Clive Thompson’s blog collision detection put me onto the extremely addictive little flash game Chaos Theory. It’s pretty cool, but not in itself worth re-blogging. But Clive (whose blog is a great collection of weird research, as well as simple-but-addictive time-wasters) also mentioned that the highest score he had achieved was 121. (The game gives you three chances to start a chain reaction over 50 moving balls, so a theoretical maximum score is 150.) So I just had to mention my score of 139. The game (quite rightly) describes this as a “Miracle!!”

Yes, that this was worth blogging reflects badly on my life. Yes, that I blogged it reflects badly on my thesis progress.

Update: just got my third miracle. 137, 130. Eat that, Clive. W00t! I am so l33t. I wonder if this confers automatic canonisation, or if I have to make some sort of application? Actually, I don’t consider 130 particularly miraculous. What Clive doesn’t seem to have grasped is the fundamentally random nature of this process, which practically guarantees a “miracle” if you keep playing long enough. It’s a bit like the monkeys and Shakespeare, only much cooler since it has lots of explosions. (Fairness compels me to admit that the fact that Clive apparently has a job might be a limiting factor in his performance.)

Now, I really have better things to do. Stop sniggering.