Ok folks, the Quake paper models are done :) Downloads and instructions can be found here: http://cow.mooh.org/paper

Enjoy ;)

Labels: papercraft

  ..are on the way!



I finished test-building the player model this morning, and it turned out OK. As you can see in the picture, I haven't spent as much time as I should have building the models (notice the dodgy seams on the shambler), but that was partly because the card stock I used was too heavy and quite difficult to work with.

I documented the build process by taking photos at critical stages; with a bit of luck, I'll have the whole lot (models, instructions, pictures) posted up online later today.

Labels: papercraft

  Last Wednesday, myself a couple of the blokes at the lab decided to kick off Beardquest 2006. There really isn't any particular reason for it.. for some bizarro reason we've all spontaneously decided to not touch a razor for a month or so. We're from a big ole melting pot of ethnicities, so some will end up hairier than others. As promised, here I am over the course of 6 days.


Frightening, isn't it? I've gone from the spiky stage (which b1 was not a huge fan of) to the incredibly annoying itchy stage, which, so far, I've never had the patience to get through. Anyway, I've committed to this course of action, and we'll see how I end up in a couple of weeks time.

Besides, I've heard rumours that a prerequisite for any sort of academic career if you are male is facial hair (remember: biology - brown beards, physics - black beards), so I'm going to test drive this whole beard thing while I'm cooped up writing up my thesis and less likely to terrify anybody with my carpeted visage.

  With the last paper in, and a long stretch of thesis-writing ahead, I decided to fill the brief gap in-between with some much-needed distractions. First cab off the rank was upgrading my AMD64 desktop machine with an obscene amount of shiny memory.



Yes folks, that's a total of 3Gb of primary storage for my automated thinking device ;) I'm fairly sure this will do me for a good long while, until the urge to pointlessly upgrade bites me again :P

At the pleasant behest of Andrew B., we spent Sunday afternoon in the Eastern suburbs enjoying the sounds of some great American composers (you know, for a long time I never even knew such a thing existed!) at a performance by the Woollahra Philharmonic Orchestra. It was particularly interesting seeing Rhapsody In Blue being played - you get to realise just how difficult the signature clarinet solo at the start is to play. It's nice actually going to a gig to see orchestral music being played; instead of hearing music with just your ears you feel it with your whole body, and it's something I'd like to do more often.



Last cab off the rank are the paper models of Quake characters I've been working on :) I've designed and successfully made a paper model of a shambler. It supercedes the previous model in that it is a lot bigger, and a lot easier to build. I'll be posting up a .pdf of the model sheet and instructions on how to build it in a couple of days. I'm planning to add other quake models too; I have the player model sheet done, but I'm yet to test building it. For those who have been itching for it, stay tuned.. it'll be here in a couple of days :D

Labels: papercraft

 
Woo! Thats the last one! I've submitted my last paper before my thesis-write up (which begins next week), so, for the moment at least, Normal Service Will Be Resumed Shortly.

In the throes of trying to write my last masterpiece, I turned to one of my old friends, MegaHAL, for some advice:

me: i hate writing papers
MegaHAL: You worry about your reward. If money is all that you can go about your reward. If money is all that you love, then that's what you're best at, isn't it?

Whilst I felt that a meaningful exchange had occurred, I found it hard to forget that MegaHAL also thinks Life's but a green duck with soy sauce. MegaHAL isn't exactly the most useful thing ever, but its mildly psychotic rantings can be fairly amusing when you are searching for inspiration.


On the other hand, useful things under KDE are numerous. Two favourites of mine at the moment would be the nifty application launcher, katapult (mandriva rpm's), and amarok, which play nicely together.

Amarok in particular is a bit of a killer app for me; it will catalogue, play and work out the context of whatever song I'm listening to. The smart playlist feature is pretty nifty way to organically browse through a large music collection. Moving files on and off my nano is also easy to do, and with the next release of libgpod it should be possible to copy the cover art over to the nano as well.

Did I mention that I like big sparks? They've got the touch? They've got the pow-eee-eeerrrrr!

  There are, supposedly, six degrees of separation between any given actor and Kevin Bacon. Of course, in our connected age, it didn't take long for a bunch of geeks to colonise the concept and to associate a numerical quantity with the concept. Hence the Bacon Number, which goes along the lines of:

• Kevin Bacon has a Bacon Number of zero
• An actor/actress whom has appeared in a movie with Kevin Bacon has a Bacon number of 1
• The Bacon number of any individual actor/actress is then is defined as the minimum of the Bacon numbers of all the co-actor/actresses he/she has appeared in a movie in, plus one

(Induction, woo!)

The concept got an honourable mention at this years sci/tech Oscars ceremony; it's probably too much to hope that it'll get a mention at the main awards this weekend.

Incidentally, the concept of the Bacon Number is derived from the Erdős number, which is the minimum distance by co-authors via publications to the late mathematician Paul Erdős. Blowing my own trumpet, at the moment, I have an Erdős number of 6 (see here - requires mathscinet access). The link was provided via a paper I co-authored with Mikhail Propenko, who has an Erdos number of 5. There is such a thing as an Erdős-Bacon number; informally, the lowest number is, in fact, held by an inanimate Baseball (in rod we trust!).

Degrees of separation feature strongly in research into social networking, often going hand-in-hand with work in graph theory. The nifty thing about it is its broad area of application; an example of which is the Wikipedia degrees of separation calculator which has been sucking up a lot of my nonexistent spare time :P