Tag: music

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Things 81: the TV show, Spotify Poetry, Mad Scientists

Video
Laurence correctly identified that this is exactly the kind of multi-level high-speed animated insanity that I enjoy (and am currently wondering if I can design an infographic for):

Link
Share a Spotify playlist, make poetry. A nice little art form. I like this one:

Don’t Look Back Into The Sun
Choose
The Whole Of The Moon
Instead
It Won’t Hurt
Too Much
I Don’t Know Why
But It’s Better If You Do
Wish Upon A Star
Just
Not The Sun
It’s Too Hot For Words
Think About It
Be Careful
Remember
Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)

Quote
I’ve wanted to post this quote for a while, but couldn’t remember it well enough to find it. Here it is courtesy of The Week, via The Times:

Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up familiar with it.”

Picture
An excellent observation from the webcomic Cowbirds in Love, as conveniently recommended to me by the futuristic magical curation power of Google Reader Play (click to view full size on their site):

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked how a very strange photo of a physically impossible propeller was achieved. The answer is simply this, and you can see more examples here.

Puzzle
Each week a different section of Things is skipped in order to cut down the length. This week there is no puzzle. This is not a trick. There is no puzzle.

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Things 79: Stickers, Paulstretch, The Past In Colour

Tim Link
I inaugurated my personal blog (as opposed to my analysis type blog, Tower of the Octopus) with a write-up of how implementing a personal ‘achievement’ system (as in XBox achievements) with stickers made me have more fun on my holiday in Edinburgh:

Stickers Make Me Have More Fun

Link
PaulStretch is an amazing application that takes music and applies “extreme stretching” with minimal distortion (and does a few other things as well). Although it has been around for years, it suddenly garnered widespread attention when Shamantis posted a stretched-out 35 minute version of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile”, which works extremely well:

J. BIEBZ – U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

I tried PaulStretch out on some other tracks and got similarly nice results, but “U Smile” does have qualities that work particularly well in this form.

I’ve been listening to it while watching extreme slow motion videos, such as this one.

Pictures
We are used to seeing certain time periods only in black and white just because of the timeline of colour photography development. However, pioneers of colour photography were active, and seeing their results is a strange experience.

1939- 1944 in colour

1909-1912 Russia in colour

Quote
Dorothy Gambrell (in Cat and Girl) has a line which sums up my feeling on looking at the above images:

“The past is just the present with different technology and funny clothes.”

Puzzle
An old classic this week.

There is a room with one light bulb in it, currently switched off. Outside the room you can’t tell if the light is on or off, and there are three light switches, only one of which operates the bulb: the basic challenge is to work out which one. In theory, you could flick a switch, go into the room to see if it worked, and if not come back out and flip the next switch, and so on. The challenge is to come up with a strategy in which you only need to enter the room once.

If that’s too easy, how about if there were four switches?

If you can manage that, how about if there were five? (I don’t know how to do that one, although Laurence claims it is possible. It may be that his setting of the puzzle is subtly different though…)

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked what answer to 2 + 4 — 3 + 5 would get you a tick from the teacher if you had just learned the BODMAS rule.

As Richard points out, BODMAS isn’t really consistent with the way we canonically parse equations (so the teacher would probably expect the answer 8, although strict application of BODMAS would yield -2), and there are better ways to teach it, as addressed in this Wikipedia entry.

The Week Before That’s Puzzle Again
Laurence supplies this excellent postscript to the Trigger’s Broom / Ship of Theseus problem set in Things 77:

“It has occurred to me that this could equally be applied to most armies,
governments, countries, football teams, religious cults, families, and
hell, humanity as a whole. At least one of these is the cause for things
like the situation in Northern Ireland, so I think if you could solve
Trigger’s Broom, then it could well go towards solving some larger
issues. (Albeit, possibly presenting people with some radically new ones
in the process!)”

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Things 18: Layton Squares, Lesson Learned, IWIWAL

(Originally sent June 2008)

This week’s films – one line reviews
The Happening was a huge disappointment, anticlimactic in every way.
(My review: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_Mpa9ViwoMg)

The Incredible Hulk was impressive yet strangely forgettable.
(My review: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ltWgo9TXvKk)

Next Week’s film
Wanted. It looks like the standard Hero’s journey (ordinary guy discovers he is in fact the son of the world’s best assassin and must take up his mantle to protect Fate itself!!) with a great cast. This is my personal most anticipated movie of the year, since it is directed by Timur Bekmambetov, who directed my favourite movie of last year, Day Watch. He has an amazing talent for making the incredible look plausible, yet still awesome. I am seeing this at the first possible opportunity.

Fantastic teaser trailer featuring a single illustrative fragment of the film:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=oTRh66yvYpc [Video removed – this short teaser kind of does the job though – Tim 23/8/2010]

If that’s not enough for you, here’s the full trailer which probably has most of the awesome stuff in it.
IMDb rating: 7.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: n/a (It’s not being shown to critics?!) [Currently 71% – Tim 23/8/2010]

A Puzzle
In answer to last week’s “what comes next”: heaven.

This week: Professor Layton and the curious village is a puzzle game for the Nintendo DS, and my favourite puzzle in it is number 100. The challenge is to work out how to loop seven elastic bands around the pins in the board so that each one is held in the shape of a square, and no pin is used as a corner twice:

A Quote
Another baffling moment from my friend Nick:

Nick: Have you heard of the psychologist, Wasslavich?
Tim: No…
Nick: Neither have I.

A Link
A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible is the name of the webcomic, and each strip generally follows that theme and stands alone. It’s also mindblowingly insane and creative and I can’t just link to a single strip. So, depending on which opening line you like the most, take your pick:

“Dale, I owe the legendary ghosts of mafia bosses $80,000!”
http://www.alessonislearned.com/index.php?comic=20

“Caroline’s doppelganger is crying again.”
http://www.alessonislearned.com/index.php?comic=37

“The universe was so ashamed that you slept late, it is shrivelling into a raisin.”
http://www.alessonislearned.com/index.php?comic=31

A video
I can’t understand why I haven’t linked to this video before. It’s an excellent example of the “Anime Music Video” (AMV) format, in which scenes from anime are ingeniously edited to create a video for a song, in this case the brilliant “I wish I was a lesbian”:

A picture
The surprisingly rarely seen true scale version of the London underground. The stylised version we are familiar with is actually an incredible triumph of marketing that turned around the fortunes of the tube.

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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?