Unstructured Gravity

If you've ever played the old Artillery computer game, Gravity Pods is essentially the same game except that the artillery is deflected by attractors and repellors.

It's a simple game while still being quite addictive.

Unstructured Fun

There's a sub-genre of games where you try to get an object from point A to point B. I found this one to be particularly addictive. The idea is that you paint a path for the ball to fall along in order to guide it to the square.

Be warned, this is an immense time waster!

Unstructured Brrrrrr!

More fun with liquid nitrogen.

Unstructured Blocks

Here's a cool and challenging (albeit forgiving) game called Bloxorz. The idea is to maneuver a rectangular brick into a hole. The idea, and execution, is very intuitive. The game becomes challenging after awhile but, unlike a lot of puzzle games, not so ridiculously challenge that you feel like the designer is just being sadistic.

Unstructured Hand Shadows

I was never very good at hand shadows. Perhaps if I had had access to the Ashley's Shadows site, I could have spent hours distracting myself from my lonely, lonely geek childhood.

Unstructured Acrobotics

Acrobots are cute, little three legged things that grab on to and push off from one another, tumbling and bouncing around (not to be confused with Autobots which are robots in disguise).

Unstructured Bunny Rabbit

Ever since we saw a yeti throwing a penguin, there have been a glut of games where the goal is to make some animal traverse some large distance (horizontal or vertical). Be that as it may, this latest one, which involves an insanely cute bunny jumping on bells in an attempt to get high (quit your tittering, you!) is surprisingly fun, addictive and, yet, soothing.

Unstructured Meta-Fun

I've always loved meta-things and Lore Sjöberg (late of Brunching Shuttlecocks) has come up with a dandy one.

As you might have noticed, "what-am-I" quizzes have been proliferating. You can now know, with all the accuracy that the internet has to bear on the subject (ahem), what style of humor you have, whether or not you have a personality disorder, and which Simpsons character you are.

Lore's test goes beyond this basic paradigm. Instead of finding out who you are from a quiz, you tell the quiz who you are. The idea is that you then pass the quiz along to your friends and they try to guess what your answers would be (he compares it to being a bit like the Newlywed Game but with no questions about whoopee).

Here's my swap quiz. You can, of course, create your own.

Le Grand Content

Le Grand Content is a fascinating little video concerning the meaning of life (with lot's of graphs).

I know that sounds horribly boring, which just proves that descriptions can be deceiving and expectations have no necessary correlation to results.

Seriously, it's brilliant and entertaining. Check it out.

Unstructured Wordplay

I've seen the following bit of clever wordplay floating around the net for a long time but I've never been able to find out who wrote it. It turns out that it was written by Jack Winter for the New Yorker back in 1994. So, with all due credit, here is the story of

How I met my wife

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate.

I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way.

I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I'd have to make bones about it since I was travelling cognito. Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn't be peccable. Only toward and heard-of behavior would do.

Fortunately, the embarrassment that my maculate appearance might cause was evitable. There were two ways about it, but the chances that someone as flappable as I would be ept enough to become persona grata or a sung hero were slim. I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to, someone who usually aroused bridled passion.

So I decided not to risk it. But then, all at once, for some apparent reason, she looked in my direction and smiled in a way that I could make heads and tails of.

I was plussed. It was concerting to see that she was communicado, and it nerved me that she was interested in a pareil like me, sight seen. Normally, I had a domitable spirit, but, being corrigible, I felt capacitated -- as if this were something I was great shakes at -- and forgot that I had succeeded in situations like this only a told number of times. So, after a terminable delay, I acted with mitigated gall and made my way through the ruly crowd with strong givings.

Nevertheless, since this was all new hat to me and I had no time to prepare a promptu speech, I was petuous. Wanting to make only called-for remarks, I started talking about the hors d'oeuvres, trying to abuse her of the notion that I was sipid, and perhaps even bunk a few myths about myself.

