Viewing profile — lotharbot

[Background: I am Dove's husband, and remember the incident described] What actually happened was the professor posed the question in class as an open research question, which he r…

Specifically, Overload was made by Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog, who were the original Descent developers. There were also major contributions from people like Dan Wentz (who worke…

Your comment was in fact snarky, a swipe, insubstantive, and unkind. I am quite used to directness in interpersonal criticism (I am after all autistic), and I understand the differ…

In Comments Be kind. Don't be snarky. ... Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please re…

that said, the respective odds of humans vs geese are not even remotely close. People sometimes get mild injuries from geese, and on rare occasions significant injuries, most often…

FWIW it's not accidental that I see my wife's HN comments. I joined shortly after her and I have a bookmark for her profile just because I love to see what she writes. But it is fu…

> "it made a break for it along the long side of the house and was visibly shocked when my runner of a fiance ran it down and cut it off" I still remember the look on her face when…

There are several things in this comment I find odd. The comment about developers being autistic is particularly funny because I personally am autistic, and my wife (who you are re…

> "bias isn’t helpful ... Let that determine what to measure" Determining what counts as "bias" is itself a subjective activity. People who grow up in different cultures have diffe…

> "the view that only the objective is real ... has been increasingly producing absurd results." As you rightly noted a couple of comments back, what this view does is it smuggles …

Indeterminate. There's no information to be gleaned. And we don't turn our lives upside down on no information.

I sometimes draw an analogy between low-probability catastrophizing and the Drake Equation. The Drake Equation attempts to calculate how many planets there should be in the univers…

Expanding on this: when you add the extra degrees of freedom in Descent-like games, relative to Quake-like games (or flight/space sims but in different ways), there are some emerge…

most people nowadays play on source ports (D1x-Redux is the current top of the heap) that support multiple controllers.

It wasn't really considered either a bug or a feature by the original designers, it was just not something they put any thought into. After it was discovered, some designers had a …

"Overload" was a game made in Descent style, by the original creators of Descent (Mike and Matt), with a great deal of input from the Descent community. My wife and I spent a week …

Drakona, sitting next to me: "Dcrazy? I remember a dcrazy!" There's still an active online community around Descent and Overload (Mike/Matt's spiritual successor.) If you look up O…

I thought about putting their actual names -- Michael, David, and Mark (even though Mark392 isn't really named Mark) -- but I thought it'd be funnier to just put their pilot names …

My wife and I met on a Descent forum, our 3 sons are named for Descent friends (KoolBear, Jediluke, and Mark392), and we've attended weddings (and sadly one funeral, RIP JinX) for …

13 year old also has "Mathematical Carnival" on his shelf.

You're basically correct, though it's usually done with 4 mechanisms making an adjustable glider loop, which can have any period of 43 or more just by increasing the spacing: https…

I (as noted in another comment: Dove's husband and the father of the child in question) homeschool him. My wife and I both have graduate math-related degrees. We let him pretty muc…

"Conway's Game Of Life" is a game of cells on a 2d grid that live/die/reproduce based on how many neighbors they have. As a result of the game rules, you can get simple behaviors l…

We (I am Dove's husband) have 2 other children. The 7 year old builds electric circuits (takes after his grandpa who worked for NASA and HP before becoming a pastor), and the 2 yea…

For example: I previously worked in the public schools, and in a museum education program that worked 90% with public school classes. My mom was a public school teacher before I wa…