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Things 12: Gender Parity, Violet Outbreak, Analemma

(Originally sent May 2008)

This week’s film – one line review
I felt Persepolis made excellent use of the animated medium, making very effective use of distorting reality to a stronger effect, and although the beginning and the end were inconsistently paced it still had a very compelling overall message.

Next week’s films
I’m going to see Iron Man at the weekend, because it sounds very much as if the mythic power of a superhero story is being leveraged correctly for once.

IMDb rating: 8.3/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 96%!!

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIFaeqwES1Y

Video from The Onion making a hilariously over-the-top philosophical point about fan expectations:


Wildly Popular ‘Iron Man’ Trailer To Be Adapted Into Full-Length Film

(also notice how advertising visibility is rising to meet the bandwidth demands of online video)

A Puzzle
Last week I asked why mammals are 50% male and 50% female. I’ll give you this one as although it took me many years to fathom, I think it’s an important example for better understanding evolution.

If any one sex occurs less than 50% of the time, because of pair-bonding in mammals those born that sex will have a reproductive advantage, while the others will have a reproductive disadvantage. As a result, a given organism will have a better chance of reproducing its genes by producing offspring of the minority sex. This creates an evolutionary pressure to increase the percentage of the smaller group, making 50% the only stable point.

Just to complete this thread, this week’s puzzle is to explain the deviations from gender parity (here represented by 100) in the following history and forecast from the UN’s fascinating website

UN World data:
Year Sex ratio
1950 99.8
1955 99.9
1960 100.2
1965 100.5
1970 100.8
1975 101.2
1980 101.3
1985 101.5
1990 101.7
1995 101.7
2000 101.7
2005 101.6
2010 101.5
2015 101.4
2020 101.2
2025 101.1
2030 100.9
2035 100.6
2040 100.4
2045 100.2
2050 100

A Quote
Nick, another of my friends with a reputation for mangling metaphors:

“Ah, he’s on thin ground there.”

A Link
Alan Moore’s “Outbreak of Violets”:

http://glycon.livejournal.com/6586.html

with missing card backs at:

http://comicbookresources.com/news/preview2.php?image=litg/2008/0428/img030.jpg

A video
Someone found the perfect soundtrack for those crazy Tube Men (takes about 30 seconds to kick off properly):

A picture
An analemma:

More detail here: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap071002.html

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Things 11: Video Store Clerk, Theremin Cat, Ambigram

(Originally sent April 2008)

This week’s film – one line review
Forgetting Sarah Marshall veered too far away from that interesting brand of comedy I liked in Superbad toward boring old-school stand-up sexist tripe.

Next week’s film
Well, we’re going to see Persepolis on May 1st, aren’t we.

A Puzzle
If you were designing mammals for optimal reproduction capacity, you might think it would be more efficient to arrange for there to be more females than males. But in fact it’s more like 50/50. Why is that this remarkably equal ratio has evovled?

A Quote
This quote sounds profound but I don’t understand it:

William Blake: No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

A Link
Video Store Clerk, the game. Guess how real customers rated movies. Strangely compelling.
http://www.videostoreclerk.com/

A video
A cat playing with a theremin:

A picture
An ambigram.

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Things 10: 100 Scientists, Paranormal, Laika

(Originally sent April 2008)

This week’s film – one line review
Happy-Go-Lucky was a film about an optimistic nutter, her crazy friends and family, and an intense conspiracy-theorist driving instructor. It wasn’t really much more than these people interacting, but that was very entertaining nonetheless.

Next week’s film
Next week I plan to catch the preview of Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Imdb rating: 8.1 /10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 83%

Trailer: FilmCrave seems to fill the niche I’ve been looking for of a film database with easy access to trailers:
http://www.filmcrave.com/movie_page_main.php?id=25468

The trailer doesn’t look entirely convincing to me, but it’s the guys that did Superbad and Knocked Up, and 8.1 and 83% are impressive figures, so that convinces me.

A Puzzle

It’s a serious one this time!

A mad dictator has his team of 100 scientists build him a superweapon. Having completed the task, he decides to kill them all, but his advisor convinces him to instead use the following method of killing, which will permit some to survive:

The 100 are to form a line, one behind the other, so the scientist at the back can see the 99 in front of him, the next scientist can see 98 but not the one behind, and so on. The dictator has 100 black hats and 100 white hats; he will go to each scientist in turn, flip a coin, and use the result to determine which hat they get. Each scientist cannot see which hat he gets, but can see all those in front of him.

The dictator will then take a gun, and starting with the scientist at the back, ask him to guess whether he has a black or a white hat on his head. If the scientist does anything other than say ‘black’ or ‘white’ in a monotone voice, he will be killed. If he is wrong, he will be killed. If he is right, he goes free. The dictator will then go to the next scientist in line and repeat the process all the way to the front of the line.

The advisor tells the scientists that this will happen in advance, so they are able to prepare some kind of strategy.

What strategy could they devise that would allow the most to survive?

A Quote
Me: Wow, this compilation has the Beach Boys on it!
My sister: What are they doing on there?!
Me: God Only Knows.

A Link
I’ve always been interested in the paranormal – both how it suggests there exist things we still can’t explain, and also the way people delude themselves into misinterpreting things. Just browsing this forum is absolutely incredible:
http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/

A video
The music video of one of my favourite tracks tells a dramatised version of the story of Laika, the dog that the Russians sent into orbit. The dog sings and the scientists dance. Brilliant!

A picture
The fun you can have attaching balloons to your car:

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Things 9: Statistics Art, Dramatic Prairie Dog, Flag Diagrams

(Originally sent April 2008)

It’s the return of Things!

This week’s film – one line review:
Last night I saw Son of Rambow, which was kind of Beano-like, over the top, strange, and put together with more heart than writing competence much like the film-within-a-film it portrays, and fortunately heart is the most important aspect of a film, so that was rather good.

Next week’s films:
Next week I plan to catch the preview of Happy-Go-Lucky. It’s a film about the power of optimism by Mike Leigh, and Mark Kermode was enthusing about it, so it sounds well worth seeing.

Imdb rating: 8.6 /10 (from 87 votes)
Rotten Tomatoes rating:  N/A (insufficient data)
[Now gets 92% on RT – metatim, 16/5/10]
Clip : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqTlFY84yYU
[Link is dead, I think this is the same one though – metatim, 16/5/10]

The clip doesn’t seem terribly demonstrative given what Kermode was going on about, but it’s the best I could find.

A Puzzle:
In the last Things I left you with the rainbow paradox. I don’t have an answer but I saw a diagram once of the colours the human eye perceives separated by how distinct we perceive them to be, that looked like a clue. If I find it then I’ll use it as the image attachment of a Things one day. [That diagram can be found here, from this Wikipedia article on colour vision – metatim, 16/5/10]

This week: If there are 3 people in a room, what is the probability that at least 2 of them are of the same sex?

A Quote:
Federico García Lorca: The iguana will bite he who does not dream.

A Link:
Chris Jordan has a series called ‘running the numbers’, in which he takes amazing statistics and makes art out of them:
http://www.chrisjordan.com/

A video:
This 5-second video was big in June 2007 but I somehow missed it. It’s an internet classic and it is vital that you see it with sound:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHjFxJVeCQs

A picture:
Below is an image which, like Chris Jordan’s art, also presents statistics in an interesting way.