I was wondering about uncommon game mechanics recently and would like to get some inspiration for a possible next project. :)

I personally enjoy games in which a story is generated organically based on the user's gameplay.

Hey Tildes, I got a job directly supervising a small team of 4 software developers. I'm very excited at the prospect and would like to put my best foot forward. To that end, I would like to have a discussion around a few topics. Feel free to expand the scope if you believe the conversation would be beneficial. I'm sure I won't be the last person to be in this position. I've done research, read, and watched videos regarding several of these questions; however, since Tilde prioritizes high-quality discussion, I thought it would be a fun opportunity to chat with others about these topics.

• As a member of a software development team, what are things that your supervisor has done that has had the greatest (a) positive and (b) negative impact?
• Supervisors, when you joined your new team, what was your methodology for reviewing the team, projects, and processes? What was the scenarios behind your review and the outcome? What would you do differently?

Introduction

I want to give an introduction on several physics topics at a level understandable to laypeople (high school level physics background). Making physics accessible to laypeople is a much discussed topic at universities. It can be very hard to translate the professional terms into a language understandable by people outside the field. So I will take this opportunity to challenge myself to (hopefully) create an understandable introduction to interesting topics in modern physics. To this end, I will take liberties in explaining things, and not always go for full scientific accuracy, while hopefully still getting the core concepts across. If a more in-depth explanation is wanted, please ask in the comments and I will do my best to answer.

Previous topics

Spintronics
Quantum Oscillations

Today's topic

Today's topic will be quantisation, explained through the results of the Stern-Gerlach experiment which was first performed in 1922. This topic treats a much more fundamental concept of quantum physics than my previous topics.

What is the Stern-Gerlach experiment?

In 1922 physicists Stern and Gerlach set up an experiment where they shot silver atoms through a magnetic field, the results of this experiment gave conclusive support for the concept of quantisation. I will now first explain the experiment and then, using the results, explain what quantisation is. If you would rather watch a video on the experiment, wikipedia provided one here, it can be watched without sound. Note that I will dive a bit deeper into the results than this video does.

The experiment consists of two magnets, put on top of each other with a gap in the middle. The top magnet has its north pole facing the gap, the bottom magnet has its south pole facing the gap. See this illustration. Now we can shoot things through the gap. What do we expect would happen? Let's first shoot through simple bar magnets. Depending on how its poles are oriented, it will either bend downwards, upwards or not at all. If the bar magnet's north pole is facing the top magnet, it will be pushed downwards (because then north is facing north). If the bar magnet's south pole is facing the top magnet, it will instead be pushed upwards. If the bar magnet's poles are at a 90 degree angle to the two magnets it will fly straight through, without bending. Lastly, if the bar magnet's poles are at any other angle, say 45 degrees, it will still bend but less so. If we send through a lot of magnets, all with a random orientation, and measure how much they got deflected at the other side of the set-up we expect to see a line, see 4 in the illustration.

Now we'll send through atoms, Stern and Gerlach chose silver atoms because they were easy to generate back in 1922 and because they have so-called spin, which we will get back to shortly. We send these silver atoms through in the same way we sent through the bar magnets; lots of them and all of them with a random orientation. Now what will happen? As it turns out all the atoms will either end up being deflected all the way up or all the way down, with nothing in between. 50% will be bent upwards, 50% downwards. So silver atoms seem to respond as if they were bar magnets that either bend maximally up or maximally down. In the illustration this is labeled 5.

If we were to take only the silver atoms that bent upwards and sent them through the experiment again, all of them would bend upwards again. They seem to remember if they previously went up or down rather than just deciding on the spot each time if they go up or down. What model can we think of that would explain this behaviour? The silver atoms must have some property that will make them decide to bend up or down. Let's call this property spin, and say that if the silver atoms chose to bend up they have spin up, if they chose to bend down they have spin down. It seems that these are the only two values spin can have, because we see them bend either maximally up or maximally down. So we can say the spin is quantised; it has two discrete values, up or down, and nothing in between.

Conclusion

We have found a property of atoms (and indeed other particles like electrons have spin too) that is quantised. This goes against classical physics where properties are continuous. This shows one of the ways in which physics at the smallest scales is fundamentally different from the physics of everyday life.

