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New content on radar.spacebar.org
(30 Nov 2023 at 23:27) |
Here is the new content:
I've mentioned that I have been working on running a five-minute mile on the treadmill this year, a goal that at one point seemed in reach. I think I also complained that I got sick and that when I got back to it, they had swapped out all the treadmills for fancy treadmills with built-in Netflix and air conditioning and stuff like that, which I now refer to as "Bob's Tred Mill." There's some good things about these, and some things that make me crazy, but one thing that especially made me crazy is they felt significantly faster than the old Precor ones I was used to. It's definitely a real thing that treadmills are sometimes not calibrated correctly (or the tread stretches out or slips, etc.) but it was also possible that being sick set me back more than I thought. The important thing is to get The Data instead of just The Upset Feelings so I was shopping for things like those hand-held unicycles that you can wheel around to measure how long things (like streets) are, as it does seem like the kind of device that I would own, looking at like the world's most accurate hand-held unicycle thing, and then I noticed at the last thing that most of them have a MAX SPEED of something like 10mph, which would not do. I finally had the brain-stroke that I could use a laser tachometer to do it, since these have a max speed more like 99999 RPM. So I measured the tread length with some chalk marks and put reflective tape on there. The treadmill will go at different speeds when loaded (running on it) vs unloaded, which also depends on your weight and stride and stuff a little, so you also gotta engage in the dexterity-testing act of measuring while running on it, which looked like this:
POV: You are me
Pointing the laser at the reflective tape dot (visible right next to the laser dot here) as it flies by while running kinda fast is definitely tricky, although I must say that it was one of those times when I thought, "I've been training my whole life for this!" and you can see that I'm showing off a little bit here by also photographing it at the same time. But you are not impressed since it reports 0 RPM. The nice thing about the tachometer is that it only needs a pair of observations to give you a frequency, and you can easily tell if you missed the tape, which you do often on account of the shaking, because you get some integer multiple that's way off from the right answer. Anyway I dutifully took multiple readings unloaded and loaded at (nominally) 6mph, 7mph, ... 12mph and made a spreadsheet with all the results converted, and... found that the treadmill is just about 1% too fast loaded, all across the board. This would be just 3 seconds for a five-minute mile, which is not nothing, but it definitely does not vindicate my Upset Feelings (I was thinking it felt more like 10%). My best guess is that the old treadmills were (all?) actually too slow, which is annoying because now I doubt some of the unofficial 5k records I painfully set for myself during the summer. But, well, the thing about endeavoring to do challenging things is: No Cheating!
In project news, I feel I have a foothold now to get myself out of this math hole, as I've finally migrated this algorithm to work only with 64-bit integer arithmetic and so I can port it to GPU soon and then be out of ideas about how to make it faster. I have no idea if there's a good story to be told for this project, but I'll try (and also, it is okay if sometimes the hobby programming doesn't lead to a video or Sigbovik paper, you know?). And speaking of Sigbovik: Heroes have emerged quite on time this year, so it's certainly looking like there will be a proceedings and conference (perhaps with livestream), so start writing those papers now.
Aside from the math hole, I've been making some progress on two other concurrent projects. It's getting normal again (even quiet) at work and winter break is coming up, and I'm looking forward to having some several-day stretches to work on them.
I played through Golf Peaks (well, I haven't beat all the bonus levels yet but I've been working back to front so it's just a matter of a little time at this point), which was a very nice little puzzle game that does almost everything right. Other than the very irritating music in one world, I think my only disappointment was that it doesn't elegantly handle infinite-length puts. I'm also still working on Return to Monkey Island, which I do like, although it doesn't hold up to my memory of the first two. I think one of the problems with modern point-and-click adventure games is the voices, actually: Not because the voice acting bothers me, but because it goes so slow compared to reading. It's like when you just want to figure out the maximum speed of the hand-held unicycle and they're trying to get you to watch a video instead of just reading. Tears of the Kingdom (which I'm still savoring, but getting close to the end now) does a good job with this; you do hear snippets of voices, which helps with the characterization, but you can blow through the dialog at a pretty fast pace. Probably a lot cheaper, too!
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| I 100%ed Golf Peaks right after posting this. But I would've had -1,000 points if I tried to finish it before posting! |
| I wholeheartedly agree with your opinion on spoken dialog, and I also love the way games like Zelda do it, where every character has a few different noises for speaking, surprise, sadness, etc. but doesn't speak in sentences or even words. |
Tom, have you played the abstract puzzle game Insight yet? That one is long, so don't start it right before some important deadline like I would do.
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| I haven't played it! But it looks interesting and I just added it to my wishlist. Thank you for the recommendation :) |
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