A while ago, Vi Hart (who I’ve mentioned before here as an author of the cool interactive essay Parable of the Polygons) made this fantastic short film about mathematics, meaning and music.

It’s really something special.

In cyberpunk worldbuilding irl news, here’s something which Jasmine alerted me to.

Local Autonomy Networks (Autonets) is an artivist project focused on creating networks of communication to increase community autonomy and reduce violence against women, LGBTQI people, people of color and other groups who continue to survive violence on a daily basis.

...mesh networked electronic clothing with the goal of building autonomous local networks that don’t rely on corporate infrastructure to function, inspired by community based, anti-racist, prison abolitionist responses to gendered violence.

The street finds its own use for things.

Hey, just look at this! It’s a completely beautiful thing!

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I just mentioned Conway’s Game of Life as an example of a Turing-complete system.

Though it’s called the “Game” of Life, and some people describe it as a zero-player game, it’s not really a game in the traditional sense of the word.

For an unexpected example of an unambiguous game which is also Turing-complete, check out Magic: The Gathering. It has been shown that a Universal Turing machine can be constructed inside Magic, and hence that it is Turing-complete.

I played a lot of Magic in high school, though it’s too expensive of a habit to keep up for long. If, like me, you remember Magic fondly, but don’t play it so much any more, might I recommend Mark Rosewater’s Drive to Work podcast?

Conway’s Game of Life is a well-known cellular automaton in which, every tick, the state of each of the cells on a giant grid is determined only by the states of its immediate neighbours in the previous tick. Despite its extremely simple definition, it is famously Turing-complete, which is roughly to say that it can compute any computable function.

And so, of course, someone has written a Life emulator, in Life.

Perhaps it’s Life all the way down...

Near London? Like thinking and talking about video games? You should check out VideoBrains. It’s a monthly meet of games journalists, developers, academics and other enthusiasts which takes place in an esports bar near-ish Kings Cross.

Each event features panels and talks by smart people, who so far have had only interesting and thoughtful things to say. If it sounds like your thing, you should really check it out.

Also, previous talks are posted on their Youtube channel, so you can get a flavour of what it’s like. But if you do watch them, consider throwing the organiser a dollar or so; he puts a hell of a lot of effort into making it as good as it is.

A commenter on an old post recently asked if I’d share my copies of Ed Brayton’s old podcasts. I’ve put them up here. I’ve mentioned before how much of a fan I am of these shows.

The list is an awful mess right now as I just copied the file names and regexp’d a page together, but it’s better than nothing.

It’s been a pretty horrifying couple of weeks on Twitter, hasn’t it? At least it has on my timeline. Two unrelated, awful events in particular came right on top of each other, each whipping up a social media storm. First the violent incursion of militarised police into peaceful democratic protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Second the eruption of sickening misogyny and violent threats directed at female game makers and games journalists, in particular Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn.

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Adobe Dreamweaver uses the Spry CollapsiblePanel plugin to create boxes that expand and collapse when a heading is clicked.

The following code allows the open/close state of the panels on a page to be remembered when the page is reloaded, or when history is accessed. It can also be used to share the open/close state between many pages containing the same panels.

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