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Technically it is on a stovetop
(31 May at 23:15) |
Heya,
Earlier this month I spoke at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science's PhD hooding ceremony! The "distinguished" "speaker." I feel that that was quite an honor, and hopefully I did it justice. I'm certainly comfortable giving a talk but usually it's because I have something I want to talk about. These students are very talented and privileged and will do okay, but it's also a really precarious time to be starting your career (in the US especially). I don't just mean the chronic problems (out of control climate change, growing economic inequality, unenlightenment, and too many Star Wars movies) but acute problems like the US "government" trashing our research institutions, and technological monsters of our own creation. So I tried to give them some advice about how to maybe survive and maybe save the world. Alas, I don't believe it was recorded, and I just now tried to find any photos of it online and instead got sidetracked for an hour into reading old chess articles, so you'll just have to take my word that it happened. (If you happen to have photos, please send them; my mom would be happy!)
That was a proper distraction from putting together this darned video that I'm still working on. I finished my "big math" cloud analysis, and then running it again when I came to discover that I had incorrectly written "min" instead of "max" when trying to interpret the results. So that was an expensive cube. But the fixed results do look cool and I figured out how to render it in Blender (which information I'm very confident I will not retain). I really just need to sit down and narrate this thing with a screen recording at this point, but I keep procrastinating that for some reason.
A less justifiable form of procrastination: My 3D printer's site for sharing models is currently running a coffee-themed contest, and I noticed a conspicuous lack of coffee makers among the entries. So I made one. It looks like this:
Technically it is on a stovetop
You can see the project page for "instructions" (which abruptly end before any flame). It has all the internal parts and would work except for the fact that it's made from plastic; this is satire! Some people have tried to argue with me that you could boil water in it (referring to some possibly real demonstrations where you boil water through a paper cup), but keep in mind: A proper moka pot would need to generate steam pressure to force steam through the grinds; the walls here are a mesh filled with air bubbles and so they are a good insulator; although the melting point of PLA is higher than water's boiling point, its glass transition temperature is only like 65°C, so it would quickly deform. Also I turned the flame on to make a short video and it immediately scorched the bottom. I used glow-in-the-dark PLA for bonus points in the contest!
Also this month I started and finished Tunic, which was an excellent Zelda game. I think probably they could have done a little more with the combat (or just make you not have to do it so much), but everything else about it was great. The instruction manual thing is just a brilliant way to do the "Metroidvania" progression, and I was extremely impressed with the art/design work in the manual itself (from the half-width forms to the halftone screens). I definitely recommend this one if you like an adventure Zeldoidvania. |  |
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| Also I updated FixederSys with a bunch of new characters. Basically if I ever see a codepoint not render, like if I'm looking at some Lean code and one of the brackets isn't showing up, then I will get completely sidetracked by drawing its entire codepage. |
| Looking forward to an hour or two of Tom 7 Academy! |
| The paper cup thing also works because the paper is so thin that heat is quickly transferred to the water (and because paper doesn't sag under heat, heh.) |
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