So last week I wrote a blog post on my XNAEssentials website demonstrating how to create a selection wheel / pie menu in XNA Game Studio 4. Before I even announced it on twitter, Michael Neel (@ViNull) sent me this tweet. Then in his @GameMarx podcast on Friday (which I watched on Saturday) he had guest speaker Andy Dunn (@The_ZMan) who he asked if he coded in Degrees or Radians. It appears both of them code in radians.
Andy then talked about @ViHartViHart of http://vihart.com/ who has math videos including some videos stating that Pi is wrong. There is this whole movement that I had no idea about. There is even Tau day (which has good info). So this morning I spent some time looking at a couple of her videos. They are awesome. Perhaps I would have done better in Trigonometry if we had used Tau instead of Pi…
If you are interested here are some links:
http://vihart.com/blog/pi-is-still-wrong/
http://vihart.com/blog/pi-politics/
I must say, I’d like to use Tau instead of Pi.
Towards the end of that second video she talks about folks copywriting works based off of Pi and jokingly creates a Binary dance with her fingers. Her next blog post expands on that and I thought it was great.
http://vihart.com/blog/binary-hand-dance/
So I just tried to add a little humor to my tutorial post about using degrees or radians when calculating angles and as a result I now know about someone I may be able to learn math from in a fun way.
So do a binary hand dance, or write some code, or learn something new …
For me, I’ve been learning Blender 3D. I’m not an artist by any stretch but I’m able to at least put place holders that resemble the item I’m trying represent in my upcoming 3D game. I’ve learned more in the last 2 weeks about Blender than I have in the last 12 years in other 3D modeling packages. I’m amazed by how quickly some of these folks create things in their tutorials. There are too many things to learn and no where near enough time. If you are also interested in some good tutorials on Blender 3D, check them out at http://blendercookie.com/
Oh and in case you were wondering … this is what Tau sounds like:
Wow – I am impressed. ViHart makes a good case, though after I finally mentally converted from deg to rad I”m not looking to do that again! To be honest, it was the XNA framework that made me do it – all the methods work radians and I didn”t want to have to type all that conversion code and then have to create reverse conversions when debugging because the numbers didn”t mean anything to me. I just quit deg cold turkey – prevented myself from coding to them and stuck with rad until I could "see the matrix".
If the XNA framework provided support for degrees in the math functions, I would have never bothered =)
I love http://blendercookie.com/ – been working through some tutorials there as well now that the XSI Mod Tool”s "free for XNA devs" status is uncertain.
Shortly after I posted this I found that someone doesn”t like Pi or Tau. They would prefer Eta. So … is Pi, Tau or Eta the best? I”m liking Eta – but of course nothing is going to change the fact that the world uses Pi
http://www.thepimanifesto.com/