Happy Modification Of Most Sigificant Digit In Base 10 Representation Day!

I didn't even think to comment when the MSB in base 2 changed. What kind of a NERD am I?

Once my average catches up with the daily weigh-in, I'll be Officially At My (Original) Goal. I think I'm going to aim at another 10 lbs, though.

In other news, I've been messing around with Haskell, but I need a real programming project to really do something. I was thinking about this again.

I realized yesterday that it's not just hard but actually logically impossible to represent a mechanical object physically as a strict tree. Consider even just a triangle of beams. Two of them attach, making them children of the same parent (the joint). The third attaches to both, which is illegal.

A commenter suggested the netlist approach that electronic simulators take. The problem is that the netlist is a genome of the device. I have to be able to take a subset of the genome and swap it out for another piece that also has to drop in place. How does that work without leaving dangling "wires"? I could just leave them there for Nature to work out, but is that going to make success too infrequent for me to have patience for?

I think my algorithmic approach could work. But I haven't really worked it out. In any case, Haskell (or possibly better yet, Tcl or Lisp) is probably a good match. These languages already allow you to run data as code and treat code like data easily. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm not sure Haskell does that. What is that property even called?

Infocard: Useful Knots

I often need knots. I have often learned the knots I need. But these two things never happen close enough together to result in long term knowledge storage. This Make blog post gave me the idea of collecting a few useful ones and putting them on wallet card.

Front:

Back:

Printed front and back on a business card and then laminated, it can nestle in my wallet until I need them. Alternatively, for this particular application, I could secret cards in amongst any ropes I might use so they are johnny-on-the-spot at the right moment.

And speaking of applications, I was also thinking this could be a neat idea for other things. How to mix drinks, electronics cheatsheet, math formulae, What To Do If Arrested, etc. In fact, it seems like such an obvious idea I spent some time googling to see if anyone had set up a Web 2.0 social networking site to do this. Nothing. So I hereafter document my process for my future self and anyone else who wants to make one:

1. Design it up a bit. In this case, I tried to pick some knots that were both unlike each other and also widely useful. There's a loop, a general "tie to a post", a stopper that can also make a second type of loop and finally a bend, which is a knot that attaches two ropes. I also wanted a "scenario" that would tie it all together (ha!). And it all has to fit on a business card.


2. Once the contents were identified, I drew all the images with pencil. I actually first started with some copyright-free knot images from a Project Gutenberg book, but there were a few problems with that. The main one was that not all the knots I wanted had drawings. Also, the images were too busy to be shrunk down that small.


3. Trace with pen. May not have been strictly necessary, but didn't take too much time anyway. Scan. Load into Gimp and fix any boo-boos. Smudges, pen dropouts, etc. With a cheap graphics tablet, I could have skipped a lot of this.


4. Bring into Inkscape and auto-trace bitmap into a vector format.


5. Use Scribus to lay out the page.


6. Print onto business card template thingies. Get laminated.

If this were an online service or community or whatevs, there would be PDFs and/or inkscape/scribus files. However, I don't have a way to host anything but images here. Suggestions?