Observing Run Report. Also a Birthday.

Well, I decided against doing a second “live from the control room” post on my second night primarily because the second night was quiet, with even less to blog about (if possible) than the first night. Thankfully, two days of staying awake over twenty-one hours pretty effectively flipped my sleep schedule and after coming down Friday morning I slept like a log until it was time to get dinner and go up again. I was thus wide awake the entire second night, and didn't even need a single cup of coffee.

I wasn't thinking that well up there due to a combination of lack of sleep and low oxygen, so I didn't take as many pictures as I would have liked (in particular, I would have liked one of me in the control room). I did take a few though, so I thought I'd share them.

I did at least remember to get a picture of the most exciting thing to happen, the flat tire on the way up Thursday night. That's my friend from college Will, the telescope operator that night, busy fixing our flat. Will loves cars, so I actually learned some things about brakes and how they work and what they look like while we were switching wheels.

This is just a shot back down the road from where we were, with Mauna Loa in the background and clouds at about the 6,000 foot level.

I forgot to get a picture inside the control room, but I did at least remember to take this picture on the way out Friday morning. Sorry it's not quite centered; I had to get off the road over some rough footing to be able to get even this much of the telescope in the frame, and as I had been up for over 21 hours at that point I wasn't sure enough of my footing to risk going further out. Also it's sometimes hard to tell if you've framed something right on your phone screen.

You can see Will next to the vehicle in the car port there, which should give you some idea of the scale. The telescope is actually open and observing in this picture, as we had just turned over control to the remote operator down in Hilo who continued observing till noon that day. That big expanse inside the building is the Gore-Tex membrane (largest in the world) that protects the dish from the elements.

And finally, this last picture is not related to my observing run, but to the other thing that happened this weekend: my birthday! Yes, I specifically picked Friday night to observe so that I could turn 25 up at JCMT on Mauna Kea. It was a really great experience. A quarter century! Wow!

And as a birthday present, my younger brothers sent me the following picture from Minecraft.

I was so taken with it that it's now my wallpaper, as you can see. Thanks guys! Actually, I should explain that monitor: I've decided, instead of buying a new computer, to build one myself. I'm still finalizing the parts for it, but I decided to go ahead and order a monitor first because I can use it (as seen here) as a second monitor for my laptop. Having a dual-monitor setup at work has really spoiled me, as it's just so handy for getting things done and being productive. Thus I intend to get another one of these monitors when I eventually get the computer built and use them together, but in the meantime this one can sit by my laptop and act as extra screen estate.

The only problem with the wallpaper is that every time I turn my computer on for the next few days I'm going to think I'm falling into lava in Minecraft and freak out, but I'm sure I'll get over it sooner or later.

Building a Pyramid

I promised my little brothers that I would put some pictures of the pyramid I built in Minecraft up on my blog, so here they are.

View of the pyramid from the south, along the entrance causeway.

This pyramid was actually a pretty interesting learning experience. Minecraft takes place in a world of blocks, which are usually taken to be one meter on a side. When I decided to build a pyramid, I first thought of building a replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza, which is 230.4 meters (755.9 feet) on a side at the base and would have stood 146.5 meters (480.6 feet) tall when it was built. Given the constrictions of Minecraft my pyramid would need to have a 45\(^\circ\) angle rather than the 51\(^\circ\) 50' 40" of the actual one (and thus only 115 meters high), and a quick calculation showed that it would require on the order of 2,054,360 blocks to build an entire pyramid.

Edit (6/14/13): The calculation is simple; it's just
\[N=\sum_{n=1}^{115}(2n)^2\] which can be solved in four lines of Python code, viz:
>>> N = 0
>>> for n in range(1, 116):
...    N += (2 * n)**2
>>> print(N)

View of the pyramid from the south-east corner. Ignore the flying castle in the background.

I also quickly learned that the area I wanted to build it in was much too small, so I decided to scale down and build a smaller pyramid 100 meters on a side. The same calculation showed that such a pyramid would still require 171,700 blocks (same calculation as before with different upper limit), and since I was going to have to gather every single block myself, I decided to cheat and take advantage of Minecraft physics (or lack thereof) to build a hollow pyramid consisting of only an outer shell.

View from atop the black obsidian pyramidion. Some previous work can be seen, the Library building to the left and the floating Sky Castle to the right.

