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The invincible 20 year olds

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It is often said that people age 20 think of themselves as if they’re invincible. It’s an attribute most commonly given to young men in general.  The idea of immortality is one which comes up in mythology a lot and sometimes it comes up within scientific circles. Bacon spent his life in search of finding ways to become immortal until, in perhaps an ironic way, his search killed him. When immortality is spoken about the concept of ageing is often also brought up, Tithonus comes to mind. Solving the problem of ageing through does not lead to immortality, although it may seem to be that way. Each year you live your chance of dying that year increases. This is how the ageing process manifests itself in this side of the numbers, growing from a low of 0.01% age 5 up to almost 40% age 100. What if instead, this didn’t rise. What if every year you had the same chance of dying as wh...
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Picking apart Perlin noise from first Principles

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Although there are a lot of tutorials explaining the what and even the how of Perlin noise and the general class of algorithms; gradient noise, I have found none explaining the why behind the algorithm. Why does this algorithm work? In this post I aim to build up perlin noise from first principles, explaining why we add each element to the algorithm as we do. We will start by trying to make a surface, perhaps for a computer game world map. We are aiming for something that looks like a mountainous region. We don’t want to hand craft this landscape as we want it to go on forever, how can we procedurally generate this world? Given we want the surface to be random, we could start with that. However as you can see that doesn’t lead to the most pleasing of surfaces, in fact it wouldn’t be traversable in the game. Our problem is that there is no smoothness from one place to another. The lowest of points could be adjacent to the highest of points. What we want is for it to take som...
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Downloads manager

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Perhaps the best lunch-hour-python-project I have seen is that of the downloads folder manager. I originally saw this in a YouTube video of short python projects which unfortunately I haven’t been able to find again to link to here. I think almost everyone has a messy downloads folder, we download images, pdfs, programs and numerous other things that create a massively long list of items which can make it hard when going back to find things. I usually kept the folder ordered by most recently which worked quite well as a heuristic for what I wanted. The idea behind the downloads folder manager is that it watches for a file to get downloaded then based on some rules moves it away into one of a set of folders. As it’s a simple python script the whole thing is completely customisable and it’s easy to pick what folders you create. I am currently using the following script to manage mine: This sorts the downloaded files into the following categories; images, archi...
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