24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Religion and Science are Alike
When I talk about religion, I speak for myself alone. Any statement which attempted to express a consensus of scientists about religious and philosophical questions would miss the main point. There is no consensus among us. The voice of science is a Babel of diverse languages and cultures. That is to me the joy and charm of science. Science is a free creation of the human mind, and at the same time it is an international club cutting across barriers of race and nationality and creed. Many fir...18 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Developing Puzzle Games Requires Experimentations
...you need fewer art assets to build a simple puzzle game. This is very good news for small developers, and for those just starting out in gaming. One or two people can build a world-class puzzle game. It would be next to impossible for one or two people to build a world-class third-person action game from scratch (and be finished by the end of the millennium). Puzzle games generally require puzzle pieces, such as blocks, widgets, shapes, or gizmos of some kind. Once you have built these obj...Folksonomies: game development
Folksonomies: game development
The entry-bar for building a puzzle game is low because they don't require many complex graphics, but the rhythm and heartbeat of the game require playing with variables and tweaking ideas.
19 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Dog Breeding and Evolution
Another familiar example is the sculpting of the wolf, Canis lupus, into the two hundred or so breeds of dog, Canis familiaris, that are recognized as separate by the UK Kennel Club, and the larger number of breeds that are genetically isolated from one another by the apartheid-like rules of pedigree breeding. Incidentally, the wild ancestor of all domestic dogs really does seem to be the wolf and only the wolf... [...] The main point I want to draw out of domestication is its astonishing ...Dog breeding demonstrates how quickly animals can evolve, even if it's under artificial selection.
03 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Physics Work is Like Building a House of Cards
To do high, real good physics work you do need absolutely solid lengths of time, so that when you're putting ideas together which are vague and hard to remember, it's very much like building a house of cards and each of the cards is shaky, and if you forget one of them the whole thing collapses again. You don't know how you got there and you have to build them up again, and if you're interrupted and kind of forget half the idea of how the cards went together--your cards being different-type p...Building ideas upon ideas to figure out physics is like constructing a house of cards, requiring intense concentration and a chain of ideas.