Tag: answer

Old

Things 17: Semiotic Blancmange, Change Blindness, Me

Post author By metatim
Post date August 24, 2010
1 Comment on 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.

Tags answer, evolution, film, illusion, photoshop, puzzle, tim, video

New

Things 75: Fast robots, Inception links, Buses

Post author By metatim
Post date July 30, 2010

Video
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.

Quote
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…

Tags answer, art, film, puzzle, robot, video

New

Things 74: Swing, Freezer Door, Carnist Bingo

Post author By metatim
Post date July 23, 2010
2 Comments on Things 74: Swing, Freezer Door, Carnist Bingo

Link
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?

Picture
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?

Tags answer, debate, ethics, music, puzzle

Old

Things 12: Gender Parity, Violet Outbreak, Analemma

Post author By metatim
Post date June 22, 2010

(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:

(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