#logarithmic scale

[thepastisalreadywritten]

How can you visualize the entire observable universe in a relatively small rectangular area?

Using the logarithmic scale, as Pablo Carlos Budassi did, locating the most notable astronomical objects as far away as the edge of time. 🌌

Source (zoomable): buff.ly/3Av83hn

—

This vertically oriented logarithmic map spans nearly 20 orders of magnitude, taking us from planet Earth to the edge of the Observable Universe.

The scheme locates notable astronomical objects of various scales: spacecraft, moons, planets, star systems, nearby galaxies, and notable large-scale structures are some of the objects indicated.

The graphic aims to provide a concise yet comprehensive representation of a diverse range of astronomical knowledge, incorporating visual clarity and intuitive organization.

Source: pablocarlosbudassi.com

—

Pablo Carlos Budassi (born 1980) is an Argentinian artist, musician and writer, known for his passion for exploring the mysteries of the cosmos and expressing his fascination through graphic art, music, and poetry.

[grayrazor]

The Next Generation warp factor scale being logarithmic seems like a really weird worldbuilding choice to me. Especially since they established early on that the Enterprise-D could go Warp 9, which means that speeds orders of magnitude faster constantly get buried in the decimal points after 9.

[fleshwizard]

Map of the Known Universe

[geometric-bs]

"Doing your best" (with chronic illness)

My doctor (bless him) straight up went "don't" when I said "I'll do my best"

Because what I think "my best" is, is completely draining myself for this One Thing and going above and beyond

I guess this goes for people w/o chronic illness as well, but "your best" shouldn't mean you end up hurting yourself in the long run. "Your best" is as much as you are willing to devote to something proportional to how much you care about it within the confines of what is healthy for you AND considering all the other stuff you have to do

Please just- holy heck we're already struggling so much please don't devote your precious energy to something that doesn't deserve it

don't do your best, do whats best for you

[estrogenizedfreak]

Y.....yes

If I ever reblog horny posts that means I'd Def take you to the bathroom if we met in a bar 🥰

"...reblogged your post" ok so you want to fuck me?

[captaingimpy]

Cracking the Code: Understanding Hunter Rank Progression in Monster Hunter Wilds

By an Anonymous Monster Hunter Enthusiast Introduction While enjoying my time in Monster Hunter Wilds, I became curious about how the game calculates Hunter Rank (HR) progression. It’s no secret that progressing through the ranks can feel unpredictable, and I wanted to better understand the underlying system. Using a combination of observation, data tracking, and analysis, I was able to…

[todays-xkcd]

Update: The physics department has recruited an astronomer who studies meteor fireballs.

Water Balloons [Explained]

Transcript

[Graph with Y axis labeled "Mass" running from 10-30 kg to 1030 kg on a logarithmic scale and X axis labeled "Lifetime", also on a logarithmic scale, running from 10-20 to 1020 seconds.] [There are three elliptical blobs on the graph: one on the lower left corner labeled "Mesons", another on the upper right corner labeled "Planets", and another in the middle (1kg mass, 1s lifespan) labeled "Flying water balloons". There are two bidirectional arrows pointing from the center blob to the two other blobs.] [To the left of the chart are Cueball and Ponytail. Ponytail is throwing a water balloon, and Cueball is dodging from one. To the right are Megan and Hairy. Megan is preparing to throw a water balloon, and Hairy is slipping in a puddle of water, with a water balloon having landed near his foot with a "Sploosh!".]

[Caption below the panel:] In the annual interdepartmental water balloon fight, meson particle physicists and planetary scientists are usually evenly matched, since they're both equally far outside their areas of expertise.

[rrrick]

This vertically oriented logarithmic map of the Universe spans nearly 20 orders of magnitude, taking us from planet Earth to the edge of the visible Universe. Each large “mark” on the right side’s scale bar corresponds to an increase in distance scales by a factor of 10.

