Tag: data

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Things 46: Miniatur Wunderland, Map of Remoteness, Door Considerations

(Originally sent April 2009)

Video
Brought to my attention by Richard, the official corporate video of ‘Miniatur Wunderland’, the largest model railway in the world, complete with earnest German-accented voice-over:

Link
An article on New Scientist with some great images showing the extent of rail, road and river networks across the globe, and the resultant ‘remoteness’ score for any given location.

Quote
I’ve mentioned this quote in conversation about three times in the last two weeks so it’s evidently topical:

Don Marquis: “The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race”

Puzzle
Last week I asked why front doors open outwards. If there can be said to be one true ‘reason’, it is that there are many reasons for it to be this way round and only one for it to be the other:

– Practicality. A common situation is for one person to be opening the door for another from the inside. It’s safer to have it open towards the person doing the opening.

– Security. If the hinges are on the outside they are more easily removed. It’s cheaper to have the door open inwards if you want to have the hinges inside.

– Weather. The hinges (see above) and interior of the door will tend to be less exposed to the elements if the door opens inwards.

– Defensibility. It’s easier (that is to say, actually possible) to defend against a potential intruder by barricading a door that opens inwards.

The only reason I’ve heard for going the other way is for safety in case of a panic evacuation, where people are likely to be pushing against whoever is first to the door. This trumps the other reasons when it comes to large public venues, but is not significant in an ordinary home.

This week’s puzzle
A great way to motivate oneself to do something (such as housework or a hobby, say) is to set an achievable time-based goal that can easily become part of a routine, like doing it once a day, or once a week. For example, I frequently intend to start a draw-once-a-day routine, and send Things almost weekly; others have similar goals for photography, or blogging.

The problem is, there’s a ridiculously huge difference between ‘every day’ and ‘once a week’. What possible strategy could one use that is somewhere between these two extremes?

Picture
It’s not explained very well, but apparently the European Space Agency’s “Environmental Satellite” can use radar to detect changes in the Earth’s surface with millimetre accuracy. In this way, images from before and after the recent L’Aquila earthquake in Italy can be compared to track how the ground has been shifted. It’s a pretty fascinating visualisation.

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New

Things 97: Vertical Ship, Climbing Game, State of 3D

Video
A brilliant solution to the problem of stability at sea:

Link
GIRP, a really nice little climbing game (probably easier to get to grips with if you know from the start that feet are not involved).

Quote
Chris Lake, in his self-referential post 10 Reasons Why List Based Posts Work Well Online, makes the key point:

We are all cognitive misers

Question
What is the oldest evidence of your own activity on the internet you can still provide a live link to now?

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked if it was true what they say, that 3D can never work. I think there are two compelling clues towards an answer here.

First, Box Office Quant takes a good solid look at what the money in 3D cinema is looking like. The conclusion is that after two years of 3D cinema being a serious consideration, it’s looking pretty solid. There’s lot of great data and visualisation of it over on the original post, but I’ll just reproduce the weekly revenues by dimension here:

It’s clear that something is working, anyway.

On the other hand, there was this development with Nintendo’s autostereoscopic 3DS by its producer Hideki Konno:

“We want to get software out to as many people as possible, and there are some people who just can’t see 3D […] We’re moving away from any stance that says if you don’t use the 3-D functionality you can’t play this game.”

While I’m yet to see some solid data, the picture that seems to be emerging is that a significant minority (10%?) really do have an issue with the convergence/focus conflict that Walter Merch identified (and which is, incidentally, the underlying science behind the apparent paradox highlighted in this XKCD), to the point that watching a full-length 3D movie or spending a significant time playing a 3D game is an uncomfortable experience for them. Naturally there’s also a small proportion of people that for various reasons do not perceive 3D in real life, for whom a 3D film/game has nothing to offer above a 2D one (and I suspect they are being used as a kind of smoke-screen to hide the bigger concerns about the former group in Hideki Konno’s quote above).

