Game Review: Sniper Elite V2 Demo

Because I am a very strange man, I enjoy prowling YouTube for footage of computer simulations. And by strange, I mean stupid. The other day, though, I took a break from the usual neutron stars and such and decided to look into ballistics simulations. Did I mention that I was strange? Well, that led me to investigate Sniper Elite V2.

It so happens that I quite enjoy sniping in shooters, which is an excellent way to get accused of camping once every three seconds. If any military was ever dumb enough to accept my silly ass, I think sniper would be just about the only position I’d be qualified for (you know, apart from living target practice). Not a lot of running around (because, in spite of a gym membership, I still have the running stamina of the corpse of a ninety-year-old anemic grandmother) or depth perception required (which is nice, because, as I’ve complained before, I don’t have any depth perception).

I watched part of a video on YouTube, and thought SEV2 (which acronym looks like something from a horrible vanity plate) looked like fun. And as it so happens, the demo was on Steam, so I downloaded it. So began the awesomeness.

You play as an extremely generic action-hero type with a sniper rifle and an infinite supply of pebbles. You start out in a bombed-out German town during World War II, on the trail of a V2 rocket engineer (which explained the game’s bizarre title; I thought it was Version 2 of something at first). Your goal is to find him and kill him, but there are German soldiers prowling the streets. You can take them on with your trusty Thompson gun (insert Warren Zevon joke here), but you only have about twelve bullets for it, so you’d better do what it says on the tin and snipe the bastards.

I must say, the sniping in the game is absolutely excellent. Unless you play on the girly-man difficulty (and really, then, why bother?), you have to account for bullet-drop caused by gravity. On the hardest setting, you also have to account for wind. Your accuracy is affected by whether you’ve just been running, whether you’re being shot in the face (always affects my accuracy, let me tell you; after all, there can be only one Simo Hyähä), and, impressively, whether or not you’re holding your breath. Holding your breath sends you into bullet-time, which is a tired combat mechanic, but it really does work here.

Then comes the best part. If you’re a good enough shot, you’ll usually be treated to a fantastic little animation of your bullet whizzing out of your barrel (and I can’t tell you how pleased I am that they got the bullet’s shockwave more or less right, instead of just going for the Matrix BS of just having random ripples behind it; I am a nerd) and flying at your enemy. Then, when it hits them, oftentimes you get a cool little X-ray or anatomy-class-skeleton view of what your terrifying projectile is doing to their innards. I thought I was the king of everything when I managed to pop both of a baddie’s eyeballs with one bullet; then my friend came over and played it and managed to obliterate one’s scrotum and make me simultaneously cringe and feel inadequate. It reminds me of that Mortal Kombat game that came out a few years ago, where you got a very gratuitous X-ray of the bones you were breaking, except here, it makes more sense and is a lot more effective. If you’re lucky (blind luck every time, in my case), you can even nail the grenades on the enemies’ belts and make them blow the hell up. It’s pretty glorious.

There’s a decent amount of strategy to the game, too. Oftentimes, the enemy soldiers will be patrolling in large groups, and if you shoot and miss or even stand up from cover for too long, you’re liable to get turned into Leberkäse in a hurry. This is where the infinite supply of pebbles (sometimes) comes in handy: you can toss one to get the enemies’ attention and mislead them. At least I think you can. After a while, it started to seem like the only way to distract the German soldiers was to ping them right in the eye. You can take quite a few hits, even on the hardest difficulty, but the game definitely rewards slow, sneaky, snipery tactics, which is good in a game with “sniper” in the title.

Another thing I thoroughly enjoyed were the enemy snipers. They’re hard to spot and even harder to shoot, but if you’re paying attention, you can usually catch the glint of sunlight off the lens of their scope. Then, you have to pop up, take careful aim quickly, adjusting for gravity and wind, and pop off a shot before the sniper can shoot you. It’s a lot like that amazing sniper duel in Saving Private Ryan, doubly so when I managed to bullseye the bastard right in the eyesocket.

All that said, though, I don’t think I’ll be buying the full version, at least not in the near future. The first reason is that, for some insane reason, the full version currently costs US$50 on Steam. That problem is compounded by another one: the demo’s too damn short. You only get to play one very short mission in the demo, and that mission contains maybe fifteen enemies total. And the problems just keep piling up: rather than letting you cleverly snipe everybody, once you’ve fired your first shot, the enemies will realistically start running around, looking for cover and searching for you. I applaud that level of realism, but that really makes the sniping part finnicky and annoying, since you spend so much time waiting for the baddies to settle down. I guess I shouldn’t really call that a problem so much as an annoyance, since it’s how a sniper would actually behave, but when I just want to pick the game up and pop a couple of Nazis in the brain, it really dampens the fun.