This scheme still required a total of 10,000 blocks of sandstone, which I methodically went about gathering. (Edit (6/14/13): To arrive at that number, imagine the pyramid as a series of concentric square rings, since it's hollow. You can imagine collapsing them down into each other, until you have nothing but a square patch of sandstone a hundred meters on a side. Simply square that number, and you arrive at 10,000.) The entire process of gathering materials and building the pyramid probably took me a good ten hours over a period of several days, and really put into perspective what it must have taken to build an actual, solid pyramid over twice as large as the one I finally completed.

The Sun rising behind the pyramid in the east. It is very impressive in-game.

First-Person Fun

I am well on the road to recovery now, thankfully, barring a minor persistent cough. Being sick over the weekend gave me some time to play Minecraft with my housemate Josh, which was both fun and instructive.

Somewhat surprisingly given its blocky look, Minecraft has one of the highest immersion values for a game I have ever seen. The Survival Mode of Minecraft plays much like Robison Crusoe. You find yourself in a vast world (and I do mean vast, over 8 times the surface area of the Earth) with nothing but the clothes on your back and have to, well, survive. You harvest wood from trees (and can sustainably replant them if you're smart), mine deep underground to find coal and iron, build yourself a shelter to protect you at night from the occasional monsters that try to attack you, and that's just a start. Once you have the basics down you can start exploring more leisurely activities, such as creating paintings for your house, designing amazing architectural masterpieces, or wandering the land in order to map it. In a way, it reminds me of the development of art and culture in a society once people have enough leisure time not to worry about imminent starvation, except experienced by one person.

The vast number of different things you can do in Minecraft lets it appeal to many different types of players. Creative types can skip Survival Mode altogether and just build incredible structures in Creative Mode (or enjoy the challenge of building things while simultaneously making a living for themselves); adventurous types can roam far and wide, seeking out new sights or fulfilling that innate human desire to find out what's “just beyond the next hill;” more competitive types can even take up arms against the sea of troubles monsters cause, and, by opposing, end them. (Sorry, waxing a bit lyrical there.)

But the best part about Minecraft is that it is also a multiplayer game, so you can do all of the previously mentioned things, with friends! And that really increases the fun, because you can more easily specialize in doing the things you find interesting or fun, again, rather like real developing societies. In our game, Josh turned out to be the builder and designer, while I ended up being the farmer, rancher, and artisan (I'm a much better farmer in Minecraft than I am in real life, by the way). And that's another reason I think the game is so much fun, is it allows you freedom to play to your strengths. Of course that's not to say that I never did any building (once I had a good farm going I did start some building projects of my own), but I could focus on it when I wanted to.

Many multiplayer games are all about people doing the same thing, together. If you're playing a First-Person Shooter type game, both players need to be at fairly similar competency levels, or it's not going to be much fun for one or both (I have fond memories of playing Halo 2 multiplayer with two of my best friends, where they would be furiously duking it out for the lead, and I'd be piddling along far behind blowing myself up with the rocket launcher).

In Minecraft, by contrast, two players can be at different skill levels and do completely different things, while still having fun. At one point I joked to Josh as we were setting out in different directions “See you in an hour!”, then realized that it was quite likely to be true since we were keeping in contact through Skype but both off doing our own completely different things, and having an absolute blast doing it. And I think that's a big reason why Minecraft is so fun; the ability to play together with other people, without everyone having to do the exact same activities. It's really rather revolutionary, once you've experienced it, and I'm now beginning to understand just why Minecraft has had so much hype about it practically since it began.

A Quiet, Mostly Uneventful Week

I usually try to go no more than a week between blogposts, but this week was pretty quiet for me. I was going to post something on Saturday but came down with my first major illness of the year, a severe head cold that has left me with little motivation or energy. I'm hoping it'll go away in a day or two, and I can get back to writing witty and interesting  posts. (At least, I like to think they're witty and interesting.)

The one big thing that happened to me this week is that I finally jumped on the bandwagon and started playing Minecraft. I avoided it for a very long time because of the hype and because I didn't think the idea was very interesting, but I have been immensely and pleasantly surprised to find out just how fun of a game it is. Being of the analytical turn of mind that I am, I've already identified a couple of the things that make it a great game, and will try to summarize them all in a future post. At this point, though, I should probably get to bed and get some rest.