At one extreme, you have the zero-sum pure competition games. Chess and Go are classic examples, but the most cutthroat one I've come across is Caesar and Cleopatra. Divorce in a box, if you ask me.
At the other extreme, you have the "family game" type, which is pretty much random who wins and who loses. The card game Fluxx is the best example I can think of here. I've played Fluxx while actively trying to lose, and won despite my best efforts. These can be fun, but they're not intellectually stimulating.
The good two-player games are in a sweet spot between those two extremes. The perfect 2-player game has enough randomness that you won't feel bad if you lose, but enough strategy to make you feel like your actions mattered when you win.
Lost Cities, Odin's Ravens, and Jaipur are three such games. They are all card games, and what cards you get is significant in all three games. But all 3 games let you manage your luck in different ways, so having a good strategy is essential.
My wife and I are in a similar spot, living temporarily in an area far away from people we know. As such, we've found a few good 2-player board games to occupy us.
Lost Cities is excellent, Odin's Ravens is very good (if slightly childish), and we're just digging into Jaipur now which may be the best yet.
Maybe you two can play words with friends together.
Did you know they even have a version you can play in real life now? Games are finally growing out of cell phones and into the third dimension! It's a really exciting time to be a gamer, with these new and innovative products.
More seriously, try board games! My wife isn't much of a video gamer, but board games were a huge hit with her. Look at things like Agricola, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, and Settlers of Catan. They reward analytical thinking like video games do, so you won't be bored, I promise.
The main point of casting from a 3D print is to change the material from being "3D printed plastic" to being any other flowable thing: metal, urethane, transparent resin epoxy, silicone, plaster of paris, etc. What your 3D printer is bringing to the table is the shape. So the key feature you're looking for, if you want to do molding and casting, is getting the right shape out. Material strength is relatively unimportant.
ABS has an impressive material strength, but if you're planning on casting, you should look into PLA printing instead. PLA's material strength sucks compared to ABS, but man is it easier to make good prints with it! You can get better resolution on it -- PLA at 0.1mm vs ABS at 0.2mm -- and the warping and curling issues are greatly reduced. It's a lot more reliable to work with.
The other big reason to use PLA is that it dissolves away in boiling water. Stick your PLA mold and whatever you casted into it into a crock pot for a day, and the PLA's gone.
Any 3D printer that can print ABS can also print PLA. Check out the MakerGear M2: Metal frame, way cheaper than a Makerbot, and it beat the Makerbot and several other contenders in Make Magazine's 3D printer roundup recently. Good accuracy, speed, and print quality. Good business ethics too (Makerbot's not so popular around here these days since they suddenly changed to closed source.)
As a note, if you're truly obsessed with getting the right shape, you should be looking at milling machines, not 3D printers. Milling machines go down to more like 0.001mm resolution. The process is detailed here.
Libertarians believe that bankers will behave when they're accountable to their customers...
This relies heavily on the customers making fully informed choices. But companies will not reveal any information to the customer they don't have to. Here's some places that could really hurt you:
- Amusement park rides made by the lowest bidder that kill children years down the line.
- Food sourced from China and imported.
- Internet service providers "adjusting" your connection speed so that you can easily reach websites they're getting kickbacks from (net neutrality stuff).
Also, if a company is ever caught in the act, it could simply change its name or disguise itself to hide from the bad press. People forget.
And lastly, there is no incentive for companies to create infrastructure - why lay down fiber optics when we're making tons of money from wires? Heck, private interests will try to prevent progress where possible - just look at the Prop 6 "free bridge" fiasco.
Wired is heavily biased towards Apple. They use the word "iPad" in nearly every article. This happened when they began distributing their magazine onto the iPad; it was a great magazine before that. Now I just ignore anything they say.
Sorry, no. Yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater is generally accepted as a limitation of free speech. It's a crime, and it should be a crime. Likewise, suicides should not be shown on TV. They are much more harmful than your average TV violence. It is well-established in the psychology literature that seeing a suicide in detail can be enough to push someone who's borderline-suicidal over the edge. Do some reading.
Scientists are interested in making more scientists. That's why mentoring exists. Generally, females do not progress as far along the scientific career track as males do. They are just as smart and devoted -- up until the point when they have kids. Then science becomes less important to them, and they stop pushing so hard to become professors / researchers / Nobel winners / whatever.
