The Windmills of Certainty

T his blog post is about my time in MMORPGs, particularly Lineage ][ and World of Warcraft. These two games are very similar, but also very different, due to the mechanics present in each game. I’ll start the half-sordid tale. I ’ve been on computers since I was 4 years old. My parents read some book that I cannot remember, but the advice given in the late 70s was to get your kid(s) on computers ASAP because they were the future. Few get predictions right, but this one was. My parents went and bought a Texas Instruments computer where I learned how to program in Turtle Geometry. I was programming little Turtle scripts to draw stars and other shapes in patterns. I also made a little game with my father who helped me build a Space Invaders type game. I also played a lot of arcade games in Eugene, OR which had a business where you pay for time and don’t need quarters. My father took me there about once a week for about 2 hours at a time, where time melted away while I was smashing butto...

R eading The Inferno can be either very interesting or very confusing. I never read it in the context of an academic course, to tear apart the meaning behind Dante's visions. However, I have read it through the lens of being a Catholic at Heart, meaning I have tried to discern the spiritual message in his work. At the very beginning, after Dante is ruminating about finding himself lost in the middle of his life, we find him encountering three beasts who guard an alluring path, after finding his way out of a thick, dark wood. But Dante feels and knows this path is where "no one ever left alive." The leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf; all are avatars for the three most deadly self-medications people use to manage their life on their own (Catholics call them sins): anger, pride, and lust.  Now in Catholic lore, pride is the worst of them all, because it is the hook into all the other sins. Pride fuels one to indulge in "disordered love" as Aquinas calls it. But ...

I'm working on building a little video (still!) to explain how I came up with a method that borrows a bit from recursive function theory to build a method for generating pi by iteratively building a recursive method, which morphs at first, and then eventually stabilizes to generate an n sided polygon. As each iteration goes forth, n increases, doubling the number of sides of an n- sided polygon, until the sides get so small that it "smooths" out the perception of a circle - which is interesting because after the 5 th iteration, the function "stabilizes", and smooths out, making the incremental change between values of pi get smaller, but pi itself gets more precise to the "true" value of pi itself. The problem with this method computationally is that computers start "blowing up" because the sides approach a value of 0, but cannot actually get there. But, from a computer's point of view, these sides might as well be zero. The sides ...

This is a blog that I hope does not become an orphan. The main purpose of the blog is to opine on topics that are intimately related to one another: Economics - improving well-being Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) Mental Health Other Themes and Topics: Mathematics Fun Art From time to time I plan on sharing other articles and blogs I have come across. In the meantime, bookmark it for future reference. Comments are welcome of course. I will be reviewing comments to make sure they make some sense and stay on topic. Sometimes the mind does wander -- so, if you find yourself doing this, that's ok. Just find a way back to the main theme or topic.