Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Thursday, 19 December 2002

# 6:40 AM

your dose of role playing gaming for the month

The Random Grimness Tables. (May not make much sense if you are unfamiliar with Earthdawn.)

# 1:05 AM

Got to the office just as the sun was going down, today. It's the classic joke about nocturnal computer programmers. Of course, when the sun goes down at 4:30 PM, it's easier to achieve this than it might be. But I do expect to be here quite late. Never mind that I got quite a bit done from noon to two, on my laptop, sitting in the laundromat. I still feel nocturnal.

In other news, my new glasses came. They're rimless and they have an antireflective coating, which is nifty, but most importantly they don't have two years' worth of scratches from falling off my head on a regular basis. At present, they don't fall off my head like the old pair did, but that may not last. The old pair used to fall off because I'd mangled the earpieces until they almost stopped pinching my head, at which point they no longer held the glasses in place. We'll see if this pair can manage to not pinch my head.

Antireflective coating for glasses is a nice example of just how scary advanced our technology is. The coating is several layers of silicon and titanium dioxide with their thicknesses carefully controlled such that visible light reflections interfere with each other and cancel out. This requires being able to lay down a coating only a few hundred nanometers thick, with essentially no variation over the surface. They can do this, and they can do it cheap enough to be only about fifty bucks extra on the cost of one's glasses. (Here's how.)

After picking up the glasses I went to the laundromat, and was somewhat relieved to see that washing machines are still simply rotating drums with various hoses attached to fill them with soapy water, drain it out again, etc. (But perhaps not for long.)