So, if you're going to spend countless hours teaching a student, which one would you pick? The male student, who's more likely to push his career like crazy and become a great collaborator and publish lots of papers with you? Or the female student, who has a 50/50 shot that she'll suddenly stop caring at age 25~30, right when her career would be taking off?
Sexist? Absolutely - and this kind of thinking contributes to undervaluing females in science everywhere. Even brilliant ones who aren't going to have kids still face this bias. It's a disaster. But it has a logical cause. Until it's possible to have family-friendly science careers, this is unlikely to change. Right now, there are too many scientists competing for too few spots. The males are going to win, because they'll (generally speaking) put their careers before their families.
You can get all the functionality of a Nook tablet by installing the Nook app to a Nexus 7.
I've tried it the other way around - turning a Nook tablet into an Android tablet - but it's an annoying process. Further, B&N likes to un-root your device by forcing you to update. There are ways around this, but you have to be pretty devoted to keep a Nook Tablet rooted. The Nexus 7 is cheaper and does more.
Also - why in the heck does processor speed and RAM matter on a device whose primary function is to read books?!
That's a good challenge! Making the plastic durable enough that it wouldn't just snap when pressure was applied would be quite tricky. It would need to be thicker and bulkier than an equivalent metal garlic press. That's just difficult enough to be interesting - maybe I'll give it a shot.
One issue that comes up here is food safety, too. Using 3D-printed plastic is not the best idea if you're working with hot or acidic foods. Garlic is probably OK though.
Wait... what? So, let me paraphrase: "Yay on closed source! Now, get out of my way while I find something open source..."
Yep! Turns out I can like both open-source and closed-source products. Open-source is a dream come true for flexibility and innovation, whereas closed-source products are generally more reliable and polished. Both have their place.
Hi. I use the Makerbot Replicator professionally to make equipment for my lab. I'm also a member of the Makerbot Google Group, who largely share my views:
(1) Good on them for going closed source. The Makerbot people have done a lot of work advancing the state of the art in consumer-level 3D printing technology. And they're being copied all over the place: there are kickstarters for near-identical models with shittier manufacturing that undercut their business. This is exactly what patents are made for, to protect innovation! And Makerbot Industries held off going closed source until they were forced to. Ultimately, I want Makerbot Industries to stay alive and keep being able to sell stuff so they can keep their R&D going. Also, they're great advertisers for 3D printing technology, and they're helping it gain mass appeal. More power to them.
Closed source or not, 3D printing puts a ton of power in the hands of ordinary people. Who cares if the printer is patented?
(2) People are feeling betrayed and that is really, really sad. See Occupy Thingiverse for details. I really hope this doesn't end Thingiverse. But it is creating awareness of the Thingiverse license agreement, which I suppose is a good thing.
(3) GOD DAMN THAT THING LOOKS AWESOME. I can't help but want the Replicator 2, it's gorgeous. It looks like the design idea here is "it does less stuff but does it better" - there's no ability to print ABS and no dual extrusion, but if it works as advertised, getting good prints out of it will be much easier.
(4) It's almost annoying how fast they iterate. The original Replicator came out in January, and this thing's already out? WTF? I've barely had time to play with the previous one, and now the support community will be split between the two models. So it'll be harder to find info on the Replicator and not on the Replicator 2.
(5) I don't know if I'll continue to support Makerbot Industries so much. Truth be, before this annoucement I was already considering a cheaper non-Makerbot 3D printer (e.g. the truly open-source RepRap). If Makerbot is going closed source all the way, that may be enough of a push to get me to buy something else. I'd be willing to pay more to support the open-source ideal.
In short, if they're going pure capitalist, then I'm going to do the same to them.
ImageJ is a wildly popular image processing toolkit written in Java. Users are able to write their own plugins as.jar files, and thanks to that, there are loads of plugins for doing every image transform imaginable.
"We should also point out that this memory is actually soldered to the system's motherboard. So whatever configuration you get from the factory, be it 4GB or 8GB, that's what you've got for good, period."[source]
Slashdot Mirror
They're not easy to find.
At one extreme, you have the zero-sum pure competition games. Chess and Go are classic examples, but the most cutthroat one I've come across is Caesar and Cleopatra. Divorce in a box, if you ask me.
At the other extreme, you have the "family game" type, which is pretty much random who wins and who loses. The card game Fluxx is the best example I can think of here. I've played Fluxx while actively trying to lose, and won despite my best efforts. These can be fun, but they're not intellectually stimulating.