The enemy AI is dull at best. They’ll occasionally take cover cleverly or manage to sneak past you into the building you’re hiding in, at which point you’d best shoot them with your silenced pistol or your twelve-bullet Tommy gun, but for the most part, they’re just goofy. I took out one enemy while he was stuck running in place behind a lamppost. And on top of that, I got a bonus for hitting a moving target. Who wasn’t, you know, moving. Also, since I speak a little German, hearing the AI talk to each other was like playing the otherwise-excellent Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, where the enemies’ entire vocabulary seemed to consist of “Search the area!” and “Spread out!” In the case of Sniper Elite, the AI constantly holler “Man down!” and “Find him!” They also fluctuate between extremely perceptive and wildly inattentive. In one section, you have to kill a soldier who’s standing in a window you need to snipe from. I shot him in the collarbone with my slow-reloading silenced pistol. I missed with my next shot while he spun around confused, looking like he suspected that the wallpaper had done it. He was just noticing me squatting un-subtly in the doorway when I shot him in his face.

I also get the impression that the sniping mechanic is all the game designers really cared about. The plot (or the tiny particle of it that you see in the demo) is simplistic and the writing is weak. In the first mission, you’re tasked with killing a V2 rocket engineer who’s carrying a not-quite-microfilm McGuffin thing which you must retrieve to find his evil scientist buddies.

And in spite of everything I said above about how fun the combat is, parts of it are piss-poor. Whenever you’re not sniping, you go into a third-person perspective, and I hate almost all third-person shooters. If you get pinned down and need to, for instance, mow down the approaching enemies with your Thompson, aiming is pretty much impossible unless you go into ironsight mode, which makes you walk like you’re stuck in molasses. And as far as the sniper sections are concerned, they’re very formulaic and uninteresting. The enemies spawn in the same places every time and their reactions are predictable. And, even though it’s awfully fun to watch your spinning bullet punch through an enemy’s skull and ricochet off the inside of his helmet and come tumbling out his neck, after a while, the constant switch to the cinematic kill-cam just starts to get dull. And even though you can shoot out a baddy’s eyeballs, pop both his testicles, shatter his ribcage, pierce his heart, lacerate his kidneys, and perform very approximate brain surgery on him, it doesn’t really have much of an effect apart from the score you get for the shot, which doesn’t seem to affect anything, at least in the demo. For the most part (and I must say, I applaud this nod to realism), a hit in the gut will stop an enemy just about as fast as a hit in the chest, and as long as you manage to nail the thick fleshy bit in the middle, the foolish human isn’t going to be sprouting any more foolish humans, or whatever it is humans do.

So would I recommend that you buy this game? Well, no. Download the demo. It’s free. It’s easy. Play it for a few days and see if you enjoy the combat. Do like me and wait to see if the price ever comes down. Of course, like I complained earlier, the demo really doesn’t give you much of a taste of what the whole game will be like, but it’s a starting point at least. All in all, I’d say that Sniper Elite V2 is consigned to the purgatory known only as Well It Was a Cool Concept. I can see it being a lot more fun as a sort of target-shooting type game, a fast-paced heavy-replay-value simulator like the amusing Stair Dismount and Truck Dismount, if you’re enough of a geek to have played those. It would be fun if it was just you in one building sniping one street full of soldiers and one building full of snipers. Then you could properly revel in the glory of giving your foes hot ballistic vasectomies. I’d say toss out all the fiddling around with planting bombs and throwing stones and killing evil mad scientists and just let me shoot Nazis and watch their ventricles go pop.

The Amateur Mad Scientist: Quarter-Ton Tomato

You may have noticed that front-loading washing machines are rapidly eclipsing the top-loading agitator variety that was once popular. This is a good thing for two reasons: front-loaders save on water, which is obviously good in these environmentally-conscious times. And two: they allow me to perform all manner of extremely unwise experiments. For you see, my 1985 vintage GE washer, original to my 1985 domicile, finally died. And now, I am equipped with a snazzy new front-loader. It uses a high-speed spin cycle to centrifuge the water out of clothes. It’s really quite hypnotic to watch. And, when it’s spinning at full speed, a little scary. For you see, according to the manual, the drum’s maximum spin speed is 1200 RPM. Yes. 1200 RPM. That’s twenty revolutions per second. Holy shit!

Before I go on to the really unwise part of the experiment, let’s do some quick math. Now, I measured a drum diameter of about two feet, which comes out to a radius of, let’s say, one foot. According to other sources, the maximum spin speed of a washer like mine is 900 RPM. To be on the safe side, let’s assume that, at maximum speed, the drum spins at somewhere between 600 RPM (10 RPS) and 1200 RPM (20 RPS). Centripetal acceleration is given by radius times the square of the angular velocity. Therefore, at 600 RPM, the outer edge of the drum is experiencing a centripetal acceleration of 1.203 kilometers per second per second, or about 122 gees. At 1200 RPM, the acceleration is a terrifying 490 gees. That is to say, under the most conservative estimate, my washing machine generates a hundred and twenty times earth’s surface gravity. I say again: holy shit. And I’d like to add: holy fuck!

