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Things 76: Bikes, Polaroids, Kanye Tweets

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

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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.

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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.

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Things 75: Fast robots, Inception links, Buses

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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.

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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

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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?

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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

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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):

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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?

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