Games
Having largely ignored video games since the era of
Pac-Man, in July 2018, I decided to explore a state
of the art video game, the “first-person shooter”
Bioshock Infinite. This is a beautiful example of
three-dimensional rendering of interactive fiction. This
document is my contemporary notes while playing through the
game.
Kerbal Space Program is a computer game in which the player builds
spacecraft, aircraft, and spaceplanes and sends them on various
missions. Not only is the game a great deal of fun, playing it helps
develop an intuitive sense for rocket design and engineering
and orbital mechanics, even among people who already understand these
topics at the mathematical level. The graphics in the game are
superb. This document is a collection of screen captures from
missions I've flown.
Retropsychokinesis is the claimed ability of certain subjects to alter
random data generated, but not examined, prior to the time
the data are presented to the subject. Crazy, you say!
Well, there's certainly no mechanism in mainstream physics which could
permit such an effect, yet experiments conducted by a number of
different researchers over the last 20 years suggest, compellingly
according to some
analyses, that the probability of the results obtained in such
experiments being purely the result of chance is sufficiently low
that they would be considered evidence of a causal mechanism in most
scientific disciplines. The archives of the Project provide a
broad collection of research reports (reproduced with the permission
of their authors and publishers) and literature citations
related to this elusive but, if real, profoundly important
phenomenon.
You can explore the phenomenon of Retropsychokinesis (if indeed it
exists) through these on-line experiments. Each presents you with
a sequence of random data produced by the HotBits
radioactive random number generator which is presented by a
visual feedback program. The random sequence is
pre-recorded but not examined prior to your performing the
experiment. Results are logged in a secure and transparent fashion,
and a daily summary of results to
date is published on the Web. Complete source code is available
for all of the experiment programs.
Update: Twentieth
anniversary update adds HTML5/JavaScript visual feedback programs,
eliminating the need for Java.