It seems that minority is small enough that 3D cinema revenue remains robust, but large enough that Nintendo don’t want to undermine their universal appeal by allowing 3D to be a barrier to participation.

Incidentally, I find it an incredible sign of the times that we now have three dimensional full-colour moving image experiences at a fully commercial scale, which is really quite an amazingly neat trick, and yet so many people I’ve spoken to seem to feel it’s not particularly worth having. Or in Louis CK’s words, “Everything is amazing right now, and nobody’s happy”:

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Things 95: Modern Movies, How to be Happy, Mouse Mystery

Video
A beautiful demonstration of physics (or perhaps chemistry):

Quote
Scott Rudin, quoted in this GQ article about why movies are all rubbish these days:

Studios are hardwired not to bet on execution, and the terrible thing is, they’re right. Because in terms of execution, most movies disappoint.

Incidentally, while there’s clearly a huge argument to be had about the relevance of the data to the argument, let’s just contextualise the “things are terrible now” discussion by looking at the breakdown of what proportion of pre-2010 films in the IMDb top 250 come from each decade:

We see a broad trend that is the opposite of the “films used to be better” argument, apart from a post-war spike.

As I said, this is a starting point for huge arguments, and if I was going to start one I would begin with one of the following:
-Any popularity poll will tend to bias more recent candidates
-Demographic bias of IMDb voters and the scoring calculation used for the IMDb Top 250 will skew the result away from the “Objective Truth” (ha ha ha) of the matter
-This data does not speak to the more important issue of ‘typical’ film quality by decade

This week’s question
A mouse can fall any distance and survive. How is this possible?

Picture
I’ve had this obvious-but-actually-important thought myself, and this is a pretty great way of expressing it:

Answer to the previous question
In Things 94, I asked why ovens didn’t come with a built-in thermomenter.

Uncharacteristically, the Things community was unable to answer – or perhaps you weren’t interested. So I asked the internet using my secret research alter-ego* on Yahoo Answers, and also on Quora just to try that out.

You can see the range of responses I received on Yahoo answers, some of which are quite useful. The question on Quora has yet to draw a response, so I’m guessing the community there is still too niche to cover this kind of thing.

Putting together the suggestions from YA and my own thoughts, this is my conclusion:

1) It’s difficult (and therefore expensive) to make an oven thermometer that will remain accurate for the device’s lifetime. If it wasn’t, I suspect ovens would be thermostat-based, and we wouldn’t have the problem to begin with. (As I said, baking books insist there is a problem, and anecdotally I can report my gas oven is almost two gas marks cooler than it should be, and adjusting for this significantly improved my baking results).

2) It also must be difficult (and therefore expensive) to design and calibrate an oven such that it accurately produces the intended temperatures throughout its lifetime, because (once again) if this wasn’t true the problem wouldn’t arise.

3) The solution to the problem is to have a separate thermometer and use it from time to time to calibrate your oven. That thermometer then doesn’t need to maintain integrity for every use of your oven, and even if it does break it’s much easier to replace than an integrated one would be.

4) Admitting there is even a problem looks bad, so any oven manufacturer supplying such a thermometer unit with its devices would be perceived as worse than those that pretend there isn’t a problem.

5) Even if a manufacturer did include a built-in thermometer, people unaware of the oven temperature problem would again presume the oven must be sub-standard to need one, and people that know enough to worry would realise an integral thermometer couldn’t be trusted for long.

I suspect similar principles apply to protective cases and screen protectors for mobile devices.

*A long time ago I thought it might be prudent to separate my question-asking online identity from my confident-and-opinionated online identity. This doesn’t seem quite as important any more, and now that Things is a blog it’s very easy for someone to connect the two anyway, so now I don’t worry about linking from one to the other. But I’ll still use it anyway.

Categories
New

Things 92: Walk Straight, Marmite Looks, One Day Music Experience Timeline

Video
A nice bit of rotoscope animation that asks the question “Why can’t we walk straight?”