The good two-player games are in a sweet spot between those two extremes. The perfect 2-player game has enough randomness that you won't feel bad if you lose, but enough strategy to make you feel like your actions mattered when you win.
Lost Cities, Odin's Ravens, and Jaipur are three such games. They are all card games, and what cards you get is significant in all three games. But all 3 games let you manage your luck in different ways, so having a good strategy is essential.
Given how the whole Arab Spring thing played out, I'm guessing the people in power in NK are not going to be inviting the Internet in any time soon.
My wife and I are in a similar spot, living temporarily in an area far away from people we know. As such, we've found a few good 2-player board games to occupy us.
Lost Cities is excellent, Odin's Ravens is very good (if slightly childish), and we're just digging into Jaipur now which may be the best yet.
Maybe you two can play words with friends together.
Did you know they even have a version you can play in real life now? Games are finally growing out of cell phones and into the third dimension! It's a really exciting time to be a gamer, with these new and innovative products.
More seriously, try board games! My wife isn't much of a video gamer, but board games were a huge hit with her. Look at things like Agricola, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, and Settlers of Catan. They reward analytical thinking like video games do, so you won't be bored, I promise.
Off-topic. This is a reply to a comment you made ages ago that stuck in my head: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:38854
Aww, damn! I was hoping someone could fill the void in my heart Makerbot left. Ahh well. Thanks for the correction.
The main point of casting from a 3D print is to change the material from being "3D printed plastic" to being any other flowable thing: metal, urethane, transparent resin epoxy, silicone, plaster of paris, etc. What your 3D printer is bringing to the table is the shape. So the key feature you're looking for, if you want to do molding and casting, is getting the right shape out. Material strength is relatively unimportant.
ABS has an impressive material strength, but if you're planning on casting, you should look into PLA printing instead. PLA's material strength sucks compared to ABS, but man is it easier to make good prints with it! You can get better resolution on it -- PLA at 0.1mm vs ABS at 0.2mm -- and the warping and curling issues are greatly reduced. It's a lot more reliable to work with.
The other big reason to use PLA is that it dissolves away in boiling water. Stick your PLA mold and whatever you casted into it into a crock pot for a day, and the PLA's gone.
Any 3D printer that can print ABS can also print PLA. Check out the MakerGear M2: Metal frame, way cheaper than a Makerbot, and it beat the Makerbot and several other contenders in Make Magazine's 3D printer roundup recently. Good accuracy, speed, and print quality. Good business ethics too (Makerbot's not so popular around here these days since they suddenly changed to closed source.)
As a note, if you're truly obsessed with getting the right shape, you should be looking at milling machines, not 3D printers. Milling machines go down to more like 0.001mm resolution. The process is detailed here.
Last, this is an awesome set of pictures showing lost PLA casting (plaster of paris -> metal)
Libertarians believe that bankers will behave when they're accountable to their customers...
This relies heavily on the customers making fully informed choices. But companies will not reveal any information to the customer they don't have to. Here's some places that could really hurt you:
- Amusement park rides made by the lowest bidder that kill children years down the line.
- Food sourced from China and imported.
- Internet service providers "adjusting" your connection speed so that you can easily reach websites they're getting kickbacks from (net neutrality stuff).
Also, if a company is ever caught in the act, it could simply change its name or disguise itself to hide from the bad press. People forget.
And lastly, there is no incentive for companies to create infrastructure - why lay down fiber optics when we're making tons of money from wires? Heck, private interests will try to prevent progress where possible - just look at the Prop 6 "free bridge" fiasco.
Wired is heavily biased towards Apple. They use the word "iPad" in nearly every article. This happened when they began distributing their magazine onto the iPad; it was a great magazine before that. Now I just ignore anything they say.
And I now have coffee on my keyboard. Well played.
Wish I had mod points. Great reply.
Sorry, no. Yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater is generally accepted as a limitation of free speech. It's a crime, and it should be a crime. Likewise, suicides should not be shown on TV. They are much more harmful than your average TV violence. It is well-established in the psychology literature that seeing a suicide in detail can be enough to push someone who's borderline-suicidal over the edge. Do some reading.
Scientists are interested in making more scientists. That's why mentoring exists. Generally, females do not progress as far along the scientific career track as males do. They are just as smart and devoted -- up until the point when they have kids. Then science becomes less important to them, and they stop pushing so hard to become professors / researchers / Nobel winners / whatever.
