Cosmos Computed

You may have noticed that my blog background changed a couple days ago. I've been meaning to change it for quite a while, but I didn't get around to it. Then, a few days ago, I had some free time on my hands. Why not create a 3D model of Earth, I wondered? So I pulled up Blender (a free computer graphics program I use) and got to work. I actually wasn't entirely sure where to begin, but I had an idea of the basics. I needed to: Map some terrain onto a sphere Make an atmosphere Create clouds Prevent the clouds from looking like a weird shell around the planet I'm not fully fluent in all the different techniques and features for Blender, so I looked for a planet Earth tutorial online. I soon found a BlenderGuru tutorial describing how to create and render a model of the planet Earth. The problem with the tutorial is that it was for a different version of Blender, and as a result didn't do everything I wanted to do. I watched most of the tutorial, did some more Google ...

I recently added a "Did You Know" app to the sidebar of my blog. The app randomly picks a math/science/technology fact from a list, and displays it. I had to write the app myself (with JavaScript and HTML), because Blogger doesn't have an app like that built-in, and even if it did, I like to have control over my things. To get technical: the data is stored on Firebase. The app reads the data from Firebase, and adds it all to an array. There is no way to tell how many items there are without reading all of them from Firebase. The app then looks at how many elements are in the array (call that number  a ) and then randomly chooses a number  b from 1 to a . It then takes the b th element from the array, and displays it. (I know, I didn't have to store them all in an array, but it's easier that way.) Because of the data storage method, I can add new facts very easily: I just have to go to Firebase and add the new fact to the database. Of course, my app updates as soo...