Tuesday, June 29, 2021

TakeTwo

 Below, two runs of Mario; the first with the flag and post,

the second without. It was a major difficulty for me and I

ended up solving it with hump/signal. 


Note i have made the snails disappear, omitted the key and lock part

and given mrio a 1 in 2 chance of scoring a gem.


Blue Mario the Intrepid gets trough it all!! I was asked by someone for

different music and removed the falling sound effect in favour of a theme

that is impressionistic ie has sound effects built-in...




                                      *      *     *

I set up the hump signal; but - markedly - do not instantiate

TakeTwo at this point!


Signal emits the post and top functions. The TakeTwo condition is in terms

of it evaluating to true.


TakeTwo gets instantiated from within spawnPost():




StartState keeps track of the status of TakeTwo:


PlayerWalking handles the move to the Bonus state:






Labs

  Below, a dose of reality on the Wuhan labs question:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15232215/wuhan-labs-leak-covid-chaotic-crowded/

Monday, June 28, 2021

Necessary

 An international group of scientists are getting real about the

need to establish the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. They

are looking at rwo possible scenarios: one with the cooperation of China

and investigative; another without, and based on science and data mining.


The overall feeling is that China should not be given veto power over this question,

necessary to safeguard all in the future.


Lettre ouverte de 31 scientifiques internationaux pour «une enquête complète sur l'origine du SARS-CoV-2» (lefigaro.fr)

Sunday, June 27, 2021

Cake

 A smoldering day for us; am having a fun breakfast of

cake, fruit and cottage cheese...Unsusual, I know:




Saturday, June 26, 2021

Handsome_M

 And then everything crashes and the hard-work code starts to

erase itself...Yes, that happened on the Mario this afternoon. Had

to start all over; but I'm in business again...And Mario is now blue.






Chill

 

Skimmed through this reaction video on Amberlynn Reid. Think I found

where it all went wrong for the younger Amberlynn. it has to do with eating 

a banana. Anyone abreast of dieting litterature will tell you, the proper 

portion for bananas is 1/2 banana. And here we have bravely dieting Amberlynn

setting out a whole banana on her 'diet' plate. She says she doesn't really like

them but seems appreciative when she does finally dig in. This si the thing, a whole

banana is actually too heavy a glycemic load. A bit of banana is okay, the last bite

of the banana is not, one is feeling dizzy and nauseous by this time... Ergo, I don't

like bananas.


There are a lot of things going on here. The most striking to me: how a dieting

program might be just as guilty of fatphobic prejudice; a whole banana is okay for

these fat folk who will eat anything in gluttonous proportion. Guilty!...Guilty!... Not to

mention all that reaction nonsense 'our gorl pretending not to like bananas'... 'our

gorl pretending to eat daintily'. Load is load; for anybody. And no one knows what parent

or internal 'parent' is telling someone to eat away through the unpleasantness. Everybody

just needs to chill a minute, on this one.


https://youtu.be/7ptmqVZP3o0

https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glycemic-index-and-glycemic-load-for-100-foods

Fusion_Canadian

 source: The Economist

Fusion power
The race to build a commercial fusion reactor hots up

A Canadian firm plans a demonstration machine in Britain


An old joke about nuclear fusion—that it is 30 years away and always will be—is so well-known that The Economist’s science editor forbids correspondents from repeating it. No one doubts sustained fusion is possible in principle. It powers every star in the universe. Making it work on Earth, though, has proved harder. Engineers have tried since the 1950s, so far without success. The latest and largest attempt—iter, a multinational test reactor in southern France—has been under construction for 11 years and is tens of billions of dollars over its initial, $6bn budget.

Listen to this story

Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.

But that record does not dismay a growing group of “alternative fusion” enthusiasts. Through a combination of new technology and entrepreneurial derring-do they hope to beat iter to the punch. On June 17th one of their number, a Canadian firm called General Fusion, put its investors’ money where its mouth is. It said it would build a demonstration reactor, 70% the size of a full-blown commercial one, at Culham, the site of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, Britain’s national fusion-research laboratory. Like iter, it hopes its reactor will be up and running by 2025.