Link
As an intriguing to follow-up to the question in Things 89 on why perceptions of attractiveness vary, OK Cupid have posted a related result: greater variation in attractiveness rating scores tends to generate more messages on the service.

The fact they say “men will get their turn under the microscope” might mean that the same result does not hold true for men, or they might just not have checked yet.

Tip
I’ve recently been enjoying a handy little shortcut in Firefox that lets me jump straight to search results on certain sites without reaching for the mouse.

Start by clicking the dropdown option against the search box, and click ‘manage search engines’:

From this menu, pick a search engine you commonly use and click ‘edit keyword’, I recommend something very short:

You can then query your chosen search engine by jumping to the location bar (Ctrl + L) then preceeding your search with your chosen keyword. For example, I can type “Ctrl + L” and then “wa how old was pat morita when karate kid came out”, press enter, and get straight to the answer without any clicks of the mouse.

(Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t seem to have this option, but there’s a Firefox add-on which is a slight improvement).

Picture
A nice way to illustrate the changes technology has wrought on the radio music experience over the last 20 years, with only a little exaggeration (click for big):

No Puzzle
According to the schedule of rotating absence, there’s no puzzle this week, but feel free to think about why we can’t walk in a straight line if you like.

Last Week’s Question
Last week I asked if anyone else had noticed a sudden surge in the misuse of “i.e.” and “e.g.”. Not many had, but a lot of people had something to say on the subject… probably enough for a whole post by itself, but I’ll attempt to quote in brief the different responses.

First, a few admitted to not being certain of the distinction themselves, even when they were sticklers in other areas, so I suppose that means I’ve done my bit to stem the tide somewhat.

The question on living vs prescribed language raised a few responses in itself. Maria noted:

The French spoken [in Montreal] is a pure and true form of ‘old’ french, ‘where for art thou’ for example. When Montrealers go to France their version of French is hardly understood which just goes to show that languages must and do evolve or we’d be speaking like players in a Shakespeare play.

Angela confessed that:

… I am afflicted and am involuntarily irritated by things like this that really should not be so irritating to me! The most frequent examples I can recall seeing include your i.e. / e.g.; everyday / every day; and unnecessary apostrophes e.g. potatoe’s, kid’s. In all cases I think that the incidence rate is increasing and we may well have passed a tipping point whereby ‘everyday’ will now mean both ‘everyday’ and ‘every day’ for ever more.

… and agreed that it’s better to let these things go, unless the error could lead to a misunderstanding, in which case it’s worth pointing out.

Rik provided a link to a tongue-in-cheek view on the book “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”, which among a lot of hyperbolic fuming makes the following point:

We are not computers which can be thrown off course by the insertion of a full stop here or a rogue hyphen there. We have a deeper understanding of meaning which you can check out for yourself by a quick reading of Chomskys writings on transformational grammar.

Simon identified a potential underlying factor behind rising misuse:

Latin stopped being taught in UK state schools during the 60s. At approximately the same time, English grammar died out as a subject because people thought it harked back to a redundant time. […] With the loss of learning through grammatical structure we have moved as a society from having a right way of doing something to adopting what society does. […] A case of crede quod habes – et habes if ever there was one.

Miranda gave further endorsement to the importance of Latin by nothing that in the case of “i.e.” and “e.g.” anyone lucky enough to have learned the language at school can easily remember which is which by recalling what the abbreviations stand for. She also pointed out that Dinosaur Comics recently addressed the issue of prescriptivism:

Finally, Xuan asks

Anyways, why did we start using e.g. and i.e. in the first place? Didn’t the Romans bugger off around 400AD?

Incidentally, in an attempt to find evidence that fewer people cared about the distinction between “i.e.” and “e.g.” I turned, as usual, to Google Insights for Search, only to find results that suggest the trend is going the other way. Alternatively, technological changes mean more is being written down by more people than ever before, so there’s more of both.