Saturday, February 27, 2016

Spindown D20

Just a little something for the Magic players in the audience - I designed a net for a really nice (IMO) spindown D20. Each number is aligned so that the number above is literally above and the number below is literally below it. The faces are also shaded to indicate how the numbers flow into each other.

Here's how the finished die looks:

And here's the net. If you make one, I'd love to see - tweet a photo to @LaurieCheers!


Saturday, January 2, 2016

Do not stare directly at the truth

Sometimes - even though it sounds impossible to the mathematically minded - the question of what is true in reality is literally a matter of opinion.
The world as it actually exists is stranger than we poor humans can conceive. All things we'd intuitively call "real" are emergent behaviours of an utterly alien underlying system. Our brains are like insects crawling on a TV screen, thinking that because they see patterns in the phosphors, they understand. Since we can't perceive or relate to what's really happening, we make theories and try to explain them with words and with mathematics... but mathematics speaks to the head, not the gut, and words are at best a poor sketch of one aspect of the real thing. If you ask a question about something in the sketch, there's a good chance your question has absolutely no correspondence with what's actually happening.
We call such questions philosophy and religion.
But still, since our sketches are all we have, people cling to them, and will argue passionately about which one is correct. (The answer, of course, is that none of them are, and the world as we imagine it doesn't even exist... but we shy away from that truth because then how do we live? It gives us no advice about how we nonexistent beings should behave).
The wise man understands that to best interact with other humans, you must be prepared to communicate at their level. As such, an illusion that millions of people believe in may acquire, like the Matrix, a kind of weight and legitimacy. And questions about it, like questions about a fictional universe, can develop their own accepted "canonical" answers and fan theories.