Fun with food

This is a fairly useless post; sorry.

Diet Coke vs. Coke Zero

I finally did a side-by-side taste test of Diet Coke and Coke Zero. Here are the ingredients lists for each:

Diet Coke: carbonated water, caramel color, aspartame, phosphoric acid, potassium benzoate, natural flavors, citric acid, caffeine.

Coke Zero: carbonated water, caramel color, phosphoric acid, aspartame, potassium benzoate, natural flavors, potassium citrate, acesulfame potassium, caffeine.

They're both kind of foul, but if I had to choose one I'd go with Coke Zero. It's got slightly more citrus taste and seems a bit less cloying.

The story I heard is that Diet Coke was rolled out around the same time as New Coke, and was an attempt to be New Coke with no calories. New Coke was canned and Coke Classic returned, but Diet Coke retained the New Coke flavor. Coke Zero is a zero-calorie rendition of Coke Classic.

Of course, like an idiot I didn't think to buy a can of regular Coke to compare against the two. However, it can be difficult to compare corn syrup to aspartame. Aspartame lingers on the tongue for a long time after you swallow.

Egg-Carton Rotational Inertia

For a great demonstration of rotational moment of inertia, use up eight of the eggs in a dozen. Get someone to place the remaining four eggs in the carton without you seeing. Then try to guess where the eggs are without opening the carton.

It's surprising when you go to pull the egg carton out of the fridge and all the eggs are at the far end of the carton. My wife and I amuse ourselves by trying to distribute the remaining eggs evenly throughout the carton. If we wanted to keep the rotational inertia as close as possible to a full carton we would keep the eggs at the ends of the carton, though. I've started doing that instead.

Battle Ponies

This week I watched four episodes of the Legend of Zelda cartoon that aired in 1989. It's not great television but it got me trying to think of a cartoon franchise that would appeal to both little girls and little boys. I think I've got it: Battle Ponies! These are ponies (a la My Little Pony) which have been trained as ninjas to fight the evil Zombie Nazi Dinosaur menace.

Binge/Purge Cocktail

Ah, New Year's Day: when a young woman's thoughts turn to toxins, and the purging thereof.

A coworker of mine is trying out a ten-day toxin-purging regime whereby she does not eat, and subsists entirely on a concoction made of (“Toxins?” my wife said. “Let me guess: lemon juice and cayenne pepper, right?”) mixed with Grade B maple syrup (it has to be Grade B or you don't get all your vitamins and minerals) and water.

This sounds suspiciously like a recipe for a cocktail to me. As a cocktail, it has the benefit that, while you're binging, you're purging too! If I have any vodka around I may give this a whirl to work out the proper proportions.

Actual Coding

I'm back working on my stealth-gameplay Roguelike. Very little progress, though. I need to hook up locks to doors. The problem is that doors are currently a terrain feature, with no state. I handle opening and closing by altering the terrain. Now I need to be able to associate a lock object with the terrain feature. Locks have a type, which contains the order in which you need to push their pins to unlock them (if you don't have a key).

I think I will just write ugly code to start with, until I figure out what kind of generalization is appropriate. When you interact with a terrain feature, if it's a door I will look up the associated lock (if any) in some sort of spatial hash.

Eventually it seems like I might want to have an actual door object, which could keep track of its state. Right now I have several door-like things in the game which have similar code: doors, portcullises (you can see through these), and windows, with differing appearances for horizontal and vertical orientation on some of them.