Tag: illusion

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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.

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Old

Things 16: Colour-changing, Memes, Captain Jack

A video
The video comes first this week because it’s so incredibly good. If you are nearby to someone that might be interested in interesting illusion videos, get them to watch with you. It’s a simple but incredible colour-changing card trick:

Films
It has come to my attention that some people didn’t realise I have a Cineworld Unlimited card, so I better plug that just this once. You pay £12 a month and you can see as many films as you like at Cineworld cinemas all across the country (although it’s £15 a month if you also want to be able to go to those in central London, which fortunately does not include the one on King Street). Last year this meant I saw films for an average of £2.95 a ticket.

One of the objections to the idea of this card is that there aren’t enough films you would want to see in a month for it to be worth it. But of course, you will quite likely find there are more films you are happy to go and see if the cost is working out to be £3 per film on average!

Link: http://www.cineworld.co.uk/Cms.jgi?RUBRIQUE_CMS=UNLIMITED
http://www.cineworld.co.uk/unlimited [link no longer works, try this one – also it is now £13.50. – Tim, 17/8/10]

Furthermore, even if you don’t have one of these cards, the Orange Wednesdays 2-for-1 offer apparently still works with tickets bought with an unlimited card (so seeing a film with such a person on a Wednesday would be free).

So anyway, this week I saw Cassandra’s Dream, which was flawed but very effective at creating tension and so proved an interesting experience, and Smart People, which was not much more than flawed characters delivering pithy lines and so was a bit disappointing.

Next Week’s film
I’ll be seeing Mongol.

IMDb rating: 7.5/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 85%
Trailer: featuring some of the most hilariously overwrought and obvious deep-voiced narration I’ve heard in a while: http://www.filmcrave.com/movie_page_main.php?id=8165

A Puzzle
An open question that emerged from a discussion I had earlier this week:

In evolution, genes are passed on and alter randomly (roughly speaking), and in this way desirable traits emerge. The analogy has been made for ideas and technology, and in this case people refer to ‘memes’ (a cross between genes and memory, as these things have to be remembered by people rather than passed on). But there are several problems with the analogy. What do you think are the main problems or differences?

A Quote
Another personal maxim of mine that came up recently:

“You can’t expect something to get better if you don’t do anything about it. In fact, you can expect it to get worse.”

A Link
A fascinating report on the experiences of a guy that played Jack Sparrow at Disneyland.

An extract:

“Here’s a napkin someone wrote on for me: “I will give you a blow job on your break, so sexy! Kim—714-XXX-XXXX.” I would also get offers from women in my ear: “Anything you want, just find me.” I had a girl who had turned 18 the day before. She was with a high school group, and she wrote down her room number at the Downtown Disney hotel. I had a lady hump my leg one day in the park.”

A picture
I recently passed the picture below on to Bryan when he needed an opening image for a presentation on how to judge creative work.

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Things 15: Photoshop Disasters, Speech Perception, Blockbuster Clinton

(Originally sent May 2008)

This week’s film – one line review
I enjoyed 75% of Indy 4, which I suppose is not bad, but I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed. I did think “that’s just silly” perhaps a little more often than is optimal.

Next week’s film
Not being interested in Sex and the City, I’ll probably just be rewatching Speed Racer (again) next week.


A Puzzle
If Green is Blue, Blue is Green, Red is Yellow and Yellow is Indigo, what is Indigo?

Note: this is a very silly puzzle that I invented, not a profound riddle or anything like that.

A Quote
This week I had cause to be reminded of a personal maxim of mine:

“Question everything. But not always out loud.”


A Link
I find Photoshop Disasters to be amusing sometimes for the things they find, and sometimes just for their obsessive attention to detail, highlighted by their quote “someone, somewhere, figured no one would notice. We are that no one!” (on the Spiderman 2 poster).

A video
This video demonstrates an audio/visual illusion in the way we perceive speech.

It is six seconds long. For maximum effect, I highly recommend first listening to it with your eyes closed. Then play it again with your eyes open.

A picture
I  found the below image used on Wikipedia to illustrate the US democratic primary results. Suddenly it becomes clear why Hillary has stayed in the race – she thought she was playing Blockbusters.

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Old

Things 11: Video Store Clerk, Theremin Cat, Ambigram

(Originally sent April 2008)

This week’s film – one line review
Forgetting Sarah Marshall veered too far away from that interesting brand of comedy I liked in Superbad toward boring old-school stand-up sexist tripe.

Next week’s film
Well, we’re going to see Persepolis on May 1st, aren’t we.

A Puzzle
If you were designing mammals for optimal reproduction capacity, you might think it would be more efficient to arrange for there to be more females than males. But in fact it’s more like 50/50. Why is that this remarkably equal ratio has evovled?

A Quote
This quote sounds profound but I don’t understand it:

William Blake: No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

A Link
Video Store Clerk, the game. Guess how real customers rated movies. Strangely compelling.
http://www.videostoreclerk.com/

A video
A cat playing with a theremin:

A picture
An ambigram.