Author: metatim

Categories
Old

Things 41: Microsoft Future (revoked), Identification by humming, Watermelon Carving

(Originally sent February 2009)

Last week’s Things got out of hand, so I will try to be concise this time.

Video
Microsoft present a vision of the future somewhat obsessed with wafer-thin touch-screens, and unlike a lot of visions of the future I only think some of it is ridiculous and impractical:
http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/the-future-is-haptic.html

[Video is no longer available, and I can’t seem to find it elsewhere on the internet. Perhaps Microsoft changed their mind about the future. – T.M. 3rd April 2011]

Quote
I saw a great film this week, here’s a quote that shows you how great it was:

[on the phone] “Hello? Cobra Bubbles? Aliens are attacking my house. They want my dog! Oh good, my dog found the chainsaw.”

I’ll name the film next week, for those that don’t know and don’t want to Google.

Link
Crowdsourced song identification. Sing / hum / play 10 seconds of a tune you need to find the name of into your computer microphone on this site, and people will listen to it and send you their suggestions. More fun (if you don’t have a microphone and a song in mind) is listening to people tunelessly humming tiny fragments of songs at widely varying volume levels with a strange echo (because they have their speakers on) and trying to identify them:
http://www.namemytune.com/

Puzzle
A famous bit of trivia that has been passed around for years holds that over the course of 7 years, every cell in your body will have been replaced with a new one. Are there any simple ways to disprove this?

Pictures
Watermelon carving has been taken to an extremely high level.

Categories
New

Things 96: Rocket Path-Dependency, Lipstick Animals, 3D Doesn’t Work

Link
When speculating on the subject of extraterrestrial space-faring life, it’s all too easy to forget the many development factors that are likely to be local to us, and to assume that too much of what we have done will generalise to other life forms out there. This article puts forward a compelling argument that our rocket-based space-faring only arose because of certain very specific and not particularly likely events.

Quote
While I don’t think it could be objectively assessed, I rather like Arthur Koestler’s observation on originality:

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

Picture
This is one of the things that makes me think of that Arthur Koestler quote: lipstick animals.

Lots more here.

Question
“Why 3D doesn’t work and never will. Case closed.”
Roger Ebert quotes Walter Merch, as a Man Who Knows What He’s Talking About, who presents several arguments as to why 3D cinema can never work.

I’ve heard a lot of bad arguments on both sides of this debate, so it’s nice to see someone with a deep understanding of the medium draw out their arguments clearly. My question is, is he right?

Previous Puzzle
Last time I asked how a mouse could fall any distance and survive.

As Phil pointed out, the statement is strictly false: “a mouse certainly can’t fall further than the size of the universe, for example.” So instead we restrict ourselves to consider mice falling off things that are attached to the earth, and no higher than the point at which the atmosphere becomes too thin for a mouse to breathe, and that the survivability criterion is assessed upon landing, and that the landing area itself is not deadly to mice.

First we must address the idea some people recall from school that all objects fall at the same speed, as per Galileo’s thought experiment and his apocryphal dropping-objects-from-the-tower-of-Pisa experiment. This is clearly false as a feather falls more slowly than a hammer, and the confounding factor is air resistance. Rather excellently, the hammer-feather experiment was conducted on the moon to show that in the absence of significant air resistance, they will actually fall at the same speed:

When air resistance is introduced the shape and particularly the downward-facing area dimensions of the falling objects matter, and although it’s hard to have a good intuitive feel for this when comparing such random objects as animals, I find it’s much easier to imagine a kind-of equivalent parachute with a weight attached.

A small parachute with a big bag of hammers attached will be pulled down more quickly than the same parachute with a feather attached. Alternatively, if two parachutes have equal weights attached, but one parachute is much bigger than the other, it’s easy to imagine that the bigger parachute has greater air resistance and so will fall slower.

Now if we imagine a parachute the size of a mouse, with a weight attached that is the same weight as a mouse, we can imagine it will fall pretty slowly, particularly compared to a parachute the size of an elephant with a weight attached the same weight as an elephant. So we can intuitively understand that the mouse survives.

