Message #3750

From: Melinda Green <melinda@superliminal.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] minor, but fun MagicTile enhancements
Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2017 14:18:28 -0700

Wow, all of these additions are perfect and amazing! I especially like rotating the horizon in the "upper half" model. Then zooming looks like something from the end of the movie 2001. The orthographic view hurts my brain and manipulating it gives me a little motion sickness though, but in a good way! :-)

<rant>My AVG anti-virus is becoming increasingly unhappy with desktop applications and scripts of all kinds. Even requesting to "run it anyway" didn’t work immediately and only sent the request to AVG which it says was busy analyzing the potential threat. I guess once they’ve processed and passed each version, subsequent users won’t have to wait, but even then it’s enough scary dialogs to probably put off most potential users. Just to get it to run before they finished processing it, I had to change an AVG setting to give myself that option. It’s like the world wants to push all applications onto the web, but that won’t solve the problem because the malware will always follow the users wherever they go. Maybe some of this automated security will help, but I don’t think users will ever get what they really want which is to not have to learn a little bit about the subject and pay it some attention. Otherwise, where the heck are we headed? Is someone going to create a web app
that implements a virtual desktop that can run Mac and Windows applications such as browsers? People worry about us losing control of AI but I think we need them to keep us under control because we don’t seem to have the ability to do that.</rant>

On 7/3/2017 12:47 PM, Roice Nelson roice3@gmail.com [4D_Cubing] wrote:
>
>
> Hi folks,
>
> I added a few small features to MagicTile for an upcoming talk and thought I’d point them out.
>
> There are now two more models of hyperbolic geometry, the upper half plane and the orthographic. The first is another common conformal model and should have been added a long time ago! The second stretches out the disk <https://plus.google.com/+RoiceNelson/posts/ESxR6WRvS9z> into a full-plane model of hyperbolic geometry where geodesics are half-hyperbolas. Both are quite fun to drag around and will be nice models for solving puzzles. I had never experienced interactivity with the upper half plane model before. I made a quick video <https://youtu.be/VYiCo2pbg5w> showing them in motion.
>
> The other feature I added was a way to view the view the Coxeter complex <https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/symmetry-and-the-fourth-dimension-part-1/> for each tiling. To see this, click the new menu items next to the existing "Tiling" items.
>
> Cheers,
> Roice
>
>
>