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Things 95: Modern Movies, How to be Happy, Mouse Mystery

Video
A beautiful demonstration of physics (or perhaps chemistry):

Quote
Scott Rudin, quoted in this GQ article about why movies are all rubbish these days:

Studios are hardwired not to bet on execution, and the terrible thing is, they’re right. Because in terms of execution, most movies disappoint.

Incidentally, while there’s clearly a huge argument to be had about the relevance of the data to the argument, let’s just contextualise the “things are terrible now” discussion by looking at the breakdown of what proportion of pre-2010 films in the IMDb top 250 come from each decade:

We see a broad trend that is the opposite of the “films used to be better” argument, apart from a post-war spike.

As I said, this is a starting point for huge arguments, and if I was going to start one I would begin with one of the following:
-Any popularity poll will tend to bias more recent candidates
-Demographic bias of IMDb voters and the scoring calculation used for the IMDb Top 250 will skew the result away from the “Objective Truth” (ha ha ha) of the matter
-This data does not speak to the more important issue of ‘typical’ film quality by decade

This week’s question
A mouse can fall any distance and survive. How is this possible?

Picture
I’ve had this obvious-but-actually-important thought myself, and this is a pretty great way of expressing it:

Answer to the previous question
In Things 94, I asked why ovens didn’t come with a built-in thermomenter.

Uncharacteristically, the Things community was unable to answer – or perhaps you weren’t interested. So I asked the internet using my secret research alter-ego* on Yahoo Answers, and also on Quora just to try that out.

You can see the range of responses I received on Yahoo answers, some of which are quite useful. The question on Quora has yet to draw a response, so I’m guessing the community there is still too niche to cover this kind of thing.

Putting together the suggestions from YA and my own thoughts, this is my conclusion:

1) It’s difficult (and therefore expensive) to make an oven thermometer that will remain accurate for the device’s lifetime. If it wasn’t, I suspect ovens would be thermostat-based, and we wouldn’t have the problem to begin with. (As I said, baking books insist there is a problem, and anecdotally I can report my gas oven is almost two gas marks cooler than it should be, and adjusting for this significantly improved my baking results).

2) It also must be difficult (and therefore expensive) to design and calibrate an oven such that it accurately produces the intended temperatures throughout its lifetime, because (once again) if this wasn’t true the problem wouldn’t arise.

3) The solution to the problem is to have a separate thermometer and use it from time to time to calibrate your oven. That thermometer then doesn’t need to maintain integrity for every use of your oven, and even if it does break it’s much easier to replace than an integrated one would be.

4) Admitting there is even a problem looks bad, so any oven manufacturer supplying such a thermometer unit with its devices would be perceived as worse than those that pretend there isn’t a problem.

5) Even if a manufacturer did include a built-in thermometer, people unaware of the oven temperature problem would again presume the oven must be sub-standard to need one, and people that know enough to worry would realise an integral thermometer couldn’t be trusted for long.

I suspect similar principles apply to protective cases and screen protectors for mobile devices.

*A long time ago I thought it might be prudent to separate my question-asking online identity from my confident-and-opinionated online identity. This doesn’t seem quite as important any more, and now that Things is a blog it’s very easy for someone to connect the two anyway, so now I don’t worry about linking from one to the other. But I’ll still use it anyway.

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Things 94: Black Swan, Vampire Squid, Stock Market Returns

Video
I saw Black Swan recently and recommend it to anyone that likes the look of the trailer, so long as you’re not squeamish as that’s a whole side of the movie the trailer skims over:

With a reported production budget of $13m (which, as I never tire of telling people, would be just enough to cover Tron Legacy’s costume budget, and was also so restrictive that Natalie Portman opted to forego her trailer in order to afford an on-set medic), I was particularly fascinated by the beautifully subtle (and some not-so-subtle) digital effects they nonetheless managed to achieve. Most excellently, you can see a showreel of how these effects were put together on Look Effects’ website, although if you haven’t seen the film you should steer well clear as it will completely ruin the film for you.

Links
Have Instapaper or Read It Later at the ready because I’m about to flag up some serious long-form content. I don’t think it was available online when it was first published, but you can now read Matt Taibbi’s dilligently researched yet seething explanation of quite what Goldman Sachs does over at Rolling Stone, in which he memorably begins:

The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Over a year later even publications like The Week will casually refer to them as “Giant vampire squid Goldman Sachs”, which is I think excellent. It’s long, but well worth it, and it has a great twist ending.

