http://www.physicsgirl.org/
Stumbled across an interesting youtube channel called Physics Girl. The videos are a lot of fun to watch and provide great basic descriptions of some times very complex physic concepts. The concepts are explained with a passion that is very engaging. There are a number of interviews with some highly respected physicists as well. She has a webpage as well and there is a link from there to her youtube channel. Check it out, its definitely worth watching!
http://www.physicsgirl.org/
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I hope you have many things to be thankful for and I hope that you remember those that who don't. I am thankful for the people I work with and for, the opportunity to be creative, and the friends that I have in my life.
Glass Door just released some data on wages for men and women in the tech industry (see their data here). However, they don't do any analysis of the data. Most likely because the data isn't good enough to do much with.
The number of women reporting is remarkably small in some cases. Only ten women reported for the software engineer at facebook. Any woman that got hired for significantly more or less than the average would have a large effect on the data. Also looking at facebook you have a difference in experience of 0.7 average experience for women and 3.2 average experience for men. So you're not holding all other variables constant as you change the gender. If the average woman's salary would increase by 2.5% at the end of her first and second year then she would earn slightly more than the men with 3.2 years experience. So what can we learn from the data? Basically nothing. Without large data sets it is impossible to come to reasonable conclusions about whats going on. To their credit Glass Door did not attempt to come to any real conclusions with the data. I guess they realized the data didn't allow for analysis and they decided to release it any way. Good way to get some attention I suppose... and I played right in their hands. Well played Glass door. Well played. As with most production processes my current creation is an exercise in two steps forward one step backwards. I had gotten the game to a place where I enjoyed it. Then I took it to new players and they play tested it. Well the the game had some issues. So I drastically simplified the game which helped the flow of the game a lot. However, it also led to just kind of a oh hum, meh kind of game. So I played with the shape of the board and that made the game winnable. Which is kind of a plus but it was kind of easy and still boring. So then I changed how the basic worker unit (called "Recruits") is created which made the game interesting again! However, it made me realize that the enemy (Alien) movement was now way to simple with the new shape of the board. So I think I'm going to try the old board shape and see if that helps.
Its moving forward. Its just slow... And a blast, if it was easy what would be the point right! Legacy of the Void has been announced. A lot of big changes to Star Craft II. Not sure how I feel about them yet, definitely need to see some games played before I figure out if they're good or not. they do sound like some very exciting changes for the viewer.
I am most looking forward to the Archon Mode. I loved that style of game in Brood War and look forward to playing it again! http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/16654945/ I have not been productive this week. Got back from play testing my game in Kansas and very little sleep as a result. Attempting to make up for it but instead when to a wine and cheese tasting/open mic night at a bar/craft beer supply store. Despite the lack of progress I met the wife of a person I vaguely work with who works for a promotional company who was talking to me about ways to get my board game out there. I am definitely going to talk with her some more in a couple months when I'm feeling good about the state of the design. So I'm going to say I was productive in the social networking aspect of things!
A friend of mine just showed me a very cool program called Vassal. Its an Open Source project to allow people to create and play board games online. I'm pretty excited about the possibility of playing board games on the other side of the world! Although really I'd settle for playing with some friends back in Kansas!
Just put up a new story, its inspired by something I'm working on right now, hopefully I'll have more info on that later but... don't hold your breath! Either way I hope you enjoy the story.
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