Power play

On paper at least, fusion is attractive. Existing nuclear plants rely on fission—the splitting of heavy atoms, usually of uranium, into lighter ones. The energy thus liberated is used to boil water into steam, which then turns turbines that make electricity. Fusion plants attempt to do the opposite, generating heat by combining light atoms to make heavier ones.

Unlike coal or natural gas, fusion would produce no planet-heating carbon dioxide. Unlike solar panels and wind turbines, fusion plants could operate in any weather. Unlike fission plants, they pose no risk of spreading nuclear-weapons technology, and should generate much less radioactive waste. They offer safety, too. “I like to say that fission is easy to start and hard to stop,” says Christofer Mowry, General Fusion’s boss. “Fusion is the opposite.”

Fusion is hard to start because it requires extreme conditions. Most Earthly fusion reactors aim to combine deuterium with tritium. (Both are isotopes of hydrogen, in which the single proton in that element's nucleus is joined by either one or two neutrons.) Protons have a positive electrical charge, and like charges repel. Persuading two atoms to join forces therefore means overcoming this repulsion. And that requires a great deal of energy.

General Fusion’s idea is to forge a middle path between two existing approaches, magnetic-confinement fusion (mcf) and inertial-confinement fusion (icf), with less need for heroic engineering than either. iter is a doughnut-shaped type of mcf reactor called a tokamak. It is intended to use carefully controlled, high-intensity magnetic fields to heat a hydrogen plasma to hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius, and then hold that plasma stable while its atoms combine. The trick is to control the fields precisely enough to keep the super-hot plasma together for long enough to allow a significant amount of fusion to happen. The present record, held by an experimental reactor in France, is six-and-a-half minutes. iter’s goal is a reaction that lasts up to ten minutes.

icf forgoes finicky magnetic fields in favour of super-powerful lasers. Experiments like the National Ignition Facility, in California, use carefully timed pulses to smash fuel pellets from all sides, heating them to temperatures similar to those in mcf plants, but also compressing them by the application of billions of atmospheres of pressure. Thanks to this crushing pressure, fusion happens much more quickly. The hope is that, one day, a useful amount of energy can be produced and harvested in the tiny fraction of a second before the zapped pellet blows itself apart. Once again, though, properly controlling the lasers and ensuring that the pellet is evenly compressed has proved tricky.

General Fusion calls its own approach “magnetised target fusion”. The basic concept dates back to the 1960s. The firm’s reactor, says Mr Mowry, does away with magnetic confinement by using powerful electric pulses to create self-stabilising blobs of plasma that are injected into the reactor’s core. He compares this to blowing a smoke ring, in which the air currents within the ring allow it to maintain its shape for a few seconds before it dissipates.

The puffs of plasma actually last around 20 milliseconds. That would not be long enough to extract much energy were they to be injected into an mcf reactor. But it is long enough for them to be compressed, as in an icf machine—and by something far less exotic than banks of advanced lasers. The core of General Fusion's British reactor will be lined with molten lithium and lead. Once a puff of plasma has been injected, ranks of gas-driven pistons will compress the core, changing it from a cylinder to a sphere and drastically boosting the fusion rate (see diagram).

But while laser compression happens in mere billionths of a second, General Fusion's takes thousandths—comparable with the timescales on which internal-combustion engines operate, and well within the capabilities of digital electronics to fine-tune. The upshot, the firm hopes, is a reactor which should be cheaper and simpler to build and operate than either an mcf or icf machine.

Critical mass

Besides compressing the plasma, the liquid-metal jacket serves to capture the energy from the reaction. Heated metal will be piped to a heat exchanger and used to raise steam. Neutrons from the fusion reaction, meanwhile, will transform some of the lithium into more tritium fuel, which would otherwise be rare and expensive. Or at least, it will one day. General Fusion's demonstration reactor will only fuse deuterium with deuterium, to keep things simple.

Still, the firm hopes that a full-fledged commercial reactor—which might be built in the early 2030s—could compete with other forms of electricity. It is aiming at a cost of $50 per megawatt-hour, which Mr Mowry says ought to make it competitive with coal. Renewable energy may prove cheaper, he concedes, but it is hampered by intermittency. And the plant will have one more advantage over existing, fission plants, the electricity production of which cannot quickly be raised or lowered. General Fusion’s reactor can increase or decrease power output ten-fold by changing the speed at which the core cycles. That should allow it to “load-follow”, ramping up production when electricity prices are high and cutting back when they are low.

