I have offloaded one more project, a bit more adventurous than the last two. If nothing else, the logic is mine save the algo's (so I am playing the rôle of Mark Barnes).
Enjoy Cellular Automata, or "Cave" for short. If you do C# and don't mind the /unsafe tag.
In 1982, BYTE was running a competition for games. We've met the "winner" which nobody remembers. Enjoying a better reputation today is the number-five loser: Gordon Mills' Ringquest - at least, for the Redditors. This game is available in the MicroM8 emulator. All for the higher-end Apples, like 48k RAM.
This game is a fanfic / alternate of Lord of the Rings where/when the bulk of the Fellowship has failed in the depths of Moria. Now the Balrog owns Sauron's Ring. Your job is to get down there and pry the Ring off him/it, before everybody else is screwed. Treasure can be found. Mills switches-up the usual Nethack / Rogue conventions such that you can use the treasure to bribe encounters out of a fight; except for the Balrog itself of course. Your aim is progress toward the MacGuffin, not to gain loot.
The comp winner was in Forth. The fourth-with-a-u also-ran was in Basic... mostly. To input this thing into your machine required manual entry of many, many hexadecimal bytes: this is how most the data were separate from the program, which prog took up 6k RAM. I suppose the step after that would have been to compress the data which at least might have cut the manual entry (but could you do that in 8-bit?). The map, at least, was procedurally-generated.
I feel like the author should instead have saved it to cassette and sold it. This was wasted on BYTE. Maybe the use of the Tolkien Estate's property was the problem; Beyond Zork solved this with the "Coconut of Quendor".
This August was among the worst months in this blog's history, beat out by last November. Dog Days indeed! Mostly I'm blaming the news because there wasn't much worth commenting. But also I found other things to do.
Here is what I did: porting fun games from ye olde Color Computer News over to C#. Incidentally I also learnt some basics on hooking Visual Studio up with Git. From July 1982 is Mark Barnes' GoldMine; from the ensuing September is Steve Sullivan's Venus Lander.
I don't know if either were classics. GoldMine did at least adapt a classic algorithm, a 1981 random maze generator. (I have it as pseudorandom.) Lander games were already old hat by late 1982: even on the CoCo, even allowing for the CoCo News' late spring publication hiccup. This one, I argue, had some art style.
I suppose I could ask if anyone else has already done these, as well. Google isn't coming up with anything.
We've had the horse since our Yamnaya days... attached to the wheel and chariot. Why didn't they just throw on some Comanche blankets and ride into battle directly?
Here's the study: the horse did indeed get friendly in 3000 BC, gene "ZFPM1". But they only got rideable (aside maybe for slender Scythian women) around 2200 BC. GSDMC, which apparently is less-great for us humies.
Some old news that shouldn't surprise any triple-digit-IQ today... and didn't surprise them in mediaeval days, either.
The debunking in question comes from Nicole Oresme, before he became bishop of Lisieux AD 1377. Back then (before the Schism), thoughtful skeptics were allowed into the Church and, it seems, promoted. Especially during the Plague the Church couldn't have popular cults springing up and introducing chaos.
This blog wholly endorses the practice of taking the spiritual to evaluate the useful-physical. It happens that sometimes the "spiritual" is just fake.
Next, do the Mandylion.
Mikhail Черновић and other Internet Slavs are on the case of the Demons. NephCon aside, we have good data on parasites and how they act... like a demon might.
I am unsure how far prayer helps directly. What does help directly is expulsion of the parasites. Ivermectin does this. So does the old-fashioned way: fasting. It may be that prayer, by subordinating (what you think is) your will to an outside power, shows you where your will is becoming the wasps' will.
Yesterday one Joseph Noel Walker raised that Darwin's stomach problems came from some parasite or other. Usually here is cited the helicobacter, famously to be discovered by a mad lad who infected himself by design. Seriously: do not try this at home.
Back to the Christians I wonder how many other nasty Late Antique bugs were solved by going out into the desert and subsisting on sterilised foods, like dried unleavened bread left out to be nuked by the dry sun. Not all the Orthodox hermits are to be dismissed.
Darwin, overall, was a man ahead of his time. But an Orthodoxy behind his time might have saved him.
Yesterday Anton Howes analysed England's century of authoritarian oligarchy. The Parliament was then held by landholding agricultural interests, "lords" and "nobles" - also bishops. They (mostly Norman) had been able to exploit a low-class (Saxon) peasantry. Then this miserable population got culled, by fleas. The survivors swiftly learnt the upside: they could bargain for higher wages.
The nobles reacted: by wage controls. In England (and Norway) the nobles further introduced the Letter Testimonial (in excellent Norman legalese). Howes equates the Letter to a Chinese hukou passport: the villein (serf) didn't get to move from his lord's manor to some better-paying lord's, or to repopulate those cities.
I don't know that Howes says this, but the fourteenth-century power-grab by the aristos made critical that aristos stay aristo. For awhile they could still gain lands and booty in France, thank you Henry V. But after the early 1400s that didn't last. I suspect the Wars Of The Roses resulted, as lords fought lords.
This all started under Edward III. "Ēadweard" is a Saxon name. One wonders if he were wiser to have held himself as the King of the English, as to revisit the nobles' privileges from the Great Charter.
