Winterbells

Cool Game of the Week: Winterbells !!!!



A friend recently showed me this awesome game and, I've been playing on and off since Tuesday to reach the target score of 1 billion points. I'm happy to say that I've finally surpassed that target and as you can see in the screenshot above, my current high score is over 87 billion!

The rules of the game are simple. You are a white bunny. Click to jump and then use the mouse to control where the bunny falls. Along the way jump on bells to keep going up. First bell gets you ten points. The nth bell you hit gives you 10*n points. So the point values increase by ten for each successive bell. And as you progress higher up into the sky, the bells get smaller in size and are more sparsely located in the sky making touching the bells that much more difficult. Along the way there are bonuses, flying birds! If you touch the birds, you double your score!! Object of the game is to get as many points as you can before you fall (game over).

Since I've started playing the game, I've come to realize that Winterbells is more than just a game - it's a metaphor for life! As you continue to climb up the sky, the stakes get higher. Each successive bell is a new harder challenge or obstacle that you have to surmount. Gravity is your archenemy: It tries to pull you down and thwart your success! And the birds are like the lucky breaks and fortuitous occurences in life. Sometimes the bird might be on the opposite side of the screen and you may have to take a risk by trying to reach it. Such is life :-)

Anways, give the game a try and see how high you can go!

Warning: Accompanying background music could be hypnotizing and prolonged exposure to the game could result in dreaming that you are the rabbit in Winterbells jumping from bell to bell! (I speak from experience ;P) Studies are currently being done to see if counting bells is more effective than counting sheep for falling asleep. Enjoy!

-- Arkajit

Space Blogging

Blogging has broken new frontiers: Blogs in Space! Ansani, the Iranian space tourist, begins her blog "A long, long time ago in a country far, far away ...". Awesome Star Wars reference!

As far as I know, there haven't been similar blogging milestones from other extreme parts of the world. So here are some new challenges for the blogging community:

• Blogging From Under the Sea
• Blogging From Atop the Summit of Mt. Everest
• Blogging From the Moon
• Blogging From Middle Earth
• Blogging From Hogwarts
• Blogging From Tatooine
  

So maybe those last three are best left to fantasy (I can just imagine Hermione saying "Honestly, are you ever going to read Hogwarts, A History. All those Muggle substitutes for magic don't work around Hogwarts!") :P .

But at least there could be records for highest/lowest elevation blogging, etc... It would be interesting to see how it would turn out. Though I'm not sure how feasible it is currently :)

-- Arkajit

Thirteen Digit ISBN

The days of the 10 digit ISBN are winding down! Starting 1/1/2007, is ISBN-13. Luckily the new ISBN system has been made backwards compatible with the old one. It seems there was always a 3-digit EAN code prefix which was always 978. Now, they're just introducing another series 979. Since the last digit in the ISBN is just a check digit, that really only gives 1 billion extra ISBN numbers. Which makes me wonder, how long can the 13 digit ISBN last before it is exhausted as well? 2100? 3000? Will we still be relying on books at that time or will all our data have become digitized and books obsolete? Or will there be some new medium by then? Just some interesting questions to ponder.

On a side note, the method of computing the check digit of the ISBN is quite interesting as well. For the 10-digit ISBN, the check digit has to be chosen such that the dot product of the vector [1..10] with the 10-digit vector representation of the ISBN (including the check digit as the first entry) should be congruent to zero modulo 11! If the check digit has to be 10, the letter X is used as the digit. Now obviously the check digit is not foolproof, but since 11 is prime, it does a pretty good job. So I wonder if for ISBN-13, the check digit will be computed modulo 13+1=14 or 13, also prime. I'm inclined to suspect that it would use modulo 13.

Anyway, this leads me to my idea for an ISBN game. So one person picks a favorite book and then finds its ISBN. He gives the other person the ISBN without the check digit and he has to go and figure out what the book is. Right now the game is fairly trivial, but you can probably add some extra steps along the way to add to the challenge. Maybe the book title can be part of a clue for a larger puzzle and maybe one other digit (besides the check digit) could be hidden as well. That at least expands the number of possible matching ISBNs - there could be other hints given to narrow down the choice. I'll have to try this sometime :)

-- Arkajit