Now, the first time I did this calculation, I started having all kinds of unwise ideas. I started wondering if I had any sufficiently compact friends I could coerce into climbing into the drum. I started scouring my neighborhood for particularly troublesome squirrels. Ultimately, I decided to test a tomato. I happened to have some tomatoes that were just moldy enough that I was afraid to eat them. Here’s our test subject:

 

Now, regular readers will be fully aware of the fact that I am insane. But my insanity has its limits. You see, as fun as it is to centrifuge fruits to death in a washing machine, I realized that at some point in the future I might like to do some laundry in my washing machine. That didn’t stop me from proceeding, by any means, but I decided that a watertight container was probably necessary.

I stuck the container in the drum, closed everything up, set the washer for a “Spin and Drain” cycle, and got ready. Our brave test subject had no comment, but he looked about as terrified as a tomato in a plastic bowl can.

I was a little nervous as the washer spun up to full speed. But I discovered that even my cheap-ass camera could take unblurred photos of the drum, which allowed me to confirm that the bowl hadn’t exploded everywhere and voided my warranty.

Notice the way the duct tape curves down towards the center of the lid. It wasn’t doing that when I first put it in. I guess that’s the effect of approximately 100-300 gees (remember, the force is less on the lid because the lid is closer to the drum’s center). But the container valiantly took the abuse. The same cannot be said for the tomato.

HOLY SHIT! Imagine that was your spleen or your brain or something. I’m glad I didn’t talk any of my cousins into that drum… Because 490 gees turns a 1-pound tomato into a 500-pound tomato (quarter-ton tomato! Get it! …sorry…) If I’d talked my 120-pound cousin into taking its place, that’d be 60,000 freakin’ pounds. But then, I might seriously void my warranty, so I’m glad I didn’t.

How Many Miles? -or- Weird Conversions Part 1

I love conversions and comparisons. How many ball bearings would it take to fill up the Empire State Building? If Jupiter was made entirely out of lead, how much smaller would it be?

Well, finally, the strange people at Wolfram (who are responsible for the ridiculously expensive and popular math software Mathematica), have created something to titillate this extremely weird and unproductive part of my soul. They call it Wolfram Alpha, and it is honestly a frightening piece of technology. You can, for example, ask it questions like “(mass of jupiter / density of lead),” and it will, in a flash, give you the answer. Which, as it turns out, is 167,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic meters. And, like an obedient child or an extremely well-trained German Shepherd, it also serves up the tidbit that this volume of lead would have a radius of 21,244 miles, which, the link Wolfram Alpha provides will gleefully tell you is about half the radius of Saturn.

Because I am a sad and lonely man, I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time punching numbers into this thing and seeing what kind of funny stuff comes out. I can, through a simple multi-step process involving some shadowy calculations that I feel compelled to trust without question (Wolfram Alpha, as an extra feature, apparently comes with hypnotism), find out how large a cube of uranium weighing the same as me would be (distressingly large, is the answer). But sometimes, it comes up with slightly odd comparisons. Something might, for example, be said to have 0.25 times the mass of Earth’s atmosphere. Or, this little gem, which has spawned what may or may not turn into a post series of strange conversions and comparisons:

Don’t you go sticking your nose into why I wanted to know what 45,000,000 times 3 centimeters was, just take note of the bit at the bottom. Wolfram Alpha very helpfully pointed out that the result is 0.84 times the number of miles the Proclaimers would walk to fall down at your door. Which is a reference to this:

Every other weird comparison I’ve gotten has been, well, weird, but not quite as weird as this. And now, because, as I mentioned earlier, I am a sad and lonely man, I’m off to stick a lot of other weird numbers into it to see if it will tell me more odd facts about Scottish bands. And if it doesn’t serve up a reference to Harry Chapin’s 30,000 Pounds of Bananas, I shall write a scathing letter of complaint.

Remembering 9-11-2001

Today, on the ten-year anniversary of the day a very bad thing happened, I’m sending out my traditional plea:

Today, forget about politics. Agendas. Conspiracies. Strategies. Arguments. Today, simply remember that, ten years ago, a lot of human beings went to work in two skyscrapers, and some other human beings got on planes, and some of the human beings on some of those planes hijacked the planes and flew them into the skyscrapers. And as a result of what those human beings did, a lot of human beings have died in the ten years since. Learn from the hijackers’ mistake: they learned to forget that the people on the planes they hijacked and the towers and buildings they attacked were people. Today, learn from that terrible error. Never forget that every other human body who walks or crawls around the world is inhabited by a person. We must learn never to de-humanize another person. We must never write another person off as insignificant.

And we should take this opportunity to remember that life is precarious. It might have been you or I on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings. Or it might be you or I who dies in a car crash today or tomorrow, or dies of a heart attack. In the memory of the people who died on September the 11th, cherish life, and remember that, no matter how bad or good it seems, the fact that you are alive is a gift, and it can be withdrawn at any moment.

What Have I Become?

It all started out innocently enough. After my last nervous breakdown, during recovery, my parents gave me an old scuffed-up aquarium, which I proceeded to fill with dirt and old leaves and rotting plywood. And pillbugs. For a while, it was fun to watch them breed and run around and poke each other and chew on my fingers when I picked them up, but soon, I wanted more. So, when I wasn’t busy with my Modern Algebra class, I spent many irrational hours sifting through leaflitter in my parents’ back yard (my own back yard being not quite large enough to house a single moth) looking for millipedes. Then I was peeling the bark off dead trees, on the hunt for the big scary centipedes that lived back there.

