Tag: comic

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Things 93: Wormworld Saga, Newton and Pascal, Idiots and Maniacs

Link
If you like webcomics, or just enjoy seeing examples of excellent use of light in digital paintings, do check out the first chapter of Wormworld Saga.

Joke
Einstein, Newton and Pascal decide to play hide and seek. Einstein is it, closes his eyes, counts to 10 then opens them. Pascal is no where to be seen. Newton is sitting right in front of Einstein, with a piece of chalk in his hand. He’s sitting in a box drawn on the ground, a meter to a side. Einstein says “Newton, you’re terrible, I’ve found you!” Newton says “No no, Einy. You’ve found one Newton per square meter. You’ve found Pascal.”

Puzzle
This sprang out of the discussion on language pedantry last week on the RAPP CC list.

In “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” Lynne Truss makes the following observation:

Yes, as Evelyn Waugh wrote: “Everyone has always regarded any usage but his own as either barbarous or pedantic.” Or, as Kingsley Amis put it less delicately in his book The King’s English (1997), the world or grammar is divided into “berks and wankers” – berks being those that are outrageously slipshod about language, and wankers those who are (in our view) abhorrently over-precise.

A similar observation in a different field is attributed to George Carlin:

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?

It seems to me that grammatical precision and driving speed fall into a very particular category of behavioural spectra in which we seem to be highly critical of others who vary from our own view in one direction or the other, even slightly. Other examples I’ve observed being described in a similar way and heard people comment on with varying degrees of politeness are alcohol consumption, smartness of dress, household cleanliness, and various aspects of personal hygiene.

The question is, what is it about these behaviours that makes us so sensitive to differences?

Picture
I’m not at all sure this diagram works fully, but I like it a lot anyway:

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Things 91: Dresden Codak, i.e., Paths of Flight

Link
In Things 48 (not yet blogged) I linked to an Aaron Diaz’s Dresden Codak update featuring 42 sharply observed 3rd-act plot twists, but recently realised that this may have misrepresented his work, which instead usually consists of astonishingly deft single-page stories revolving around simple but brilliant ideas.

Here’s 3 of my favourites to give you a much better idea of Diaz’s oeuvre:

Lantern Season:

Fabulous Prizes:

Girl vs Bear:

His blog on comic art theory is also well worth checking out if you are remotely interested in the art form.

Quote
During a characteristically interesting and varied conversation with Adam a few days ago, he suddenly revealed the following:

That reminds me of a really interesting thing I read in the Metro today – something like: 30,000 people… something. I can’t remember what it was, but it was really amazing.

Question
Sometimes I want to ask things in Things that are even more obviously not what people might call Puzzles than usual, so in these cases I’m going to be more direct and call a question a Question. So here is a Question.

When it comes to arguments about the English Language I tend to side with the people saying “most people say it this way so that’s now correct” against those saying “this is the way some Victorian guy wrote in a book that it should be said so everyone doing otherwise is wrong”, but I do admit that some distinctions are worth holding against a tide of misuse, one example being that I would correct instances of “i.e.” and “e.g.” being used in one another’s stead where polite and possible.

Fortunately, this didn’t come up very often.

Then in 2010 something terrible happened. About 95% of all instances of “i.e.” that I read were incorrect and should have been “e.g.”, which is particularly silly as it reads as if the author believes a set of many elements (e.g. social networks) consists of only one (e.g. “i.e. Facebook”).

So my question is this: have you also noticed such a sudden rise in “i.e.” misuse, or have I just been unlucky and/or suffered from confirmation bias?

Video
A while ago I realised you could collage time lapse photography of a flight path to obtain an image of a string of planes; I then realised you could do the same thing with video, but recognised that this was beyond my means to produce. Conveniently, GE have now done this:

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Things 87: Hacked Kinect, Technology vs Poverty, Robot Kid

Video
Now that the Xbox Kinect is out, people are playing with it (a $3,000 prize was offered for the first person to provide an open source driver, and it’s gone crazy from there) and doing a lot of cool stuff. Here’s my favourite so far (stick with it to 42′ when crazy stuff starts happening):

Link
Can technology end poverty? An article by Kentaro Toyama, a man with years of experience in the field, points out that:

“Technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute.”

