Neither VAX nor official

Therapist: Linear Mandarin is not real, it cannot hurt you Linear Mandarin:

with an attached image: the 5x1 matrix 【金、木、水、火、土】 (the five chinese elements metal, wood, water, fire, earth in a single vertical column) being multiplied by the 1x5 matrix of the same characters in a single row. the resulting matrix is a 5x5 grid of the following characters:

鍂鈢淦钬钍 鈢林沐炑杜 淦沐沝淡汢 钬炑淡炎灶 钍杜汢灶圭

chinese characters can be constructed by putting multiple characters together, so the grid is formed by combining two elements from each matrix. for example the character at the first row and first column is made up of the first character in the horizontal matrix and the first character in the vertical matrix, and so on. (金 or 水 are both written differently when they take up the left side of a character as a radical instead of being a standalone character, so the joke doesn't quite scan perfectly visually.)

this is quoted by Glinert 🇺🇸️🏭️ @\StevenGlinert reading

in college in freshman year i took linear algebra at the same time as an intensive chinese course and got a horrific cold right before the linear algebra midterm and I had a fever nightmare about the exam and it was literally this:

STart Summer 1986

Animation playing during the game transfer process on a Famicom Disk Writer kiosk, a service offered by Nintendo in Japan allowing players to copy exclusive versions of Famicom games to rewritable disks.

The animation features Luigi showing what not to do with the disks, which is to not keep them near magnets or touch the exposed part of the disk.

State of Technology, 1982

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

This is a freebie and is being written as a side project by a very busy physicist and apparently distributed as a side project by a very busy rocket scientist, this blog is gonna be sparse on the updates.

Yes it's coded in Matlab yes we know you hate Matlab.

At some point the creator (I'm gonna have to ask them what pseudonym they want because I can't keep calling them 'my beta' but again we didn't think this would happen) is intending to code this up as a .exe that users can run directly if they trust us or compile themselves and then run if they don't. This person is way more computer than I am and I'm more computer than much of Tumblr so yes this is a high bar to entry.

Yes the intention is to publish the code when it's working properly, and I'm trying to convince them to set up a github page. It's going. Badly.

At the moment it's generating random star systems beautifully, though the smaller moons keep phasing in and out and you have to check the readme to find out what the numbers mean. Generating planets to spec is stickier just at present and will be a longer time coming.

Their intention is to send me a working copy of the random generator to post sometime on Friday, so realistically you won't see that before the weekend because I have a life too and y'all are killing my notes.

Yes EVENTUALLY you should be able to input any of the parameters the generator allows for and it will output a system that meets your requirements, but I anticipate spending a LOT of time deliberately breaking it before that's up and running.

To the person who offered debugging help, I love and appreciate you but this person learned to code fortran and assembly before anything else and makes new code languages for fun so I do not think you will be able to read their code (no shade, I can't either).

I'm charmed that BRLESC had a photograph of ENIAC (its predecessor at Aberdeen Proving Ground) hanging on the side of its console. (Also note the drapery beneath the photo, presumably blocking an entrance to the wiring-side of the panel.)

Speculating a bit here, but while I don't think the below image is the exact one in the photo (the perspective's not right, even from a three-quarter view), I think it might be from the same set. It's too low resolution to make out exactly, but there seems to be someone in an dark, ankle-length dress and a second person in the background.