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Things of the year 2010

It’s time to look back at the year in Things.

The Things newsletter was sent throughout 2010, although I only started blogging it in April with Things 67. Here I’m going to pick out my favourite 3 Things from each of the main categories, including some from the pre-blogging era.

But first:

Tim Link
I compiled a list of my top 10 movies to watch at Christmas, not because they’re Christmassy but because they are perfect for the hazy lawless dreamlike days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Click through to see trailers, summaries, and other handy links, or if you just want to know what I chose, here’s how they stack up in terms of IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes ratings, with bubbles scaled by number of IMDb votes (as a proxy for famousness):

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked why our ears ‘pop’ when a plane takes off or lands, given that the cabin should be airtight and thus immune to changes in pressure.

Richard pointed out that actually maintaining that pressure differential at altitude must take a lot of strength, and therefore weight, in terms of materials. By allowing the internal cabin pressure to reduce to still-tolerable levels, the pressure differential is reduced, less strength and therefore weight is needed, making the aeroplane more efficient. Makes sense to me.

Now, on to the Things of the year:

Videos
From Things 70, a perfectly self-explanatory animated gif:

In Things 85 I highlighted the growing trend of cat dubbing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bTbAsmPOKo

Most recently, in Things 88 I highlighted this beautiful short animation:

Links
In Things 63 (not blogged), I linked to this really nice way to comprehend the scale of the universe.

The Swinger – swinginating music automatically. As featured in Things 74.

Finally, in Things 86 I linked to Steven Steinberg’s informed musings on AI and Car Insurance. (Dead link, here’s the archive.org version instead – T.M. 19/5/22)

Quotes
Things 70:

Phil: Doing stupid things can have certain positive beneficial effects.

Things 72 (Art Special):

Flaubert: Art is born of restraint and dies of freedom

Things 87:

dragonfrog, commenting on this Boing Boing post: A quote from Bruce Schneier I think is applicable here: “If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems, and you don’t understand the technology.” If you leave out the word “security” I think it remains just as valid.

Pictures
As featured in Things 66 (not yet blogged), from LukeSurl.com:

As featured in Things 81, from Cowbirds in Love:

Finally, from Things 87, because this never gets old for me:

Open-ended Puzzles
1) In Things 71 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, which I posted in Things 72:

  • 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… and I’ve now read it, and have applied the principle of Mindfulness, which was its main point, to rather good effect. But that’s another story).
  • 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. (I since got a Smartphone via work, saving a lot of time with the DropBox and notepad apps, but wasting a lot of time with Angry Birds).
  • 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

2) In Things 77 at Angela’s suggestion I set the Trigger’s Broom / Theseus’ Ship problem. While there was some excellent discussion, which I summed up in Things 78, my favourite answer came from Laurence, which I posted in Things 79:

“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!)”

3) Reacting to a ridiculous news item on Free Will (URL broke, here’s the new one – T.M. 19/5/22), in Things 84 I asked:

given an arbitrary budget, and any science-fiction technology you care to imagine, how would you devise a test to see if Free Will exists? Feel free to use any definition of Free Will you think might be useful.

Again, there was some interesting discussion summarised in Things 85, but I had one preferred response, from Tarim:

I cannot think of ANY definition of Free Will.

Which I thought was a fair point.

Puzzles that had good answers that I didn’t know
Richard deserves a special mention for supplying quick, detailed and accurate answers to many puzzles where I had no idea what the answer was at the time I asked. Here’s my favourite three examples.

1) In Things 74 I asked why walk-in freezers have doors that cannot be opened from inside. Richard pointed out the answer is that actually, they generally don’t.

2) In Things 85 I asked about some very strange sequential spikes in searches for numbers on Google Trends:

As I posted in Things 86, Richard worked out that it must be people search for the latest fansubbed episodes of the anime series Bleach, which is pretty much confirmed by checking the search terms associated with these numbers over on Google Insights for Search.

3) The ear popping problem, as was posted in this very edition of Things.

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Things Special: Twitter week

Last week I was in the “Tweet Seat” for my workplace, @RAPP_UK

So in this week’s Things I’m compiling my tweets, and will give them some kind of review and additional context. This is mainly because 140 characters feels a bit like pointing at something and making a kind of grunting noise, when what I really want to do is sum up what’s interesting about the link and what my view is. Since this adds up to quite an intensive read, I’ve arbitrarily broken it up with some pictures I recently found online that I liked.

