Author: metatim

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Things 16: Colour-changing, Memes, Captain Jack

A video
The video comes first this week because it’s so incredibly good. If you are nearby to someone that might be interested in interesting illusion videos, get them to watch with you. It’s a simple but incredible colour-changing card trick:

Films
It has come to my attention that some people didn’t realise I have a Cineworld Unlimited card, so I better plug that just this once. You pay £12 a month and you can see as many films as you like at Cineworld cinemas all across the country (although it’s £15 a month if you also want to be able to go to those in central London, which fortunately does not include the one on King Street). Last year this meant I saw films for an average of £2.95 a ticket.

One of the objections to the idea of this card is that there aren’t enough films you would want to see in a month for it to be worth it. But of course, you will quite likely find there are more films you are happy to go and see if the cost is working out to be £3 per film on average!

Link: http://www.cineworld.co.uk/Cms.jgi?RUBRIQUE_CMS=UNLIMITED
http://www.cineworld.co.uk/unlimited [link no longer works, try this one – also it is now £13.50. – Tim, 17/8/10]

Furthermore, even if you don’t have one of these cards, the Orange Wednesdays 2-for-1 offer apparently still works with tickets bought with an unlimited card (so seeing a film with such a person on a Wednesday would be free).

So anyway, this week I saw Cassandra’s Dream, which was flawed but very effective at creating tension and so proved an interesting experience, and Smart People, which was not much more than flawed characters delivering pithy lines and so was a bit disappointing.

Next Week’s film
I’ll be seeing Mongol.

IMDb rating: 7.5/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 85%
Trailer: featuring some of the most hilariously overwrought and obvious deep-voiced narration I’ve heard in a while: http://www.filmcrave.com/movie_page_main.php?id=8165

A Puzzle
An open question that emerged from a discussion I had earlier this week:

In evolution, genes are passed on and alter randomly (roughly speaking), and in this way desirable traits emerge. The analogy has been made for ideas and technology, and in this case people refer to ‘memes’ (a cross between genes and memory, as these things have to be remembered by people rather than passed on). But there are several problems with the analogy. What do you think are the main problems or differences?

A Quote
Another personal maxim of mine that came up recently:

“You can’t expect something to get better if you don’t do anything about it. In fact, you can expect it to get worse.”

A Link
A fascinating report on the experiences of a guy that played Jack Sparrow at Disneyland.

An extract:

“Here’s a napkin someone wrote on for me: “I will give you a blow job on your break, so sexy! Kim—714-XXX-XXXX.” I would also get offers from women in my ear: “Anything you want, just find me.” I had a girl who had turned 18 the day before. She was with a high school group, and she wrote down her room number at the Downtown Disney hotel. I had a lady hump my leg one day in the park.”

A picture
I recently passed the picture below on to Bryan when he needed an opening image for a presentation on how to judge creative work.

Categories
New

Things 77, Time Slices, Innovative Pricing, Trigger’s Broom

Video
Imagine frames of a video printed on the side of a sequence of decks of cards. Then imagine all of those decks combined with a perfect n-riffle shuffle. What would the result look like if played back as a video? Something like this:

Surfing the 4th Dimension from Don Whitaker on Vimeo.

A bunch more, by phyrworks, can be viewed here.

Link
I love the idea that seemingly obvious things that work pretty well are actually only local maxima, and if you move far away enough from the norm you can actually find something far more effective.

The nicest example of this I’ve come across so far can be found here; some great data to show that under some circumstances combining the two pricing strategies of pay-what-you want with half-goes-to-charity produces a significantly better outcome than either option alone, or standard pricing. (This was anecdotally demonstrated by the Humble Indie Bundle back in May, but that clearly lacked a fair “control” for comparison).

Puzzle
As suggested by Angela last week, the problem of Trigger’s Broom, more conventionally known as the Ship of Theseus Paradox:

Trigger: And that’s what I’ve done. Maintained it for 20 years. This old broom’s had 17 new heads and 14 new handles in its time.
Sid: How the hell can it be the same bloody broom then?

Is Trigger’s broom still the same broom? If so why, if not why not?

Picture
Jeremey’s Place fake food emporium finds a clever way of shifting their otherwise fleetingly-entertaining spilled-food novelty items:

Categories
Old

Things 15: Photoshop Disasters, Speech Perception, Blockbuster Clinton

(Originally sent May 2008)

This week’s film – one line review
I enjoyed 75% of Indy 4, which I suppose is not bad, but I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed. I did think “that’s just silly” perhaps a little more often than is optimal.

Next week’s film
Not being interested in Sex and the City, I’ll probably just be rewatching Speed Racer (again) next week.


A Puzzle
If Green is Blue, Blue is Green, Red is Yellow and Yellow is Indigo, what is Indigo?

Note: this is a very silly puzzle that I invented, not a profound riddle or anything like that.

A Quote
This week I had cause to be reminded of a personal maxim of mine:

“Question everything. But not always out loud.”


A Link
I find Photoshop Disasters to be amusing sometimes for the things they find, and sometimes just for their obsessive attention to detail, highlighted by their quote “someone, somewhere, figured no one would notice. We are that no one!” (on the Spiderman 2 poster).

A video
This video demonstrates an audio/visual illusion in the way we perceive speech.

It is six seconds long. For maximum effect, I highly recommend first listening to it with your eyes closed. Then play it again with your eyes open.

A picture
I  found the below image used on Wikipedia to illustrate the US democratic primary results. Suddenly it becomes clear why Hillary has stayed in the race – she thought she was playing Blockbusters.

Categories
New

Things 76: Bikes, Polaroids, Kanye Tweets

Video
For some reason it’s the most pointless things that make me feel most encouraged about the human race:

Picture
I am naturally drawn to extremely long term, incremental projects. This probably explains why I have chosen to serialise 50+ issues of old Things on this blog at a rate of one a week; why I have spreadsheets tracking my sleep data going back nearly 10 years; and perhaps why it took me 6 years to complete a PhD. But as the title suggests, “He Took a Polaroid a Day” takes that kind of thing to a whole new level.

Quote
Leonard Bernstein: To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked why buses come in clusters. I think the main problem is the feedback loops – any traffic fluctuation that causes a bus to become slightly delayed means a longer wait at the next bus stop, which means more people are likely to turn up. More people take longer to get on board, and as Xuan points out make it more likely the bus will need to stop more often. Meanwhile, when the next bus turns up there has been less of a wait since the last bus left, so fewer people board, and by the same token the bus can make faster progress, so the gap between buses is closed by feedback loops at both ends.

One answer is to hold buses to “even out gaps in the service” as does indeed sometimes happen. Xuan also suggests better data on how crowded imminent buses are would encourage people to wait for the next, more empty bus, easing the feedback loop. I also think the surfacing of real time public transport data – as could be viewed a few weeks ago – will help us collectively improve efficiency in a similar way.

Pictures
Kanye West begins tweeting in a rather ostentatious way. In a stroke of inspiration, someone thought to use his tweets to re-caption New Yorker cartoons. Examples below; full story here.