Went to bed, but nothing happened.

I tell myself I'm on the mend from this darn cold, but it may just be wishful thinking. I should be asleep now, but my first attempt has failed miserably. Partly its my sinuses. Partly its because I've been sleeping so much the last few days, and partly because I've had an inspiration for a great role-playing setting.

It would be perfect for a massively cross-genre group of players. We could have ninjas, wizards, superheroes, spies, space opera characters, cyberpunks, aliens, pirates, pulp detectives and African explorers, and they all would have a definite part to play. The thing that's been keeping me up though is trying to figure out the physics of the setting (which is actually quite important -- it has a huge impact on what characters can do, and how the setting will affect them), which is quite typical for me.

Its not even clear how much of the underlying physics of the setting would ever be worked out the by characters, but it would be necessary for me to adjudicate many common role-playing situations I could see arise.

So, I have one heck of a nifty setting. If only I had a plot...

Dense Information Coding.

I've just learned that University of Rochester researchers have managed to encode a 21 by 41 pixel image into a single photon of light, and were able to decode it again only slightly degraded. Its a major step forward for optical data encoding.