She responded well, and I was mayed that she considered me a savory character who was up to some good. She told me who she was. "What a perfect nomer," I said, advertently. The conversation become more and more choate, and we spoke at length to much avail. But I was defatigable, so I had to leave at a godly hour. I asked if she wanted to come with me. To my delight, she was committal. We left the party together and have been together ever since. I have given her my love, and she has requited it.

Pancakes!

Behold, the joy of pancakes!

Kinetic Art

Unstructured Fun

First an announcement: instead of doing regular Tuesday Fun articles, I've decided to do them on a less structured scheduled; hence, "Tuesday Fun" is now "Unstructured Fun".

For this first entry, Lore Sjöberg, formerly of Brunching Shuttlecocks, has put together a fun little web toy called Untitled States. Basically it's a set of pictures that you can self-caption.

It's a simple toy but, in my opinion, surprisingly fun to play around with. It also provides you with HTML so that you can add the resulting images to a web page or post them to a forum.

Have fun.

Unstructured Anagrams

I first found a minor hobby in making anagrams back in the days when doing so was much more of a challenge. Now with any number of anagram websites out there, finding all possible permutations of a given word or phrase is child's play.

Be that as it may, even if the skill of anagram creation has been made obsolete, the enjoyment of finding unexpected and humorous anagrams is still alive. My own name anagrams out to "a wide snarl", which is pretty cool until you consider that it can also produce "weird nasal" and "snail wader".

My personal favorite of the generators is the Internet Anagram Server (aka, "I, Rearrangement Servant". Be sure to play with the advanced features. And if, perchance, your boss has a name that can be turned into "crap for brains", I would suggest that you keep that bit of trivia to yourself.

Dynamite

I wasn't expecting to like Napoleon Dynamite (largely because of an utterly incomprehensible media campaign by MTV). I finally saw it on DVD because a friend of my girlfriend strongly recommended it. Much to my surprise, I really liked it. It is, indeed, a true example of geek cinema.

If you liked it as well, you may like today's link to the Napoleon Dynamite Soundboard, which is a clever little Flash tool with various quotes from the movie.

Stupid Google Trick

For today's fun, I'd thought I'd share a stupid Google trick that I worked out all on my own.

Let us suppose that you've decided to write some science fiction. Let us further suppose that you've decided to allow for faster-than-light (FTL) in your stories. You now need to figure out how much faster than the speed of light your fictional technologies will allow. Can people zip off to Alpha Centauri in a matter of hours, or would it take a five month journey. The precise speed will have a rather important impact on your fictional cultures, to say nothing of the machinery of your plot-making.

Figuring this out isn't too difficult, fortunately. You could just get out a calculator and some paper and work through the calculations. A few minutes worth of work will give you an idea of how fast your characters need to be to be able to get from point A to point B in order to advance your plot.

Let us suppose that you are lazy.

You may already be familiar with Google Calculator. Basically, if you put a calculation into any Google search, it will give you the answer. So if you type "4 + 4", Google spits back "4 + 4 = 8".

The calculator comes pre-programmed with all sorts of conversions and standard values, as well. Thus: "5 gallons in cups" = "80 US Quarts". You can also try such entries as "mass of the Earth in metric tonnes". Google already knows the mass of the Earth and is easily able to provide that it is about six trillion trillion metric tonnes.

Among the things that Google knows is the speed of light, and it recognizes the physics shorthand of writing as the constant c. Google is also able to perform calculations involving velocity and time (50 miles per hour is 134,400 furlongs per fortnight), so I wondered if it could do something similar with multiples of the speed of light.

Let us suppose that you want to see how fast it would take to get to Alpha Centauri (4.3 light years) if you had a warp drive that could go one-hundred times the speed of light (or 100 x c, which can also be written as 100c). Enter: "4.3 light years / (100c) in days". Google returns: "(4.3 light years) / (100 * c) = 15.7054145 days".

