The Manga Guide to Calculus

The Manga Guide to Calculus follows a story of a young reporter who must use calculus to analyze data to discover news stories, or something like that. What I find amazing about this book is that for $20, you can get entertained while learning calculus, even going as far as partial differentiation and Taylor series expansion.

$20?!?! Man, what a deal! My stupid boring text book I used in college cost way more than that. Not only that, but there is an entire series of "The Manga Guide to..." books, ranging from databases to the universe.

I'm seriously considering getting this book, and integrating it into my life. Did I just make a stupid math joke? Yes I did, and it was a bit derivative to boot.

Best commercial ever (even if intel is evil ;)

Play Budget Hero

Budget Hero is a game about balancing the federal budget. Based on the actual economic model and data used by the Congressional Budget Office, it's your turn to decide what to spend on, and what to cut.

Not only that, but you get to choose up to three different "value badges" our of a pool of eight to measure how your decisions on your budget affect what you value. For example, you might choose the green badge, the energy independence badge, and efficient government, like I did the second time around. If you choose the card to award $30 million to the person that invents a better car battery, then that would contribute positively to your green badge. Choosing to drill for oil in Alaska would increase your energy independence (oddly, I don't think that affected my green badge negatively, though). Double clicking on the cards will tell you what your spending/cutting would do, so make sure you do that, rather than just drag the cards onto the "recently played" pile. Research, people!

Let's just say that I effectively nailed the efficient government badge. The other two badges, not quite a quarter was earned. I'm not proud of what I did, but suffice it to say that there would be more than a few old people angry with my decision to destroy social security as much as the game would allow (little do they know that the joke would be on my generation anyway). But I did reduce the national debt from $13.8 trillion in 2008 to $9.2 trillion in 2018 and delayed the budget bust from the year 2038 to 2070, so at least I've got that going for me.

All in all, it was a fun and educational game. I actually felt like this game helped my life and my understanding of government spending in a positive way, which is more than I could say for many other games I've played in the past, like Bart vs. the Space Mutants.

An article about the development of the game can be found at Gamasutra's Post Mortem: Getting Serious with Budget Hero. It provides some interesting gamer statistics, it is worth the less-than-five-minute read time.

Weird Al on Circus of the Stars

I remember watching this when I was nine or so. I still get nervous watching this sway pole act today. Watch it on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8CTEEOMLgE.

Then, become a fan of his on facebook!

Tic-Tac-Toe

Paul and I are in the process of game creation. Our plan is to start small and work our way to bigger and better games.

So our first collaborative work is Tic-Tac-Toe. You can't start much smaller than that. It's finished, and now we plan working on a Tetris clone.

Google Street View: Coming to a street near you

I was talking with one of my co-workers during a break, and he revealed that Utica, KS had been Googlized! So I wondered what other places of Kansas they drove through. As it turns out, it was a bunch.
They hit Tribune (and some highway), Macksville (who is this guy?), and plenty of other western Kansas towns got hit too. An obvious one they missed: Hays! I'm sure Google will not stop until they've managed to index every town, and then move on to our very own brains. It'll be great, I can't wait.