Forbidden Island, Universe Sandbox, and Falling Pianos

George, Alex and I played a game of Forbidden Island last Saturday night. This is a very good game in which all the players must work together to a) retrieve four treasures from the island, and b) escape the island together. Meanwhile, the island is trying to kill you by flooding!

The cooperation aspect is unusual and a nice change of pace from most games. As in real life, however, even well-meaning teammates can occasionally grind each other's gears, especially under the pressure of imminent death. It can be remarkably intense -- but very fun! -- for a cooperative game that lasts maybe a half hour.

One thing we've learned in about ten different sessions: We always discover a new rule or detail of the game. I'll admit that the rules aren't super simple, but neither are they a complex web. Nevertheless, we've never failed to be surprised by some little feature. For example, we just realized that each treasure can be picked up at either of its two possible locations in any given game, even though there is only one treasure figurine of each type. We've dubbed this "quantum entanglement of treasures." We didn't exploit this feature, and Alex hates it, but it's there and we'd always missed it before. Maybe we're just dense.


A couple of years ago I bought the Universe Sandbox astrophysical simulator. I also purchased Newton's Aquarium, and another program whose name I can't recall at the moment. U-Sandbox is my favorite. I'm a physics geek so I'd have wanted them anyway, but I specifically went looking for easy software to help me work some problems in The Other Side of Space. I did so when I was first outlining the book, and it gave me a good jump start with the plot. Now that I'm closing in on completing the first draft of the novel, I've had to dive into the sandbox again. (Things change during writing.) I won't spoil anything of the book here, but I just crashed a 500 kiloton teapot onto the Moon, multiple times! If you have clear skies, you might see the impact craters next time you look.

One interesting observation I made is that your initial velocity doesn't have as much affect on your impact velocity as one might think. For example, suppose you start from the radius of the Moon's orbit and you drop a tungsten piano onto the Earth, maybe with the Coyote as your target. When it hits his head, it will be traveling about 11.1 kilometers per second. This is almost enough to kill him. (By the way, this is just slightly less than escape velocity for Earth.) On the other hand, suppose you throw the piano down really hard, at 5 kilometers per second? The Coyote is done for, right? It must hit him at 16.1 kilometers per second. Except it doesn't! It brains the poor slob only doing about 12.2 kilometers per second.

I leave it to the student to think about why this should be the case. Don't worry about details, unless you're really interested, just the general concept. I'll offer this hint: A constant acceleration (or an accelerating force) operates on an object to change its velocity. Near the Earth's surface this acceleration is 9.8 meters per second per second toward the Earth's center. What that means is (ignoring air resistance) that  for every second that an object falls near the Earth's surface, it goes 9.8 meters per second faster. You drop a hamster hammer and it starts falling. At the end of the first second it's falling at 9.8 meters per second. At the end of the second second it's falling at 19.6 meters per second, and so on. The same basic idea is true even if the acceleration isn't constant, such as starting far away from the Earth's surface and falling for a long time.

No animals were harmed in the writing of this blog entry. All coyotes and hamsters were simulated. Teapots and Tungsten pianos were real.

Scrabble Poetry

I'd not blogged for more than a handful of months in part because of so much going on -- "The vicissitudes of life" as my old friend Victor Lyons used to say.

I was prompted to get back to it recently because of something my daughter Jamie said. Yet when I did, I started (yesterday) with a note about my new novel Knights of the Full Moon.

So I decided to try again, but realized I wanted to take more time than I really have at the moment to write about Jamie. That's when I noticed how I mention Scrabble at the top of this blog, and yet I haven't said anything about it yet.

So, without (much) further ado, here's a Scrabble poem that I wrote some time ago during a fierce war with my friend George. It was the opening volley in a horrible conflict.

How do I spell thee?  Let me count the ways.

I spell thee OBI, OBE, and OBEAH, all are right,

We know even when the book is out of sight,

But FATTEND upon all seeing made me lose face

I spell thee XI and CHI and KI, with definitions not the same,

I spell thee freely, what 'ere it takes to win the game

I spell thee with passion that all can feel,

And thus bluff the phony, so you will think it real,

In thinking of GRIEFS, is it I before E?

Do ADZ and ADZE both correctly use my Z?

With my lost challenge, I'll spell thee again, but not the same,

But now the spot is gone.  Damn!

I shall spell thee better next game.


With lazy apologies to Elizabeth Barret Browning. More later!