An Exercise In Futility

Reading mrproper’s “Friday Five” makes me want to take part as well! I will have to dig up where he gets the original questions so that i don’t end up doing my ‘friday five’ on the following wednesday (like i am doing now): 1. What was the last TV show you watched?

• That 70’s Show

2. What was the last thing you complained about?

• A typo in a protocol stack

3. Who was the last person you complimented and what did you say?

• No idea; No idea!

4. What was the last thing you threw away?

• A used kleenex

5. What was the last website (besides this one) that you visited?

• “Kevin Breit’s Website”

Have you ever heard of ‘witching’ or ‘divining’ for water? I have heard many stories of people who could use a stick or a couple of coat hangers to locate underground wires, pipes, and water sources with astonishing accuracy. But I had never seen it done… until yesterday. I was shown the simple technique which involves holding a pair of bent coat hanger wires, and then walking around until they twist together. I didn’t find it unbelieveable - but I do think it is pretty incredible - that some underground object can cause a significant force to be exerted on a pair of wires. My immediate thoughts are that is has something to do with magnetic & electric fields… And maybe the human body acts as some sort of antenna/amplifier or something. What i’m wondering now is - could one locate underground tunnels (such as storm drains) using this method? Would the drain have to have water in it, or is an air path sufficient? I have more questions than answers at this point!

These are quite funny. I especially liked this:
Use your flashlight to lift the walls right off of you! It’s like some sort of jedi beam or something…

As you all know, i am firmly against the war in iraq. Do the ends jusify the means? I always thought that war was for when diplomacy failed. In this case, diplomacy was barely given a chance! It seems that some people are too interested in having things immediately, instantly; as if time was of the utmost importance… But really, is time more important than human lives? The death toll for the war (so far) appears to be several thousand (soldiers and civilians), and the war isn’t over yet… Even if diplomatic means were to take 4 years to oust Saddam, do you really think that he would kill several thousand people in that time? I’d put my money on ‘most likely not’.

We need to come up with a name for this project, since it looks like it’s actually going somewhere! As an experiment in ray casting methods, I worked on a brute force algorithm that had no optimisations and that used lots of floating point math. The result: A routine that used absolutely no trig identities (just principles of similar triangles), and rendered between 0 and 4 fps (yowch!). I am now working on a second algorithm that I hope will be the first in a series of ’successful’ ones, meaning that they render at at least 30fps. The challenge is to come up with something that is not only fast, but works at any viewing angle. Not simple.