As a nice follow-up (or much shorter way of cutting to the heart of the matter), Charlie Stross explains how we got to this point. Or if you want the whole thing in one pithy excerpt:

Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.

I think the way we tend to automatically expect groups of humans to behave like individual humans is one of the most disastrous mistakes we make on a daily basis.

Puzzle
All ovens that I’ve seen have some kind of temperature ‘input’ dial, but why do so few have any kind of readout of the actual internal temperature, to the point that there is a market for independently purchased oven thermometers? Shouldn’t market forces guide the manufacturers to include such a feature themselves?

Picture
I see a lot of data visualisations that make me angry because they do little more than treat data as almost random input for some kind of procedural image generation process (which is actually very cool when it doesn’t claim to be something it isn’t). This New York Times visualisation of stock market returns over the past 90 years, on the other hand, is actually quite practical at giving you both an overall sense of the patterns while still making each data point quite clear.

I'd just like to make it clear that I'm using the 'ragged edge' functionality of FS capture to show that this is only part of the image. A while ago, when everyone at work had just got in to FS Capture, it was used on just about every image you saw. Those were dark days.

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked why we seem to be so intolerant of variation in things like driving speed or grammar pedantry.

Angela suggests it’s all to do with herd instinct:

We are constantly (often subconsciously) comparing ourselves with others around us and balancing the desire to fit in (be part of the herd) with our desire to ‘self-express’ (stand out). Even small differences between us and others in the herd could potentially threaten us if they lead us to be ostracised or confer upon others some advantage in terms of survival or reproduction. I think that’s one of the reasons we a) notice and b) are so perturbed by even slight differences – they could signify a real risk to our deepest interests.

I think that’s part of the answer, although it doesn’t explain why we’re more tolerant of a lot of other things, or at least tolerant of variation in one direction (such as how we judge others’ use of free time).

I initially thought it covered those particular areas of life because we recognise them as prisoner’s dilemma / tragedy-of-the-commons areas, where a few people taking the easy way risk leading society to a collectively suboptimal Nash equilibrium.

However, I now think there’s two separate factors at work. In driving, even slight differences in speed add up to one car overtaking another, which we can’t help but read as a social signal that one is ‘doing it wrong’ (and we see the same thing with walking speed).

On the other hand, things like specific bits of grammar pedantry or household hygiene fall into a category of behaviours drummed into us as children, which we then cling on to tenaciously through a combination of Anchoring and Status Quo Bias. Deviation from these things is more on a sub-task basis (“I can’t believe they don’t clean their skirting boards!”) rather than a spectrum, as we adhere to whichever specific rules we were taught.

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Things 93: Wormworld Saga, Newton and Pascal, Idiots and Maniacs

Link
If you like webcomics, or just enjoy seeing examples of excellent use of light in digital paintings, do check out the first chapter of Wormworld Saga.

Joke
Einstein, Newton and Pascal decide to play hide and seek. Einstein is it, closes his eyes, counts to 10 then opens them. Pascal is no where to be seen. Newton is sitting right in front of Einstein, with a piece of chalk in his hand. He’s sitting in a box drawn on the ground, a meter to a side. Einstein says “Newton, you’re terrible, I’ve found you!” Newton says “No no, Einy. You’ve found one Newton per square meter. You’ve found Pascal.”

Puzzle
This sprang out of the discussion on language pedantry last week on the RAPP CC list.

In “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” Lynne Truss makes the following observation:

Yes, as Evelyn Waugh wrote: “Everyone has always regarded any usage but his own as either barbarous or pedantic.” Or, as Kingsley Amis put it less delicately in his book The King’s English (1997), the world or grammar is divided into “berks and wankers” – berks being those that are outrageously slipshod about language, and wankers those who are (in our view) abhorrently over-precise.

A similar observation in a different field is attributed to George Carlin:

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?

It seems to me that grammatical precision and driving speed fall into a very particular category of behavioural spectra in which we seem to be highly critical of others who vary from our own view in one direction or the other, even slightly. Other examples I’ve observed being described in a similar way and heard people comment on with varying degrees of politeness are alcohol consumption, smartness of dress, household cleanliness, and various aspects of personal hygiene.

