Non-arbitrary decks of cards, or Uno with Set cards

So this is something I thought about a while ago.

A deck of cards has 13 numbers + face cards, and 4 suits.  This seems a bit arbitrary to me.  I thought to myself, we can do better than this.

How about something like, 3 numbers, 3 suits, and 3 colors?  This gives you 3^3=27 cards, which I think is much more pleasing.  Also this could be considered a "3 dimensional" deck, as each card could be uniquely placed in a cube by treating each value of each attribute as a distance from a cube edge.

Or, you could make a 4 dimensional deck, with 4 numbers, 4 suits, 4 colors, and, I dunno, 4 shadings. 4^4 = 256 cards.

Well, after thinking about this, I re-stumbled upon  a game I had played a while before that, which I now suppose could have at least unconsciously led to my idea in the first place.  This is a card game called Set, (the family game of visual perception it says on the box.)  This game has the 4 numbers, 4 shapes, 4 colors, and 4 shadings.  There are 3 of each instead of 4 of each, giving the maybe less "mathematically pleasing", but maybe easier to work with, 3^4 = 81 cards.

The game they designed for it is fun I  guess, I guess it's gotten awards and stuff.  It is mostly just about being faster than the other person at recognizing patterns.  But anyway, I bought a set and set to thinking about my old idea of using these cards to play actual games.  The game I started with worked pretty well I think.  That game is Uno, or I guess Crazy Eights.  The rules are, as I have tried out,

-Each player starts with 7 cards.
-A card is drawn from a draw pile
-Now players take turns putting down cards that "match" previous cards on a growing pile.
-"Matching" cards have either two OR three things in common.
-Two things in common means it's the next person's turn to go
-Three things in common means you can go another time if you choose to (my fiancee says you are REQUIRED to go a second time, which I guess makes things more challenging, but also maybe a bit more complicated...)
-If you have less than two things in common with the card already down, you have to draw until you can play again.
-The first person to get rid of all their cards wins.

This is basically the most basic rules of Uno but with more than just an arbitrary number of colors and numbers.  As my fiancee points out, nobody likes you when you call someone out for not saying "Uno", (wasn't me!)  so I leave it up to the prospective players whether or not to add a rule requiring the calling of "SetUno!" when down to one card.

I've only played the game with two players, but I see no reason it wouldn't work with more (I'll probably try that soon and update here.)

And yes I like the name "Setuno" for this game.

I feel like Set cards could with not to much trouble be adapted to work like other card games as well.  Maybe I will try something with a bit more strategy than Uno next, like Rummy?

Wavelength of 2^95 Planck lengths = red

Ok, so for my first post since the thing about Rule 110 tiles over a year and a half ago, I will be talking about something interesting (in my opinion) that I discovered. 

First of all, I have always been kinda fascinated by Planck units.  The  way I understand it, Planck units are fundamental amounts of stuff in physics.  For instance, the Planck length is considered to be the smallest unit of length that has meaning in current physics theories.  The Plank time is the corresponding smallest unit of time.  Light, by the way, apparently travels at exactly one Planck unit per Planck time, which is interesting. 

Anyway, I got this idea a while back I decided that the metric system doesn't go far enough in having non-arbitrary units of measure.  Sure it's all "a meter is 100 centimeters, a centimeter is 10 millimeters" but a millimeter is arbitrary.  What about doing things in multiples of 2^n Planck units?   
If I did things related to 2^n Planck units, maybe I would feel more "in tune with the universe" or something silly like that.  Now the Planck units for length and time are very small.  By trial and error and using Wolfram Alpha, I was able to figure out that 2^144 Planck times is about 1.2 seconds.  (I probably could have found an answer more efficiently using logarithms or something but I was feeling lazy.)  I used to give myself two hours to try and get as much done as possible when I had things to get done, but now I try to give myself an extra minute and a half, since 1.5 x 2^155 Planck times is close to 61.5 minutes.  (Or perhaps I should have gone for 2^155.5 Planck times and subtracted a couple minutes instead...)

I also started thinking about plank lengths.  Then I started thinking about wavelengths of light.  What color, I wondered, corresponds to some wavelength integer n of 2^n Planck lengths?  With more trial and error, I figured out that 2^95 Planck lengths corresponds to a wavelength right in the middle of the part of the red labeled region of the visible spectrum!  This seemed kind of interesting, since 2^96 Planck lengths would be twice the wavelength, and in the infrared (invisible to humans) whereas 2^94 would be half the wavelength, and also out of the range of human vision (ultraviolet.) 

I have a feeling that most likely there is no real significance to this, but who knows, maybe there is.  Humans evolved to see wavelengths of light that are available for us to see, which depends on the wavelengths most emitted by our star, which depends on nuclear/quantum physics, which depend on the Planck length and other Planck constants.  I'm sure I'm stretching here, and mostly I just like to think that there's something special about the color red for me now. 

I did some google searches for 640.2 nm and 640.3 nm (wavelengths of visible light are generally given in nanometers, 2^95 Planck lengths ≈ 640.5 nm) and found a few things that at a glance looked possibly interesting, but I also found hits for things at 640.6 nm, etc.  It would be interesting to do some analysis to see if there are more hits for 640.2 and 640.3 than for other wavelengths.  At a glance I didn't see much interesting for 640.25 nm, which is interesting in and of itself that as far as I know I'm the first to say anything interesting about that particular wavelength :-P

As an aside, there's also the Planck mass, which is interesting in and of itself.  This one is different from the Planck mass and Planck length, in that it's a maximum value, not a minimum value.  There is apparently no minimum value for mass.  One way I have heard the Planck length described is that it's the maximum amount of mass (or equivalently energy) that will fit in a Planck length x Planck length x Planck length cube of space.  (At this point it becomes the smallest possible black hole, and only becomes bigger with more mass added!)  The upshot of all this though is that unlike the Planck length and Planck mass which are much much to small to observe in any way, a Planck mass of something could actually be visible to a person.  A Planck mass is about 21.8 micrograms, which, according to Wolfram Alpha, is about 7X the mass of a "typical small grain of sand," for what that's worth. 

More interestingly, and again using Wolfram Alpha, I find that a cube made of a Planck mass of gold wold be a bout a tenth of a millimeter on an edge, and currently be worth about a thousandth of a penny!   A Planck mass of ultralight Silicon Aerogel on the other hand, would according to my calculations be a slightly less easy to lose cube 2.5 millimeters on a side!  You can buy a whole bunch of those here!  (The Planck mass of Aerogel costs a bit more than the gold D-:)  This could be an interesting marketing scheme for selling tiny amounts of stuff to nerds...yay!

Posting!

So I've decided to start posting stuff on here, per my fiancee Yang's encouragement.  I will add some new stuff soon!