Things from today
Mar. 1st, 2012 01:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidI live on a short block with four houses on my side of the street. It's permit parking; there are signs to this effect in front of the house to the left and the house to the right of my building. And now, there's a sign in front of my building too. I have no idea why the city thought it worth the expense; people can walk a few feet to check the parking restrictions pretty easily. It seems like a waste of money, and another obstruction to easy shoveling (not that I have done much of that this year...).
Happy leap day! (well, um, ::glances at clock:: yesterday) Leap seconds and hours (daylight saving shifts) feel special, but leap days and months become just a naming convention, along with a wrinkle for birthdays.
Someone was getting rid of a bunch of larger-bubble wrap this evening. I decided to help minimize the space it would take up by popping the bubbles, using my (unshod) feet. It was the most fun I'd had in days. I had enough to compare the sensation of stepping hard or more carefully on one, a few, or many layers. One was fun (and loudest!), feeling the bubble pop, but many layers was even better, feeling myself getting lower as the air went. Everyone heard the sounds; someone brought me some little-bubble wrap later to play with; I decided little-bubble wrap is better for popping by hand.
I had a side thought about the air in the bubbles: has anyone made specialty "souvenir" bubble wrap? "Air from the Holy Land!" (or wherever). Stupid, but I bet it would have a niche.
One of the people I met recently brought in a piece he'd just finished: a 3-dimensional chess board, 5 by 5 by 5, out of lucite. We ended up playing a game of Raumschach, which totally bent my brain to play (poorly, but I didn't care). The standard pieces move in predictable ways (castle in straight lines in the plane, which could be vertical or horizontal; bishops diagonally in the plane, ditto; and so on), and there's a pair of special pieces, called unicorns, which move diagonally both horizontally and vertically. One color sets up one one side of the top two tiers, while the other sets up on the opposite side of the bottom two tiers. Pawns can only move forward, which for one side includes down, and for the other means up ("The enemy's gate is down" :-).
I played a fairly horrible game (losing pieces because I didn't realize they were vulnerable to pawn capture, for instance), in the end conceding once I'd lost the vast majority of my pieces (with an actual checkmate nowhere in sight). It was a lot of fun, though, making me think about the moves a lot, but still not having a grasp of actual strategy or planning moves ahead (except once, when I accidentally sabotaged my own plan).
I also thought about wrap-around chess variations. In The Shape of Space, the author points out that wrapping the board left-right turns it into playing on a cylinder, while wrapping on both pairs of opposite sides puts it on a sphere (and requires a different starting position :-). If it's only two sides joined but with a twist, it's a Moebius strip, while with both pairs twisted, a Klein bottle. (Sudden thought now: I wonder what surface would be described if two adjacent sides wrapped.) Anyway. If one pair of opposite sides linked in Raumschach, I think it would be a cylinder with a smaller cylinder cut out of the middle. Past that, though, I have no idea what surfaces would be described for any of these: one pair opposite sides linked with a twist in one, two, or three directions; two pairs of opposite sides linked straight or with any of the twist options; three pairs of opposite sides linked straight or with any of the twist options. Perhaps three pairs of opposite sides linked is a tesseract? Not that I can imagine actually playing any of these variations!
I hadn't realized that another acquaintance not only does some lovely woodworking (a wooden lamp with 1/32nd of an inch thick sheets of beautifully burled wood as the shade), but also lampwork. He had his flame and a cooling oven right there in his space, and I had the chance to watch him work as he made a replacement chess piece as an experiment. It was beautiful to see the glass become more molten, then harden; my first thought was that this was like working honey, or perhaps taffy. I couldn't tell how to make any shape, but it was easy to figure out what each move accomplished, which made me think I might be able to do this someday (glassblowing feels much less accessible, and he said it's also heavier, sometimes requiring two people). We talked a bit about glass: he sees working it as lessons in physics made manifest, which I'd never thought about before. He used a few implements to get the effects he wanted (a pawn with eyes, a knight, a vine, etc), but mostly it was about heat, gravity, shape, color, distilled to their essence. (And it reaffirmed my decision to give my newer gaming character a glassblowing background :-)
I wish I hadn't been so hungry and tired (ok, and back pain'd); I would have loved to have stayed even later than I did to continue talking glass. Perhaps I'll learn more next week.