Or perhaps we can’t? I realise that wasn’t very scientific, but I tend to prefer thought experiments of this kind as they seem to help most people grok ideas better than formulae.

This article over at Everything2 also has some concise words to say on the subject of falling animals.

Categories
Old

Things 40: Big Dog Robot, Movie Marketing, Facebook Principles

(Originally sent February 2009)

For those that are new or may have forgotten, ‘Things’ is intended to be weekly, I’ve just been abnormally busy recently. I’m getting this one done by adding bits in stages throughout the week, but since it has somehow become much longer than usual it has actually taken more than a week for these incremental efforts to add up…

Movies
The movie Push was much better than I had expected, being unusually well thought-out and executed for the genre.

My review:

I’m currently undecided on which I want to see of these two films:

The Unborn – implementing all ‘best practice’ horror cliches
(IMDb 4.8/10! Rotten Tomatoes 13%!)

Franklyn – Possibly ‘Bridge to Terabithia’ for adults, but less mature
(IMDb 7.8/10 Rotten Tomatoes N/A)

(Don’t forget you can switch off YouTube annotations via the icon in the bottom right)
[Much later I did eventually see Franklyn. Unfortunately I don’t recommend it. – T.M. 20/2/11]

Video
‘Big Dog’: Once again, technology jumps forward a bit faster than I was expecting, this time in robotic quadrapedal locomotion:

Link
I found this New Yorker article on the marketing of movies absolutely fascinating.

Warning – long article! Recommend consumption in chunks!

Excerpts:

“Publicity is selling what you have: the film’s stars and sometimes its director. Marketing, very often, is selling what you don’t have; it’s the art of the tease.”

“Even as movie attendance has dropped nineteen per cent from its peak of 1.6 billion theatregoers, in 2002, the number of films released each year since then has increased by thirty per cent. A dozen new films—three of them big studio releases—now vie for attention on any given weekend. To cut through the ambient noise, major studios spend an average of thirty-six million dollars to market one of their films.”

(Note that the average is probably the wrong figure to consider – a handful of gargantuan budgets will massively distort it. I would guess the median figure might be around 10 million dollars based on similar power-law distributions)

“the industry-standard multiplier for ultimate box-office—two and a half times the opening weekend’s gross”

Quote
Nat Torkington of O’Reilly Radar, on the trend for applications and data to be run and stored in the ‘cloud’ (the external network, e.g. Google Docs or webmail) rather than your own computer:

“Data in the cloud can be a privacy problem, because you’ve outsourced your privacy, so you’re vulnerable to attack not just from hackers but also from governments, competitors, and incompetence.”

Taken from a very important but annoyingly presented talk you can click through (yes, talk you can click through, that’s why it’s annoying) here:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/web-meets-world-privacy-and-th.html

Puzzle – previous
Last time I asked what people thought digital cinema projection combined with mobile phone interaction might cause to happen. Here’s some of what came out…

Storytelling used to be interactive with the storyteller flexing the way the story is told depending on audience reaction – this sort of thing becomes possible again. The mood could be flexed (perhaps with the soundtrack – dynamically generating suitable music is something already being used in video games), lines changed, or even the ending. But where does the input come from?

Live ‘what happens next’ competitions with prizes for audience members (!) and for scriptwriters…

Crowd-source optimisation of the presentation – up/down volume, focus, alignment. (I heard some cinemas in the US already do this – a few chairs in the auditorium are equipped for the audience member to give instant feedback on these issues, or it may have just been a single button that means ‘something is wrong’)

Product placement: can be localised (different product appears in same film when shown in different countries, or different locations in those countries), or placed on the screen in real time using some kind of eye-tracking, and optimised using mood-measurement, and cinema temperature control!!

Personally I suspect it will go through a process of hype (a few gimmicky movies where you can choose the ending, a rush of adverts with some kind of audience interaction tacked on), it will rely on sponsorship from a mobile operator (probably Orange), and it may ultimately fail because Cinema is a ‘sit back’ medium, rather than a ‘sit forward’ inherently interactive one like the web. (TV is a ‘sit back’ medium, which is why nobody presses ‘the red button’).

