Categories
Old

Thing 19: The Beginning of Time, Cat game, Animal Friendship

(Originally sent June 2008)

This week’s film – one line review
Wanted was an extraordinary hotch-potch of the ridiculous and the sublime, and I highly recommend it to anyone that liked the look of the trailers. Incidentally, it now has 71% on rotten tomatoes, and I can’t help noticing that WALL-E is on 98%, but we have to wait another 3 weeks for that.

My review of Wanted:

Next Week’s film
Hancock.

A comedy about what it would be like if someone with Superman-like powers was a degenerate reprobate played by Will Smith, which actually looks as if it could be a highly original kind of superhero story.

IMDb rating: 6.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 33%

A Puzzle
This week: philosophy.

One of the weirdest things about the universe is that it exists at all. Without even bringing God into it, either there was nothing and then suddenly it began, or something has been around (one way or another) forever, and neither of these two concepts seems plausible to our intuition. But in fact these are not the only two options. Can you think of any others?

A Quote
James Richardson: “The Man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be.”

A Link
A game involving cats:
http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/cats.htm

A video
A wild crow with “no known history of humanitarian benevolence” adopts a kitten:

A picture
Continuing the theme of cross-species friendship, an infra-red triggered camera set up to try to capture a picture of Bigfoot ended up capturing something even more bizarre – a raccoon riding on a wild hog:

All part, incidentally, of an ingenious marketing strategy by the makers of the camera:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/bushnell-bf/

Categories
New

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!)”

Categories
Old

Things 18: Layton Squares, Lesson Learned, IWIWAL

(Originally sent June 2008)

This week’s films – one line reviews
The Happening was a huge disappointment, anticlimactic in every way.
(My review: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_Mpa9ViwoMg)

The Incredible Hulk was impressive yet strangely forgettable.
(My review: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ltWgo9TXvKk)

Next Week’s film
Wanted. It looks like the standard Hero’s journey (ordinary guy discovers he is in fact the son of the world’s best assassin and must take up his mantle to protect Fate itself!!) with a great cast. This is my personal most anticipated movie of the year, since it is directed by Timur Bekmambetov, who directed my favourite movie of last year, Day Watch. He has an amazing talent for making the incredible look plausible, yet still awesome. I am seeing this at the first possible opportunity.

Fantastic teaser trailer featuring a single illustrative fragment of the film:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=oTRh66yvYpc [Video removed – this short teaser kind of does the job though – Tim 23/8/2010]

If that’s not enough for you, here’s the full trailer which probably has most of the awesome stuff in it.
IMDb rating: 7.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: n/a (It’s not being shown to critics?!) [Currently 71% – Tim 23/8/2010]

A Puzzle
In answer to last week’s “what comes next”: heaven.

This week: Professor Layton and the curious village is a puzzle game for the Nintendo DS, and my favourite puzzle in it is number 100. The challenge is to work out how to loop seven elastic bands around the pins in the board so that each one is held in the shape of a square, and no pin is used as a corner twice:

A Quote
Another baffling moment from my friend Nick:

Nick: Have you heard of the psychologist, Wasslavich?
Tim: No…
Nick: Neither have I.

A Link
A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible is the name of the webcomic, and each strip generally follows that theme and stands alone. It’s also mindblowingly insane and creative and I can’t just link to a single strip. So, depending on which opening line you like the most, take your pick:

“Dale, I owe the legendary ghosts of mafia bosses $80,000!”
http://www.alessonislearned.com/index.php?comic=20

“Caroline’s doppelganger is crying again.”
http://www.alessonislearned.com/index.php?comic=37

“The universe was so ashamed that you slept late, it is shrivelling into a raisin.”
http://www.alessonislearned.com/index.php?comic=31

A video
I can’t understand why I haven’t linked to this video before. It’s an excellent example of the “Anime Music Video” (AMV) format, in which scenes from anime are ingeniously edited to create a video for a song, in this case the brilliant “I wish I was a lesbian”:

A picture
The surprisingly rarely seen true scale version of the London underground. The stylised version we are familiar with is actually an incredible triumph of marketing that turned around the fortunes of the tube.

Categories
Old

Things 17: Semiotic Blancmange, Change Blindness, Me

This week’s film – one line review
Mongol was bizarrely repetitive and dramatically failed to chart the rise of Genghis Khan as it had promised.

Next Week’s films
I’m going to see The Happening (because I like “everyone’s gone” films) and then The Incredible Hulk (because superhero movies are modern fairy tales) immediately afterwards, bringing the number of films I have seen this month to a total of 5. If interesting films continue to come out I may beat my personal best of 7 in a month, averaging £1.71 with the Cineworld Unlimited card. Woohoo!

The Happening
There are so many trailers for this that I think I’ve put together everything, but here’s a good one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxMLvh4Tb6g [gone, oh well – T.M. 7/11/14]
IMDb rating: 6.8
Rotten tomatoes rating: 11%!!

The Incredible Hulk
Trailer that seems to sum up the entire movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7a5LcTckfg
IMDb rating: n/a
Rotten tomatoes rating: 71%

Last Week’s Puzzle
The two main differences between memes and genes that we identified were that memes never really ‘die’ so can produce offspring indefinitely afterwards (note for example that many email scams were in existence in letter form over a century ago); but also that they actually evolve by Lamarckian evolution rather than Darwinian:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckian

This Week’s Puzzle
What comes next?
person, fiddle, degree, estate, column, sense, ?, …

A Quote
The descriptions in Photoshop Disasters are often very well written.

“By renormalizing the model’s waistline, Maxim Mexico takes a bold socio-political stance in the ongoing battle of the politics of representation, clearly referencing the oppressive reification of male-gaze heteronormative modes of synthesis in a semiotic blancmange of post-structural teakettle barbecue hatstand fishmonger.”

A Link
To continue the illusion theme, I encourage you to try out this excellent java application demonstrating the incredible effect of change blindness.

Two images cycle with a flash between them: the challenge is to spot what is different between the two images. When you give up, right-click on the image and set the ‘delay’ to be shorter – when you get down to ‘no gap’, the change becomes completely obvious. Then use the right click menu to reset the gap length to a challenging amount (very important – if you watch a different image with ‘no gap’ the difference will be obvious and you can never un-see it), then try a different image.

If anything, this is more incredible than the video last week.

http://www.usd.edu/psyc301/Rensink.htm
Link no longer works – try this instead: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/download/

A video
I linked to Captain Disillusion explaining the ‘guy catches glasses on face’ video on the Living In A Digital World blog. Because I think he’s so great, here it is again:

A picture
Something a bit different this week – instead of something I found online, a picture of me and my parents.