Plus a nice conversation about Firefly/Serenity, among other topics, and meeting some new people.
Happy leap day! (well, um, ::glances at clock:: yesterday) Leap seconds and hours (daylight saving shifts) feel special, but leap days and months become just a naming convention, along with a wrinkle for birthdays.
Someone was getting rid of a bunch of larger-bubble wrap this evening. I decided to help minimize the space it would take up by popping the bubbles, using my (unshod) feet. It was the most fun I'd had in days. I had enough to compare the sensation of stepping hard or more carefully on one, a few, or many layers. One was fun (and loudest!), feeling the bubble pop, but many layers was even better, feeling myself getting lower as the air went. Everyone heard the sounds; someone brought me some little-bubble wrap later to play with; I decided little-bubble wrap is better for popping by hand.
I had a side thought about the air in the bubbles: has anyone made specialty "souvenir" bubble wrap? "Air from the Holy Land!" (or wherever). Stupid, but I bet it would have a niche.
One of the people I met recently brought in a piece he'd just finished: a 3-dimensional chess board, 5 by 5 by 5, out of lucite. We ended up playing a game of Raumschach, which totally bent my brain to play (poorly, but I didn't care). The standard pieces move in predictable ways (castle in straight lines in the plane, which could be vertical or horizontal; bishops diagonally in the plane, ditto; and so on), and there's a pair of special pieces, called unicorns, which move diagonally both horizontally and vertically. One color sets up one one side of the top two tiers, while the other sets up on the opposite side of the bottom two tiers. Pawns can only move forward, which for one side includes down, and for the other means up ("The enemy's gate is down" :-).
I played a fairly horrible game (losing pieces because I didn't realize they were vulnerable to pawn capture, for instance), in the end conceding once I'd lost the vast majority of my pieces (with an actual checkmate nowhere in sight). It was a lot of fun, though, making me think about the moves a lot, but still not having a grasp of actual strategy or planning moves ahead (except once, when I accidentally sabotaged my own plan).
I also thought about wrap-around chess variations. In The Shape of Space, the author points out that wrapping the board left-right turns it into playing on a cylinder, while wrapping on both pairs of opposite sides puts it on a sphere (and requires a different starting position :-). If it's only two sides joined but with a twist, it's a Moebius strip, while with both pairs twisted, a Klein bottle. (Sudden thought now: I wonder what surface would be described if two adjacent sides wrapped.) Anyway. If one pair of opposite sides linked in Raumschach, I think it would be a cylinder with a smaller cylinder cut out of the middle. Past that, though, I have no idea what surfaces would be described for any of these: one pair opposite sides linked with a twist in one, two, or three directions; two pairs of opposite sides linked straight or with any of the twist options; three pairs of opposite sides linked straight or with any of the twist options. Perhaps three pairs of opposite sides linked is a tesseract? Not that I can imagine actually playing any of these variations!
I hadn't realized that another acquaintance not only does some lovely woodworking (a wooden lamp with 1/32nd of an inch thick sheets of beautifully burled wood as the shade), but also lampwork. He had his flame and a cooling oven right there in his space, and I had the chance to watch him work as he made a replacement chess piece as an experiment. It was beautiful to see the glass become more molten, then harden; my first thought was that this was like working honey, or perhaps taffy. I couldn't tell how to make any shape, but it was easy to figure out what each move accomplished, which made me think I might be able to do this someday (glassblowing feels much less accessible, and he said it's also heavier, sometimes requiring two people). We talked a bit about glass: he sees working it as lessons in physics made manifest, which I'd never thought about before. He used a few implements to get the effects he wanted (a pawn with eyes, a knight, a vine, etc), but mostly it was about heat, gravity, shape, color, distilled to their essence. (And it reaffirmed my decision to give my newer gaming character a glassblowing background :-)
I wish I hadn't been so hungry and tired (ok, and back pain'd); I would have loved to have stayed even later than I did to continue talking glass. Perhaps I'll learn more next week.
Plus a nice conversation about Firefly/Serenity, among other topics, and meeting some new people.