Or maybe I’m wrong – apparently the statistics actually show that 11 million people press that button every week, and a ‘killer app’ that we haven’t thought of could always emerge in interactive cinema and transform the entire medium.

Puzzle – this week
This just in – Facebook are taking what I consider to be an incredibly significant step in that they are now approaching their terms of service in a way similar to the US Constitution:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=56566967130

Their proposals for a ‘statement of rights and responsibilities‘ and ‘Facebook Principles‘ are currently up for debate.

There are three parts which I think work very interestingly together:

Principle 1. Freedom to Share and Connect
People should have the freedom to share whatever information they want, in any medium and any format, and have the right to connect online with anyone – any person, organization or service – as long as they both consent to the connection.

Digital technology has blurred the line between ‘information’ and ‘content’. As such, the very first principle sounds as if it endorses p2p file sharing…

R&R 2.3 For content that is covered by intellectual property rights (like photos and videos), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use, copy, publicly perform or display, distribute, modify, translate, and create derivative works of (“use”) any content you post on or in connection with Facebook. This license ends when you delete your content or your account.

Facebook need your permission to share your content with those you want to share it with, certainly, but imagining them modifying and then publicly performing it sounds a bit strange (I’m imagining a personal photo being photoshopped in some bizarre way and then paraded around Tokyo on a sandwich board with a strange slogan in order to promote Facebook) – and the idea that they will then stop such a thing as soon as you ‘delete your content’ is also hard to imagine…

R&R 5.1 You will not post content or take any action on Facebook that infringes someone else’s rights or otherwise violates the law.

Does this contradict Principle 1? Does that matter?

A picture
After an unusually intense edition of Things, here’s a nice little story and picture from the surprisingly entertaining Cake Wrecks blog.

Categories
Old

Things 39: Swype, Honest Homeopathy, Cung Fu Kittens

(Originally sent February 2009)

I managed to catch a showing of The Good, The Bad, The Weird yesterday:

I’m very glad I did. It was a bit unexpectedly violent, but had an incredible amount of innovative action visualisation on the screen for a lot of the time.

(Imdb 7.5, RT 88%)

On a similar note, I’m looking forward to seeing Push which looks very silly with people deflecting bullets with the power of their mind:

(Imdb 7.0, RT 26%)

A video
Last year I realised entering text was becoming one of the most important things we do, and the current ways of doing it on mobile devices are actually pretty rubbish. Here’s one vision of how that could change, being presented to a great audience that knows which questions to ask (long video but you get the idea pretty quickly):
http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/presenter.php?presenter=76

Link is dead, here’s a short bit that somebody else shot:

Here’s a more straightforward demo:

A link
Although I don’t subscribe to the idea that “if science can’t explain it then it can’t be real”, Homeopathy does not seem to hold up to rigorous examination, but on the other hand it does offer an excellent method of obtaining a placebo effect. This risks being dishonest, but here’s what an honest approach would look like:
http://www.fdhom.co.uk/index.asp

A quote
People almost always mean “I don’t consider <x> a high priority” when they say “I don’t have time for <x>”. This was made transparent earlier this week when I heard someone say:

“I don’t watch TV, I don’t have time for it. Except for sports.”

Puzzles
Way back when I last sent Things I set the Atheist Paradox. My view is that it cleverly exploits the fact that DNA really is the only known example of a ‘naturally’ emerging code in combination with a flawed comparison between “things we know require intelligent design” and “things we see emerge ‘naturally'”, while completely ignoring the hierarchical nature of Intelligent Design. But I won’t go into that any more here.

Anyway, this week, an open ended question. Cinema screens are becoming digital. This means they can also become interactive – before the film, adverts or who knows what can be showing, and the audience can interact with it via their mobile phones. Given that possibility, what could be done? What should be done? What will be done?

A picture
InventNow.org is a site for kids to submit their inventions and discuss them. They mainly seem to be board games, spaceships, and self-heating clothing. But I particularly liked “cung fu kittens plus”: