There are also radioactive tiles decorating the Caltech campus: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lapie/3340318920/

Apparently there was a brief period in the 20th century when this was a popular way of making yellow glazing.

google "radium girls"

not sure why I was downloaded. the radium girls painted radium on dials which glowed

Did you read the piece? They talk about VR.

Actually, they dismissed it pretty quickly I thought.

I believe the "dismissal" is this cogent argument:

Shuffling bits around takes energy; if your virtual reality services grow exponentially and energy production doesn't, then the price of energy must also increase exponentially or else one of your VR companies could buy all the energy and shut down the competition.

Energy production (and computation) are limited by the capacity of the earth to vent heat into space at a reasonable surface temperature.

So unless you allow for an exponentially expanding real-world physical economy, you can't have an exponentially growing virtual economy.

The price of energy is capped at the cost to privately produce it for yourself, which is probably pretty low in the scheme of all encompassing virtual real estate fiscal gods.

Not unless the physical economy is growing at about the same rate as the virtual one. Or else how is that extra power generation capacity being added?

If the virtual economy grows 10%, that doesn’t mean we need 10% more energy to make it happen.

1 additional bit of information allows exponentially more complexity to exist. Digital scales very very well.

Thanks for fixing the espresso machine <3

of course :)

You should check out the OpenCOBRA project: https://opencobra.github.io/cobratoolbox/latest/

To be fair, it's incredibly CPU-heavy. It uses an iterative approach to calculate the forces exerted on the grid, so for each frame it calculates the force exerted on each node a set number of times. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlet_integration)

However, this shouldn't be so heavy that the Firefox JS engine struggles with it...

Yeah the weird thing is that aside from being unresponsive it seems to run fine. The lines move around and the fabric stretches and waves smoothly. That's on an older i3, and a newer 3.GHz i5. I bet it works properly in chrome. I like Firefox but I always seem to have performance issues with it.

Wow, thanks! I just used Sublime Text 2 (which I admittedly haven't bought so the prompt to buy it pops up every now and then when I save, gulp!). I have a ruler set at 80 chars and try not to surpass it.

Also, I have a JSHint plugin installed on Sublime which scans the document every time I save it and checks for missing semicolons, implicitly declared variables, etc.

Thanks for the PR!

Thanks for the historical input!

I actually thought Snake and TRON were two distinct games with Snake being a 'player against environment'-game and TRON being 'player against an NPC'-game.

The TRON/Lightcycle genre is at its very best as a PvP(xN) game. Haven't logged in for years, but there used to be dozens of very active servers running Armagetron Advanced, and it looks like it's still going:

http://armagetronad.org/index.php

A very fun, fast paced, social, arcade-like gaming environment for someone not invested enough in gaming to delve into the likes of WoW or similar.

They had a tournament of this at PAX AUS this year. It's not dead.

Not true. If you want to challenge yourself you can play with increasingly obscure keyboard layouts. It's a feature!

Final boss: left ctrl, numpad 3, backslash, and ]. Better use your nose!

You play the white light-cycle.

i. Use WASD to steer — you can't turn on the spot.

ii. Don't hit anything.

iii. Try to make the other light-cycle hit something.