Monday, July 15, 2013

Previews from the future - Des aperçus du futur : HSK 1 + HSK 4

Very excited with the progress made these last few weeks!  I'm very confident I'll meet my personal deadline (click to see the post on that).  Here are some last previews of my future work, before I pause posting and make the final push to finish the book.  Enjoy!  Feel free to like or comment below. : )

   Original art - Howard T. Chiam
HSK 4 - 翅膀 - chi\bang\/ - wing

 
 Original art - Howard T. Chiam
HSK 1 -  愛 - ai\ - love


Still can't tell what's going on?  Once all the dust clears in August/September, it'll be clearer when everything comes together.  In context.  With the whole story.

And one final hint:  a few minutes after reading this post, try remembering these pictures. ( :

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Clocks and Time

Keeping with the apparent clock theme, time is ticking:  I've got about two months left to finish the book before I hit my personal deadline.
Original art Howard C.


Random food for thought:  is time actually linear?
Hmmm...

Original art Howard C.
Some observations of reality assume time is perfectly linear and constant.  But our most accurate observations of time itself are based on the most accurate clocks, themselves arguably inherently imperfect (and hence not perfectly linear and constant).  And how do we know they're so accurate anyways?  I'm actually wondering now:  while making these "more-accurate" clocks for the first time, how do you test that they're more accurate if all you have are "less-accurate" clocks to test/compare them with?

Original art Howard C.
Anyways, the pictures in this post are a test of drawing with superimposed lines/colouring.  The text in this post was just generated/added to surround them.  Heh.

Monday, July 1, 2013

How to Do a 7 Minute Workout - another experiment

I've experimented with a free, intuitive programming language called Scratch.
I also happened to see a news broadcast talking about a 7-minute workout for busy people without gym equipment, apparently with some research behind it.
Put them together and what have you got?  Bippity boppity 7 minute program (see below for embedded version).  I open the on-desktop Scratch interface (API) and put it on full screen, using it as breaks between half hours of work when i decide to use a disciplined schedule of alternating 10-minute "breaks" and 30 minutes of "work".

   Get at least 7 minutes full body resistance+cardio with minimal equipment.
   Repeatable cycles of 7 minutes of high-intensity circuit training.

   News broadcast, video:
   http://globalnews.ca/video/568138/seven-minute-workout
   (I couldn't find the original broadcast I saw, but this looks good enough to see the mechanics of the exercises.)

   Note:  The creator of this program does not solicit or endorse the research, just created it for personal use.  Use at your own discretion.

Here's an embedded version of the code you can try right here:


The code is downloadable at the Scratch website:
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/11184401/ 
Click "Share to" and the button "Download code" will show up.  It's a file that runs on Scratch programming software.  I found Scratch an interesting, easy programming language.