A while back, I was home in Virginia for a little while, and my friend James decided it was time to build a trebuchet Pictured: James, Doug I say measure once, cut eighty or ninety times. As you can see by Doug’s hat, trebuchets are very serious business. I had to leave before we could …
Author Archives: Randall
Geohashing Followup + change to algorithm for Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia
Geohashing has been great fun so far. There are hundreds of users on the wiki, and I’ve gotten to wander places like this: There’s been a small change to the algorithm to deal with time zones. This change does not affect anyone in North/South America (excluding Greenland), does not affect Saturday meetup times anywhere, and …
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Geohashing
Summer seems to have arrived, at last. As you may have noticed, today’s comic contains an algorithm for converting dates into local coordinates. For a given day, you can calculate what that day’s coordinate is for your region. Dan has put together a tool for calculating a day’s coordinates and show it using Google Maps. …
GPS Cyborg Implant
Last week, I wrote a short Python script that uses a USB GPS device under Linux to help with navigation. It doesn’t have maps or anything — it just gives distances and, while you’re moving, the direction to the destination (as in “two o’clock”). It prints this info on the terminal and speaks it using …
Friday Night
So there I was at the stroke of midnight, contemplating the four-knights opening by the dim glow of a flashlight, ears popping under the extra five pounds per square inch of pressure. On Friday night, Dan (who you may remember as the Robot9000 bot author), Finn and I invented midnight underwater speed chess. A nice feature …
Center of Population
What’s the world’s center of population? The center of population for a region is, roughly, the center of mass of the inhabitants. The Census bureau defines the center of population of the US (currently in Missouri) as the point at which an imaginary, flat, weightless, and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly …
A List
I was cleaning my room when I found this list in a pile of papers: It’s my handwriting from the last couple years, and it looks faintly familiar, but for the life of me I have no idea what it means or why I wrote it. … can anyone help figure this one out?
Hooray robots!
A number of people have asked me about building the robot sketched in yesterday’s strip. You’re definitely welcome to, and I’d love to see the results. There are a couple engineering details that might trip you up. Rotating the webcam is one of them — I don’t make this explicit, but the idea in the …
Two Female Leads
Quick, name a few recent popular movies where the two top-billed stars are female. Here’s a miscellaneous survey I just did, tallied by gender of top billed/second billed star: M/M M/F F/M F/F 20 biggest movies of 2007 10 10 0 0 20 biggest movies of 2006 11 7 0 2 20 biggest movies …
New Electric Skateboard
Happy pi day, everyone! My skateboard was broken for the past five or six months, and rather than get it repaired, I traded it in for a new, more powerful model. For a cost of about $120, I now have a board that can go zero to 20 mph in four seconds. This is a …
xkcd 