Big Think

[diz-eaze]

having albedo and scaramouche as both your roommates—ohh…damn. double whammy…

like yeah, if you think scaramouche’s picture taking habits are bad, take a look at this guy *thumb pointing at albedo* this guy is NUTS!!! i know he’s probably broken a camera or two because of that. and on a freak-off scale between the two, i’d wager money on albedo breaking that scale in full. sure, both are weird and creepy, but it’s always the calm and stoic ones that got the craziest unimaginable tricks up their sleeves. and tbf scaramouche isn’t completely overt about his interests and motives, but he’s a little more pathetic about it bc he’s prone to accidentally exposing himself if he ever fucks up. not albedo though. he’s too perfect. too pristine. and he has that same cleanliness and smile as to idk hannibal. albedo is perfect premeditated. scaramouche is just a hot mess with a wetter dick.

also kabukimono scaramouche 💆‍♀️💆‍♀️ i like to imagine that it’s some kind of childhood friends/crushes (possibility one sided), who got separated because one or the other moves somewhere, then reunited only to figure out that little boy you used to hang out with is now all grown up and completely different than what you remember. but he still likes you. but he reallllyyy likes you this time around. and might have been following you around all these years oh well

or kabukimono > scaramouche pipeline might have had happened after an intense breakup and he crashed out and did an entire personality 180. scaramouche has phoenixed into a bitter ex-boyfriend. his mom thinks it’s a phase like most kids this days, but oh boy this little guy truly means it this time

running laps around this ask because you get me so bad,,, you get me !!

yandere albedo is so delicious because it's impossible for him to get outed as a freak !! his countermeasures against being found out are too high; too elaborate. and also... it's speculated by the traveler in the paralogism quest that albedo would never be put on trial for murder because if he did commit the crime, he'd never be found out because he's just too good, thus never being suspected in the first place LMFAOOOO. his reputation and personality in general causes people to think of him being a freak to be like,,,, an impossible concept. fanfiction levels of OOC for them, if you will. but if they had mind-reading powers, then they'd see the degeneracy that plagues albedo's thoughts 24/7 :(((

random npc: wow, mister albedo looks so serious! :0 i wonder what he's thinking about! albedo, thinking about (y/n): no lube, no protection, all night, all day, from the kitchen floor to the toilet seat, from the dining table to the bedroom, from the bathroom sink to the shower, from the front porch to the balcony, vertically, horizontally, quadratic, exponent al, logarithmic, while i gasp for air, scream and see the light, missionary, cowgirl, reverse cow girl, doggy, backwards, forwards, sideways, upside down, on the floor, in the bed, on the couch, on a chair, being carried against the wall, outsid-

whereas scara, specifically modern au roomie, is the ultimate boyfailure who's just too unhinged and much of a gooner to keep all his freakyness to himself. it's quite impossible for him to function as a normal human being whenever your in the vicinity, in fact, just a simple whiff of your scent is enough to have his pants tightening :(( what more if you willingly speak to him, or accidentally... touch him !? he's so obvious to the point where even you get the hint a month or two in him being your roommate. though you mistake his infatuation as a simple crush instead of what it actually is: a maddening obsession.

and childhood friend scara is such a cute concept,,, he's literally been in love with you since the age where you could only waddle around, and he's never stopped being in love with you even after all this time... despite the distance and unfamiliarity. and while his version of love is a tad bit too intense for normal human comprehension, it's very much real and genuine :((((

[bobacupcake]

Can you do one about the Sea of Thieves water?

OK

so . there was a biiig long talk about this at siggraph one year!! you can watch that here if you'd like . in the time between me getting this ask and me fully recreating the water, acerola also released a great video about it . the biiig underlying thing they do and the reason why it looks so good is they are making a Really Detailed Ocean Mesh in realtime using something called an FFT (fast fourier transform) to simulate hundreds of thousands of waves, based on a paper by TESSENDORF

WHAT IS AN FFT - we'll get to that. first we have to talk about the DFT - the discreet fourier transform. let's say you have a SOUND. it is a c chord - a C, an E, and a G, being played at the same time. all sounds are waves!!! so when you play multiple sounds at the same time, those waves combine!!! like here: the top is all 3 notes playing together, so they form the waveform at the bottom!!

now if someone handed you the bottom wave, could you figure out each individual note that was being played? how about if someone handed you a wave of One Hundred Notes. you would think it would be very hard. and well, it would be, if not for the Discreet Fourier Transform.

essentially, there is a way to take a bunch of points on a waveform comprised of a bunch of different waves, add them all together, do some messed up stuff with imaginary numbers, that will spit back out at you what individual waves are present. i made a little test program at the start of all this: the left are the waves i am putting into my Big Waveform, the top right is what that ends up looking like, and all the little rainbow points on it are being sampled to spit out the graph at the bottom right: it shows which frequency bands the DFT is finding (here it is animated)

this has enormous use cases in anything that deals with audio and image processing, and also,

THE OCEAN

tessendorf is basically like, hey, People Who Are Good At The Ocean say that a buuuunch of sine waves do a pretty good job of approximating what it looks like. and by a bunch they mean like, hundreds of thousands to millions. oh no.... if only there was a way we could easily deal with millions of sine waves..........

well GREAT news. not only can you do the DFT in one direction, but you can also do it in REVERSE. if you were to be given the frequency graph of a noise for example, you could use an INVERSE DFT to calculate what the combined wave graph looks like at any given time. so if you were to have say, the frequency graph of an oceaaaan, for example, you could calculate what the Ocean wave looks like at any given time. and lucky for us, it works in two dimensions. and thats the foundation of the simulation !!!!!

