Fireflies (2017)

by j_b_s • 7 years ago

196 23 7 years ago

dsalzman• 7 years ago

Nicky Case is amazing. His interactive game to explain segregation in cities is very eye opening as well. https://ncase.me/polygons/

tunesmith• 7 years ago

I'd like to see a model like that adapted for vaccinations. So you can easily see the risk (for infants/elderly) dramatically increase as vaccination rates decrease a tiny bit.

mikk14• 7 years ago

Have you tried this: http://vax.herokuapp.com/game ?

lukifer• 7 years ago

Case has brilliant insights into systems: "Peace is not the mere absence of war; health is not the mere absence of disease; success is not the mere absence of disaster."

http://longnow.org/seminars/02017/aug/07/seeing-whole-system...

severine• 7 years ago

Needs a (2017).

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14452832

tlb• 7 years ago

Added (2017), thanks.

isoprophlex• 7 years ago

What happens if you fix a couple of fireflies on one end of the volume to have a slow clock speed, and a couple on the other side to have higher clock speed? (Also freezing their random motion)

What do the fireflies in between do? Would the faster clockspeed win out and entrain them? Do you get chaotic behaviour?

Very cool page.

TrueDuality• 7 years ago

Love this kind of complex behavior emerging from simple rules kind of thing.

modernerd4• 7 years ago

I revisit Fireflies from time to time, but everything on https://ncase.me/ is wonderful. I particularly like https://ncase.me/door/.

Nicky's site elevates the web beyond “magazines/newspapers/leaflets on a network-connected screen”. It reminds you that the web can be a rich and interactive medium with stories told and ideas taught with love and with care.

It feels like there's a gap in the market for tools that help people to build richer experiences and “playable articles” like these.

So many content management systems and platforms seem stuck in the “your website is a brochure but online” mindset. In the same way that PowerPoint seems to encourage crappy presentations, traditional tools for website creation often do the same for websites. Coupled with the sheer difficulty of creating and maintaining a website, it's no wonder that blogs and personal sites feel like they're in decline.

I'd love to see more tools that let users build sites that aren't just linked pages whose most interactive feature is a contact form or search field. The only one I can think of that's close is https://glitch.com/. Are there others I've missed?

hamaluik• 7 years ago

Agreed.

See also https://www.redblobgames.com/ that is in a similar realm (though not quite as artsy as Nicky’s)

caffeinewriter• 7 years ago

https://explorabl.es acts as sort of a repository for it. Unsurprisingly created by the irreplaceable and aforementioned Nicky Case.

zamfi• 7 years ago

There’s also things like https://editor.p5js.org

prox• 7 years ago

Hey that’s amazing! I could build stuff right away. Thanks.

ThePadawan• 7 years ago

Spoilers for /door:

I wondered how the author encouraged me to find a solution for the second map that made reach the target by walking around the obstacle to the left side and returning around the right side (and symmetric).

Turns out that if you try to walk back around the left side, the clock is artifically made to run much quicker. Nice.

LeoPanthera• 7 years ago

This actually annoyed me. Feels like the game is cheating.

modernerd4• 7 years ago

Nice find! I never tried to solve it that way.

It also accelerates time if you enter on the right and try to return on the right.

The source:

https://github.com/ncase/door/blob/e4b218d2a5b9667cfca9b66fc...

gigama• 7 years ago

Cool js demo, certainly worth reposting. Since he credits Steven Strogatz here's the link to Steven's 2008 TED on synchronicity and emergent behavior.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSNrKS-sCE0

JoeCortopassi• 7 years ago

As cool as this is, and it is, this is probably the least interesting thing on the https://ncase.me website.

It's well worth spending an afternoon just going through some of the stuff presented there

My two favorites: https://ncase.me/crowds/ https://ncase.me/trust/

anonytrary• 7 years ago

This makes me really sad. Right after I went off to college, my parents moved to a new, secluded neighborhood in its infancy -- only a handful of homes there. Our house was the one right next to a tall meadow, protected by a deep forest and a pond. During those summers, you could gaze into the meadow and witness thousands of fireflies putting on a show --- every day, the 4th of July. Occasionally, you could witness huge rafters of turkeys (many dozens) slowly making their way through the fields, their true numbers hidden by low hanging fog.

Then in my last couple years of college, the neighborhood matured further into development. The developers slowly turned the woods into meadows, the meadows into dirt fields, the dirt fields into streets, foundations, and lawns. That was the end of the fireflies; the end of the turkeys; the end of the natural beauty that once lurked there.

regularfry• 7 years ago

20 or 30 years ago, Scientific American published (in the paper magazine) a firefly circuit you could build to see this coupled oscillation happen with physical hardware. I always wanted to build a couple of hundred or so and plaster a room with them, but that's always been ETOOMUCHEFFORT.

It's probably worth an update.

Fireflies (2017)

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