So, if you're going to spend countless hours teaching a student, which one would you pick? The male student, who's more likely to push his career like crazy and become a great collaborator and publish lots of papers with you? Or the female student, who has a 50/50 shot that she'll suddenly stop caring at age 25~30, right when her career would be taking off?
Sexist? Absolutely - and this kind of thinking contributes to undervaluing females in science everywhere. Even brilliant ones who aren't going to have kids still face this bias. It's a disaster. But it has a logical cause. Until it's possible to have family-friendly science careers, this is unlikely to change. Right now, there are too many scientists competing for too few spots. The males are going to win, because they'll (generally speaking) put their careers before their families.
The Nexus 7 also has a GPS, which I believe the others do not.
Umm, they are the same price (the $199 version), and the Nook has expandable memory and the Nexus does not.
Quite right! My mistake, I misread the price. Thanks for catching that.
You can get all the functionality of a Nook tablet by installing the Nook app to a Nexus 7.
I've tried it the other way around - turning a Nook tablet into an Android tablet - but it's an annoying process. Further, B&N likes to un-root your device by forcing you to update. There are ways around this, but you have to be pretty devoted to keep a Nook Tablet rooted. The Nexus 7 is cheaper and does more.
Also - why in the heck does processor speed and RAM matter on a device whose primary function is to read books?!
That's a good challenge! Making the plastic durable enough that it wouldn't just snap when pressure was applied would be quite tricky. It would need to be thicker and bulkier than an equivalent metal garlic press. That's just difficult enough to be interesting - maybe I'll give it a shot.
One issue that comes up here is food safety, too. Using 3D-printed plastic is not the best idea if you're working with hot or acidic foods. Garlic is probably OK though.
Wait... what? So, let me paraphrase: "Yay on closed source! Now, get out of my way while I find something open source..."
Yep! Turns out I can like both open-source and closed-source products. Open-source is a dream come true for flexibility and innovation, whereas closed-source products are generally more reliable and polished. Both have their place.
Hi. I use the Makerbot Replicator professionally to make equipment for my lab. I'm also a member of the Makerbot Google Group, who largely share my views:
(1) Good on them for going closed source. The Makerbot people have done a lot of work advancing the state of the art in consumer-level 3D printing technology. And they're being copied all over the place: there are kickstarters for near-identical models with shittier manufacturing that undercut their business. This is exactly what patents are made for, to protect innovation! And Makerbot Industries held off going closed source until they were forced to. Ultimately, I want Makerbot Industries to stay alive and keep being able to sell stuff so they can keep their R&D going. Also, they're great advertisers for 3D printing technology, and they're helping it gain mass appeal. More power to them.
Closed source or not, 3D printing puts a ton of power in the hands of ordinary people. Who cares if the printer is patented?
(2) People are feeling betrayed and that is really, really sad. See Occupy Thingiverse for details. I really hope this doesn't end Thingiverse. But it is creating awareness of the Thingiverse license agreement, which I suppose is a good thing.
(3) GOD DAMN THAT THING LOOKS AWESOME. I can't help but want the Replicator 2, it's gorgeous. It looks like the design idea here is "it does less stuff but does it better" - there's no ability to print ABS and no dual extrusion, but if it works as advertised, getting good prints out of it will be much easier.
(4) It's almost annoying how fast they iterate. The original Replicator came out in January, and this thing's already out? WTF? I've barely had time to play with the previous one, and now the support community will be split between the two models. So it'll be harder to find info on the Replicator and not on the Replicator 2.
(5) I don't know if I'll continue to support Makerbot Industries so much. Truth be, before this annoucement I was already considering a cheaper non-Makerbot 3D printer (e.g. the truly open-source RepRap). If Makerbot is going closed source all the way, that may be enough of a push to get me to buy something else. I'd be willing to pay more to support the open-source ideal.
In short, if they're going pure capitalist, then I'm going to do the same to them.
This post was removed due to Dice content standards violations.
ImageJ is a wildly popular image processing toolkit written in Java. Users are able to write their own plugins as .jar files, and thanks to that, there are loads of plugins for doing every image transform imaginable.
Too many mind worms.
Your beloved Lenovo is doing it too:
"We should also point out that this memory is actually soldered to the system's motherboard. So whatever configuration you get from the factory, be it 4GB or 8GB, that's what you've got for good, period."[source]
The Space Olympics didn't work out too well actually.
If you begin with "If you begin with", YOU have lost the argument.
Waitaminute...