And General Fusion is not the only firm pursuing commercial fusion. On April 8th tae Technologies, a rival based in California, which was founded in 1998, said it had raised $280m for a demonstration reactor of its own, bringing the total invested in the firm to $1.1bn (see chart). Like General Fusion, tae relies on puffs of self-stabilising plasma. Unlike General Fusion, it aims to produce electricity by combining hydrogen with boron, a process that needs temperatures of billions of degrees, but which should require less radiation shielding.

General Fusion’s other rivals include two British firms, First Light Fusion and Tokamak Energy, both based near Culham, and a pair of American ones, Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Zap Energy. Nor are governments putting all their eggs in the iter basket. The Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, a German government agency, is trying to build a power station based on a device called a “stellarator”—a twist on the mcf approach. Its Wendelstein-7x device began working in 2015. And the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy’s step reactor, scheduled to open in 2040, is intended to demonstrate the commercial practicality of fusion. One reason General Fusion chose Culham, says Stephen Dean, who runs Fusion Power Associates, a research and education foundation which covers the field, is that this lab has a focus on getting to market quickly.

For his part, Dr Dean sees no fundamental reason why one or more of the current crop of contenders should not succeed in building a reactor that generates useful quantities of energy. But it is economics, not physics, that will have the final word. High-tech fusion reactors, assuming they are ever built, will have to compete in a world in which the price of solar and wind power is falling steadily. Fossil-fuel companies, meanwhile, are trying to work out how to capture and bury the carbon dioxide emitted from their power stations. Advanced fission reactors are attracting private interest of their own—on June 2nd TerraPower, a firm backed by Bill Gates, a founder of Microsoft, announced plans for a high-tech nuclear plant in Wyoming. All that competition is good news in a warming world. But it promises a white-knuckle ride for investors. 

A version of this article was published online on June 23rd 2021

Friday, June 25, 2021

Decisions

 Made a decision: Mario in the bonus round will be blue💖. I am also 

planning a little enhacement: the game map will be 200 tiles wide, instead

of 100. And to make it all a bit more exciting, those double cliffs will be

filled with water.


For now, managed to turn Mario blue and test the appearance of the pole and

flag at the end of the level. Past this point, WalkingMario he will 'die' and come 

back to an altered start and playsate, but with all his points.



 

Thursday, June 24, 2021

FêteN_2021

 Sometimes less is more; BFN à tous:



                                                              *     *     *

Not completely in the dark about the next step; the level is jsut so long because

level generate makes it 100 tiles wide ie 1600 pixels. Keeping track of player's x position

here:








Wednesday, June 23, 2021

Key and Lock

 As always, reading the instructions is the way to go. Decided to give

a push on the Mario assignment and get the key and lock part done, from

LevelMaker. Works jsut fine. Below, the first trial shows player getting the key,

hitting the lock and scoring 100. In the second trial, player hits up the lock 

without the key but does not score. Maybe should make the lock persist until player

tries it with the they, but there are many locks. 


The next hurdle is getting the Post and Flag to appear at the right time...




From LevelMaker:




This from PlayState:






Delta_Plus

 There has been found - in India - a more deadly form of the

Delta variant, now called Delta_Plus. Twenty-two cases so far:


https://www.lefigaro.fr/sciences/une-nouvelle-mutation-du-variant-delta-inquiete-l-inde-20210623






Tuesday, June 22, 2021

Waters

 Good one for the team this morning: I have managed to

show a moving animation of the Mario water images, and this

starting with a random member of the set every time.

A little help from hump/timer and voilà.









                                        

                                                   


                                         

                                         

Sunday, June 20, 2021

Fathers_2021

 Father's Day and the first day of summer all in one; this time of

year is great, with so many things to celebrate. all of which provide

ample excuse to let go of austere witer habits...and diets. I say, let the

PARTY begin:



                                              *     *     *

I was asked how the above animation was accomplished. It is really

a little tinkering with Character(3) from Games50 Mario. What I liked

about the original was the Animation Class code, which one just needs to 

reference to parse trough our animation frames.