Next time

Next time we will investigate what happens when we rotate the angle of the magnets used in the experiment. This will lead us to discover other fundamental aspects of physics and nature, quantum superpositions and the inherent randomness of nature.

EDIT: part 2 is now up here.

Feedback

As discussed in the last post, I am trying something different for this post. Talking about more fundamental quantum physics that was discovered 100 years ago rather than modern physics. Did you like it? Let me know in the comments!

For about a year I have been trying to work out how to make music. I want to make stuff like the OP-1 videos on Red means recording. I have a midi keyboard and LMMS on my desktop but I just can't work out how to do anything.

Does anyone have any tips or resources? Everything I have found has been so specific to a certain tool that I can't use it or so theoretical I don't understand what to do with it.

There was a brief (an oh-so-brief) period in youtube history where all types of non-corporate content thrived. I'm referring, if memory serves, to the timespan from around 2011 - late 2014.

This was after youtube initially got big, but before Google decided that it wanted to step in and maintain the cultural status quo rather than redefine it. Ad revenue paid creators fairly-ish in most cases, and the talk of the town was machinima assfucking it's segment of poor souls that signed into it, rather than youtube pulling the same moves universally as it did a few years later.

(Suffice to say I have no love for the platform).

It's important to note that at this time, Youtube was a bit like a small-scale television enterprise, before it dreamed of deliberately becoming one. Youtube had everything from animations to product reviews, news to reality programming to VFX extravaganzas.

One of the most incredibly important innovations of the time, and one that's been all-but-lost, was the birth (and subsequent heat-death) of youtube news channels.

These channels mirrored cable news, but without the influence of corporate sponsors getting in the way, and without the ravenous need to appease political parties and harebrained cable tv viewers. They were biased - good god were some of them biased - and they weren't perfect, but they were set up in such a way that, had youtube not fucked it up (sigh...) they might've someday dethroned CNN, MSNBC and Fox.

With the next election coming up and shaping up to be a small-scale repeat of 2018s (you're kidding yourself if we're every going to go any other direction than further down at this point - after all, it works!) it's important to remember that there was, for a beautiful gleaming moment, a chance for not a corporation, but a community, to rise up and redefine the way people received news in a way that hadn't been seen since the conception of the newspaper.

Instead, youtube squandered it. Real events and engaging content don't generate views. People can't sit and watch hours of current events like they do for whatever-the-hell youtube trends nowadays (list videos and toy openings, I guess?), and why would they? If you get on youtube to watch today's news, you're not going to stick around for yesterday's. So youtube's 'algorythm', a word I've come to absolutely detest, doesn't favor them just like it doesn't favor basically anything else that once made youtube great.

The icing on the cake: rather than embrace even a tertiary aspect of the community, they went for the safe option and the ad revenue. No Phillip Defranco for you, we'll show you Jimmy Kimmel. No TYT, we'll fill trending with clips of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The only real survivor of the era was infowars.

Here's to you, youtube news. Dead and gone, but not forgotten.

Obviously this depends heavily on one's interpretation and subsequent extrapolation of the current geopolitical climate. That being said Nazis, the Soviet Union and generic Middle Eastern terrorists will eventually fall out of vogue and lose their cultural significance with each passing generation. What might come next?

If nothing else, I suspect zombies will remain one of those recurring trends that come in waves.

With Essen Spiel 2018 arriving tomorrow, I was wondering what boardgames you guys are most anticipating.

I've listened to a bunch of podcasts and watched a bunch of top-10 most anticipated videos and there are a bunch of games that are getting me excited.

For example, Treasure Island, which I only found out about yesterday, looks pretty interesting to me. It involves one player hiding some treasure and the other players trying to seek it out (Scotland Yard style). The pirate hiding the treasure has to give out clues that may involve drawing areas on the may in dry-erase marker with a compass, like a ship's navigator.

However I'm most eagerly awaiting more detail on the forthcoming Capstone game, Pipeline and some more details on the Splotter expansion to Food Chain Magnate (even though I don't think it needs an expansion).