When I got what laughably counts for my sanity scraped back together, I returned to my home with my aquarium of extremely well-fed, pampered pillbugs and millipedes in tow. But I’d caught a bug–sorry, that was terrible–and there is no cure. I’d fallen victim to that little-known scourge: invertebrate addiction. I’ve always liked invertebrates. So few of them are nasty and hairy, and they never call me “psycho kid” or yell at me because there aren’t any dry towels or make funny faces when I ask them on dates. Unfortunately, the cephalopods–my very favorite class of invertebrates, on account of including the nautilus, the cuttlefish, and the octopus, any one of which is probably smarter than I am–are practically impossible to keep in captivity, and I’m the kind of half-autistic obsessive-compulsive who likes his nature in a very neat rectangular container where he can poke at it at whenever he likes. And, being so intelligent, I figured it would be pretty cruel to keep an octopus or a squid in my tiny-ass house (tiny ass-house), so I went looking for another kind of invertebrate that I could keep in my tiny-ass house.

It was then that I discovered snails. I’d added a few snails to my terrarium when I was first setting it up, but I soon learned of a much larger, much less everyday variety: the apple snails. Good old Pomacea diffusa. And then I sighed melodramatically and thought “Aw gee…I could never afford an aquarium to keep them in…” But then one day, I was at the petstore. And I saw snails running around their fishtanks. They had tentacles growing out of their faces and eyes without pupils and sharp teeth and iridescent orange marks on their sides, and they were cheap, and I bought five. And, because I am an idiot, tried keeping them in a gallon Mason jar. They reacted poorly, but my parents, probably worried that I was going to destroy the entire animal kingdom at this rate, gave me a little ten-gallon aquarium as a birthday present. And I, being, once again, an idiot, thought “Filtration? Filtration’s for weaklings!” The snails disagreed. So, several hundred gallons’ worth of water changes and about fifteen dead shrimp later, I had an aquarium, inhabited by nothing but snails and shrimp.

But I wanted more. I couldn’t settle for just one kind of snail, I wanted all species of snail. Soon, I discovered that the tanks at the petstore were infested with Malaysian trumpet snails, cute little invasive bastards who like to dig in sand and pop up as if to say “Fuck you, I’m a snail, I go where I want!” And the petstore, pretty much at their wits’ end on how to get rid of them, happily gave me twenty for free. And on a later visit, they, with a mischievous look in their eye that I didn’t recognize, happily gave me five common pond snails, the deadly scourge known as the European physa.

Then, my first snails laid eggs, providing me with my next novelty fix for a while, but after the eggs hatched, I had more snails than I knew what to do with, and so I emptied out a second terrarium I was starting and turned it into an aquarium just for overflow snails. And my parents, glad that I finally had a hobby that didn’t involve vivisecting woodland creatures, happily gave me a seventy-five gallon aquarium that used to house our dear boa constrictor. I turned it into a terrariaum. I bought hermit crabs and pestered them endlessly, trying to get them to snuggle with me like little hard-shelled kittens. Then, as always happens in the summer, I found my house overrun with field crickets, which I immediately caught and forced into slave labor, that slave labor being the endless manufacture of insectile cuteness.

And the other day, it finally occurred to me what I’ve become. When I was younger, I played Pokemon on the good old GameBoy. And there was always that one pain-in-the-ass bastard who hung out at the edge of the tall grass, waiting for some hapless beginner to wander through, all his Pokemon half-dead from the endless battles with pigeons and caterpillars in the dreaded Tall Grass, and then sprang out and challenged said trainer to an inescapable battle, at which point he would deploy fifteen fucking caterpillars and kill all your Pokemon.

Well, I realized the other day that I’ve become that guy. I’ve become some bizarre real-world analogue to the tall-grass Pokemon bastard. I am a collector of strange animals. All that remains now is for me to put them in little containers and walk around looking for someone else who happens to have their own container of water snails and challenge them to a duel. All I have to do is wait…

Spawn More Overlords!

Bam! You just looked at a picture of two snails having sex! It’s like a Rickroll, except it makes you want to wash your eyeballs and move into a monastery! I would just like to congratulate the snail on the right. He (yes, he; not all snails are hermaphrodites, trolls…) has been..spreading the love at least once a day for the last two weeks. Which is more action than I’ve gotten in the last year. Which, considering I have an aquarium full of snails and take pictures of them boinking, isn’t really too surprising. Sooo lonelyyy… Anyway, that snail is awesome. In spite of the fact that, out of the four females in the tank, all but one (the other snail in the dirty, dirty picture above) are at least twice his size. Does he let that stop him? No! Is he dissuaded by the fact that the other snails are more or less uninterested in his runty ass? Of course not! Does he let go when they maneuver under low-hanging objects in an attempt to bash him off their backs? No way José! Like the emperor Caligula or a that one guy in high school, he will not rest until he’s fathered at least a thousand bastard children. (Which really, is unfair to the snail; lacking a concept of matrimony, they really have no distinction between legitimate and illegitimate offspring. You judgmental bastard.) Anyway, kudos to him! I’ll leave you with this:

