Category: Geeking Out

Dice Dice and More Dice Introduction Games are played in the contexts of rules, play, and culture. A game of chess played a century and a half ago would have a very different context and meaning between players than a game played today. Those players would be more likely to see one color of abstract…

Chutes and Ladders Actions and Consequences My young kids hate Chutes and Ladders. They hate the complete randomness of spinning that stupid wheel. They hate the complete lack of player agency as there are zero choices to be made. In fact, the game has its origins in teaching children about karma and accepting one’s fate.…

Magic Square Tic Tac Toe Introduction Adding to my expanding collection of Explorable Explanations (EEs), I’ve been interested in isomorphs of various board games. For example, the game Snakes and Ladders / Chutes and Ladders (a game with zero player agency originally intended to teach Hindu children the concepts of karma and destiny), can be…

Tower of Board Games An online friend started a board gaming club at his elementary school. Occassionally, he posts pictures of the free games companies send him. Other times he posts photos of his students engaged in play. I asked him about the games and what it was like teaching children so young board games.…

Bally Time Zone / Space Time Pinball Backglass Photograph by Matthew Allison Introduction I recently became interested in arcade history. Pinball history is particularly fascinating for the way inventors have come up with so many mechanical innovations over the years. From the first springer launch to the first speaking pinball to incorporating a wide variety…

12-Spiral in HTML Canvas (Primes highlighted in red) Mathematics is about exploration, not the rote memorization of algortithms. It’s about finding patterns, appreciating how numbers relate to one another. That’s why I love programming. Much of writing code involves experimentation with mathematics, tweeking a variable to see what comes out of a complex function. It’s…

Friday Night Magic at Earth 383 20 years ago this month, I introduced my college friends to a new concept, the collectible card game (CCG). Magic the Gathering was instantly addictive for all of us, a game one part role-playing, one part exploration and discovery, and ten parts ingenuity. I’ll never forget when my friends…

So I decided to spend the weekend redesigning/modernizing my lifetime project, a citation-management tool mxplx, because the site is old and ugly looking and I wanted to play with some of the shiny new toys in CSS: The 00s Called, They Want Their Website Design Back So hundreds googlings and SOings and two sugar-driven all-nighter’s…

Sheldon Fashion I love love love The Big Bang Theory (BBT). I love the intelligent science references, the highly-debatable geek-culture references, and the cameos only a nerd would enjoy. Most of all, the portrayal of idiosyncratic individuals who bare an incredible resemblance to people I’ve had to deal with for decades working in IT and…

Jump To: Introduction Closed-Source Genetics Open-Source Genetics Going Public With My Genome Better Living Through Personal Genomics DIY Genomic Sequencing for Programmers My Personal Genomic Results Further Reading Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) Introduction It’s been over a year since I signed up with 23andMe and several months now since I downloaded my raw genomic data…

“Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted.” ~ John Lennon “Time is the fire in which we burn.” ~ Tolian Soran, Star Trek Generations The Dilemma We have a finite amount of time in this life, and we should be mindful of how we spend it. I’ve recently become highly cognizant of the fact that…