Lunar Module

November 24th, 2019

As soon as I saw the above in the LEGO store window I had to have it.

It was built in three stages; the lunar surface first:

Of course I had ‘help’ πŸ™‚

The descent stage was next, and was a lot of fun to build including a lot of ‘metallic’ parts.

It also contains lots of little details, including a tiny model laser reflector, which I often use in examples during one of my lectures!

The finished Lunar Module:

It’s a fantastic kit, and one of the most fun LEGO builds I’ve ever done. I give this my highest LEGO score πŸ™‚

Train Show

November 23rd, 2019

We visited a model train show today! We’ve seen signs for this biannual show for years now but today was the first time we went. While neither of us are into model trains it was cheap and we hoped it would be interesting. It was!

It was very busy! The demographic was (unsurprisingly) almost exclusively ‘old dudes’ and it was pleasing to see these guys as happy about their model trains as I would be in a game convention.

There were dozens of vendors selling all sorts of trains and track and electronic control parts and scenery. It was eye opening to see just how expensive some of it was:

And how old as well:

That’s a pre-war set that cost $1200 at the show and came with a page from a catalog that listed the original sale price: $21.50

So many trains…

Sooooo many trains!

But there were other items for sale as well, such as (very expensive!) dinnerware from various train lines:

And – to my delight – old postcards!

Many of the items for sale were made by Lionel, and a couple of vendors had unusual non-train Lionel items for sale such as this stereoscopic camera:

Oh and yes, there were a few actual train sets on display:

All in all it was a fun show to visit. Maybe I’ll go again one day πŸ™‚

Infinite Ape Simulator

November 14th, 2019

I’ve been thinking about the Infinite Monkey Theorem, which postulates that an infinite amount of monkeys banging away on keyboards randomly forever would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. You can read about this in detail here.

I thought to myself, rather than use dirty monkeys to reproduce Shakespeare (which has been attempted), why not use a machine brain? So I turned to an actual honest-to-goodness computer and wrote a simulation.

My machine was the Commodore 64, and I wrote a simple piece of code to randomly generate three letters in order and test to see if they spelled ‘act’, the first word of Hamlet. I was testing the water, so to speak, instead of diving right into a full reproduction of the entire play.

Now it’s fairly simple statistics to calculate that of the 17576 possible three letter words, only one is ‘act’. But I started by looking for words that started with ‘a’ (ie. of the form a–) of which there are 676, and then words starting with ac-, of which there are 26. I timed my result to see if – as expected – each successively correct letter took approximately 26 times as long to generate as the previous.

Here’s my code alongside one example output looking specifically for ‘act’:

The time is in seconds, and I ran 12 searches each for a– and ac- and 5 (due to the time required) for act. Here are the average times to generate each type of result:

A–: 3 seconds
AC-: 84 seconds
ACT: 2027 seconds

These numbers are close to 26x multiples of each other as expected, and I imagine were I to do enough tests they would converge to that value. From these results we can speculate how long it may take for my C64 to recreate Hamlet…

But first some facts: Hamlet has 132680 letters and 199749 characters in total including spaces and seven punctuation signs. Including these but ignoring case, there are 34 potential candidates for each character and 199749 characters need to be generated. My predictions that follow are based on times equal to 34/26 of those listed above.

The expected (ie. 50% chance) time it would take my C64 to randomly generate Hamlet would be 34^199746 times 1908 seconds which is (approximately) 34^199739 million years. The minimum time is about 1.7 hours ( if it got it right on the first go) and the maximum is of course infinity.

But – given our universe is only less than 14,000 million years old – this means I’m confident in saying my C64 would never randomly generate Hamlet. In fact were I to expand the sim to look for the sequence ‘Act 1’ I would expect the average successful attempt to take about one month. If I extended the sim all the way to the first spoken word – over 100 characters in – I’d expect the Earth would be consumed by the sun before my C64 did it.

Some of you say “that’s just a C64!”, which is primitive compared to the device you’re reading this on. But even if your fancy phone or laptop is a trillion times more powerful, this is nothing compared to a factor of ~10^200k.

It’s pleasant to think of infinite typing apes (or computers) randomly spewing out a work of art, but it would never happen πŸ™‚

(Incidentally and somewhat related; the world is still awaiting the results of B’s testing of this!)

Beading

November 10th, 2019

Over four years ago I made a masterpiece using Perler Beads. It was a day of the highest highs and lowest lows but from the ordeal emerged what it still one of my favourite possessions.

And yet despite using 3364 beads that day it was only a tiny fraction of the beads we had bought! Perler Beads, purchased in bulk, are cheap and I had tens of thousands remaining! And in time – now and then over the intervening years – I have used them for what they are most often used for: making physical models of game sprites!

The process is somewhat laborious to be honest, but it’s a fun diversion every year or so and the results usually look ok. Ironing them to melt the beads together is still the irritating part, since it’s difficult to get them regularly melted. Color matching can be iffy too, at least for me since I just use what I have.

The above was made using very tiny beads and the finished invader is only about 2 cm wide. As you can see I melted him thoroughly so you can’t even see the holes in the beads any more. I think he looks good!

For most of these I superglue magnets on the back and they live on our metal doors. The lower left frog was an original creation made by JK (and also uses tiny beads) and the squirrel – which is quite large – was originally made for my mum but due to fragility I haven’t brought it to Australia for fear of it breaking!

That’s a black mage from Final Fantasy. He took longer than I expected and almost fell to pieces during ironing. My heart skipped a few beats!

For a couple of years now I’ve entertained the thought of doing another large scale project, albeit not as big as The Masterpiece. But then I recall that 7-hour nightmare and reconsider πŸ™‚

But who knows… maybe one day I’ll get to it…

Inktober 2019

November 1st, 2019

I did ‘Inktober’ again! This is where artists – such as myself – create and share a new piece every day in October. I used the same app as last year and once again followed no theme, making each piece up as I went along. You’ve already seen one example in the previous post; here I’ll show more.

They started off rather simple. The above was inspired by a dream in which I was tending a strange plant just like the one drawn. I was still getting refamiliarizing myself with the app at this point.

That was drawn after listening to Bela Lugosi’s Dead over and over again (“The virginal brides file past his tomb…“). I wanted to superimpose a window over it with Dracula looking out but lacked the skill.

This one was inspired after watching a YouTube video about the days of airships flying over NYC. It also features silhouettes, which were a common motif this year.

One day, when I was very tired after my 11.5 hours at work, SMC sent a dazzling photo of an ocean sunset in Vanuatu. I used it as inspiration for the above. To be honest I could have put more detail in but I was simply too exhausted!

Around halfway through the month I developed a few new tricks that allowed me to squeeze a bit more detail out of what is a very limited drawing app. This simple sketch of a tower was an early example, but things progressed in time to pieces like this:

And eventually this:

The above is my favorite drawing of not just this years group, but last year as well. I feel I – finally – achieved what I wanted with the starfield and the lighting of the silhouette and enjoyed reusing the tower from earlier. I wonder who lives there?

Another Inktober is now over, and my talents will – at least for the next 11 months – remain exclusive to cards and postcards. But I’m sure I’ll be back for Inktober 2020!