Personal chat thread

[wjfox]

I tried getting back into Twitter/X, but it's just an absolute cesspit of hatred, racism, climate change denial, antivaxxers, conspiracy theorists, and other assorted nutjobs.

The site has been truly ruined by Elon Musk.

So... *log off* (again).

[Time_Traveller]

Well this is something I would never think of doing on Wikipedia but I am planning from this Saturday to enquire and join Wikiproject: Epilepsy via the ILAE Wikiproject Project who oversees it now, it has been on my mind for awhile now and I have subscribed to the relevant pages in the meantime. I know I have limited knowledge on the subject even though I have it but it would be a an interesting learning experience to know more in the process from now on and of course, this would dramatically effect the outcome of future articles that I do on the site as well. I have some ideas to improve the main page of it too since it hasn't been properly edited since its creation in 2015.

[wjfox]

A friend and I went to Bill's Hammersmith Restaurant this evening.

This was our dessert.

"Bill's Flower Pot" –– edible pot, soil, flower... all made of chocolate. With strawberries.

[Time_Traveller]

Well this is something I would never think of doing on Wikipedia but I am planning from this Saturday to enquire and join Wikiproject: Epilepsy via the ILAE Wikiproject Project who oversees it now, it has been on my mind for awhile now and I have subscribed to the relevant pages in the meantime. I know I have limited knowledge on the subject even though I have it but it would be a an interesting learning experience to know more in the process from now on and of course, this would dramatically effect the outcome of future articles that I do on the site as well. I have some ideas to improve the main page of it too since it hasn't been properly edited since its creation in 2015.

Well an update on this, by the looks of it I have emailed the Wikipedian who is in charge of ILAE however, I have had no reply since posting the email that Saturday so I have decided to message the Medicine talk page on Wikipedia to see if I have better luck within the next 2 weeks.

I am planning however, over the next 2 weeks to create new categories/pages under the Wikipedia Commons for my photographs and expand it so for example if I took photos in Gloucestershire it would be under my name/Gloucestershire and so forth. I have had some inspiration earlier this morning from another another Wikipedians account by looking through his commons account page and perhaps, creating a church one too in the near future. I am starting to expand the United Kingdom photograph taken on "this date" too by encompassing all my photographs I have taken over the last 8 years into this category. It is rather strange how I get ideas on Wikipedia to totally overhaul my commons pages when looking through them.

[Jakob]

I'm working on creating a height map of the Kyanah homeworld, so far I've hardcoded elevations at the corners of quadrangles and used bilinear interpolation to fill in the intervening points at a resolution of 0.1 degrees per pixel at the equator (more at other latitudes to have a consistent level of detail). This should correspond to 1 pixel per 17-18 km everywhere on the planet. Unfortunately this means that most oases and city-states will be either invisible or just a single pixel. 0.01 degrees per pixel would mean 1 pixel per 1.8 km which would actually show most city-states and oases in some detail, but then the image would be 648 megapixels and likely no screen could render it at full detail anyway.

I also have some misgivings about the bilinear interpolation, it feels a bit janky and blocky in places. I will likely try biquadratic or bicubic interpolation. On top of that, I will implement Perlin noise at multiple scales (to have differently-scaled geographical features), which will hopefully also smooth some of the artifacts. But in any case, I'm pretty pleased with myself for having minimal artifacts at the poles. Of course, we can't forget the impact ranges and general prevalence of craters, so craters will be scattered lightly in geologically active biomes, heavily in geologically inactive biomes, and extremely heavily in shattered biomes, using the biome map I already made. Hopefully that will make things pop a bit.

Once I have this, I can use a separate Perlin noise map (perhaps blended with linear interpolation too) to control the height of the water table (likely using the biome map for parameters, as usual) and create oases where it intersects the surface. With oasis locations in place and the biome map, we have everything we need to a) place city-states to make the first proper political map and b) begin making an actual visualization of the world. I will likely texture it pixel by pixel using elevation, oasis, and biome data to determine the average color of the surface in each pixel--in some places this will be vegetation of various types, in others sand and rocks--if I feel ambitious, I may even try to generate seasonal variations. Likely the albedo will be slightly higher than Earth's to help explain why Tau Ceti e is not a molten hellhole. The city-state data can also be used to create imagery of the night side.

Sorry for the lossy gif :/

[Time_Traveller]

My USB extension lead is on its last legs and has decided this evening to blow a socket as they say and can only charge my laptop, I have bought a new one and arrives on Wednesday so, until then I will chuck out the extension lead plus only go on my laptop and mobile including charging downstairs until it arrives. However, in a few months I will be changing my plug socket to a USB one after I have finished redecorated and newly furnished my bedroom so, will rely on it less.