Yesterday, or rather, earlier this night. My girlfriend and I beat the Enderdragon in the game Minecraft. She died twice and I did not die once. I went through all 7 of my golden apples, my 2 regeneration potions, my 3 slow falling potions, and 64 arrows. It was hard work getting to this point but this is the first time I have done it completely legit, no commands. We immediately got an end city, got one elytra, and then another end city and another elytra. Earlier that same day, I finished 3 classes of mine for Spring Semester at UMass Amherst.
A list of the classes I have taken and are taking can be found elsewhere on my website. Maybe on my projects page! As of writing, these files still haven’t been made into a webpage. Hoping after tomorrow’s computer science final project that I will have the time to fully devote to understanding ruby gems, jekyll, liquid, and more html, css, and javascript stuff.
1. Excel in your classes for your freshman year.
2. Make some really great friends that are interested in what you’re interested
3. Learn more
Talk soon, Jack
Maps of China are broken
No seriously, pick any city in China and zoom into it. It looks fine at first, especially when only on the default map view. But if you choose satellite view, you’ll notice some weird stuff pretty fast. You’ll notice roads going over oceans and streets not aligning with satellite imagery. You’ll notice businesses that seem out of place. Basically satellite view and street view don’t align.
This is because to be able to do surveys of China, you need permission from the Chinese government. The only company(ies?) that have surveying permissions of China are Chinese companies. So, the satellite imagery you see of China is correct, but all of roads, business locations, and land borders are all messed up because google is not authorized to use actual mapping data of Chinese land. I think the original video I saw on this topic was a video from Half as Interesting Here’s the link
Did you know…
that every 4th generation of monarch butterflies, specifically the generation the flies from the southern United States to their winter migration spot in Mexico live 10x longer than the three generations that came before them?
In the first episode of a documentary series I watched today by National Geographic called Great Migrations, Nat. Geo. explored the Monarch butterflies migration patterns. The migration cycle is a year long cycler that spans 4 generations of butterflies. Every 6-8 weeks, monarchs lay their eggs hundreds of miles southward of where they were born and begin a new generation. On the last leg of their journey, monarchs give rise to one more generation coined a ‘super-generation’ that lives 10x longer (~6-7 months long) who then makes the long journey into the center of Mexico. They live mostly sedentary lives here until the cycle begins again.
Did you know…
that lightning strikes occur on earth at ~44 times per second?
I was reminded of this little tibit when I was watching a nature documentary, Night on Earth last night on netflix. I finished the last episode yesterday there was a shot of elephants with a lightning show in the background. It was beautiful and it reminded me of when I learned of this statistic years ago reading one of my books. I didn’t remember the number but quickly found 44 (± 5) strikes per second on the wikipedia page for lightning.
Did you know…
That at Saturn’s north pole, there is a large hexagonal shaped atmospheric feature?
Neither did I, but apparently it has been around for decades and as of right now, scientists have not reached consensus on an explantion.
Did you know…
The last time the solar system was at this point in The Milky Way, dinosaurs were still roaming the earth?
I didn’t either, but an article in Scientific American showed me how we are trying to map our Milky Way, why its so hard, and what we’ve discerned so far. The Solar System orbits the Milky Way ~6 times faster than the earth orbits that sun! (in linear velocity))
Did you know? …
That lions will hunt cheetahs and eat them?
Me neither, but today I watched an episode from a documentary on netflix called Night on Earth that showed me a group of cheetahs and how a lion threatens the cheetahs nightly hunt. Also of note, cheetahs and lions have excellent night vision.
Did you know? …
That teeth found from humans that lived 10,000 years ago have been found to have less gum disease, fewer cavities, less overcrowding and generally straighter teeth?
Yeah, me neither, but a Scientific American article enlightened me today on how and possibly why that is the case.
It’s now october and I haven’t written much since my last blog post. This is a little disheartening but there are lots of reasons why and many excuses I could make. Normally, I would try and recount for the lost ~10 days of journalling but I do not have the time to do that today and do not want to.
My love for what I do at AirCycler has been rekindled, I find myself enjoying what I am learning in my classes much more than previously, but I have a lot of wasted time in my day. Youtube, lack of control over my priorities and tasks I need to do for other people, it has been interesting.
A few things have occurred to me that are interesting.
An open repository of interactive knowledge (Desmos graphs, problems, visualizations, and proofs) when it comes to math, physics, chemistry, and a whole slew of other things would be super cool. I imagine taking what I learn in class and making nice pretty visualizations of it for everyone involved helping overall understanding of concepts.
I am not a bad programmer, I find that I beat myself up sometimes because I can’t figure out where a bug is originating from, or writing code that isn’t bug free, but this is a part of the process. It is hard to keep track of all the things that are going on in ones head all the time and writing codes is just prone to making mistakes. That being said, I am proud of how I am doing in my current college computer science course, CS187 - Data structures and algorithms. This is movitating me on returning to my ongoing learning of the programming language Rust.