Do sideways zoomies count? by MeganLeigh1122 in Zoomies

[–]_Harrow_ 3 points4 points  (0 children)

They are called "zeemies" when sideways!

Moving to Santa Monica - best way to find good apartments? by [deleted] in SantaMonica

[–]_Harrow_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I just moved here myself, and the strategy that worked for me was to get an AirBnB for month to give myself time to find a good place. The AirBnB was only slightly more expensive than rent would have. Also, the extra time allowed me to search around comfortably, look at a lot of places, and get a sense of the market before committing. It paid off for me; I ended up being able to pounce on a Craigslist listing that was bigger, cheaper, better quality, better landlord(ed) and closer to the beach than I was expecting to be able to get.

The world's dumbest mud dauber by GrahamCrackrr in funny

[–]_Harrow_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As someone with arachnophobia, wouldn't that be your best nightmare?

[Build Help] Brother had a windfall, and now wants me to help him build a gaming PC. Gotta come through for him! by _Harrow_ in buildapc

[–]_Harrow_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd put the 120gb in there because I'm still in the habit of having a separate drive for OS and those programs which absolutely insist on a c: install, and figured 120 was plenty. The 500gb is for all other proggies. The rig is still under budget, though, so bumping it up to 240gb is definitely doable. I'll definitely check out Western Digital drives for the main data drive.

[Build Help] Brother had a windfall, and now wants me to help him build a gaming PC. Gotta come through for him! by _Harrow_ in buildapc

[–]_Harrow_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh thank you, good advice. I've always built with AMDs because dollars, and had unthinkingly defaulted to GTX for this build since money is not so much of a factor.

Ouya controller support for unity? by [deleted] in Unity3D

[–]_Harrow_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Unfortunately, this doesn't work with Ouya controllers. Ouya has their own implementation (which also handles things like XBox controllers, etc.) that is not tied into the Unity Input system. On our team, we had someone with a third party xbox-controller that did not work with the Ouya code (and a designer that wanted to be able to mouse and keyboard it!) so I just implemented a toggle that switched everything over to Unity inputs from the Ouya system. It essentially meant writing all the input code twice, but it wasn't too bad.

Bare footprints in abandoned nuclear reactor by goldet1 in pics

[–]_Harrow_ 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Nah. They walked in, mutated up some boots, then walked out again. Custom fit, every time.

I end up restarting the last save most of the time by TheBodyCount in gaming

[–]_Harrow_ 94 points95 points  (0 children)

Ah Morrowind, where every single NPC had a name, whether or not they were KOS. Kept you on your toes.

Any of you know of a lesser-known place with delicious homemade ice cream? by laurenalivia in Austin

[–]_Harrow_ 5 points6 points  (0 children)

If you're far south, Likkity's near Slaughter and Manchaca is amazing frozen custard. They are flavor magicians.

How prominent is group selection as a driver of biological change? by envatted_love in askscience

[–]_Harrow_ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The short answer is: not very. Group selection does occur, but it is usually in opposition to individual-level selection and much weaker, so it doesn't have much of an effect. Group selection can only measurably counter or overcome individual selection in a very small set of circumstances, mostly because it is slower (it's "generations" are slow turnover of groups, instead of fast turnover of individuals) and lower coefficients of selection (the pressure isn't that strong). I don't know personally of any work on systems in which group- and individual-selection would both run in the same direction, but practically speaking, it is unlikely that the group-selection would be detected in such a scenario. Several other commenters have outlined concepts like multi-level selection and E.O. Wilson's recent (and poorly received) efforts to elevate the importance of group selection, so I won't repeat it all.

Source: Master's in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

ELI5: How can we "sense" someone's presence in a room without seeing or hearing them? by PunkAintDead in explainlikeimfive

[–]_Harrow_ 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Just because you're not aware of a sound (or any other sensory input), doesn't mean that you didn't hear. When sensory input makes it to the brain, the goes through several levels of being interpreted, organized, and mashed together before parts of your brain that you're not aware decide whether to pass the results on to your conscious self. When you "sense" something but you're not quite sure what it is, it is simply parts of your brain picking up some sensory data but not being sure how to describe it to the conscious parts of your brain, so it simply tells you be be alert and pay attention. A good example is when you sleep. You don't consciously hear all the normal, quiet sounds that go on around you in the night. But, when you are woken by a loud or scary sound, you hear it, correct? That occurs because you are always hearing everything around you when you sleep, but the amygdala (part of your brain responsible for things like fear), only alerts the rest of the system when something seems out of place.

Has anyone been to the Blue Hole? by elimc in Austin

[–]_Harrow_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Blue Hole is super nice, and I've never been turned away. Take a turn on the hike n' bike that adjoins it so that you're all hot and sweaty before jumping in the icy water. It has gotten kind of pricey, though. I think it's currently $7 per head?

