Fun

Predation is set in the wrong time!

Posted on by Paolo Redaelli

Earth looked very different long ago. Search for addresses across 750 million years of Earth’s history.

This according to Ancient Earth globe! What a cool site! I promptly looked where Milan were at dinosaurs time, 66 million years ago:

Milan were on the coast of a tropilcal ses

Then my mind went to the Predation Role Play Game setting. This is the map of the Earth where Predation is set:

Made by Butterfron from DeviantArt

According to the setting itself and to the reviews it is 66 millions years ago, just “a little” before Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, marked by K-T geological boundary (Cretaceous–Tertiary) which wiped away dinosaurs.

Do you see any difference? Let’s pan the globe and put them side by side:

Ehi, Predation is set the wrong time! They told us it was set just before the asteroid. Well, for an arbitrary definition of “just before”. A little difference of “only” 27 millions years. Someone please tell SATI that the clock of their time machine is badly screwed. Or they made it by purpose?

Predation is set in the Turonian age!

Turonian’s Earth, according to Wikipedia

Troll dice roller and probability calculator

Posted on by Paolo Redaelli

Recently I’ve been looking for an alternative to AnyDice, probably the most known and widely used Dice Probability Calculator. It’s really good but it has a huge con. It’s proprietary, the source code is not available.

Enters Troll, dice roller and probability calculator which has a somehow raw and crude user interface but its sources are available to download.

Thanks Torben Mogensen for creating Troll (currently on http://www.diku.dk/∼torbenm/Troll).

I’ve hastily made a mirror of it. It is an academic project: there are no copyright tenses, there is no license, the documentation is made in LaTEX and there is an article which has been published as a paper at the ACM Sigplan Symposium on Applied Computing, 2009.

Well, that’s good enough for me. It also makes me rediscover ML languages as it is written in Moscow ML which looks like quite a stable language. Sadly it’s not in repositories of the major distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora). It’s available “only” as ZIP, TAR Ball, On GitHub, as PKG File, DEB and Win.