College Group Board Games

I was recently commissioned to purchase a starting set of board games to make available to our church's college group for use after our weekly meetings.  Our hang-out time afterwards is generally characterized by talking and pancakes (yes, pancakes) and it was thought that the board games might provide some alcohol-free social lubricant.  We did a test run using our own games last Thursday and the response was positive so we got the go-ahead to make it official.

Based on our trial run I was looking for games that had some of the following characteristics:

1. Familiarity to college students/people in general.
2. Easily taught and learned.
3. Relatively short (less than 30 minutes) to play.
4. Good for larger groups (five or more will probably be common).

Not all of the games chosen fit all of these requirements but many come close. And here they are....

I've got a list of further additions if such a need arises but I'd be interested in any suggestions.

Vacation in Vancouver BC and Portland

Here are some photos from my recent trip to the Pacific Northwest.  The first week or so was spent up in Vancouver BC where I attended a conference and my wife saw the sights.  Our hotel was in downtown Vancouver and the living felt very urban.  Lots of people on the sidewalks at all hours, lots of bicycles, buses, cars, and pedestrians. We saw more pet dogs than children and it definitely seemed a place for yuppies to thrive.

Here's the view from our hotel window:

More than any other city I've visited (including Portland, OR) downtown Vancouver accommodated bicycles.  Note the dedicated lanes and bicycle parking in the median.  My wife rode all over downtown on a rented bike, something she won't do here in Wichita.

Downtown is largely surrounded by a harbor including a seaplane terminal.  I'm guessing this is where some of those vehicles go for fuel, the floating Chevron station.

A fair number of the buses downtown were powered by electricity from these overhead lines.  There were points on some of the routes where the drivers had to get out to switch lines so the bus could continue on its route.  

The Olympic "cauldron" from hosted 2010 Winter Olympics.

The city is very environmentally-oriented which includes growing a lawn on the convention center roof.  

I did not appreciate how major a shipping terminal the city was until I saw this.  Many, many freighters were in the harbor the entire time we were there.

More of downtown from the harbor.  The skyline was full of skyscrapers.  Particularly on the west end of downtown, virtually all of the buildings were over 30 stories tall.  As I said, very urban.

This is art.  There was a sign saying so.  It also said not to touch the art so we didn't.

My wife wanted to go hiking near waterfalls and I knew just the spot.  It had been many years since I had been down to Silver Falls State Park not too far from Portland.  Six miles, 8 waterfalls, good times.

I don't know what happened to this tree but it is clear it hit the ground violently.  I have never seen a trunk this large shattered like this.

Also in the odd-sightings category, a burned-out tree with only the bark remaining?  Maybe?

Lorenz in Living Color: Part 4 - Visualizing the System

As I mentioned previously, an error in my implementation of the Runge-Kutta algorithm on the Arduino left me convinced that I needed something with higher precision to do the necessary calculations.  This set-back would eventually sideline the project for several months but before I set it aside, I took on the chunk of code that would follow the calculations to find the solution to the Lorenz system, that I was having trouble with.  Given the z, y, and z values that would result from that calculation, I needed be able to determine the red, green, and blue values for all 50 of the LEDs I was going to be using.

This gets to a very fundamental question: once I did get to a place where I had a running list of coordinates of the solution points to the Lorenz system, how was I going to present those in an attractive way?  My first thought was just to use a row of LEDs each one representing a state of the system.  As the Arduino would generate the solution to the system for the next step in time, the new color would be shoved onto the string of LEDs, pushing all the previous solutions down one LED.  The result would look a lot like the animations form previous posts but here's what it looks like when all 50 LEDs are used:

My thoughts were to orient the string of LEDs vertically, maybe four or five feet tall and place them behind a piece of frosted glass or plastic, perhaps with some etching somewhat related to the weather.  I held onto this idea for quite some time before I was confronted with the reality that I had no way to etch a five-foot long piece of glass or plastic nor did I have any specific plans for what that art would be.  And if I was going to be the one to make the art, I suspected I would spend a large amount of time on it and the results would not be that fantastic.  The project would turn into one playing to my weaknesses rather than my strengths.

Lorenz, the man, is the one that coined the term "butterfly effect" to describe how chaotic systems can start out in very similar states but over time diverge drastically.  Interestingly, given the right set of parameters to the Lorenz equations, the shape of the solutions ("the attractor") takes on a vaguely butterfly-like shape.

I started of thinking of ways of trying to use this visual similarity. I still liked the idea of having the LEDs behind frosted glass to diffuse the colors; maybe a butterfly shape could be etched into the frosted glass?  Behind this etched glass I could arrange the LEDs in the shape of the attractor and as the solutions to the system were found, I could light up the LED that corresponded to that place on the X-Z plane with the color that corresponded to the X(red), Y(green), Z (blue) coordinates.  By arranging the string of LEDs in a figure-eight the looping path of the solution to the system would be shown by constantly moving LED with a color based on the the latest solution to the system.

But this would once again require me to create some kind of passible image of a butterfly to be etched. Seeking to avoid this complexity, I decided to switch the two images: I would etch the attractor on the frosted glass and arrange the LEDs in the shape of a butterfly.  I could generate the image of the attractor using Matlab and arranging 50 LEDs in the shape of a butterfly profile seemed something I could manage.

Once this decision was made, the next step was to write the code that would take the latest solution to the Lorenz system, an X, Y, Z coordinate, and define the state of each of the LEDs.