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Pulse

A very slow one, but still. Nothing interesting is happening to me at the moment. Or lets say a lot is happening, changing and shifting. But there is nothing I can pinpoint yet. I will write again, when the fog is clearing ;-) .

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Sorry , mea culpa

I found some unapproved valid comments and have approved them. Sorry that this is slow, but since my blog was (accidentally) on an aggregating site, people flood me with spam.
So sorry people, I will try to keep up, but I am rather convinced that the blog is not widely read, since my life is poor in exciting stuff to write about at the moment. I am too old to really put a stream of consciousness in here ;-) . So I think it slightly silly to tell you that we have snow on the balcony and my coffee machine is needy and seeks attention. At the moment by wanting to be decalcified (entkalkt ;-) ), normally it just wants its monthly cleaning tablet.
But since Wall-E I have a new obsession or lets say, an old obsession bubbled up again, robots. And since the yesteryears of my early obsessions, when I was a student and couldn’t imagine to buy a robot kit, because it was to expensive, prices did go down. Go Arduino.
And maybe I will write something about Processing another cool thing I play around with, aehem research on.

And I wanted to link to these 2 sites : Programming and this site Science where Peteris Krumins has a fantastic list of online videos from universities and google tech talks and other sources for people who want to learn stuff, but are at the moment not able to go to MIT ;-) . I put them into my blogroll too.

So I hope you bear with me, I will get used to not only having spam-comments and please if you write non-english or non-german commentaries, I will only approve them, if I can guess what they say (Cyrillic is definitively out of my league) and the included links are safe. This is after all, also a professional blog.

not dead yet …

Long time no post, but I was freelancing in Italy for 3 month. After I came back I didn’t have anything to say. New stuff I toyed to write about, but didn’t find more than a one-liner in me :
- my new apple bluetooth keyboard made from aluminum, which complements my N800, very nice
- new computer, quadcore, more RAM, nice graphic card, Vista ;-) , prompted me to buy Crysis and Bioshock (25 SFr. each, Bioshock even the version with the Big Daddy figure)
- new camera Panasonic LX3, will write about it after the holidays, after I have pictures to show
- my art education continues, see next post

Somehow this self-made corset of staying in the technical and game development theme doesn’t work. So I will include other stuff to. Maybe I get to write more.
I am in a serious overhaul concerning my life its direction and where to go with my own project. It starts to come together, but it is all still very vague. I am grateful that I have this time of exploration. By the way Python is seriously cool and makes me hope that I can do this very funny thing in my head. I am not yet clear about what it is, but there is something there, waiting to come out.

Leo , ipython , Console and Panda3d help. I will try to write a post about these tools too. I still use Emacs, but for other stuff ;-) .

I am flooded by spam comment by the way, so if your comment doesn’t appear immediately please be patient, I can only manage a finite amount of spam.

More teaching …

This time, physics. We did a lot of exercises. And I told some anecdotes from the days when I was a string theorist, to catch their focus again. People are always less interested in the mundane everyday Newton stuff, they want to know about stars ( happily I actually did astrophysics in my master course) and the big void, relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory. The problem is without the math and some fundamental base knowledge, how forces work, all of this stuff is pretty hard to understand. If you don’t know how the world you sense works, relativity theory is just strange and quantum mechanics scary. Newton on the other hand can be done with a lot of drawing and some simple math.
Why are people so scared of physics ? Why is it so hard for education systems to teach, that this stuff is important everyday stuff, you actually need driving your car ? You should know how long it takes to get your car from any velocity to standing. Everybody should know and actually instinctively knows, what happens if the road is wet or iced.
Sports theory has a lot to do with physics. If you look at people in high jump competitions, try to figure out where the center of mass is. There especially, athletes use a lot of physical theory to optimally shift their center of mass to gain height. When they changed to a new jumping style some decades ago, which takes this into account, the maximum height dramatically increased.
I am pretty passionate about physics. I just think this stuff is interesting. But is also helps in everyday live, if you know where to push for maximal effect.

My first time as a teacher

Monday / Tuesday I gave some lessons at the Games Academy in Berlin. This is a private school for people who want to work in the video games industry. My course this week was mathematics for game programmers, next week it will be physics.
I was pretty nervous. I have done some 45 minutes presentations, but 16 lessons of school is something different. You have to engage people more, there need to be exercises and the pacing needs to balance out. It went pretty well. Naturally I have to fine tune it, but I seem to get information across in a fairly cohesive way. So I am not boring as a teacher, which really is great, because I actually always somehow loved to share information. Which is what teaching is for me, share information and help somebody to get the basics they need to find the information they may be interested in themselves.
So now I have to prepare the physics lessons, but at least I know the people and their expectations.
But who would have thought that my studying theoretical physics and mathematics (which I did for entirely selfish reasons), would 10 years later lead to me giving lessons for game programmers.

The beginning

Soon to come, my experiences at the GCDC Leipzig.