Or, (and with many apologies to Allie Brosh, whose blog is much better than mine):

The Amateur Mad Scientist: Episode 5

Having discovered that I can maintain a closed ecosystem in a jar indefinitely (by which I mean for three weeks; I have the time-sense of a hyperactive Chihuahua), I decided to try a slightly riskier endeavor. Using a high-grade sterile enclosure cleverly disguised to look like an old curry jar, I added sand, gravel, crushed seashells, conditioned tapwater, and one Malaysian trumpet snail (Melanoides tuberculata). I chose the trumpet snail because: 1) I had some on hand, which the petstore (somewhat forebodingly) gave me for free; 2) They’re a lot smaller than my big aquarium snails; and 3) They’re apparently tough as hell and don’t have much in the way of oxygen demands. For oxygenation, I added four or five fragments of a Marimo moss ball plant I bought about a week ago. Here are the results:

In case you couldn’t tell from my wonderful photography, the plants are in the middle and the snail is that little brown thing half-hidden by a reflection off to the left. Surprisingly, the water isn’t cloudy because of my incompetence, but because the crushed seashells haven’t had time to settle yet, and I’m apparently harboring some latent anger, because I crushed them really well. More updates as events warrant!

The Amateur Mad Scientist – Episode 2

Haha! And you thought this was gonna be another of those Life of an English Major “series” that I lose interest in two weeks later and forget about. But no! There are now at least two episodes of the Amateur Mad Scientist. In the last episode, I put five pillbugs in a nasty-ass recycled deli container and tried to force them to breed. This one’s not quite that mean, if for no other reason than no macroscopic organisms are involved. I present to you: the Super-Ghetto Biosphere.

For an enclosure, I decided to use a little glass jar that totally didn’t used to have tartar sauce in it.

To that, I added sand enriched with organic material. Sand I totally didn’t steal from my hermit crabs. And then the water. Nasty-ass water. Water, like, swimming with little critters. Paramecia ‘n’ shit, yo. Sorry…that joke was fucking stupid. But anyway: the water is also fortified with organic matter (not floating aquarium-snail poop, I promise).

And now the keystone of the entire ecosystem: a cutting of the infamously tenacious water wisteria plant (Hygrophilia difformis). Because if experience has taught me anything, there’s nothing plants like more than being sealed in jars.

So that’s the setup as of 6-22-2011. I’ll post pictures over the weeks to come detailing my resounding success (Ha!). Watch this space!

Update: As pf 7-2-2011, the plant is still (somehow) alive, and has deigned to throw down at least one root. Also, algae.

Update: As of 7-7-2011, the plant is still, in spite of my worst efforts, alive, and the algae has proliferated and started consuming all the detritus I was too damn lazy to screen out.

Visual Numbers: The Next Generation (I)

Hey, just because I’m an English major now doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a bit of math on the side. Therefore, I present to you Visual Numbers: The Next Generation (Part I, insert obligatory Star Wars joke).

I’ve always been a big fan of fractals. I was imagining fractal-esque recursive structures back when solving 2x + 5 = 0 seemed intimidating. Recently, in my wanderings through the hallowed halls of physics, I stumbled across the idea of generating fractals by coloring each pixel of an image according to the final state of a differential equation, with the x and y coordinates of that pixel as input parameters. Of course, being an incompetent programmer, I haven’t been able to write a stable integrator for a differential equation, but I’m just smart enough to manage simple stuff like the discrete logistic map, where every new x is computed according to the formula x = λx(1-x), where λ is a constant. The other day, I had a brainstorm and decided to create a two-dimensional version of the same sort of thing, only with x as a vector and replacing x at each step with F(x), where F is a vector function. Basically, all that means is that I now have two integer variables to play with, which allows for more interesting behavior and allows me to create pretty pictures like this:

In this image, each pixel is colored according to the following rule: all pixels start out white. Then, each pixel is turned into a vector v(x,y), where x and y are the pixel’s coordinates. The function v(x,y) = v(-x.y,x.x + floor(0.5 * x.y)) is then applied repeatedly for a fixed number of steps (in this case, 750). If at any point during iteration the vector reaches a previously-visited point, then that point forms a closed, repetitive orbit in 2-space and the pixel is colored black. If this doesn’t happen, the pixel is left white.

The shapes here are pretty nice, even if I do say so myself. From some prior experiments with similar mappings, I think that the smaller black ellipses with banding and satellite blobs represent orbits shaped like three elliptical orbits connected into a weird triangle, and that the large oval with the large banding represents the “spirograph-like” orbits.

The really neat thing about mappings like this is that they’re a (relatively) computationally-inexpensive alternative to the differential-equation mappings I discussed earlier. I’m no great mathematician (obviously), but I get the feeling that these two-dimensional mappings are discretized analogues of the mapping that generates the ever-beautiful Mandelbrot Set.

