Snowflakes

In the realm of science, there are many things which are not fully understood. The mechanism behind the formation of a snowflake crystal is one of these things.

Online Snake Game

This is a simple Snake video game I wrote over the past few days. For the graphics, I used my Firetools.js library, which I also mentioned in my Pong post.

To play the game, use the arrow keys on the keyboard (you might need to click on the game to give it focus). The world loops, so you can go out one side of the screen and come in the other. Eat 50 green pellets to win the game. Each time you eat a pellet, you will get longer and your score will go up; the longer you are, the more points you get for each pellet. If you don't eat enough pellets, you'll begin to starve, and get shorter. Cherries make you longer, but do not prevent starvation.

I did not add the ability to track high scores, but I might add that feature later on. Meanwhile, you can post your scores in the comments. Have fun!

2014 in Photos

The year of 2014 is over; the year of 2015 has begun. Over the past year, I took a lot of pictures - more than 1200 photos of clouds, bugs, plants, rocks, and more. I deleted most of the low-quality and repetitive photos. Then, I selected 20 of the remaining photos which I thought were the most interesting or significant.

In this post, I'll include those photos, in chronological order.

Ultra-Macro Photography Upgrade

Some people pay hundreds to be able to photograph tiny subjects such as snowflakes, but now you can do it for $5.

The Problem with Technology

Glass cellphones... brilliant

About a month and a half ago, an Orbital Sciences rocket exploded during liftoff. Although nobody was injured from the explosion, hundreds of millions of dollars of supplies and equipment were destroyed in a matter of seconds. The fireball, which could be seen for miles, stunned observers; many hadn't even seen a lift-off before, much less an exploding one.

Only three days later, another space-related accident occurred: during a test flight of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo spacecraft, a premature wing rotation due to pilot error resulted in the destruction of the spacecraft, killing one of the two occupants and severely injuring the other.