What I changed in main.lua:

I lwas a lazy Daisie and left the charactercode as is; just the changed the reference

image to that of flag poles. Did have to change the heigt of the 'character' though.


Added a copy of character animation, and changed the frame references. Chose

the blue pole and the red flag. It is here called the FAnimation...


Flag now has a speed, which I made slower then that of the poles.


Initiated the flag off-center.


Here it is, the 'invisible' switcheroo.


Update both animations.




Disabled the camera scroll(This is what keeps character centered in the original and

makes the tiles re-draw, eventually with a cliff at the left end.)

                                       
                                           
In love.draw(), called the flag before the pole to accomodate the visuals. And

added the text message, all within 'push'.


*     *     *

Changed the interval on the poles animation, from 0.2 to 0.7. Much better

overview of the various poles. Thik tomorrow I will try to use the animation

to run an animation loop...




Thursday, June 17, 2021

Flags

 Taking a breather form all that signal business.


Made a mock-up for the flags. Had to get a newsymmetrical 

image of both poles and flags from the image given. Then put 

them together.


Poles is now 64 x 52:

Flags is 45 x 64:

                                                       

Put them together (flags before poles) with minot adjustments:




*     *     *

Showing the flag programmatically, form PlayState:








Bac_Philo_2021

 France's annual Bac exams - which regulate access to higher education

in France - kicked off today with Philosophy and French Lit. The Philosophy

text for comment struck me as interesting; from sociologist Emil Durkheim. Important

becuse society at this point  is particularly embroilled in the wealth issue; but also dated

because there is no concern there for the Environmental, the living ...Below:


The text to be commented on is De la Division du travail social (1893)


“It is the same with morality. Each nation has its own morality, which is determined by the conditions in which it lives. One cannot therefore instill in it another, however high, without disorganizing it, and such disturbances cannot but be painfully felt by individuals. But does not the morality of each society, taken in itself, include an indefinite development of the virtues it recommends? Not at all. To act morally is to do one's duty, and all duty is subject to definition. It is limited by the other duties: one cannot give oneself too completely to others without loosing oneself; one cannot develop one's personality to excess without falling into selfishness. On the other hand, the set of our duties is itself limited by the other demands of our nature. If it is necessary that certain forms of conduct be subject to this imperative regulation which is characteristic of morality, there are others, on the contrary, which are naturally resistant to it and which nevertheless are essential. Morality cannot rule over industrial, commercial, etc. functions without paralyzing them, and yet they are vital; thus, to consider wealth as immoral is no less a fatal error than to see wealth as the good par excellence. There can therefore be excesses of morality, from which morality, moreover, is the first to suffer; because, as its immediate object is to regulate our temporal life, it cannot divert us from it without itself drying up the matter to which it applies. " 

                                                                           Emil Durkheim 'De la division du travail social' 1893



Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Signal

 Finally broke down and resorted to using hump.signal

to handle my keys and locks scenario. From the PlayState.

Signal is very powerful but getting the settings right is something 

of a challenge. Currently at the test code below: it gives one or two

 keys of the one color - Mario cannot always reach everything 

in his world - so a second chance is a good idea. 


Assuming the level is 500 points, giving each key hit 100 points 

works out for the present length of things...








Tuesday, June 15, 2021

Code_It

 Merrily spawning keys and locks this morning; albeit in disparate

colors. If programming should be the priority, some things just need

some decent code!!




Sunday, June 13, 2021

Events

 Progress - and not- on the mario assignment. Decided to make

the key objet appear in PlayState, like the snails, and addig my key to the

objects list. Problem is, when I create an ojects list for the level, adding

a key to it comes with all the other objects, like bushes, disappearing.

Very strange. Will need to look at that all over again, tomorrow!!




This is not an idle issue. Once the player getd the key and hits the lock, the end

of level flag appears and the level is reset (without keys). it is a sequence of events

one is coding for!?


Even looked at hump.signal as a possible way to simplify removing the key events loop...

                                                         *     *     *

I was too hasty: this does work...Just need to insert my key on the model of the snails insert.







In effect, GameLevel already initiated these tables, with further update and render

functions. What threw me is that these are branded local; and thet remain local

to the PlayState.




Now for the scenario problem...