Author: metatim

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Things 46: Miniatur Wunderland, Map of Remoteness, Door Considerations

(Originally sent April 2009)

Video
Brought to my attention by Richard, the official corporate video of ‘Miniatur Wunderland’, the largest model railway in the world, complete with earnest German-accented voice-over:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN_oDdGmKyA

Link
An article on New Scientist with some great images showing the extent of rail, road and river networks across the globe, and the resultant ‘remoteness’ score for any given location.

Quote
I’ve mentioned this quote in conversation about three times in the last two weeks so it’s evidently topical:

Don Marquis: “The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race”

Puzzle
Last week I asked why front doors open outwards. If there can be said to be one true ‘reason’, it is that there are many reasons for it to be this way round and only one for it to be the other:

– Practicality. A common situation is for one person to be opening the door for another from the inside. It’s safer to have it open towards the person doing the opening.

– Security. If the hinges are on the outside they are more easily removed. It’s cheaper to have the door open inwards if you want to have the hinges inside.

– Weather. The hinges (see above) and interior of the door will tend to be less exposed to the elements if the door opens inwards.

– Defensibility. It’s easier (that is to say, actually possible) to defend against a potential intruder by barricading a door that opens inwards.

The only reason I’ve heard for going the other way is for safety in case of a panic evacuation, where people are likely to be pushing against whoever is first to the door. This trumps the other reasons when it comes to large public venues, but is not significant in an ordinary home.

This week’s puzzle
A great way to motivate oneself to do something (such as housework or a hobby, say) is to set an achievable time-based goal that can easily become part of a routine, like doing it once a day, or once a week. For example, I frequently intend to start a draw-once-a-day routine, and send Things almost weekly; others have similar goals for photography, or blogging.

The problem is, there’s a ridiculously huge difference between ‘every day’ and ‘once a week’. What possible strategy could one use that is somewhere between these two extremes?

Picture
It’s not explained very well, but apparently the European Space Agency’s “Environmental Satellite” can use radar to detect changes in the Earth’s surface with millimetre accuracy. In this way, images from before and after the recent L’Aquila earthquake in Italy can be compared to track how the ground has been shifted. It’s a pretty fascinating visualisation.

Categories
Old

Things 45: Ant Colony Sculpture, Maunder Minimum, Photoshop Effect

(Originally sent April 2009)

Video
What happens if you fill an underground ant colony network with concrete, let it set, then excavate the resulting sculpture?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozkBd2p2piU [Removed, try this – metatim 18/08/2015]

 

Link(s)
The sunspot cycle typically lasts 11 years. We are currently undergoing an abnormally long period of low (and therefore cooler) activity, still going 12.8 years after the last solar minimum, which some speculate heralds the beginning of a new Maunder Minimum. However, NASA say this is unlikely and will not have a significant effect on global warming.

The links
Maunder Minimum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_minimum

How unusual is current activity:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/15/sunspot-lapse-exceeds-95-of-normal/

NASA’s take:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/

Quote
I like it when you get a complete story in the few seconds of conversation you hear as you walk past someone. I overheard this:

Teenager: … and then he says-
Adult [interrupting]: “Why have you got no clothes on.” I told *you* that joke.

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last time I asked what you could buy for less than £5 which consists of the largest number of things, where the number of those things is written on the packet/box/tin. For those still working on it, do not click on the following link which goes to the best answer I’ve been able to find – 5,000 things for £2.71. http://is.gd/sKpN
[Update – the same idea can now yield a score of 10,000 – T.M. 16/4/11]

Puzzle
This time, the question is simple: why do house front doors almost always open inwards?

Picture
It is reasonably well known that photo manipulation is common on magazine covers, but it’s good to be reminded of how much distortion actually goes on sometimes, in examples such as this:

An interesting collection of images demonstrating the point the other way round can be found in these front covers of an apparently forthcoming edition of the French Elle magazine.

