Showing posts with label people. Show all posts
Showing posts with label people. Show all posts

Sunday, April 19, 2009

I'll be BAWK



Last weekend, we went on an epic roadtrip through California.

It's an annual section leader tradition, and this was its fourth year. On Friday afternoon, we piled into cars with food, sleeping bags, laptops, and cameras, and started our trip. The goal? Solving puzzles and getting places as fast as possible. BAWK is framed as an adventure game. The theme? Always a B-movie. This year it was Cannibal Women of the Avocado Jungle of Death The route? TBD. We go nowhere fast, then hang out and have fun.



It turned out that we were driving from Stanford to within 90 miles of Mexico on that first afternoon. It was a beautiful drive through the Sacramento Valley and the Mohave Desert.

Stop 1: the Salton Sea.



A rainbow on the way to Dinosaur Point (San Luis Resovoir).

We camped on the Salton Sea our first night. In the morning, we went to an abandoned trailer park that had sunk into a wet marsh. Pictures coming soon.



Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve.



Joshua Tree National Park.

On the way back, we made it to Big Sur before sunset. It was gorgeous.



Brandon, the B in BAWK and roadtrip planning genius.



The sun.




The sea.





The beach. We swam here.

I love the desert. I love the backroads, the cogs under the surface of society, the small towns that grow our food, transport our goods, generate our electricity. I love the freedom of driving with friends through the middle of nowhere, going wherever we want to go.



California is beautiful.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Waltzing cubes

Lucas, who I know from math and CS, has an absurd number of Rubik's cubes. He has the standard cubes in every size from 2x2 to 5x5. He has combinatorically ridiculous 7x7 cube that probably takes days to solve. He also has variations like square one. In a few weeks, he'll get a package from Japan and in it will be a void cube. (How you would build something like that without breaking the laws of physics is beyond me.)

Years ago, Lucas also made a Rubik's cube waltz. This means: he scripted and raytraced the whole animation in POV-RAY and Mathematica. Props!

 
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