I was invited the other day by Frank (a programmer on the Apricot Team) to attend a Free Hugs gathering at a crowded square in Amsterdam.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Free Hugs, watch this video: Free Hugs Campaign In short, you stand around holding signs with "Free Hugs" written on them, and let people hug you (and hug back, of course).

Needless to say, I couldn't possibly refuse to go along. And I'm glad I did. It was quite an experience, in more ways than I anticipated.

There was of course the great fun of it, and the elated feelings from human contact. But it was surprisingly moving at times. There were some people that I could barely communicate with due to language barriers, but we connected through hugs. And it didn't matter who it was. All ages. All races. All classes. All genders. It was very hippie and awesome.

Even people that didn't hug would often let slip a betrayingly genuine smile across their face.

It was also fun having people take pictures of us. I'm not a big fan of posed pictures, but having people take pictures of us standing out there with "Free Hugs" signs, and giving hugs to complete strangers, seems very representative of the way I'd like to be remembered.

First off, it seems people are starting to find my blog from track-backs on the Project Peach website. After noticing this, it suddenly brought into sharp focus that I've slipped in my intent to keep my blog relatively impersonal. Especially entries I made during the more stressful parts of Peach, which are particularly inappropriate if Blender users start reading this blog.

So with that in mind I've cleaned up the blog a little.

Anyhoo, all that unpleasantness aside, Project Peach is rapidly coming to a close, with only two or three days left of actual production. After that we'll start work on the DVD. For my part, I'll be working on documenting how to use the character rigs. I'm not entirely sure what format or formats I'll use for that, but I'd like to make it at least mildly entertaining, even for people who have no idea what a "rig" is. The nice thing about working on the DVD is that it will be notably less stressful than these last parts of production.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, the movie was essentially finished a week or more ago, and since then we've just been working on improving the details. Turns out that this is actually really stressful. You don't exactly get a satisfied feeling from discussing for twelve thousand and two hours which moment a character's left pinky finger should twitch.

First some good news about Project Peach: the movie is done! It's finished! If we wanted to, we could release it right now. However, we are taking the time we have left to go back and improve the parts we are least happy with. Even with this extra time, there's going to be plenty of things in the movie that we'll cringe at, but I suspect a typical audience won't notice them (or at least won't care about them).

Second -- and this is the primary point of this post -- I discovered an awesome website the other day: http://projecteuler.net

They have a whole bunch of math problems geared toward being solved by computer. I'm finding it to be quite fun.

The really cool thing about it is that the emphasis isn't just on getting the right answers (although you do have to do that too), but also on finding the most elegant and efficient ways to compute the answer. In effect, it's about figuring out and deriving math concepts. And I find that a lot of fun.

Interestingly, I think this is actually a really good example of one of the reasons reason I rarely enjoyed math classes. In most math classes (at least that I took) they give you the formulas, and just wanted you to use them to find the answers. For me, that's extraordinarily boring. For me the fun part is figuring out those formulas and concepts myself. Perhaps that's a slow way to learn math, but it's a hell of a lot more fun that having it spoon-fed to you.

I ran across this old New York Times article recently: For Best Results, Forget the Bonus

The article in general is interesting to me, but in particular I wonder how this applies to the most predominant schooling paradigms in use today. How many rely on reward systems?

For example, grades -- even if they serve a rating/gauging purpose -- also double as a reward system, even if only unintentionally. And in many (most?) cases, students are made acutely aware of the grading system. The goal quickly becomes getting a good grade rather than learning something. And even if the two are linked (i.e. learning something leads to good grades), making the grades the focus -- or even just something the students are aware of at all -- could very well be harmful.

I even wonder how much parents fall into this reward trap. What is their primary concern? What is the first thing that comes to their mind? Their child getting a good grade and passing the class, or their child learning something? Their child doing well in school, or their child progressing as an informed and intelligent human being? And how, then, does that translate into how they then try to motivate their child?