Interestingly (and here I’m playing mathematician again), you can write this type of mapping this way:

F(v) = v(ax + by,cx + dy). In the case of the above map, a = 0, b = -1 , c = 1, d = 0.5.  With a = 0.5, b = -1, c = 1, and d = 0.1, you get a beautiful spiral pattern:

It’s a little hard to see because the orbits are so dense, but this pattern is actually fractal, too (or seems to be): there are smaller spirals to the top-center and left-center of the big one, and what looks like unformed proto-spirals in between those.

And this lovely pattern is created by a = 0, b = -1, c = 1, d = 0.1. Note the eleven-pointed stars in the upper right and left and the lower right. Watch this space for more mathematical prettiness.

The Size of the Sun

In the above image, the tiny red rectangle towards the middle of the Sun represents (approximately) the surface area of the Earth. Meaning that the sunspot above it is almost big enough (approximately; some perspective effects come into play) to encompass the entire surface of the Earth. Odds are that everything you have ever done or seen has taken place in an area smaller than a sunspot. The universe is odd.

(Image courtesy of NASA’s remarkable Solar Dynamics Observatory)

The Amateur Mad Scientist (Part 1)

Oh hi. Didn’t see you there.

Sorry, I haven’t done this for a while. The ol’ sense of humor is kinda rusty. But, it seems that I’m back, and even geekier than ever.

The amateurish picture you see above is of two pillbugs (probably Oniscus spp. Edit: Probably Armadillidum nasatum), the coolest terrestrial crustaceans in existence. Their main functions in the forest ecosystem are consuming detritus and excreting soil (poop). Also, entertaining lonely twenty-somethings on Friday nights. They’re incredibly cute, completely harmless, easy to keep as pets, and if you don’t mind waiting a while, they make great compost. Ha! who needs cats?

But as well as being a nerd, I’m also a man. A manly man. With at least seventeen confirmed chest hairs. So, I like my coffee hot, my whiskey lukewarm, my women buxom (or plain, I’m not picky), and my bugs HUGE. And since the gigantic (we’re talking the size of my nose, and my nose is big. GRRRR!) pill millipede (see below) is native to the tropics and doesn’t do well in captivity, I thought “I’m a nerd. I’ve got spare time. Why not make my own?”

So begins my new series “The Amateur Mad Scientist.” Experiment 1: the evolution through artificial selection of gigantic f**cking pillbugs! I started out with five of the largest Oniscus Armadillidum adults I could pull out of my dad’s compost heap (I’m almost afraid to look in my compost heap after the maggot episode of a few months ago…). Five is a nice number, and easy to keep track of, and most importantly, gives me roughly a 96.8% chance of having at least one male and one female. When they reproduce and the hatchlings grow to full size, I’ll pick the biggest ones and leave them in the experimental colony (the losers I’ll transfer to my aquarium-sized pillbug-millipede colony, after calling them sissies and stealing their lunch money, of course). I’m honestly not entirely sure how long a pillbug generation is, but I imagine (meaning: I hope) I’ll see the effects before too long. Watch this space!

Other Business: I’m going to try to get back into the habit of posting stuff. I’ve got a couple of NetLogo simulations worth talking about, and some other things. So yeah. Watch this space.

EDIT: So two of the pillbugs died and I got to thinking “How would I feel if someone put me in a Tupperware container and tried to breed me into a race of giants?” And I decided that I would, in response, crawl out of the container while my captor was asleep, shit in his eye, and crawl into his ear and eat his brain. The surviving pillbugs are now back in the wild, no doubt talking all kinds of shit about me, none of which, I assure you, is true.

Re-Boot

A while ago, I promised some big(gish) news. Well, here it is: The Life of an English Major is getting rebooted. I’m switching to a new username and moving to a new patch of land in WordPress country. After four years (has it really been…?) I find myself a completely different person than the whiny, mucus-filled, befuddled lunatic who booted this blog in the first place. Don’t worry, I’m still a whiny, mucus-filled, befuddled lunatic, and I plan to do a lot of things the way I’ve been doing them since the blog began. Here are a few of the Life of and English Major set-pieces that won’t be going anywhere:

• Visual Numbers: It’s true, I’m an English major now, but I do still love Math. A year ago, Math and I had a messy divorce after a long and increasingly loveless marriage. Now that I’m married to English and my ex and I have reconciled, I’ve decided to stay married to English and just have a steamy affair with Math behind English’s back. And what all that torturous mess means is: I’m going to keep up Visual Numbers, my (sort of) long-running series of posts visualizing the beautiful patterns that lurk in numbers, along with whatever interesting mathematical ramblings I manage to concoct.
• Random bits and pieces: One reader found my blog by Googling “insect crawling up the rectum.” And I’m always seeing amusing targeted ads here and there. May it ever be so.
• Stuff for writers: I love to write. I also love to write about writing (mainly because it’s a lot easier to write about it than to actually do it). I’m sure now that I’m actually almost kinda semi-serious about it, I’ll have more to say.
• Reviews of stuff: I do love to give my cynical and often simpleminded opinion about things, and I shall continue to do so. Less simplemindedly now, I would hope.
• Netlogo simulations: I do still love to program in NetLogo, and if I should happen to write a decently amusing simulation, I’ll let you know about it.
• Random ideas like this one.
• Random speculations and musings.
• Unwise experiments with food and dangerous chemicals.