So, here’s the first tweet:

Tommy Pollata’s Collapsus.com looks cool, but as with other transmedia it’s hard to assess cost/benefit (i.e. time/quality) before diving in

I think this tweet falls between all stools – “looks cool” isn’t enough of an endorsement to go check something out, and there still weren’t really enough characters left to make my point properly. The point was, for something I’m familiar with like movies, I know exactly where to look to assess how good a movie will be (imdb, rotten tomatoes, lovefilm or youtube or filmcrave for trailer), I can easily find out the running time, and I know exactly what kind of commitment I need to make to watch it. For transmedia projects, ARGs and the like, none of this stuff is in place, meaning I have no idea if it will be good or not, and no idea what kind of commitment it will require.

@wireduk Cover story Kinect’s tech is smart, but if Amplification of Input (http://bit.ly/9nDhRc) = Fun, surely Bigger Input = Less Fun?

Thanks to Google Books I was able to link to the idea of “Amplification of Input”, and just about compressed my argument down to the character limit, but as a tweet it somewhat relies on the reader already knowing exactly what Kinect is. While there’s technically enough information in the tweet to help you find the online version of the article I’m talking about, it’s not convenient enough, besides which this is the internet, so mentioning something and not being able to make that mention a link seems ridiculous. I’d also add some caveats to my point, in that while Amplification of Input is one thing that makes games fun, there’s certainly plenty of others, many of which the Kinect could be good at, and I’m also keenly aware that DDR being more fun with a Dance Mat than a controller is a perfect counterargument.

‘People that read more books more likely to buy eReaders’, and other predictable but nice-to-know eReader stats, here: http://bit.ly/9SSgL7

My suitably pithy summary is actually a response to the article’s own bizarre misreading of the stats: “Digital reading has caused a shift in book reading and buying habits, too: While two in five Americans (40%) read 11 or more books a year, with one in five reading 21 or more books in a year (19%), 36% of those who own e-readers read 11 to 20 books a year (36%), and 26% read 21 or more books in an average year.” Sorry, no. The fact I was responding to this probably wouldn’t be clear if you read my tweet then read the article, which itself uses the much more reasonable header “Digital Readers Read More Books” before launching into that quote.

There Are 100 Million Female Cyborgs, one of many interesting musings on humans and technology mutually augmenting: http://bit.ly/b5oCbG

This was the first tweet I was pretty much happy with, encapsulating what I liked about the article with enough intrigue to provoke someone interested in that kind of thing into taking a look.

Digital technology continues to encroach on the supposed benefits of analogue versions: http://bit.ly/cslZUe

I experimentally tried removing all context for the link to make room for my view on it. The Bit.ly results showed this reduced the number of clicks (although whether 2 down from 6/7 is significant is up for debate). There could easily be people that read this but didn’t click who would have if I had made it clear that this was about a web-interface for viewing old paintings in incredible detail.

Here is a contextless link providing tacit endorsement of a news article about Science: http://bit.ly/cZLHVP

This link drew more clicks (8), although perhaps people were reading between the, er, words and understood what kind of a thing they were about to read. Fortunately I didn’t feel like providing much more than tacit endorsement, so this tweet just about worked.

Dorothy Gambrell’s Cat and Girl webcomic has a lot of great insights on trends (and many other areas of life): http://bit.ly/bvceXy

Not based on any moment-by-moment discovery, I just wanted to get a reference to Cat and Girl out there, using a reasonably recent addition. I guess it’s an okay tweet.

Randall Munroe updates his Online Communities map over on XKCD – this time using social activity for scale: http://bit.ly/cAqYO6

Tacit endorsement seemed like enough here, and I was happy to give a full citation – I’ve always found it strange when people post “someone has done this great thing” when it’s easy to find out who “someone” is. A weird personal case was someone commenting on one of my own YouTube videos saying “Whoever edited this should keep up the good work” – I’m right here! On the internet.

Doogie Horner categorises Facebook profile pictures on Fast Company, good thing I’m hidden behind a logo… http://bit.ly/dfHFZU

Sitting in a ‘tweet seat’ behind a brand is actually quite a strange experience. I avoided using the first person because that felt actively strange, but I suspect the real problem was I didn’t have any social cues for what the correct manner was, or even any real-time feedback on whether I was doing it right or wrong. But in any case, I knew I was at least somewhat hidden behind the logo, which I found interesting in itself.

@judell (O’Reilly) wants everyone to learn to pass by reference: http://oreil.ly/bCZkoE – I suspect DropBox will help.

