Tag: advertising

Categories
Old

Things 28: Shampoo Theories, Cat Heaven, Large Hadron Collider,

(Originally sent September 2008)

Films
If I have time, I may watch Pineapple Express, because a collision between a stoner flick and an action adventure movie sounds very silly.

IMDb: 7.8/10
RT: 70%

Last week’s puzzle
Why does shampoo become less effective with use?

I received some answers to this, and it seems there are two main theories.

1) The hair/scalp adapts to the chemicals and starts to resist them

2) Shampoo residue builds up over time

I then put these questions to the yahoo answers community through my secret research alter-ego.

The fact that hair is ‘dead’ would seem to deny theory 1) to me. In The Week I read that the biggest mistake made by people washing their hair is that they don’t rinse it enough, and you should rinse it for about twice as long as you expect. This would seem to endorse 2), but having tried this myself for the past 2 months I found the problem persists.

Mystery status: unsolved
This week’s puzzle
Why are some people photogenic and some not? In other words, why do people look different in photos to real life?

A video:
Cat heaven, including peaceful co-existence with dogs:
Cats on the kings:

A link or 3
There has been much talk about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and whether or not it will end the world. Someone has helpfully created this page:
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
View the source code to see how the site works.

However, there is an interesting development – it seems the site does not really work:
http://gist.github.com/9810

Meanwhile everyone can keep an eye on the experiment for themselves from these webcams:
http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

A quote
A wonderfully true and melancholic song title from the Future Sound of London:
“Everyone in the world is doing something without me”

A picture
The big challenge when designing shop window advertising is to somehow get people to stop walking by and actually come into your shop and buy something. See a copywriter’s innovative answer to this problem in the image attached. (Photo taken between WWAV and Hammersmith tube)

Categories
New

Things 86: Better Train Journey, AI vs Car Insurance, Underwater Sculpture

Video
I see quite a few videos of ‘what the future will look like’, and most of the time I find them to be unconvincing. However, this view of how a simple train journey could be improved with some simple interface / screen / disposable printing ideas  seems much more sensible:

Link
Steven Steinberg has some really excellent musings on the plausible future of weak AI – including its effect on the car insurance industry, which is much more interesting than it sounds. Long, but well worth preloading on your smartphone to read on the tube, or however you fit long-form content into your life these days.

Quote
I was doing a bit of ego searching when I came across a quote from me two years in the past, which I had completely forgotten and perhaps unsurprisingly found very appealing. Under this photo I had uploaded to Flickr:

I respond to a comment and made this irrational leap of logic:

“It is in all artists’ best interests to work in the field of robotics.”

Picture
I remember reading about these underwater sculptures a long time ago. Placed in 2006, this 2009 gallery shows how the ocean has made some really great aesthetic enhancements.

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked about some very strange sequential spikes in searches for numbers on Google Trends. 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.

Another mystery solved!

Categories
Old

Things 13: Mirrors, Chronotron, Animal Crossing Comic

(Originally sent May 2008)

This week’s film – one line review
Iron Man was very well put together, with great screen presence from Robert Downey Jr and Jeff Bridges, but to me it didn’t seem as amazing as everyone makes out, and I don’t think non-genre or non-Downey fans need to see it.

Next week’s film
I’m going to see Speed Racer sitting in the front row with my brain switched off and my eyes wide open.

IMDb rating: 6.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 33%
Trailer:

A Puzzle
Why do mirrors reflect left and right but not up and down?

This is actually a surprisingly deep question.

Hint: The question still stands if you’re looking at the mirror in space.

A Quote
The best quip I have ever made.

My flatmate Ross was elected the new president of the juggling society. He was suggesting that we should club together to get some kind of leaving gift for the outgoing president. With frankly uncharacteristic wit and speed, I replied

“You just want to set a precedent of giving a present to the president.”

A Link
As pointed out to me by Simon, Chronotron is a flash game in which you solve puzzles by going back in time in a tardis and interacting with your past self:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Scarybug/chronotron

A video
My favourite ad right now is for the VW Golf, in which car footage is edited together to create music:

A picture
‘Animal Crossing’ is a game in which you look after a village of animals that live together. Time keeps passing in the village even when you are not playing, so if you don’t play for a while then it tends to get overgrown with weeds and so on.

Anyway, this led to the true story that is told in this surprisingly moving comic – click to read it in full.