Life notes
Games and life
Running through the games on my phone and what I like about them
Factorio
Life notes
Games grimy and green
Every day, I spend an hour or three playing a game called Factorio, in which you mine and process natural resources with which to build and automate ever-larger factories that manufacture materials for research, transport, power, and weapons. Once your factories get big enough (say, when they consume 10 MW)
Science
The thing about π
Consider the following setup, from the game 'Factorio', the game about factory management and automation: There are two factories visible in this image – the two rectangular, green-walled buildings. Take the one on the left: it's manufacturing electric furnaces, with steel plates, stone bricks and advanced circuits
Science
A future obscured by exponential growth
A couple months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I think most of us realised how hard it is to comprehend the phenomenon of exponential growth. Mathematically, it's trivial – a geometric progression – but more physically, the difference between linear and exponential growth is very non-trivial, as a cause-effect chain where