BUT WAIT

as incredible as the DFT is, it doesn't scale very well. the more times you have to do it, the slower it gets, exponentially, and we are working with potentially millions of sine waves here

THE FAST FOURIER TRANSFORM here we are . the fast fourier transform is a way of doing the discreet fourier transform, except, well, fast. i am Not going to explain the intricacies of it because its very complex, but if you want to learn more there are a ton of good 30 minute long videos on youtube about it . but essentially, due to the nature of sine waves repeating, you can borrow values as you go, and make the calculation Much faster (from exponential growth to logarithmic growth which is much much slower, and scales very well at higher numbers). it's, complicated, but the important part is it's so much faster and the diagram kind of looks like the shadow the hedgehog story plot

so if we use the inverse FFT on a graph of a rough estimate of what frequency of waves in the ocean (called a spectrum, basically tells us things like how many small waves, how many big waves, how different waves follow the wind direction. sea of thieves uses one called the phillips spectrum but there are better ones out there!!) now we have our waves !!!!!!! we can also use another inverse FFT to get the normals of the waves, and horizontal displacement of the waves (sharpening peaks and broadening valleys) through some derivatives . yayy calculus

OK MATH IS OVER. WE HAVE OUR WAVES!!! they are solid pink and look like pepto bismol. WHAT NOW

i cheated a bit here they look better than not being shaded because i am using the normals to reflect a CUBEMAP to make it look shiny. i think sea of thieves does this too but they didnt mention it in their talk. they did mention a FEW THINGS THEY DID THOUGH

FIRST OFF - SUBSURFACE SCATTERING. this is where the sun pokes through since water is translucent. SSS IS REALLY EXPENSIVE !!!!!! so they just faked it. do you remember the wave sharpening displacement i mentioned earlier? they just take the value where the waves are being sharpened and this will pretty naturally show off the areas that should have subsurface scattering (the sides of waves). they make it shine through any time you are looking towards the sun. they also add a bit of specular ! sss here is that nice blue color, and specular is the shiny bits coming off the sun. the rest of the lighting is the cubemap i mentioned earlier, i dont know if thats what they use but it looks nice !!!!!

then the other big thing that they do is the FOAM !! sorry i lied. there's more math. last one. you remember the wave sharpening displacement i Just mentioned. well they used that to find something called the JACOBIAN and well im not even going to begin to try and explain what it means but functionally what it does, is when the jacobian is NEGATIVE it means waves are clipping into eachother. and that means we should draw some foam!!! we can also blur and fade out the foam texture over time and continuously write to it to give it some movement, and bias this value a bit to make more or less foam. they do both of these!!!

YAYYYYY !! OK !! THAT'S SEA OF THIEVES WATER!!!!! THANKS FOR WAITING ALL THIS TIME. you can see my journey here if you would like to i have tagged it all oceanquest2023

thank you everyone for joining me :) i had fun

[tiktaalic]

I love the goldfinch so so much because it’s all Theo pov and you’re like oh he’s crazyyyyyyyy. He’s the craziest man I’ve ever heard of he’s topping out the scales. And then you hear what other people say about Theo and you go oh my god he’s been omitting things. His crazy has to be measured on a logarithmic scale. When I thought he was the craziest man I’ve ever heard of I was wrong. He’s so crazy he’s off the map they need to zoom out on the scale so he’ll even show up. They don’t have numbers for this man yet.

[tinierpurplefishes]

Left pizza with none beef

What is at the exact middle point between "nothing burger" and "everything bagel"?

"Something burrito"?

[o-craven-canto]

Growth curves of various types of organisms, from zygote to maturity. Body size on a logarithmic scale, organism age on a kind of pseudo-logarithmic one.

Source: Bonner JT (1965), Size and cycle: an essay on the structure of biology, p. 37 etc.

[askagamedev]

What are common keywords any game design resume should include?

It depends on the kind of designer position you're aiming for. We want to see key words for common tasks that those kind of designers have done. Here are some examples:

Common

Experience, craft, create, live, season, update, content, schedule, create, design, team, player, UX.

