Evolution makes sense: parent organism spreads genes down to its children. But that's not the only way for genes to spread!
Genes can also spread horizontally to unrelated organisms! That's called Horizontal Gene Transfer. Bacteria do this all the time! The tiny animal shown here has 8% of genes borrowed from bacteria!

The Wikipedia page mentions a whole bunch of other examples of horizontal gene transfers:
- Small fish called smelts got the "antifreeze" gene from herrings
- Fruit flies have genes from bacteria
- Some fungi learned how to infect plants by getting the gene from plants!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer#Eukaryotes

π can actually have different values! It is defined by the shape of a circle and that is defined by distance. If you use the "Manhattan distance" then a "circle" actually looks like a square. Here are other "circles" for different definitions of distance (starting with Manhattan distance, then going to our regular circle and crossing over to Maximal distance)
For these different definitions of distance, our value of π is the smallest possible π!

Read more at https://azeemba.com/posts/pi-in-other-universes.html

#math

Made a tool earlier this year to help me track my side projects. If any interesting application are running on your computer, then it starts taking screenshots and grouping them into work sessions!

Then you can browse through different work sessions and see how much time you spent on different projects!

Published it at https://github.com/azeemba/work-snapshots/

Two 6-sided dice and one 12-sided dice have similar expected values (7 vs 6.5) but very different distributions of outcomes!

I explore more examples where the distribution matters more than the expected value in game design and finance: https://azeemba.com/posts/probability-the-distribution-matters.html #gamedev #math

Experimenting with adding tag plays in The Ump Show! Do you think the runner is out in the third play?
Wishlist the game on Steam! https://TheUmpShow.com

#baseball #mlb #gaming #gamedev #indiegame #indiedev

Finally released the game I have been working on for the past year: The Ump Show. Live out your fantasy of being a baseball umpire! https://azeemba.itch.io/the-ump-show

#baseball #gamedev #gaming #mlb #indiedev #solodev