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Things 123: Game weekends, Puffins, Lilith, Abstract Animated GIFs

Events Sandpit this very weekend (25th August), Weekender later (Fri 14th-Sun 16th September)
Hide & Seek are running one of their curated ‘Sandpit’ game events, taking place on Saturday and Sunday afternoons this weekend (25th and 26th August), unusually but awesomely located at the Natural History Museum. NHM page is here; a longer article about what’s happening can be found on Wired.

Then, from Friday 14th through to Sunday 16th September is Hide & Seek’s Weekender (facebook event here), mostly in the Clore Ballroom in that Royal Festival Hall place, this being as usual a whole festival of games, largely drawn from Sandpit events from the last two years.

This happens to include Competitive Sandwich Making on the Friday, which Clare and I will be running (here’s what happened last year when we ran first), this time featuring a secret rank beyond Earl of Sandwich, if people are competitive enough to discover it. There’s also lots of other amazing things happening, including two of my favourites: Die Gute Fabrik’s Johann Sebastien Joust and Viviane Schwarz’s Treasure Maze.

Tim Link – You’re In A Room
I finally wrote up the game Clare and I made for a more recent Sandpit: You’re In A Room, a sort of Whose Line Is It Anyway version of Knightmare; you can find out what on earth that means here.

Video – Puffin Webcam
In the exciting new world of putting webcam streams onto my TV for background entertainment, now that the Miranda’s Kittens feed is no longer live, I’ve had to find something else. It turns out there’s a whole range of great feeds available on explore.org, including a puffin cam.

Bonus videovia Clare while I was writing this
Dog swims with dolphins!

QuoteLilith
I recently wondered what really is the deal with the biblical (or is she?) character of Lilith, so I turned to Wikipedia on the subject, and found it fascinating – here’s just the section headings to give you an idea of the span of cultural records she appears in:

Mesopotamian mythology
Siegmund Hurwitz
In the Bible
Jewish tradition
Greco-Roman mythology
Arabic mythology
In Western literature
In modern occultism

The highlight for me was discovering that Lilith only appears once in the bible, and even then arguably so, in Isiah 34:

(13) [Edom] shall become an abode for jackals and a haunt for ostriches. (14) Wildcats shall meet with desert beasts, satyrs shall call to one another; There shall the lilith repose, and find for herself a place to rest. (15) There the hoot owl shall nest and lay eggs, hatch them out and gather them in her shadow; There shall the kites assemble, none shall be missing its mate. (16) Look in the book of the LORD and read: No one of these shall be lacking, For the mouth of the LORD has ordered it, and His spirit shall gather them there.

This makes “lilith” (in the bible at least) a hapax legomenon, a word only occurring once in the source and therefore challenging to decipher – given only this context, is she a demon, or just some kind of regular animal with sinister associations?

I also recommend reading this translation of Isiah 34 in full (it’s only ~400 words), as it’s use of hyperbole puts our modern tabloid newspapers and comment trolls to shame.

Pictures – Abstract Animated GIFs
I’ve seen some interesting abstract animated GIFs floating around the internet, and tracked them down to two artists: David Ope, and Mr Div. Here’s one example of each, and do click through to view the rest of their work:

David Ope:

Mr Div:

Puzzle – The shrinking empires
Here’s an unfortunately small version of a fascinating visualisation of world history (which we bought as a poster for the office from Stanfords, although they don’t seem to have them any more), with time running from left to right, and rough location on earth from top to bottom, with identifiable countries/kingdoms/empires marked out:

You can just about see the Roman Empire as a big blob of orange in the middle, the Ottoman Empire in blue towards the right, and the British Empire stretching wide in patches of red before retreating back home by the time we reach the right-hand side representing the present day.

Even at this scale, one pattern is apparent: they just don’t make empires as big as they used to. The closer we get to the present day, the smaller the tribal groups become. Why is this?

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Things 120: Olly Moss, Benjamin Franklin Effect, A Difficult Person

Pictures – Olly Moss
Sometimes, as you browse the internets, you get a lovely moment in which you realise the person that made this cool thing you are looking at is the same person that made that other cool thing you remember from a while ago. You check out the rest of their work, and if you haven’t already, probably think about whether it’s worth following their output more closely.

I recently had that, except it turns out that Olly Moss is behind at least six different things (or sets of things) I had admired in the past:

Clearly, they share a certain graphical elegance and pop-culture-ouvre, and in the end the coincidence isn’t that huge, because he’s most likely closely followed by one of the aggregators of content that I browse, although I do recall seeing at least three from reasonably independent sources, so I remain quite amazed.

In short, do go have a browse of his projects. There’s lots more great stuff there.

LinkThe Benjamin Franklin Effect
Summed up nicely at the start:

The Misconception: You do nice things for the people you like and bad things to the people you hate.
The Truth: You grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate people you harm.

It’s not a totally airtight case, but the article weaves anecdote with data nicely, the results are certainly very suggestive, and I recommend that you read the whole thing.