Level Design

Layout, place, trigger, volume, spawn, point, reward, treasure, quest, lighting, light, dark, texture, object, obstacle, blocking, whitebox, direct, draw, through, inviting, space, place, multiplayer, competitive, cooperative, co-op, deathmatch, capture the flag, ctf, domination, asymmetric, symmetric.

Quest Design

Text, reward, spawn, balance, level, pace, pacing, word, budget, localization, loc, narrative, item, itemization, dialogue, branch, spawn, difficulty, player, multiplayer, encounter, placement, place, trigger, chain, pre req, pre-requisite, condition, scripting, faction, seasonal, event.

Cinematic Design

Narrative, camera, character, blocking, screen, position, ease-in, ease-out, pan, cut, smash, storyboard, frame, framing, beat, cue, pacing, feel, shot, zoom, sfx, vfx, mark, contextual, conditional, quick time, event, timing.

System Design

Balance, numbers, formula, spreadsheet, excel, curve, quadratic, linear, logarithmic, growth, plot, level, power, over, under, even, normal, distribution, player, total, analysis, scale, scaling, script, scripting, math.

If you're at all familiar with the regular kind of duties and tasks that any of these kind of designers do on a regular basis, you'll immediately start to see how these words fit into describing what we do day in and day out. These are going to be the kind of words we see used to describe the sort of experience we expect to see on a resume/CV from someone who has done this kind of work before. We won't expect all of them in every resume, but we expect a good many of these words on the resume/CV of a reasonable candidate.

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[whats-another-song-contest]

For many years there has been intense discussion on the role and legitimacy of the jury vs the televote in the Eurovision Grand Final. The problem is that many of the arguments I see made are based on nothing but people's gut feeling and snap judgements from watching the show. And humans are notoriously terrible at intuiting statistics.

That's why I wanted to provide some actual data to give context to the more eye-catching examples people tend to use, and hopefully encourage some critical thought. I spent the afternoon updating my eurovision excel file with data from the 2024 and 2025 Grand Finals, and can now present these graphs of jury results plotted against the televote. As far as eurovision statistics go, this is one of the simplest charts you could make, and should hopefully be as simple to understand.

Terms: I use the term televote to refer to the entire public vote - this includes all votes from calls, texts, websites etc.

The axes: These show percentages out of the total number of jury or televote points awarded overall in a given show. Using this measure instead of the actual point scores ensures that results from different years are comparable, despite the fact that the number of Grand Final entries and overall points to be distributed between them varies from year to year (depending on the number of voting countries) .

Reference line: This shows where an entry would land if the juries and televote respectively awarded it an equal percentage of their available points. Data points that land above this line means the jury awarded the entry a greater proportion of its available points as compared to the televote, and vice versa. I find it interesting to see which entries land near this line, and then compare them to entries that stray further from it, in either direction. I also like to see where my favourites ended up, and consider how that can be understood in the context of the previous comparison.

First chart: Here each data point represents an individual entry in the Eurovision Grand Finals from 2016 to 2025 (aka every year with the current split scoring system). Data source: eurovisionworld.com

Second chart: These data points represent the average percentage out of the total jury/televote points each country was awarded between 2016 and 2025 (for the years that they made it to the Grand Final, that is).

Beware: For countries that made it to the final more times there are more data points to average, while for others there are as few as two results to work from.

Also beware: Averages can obscure variance - a country with epic highs and lows might end up looking similar one with stable middle-of-the-road results, despite their actual experiences being very different. That is to say: there are lots of outliers included in these averages - Spiders Georg has set up his cave and now lives in this chart. With his entire spider farm. Look at it. It's on the web.

Also-also beware: This chart makes the assumption that nationality is the most relevant variable to investigate in relation to the final result. But that remains an unproven assumption; before drawing any conclusions about potential biases the public or juries might have for certain countries, these results should be compared to charts where other factors are accounted for, to rule them in or out as compounding factors. Such factors could be running order, when the voting opens, genre, vocal ability, dancing ability, stage precence, visual production, creative cohesion etc.

In short, this chart doesn't rule anything in or out on its own—but it makes a good starting point for further investigation.

Country letter codes, for reference:

Not sure how viewable these charts will be on smaller screens, but for the lower scores on the detailed breakdown to be visible at all I needed to make them huge. Might fuck around and make the scale logarithmic at some point, to show more detail in the lower range without cutting off the upper. I also have more data tables with more complex calculations going on in this excel file. I might make charts of those at a later date, if I can first work out whether they provide any useful insights at all or were just fun to make. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thanks for reading!