Since people in developed nations already have a great deal of intent and capacity, we tend to overestimate the absolute benefit of technology and get overexcited about the field of Information and Communication Technologies for Development, which ultimately fails to deliver on its promise. Well worth a read.

Quote
In relation to the above article, over on BoingBoing, commenter dragonfrog observes:

A quote from Bruce Schneier I think is applicable here:

“If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems, and you don’t understand the technology.”

If you leave out the word “security” I think it remains just as valid.”

Puzzle
15 years ago I was playing Tomb Raider (the 21st game I ever completed, according to my records. Current count: 103. More on that later). Years later, I read one of Jollyjack’s observational-comedy-style ‘How To Play’ comics on DeviantArt, and while all his observations strike home, one thing in particular was unexpected:

This was something I did frequently, without really knowing why, and some of the comments said the same.

The question is, why do people playing Tomb Raider (and no other game that I’m aware of) feel driven to do this?

Picture
If I was a parent and I could make this kind of thing come about, I definitely would:

Tim Link
The above image is the first one I posted to a new Tumblr I’ve created to queue up images to draw every day, Now Draw This. My attempts then appear on Sleep or Draw. As mentioned in Things 84, I’m mainly saying this here to reinforce my perceived obligation to stick to the schedule, which seems to be working so far.

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Things 25: Dead Fantasy, People Bucket, Oh No Pigeons

(Originally sent August 2008)

This week’s film
Clone Wars was terrible as a film, but it could be okay when it comes out as a kids’ TV series this autumn.

Next Week’s film
I keep going to American comedies and regretting it, but I think there may be something in Get Smart. I particularly like the ‘neither of us is dead’ bit from the start of the trailer:
Trailer: http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=YJIAdF8SY2M
Imdb: 7.3
Rotten Tomatoes: 52%

A Puzzle
You would expect the abilities of humans to remain about the same over 100 years, and Olympic records to be broken at an ever slower rate. But this is not the case – it seems as if the athletes of one decade are generally better than those of the previous. Why is this?

Last week’s puzzle came from here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041127085423/http://fermat.ma.rhul.ac.uk/laurence/puzzles.html
(Dug out from the archive because it used to be hosted on a secret machine we had hidden in the maths department to act as a file sharing facilitator, which was eventually rumbled)

[Now mirrored here – T.M. 18/10/10]

A video (highlight of this week’s things!)
I like extreme things, things people have created where they haven’t let themselves be burdened by what’s been done before, or what people expect, or what makes sense. This is why I like films like Speed Racer and Day Watch.

And things like “Dead Fantasy I”, where one guy has used his favourite female character models from the games Final Fantasy and Dead or Alive and choreographed the most insane battle royale imaginable. Watch nice quality version over on Game Trailers, or just see this YouTube version if you’re impatient:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5v0_TjBxY8 (both links died, try this link instead – T.M. 17/5/22)

If you liked that, look for “Dead Fantasy II” which, somewhat unbelievably, is even more extreme.

A link
‘People bucket‘ is a silly fun little game in which you throw people into a bucket, found on one of the sites that is linking people to Talking pets.

A quote
Julia, earlier this week: “I believe in doing everything in moderation. Except cigarettes or alcohol.”

A picture
A comic from ‘Pictures for sad children’, for anyone that has ever been saddened by seeing one pigeon hassling another (mirrored here if that link breaks).

(You can now buy the t-shirt).

I also recommend the sequence on “how nerds destroy the world”, which begins here. (For context, the main guy is a ghost who has regrets and is destroying the technological gadgets he feel he wasted his life on)