Justin Lloyd's Thinkering

Somebody needs to think about this stuff...

Archives for 1982

Universal lies

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The second biggest lie that society will ever tell you is ” you can be anything you want to be.”

The biggest lie that society will ever tell you is “you’re not allowed to do that.”

Time as a function of mass

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In a moment of boredom I was thinking about mass and gravity and pondered the possibility that time is a function of mass. i.e. time cannot exist without mass. Gravity is a function of mass, so why not time. I guess I should go and research this and I am sure someone has already thought about this question years before me (as they usually do.)

If only two objects exist in the universe, both very distant from each other. They will exert, however minute, a gravitational force on each other.

Time, from an outside observer’s point of view, slows down for any object as it approaches a massive object, until time effectively comes to rest for the observed object. It is reasonable to assume that time will “speed up” as the objects move away from each other. For the massive object, from an outside observer’s point of view, this would be an almost imperceptible increase, but for a smaller object moving away from a massive object, the increase in the rate of time would be dramatic. It must be assumed that “time” is faster the further away the objects are from each other. At an infinite distance time MUST “speed up” to infinity. In the absence of mass, time could not exist just as gravity cannot.

But why…?

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So I just read that the Japanese people write their dates backwards, year, month, day.

Smart people.

We’re late, so we might as well be really late…

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Sometimes your project is going to be late before you even start working on it.

The reason is that you decided when you needed to have the software done before you really knew what you were going to be building.

And rarely do the people who want what they want have any idea how much they can reasonably fit in the timeframe available.

What a beautiful baby?!?

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Becoming successful is a bit like winding up pregnant.

Everyone is readily congratulating you.

But none of them really understand how many times you got fucked for it to happen.

Critical information

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Do you think that the battle between David and Goliath was the earliest historically recorded critical hit?

Definitely a case of someone rolling a natural 20 with a bunch of bonuses.

The value of prototypes

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After four years of writing computer game software, and also designing pen & paper games and board games, I have come to believe that creating a working prototype is very important.

A prototype lets you work out the kinks in your design and your rules before you commit to writing even a single line of code.

Coding (figuring out the machine and how the machine works) is fun. But that “fun” should be reserved for a very distinct phase of development.

Even a simple paper prototype (even for an arcade game) is useful to determine how the player’s spaceship (or whatever) moves about on the screen. How enemies will move, and so forth.

I can prototype in a few hours with figurines or dice or pieces of origami and a large sheet of graph paper how a game will play and some of the fun to be derived.

Whereas I would spend days or even weeks determining if the game play actually works if I were writing out the assembly and converting to machine code.

Programming is immensely fun, but solving interesting problems with figuring out how the machine works should really be a separate development step than figuring out how the game should play.

Just a bloody sump

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Because fat people carry more blood (an extra fluid ounce of blood for every extra pound of fat according to an encyclopaedia) it would be for the national good for people with extremely rare blood types to be morbidly obese, because they would have more blood they could spare.

I am not saying my logic isn’t flawed, but certainly amusing to think about.

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