Categories
New

Things 99: Rules for Stories, Sci-Fi Map, Movie Bar Codes

Video
When an important character first appears in a movie, it’s generally good practice to have the first few things they do give a strong indication of what kind of person they are. I think this is why people get so upset about the “Han shot first” debacle, since it was such a character-defining moment.

Occasionally, real life can give us the same speedy insight into a person, such as these 14 seconds:

Quote
In screenwriter Todd Alcott‘s series of insightful and fascinating posts analysing The Shining and how it fits the standard three-act structure set against a driving need of the protagonist, provided that you consider the hotel itself to be the protagonist (which is actually quite a compelling argument; read it in full in parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), he has the following aside:

[I]n order for a protagonist/antagonist dyad to work dramatically, the protagonist must be aware that the antagonist exists, and is acting upon things, and vice versa. This is why […] fantasy stories always have magical characters who can see the future and know what’s going on in distant lands – because otherwise, the protagonist and antagonist would never know that the other exists.  If Gandalf is just some guy who tells Frodo to throw the ring into a volcano and Frodo says “okay” and sets out, there is no drama to Lord of the Rings.  It must be that Gandalf is a wizard and that Frodo can have visions when he puts on the ring and that Sarumon has a magic ball that sees things, or else everybody is just kind of doing things.

I wasn’t so sure about that when I first read it, but ever since then I’ve seen it more and more. I think it’s actually more the case that when a writer has a story in mind it’s very difficult for them to separate their omniscient knowledge of events from the far more limited knowledge held by the individual characters. If you have some kind of fantasy setting, it’s almost irresistably tempting to get around this by including some kind of magical information transfer. Harry Potter leans on this story crutch particularly heavily (although to be fair Rowling does fold the implications back into the narrative).

Picture
Ward Shelley’s History of Science Fiction, originally posted at scimaps.org:
(click for big)

Puzzle
Imagine taking a frame from a movie, and squashing it horizontally to produce a thin vertical line. Now imagine doing that to every frame of the movie, and putting those lines next to one another in sequence. While I’m not sure of the precise transformation used, this is what Movie Barcodes essentially does.

For many movies, this will tend to produce a set of incomprehensible stripes that show little more than the general color grading of the film. The Matrix is a perfect example (click for big on this or any of the others in this post):

Films using distinctive palettes at different times reveal their underlying pattern, for example the distinct striations of Hero:

This begs the question: are there any movies which you could recognise from their “bar code” alone? I suspect this is only reasonable if you’re given a subset of movies to guess from, or if the movie is particularly distinctive. So for this week’s Things, see if you can guess the following movies (the answers are in the filenames of the images):

A famous Disney movie:

Another famous Disney movie:

A film I like:

New movies are regularly added to the Movie Barcode Tumblr, and most excellently they sell a variety of prints of some of the most popular!

Categories
Old

Things 44: Celebrations Results, Cat vs Squirrel, Procrastination Flowchart

(Originally sent April 2009)

Movies
This week I chose to see a film with Nicolas Cage in it instead of Slumdog Millionaire at the cinema, and I did not regret it. Insane big-budget B-movies like Knowing are the best thing to see on a big screen.

My review:

Blog
A rare event – I updated my blog, with the results from my Celebrations experiment.

Link
A reference for April Fool’s websites in 2009.

Quote
As referenced by my flatmate in the review of Knowing – Donald Rumsfeld, 2003, making a good point badly:

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Followed up by:

“I believe what I said yesterday. I don’t know what I said, but I know what I think… and I assume it’s what I said.”

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked about the 3rd most abundant element in the universe – it turns out to be Oxygen.

Puzzle
This week: a puzzle I don’t think I am quite able to set with sufficient precision, but will try anyway. You can buy some things in packets/tins/boxes and they list the number of items they contain, such as 6 eggs, 12 spoons, 52 playing cards. With a budget of £5, what would you buy to get the largest possible value for this number?

Video
Squirrel vs cat:

Picture
A procrastination flow chart (click for big):