This is an extremely dense tweet that needs several stages of unpacking. If ‘pass by reference’ doesn’t make any sense then you need to read the article, but if it doesn’t make any sense then perhaps you will be put off clicking on the link. To see how DropBox might help you need to be familiar with both that concept and the features of DropBox (which I won’t expand this huge post even further by elaborating on). Finally, the tweet originally started with ‘Jon Udell’, which I then realised looked a bit silly in a tweet about pass-by-reference – although making it “@judell” then turns it into a directed comment, which wasn’t what I really wanted to do. It’s ultimately an interesting feature of Twitter that there isn’t really a distinction between referencing someone and (effectively) saying their name while raising your voice and making meaningful eye-contact with them across the room.

The Nooski Mouse Trap – a better mouse trap, but also a smarter business model: http://bit.ly/d20sru

This tweet hits a lot of the buttons, I would just prefer to be able to link to the specific reference to  ‘a better mouse trap‘ as I’m saying it for those that haven’t heard the phrase before.

Facebook fix Groups, show app data, allow data export: http://on.fb.me/bHH3mL As usual, EFF has insightful commentary: http://bit.ly/9igUl4

It was fun to try to compress this into a single tweet, and linking to commentary from EFF means I don’t feel I need to add my own view, which was also useful because I didn’t have time to do more than scan through both articles at the time. Having subsequently read them both, I think the most interesting point is that the new groups functionality is a more accessible way of communicating with sub-sets of your friends, which seemed like something Zukerberg was ideologically opposed to doing.

Skype is on Android: http://bit.ly/aw5fXG Androids are on Skype (sort of): http://bit.ly/ds6J3A

It’s probably obvious that I was very pleased with this tweet. I found it interesting that it could not have occurred if I had insta-tweeted the Skype-on-Android news, as Twitter effectively incentivises people to do, since I only read the ‘Androids on Skype’ article later.

Find out if Libya is happy for you to click on this very link, by clicking on it: http://bit.ly/aqn6Ui

This was the most clicked-on link (at 11), perhaps because of the hint of interactivity. Perhaps it reads as something of a bait-and-switch, but I think it still has some validity. If you want to judge for yourself you’ll just have to click and see.

Most ideas are obvious in retrospect, but few more so than McDonalds getting a Farm on Farmville http://bit.ly/cQq9k3

This is a superficially well-formed tweet, but I would much rather have had the time to engage with the deeper questions raised by this kind of sponsorship – is it measurably beneficial for McDonalds? For Farmville? For Farmville players? What are the long-term implications of this? For now it will just have to sit as an example of some kind, waiting for others to join it, until I finally feel I have enough ammunition to look into the issue properly.

Audio zoom presumably means sports broadcasters will now be looking for real-time bleep censoring technology: http://bit.ly/ckuX25

Another tweet that takes a few leaps to process, but is hopefully clear… the technology presented allows one to ‘zoom in’ on the audio in a crowd, most obviously useful in the public sphere in big sports events, typically broadcast live, which would therefore need swear-words to be automatically bleeped. The public surveillance angle is actually more interesting to consider, but is too deep to get into in a tweet, or even here. So just… think about it.

Chrome pushes IE below 50% share in “promote it and they will come” shocker http://bit.ly/9uZJxT

More ‘reading between the words’ needed here to decode the reference and how it applies to this story. Since most are probably familiar with the quote (which is almost always misquoted, a fact I think is very interesting in itself), the remaining thing to add (that may be less obvious to people not watching these things) is that Google would build a lot of things and just see what happened, whereas they have recently begun to actively promote their products, the result apparently being that people are actually trying them. There’s a full blog post of material to unpack here, so I may one day revisit this point.


Tried the Playstation Move; could be Sony’s stalking horse for interactive AR – see blog post for my reasoning: http://bit.ly/c4Bj3z

This is a qualitatively different kind of tweet. I scraped together enough time to write a post on something, which means no ‘viewpoint’ is needed on the tweet, just some useful explanation along with the pointing finger. But what I found particularly interesting was that in the process of distilling down to 140 characters I actually came up with a better turn of phrase than two drafts of the original post had yielded – “stalking horse” is I think exactly right.

My tweet seat time is up, so I figured I’d take the opportunity to review and expand on my tweets: http://bit.ly/coWQkG

Well, here we are. And that was that.

igital reading has caused a shift in book reading and buying habits, too: While two in five Americans (40%) read 11 or more books a year, with one in five reading 21 or more books in a year (19%), 36% of those who own e-readers read 11 to 20 books a year (36%), and 26% read 21 or more books in an average year.

See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/b1uO5D
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Things Special: 10 Pictures Lacking Context

I was browsing my collection of internet images and noticed an interesting sub-category: Pictures Lacking Context.