Hopefully, I’ll also come up with a few new things to do. In addition, there’s going to be a lot less random bitching and whining, half-baked ideas, and a hell of a lot more spelling and grammar checking (when I saw that I’d written “it’s” where I should have written “its,” I died a little). And there’s not going to be any politics. None. None at all. I have reached an advanced stage of serenity an disillusionment when it comes to politics. I’m going to take care of my little patch of the world, and that’s all I can hope to do. Let the politicians argue about the placesettings on the Titanic.

The re-vamped Life of an English Major should be up and running soon. See you there!

An Update (No, Really)

I’m still here. I’m still alive (mostly). I’m just busy. Like, really busy. Beavers? Beavers ain’t got nothin’ on me. I promise I’ll be updating again soon. (Hopefully) I’ll have some big(gish) news soon.

Haiti

I’m not going to pretend to know the miseries of the Haitian people after the earthquake, and I’m not going to use guilt or pathos to appeal to anyone. I just want to say that, if you’ve got any money at all to spare, spare a little for Haiti. It’s in pretty rough shape, and it could really use the help. I suggest giving to the American Red Cross, I think they’re fairly reputable, but give wherever and however much you can.

R.I.P. Kim Peek

R.I.P. Kim Peek (11/11/1951 – 12/19/2009). Goodbye, Rain Man.

You Know You’re a Nerd When…

…you think “I want to make a softboiled egg, but I don’t know how. I’d better hit the ‘net and look it up. But I want to get the time right, so I’d better consult at least two sources.” I’m actually a little ashamed…

Targeted Advertising

Lately, as my social skills have improved to the point that I’m no longer that kid who always ends up partnered up with the teacher for group activities, I’ve begun regular e-mail conversations. I use Gmail, because it’s free, because Yahoo annoys me, and because I’m clearly very trusting. Lately, I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend of highly targeted ads appearing in the side-bars of my e-mails. Most of them are just unsettling: I write some witty quip about cucumbers, and as soon as I get my reply, there in the sidebar is something like “Cucumber Recipes 4 Free!!!” Sometimes, though, the ads are a bit more surreal. When discussing space travel with someone, I saw the following:

Well thanks, Google! I bet I can get a crapload of frequent flier miles!

But fret not, Gmail users, Google doesn’t want you to play eccentric millionaire and book passage on a Soyuz. Oh, no. They want to help you save money, too!

In unrelated news, if you’re single, Christian, and incredibly creepy, there’s a site looking to hook you up with possible jailbait in no time!

You know, all this taken together with its interest in insects crawling up the rectum makes me suspect that the Internet may not actually be entirely sane…

Something Wicked This Way Comes

You know something? I hate 3D movies. Not because they’re more expensive (which they are). And not because they have the feel of a fad (which they do). And also not because I worry that the gimmick will take precedence over good storytelling (which I do). No, I hate 3D movies because I can’t…fucking…watch…them.

As it so happens, I’m what you call “stereoblind.” When I was a little kid, I had an uncooperative eye muscle, and so my eyes never learned to focus together on one point. As a result, my brain never had consistent images with which to learn depth perception. And as a result, I can see perfectly well out of both eyes, just not at the same time.

For a long while I had no idea what was going on. As a kid, I had a book about dinosaurs, and it had a few pages of those red-blue 3d anaglyphs. I put on the 3d glasses, not entirely sure what I was going to see. What I saw was nothing. I looked through one eye , and saw only the red half of the drawing. I looked through the other eye, and saw only the blue half. I switched back and forth. Still no 3D. As I got older, I grew to hate those “Magic Eye” pictures. Finally, in high school, it struck me that the reason for all of this was the fact that I have no depth perception at all. My right eye does its thing, and my left eye does its thing, and they don’t communicate much. At one point, I remember thinking “Well, at least that whole 3D movie craze passed me by.”

Well, the universe couldn’t let a silly “famous last words” statement like that pass. Oh no. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been learning that James Cameron’s Avatar (by James Cameron) is being touted as a 3D movie. NPR tells me that Cameron is also converting Titanic into 3D, and more and more theaters are jumping on the three-dimensional bandwagon. Well, to stretch the analogy way farther than I should, I’m rolling along behind that bandwagon in a wheelchair with a bad wheel. If the 3D craze becomes the massive thing that movie studios seem to hope it becomes, then I’m going to have a lot more stuff to rant about.

Veteran’s Day

I’ve never been drafted to serve in a war.

I’ve never seen bombers flying overhead.

I don’t know what it looks like when someone gets shot in the head.

Idon’t hear about bombings in Pakistan and Afghanistan and think “That could have been me.”

Political factions have never cut of my power, or my water, or my food.

If I sleep poorly at night, it’s never for fear of my safety.

