Philipp Flenker

This is a classic example of hidden complexity:

In Tetris, a randomizer is a function which returns a randomly chosen piece. Over the years, the rules of how pieces are chosen has evolved, affecting gameplay and actual randomness.

Everyone who has ever played around with random numbers has already met the concept of “floods” and “droughts”, but possibly not with that name. It’s interesting to see which solutions they came up with to strike the right balance between keeping the game unpredictable, but still beatable and fun.

We officially have the first case of a suspected crime in space:

Nasa is reported to be investigating a claim that an astronaut accessed the bank account of her estranged spouse from the International Space Station, in what may be the first allegation of a crime committed in space.

The whole mess of Boing is going further than originally thought. This makes me deeply uncomfortable, as I always regarded aviation as the one sector where people have time and budget to thoroughly test their software. Aviation was even the example #1 when it came to formal proving of algorithms, back in university.

Here are two useful links for rapid prototyping or testing: A service to generate avatars from user initials, and an API which returns randomly generated users.

Are you debugging your front end code with Chrome Dev Tools? Then you might find these tips useful.

Wikipedia defines Change Blindness as follows::

Change blindness is a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when a change in a visual stimulus is introduced and the observer does not notice it.

You can observe that effect in action with the image in this blog post.