Photos that beg the question”What is going on here?”, and sometimes also “How did this image come about?”

In many cases I wilfully excluded the original source of the image from the filename when I saved it just to preserve the mystery, since I rather like them in their unexplained form.

1) Press Button To Operate Donkeys.
A very clear and straightforward sign. Wait, what?

2) Competitive Whaling?
Maybe?

3) Bridge Out Ahead. Use Alternative Routes.
Even if this may seem relatively straightforward, you still have to ask – where is the photo being taken from?

4) Hitler Photoshop
Clearly. But why bother? What does it meeeeeeeeeeeean?

5) Ritual Raccoon Throwing
The weirdest thing is everyone is acting as if this is expected behaviour. Even the raccoon.

6) Man Chases Ducks. Also, Walks On Water.
Look at this man. Now look at yourself. You are sitting at a computer. He is running on water after ducks. Consider everything else you could be doing instead of this.

7) Performance Mining
Not only can we mine an incredible hole in the middle of a lake, we also build roads all around it for no reason. Aliens viewing this must think we are trying to communicate something.

8) We Made This
Or stopped it? Or found it perhaps? They do seem somehow proud of themselves. This is the only clue.

9) The Law of Attraction
If you collect enough chairs in one space, more chairs will inevitably be drawn there. Right?

10) The Original
The image that defined the genre. Of course, it’s actually clear what has happened in this case.

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Things Special: Edinburgh International Film Festival

I went to the Edinburgh International Film Festival and saw a whole bunch of films, which I enjoyed so much I am amazed it took me this long to work out that this is exactly the kind of thing I should do with holiday time.

Here’s my shortlist of the most interesting films that I saw. Some of these will see wider release in the near future, whereas others you will only hear of again in 13 years time when they pop up as a result of some Byzantine algorithm as a recommendation to you on some presently incomprehensible video-on-demand offering with a staggering range of content, at which point the title will sound very vaguely familiar to you and you will dimly remember the things about it which you are about to read here, and hopefully that will be enough to make you take the plunge. I hope you enjoy it.

Well, actually some of these are short animations which you can watch right now on the internet, so there’s a short term gain to reading the following too.

The Illusionist
What: Animated adaptation of an unmade Jaques Tati script by Silvain Chomet, the man behind Belleville Rendez-vous
Good: Superbly captures the beauty of Scotland in general and Edinburgh in particular, with sublime hand-drawn character animation and deft characterisation
Bad: Surprisingly loose in plot and fuzzy in storytelling
Conclusion: Absolutely worth your time for the visuals alone

Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHVG1JmbU30

Monsters
What: Low budget yet well-realised alien invasion as setting for semi-romantic road movie
Good: Beautifully shot, atmospheric, with an incredibly realistic-feel for its budget and a beautifully understated soundtrack from Jon Hopkins. And giant alien octopi.
Bad: Weakness in the development of the female character betrays a male gaze bias, undermining the main dynamic of the film
Conclusion: Essential viewing for anyone interested in what can be achieved on a budget, giant alien octopi, or Whitney Able’s legs

No trailer available, but this clip gives some clues to the look and feel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH9NswxZyAQ

[Update – Trailer now available, see below! – Tim 8/1/16]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmR-l3y_coo

Skeletons
What: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in reverse, but as a quirky-in-a-good-way British comedy
Good: A great idea fleshed out with wonderfully convincing yet unexplained details
Bad: Slightly odd in structure, as it does not entirely succeed in erasing all trace of its short-film origins
Conclusion: If you’ve ever moaned about sequels and remakes and a dearth of new ideas, this is exactly the kind of movie that you should be watching instead.

Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l-lf6auEYk

Mark
What: EIFF sum it up perfectly: “Touching portrait of a lost friend through footage gleaned from diverse sources.”
Good: A fascinating patchwork of home video footage, photos, interviews, and scenes from entirely different movies, that combine to form a strangely affecting portrait in a way conventional methods could never reach
Bad: The film-maker’s own relationship with the subject seems self-censored, slightly undermining the sense of insight and authenticity that pervades the film
Conclusion: Mysteriously only moved me to tears about an hour after leaving the cinema, even though I thought I’d stopped thinking about it. Worth a try just to see what it does to you.