I have the leisure to think about myself.

When the government does something I don’t like, I’m not afraid to say so.

For all this, I thank our veterans. All you brave souls: thank you.

What the Internet Likes

Being a blogger who sits in the sad, lonely corner of the Internet along with all the twitchy Twitterers whose updates all look like “f*cking blue dog dems need to stfu,” I occasionally (okay, frequently) feel the need to inflate my own sense of importance.

This time, I’ll be doing that by using my humble little blog as a statistical snapshot of the things the Internet likes.

Oh, Internet, you’re such a muddled psychotic bitch (or bastard, in the interest of equality)…

By far, the Internet loves VY Canis Majoris, the current candidate for “largest star in the universe,” more than anything else. Since I posted it, it’s gotten an absurd 13,766 views. Whoo.

Okay, so that’s nice: people want to learn things about the mysteries of the universe. Cool. Maybe we’re doing better as a society than I thought. But no. No. The rest of my science posts languish in the bottom of the bargain bin, while, by far, my Zombie Simulator-related posts are the proud runners up, having garnered 10,466 views.

Okay. Internet-people like zombies. No big surprise. You know what else Internet people like? Stupid memes. That crazed devotion to sloppily-doctored pictures with poorly-spelled captions earned my “Yo Dawg…” post 437 views. What to take away from this: the Internet likes memes, but it likes them more than an order of magnitude less than zombies.

Struggling along near the back of the pack, battling shinsplints since the first quarter-mile, is the Giant Rubber-Band Ball, with 302. Puffing along beside it, considering an unsportsmanlike elbow to the face, is Poor Man’s Liquid Nitrogen with 292.

So what have we learned? Well, that the Internet is a big fan of impractical time-wasting things, often with a scientific theme. A lot like me.

But you might be asking, what doesn’t the Internet like? Well, a lot of things, but mostly, my weekly updates and various other posts about my life. So the Internet thinks I’m kind of a loser. A lot like me. But now, that’s really more my psychiatrist’s business than yours, isn’t it.

https://asymptote.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/yo-dawg/

Awesome Chart

I’ve been a fan of xkcd ever since I discovered it a few years. There’s something about the comic’s simultaneously intelligent and absurd humor that strikes a chord in me. But today’s comic is one of those rare ones that’s intelligent, absurd, and remarkable. The caption basically says it all, but I’d like to add that Mr. Munroe was spot-on about Primer: the world’s coolest time-travel movie with the world’s most incomprehensible plot.

Image courtesy of http://xkcd.com/

(With many thanks to Randall Munroe!)

NaNoWriMo 2009!

Oh, man. The magical season is upon us again. And good guess, but I don’t mean the Halloween season. I mean the glorious month of November, where thousands of people sweat out, bleed out, or otherwise excrete a 50,00o-word novel. National Novel-Writing Month returns again! I’m honestly a lot more excited than is reasonable, but I always have a really smashing time, and who knows, maybe this year I’ll actually make good on my promise to revise the aforementioned excretion.

Anyway, here’s a brief preview of this year’s novel:

Plenty of neurotic losers spend their high school years plotting the destruction of the human race. Jon Cordin may be the first to succeed…

To My Nasty Virus

Dear Virus,

Although I was thrilled to be chosen as your auspicious host, I believe that our relationship is over. Really, it’s over. Get your shit out of my closet, clean out my sinuses, and get packing. You are freakish and unnatural. You exhaust me. No 21-year-old should have the energy of an unhealthy 60-year-old man with a bad knee and a serious Nyquil habit. How the hell am I supposed to explain to my reader(s) why I haven’t been able to stick three coherent sentences together. It’s over. Move on. I have a wide variety of friends and relatives you can stay with. It’s time to broaden your horizons, spread your wings.

Sincerely,

The Guy Who’s Been Sick For Two Months

The Weekly Limerick #1

Because it seems so much more entertaining than “The Weekly Update.”

As usual, not much to say.

School tends to fill up my days.

Played some new games, it’s true

I could write a review

But I probably won’t anyways.

From the “Smashing Stuff Into Stuff” Department…

To prove that my abandonment of my math major doesn’t disqualify me as a nerd, I will very likely be awake at 7:30 tomorrow morning, seated expectantly in front of my computer, waiting for the LCROSS probe to impact the Moon’s south pole. I giggled fairly hard when Deep Impact smashed into the comet Tempel 1 a few years ago, and I’m embarrassingly giddy this time to be able to watch the event live.

Aside from the fact that it’s awesome, NASA are punching a hole on the lunar surface in order to study its composition, to find out how much water/hydroxyl is actaully down there. To steal a joke from Drew Carey: If they find some, you know what that means: another four-dollar bottle of imported water! But I digress.

The impact is to be broadcast live on NASA TV, and is scheduled to occur around 7:31 AM Eastern Daylight Time. Not for the first time, I curse the fact that I was born in the Southeast, because thanks to the Earth’s damnable rotation, I’m not going to be able to observe the impact directly. But I will be watching, and it will be awesome. Be there or be round. (See, I’m funny!)