Tag: puzzle

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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 27: Shoe Friends, Dog Frisbee, Dying

(Originally sent September 2008)

As I had suspected, Things is not by nature interactive – one person requested to be on the CC list (and this also happened to be the one person to reply to last week’s puzzle). Since the functionality with one person is identical to keeping everyone on the BCC list that is what I will do, until someone else wants to be CC’d!

Nothing wrong with this, it just reaffirms my decision to switch to BCC by default.

Films
Films continue to be rubbish, ‘Rocknrolla’, ‘Step Brothers’ and ‘The Duchess’ all having zero appeal to me.


Last week’s puzzle
Shoes are like friends…

“You only need a few and even then there’s only one or two you really spend much time with”
“You’ll always know which the best ones are because you like wearing them constantly and you never feel like they’re worn out.”
“They come in pairs”
“You only know their true value when it rains”

Additional answers from 2010:
Richard: “Shoes are like friends … everyone needs two good quality ones that they’ve worn-in over many years”
Phil: “A good thing to put on before going out, but there were far too many episodes which are all basically the same?”

This week’s puzzle
Sometimes it seems as if a shampoo becomes less effective the more you use it, and by the end you have to switch to a different one entirely. Why is this? (Note, I don’t have a good answer on this one, please do send in any theories you may have).

A video
I taught our dog to catch a frisbee and thought I would upload some video of this to YouTube. Then I reasoned that someone had probably already done this to a much higher standard, and upon searching discovered the amazing world of competitive dog frisbee catching:

For anyone interested, I did end up including some of my dog’s frisbee-catching skills in the background of my review of the Bourne trilogy:

A link
A lovely game (in the very loosest sense of the word) involving a cat and some dots.
(Possible challenges to set yourself: enclose the cat in the largest area possible, let the cat escape with the most dots filled in possible)

A quote, or rather a poem
I went to the funeral of my great aunt this week. During the service my mum read this poem:

Gone From My Sight
I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white
sails to the morning breeze and starts
for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until at length
she hangs like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come
to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says;
“There, she is gone!”

Gone where?

Gone from my sight. That is all.
She is just as large in mast and hull
and spar as she was when she left my side
and she is just as able to bear her
load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone
at my side says, “There, she is gone!”
There are other eyes watching her coming,
and other voices ready to take up the glad
shout;
“Here she comes!”

And that is dying.

by Henry Van Dyke, a 19th Century clergyman, educator, poet, and religious writer

Personally I’m a bit of a nihilist when it comes to death, but I can see how this would be comforting to others.

A picture
Something went horribly wrong when I searched itv.com for video of the Edinburgh Fringe festival – it seems they have some kind of automatic title generator. Result number 2 is the most problematic (click for full size):

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Things 85: Talking Cats, Shark Facts, 285 trends

Video
Bowing to the inevitability of Moore’s law, cats with captions are no longer as popular, instead being replaced by dubbed videos of cats. Lip-syncing and attitude-matching are key:

Links
I recently discovered that Sharks can sense electricity! And are also viviparous, despite not being mammals! These things should really be taught from an early age. If you didn’t know those things, do follow those links and fill in this shocking gap in our educational system.

Quote
On Luke’s Facebook profile under ‘quotes’, he writes:

I am not big on quotes, as I think proper arguments take more than a few lines to construct. Quotes are therefore like mantras – declarations of universal truths which I am naturally rather suspicious of.

To further undermine this entire section of Things, I was recently reminded of David Malki’s thoughts on the matter; he also monetised the idea by producing a suitable bumper sticker. A banner on the same basis was the kind of thing likely to be seen at the Rally to Restore Sanity.

Puzzle
After recently trying to convince people that the number 285 occurs more often than it should (a perennial hobby of mine), I re-ran the numbers on search volumes and found something rather strange. What is going on around August here?

Last week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked how one might devise an experiment to test for the existence of Free Will, using “any definition of Free Will you think might be useful” (since an experiment reported in the Telegraph seemed obviously lacking).

John cited far more interesting MRI experiments which strongly suggest ‘decisions’ are made up to 10 seconds before we are consciously aware of them. But I felt that the nebulous concept of Free Will could also dodge this attack; perhaps Free Will ‘happens’ before that decision process becomes visible to MRI and before we become aware of it. There are plenty of other experiments that demonstrate that a lot of strange processes conspire to construct the illusion that we are experiencing the world in ‘real time’, but that’s another story.

Tarim said he couldn’t think of any definition for Free Will, which is a pretty reasonable response. I admitted I had personally found considering the ‘devise a test’ question a useful line of thought for clarifying the matter in my own mind, but just trying to come up with a definition is actually a more direct route.

This being the internet, we don’t have to look too far to find people trying to give definitions of Free Will. It actually seems fairly straightforward: it can either be used in a ‘Compatibilist‘ sense, or in a sense that doesn’t make any sense.

Angela (who also noted the definition problem) said she would ask her solicitor, who apparently offers a free will service.

Finally, I note that Things 66 (sent just before I started blogging each edition) included this link on the subject.

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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)