ideonexus

interweaving ideas

  • Arduino Time Zone Portal LED Project

    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…

  • A Tale of Two AI’s: “Her” VS “Ex Machina”

    Ex Machina Human beings have speculated about Artificial Intelligence for over 2,000 years, our fantasies evolving as our technology evolves. More recent films, like Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick’s A.I., Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and George Lucas’ THX-1138 all tackle the hard questions and present insightful ways of looking at the issue. Most recently, I…

  • Celebrating the Winter Solstice at The Humanist

    Winter Solstice Article in The Humanist The Humanist has posted my celebration of the Winter Solstice, the annual cosmological event around which almost all of the season’s holidays orbit, in the article The Darkest Day: A Quintessentially Humanist Celebration. Here’s a sample: The winter solstice connects me to Galileo, who revealed humanity’s true relationship to…

  • Nicolas de Condorcet’s “Progress of the Human Mind”

    It frustrates me bitterly that the works of the Enlightenment are almost forgotten in America’s universities. Science classes ignore them because scientists must focus on the most current understanding of our world. Humanities classes ignore them because the Age of Enlightenment, with its rationality and empiricism, is seen as the oppressor of creative expression. But…

  • Number Spiral Mandalas with HTML Canvas

    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…

  • How the IPCC’s Climate Report is a Model of Good Science

    Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis Credit: IPCC Weighing in at over 1,500 pages, surveying the results from thousands of journal articles, and written by 259 experts from fields including meteorology, physics, oceanography, statistics, engineering, ecology, social sciences and economics, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis…

  • Creative Commons Children’s Book: ABC’s of Biodiversity

    ABCs of Biodiversity from ideonexus Download a PDF Version Here (30MB) Download a PPTX Version Here (103MB) This book is another tool in the myriad strategies we parents use to teach our children. The ebook format allows something print books don’t: an alphabet book with 10 examples of each letter. This means there are 260…

  • Evolutionary Wonders in a Newborn Baby

    Want to get closer to your primal beginnings? Have kids. During nine-months of pregnancy, you will learn about all the evolutionarily-influenced mechanics of giving birth, from the fetal acrobatics involved in maneuvering an enormous head required to house our big brains through a birth canal constrained in size so that human females can walk upright.…

  • 20 Years of Magic the Gathering

    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…

  • Bird Feeders, Pornography, and Other Evolutionary Traps

    “Examples of animals exhibiting maladaptive responses to evolutionary novel objects and becoming trapped. (A) A Cuban tree frog (Osteopilus septentrionalis) ingesting a decorative light that mimics the bioluminescent qualities of its insect prey. (B) A black-footed albatross (Phoebastria nigripes) killed by the ingestion of small, often colorful, floating garbage that mimics food items. (C) A…

  • Mass Effect as Great Science Fiction

    Cerberus For 106 hours (24 ME1, 33 ME2, 59 ME3) over the last six months, I have been exploring the epic science fiction worlds of Mass Effect (ME). I could have easily only spent 60 hours there, since that’s enough time to get through the game, but I was genuinely engaged with the universe and…

  • Is Web Design All About Hacking or Kludging?

    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…