Archive for March, 2008

LEGO X-wing & Belafonte

Friday, March 21st, 2008

As a delayed present from one of my sisters, I got the LEGO X-wing using the gift voucher she gave me for Christmas. It is a mighty set, doing all the kinds of things I tried to do in my own various interpretations of the craft, both when I was younger and even more recently.

This brings my total number of LEGO bricks to 13,301, with 7,925 in whole sets and 5,376 as loose parts.

Regarding my next big LEGO project, that I alluded to when writing of the Gay Deceiver, it shall be a LEGO-man-scale version of the Belafonte from The Life Aquatic.

I was being a tiny bit secretive as no-one has yet made such a model, the closest so far being the submarine and the crew themselves. So I vaguely wanted to be first, to not let anyone get in there ahead of me…

But that seems a little silly. A few years ago, I had all kinds of plans and sketches and writings detailing the “perfect” ebook reader (electronic ink display, touchscreen interface, clockwork powered, always-on-internet connection) and I was going to make a website out of it, with the intention that, if I would never make it myself, it would put the idea out there for someone else to. Of course, many other people were thinking along similar lines, and the Kindle is pretty close, only without the touchscreen or clockwork (I’ve since learnt that clockwork provides nowhere near enough juice).

So anyway, if someone else makes the Belafonte before me that doesn’t matter too much. If it is exactly what I wanted to build, then I can simply follow their instructions, and if it’s not then I still have my mighty plans…

I’m writing to Eric Anderson to ask if he has any sketches/drawings I may see, and when I’m next in London I’m going to visit the National Maritime Museum in order to get some plans of the Ton class minesweeper, which is the kind of boat the Belafonte was.

So, that’s one of my future LEGO schemes. Right now I’m in Germany, have a few assignments to work on over the coming weeks, an interview for an internship too.

Ooh, I am a published writer now, with an article on pages 12 and 13 of the current issue of my university’s student magazine, The Courier. You can download a PDF of the issue (59.4) from the Archive and a more in depth version of my piece is online too. Sure, it’s just the post I wrote last November, but now… published!

Ooh ooh, I also finished Guitar Hero III in Expert mode on Wednesday 12th March! After drinking some booze and playing some multiplayer, I was so very much in the zone that I beat the devil first try. Hoo-hah. Now, to play through it all again on the new Xbox 360 Kitty and I will be buying tomorrow…

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No, there are not more people alive today than have ever died.

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

Today, 12th March 2008, there are approximately 6,793,052,354 people alive right now.

According to ‘How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?’ by Carl Haub, in mid-2002, there were 6,215,000,000 people alive and the total number of people ever born was 106,456,367,669.

Assuming the total number of people alive doubles every 50 years, as Isaac Asimov supposed in 1991, then in 800 years time there will be as many people alive as there had ever existed up to mid-2002.

Which is to say, if the human population continues growing at the current rate, by the year 2800 there will be over 100 billion people alive.

I tried to work out the method to determine:

1 – How long it would be until the number of people living was exactly half that of those who had ever been born (which is to say, the same number as all those who had died up to that point).

And:

2 – How long it would take for there to be more people alive than had ever lived.

But my brain does not know how, at least not right now.

~

I first read Asimov’s ‘The Power of Progression’ years ago, but it was Ellis’ musings and the bizzare “answers” to this question on Yahoo! that prompted me to write this.

~

The short answer; no, there are not more people alive today than have ever died. We make up about 5.8% of all those ever born.

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Time Lapse Carcassonne

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

This Saturday just gone, I played Carcassonne with some friends and made a time-lapse video of our game, as we had discussed the week before:

( Time Lapse Carcassonne (YouTube, 18 seconds )

If you like, you can also download a much higher quality version:

( Time Lapse Carcassonne (5.44MB QuickTime Movie) )

2 hours and 45 minutes compressed into a little over 18 seconds? Hoo-hah.

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LEGO Gay Deceiver

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

In researching my next big LEGO project, I remembered the Serenity model I saw a while ago and so looked around a bit more on that website. In doing so, I came across a model very much like one I would build myself, a spaceship based on the Gay Deceiver from Robert Heinlein’s books.

Gay Deceiver

If you read through all twelve pages, you will see the attention to detail I shall be striving for myself.

Also, quite a while ago now, I finished inventorying all my LEGO bricks (well, all save three models (1381, 4027 & 4029), the parts for which are mostly still in London as part of a mighty whale). The final numbers were 12,853 bricks in total, of which 7,488 are from models I’ve acquired in the last few years (2,056 from Café Corner and 1,045 from the ginormous Batmobile alone) and 5,365 are from my childhood, reclaimed from my siblings the Christmas before last.

My next model is rather ambitious in scale, and so even all that LEGO shall probably not be enough, but I shall use Bricksmith for a lot of it anyway as I shall likely not have my LEGO with me when I’m in Germany. However, having the database of all my parts on Peeron means I will be able to know which parts I need to buy and which parts I already have, which was the goal of all that cataloguing in the first place.

Finally, No Country for Old Men was interesting and sad, the 2nd and 3rd seasons of My Name Is Earl get much better than the 1st, with an engaging ongoing story, and I’ve finished all but the final devil-battle-song on Expert mode in Guitar Hero 3.

Over the next few weeks, I shall be posting several articles and also the photos from Hong Kong. Hoo-hah.

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