Lentil Bean card
by dmm
As a Valentine’s gift for marymary, I designed a fake “Lentil Bean” card for the game Bohnanza.
Gaming, Gifts, Graphics | Comment (0)Turning two 8×8 chessboards into a 10×10
by dmm
I haven’t actually created a physical one yet but I figured out how to nicely cut two 8×8 chessboards into a 10×10 one, conserving the center fold and the borders.
Slayers Cosmology thought
by dmm
Rewatching Slayers Try, in which a character from the space-opera universe next door visits the sword-and-sorcery world the series takes place in. Another character mentions that the visitor will be “fragile” because he’s from another world.
This makes me think that the main characters are made of Fire, Water, Earth and Air which obeys the Law of Attraction, the Law of Similarity, etc. while the visitor is made of Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen held together by Electromagnetism, Gravity, and the Strong and Weak forces.
Graphics | Comment (0)Monte Cristo fest pt. 1
by dmm
We made plans a month or so ago to watch the anime series “Gankutsuoh” together. It’s an adaptation of Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, moved into the future and replacing Rome with Luna etc.
Today we began this Monte Cristo fest, watching episodes 1-5 while the snow lurked outside. Afterwards, Monte Cristo sandwiches of course! We had picked up some swiss cheese, ham, and turkey at the grocery store today, so our first attempt was this: a egg-milk-vanilla batter, soak Challah slices and fry them up, 2 slices of swiss and one each of turkey and ham, and bake the sandwiches in the oven for a few minutes to melt the bread.
Verdict: ok. The swiss was a little strong, and the bread wasn’t sweet enough. I tried some powdered sugar on mine, which helped a little. We also forgot that syrup was an option until we had finished them.
Plans are to try again with slices of sourdough and maybe different cheese-to-meat ratios.
Graphics, Grub | Comment (0)Spline story
by dmm
I’ve been investigating approximating arcs with cubic splines. This is something that PostScript does automatically, but I want more control over the process than the interpreter is providing.
I was specifically interested in this 90-degree arc. (In this image, the green line is an actual circular arc. The black line is a spline based on the control points marked as red dots.) My question was: what is the correct distance (let us call it A) between the end points and the nearby control points, for a circle of radius 1?
My first thought was to try zeroing in on it by trial and error. My first value for A was 0.5, which turned out to be slightly too small. 0.6 was slightly too big. 0.55 appeared to be exactly right.
This bothered me. 0.55 is only a tidy number in base 10, and there was nothing base-10-ish about my input. I expected the answer to involve some sort of fraction involving a square root or something, with all the integers involved being on the order of 2-4. 0.55 (or 11/20) did not seem like a likely correct answer.
So, I started again and attacked the problem with algebra. (I can go into more detail about the solution on request.) Solving for A gave me this answer:
A=(4/3) * (sqrt(2) - 1)
That is the kind of answer I was hoping for. And what does this come out to?
(4 / 3) * (sqrt(2) - 1) = 0.55228475…
Sigh.
Graphics | Comment (0)Lehua Branch
by dmm
marymary wanted a stylized Lehua branch graphic for her hula group. PostScript to the rescue!
Doodling based on my initials
by dmm
Here’s a doodle based on the first and last letters of my first name, my middle initial and a dot, and the first and last letters of my last name.
I guess I’m in kind of a logo mood lately :)
Graphics | Comment (0)First comp copy of Star-Diary arrives
by dmm
I got my first comp copy of the book One Hundred Year Star-Diary which I worked on with Alec Finlay. It’s a little bigger than I expected! Pictures below.
Cover:
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Black-metal logo for puzzle person
by dmm
On an NPL mailing list, we were discussing “black-metal” band logos, such as those seen here: Ten most Incomprehensible Black Metal Logos. Rubrick asked, “who’s going to be the first to do a Black Metal logo for Ucaoimhu?” (Ucaoimhu is the nom-de-puzzle of a prolific puzzle-writer.) I couldn’t resist a challenge like that.
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