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Things 102: Bionic Cat Ears, Brilliant Journalism, Drawable Monsters

This Week’s Puzzle
I have a Tumblr on which I post daily things to draw, called Now Draw This. I really want to make sure I credit the relevant artist when I post a piece of artwork. (I should do that with the photos too, but for various reasons that’s not as important to me).

TinEye is an awesome reverse image search engine, which in the past has helped me track down artwork even when the version I had turned out to have had the colour palette significantly edited. Pretty clever.

The problem is, this site posted the above image (of Ico and Yorda from the game Ico), and neither TinEye nor wily Googling is helping me track down the original artist.

Can you find out who created the above image originally?

Video
Technology expands the range of things we can do. As a society we try to keep up by generating some kind of idea of what we should do. For example, mobile phones enabled us to use ostentatious ringtones. For a while they were everywhere. Now, it seems we’ve collectively decided that’s not such a good idea.

So here’s something I hadn’t even considered: what if you could collect some kind of real-time usually-invisible data about yourself, and then manifest it with a clear physical signal? Would that ever be a good idea?

Link
Michael Lewis writes long articles on complex but important topics, that are nonetheless incredibly engaging, thus creating pretty much optimal long-form journalistic pieces. I highly recommend that you make time for his article Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds (which I thought I’d linked to before but can’t find in my records), and if you like that then you should also read When Irish Eyes Are Crying.

Quote
Joe Cornish, director of Attack the Block, interviewed by Little White Lies:

If you look at a lot of the digital creatures in Harry Potter, you couldn’t go home and sketch them – you’d need a draughtsman’s degree. […] The charm is to go home and feel that it’s possible to figure out how they did it. When I was a kid, I’d go and see Ghostbusters and spend the next day trying to draw the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, or trying to get the logo right. They had a graphic simplicity that was much more infectious and warm and authored than a lot of the stuff now.”

I had the same childhood experience, and I think it’s a really fun rubric. Attack the Block‘s creature design succeeded in exactly that way.

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked what the purpose was of this insect-eye mirror I saw on the ceiling in a bank in Vienna, but nobody hazarded a guess.

You can tell from the shadow that there’s a bright spotlight pointed at the mirror, so my hypothesis was that it was some kind of way to generate a bright, ambient light throughout the room. But it seems like overkill / overdesign if that’s the goal. And why would you want to have a diffuse, shadowless light that badly anyway? I like to imagine, completely baselessly, that there’s a local superstition about some kind of money-stealing creature that inhabits shadows. But if you can think of something more plausible, do let me know.

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Things 44: Celebrations Results, Cat vs Squirrel, Procrastination Flowchart

(Originally sent April 2009)

Movies
This week I chose to see a film with Nicolas Cage in it instead of Slumdog Millionaire at the cinema, and I did not regret it. Insane big-budget B-movies like Knowing are the best thing to see on a big screen.

My review:

Blog
A rare event – I updated my blog, with the results from my Celebrations experiment.

Link
A reference for April Fool’s websites in 2009.

Quote
As referenced by my flatmate in the review of Knowing – Donald Rumsfeld, 2003, making a good point badly:

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Followed up by:

“I believe what I said yesterday. I don’t know what I said, but I know what I think… and I assume it’s what I said.”

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked about the 3rd most abundant element in the universe – it turns out to be Oxygen.

Puzzle
This week: a puzzle I don’t think I am quite able to set with sufficient precision, but will try anyway. You can buy some things in packets/tins/boxes and they list the number of items they contain, such as 6 eggs, 12 spoons, 52 playing cards. With a budget of £5, what would you buy to get the largest possible value for this number?

Video
Squirrel vs cat:

Picture
A procrastination flow chart (click for big):

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Things 38: Cat Lift, 999 transcripts, Atheist Paradox

(Originally sent January 2009)

A Video
Whenever people talk about not being able to keep a cat because they live in a flat with no ground floor access, the same idea always pops into my head. Here’s a video of someone actually doing that idea:

A link
Transcripts and audio of incredible 999 calls:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/nov/29/unpublished-999-call-transcripts

A quote, or rather, a Latin saying
“de gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum”

– “There’s no arguing about tastes and colours.”

A puzzle
Last week I asked about the Paradox of Value. Wikipedia covers it rather well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value

This week, it’s time for another Paradox:

The Atheist’s Paradox
1) DNA is not merely a molecule with a pattern; it is a code, a language, and an information storage mechanism.
2) All codes are created by a conscious mind; there is no natural process known to science that creates coded information.
3) Therefore DNA was designed by a mind.

It’s supposed to be a paradox in the sense that an Atheist is unable to refute the logic but also unable to accept that DNA was designed. My question is of course: what is wrong with this argument?

A picture
Although it’s a bit against the spirit I intended for Things, I am forced to link to the same site as last week, since the Big Picture has a marvellous satellite shot of this week’s big inauguration:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/01/the_inauguration_of_president.html

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Things 37: Ideas of 2008, Centripetal Hamster, Pictures of 2008

(Originally sent January 2009)

It’s 2009. Time for some Things.

A quote
Richard Feynman:

“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”

A link
NY Times ideas of 2008, presented in a fascinatingly browseable format: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/12/14/magazine/2008_IDEAS.html#w-ideas-3

A video
Hamster demonstrates centripetal force:

A puzzle
Last time I asked if there were more households with dogs or with cats.

According to the data available to me (which covers the UK excluding Northern Ireland), 23.1% of UK households have 1 or more dogs, and 23.2% have one or more cats. So the answer is cats, but by an almost unbelievably small margin.

(6.1% of households have 1 or more cats and 1 or more dogs; there are about 14.7 million dogs and 17.7 million cats).

This week’s puzzle is a classic: the paradox of value.

Water is generally much more useful than diamonds, yet diamonds are more expensive by a gargantuan factor. Why is this?

Pictures
The Boston Globe ‘Big Picture’ section always does the best round-up of a year’s photos. Three pages of amazing images start here:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/the_year_2008_in_photographs_p.html