Just vary the multiple (e.g. 45c), adjust the distance (8.6 light years to Sirius, for instance), and the unit of time (e.g., months or years) to customize your results.

Bonus exercise: use Google to figure out how tall you are in attoparsecs.

Unstructured Fun

Sometimes, or so we are told, it is important to think outside of the box. At other times, it's necessary to think inside of the disk, or at least that's what the uninspiringly named but exceedingly addictive Breakout variant Plastic Balls 1.5 would have us believe.

A Flash Player is required to play this game.

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As readers of this site should well know, I have a weakness for word play. Most forms of word play have to do with the way we use words or put them together (puns, palindromes, and anagrams being pertinent examples). Amibigrams, however, are unique in that they deal with the written word.

An Ambigram is, to quote Ambigram.com, "a word or words that can be read in more than one way or from more than a single vantage point, such as both right side up and upside down."

Essentially, Ambigrams are a rather remarkable form of caligraphy. Some ambigrams contain the same word from multiple vantages, while others "encode" multiple words (such as True and False). Here are some of the better Ambigram sites that I've found (I strongly recommend printing out the non-animated examples so that you can more easily rotate them):

• JohnLangdon.net
• Inversions by Scott Kim (includes some very nice animated ambigrams)
• Kevin Pease's Ambigrams
• Eye Twisters
• Western Washington University (student created ambigrams)
  
• The Ambigrammatic (an ambigram generator)
  

Special thanks to Karen Brown and Natalie Ramsey for pointing me to John Langdon's homepage.

Making Feinds

Making Fiends is an animated web comic and the invention of Amy Winfrey, formerly one of the animators for South Park as well as the creator of Big Bunny and Muffin Films.

The plots, which are simple but amusing, revolve around the interaction of two little girls named Vendetta and Charlotte.

Vendetta is a young evil genius who has a talent for creating monsters (i.e., fiends) which she uses to terrorize her playmates and teacher. Charlotte, by contrast, is a happy-go-lucky girl who can't believe that Vendetta is evil and who is convinced that they are best friends.

Vendetta, naturally, hates Charlotte and, each episode, does her best to create a monster to destroy her. Naturally, and to her immense frustration, Charlotte's innocent perspective manages to thwart Vedetta's schemes. It's a simple enough formula but surprisingly enjoyable all the same.

Be warned, the opening theme will stick in your head.

A Flash player is required to use the site.

Unstructured Geekery

As every true geek knows, geeks come in all sorts of varieties. There are computer geeks, political geeks, movie geeks, weather geeks, as so forth. The diversity of geekdom is, indeed, deep and wide.

As for myself, I am very much a science geek. I've been deeply interested in science since I was five. One of the great disapointments of my life was the dawning realization that I would make a lousy scientist. Fortunately, science is much like sports in that even if you aren't a player, you can still have a lot of fun being a spectator. So for today's fun, I thought that I'd list out some of my favorite science sites:

Slashdot is a site that is largely dedicated to computer geekery (Linux is very much a holy word among those people), however, it does have a great science sub-section that has the additional advantage of being accessible via an RSS feed.

The Loom is an excellent science blog run by Carl Zimmer, who is the author of some marvelous science popularizations. The focus of the site is mainly on the biological sciences with special emphasis on evolutionary biology. It also has an RSS feed.

ScienceDaily.com is, at the sites name would imply, a site dedicated to breaking science news. One of the things that I particularly like the fact that they are very good about linking to the original news releases for their articles.

Finally, we come to my favorite site: the arXiv.org e-Print archive. Be warned, this is not a site for the faint of heart. It is a repository of original papers in the fields of physics, mathematics, nonlinear science, computer science and quantitative biology. If you are serious about science, this is where you can see the cutting edge of research and theory (many papers appear here before they are officially published in scientific journals), but be warned that these are undiluted publications that tend to be filled with a lot of technical jargon and hardcore mathematics.