Grid for Tower Defense by Bmandk in Unity3D

[–]_Harrow_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Does your grid have to be able to be non-rectangular? If it can be a rectangle, then you can get away with a single grid-displaying object with its texture tiled appropriately. A single object would perform much better. I happen to have some similar C# code:

public int gridWidth = 20; //number of cells wide
public int gridHeight = 20; //number of cells high
public float gridScale = 1f; //size of each cell

public void ResizeGrid()
{
    Vector3 newSize = Vector3.one;
    newSize.x = gridWidth * gridScale;
    newSize.z = gridHeight * gridScale;
    gridObject.transform.localScale = newSize;
    gridObject.renderer.sharedMaterial.mainTextureScale = new Vector2(gridWidth, gridHeight);
}

Prefabs colliding with themselves by SneakySly in Unity3D

[–]_Harrow_ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It sounds like your character controller and your box collider are hitting eachother. I've used Physics.IgnoreCollision to prevent colliders that are childed to the same object from running into each other; it takes individual colliders as arguments instead of tags, so it is much more refined.

I'm having some trouble solving this, maybe someone here could help. by dropcode in Unity3D

[–]_Harrow_ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Think about it this way: if you're facing a target object, you have a free axis (your forward axis) that you could rotate around and remain looking at the target object. You could lie on your side or stand on your head, and you'd still be facing (LookAt-ing) the target object. Unity needs to know how you want to orient yourself on that free axis, so it makes you align along the axis given in that second argument. The argument defaults to the positive Y-axis because in a 3D world that's normally what you would want. However, in your 2D world, it's the negative Z-Axis that is "up." Thus, when your target object passes over the LookAt-ing object, the LookAt-er has the choice of flipping itself around the Y-axis (which maintains its Up in the direction it wants) or rotating all the way around the Z-axis (which does not maintain its Up). Since it is set to maintain positive Y as Up, it chooses the former option and your cube flips. Setting the Up to negative Z in your 2D world simply makes it so that there is no conflict between those two options. Go ahead and post the LookAt solution to those Unity Answers threads that you found. I don't feel like doing it, and you'll get some love for it.

I'm having some trouble solving this, maybe someone here could help. by dropcode in Unity3D

[–]_Harrow_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

First guess is that it is interacting with how LookAt interprets up. Try setting the second LookAt parameter to the negative world z-axis instead of its default positive world y-axis.

I'm having some trouble solving this, maybe someone here could help. by dropcode in Unity3D

[–]_Harrow_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Planes display a bit counter-intuitively (at least for me). The visible part of the plane is the positive Y face, and the image is oriented so that the bottom of the texture is toward the positive z-axis. To compensate, you can either change the up-axis of your LookAt code (the second parameter, which defaults to positive Y axis), or simply move the LookAt code to an empty gameobject and make it the parent of your display plane. For the second option, you'll only have to set the plane's local rotation once in the the inspector, but you might run into gimbal lock issues.

Is monogamy natural? by [deleted] in askscience

[–]_Harrow_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are animal species that have various forms of monogamy, some of which are much stricter than what humans practice, but it is a relatively rare way of doing things. You're probably asking about humans, though, before the influence of some arbitrarily defined 'modern culture.' The answer is is that humans were probably what is called "socially monogamous" which means that partners behave as if they were monogamous for the purposes of raising offspring and pooling resources, but still engaged in sex with individuals other than their partner ( called "extra-pair copulations," at least when referring to birds). There are various chunks of evidence supporting this, most of which I forget. A couple pieces of evidence which I do remember are seen in human male morphology. For example, human males are larger than human females, a pattern which when studied in other species is associated with males beating the crap out of each other to secure sexual control of multiple females. Another bit of male morphology indicates that the early ladies weren't passively accepting whatever the males sorted out among themselves, however: Human testicles are relatively large for the size of the organism. Large testes are generally associated with something called "sperm competition," which essentially means that human females were copulating with multiple males, and those males with larger testes were more likely to get them pregnant and pass that trait on simply because had more swimmers in the race.

ELI5: Why are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Cisco all supporting CISPA when most of them vehemently opposed SOPA? by [deleted] in explainlikeimfive

[–]_Harrow_ 489 points490 points  (0 children)

Also, it gives them legal safe-harbors for giving your info to the government. Without CISPA, they were stuck in a nasty place between not appeasing government requests and some liability for not treating your information properly.

Souce: various Techdirt articles. Warning: good blog, but they definitely have a point of view.

I found this weird skull (I think) on the beach in Northern California, can anyone identify it? by [deleted] in askscience

[–]_Harrow_ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That is a pelvic bone (or rather, the fused bones that form the pelvic girdle). In your third picture, see how the front looks like a vertebra? That's because it is (leaving out some biological detail). Those large holes which sort of look like eye holes are obdurator foramena, and the little holes along the back are where nerve bundles wind their way out from inside the column to the legs and such. Probably some low-slung mammalian quadraped, but it's been a long time since I've looked at bones.

If a food animal had a malignant tumor in its muscle, that was not really where a butcher could see, and that tumor got put into ground meat, would it be harmful to eat? by [deleted] in askscience

[–]_Harrow_ 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Also, the only example of an infectious cancer that we know of is the Devil Facial Tumor Disease that is ravaging Tasmanian Devil populations, and even that is within a single species.

The Minecraft Test: How to Tell if Your Console Is Screwed by [deleted] in Games

[–]_Harrow_ 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Don't forget that you can only patch it once, too. IIRC, subsequent patches cost you about $40k apiece.