Wired Cola

[Now with photos. Also, please to be entering contest and maybe winning Flip MinoHD (kindly provided by AXE) when I return. -RjC]

The ridiculous modern magic of air travel is seriously diluted by the real-world implementations of it.

That's not an amazing insight. But don't let it distract you from the modern magic that causes it: air travel is really, really cheap. Maybe even deliriously so.

So I left on a jet plane earlier this week, along with TLO and her parents. We had the misfortune to be traveling to Athens via Frankfurt, and on the very day when a general strike closed the Athens airport (and later in the day, saw three people die when an associated protest march turned riotous and firebomby).

With our FRA-ATH flight cancelled, the YVR Lufthansa people advised us (surely correctly) to just fly into Frankfurt and take pot luck with the next day's flights.

UPDATE: contest is now closed, judgment will be completed shortly.

We here at Wired Cola have a simple policy towards pitches, corporate promotions, and special marketing offers: we can be bought, and we're cheap. How cheap? Our rate card is too embarrassing to publicly disclose. Email me if you must.

But in a rare twist on our usual beggar-thy-readership policies (all twenty of you), there's something in it for you this time.

It's a Flip video camera! I know, the best new gadget of 2007!!

Jon over at The V3H (best Tri-Cities blog I've found!) was kind enough to do a little profile of my bike scavenging proclivities today, for which I am most grateful. Go read the post to see all the things you probably already knew about me.

At the dread risk of writing a meta-post, reduced service on the Cybermorphic™ front has been due to following up a full day's work with steady work on the History of Video Games exhibit, plus various other forms of having a life, which is a big pain in the ass that really eats into my blogging time. OTOH, I've been calling all video game playing "research" for the last six months, and that's fun.

...that 5 of Andrew's 212 friends share a birthday.

#!/usr/bin/perl

#monte carlo calculation on Andrew's Birthday question.
# In short, this code allows a general test of the question:
# "if I have x friends, what are the chances that any y of
# them share a birthday?" It does so using Monte Carlo technique.
# runs should be set high (at least 1000, maybe higher) to give a
# good answer. I don't know what gives good confidence here.

# init a few things. bdaymatches is how many friends share one birthday.
use constant friends => 212;
use constant runs => 10000;
use constant bdaymatches => 5;
$foundmatches = 0;

# this loop calls yeartally once per run, adding each run to the array of
# runs called fullrun.
for ($i = 1; $i <= runs; $i++)
{
@temp = &yeartally;
$fullrun[$i] = [ @temp ];
#print "@temp\n";
# printf "THIS IS A YEAR BREAK \n";
}
#debug printing of the array:

I am getting much closer to finishing my Video Game exhibit. I now have a good idea of what games I want to highlight.

If you have any of the following games or systems (or manuals, posters, boxes, etc.) and you would be willing to lend them out for some months starting in late June, 2010, please let me know. If you have any leads on this stuff, let me know.

If you think I've left something obvious out, note that I may already have it, but I will welcome suggestions.

Ultima I
Quake I
Game Gear and a representative game (Sonic something something?)
World of Warcraft (box/art/manuals; I don't need the disc itself)
Zork
XBox 360 and Beautiful Katamari
Nintendo Game and Watch handhelds
PSP, and games (Gran Turismo, perhaps)
iPhone or iPod Touch (a dummy unit would work fine)

I got interested in Olympic medal counts measured various ways, and ended up with this partly-complete spreadsheet.

Among other things, I've compiled medals by national population, and medals by athletes sent, at least for the top teams. I also put in some weighted stats where a Gold = 3, Silver = 2, and Bronze = 1.

Maybe most interestingly, I painfully went through EVERY country's "athletes awarded" counts, by hand-counting it off the pretty good CTV medal-count pages. "Athletes Awarded" is my own count of the number of each type of medal actually handed to competing athletes. This accounts for the fact that if you win the 4-man bobsled gold, four men actually get gold medals.

Brief notes on whipping around the Olympics:

TLO and I won tickets to the women's Snowboard Cross event, but we were groundlings, and yeah, those were the ones that got cancelled. Oh well. Seeing it on TV was quite good, and given the half-day delay in the women's event, it would have been pretty gruelling to hang about up there.

We spent the first Saturday loitering around the Richmond O-Zone, which was interesting enough and not too frantic, though we avoided Holland House (alas). The next day, with friends, we toured various Houses: Sochi (Russia), Saskatchewan, a 2 minute visit to Quebec House, and a trip over to the Olympic Cauldron.

If you don't know yet, there's a Camera Connection kit (see the bottom of the page) that will let you plug in a SD card or a camera (via USB). I predict some frustration as people figure out that the thus-provided accessory USB port can't be software-hacked into serving other purposes.
Also, the iPad appears to be a very interesting device, but the most immediately and completely overshadowed device would be the $1000 Wacom Cintiq 12".
Now go read Gruber.

Well, not just physical form. Philosophical form too.
My first post elicited some great comments, and a few months of thinking have pushed me into a rough plan of what I want to do. Let's see if I can flesh it out here.
For the physical space, I will be filling four tall display cases. They're all 18" deep and 79" tall. two are 31" wide, two are 62" wide. I won't be figuring the exact physical layout today, but those are the parameters. There's also the possibility of placing a standup arcade machine outside the cases. Decent power is available in all the cabinets; networking, maybe.
First, I still like the three themes I originally thought of, but here's some elaboration.
Why are games fun? I will base this on a short explanation of the reward structure in all good games (how they make you feel challenged but not overwhelmed, and how they have a pleasurable reward structure).