Quote – A Difficult Person
What I would like to do now is present you with a quote which, out of context, is rather dry and uninteresting, which would be a rather pointless thing to do, so instead I will first attempt to provide you with that context, in the hope that the quote will then seem to you just as striking and memorable as I found it to be. So bear with me here.

In Face of the Crime, or in the original German, Im Angesicht des Verbrechens, arguably better translated as “Face to Face with Crime” or perhaps “All up in the face of crime”, was described by a friend-of-a-friend as a kind of Berlin-based version of The Wire, and unfortunately it isn’t, as the characters are much less engaging, and the realism level far lower, even when one ignores the strange touches of what I guess people would call magical realism. That’s not to say that it’s bad, I actually found it rather interesting in its own strange way, it’s just a matter of setting one’s expectations accordingly.

If you think that sounds promising, and if you are the kind of person that avoids any spoiler for something you might later watch, no matter how small the detail or slim the chances of you watching it, then you may or may not choose to watch the trailer below (which is in German without subtitles and is somewhat NSFW) to further firm up your opinion, and based on that you may prefer to skip straight past this section to the puzzle bit below; but just so you know, as spoilers go, where 1 is inconsequential and 10 is The Sixth Sense, I’d put this at a 3.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fcGaKWyrIY

So, we have someone I’ll describe as our hero, a straight-laced fellow who rarely betrays emotion, and is just trying to do the right thing, which is tough when you’re a cop in a crime drama with some back-story and Damoclean family tension hanging over you. One gets the impression that you’re supposed to root for him, on account of his moral rectitude, but it’s a little hard to do so, since he mostly does what is expected of him, and just occasionally does something else, but without getting remotely emotional about it.

Meanwhile, there is the heroine, who has a powerful vision of the hero’s face while swimming in a lake (and we know it’s a powerful vision because it gets repeated in the recap at the start of almost every episode), and whom it is strongly implied is destined to meet and presumably fall in love with said hero. She’s got a lot of common sense and a goodly amount of agency, but occasionally must put those things to one side in order to allow the plot to proceed, presumably because she realises that one way or another this will ineluctably lead to her destiny with the hero.

I don’t consider it much of a spoiler to say that they eventually meet, and we know and they know that something magical and destiny-related is happening, even though they’ve barely spoken to one another at this point, and despite the fact that the heroine seems to be all about hope and destiny while the hero is clearly married to his job and gives the impression that truly loving somebody would probably be beyond his emotional register.

I no longer remember the exact details, but there comes a slightly awkward conversational moment, and the heroine’s eyes flicker just slightly, and you can see that while she knows this is her chap-of-destiny, it might actually be that he’s not the best potential partner one could possibly imagine, and she suddenly says, quite bluntly (according to the subtitles):

Could it be that you are a difficult person?

Answer – Climb and Descent
Last week I asked if there was a single time on both the day of ascent and day of descent at which Joss Whedon could be found at the same altitude, given that he began both journeys at midday and ended them at midnight. A nice way to see that the answer is clearly yes is to imagine both journeys happening simultaneously, in which case there must clearly be a time at which the ascending Joss Whedon crosses paths with the descending one.

Perhaps more convincingly, you can draw the answer, as Richard describes:

Trivially proven by drawing two overlaid graphs of altitude vs time.  One line goes top-left to bottom-right, the other bottom-left to top-right.  Short of teleporter accidents, the lines have to cross at some point.  Read off the time and altitude to find where/when.

That was Level 1. Here comes Level 2:

Puzzle 2A – Temperature Pairs
Continuing the series of puzzles Tarim recently introduced me to…

Imagine a straight line that starts anywhere on the surface of the Earth, passes down through the centre of the planet, and comes back out on the opposite side. We take the air temperature at each end of the line. Now imagine rotating that line about the centre, describing a ~circular route of places on the earth’s surface that are all directly opposite one another, and we continuously record the air temperature of those places all the way around (and we do all of this, somehow, in a single moment in time).

(You might also like to imagine that this is all happening in some idealised abstract space where we don’t have to worry about the fact that this entails taking an infinite number of temperatures with infinite precision; I’m just painting the picture in this way because it’s the most convenient way I can think of).

The question (which you might have anticipated if you were trying to see the parallels with Climb and Descent) is this: will there be a position of that line for which the air temperature recorded at each end is exactly the same?

Given the parallels I’m drawing with the last puzzle, you’ll probably be thinking that the answer is yes. But can you prove it?

Puzzle 2B – Temperature/Pressure Pairs
Perhaps that was too easy, so instead consider this: what if we measure both air temperature and pressure at each end of the line, and we consider every possible pair of points on opposite sides of the Earth. Will we be able to find a point that is at exactly the same air temperature and pressure as its opposite on the other side of the Earth?

Trivially proven by drawing two overlaid graphs of
altitude vs time.  One line goes top-left to bottom-right,
the other bottom-left to top-right.  Short of teleporter
accidents, the lines have to cross at some point.  Read off
the time and altitude to find where/when.
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Things 119: Journey, Tree Record, Climb and Descent

Game: Journey
If you’re a gamer, you’ve probably heard about Journey. If you’re not a gamer, then you should have heard about it anyway, because it’s quite beautiful and amazing, and only takes 2-3 hours to play through, which means you could visit a friend that has a PS3 and play it in one sitting.

