Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/17/non-euclidean-doom-where-the-value-of-pi-is-not-3-14159.html
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Interesting how a variant pronunciation of “segue” is misinterpreted as the name of an electric vehicle manufacturer.
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Non-Euclidean Doom… It’s needs a few Lovecraft-themed levels.
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i was very old when i realized “segue” is pronounced “segway” and seg-ew is nothing, and I maintain the opinion that it is infact the word that is wrong, not me
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I was… older than I ought to have been. I was maybe 9 or 10 when I first saw it in print and had no idea it was the word I’d been hearing (albeit infrequently) throughout my life. I mentally pronounced it “seig” and moved on. interestingly, the meaning of it was obvious from context but I couldn’t pair it to the correct pronunciation due probably to the word’s infrequent usage. I think I got it sorted out in high school, but maybe college.
edit: embarrassingly, I was pronouncing “subtle” with the B until my buddy ridiculed me for it as a college freshman. but I knew “suttle” was a word that meant the same thing, I just had no idea that it was the same word.
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This makes me think the mirror dimension in the Doctor Strange movies is just one in which the value of pi is way off.
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Doom has it’s own mirror dimension
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Presumably in non-euclidian doom, the best gun is the
BSJ-9000
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A brief segway will cover…
It’s not just misspelled, I suspect it’s misused, too. From the description, it appears that the section referred to wasn’t a segue (or a segway) at all, but a brief digression.
(I risk being labelled a grammar/usage N@zi, but that’s not fair: not just because of the comparison but because actual N@zis at least got something out of it. sigh.)
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For the love of god, don’t let Christopher Nolan hear about this. I can’t take 3 hours of a team of intrepid explorers trying to figure out non-Euclidean worlds…
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I just love the CCC’s video player. The scrubbing timeline is genius. Never has it been so easy for me to skip to the relevant part of the video (except when watching other CCC talks, of course)
I think that’s a common problem with kids who read a lot, and frequently above level. You follow learned pronunciation rules in your head, then English, being a tricksy bastard, doesn’t sound anything like what you think it should. I mentally pronounced segue as “seeg” for a long time, and idling with a short i, among other errors.
*Insert quote about English mugging other languages for gerunds here.
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The trick, I find, is to get a handle on where the word was stolen from. In this case, it was from Italian (seguire, “to follow”). The same roots as “sequence”, “sequel” and so on.
More on topic, this actually could be useful information should the Laundry Files ever be made into a movie.
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I never knew Doom used the wrong value of Pi, but it shows how they used several more digits than were actually significant in that context - especially given that even at “pi=3” it’s not that warped. (I wonder if the distortions would have been more extreme at distance, though.)
Something I always loved about the Marathon 2.5D engine, which could do “room over room” spaces, was you could have spaces that wrapped around themselves in non-Euclidean ways, such that you might have, for example, a room filled with pillars, and depending on whether you went around a pillar to the left or the to the right, you’d end up in two different spaces. In fact those kinds of weird spaces would routinely be used without the player being aware of it, because that was often what you needed to do to create the illusion of an actual 3D space where a traversable space was (apparently) over another traversable space.
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Yes. I’m still mortally traumatized from the oral book report I gave on Rendezvous with Rama in elementary school, lol!
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On the other hand, since we ‘have’ Sam Altman taking meetings with governance people to put limits on linear algebra (not my call, someone leaving OpenAI;) maybe it’s time there were a young person in a spicy surveyors’ movie who says ‘Oh this is Linear Algebra? I know this.’ who takes the console or such and goes to town looping time or space or surveyors (yep, Narnia cabinet’s workin’ again) in an eventually more fortunate way.
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This is why I always vogue, and pretty much any way I like, too.
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