Posts

Showing posts with the label logic

The four little pigs

Image
There are stories on the internet about "the fourth little pig", but before I ever saw those, a decade ago I made up my own story called The four little pigs as a bedtime story for my toddler. I've always liked the perspective I put on the original tale. Once upon a time... ...there were four little pigs: Curley, Hurley, Turley, and Xerxes, all brothers. These four pigs knew they had to build a home to protect themselves from the weather, and also from a wolf who roamed the area and who, it was said, had a particular fondness for eating pigs, especially tender young pigs such as themselves. From the wolf's point of view, he simply wanted to feed himself and his family, and if he could nab a tender young piggy, so much the better. The four pigs were all quite intelligent and each one had his own idea of the best approach to building shelter. Unfortunately, they couldn't agree on anything about their new home. They disagreed about where to build the house, w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mechanical T flip flop counter in Minecraft

Image
My son and I began playing Minecraft together, me on my Windows laptop and him on his iPad. In my opinion, Minecraft is probably the only game in which a parent and child can play together in the same virtual world and both of them enjoy it. Quality time with your child in a video game? Who would have thought? The game is easy enough for a child to understand and complex enough for an adult to appreciate. In "creative" mode, it's like a giant Lego virtual 3D world in which you can build fantastic structures more easily than with Lego. Then there's "survival" mode, in which you're plunked down in a world with nothing, and you must gather resources, make your own tools, feed yourself, and so on — pulling yourself up by your bootstraps in a world full of both friendly and hostile creatures. One of the more intriguing features of Minecraft is the redstone circuit capability. You can build moving machines, logic circuits, devices that get triggered from ...
2 comments
Read more

Popular posts from this blog

Syncing Office 365 Outlook to Google calendar using Power Automate

Image
When my employer switched over from the Google office suite to Microsoft's Office 365, it caused unexpected disruption in my family. I had been sharing my work calendar with my wife (sharing no details, just busy times). It became an integral part of her calendar, to help her coordinate (between her job and my job) who picks up and drops off my son from school, and to let her know when I was free to take a phone call during my work day. Since the switchover to O365, my ability to share a calendar externally was eliminated. Based on documentation I could find, it should be possible, but the option doesn't appear in my employer's implementation of Outlook. I can view my personal Google calendar in my work Outlook calendar, but I can't share it the other way. Microsoft's Power Automate provides a way to solve this problem. It lets you create flows of data, triggered manually or automatically by events, to move data around, not only among the Microsoft products but ...
Read more

Whose hands are biggest? You may be surprised.

Image
A recent project to create an ergonomic handle for 3D printing led me down a path that introduced me to anthropometric measurements of the human hand, which in turn revealed some interesting facts about hand sizes. I had no idea that hand size is dependent on nationality, but I found a number of research articles on this topic. For those who don't want to read further, the answer to the title question is: Based on the data found, Filipino males have the biggest hands, by a significant margin. In fact, the margin is large enough that this population may be considered an outlier from the general human population with respect to hand size. Even Filipina females have larger hands than most males of other nationalities. On the other end of the spectrum, Vietnamese females and Indian females have the smallest hands. Now you can read on for the whole story, or you can skip down to the chart at the end. Idea for a toy My unintentional investigation into hand sizes started while de...
Read more

Elliptical-blade NACA airfoil propeller

Image
You don't see aircraft with elliptical wings anymore. The most famous aircfaft with such wings is probably the Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft from World War II. Elliptical wings have the most uniform theoretical distribution of lift and therefore the least induced drag. In the case of the Spitfire, the gentle taper of the ellipse near the wing root also provided more room to mount weapons internally than a straight-taper wing, while providing an overall thinner, low-drag cross-section. However, with all curved edges, elliptical wings are expensive to construct. Of all the kinds of drag that a wing or propeller blade experiences, induced drag is an unavoidable price for lift. Induced drag has nothing to do with the drag created by surface area, surface roughness, or thickness of the airfoil. Induced drag depends on the planform shape of the wing. It is also inversely proportional to aspect ratio (the ratio of wing length to airfoil average chord length). The optimal and ...
Read more