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Things 79: Stickers, Paulstretch, The Past In Colour

Tim Link
I inaugurated my personal blog (as opposed to my analysis type blog, Tower of the Octopus) with a write-up of how implementing a personal ‘achievement’ system (as in XBox achievements) with stickers made me have more fun on my holiday in Edinburgh:

Stickers Make Me Have More Fun

Link
PaulStretch is an amazing application that takes music and applies “extreme stretching” with minimal distortion (and does a few other things as well). Although it has been around for years, it suddenly garnered widespread attention when Shamantis posted a stretched-out 35 minute version of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile”, which works extremely well:

J. BIEBZ – U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

I tried PaulStretch out on some other tracks and got similarly nice results, but “U Smile” does have qualities that work particularly well in this form.

I’ve been listening to it while watching extreme slow motion videos, such as this one.

Pictures
We are used to seeing certain time periods only in black and white just because of the timeline of colour photography development. However, pioneers of colour photography were active, and seeing their results is a strange experience.

1939- 1944 in colour

1909-1912 Russia in colour

Quote
Dorothy Gambrell (in Cat and Girl) has a line which sums up my feeling on looking at the above images:

“The past is just the present with different technology and funny clothes.”

Puzzle
An old classic this week.

There is a room with one light bulb in it, currently switched off. Outside the room you can’t tell if the light is on or off, and there are three light switches, only one of which operates the bulb: the basic challenge is to work out which one. In theory, you could flick a switch, go into the room to see if it worked, and if not come back out and flip the next switch, and so on. The challenge is to come up with a strategy in which you only need to enter the room once.

If that’s too easy, how about if there were four switches?

If you can manage that, how about if there were five? (I don’t know how to do that one, although Laurence claims it is possible. It may be that his setting of the puzzle is subtly different though…)

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked what answer to 2 + 4 — 3 + 5 would get you a tick from the teacher if you had just learned the BODMAS rule.

As Richard points out, BODMAS isn’t really consistent with the way we canonically parse equations (so the teacher would probably expect the answer 8, although strict application of BODMAS would yield -2), and there are better ways to teach it, as addressed in this Wikipedia entry.

The Week Before That’s Puzzle Again
Laurence supplies this excellent postscript to the Trigger’s Broom / Ship of Theseus problem set in Things 77:

“It has occurred to me that this could equally be applied to most armies,
governments, countries, football teams, religious cults, families, and
hell, humanity as a whole. At least one of these is the cause for things
like the situation in Northern Ireland, so I think if you could solve
Trigger’s Broom, then it could well go towards solving some larger
issues. (Albeit, possibly presenting people with some radically new ones
in the process!)”

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Things 78: Nuclear, BODMAS, Curvy tube map

Video
While not perhaps the best way to view the data (using time to represent time always feels strangely inefficient, although it’s difficult when you also want to present geographical data), this video might nonetheless be a good way to actually take in the data:

Quote
John Hodgman “A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime.”

Puzzle
I’m sometimes called upon to help people with their children’s maths homework, and I found this problem particularly hard.

The solving method is explained as follows:

When you are working out a sum with more than one operation (eg 8 + 2 x 3), follow the BODMAS rule. Without these rules you could have more than one right answer, so getting the order of operation correct is important. You should calculate in this order;
Brackets
Order (powers/square numbers)
Division
Multiplication
Addition
Subtraction

The first problem in the ‘level 1’ set of problems is simply this:

2 + 4 — 3 + 5

What answer would earn you a tick from the teacher?

You can see the original problem sheet here, and the level 2 and level 3 problems here.

Picture
This curvy tube map is rather nice (although the full-size version doesn’t seem to be available any more):

Some of you may recall the scale tube map from Things 18.

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked about Trigger’s Broom (also known as the Ship of Theseus problem): the broom has had both head and handle replaced many times, so we might ask “Is Trigger’s broom still the same broom? If so why, if not why not?” This question has stimulated debate and discussion for centuries and Things recipients were no exception. I’m going to paraphrase people’s responses here to prevent this issue of Things becoming even longer.

Both John and Laurence point out that the Sugababes present a similar problem (as does the Wikipedia article, which is an excellent starting point for anyone that has not delved into this subject before)(naturally “as does” could refer to both “point out” and “present a similar problem”).

Thomas makes the distinction “There are two questions: “Is it the same?” and “Is it the same broom?”,” pointing out that the former question is trivial, but for the latter “we don’t insist on new labels, new identities for every subtle change in an object … so things like the functions it performs and who possess it as better ways to identify them”.

Laurence counters “what if these heads/handles were replaced when they started to show wear, but were still functioning. If I rescue Head_1 and Handle_1 from the bin at different times and join them, what do I have?”

As Angela noted in her original setting of the question: “based on the fact that none of the cells in your body now are the same as they were when you were born, are you actually you??”

This was touched on in the puzzle from Things 41 (yet to appear in blog form), which went:

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?

To which there are some interesting answers.

Without diving down that rabbit hole too deeply, I first note my original answer to Angela on the personal identity issues raised by Trigger’s Broom:

Identity is a convenient fiction that we are hard-wired to believe in.

Second, I highly recommend making time for this cartoon which sheds some light on the subject, which I saw many years ago and Laurence managed to find on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc

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?

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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:

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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.