But why would you want to do that?

In this interview, Jenova Chen, the game’s creative director, says:

“Augustine wrote: ‘People will venture out to the height of the mountain to seek for wonder. They will stand and stare at the width of the ocean to be filled with wonder. But they will pass one another in the street and feel nothing. Yet every individual is a miracle. How strange that nobody sees the wonder in one another.’

“There’s this assumption in video games that if you run into a random player over the Internet, it’s going to be a bad experience. You think that they will be an asshole, right? But listen: none of us was born to be an asshole. […] It is the system that made the player cruel, not the player themselves. So if I get the system correct, the players are human and their humanity will be drawn out. I want to bring the human value into a game and change the player’s assumption.”

The reason I say the game is amazing is that it succeeds at this seemingly impossible aim. I’ve played through it a few times now, and each time I’ve had at least one incredibly positive and sustained play experience with a complete stranger.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mF8KkDiIdk

[Video not working, try this search – metatim, 02/08/15]

Film: The Cabin in the Woods
If you like horror films, you really should watch The Cabin in the Woods. I don’t think it quite succeeds at Joss Whedon’s stated aim (which you shouldn’t look up until after you’ve seen it), but it’s worth it for the wonderfully insane final half hour or so, which, impressively, the trailer largely resists showing any of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ENUBUdFswM

[Video not working, try this search – metatim, 02/08/15]

Video: Tree Record / Years
The technology to turn wistful ideas into a reality is in our hands. Look at this device and imagine what you want it to do:

Now check out the video, where it does exactly that:

Read a bit about it here.

Puzzle: Climb and Descent
Tarim recently introduced me to levels 1 and 2 of a puzzle I’d only ever previously heard set at level 3. This week: level 1.

On Day 1, Joss Whedon hikes his way up a mountain, starting at the bottom at midday, and reaching the top (with a few rest stops along the way) 12 hours later, at midnight. He basks in the glory of his achievement for 12 hours, then at midday on Day 2 sets off back down the mountain, reaching the the bottom 12 hours later again, at midnight.

The question: is there a particular time at which he passed through exactly the same altitude on both his Days 1 ascent and Day 2 descent?

Answer: Voice recognition
A long time ago I asked what one could do to improve the chances of having your words understood by one of the many would-be voice-recognition services we find around us today.

After a bunch of googling around, the answers seem to be:

  • Reduce ambient noise where possible
  • Don’t speak too loudly and close to the microphone
  • Leave longer gaps between words than you might in natural speech
  • Speak with the accent the device was tested for

That last point is the one I’m most interested in. The question is, what accent should you use?

It seems the various companies offering this service (Apple/Siri, Google voice search, Xbox Kinect) do have to release different versions for different parts of the English-speaking world (I don’t have a good source for that, but it’s the impression I get from their staged releases, people’s reported experiences, and common sense).

My next plan is to carry out a small personal test in which I try putting on different accents. Results will of course be reported here.

@metatim

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Things 59: Building Projection, Plant Sculpture, and the Train Problem

(Originally sent October 2009)

Films
I saw Surrogates, which was a strong enough concept (with relevance to the kind of changes we will see in the coming decades, even if we don’t quite achieve fully robotic avatars affordable by 98% of the population) that it maintained interest despite the weak writing and characters.

Video
Technology unlocks surprising things. Witness the kind of trompe l’oeil magic that can now be achieved by virtue of having a powerful enough digital projector:

If you like that, there’s more here.

Link
Highlighted in the final part of last week’s issue of The Week, this article from pseudonymous postman Roy Mayall casts an interesting light on the current wrangling with Royal Mail.

Key quote from towards the end:

“There is a tension between the Royal Mail as a profit-making business and the Royal Mail as a public service. For most of the Royal Mail management … it is the first. To the delivery officer … it is more than likely the second.”

The current ongoing (in)action would seem to stem directly from this tension.

Pictures
Sculpture/carpentry/architecture with living plants.

I suspect this would seem less benign if the same modificiations to a natural form could be carried out within minutes instead of over the course of years.

Puzzle
I mentioned this puzzle in a recent discussion stemming from Things and it sparked a lot of interest. Here is a version only slightly modified from the way I originally heard it from Laurence:

Trains leaving station A only go to station B. A single from A to B costs £3. A return from A to B and back again costs £5. A woman walks into train station A for the first time in her life. She goes up to the counter and hands the cashier £5. Without either of them saying a word she is given a return ticket and leaves happy. How did the cashier know what she wanted?

The original version, along with many other puzzles, can be found here:

http://www.mannveille.com/tim/mirror/stripper-puzzles.html

(Note that I think this puzzle should now be filed in the first section).

Before you are tempted to ask someone for help with this puzzle, please see this warning / subtle hint.

-Transmission Ends