I’ve always been a big fan of sunsets. I get some really nice ones most evenings in the summer from my current flat but with winter approaching I wanted to try and make something virtual and consistent. One of my goals was that after I got my quest 2 to try and sit coding with a sunset in the background. There are a number of issues on the road to realising that dream in its entirety however I got a long way with watching the sunset over the ocean. Bellow, I present a shader (Code dedicated to programing the shader section of the graphics card pipeline) for a sunset over ocean waves. Ocean waves in deep water are much easier to generate than shallow-water waves as you can get away modelling them as not interacting with anything. That permits an ontogenetic style where you can skip to the future without calculating the intermediate steps. The surface is based on the sums of sin waves which is not true to how water actually moves as it moves in  Gerstner waves . So I based the ...

Wood is a great material (You might say I’m biased, son of a timber merchant and all that) but it can be both cheap and expensive. The oxymoronic nature of that comes from the fact that compared to plastics wood is expensive and compared to metals it is cheap. One of the things I’d like to explore in this post is an idea that came to me when exploring what could be done with regards to expanding land into the sea . On land, you are, in the modern-day limited not by the cost of the development you wish to create but by the ability to get permission from the powers that be to construct that development. The cost of raw land in the UK has not increased much faster than inflation over the years while the cost of housing has far outstripped the rate of inflation. The discrepancy is in large part to the limitation on the ability to develop the raw land into a property. Clearly, this is a desirable state of affairs in that we don’t want to cover the British isles with concrete blocks but equa...

As you may have noticed from the other posts on this blog I enjoy making things. I try as much as possible to make useful things, despite what my girlfriend says about the paper mache tower . In May this year, I was starting a new job and with it coming up to a year in the flat my girlfriend and I were considering if we needed more room. One of the issues was that we didn’t have a sofa and with both of us working from home, we didn’t really have anywhere to put a sofa. I was considering starting to go back into the office again, at least part-time and so looked into the idea of a desk that would fold out over a sofa for when I needed it, but that would fold away when I didn’t. It was quite hard to find something to meet this specification. Most of the fold-away desks just don’t work over a sofa and those that do are too small to work off. I thought that given the simple nature of a desk as a piece of furniture I would have a go at conceiving of something that would be perfect for my si...

  Mark Twain is famous for his quote "Buy land they aren't making any more of it". This is an under-edited post exploring the costs of making more floating land out of fibreglass boxes that you can then have sitting in the ocean. Living in Britain the cost of land is very high, at least compared to any kind of global average. I've been wondering if a super low-cost construction on the water could ever be cheaper. Starting with some reference numbers: https://www.travisperkins.co.uk/mdf-hardboard-and-pinboard/standard-hardboard-panel-2440mm-x-1220mm-x-3mm/p/500013 8.36/sheet https://www.mbfg.co.uk/225gm_csm.html 2080 for 16*120m rolls 0.95m width 225gsm 1.14 GBP/ m^2 https://www.cfsnet.co.uk/acatalog/Web_FibreglassGuide.pdf Google claims this source says 2 layers for 300gsm https://www.travisperkins.co.uk/planed-softwood-timber/redwood-planed-square-edge-5th-25-x-50mm-finished-size-20-5-x-44mm/p/180032 Beams at 2GBP/meter 8 sheets 4 beams 2440 4 screws per panel Cost o...

  Some people think that the world map centred on Greenwich is an unnecessary layover from the times of empire. Of Course, many countries issue maps with themselves more central. Living in London, with the nassim I have for home I felt that the longitude being centred in Greenwich wasn’t enough. I thought that the latitude should also be centred in Greenwich. The majority of world maps use what is called the Mercator projection. This is a projection based on putting the sphere of the world inside a cylinder. The position of a location on the globe projected onto this cylinder is then where it occurs on the map. This has the nuance of distorting the polls and making areas closer to the poles much larger than they actually are. There have been many attempts to change the projection using other techniques that push the distortions to different places. There are maps that attempt to keep the relative surface area of countries accurate to life. The nature of creating a flat representati...

This is something I thought about for the first time this week (Back in October). It should be a simple calculation. Amount of blood times blood sugar level. A normal blood sugar level when fasting (Including after just waking up) is 72 to 99mg/dL. A normal blood sugar level 2 hours after eating would be below 140mg/dL. The amount of blood in the body normally accounts for around 10% of the body weight .  Given that blood is mainly water its density won’t be far off that of water so it stands to reason that the average 70kg human will have about 7 litres of blood. Multiplying through this gives a waking total blood sugar of 5g and an after lunch blood sugar of 10g. Since this is the body’s preferred source of energy, it would be interesting to know how long the body can survive on just the sugar in the blood. Sugar is about 375 cal/ 100g That means that we have 38 calories of sugar in our blood after lunch and 19 after fasting. Assuming a 2000 cal daily energy use the body require...

This is a post in part to help my Nana explain to people what the noisy thing in her dining room is and why anyone would want that. This is the first post in a series. What why? Will it be worth it How to silence the thing I have spent the weekend at my Nanas house after travelling to Newport last week (You could still buy petrol back then). Last week I went to pick up an Antminer s19 pro. It’s a very special computer. To the core of it, the following is what the system looked like when I left it last. This large boxed system behind the wood-burning stove is mostly hollow air chambers. The actual computer looks like this, the sound is the reason for the hollow air chambers. The heating system in this chocolate box cottage is direct electric. That means that the electricity is passed through a wire, the resistance of that wire causes heat, that heat is used to warm the house. The reason this is such an expensive way to heat a house is mainly because it is compared to a regular gas boile...