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Things 75: Fast robots, Inception links, Buses

Video
It’s strangely easy to forget that sufficiently well-made robots can move and react ridiculously fast. Here’s some nice reminders:

Links
Spoiler warning: if you haven’t seen Inception, these links are not for you. Move along to the quote.

I saw Inception and particularly liked the way you can enjoy it at face value or try to make out a deeper underlying truth. Whichever camp you fall into, I recommend checking out this YouTube video (more accurately audio), and if you’re trying to piece things together you might be aided by this simple diagram, or this more ambitious one.

If you want to dive deeper into working things out, I recommend you start with the IMDb FAQ which has some pretty good answers, then move on to the InceptionTheories forum.

Quote
Piet Mondrian: Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Puzzle
Here’s a classic: why do buses come clusters?

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked why walk-in freezers have doors that cannot be opened from inside. As Richard pointed out, the answer is that actually, they generally don’t. But if they did, I like Maria’s theory: “Maybe it is a Hollywood conspiracy. Think of the lack of plots if people didn’t get stuck inside a walk-in freezer.” Hollywood manipulating real life to make convenient tropes seem more plausible sounds like a fun premise for a film…

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Things 74: Swing, Freezer Door, Carnist Bingo

Link
A test audience on Facebook didn’t find this remotely as incredible as I did, but here it is anyway: The Swinger, an algorithmic process that can automatically generate a swing remix of a song.I recommend trying out whichever of the songs listed you are most familiar with, but for me “Money For Nothing” had the most profound effect.

Quote
Marie, during an argument: “Ah, but I’m a philosopher; numbers don’t exist.”

Puzzle
Anyone that has watched enough movies or TV is familiar with the dangers of an industrial freezer room: if you happen to get shut inside, you are doomed, since the door can only be opened from outside. But this seems like a very strange design flaw. Why are those doors designed in such a way?

Picture
As a vegetarian, I’ve found myself in many minor debates on food ethics over the years. A strange feature of these debates is that meat eaters have not generally applied as much thought to what they personally think they should or should not eat, and as a result vegetarians (and especially vegans) tend to find themselves arguing against the same instinctive, poorly-thought-out arguments every time. The Secret Society of Vegans found an excellent answer to this recurring feature of any v*gan’s life: a ‘bingo’ card for use during such debates:

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked how turning over a cassette caused the other side of the tape to be read. In fact the ‘side’ terminology only applies to the cassette – the tape itself has one ‘side’ of music recorded in one direction along the top, and the other in the opposite direction along the bottom.

Tarim points out that 8-track tape is much more mind-boggling: the tape is a continuous loop, wrapped around a single spool, with one end necessarily being pulled out from the inner part of the spiral. How could such a mechanism overcome so much friction in order to run continuously?

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Things 73: 5 seconds, Mamet Memo, Choose a Typeface

Video
The top 20 entries in a 5-second video contest – another great example of creativity out of limitation, as discussed in the Things Art Special (contains some scenes likely to offend, although only briefly):

Quote
David Mamet’s extraordinary memo/rant/lecture on writing good scripts, packed with excessive capitalisation, fractured grammar and other weird errors, all of which only serve to reinforce the passion with which he is trying to improve the world, can be read here.

If you don’t have time for 1,099 words, here’s a synecdochic exceprt:

EVERY SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC. THAT MEANS: THE MAIN CHARACTER MUST HAVE A SIMPLE, STRAIGHTFORWARD, PRESSING NEED WHICH IMPELS HIM OR HER TO SHOW UP IN THE SCENE.THIS NEED IS WHY THEY CAME. IT IS WHAT THE SCENE IS ABOUT. THEIR ATTEMPT TO GET THIS NEED MET WILL LEAD, AT THE END OF THE SCENE,TO FAILURE – THIS IS HOW THE SCENE IS OVER. IT, THIS FAILURE, WILL, THEN, OF NECESSITY, PROPEL US INTO THE NEXT SCENE.

ALL THESE ATTEMPTS, TAKEN TOGETHER, WILL, OVER THE COURSE OF THE EPISODE, CONSTITUTE THE PLOT.

Puzzle
Some of you may remember cassettes, small mechanical devices about eight times the size of an mp3 player, with 90 minutes or so of music physically encoded on a piece of wound tape, designed to spool and respool through a larger mechanical device which would ‘read’ the tape and produce the appropriate noises.

The tape had two ‘sides’, and you would play the other side of the tape by literally turning the cassette over.

The puzzle is this: no matter which side up you turned the cassette, the same physical side of the wound tape would face outwards. So how did the machine know which ‘side’ to play?

Picture
A well-thought-out flow chart to help you choose a font for any occasion:

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Things 72: Art

Quotes
Flaubert: “Art is born of restraint and dies of freedom”

Dorothy Gambrell (Cat and Girl): “Great stuff is usually made within very set boundaries […] the importance of a medium lies in its limitations.” (link)

Antony Gormley: “A lot of public art is gunge, an excuse which says, ‘we’re terribly sorry to have built this senseless glass and steel tower but here is this 20-foot bronze cat'”

Link
Kanji that transform into the animal they represent. A brilliant example of art within tight boundaries.

See the rest of the series here (although beware potentially NSFW imagery at the bottom of the page, after the polls, depending on what they have posted recently).

Video
Here’s a really amazing example of art vs limitations: using only the ramblings of a reluctant drunk man for the audio, make a video about the story of a historical figure. Somehow, moderately famous actors are involved in the project. The result is fascinating (although does contain moments of the more unpleasant consequences of drunkenness):
Drunk History – Nicola Tesla

Pictures
Putting captions on pictures of cats is an emerging art form I have been monitoring for some time. I previously put together my top 10 cats from 2007 and 2008; here, belatedly, are my top 10 cat images spotted in the first half of 2009.

Question
Roger Ebert asserts that “Video games can never be art” Why is he wrong?
(See these posts on Penny Arcade for context and their own responses).

Last week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked what would be the best thing I could buy that would maximise hours saved per pound spent. This produced a wide range of responses, largely depending on which assumptions people chose to question.

  • Yasmin suggests Red Bull (and similar) to save time by needing less sleep.
  • Alam suggests a clone of myself
  • Xuan suggests slaves and a washing machine.
  • Angela suggests two books that could improve one’s efficiency and so save time – The Miracle of Mindfulness and Making Time. (Funnily enough I already own the latter… but I haven’t found time to read it yet).
  • John suggests grated cheese.
  • Phil points out anything free that saves any time would maximise the metric, such as DropBox. This technically lies outside the “buy” requirement. He also suggests a combi-microwave and a smartphone, and then finally a device to prevent time-wasting by cutting off internet access between certain hours.
  • Simon specifically attempted to address the “I” part of the question by recommending an iPad as being a particularly good purchase for me, by switching to digital goods (music, movies, comics, books); “Imagine all that time not wasted, going to shops, ordering physical products online and searching for things you can’t find.” I don’t exactly agree, but that’s a huge discussion for another time.

Finally, Laurence suggests a Time Machine, and insightfully adds:

The inevitable complexity of all the proposed solutions reminds me of
the following quote:

“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create
the universe.”
– Carl Sagan

I had planned to make simple estimates for the “hours saved per pound spent” for each answer and declare a winner, but due to the range and complexity of answers this now falls out of the remit of Things and will instead be posted over on my analytical blog, Tower of the Octopus (which now has its own domain) once I find time to make such estimates.