No trailer or anything, but this is the website of the film’s creator:
http://www.mikehoolboom.com/r2/section_item.php?artist=255

The Secret In their Eyes
What: Past-and-present mystery detective story, also the biggest and purportedly best film ever to come out of Argentina
Good: Just about everything about it is of the highest order, with some directorial flair that raised the hairs on the back of my neck
Bad: Ultimately doesn’t quite satisfy, although it is possible that some key elements slipped between the cracks of translation
Conclusion: Any film with so many top-notch elements deserves your attention

Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CUj7kdW7IQ

Short Films and Animations

I saw four showings that curated short films and animations (mainly the latter), of which a few really stood out. I was particularly satisfied to see that digital technology now seems to be doing a brilliant job of getting out of the artist’s way and just helping them create something visually intriguing – for many of the shorts I couldn’t work out what animation technique had been used, which I consider to be a great thing.

Sarah Wickens’ “What Light (Through Yonder Window Breaks)”:
Animated in a way I’ve never seen before (actually the result of a combination of techniques elegantly disclosed in the credits at the end), watch this short extract and see if you can perceive the magic behind the movement:

Stewart Comrie’s “Battenberg”:
A short animated film seemingly applying stop-motion to taxidermy to create an incredibly atmospheric encounter between a magpie and a squirrel in a doll’s house. You can view a trailer here:
http://community.thisiscentralstation.com/_Battenberg-trailer/video/1111114/126249.html

David Lea and John Williams’ “Shadow Play”:
Shadow puppets combined with (what I presume must be) a digitally composed emulation of the multiplane camera creates a wonderful medium in which to tell a very silly story. You can watch the entire thing here, but from the way the site is designed I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to do so any more, so take a look now while you still can:
http://www.passion-pictures.com/flash.html#page=d23&video=v2189

Bill Plymptom’s “the Cow who wanted to be a Hamburger”:
A weird, garish, jerky animation style and a purely orchestral soundtrack combine in a surprisingly wonderful way to tell a story with the energy and joy of a six-year-old

Teaser:

Joanna Lurie’s “Silence Beneath the Bark”:
A great example of how far CG has come since The Adventures of André and Wally B, approaching the aesthetics of natural collage. You can view a trailer and if you like what you see in the first few seconds I recommend you click to ‘view le filme entier’, which unsurprisingly enables you to see the full 11 minute animation (click the picture to start):
http://www.joannalurie.com/

Marko Meštrović’s “No sleep won’t kill you”:
I can’t say I particularly understood or even enjoyed the experience of watching this, but it blew my mind in a way I won’t soon forget, and that’s something I like to experience. Watch the whole thing right here, if you can take it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbgxdIvXpo0

Jonas Odell’s “Tussilago”:
A variant on rotoscoping provides a distilled and and elegant way to present the harsh reality of finding yourself caught up in the kind of thing we usually only read about in the news.

Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcMObUK6m2I

[Update – Now fully available on Vimeo, see below! – Tim 8/1/16]

Angela Steffen’s “Lebensader”:
A wonderfully pure animated style, using digital tweening to achieve an amazingly smooth finish (I presume), which luckily enough you can view in its entirety right here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-3anKZyOz0

Logan’s “A VOLTA”:
Blew my mind in a similar way to Tussilago: not very nice (certainly NSFW), hard on the eye and the brain, but fascinating, impactful, and dream/nightmare-like. You can watch the whole thing (or a few seconds if you just want to understand what I’m attempting to communicate) over at Boing Boing:
http://boingboing.net/2009/06/09/bb-video-a-volta-fro.html

Finally, a couple of shorts I was very disappointed to find seem to be entirely absent from the world of internet video streaming:

Min Sung-ah’s “The Newly Coming Seasons”:
An animation in which every frame looks like a stunningly beautiful watercolour piece. You can at least see some screenshots here:
http://www.indiestory.com/English/html/indie_filmContent.asp?filmIdx=1066&filmCate=1&filmGenre=3&page=2&filmKeyword=&ordby=filmIdx

This review gets it exactly right:
http://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/reviews.php?film_id=18824

[Edit – You can now view this animation on Vimeo, hooray! – Tim 8/1/2016]

Finally, Rainer Gamsjäger’s “State of Flux – wave #1”:
What looks like a continuous pan in one direction across a barrage while the water alternately flows forward and backward, which is of course impossible. Instills a strange trance as the brain struggles to comprehend both the impossibility and the beauty of what it is seeing. You can at least see some screenshots to get a rough idea of it, but there is no substitute for the moving image, so if you ever have an opportunity to see it then do so. Or just wait for it to pop up out of nowhere in 13 years time.
http://rainergamsjaeger.com/?page_id=118

[Update – You can now watch a minute of it on Vimeo! – Tim 8/1/16]