philippines had a web-based, up-to-date list of towns with some basic information, it might make sense to offload the effort of maintaining that information to them. As it stands, though, not even the US has such a directory -- so Wikipedia picks up the slack (or at least it does for towns in the US).
I'm not very in-tune with Wikipedia's culture (which, I've read, is very nuanced and rigid[1]), but I really don't see why this is a bad thing, given the information in the articles is accurate (and the article gives the impression that glitches are rare).
If nobody else was going to create an article about some species of butterfly, I don't see why adding that information would be harmful to Wikipedia. Does it make Wikipedia harder to read? Harder to search?
I don't think "it's not written by a human" is a valid argument for factual information, and I've never seen any evidence to suggest that it should be one.
After looking at these, I'm beginning to see why there is some backlash. There are literally thousands of articles here that read "X is a species of grass. It got its name from Y and is described in Z catalog." The only people who would need this information are botanists, and they already have their own specialized sources. I'm still not against bot-produced content, but I understand why some people oppose initiatives like this.
I feel like Minecraft came close. Interestingly enough, Minecraft has similar features to a lot of MUDs (focus on player-defined and player-modified environments, lack of focus on graphics, fantasy tropes, some programmability, a game centered around navigation).
(This isn't the exact link I remember seeing, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3666564 )