The question is, what is it about these behaviours that makes us so sensitive to differences?

Picture
I’m not at all sure this diagram works fully, but I like it a lot anyway:

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Things 92: Walk Straight, Marmite Looks, One Day Music Experience Timeline

Video
A nice bit of rotoscope animation that asks the question “Why can’t we walk straight?”

Link
As an intriguing to follow-up to the question in Things 89 on why perceptions of attractiveness vary, OK Cupid have posted a related result: greater variation in attractiveness rating scores tends to generate more messages on the service.

The fact they say “men will get their turn under the microscope” might mean that the same result does not hold true for men, or they might just not have checked yet.

Tip
I’ve recently been enjoying a handy little shortcut in Firefox that lets me jump straight to search results on certain sites without reaching for the mouse.

Start by clicking the dropdown option against the search box, and click ‘manage search engines’:

From this menu, pick a search engine you commonly use and click ‘edit keyword’, I recommend something very short:

You can then query your chosen search engine by jumping to the location bar (Ctrl + L) then preceeding your search with your chosen keyword. For example, I can type “Ctrl + L” and then “wa how old was pat morita when karate kid came out”, press enter, and get straight to the answer without any clicks of the mouse.

(Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t seem to have this option, but there’s a Firefox add-on which is a slight improvement).

Picture
A nice way to illustrate the changes technology has wrought on the radio music experience over the last 20 years, with only a little exaggeration (click for big):

No Puzzle
According to the schedule of rotating absence, there’s no puzzle this week, but feel free to think about why we can’t walk in a straight line if you like.

Last Week’s Question
Last week I asked if anyone else had noticed a sudden surge in the misuse of “i.e.” and “e.g.”. Not many had, but a lot of people had something to say on the subject… probably enough for a whole post by itself, but I’ll attempt to quote in brief the different responses.

First, a few admitted to not being certain of the distinction themselves, even when they were sticklers in other areas, so I suppose that means I’ve done my bit to stem the tide somewhat.

The question on living vs prescribed language raised a few responses in itself. Maria noted:

The French spoken [in Montreal] is a pure and true form of ‘old’ french, ‘where for art thou’ for example. When Montrealers go to France their version of French is hardly understood which just goes to show that languages must and do evolve or we’d be speaking like players in a Shakespeare play.

Angela confessed that:

… I am afflicted and am involuntarily irritated by things like this that really should not be so irritating to me! The most frequent examples I can recall seeing include your i.e. / e.g.; everyday / every day; and unnecessary apostrophes e.g. potatoe’s, kid’s. In all cases I think that the incidence rate is increasing and we may well have passed a tipping point whereby ‘everyday’ will now mean both ‘everyday’ and ‘every day’ for ever more.

… and agreed that it’s better to let these things go, unless the error could lead to a misunderstanding, in which case it’s worth pointing out.

Rik provided a link to a tongue-in-cheek view on the book “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”, which among a lot of hyperbolic fuming makes the following point:

We are not computers which can be thrown off course by the insertion of a full stop here or a rogue hyphen there. We have a deeper understanding of meaning which you can check out for yourself by a quick reading of Chomskys writings on transformational grammar.

Simon identified a potential underlying factor behind rising misuse:

Latin stopped being taught in UK state schools during the 60s. At approximately the same time, English grammar died out as a subject because people thought it harked back to a redundant time. […] With the loss of learning through grammatical structure we have moved as a society from having a right way of doing something to adopting what society does. […] A case of crede quod habes – et habes if ever there was one.

Miranda gave further endorsement to the importance of Latin by nothing that in the case of “i.e.” and “e.g.” anyone lucky enough to have learned the language at school can easily remember which is which by recalling what the abbreviations stand for. She also pointed out that Dinosaur Comics recently addressed the issue of prescriptivism:

Finally, Xuan asks

Anyways, why did we start using e.g. and i.e. in the first place? Didn’t the Romans bugger off around 400AD?

Incidentally, in an attempt to find evidence that fewer people cared about the distinction between “i.e.” and “e.g.” I turned, as usual, to Google Insights for Search, only to find results that suggest the trend is going the other way. Alternatively, technological changes mean more is being written down by more people than ever before, so there’s more of both.