Tag: technology

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Things 36: Amara’s Law, Wondermark, hahahahah

(Originally sent December 2008)

The ‘Things’ email has existed in one form or another for over a year now. The fact that this is number 36 and not 52 shows that I clearly take too many Fridays off. (Actually it was mainly due to a big hiatus). Anyway, I have this Friday off, but have decided that that is not a good enough excuse.

Owing to the popularity of the chicken video last week and the sort-of anniversary of Things and the approaching of Christmas and the addition of more people to the list over the year, I thought it might be an idea to have a ‘Best of Things’ roundup next week.

So please reply and nominate your favourite items that have ever appeared in Things, and I will use these to compile a top 5, or something. I guess the people that just joined in the most recent wave don’t really have enough to go on, sorry! [Note, not a live question, this was sent in December 2008! – T.M. 22/1/11]

Quote
Roy Amara:

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

Link
Wondermark is a webcomic that is also a really great example of the value of copyright expiry. David Malki takes images from the 1800s (sourced from the public domain or his own collection of rare books), does a bit of photoshop and then adds speech bubbles.

He’s actually not bad at drawing either, but his writing is really very good, and this enables him to focus on that.

My personal favourite strip is a great example of how he makes humour out of philosophy:
http://wondermark.com/413/

My favourite sequence consists of four strips about getting rich, or not, which begins here:
http://wondermark.com/383/

A good example of his skill as a writer can be found in the following strip, in which there is a well-argued, thoughtful and erudite argument against the advertising for Shrek the Third, in about 60 words:
http://wondermark.com/298/

Puzzle
Last week we wondered why a chicken holds it’s head so still. A bit of Googling didn’t prove it immediately, but I am pretty confident that the reason is this: their vision, or processing of vision, is either movement-based or strongly prioritises movement. A bit like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.

This week a bit of estimation for you. In the UK, are there more households with dogs, or more with cats?

A Video (or two)
This video was brought to my attention by Richard. Alan Watts was a dude who knew what he was talking about, and said some wise things. The South Park guys did some animations that went with those things. Here is my favourite:

For you cat/Roomba fans, here’s another video of a cat riding a Roomba – this time the Roomba is behaving normally rather than being remote controlled. It gets a bit repetitive but do skip to the end if you get bored, as Something Happens:

Picture
A shrewd linguistic analysis of laughter:

Not really a picture I suppose, but best expressed as one.

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Old

Things 35: Lovefilm, People of the Screen, Chicken Head

(Originally sent December 2008)

I joined LoveFilm last week, mainly so I would know what I was talking about when giving a presentation to them on what I think they should be doing. It turns out they already do a lot of what I had first thought of so I knew to leave that out, and during the presentation I found out that they are planning to do a lot of the stuff I thought of too.

In other words, they do a lot of stuff that I think is good, and are going to do more. My name is Tim Mannveille and I endorse this message.

My Lovefilm profile is here so you can see what I’m doing with the service, and here is my referral link that gives you a 1 month free trial and me a referral bonus!

Films
So, I still don’t have time to see enough films for a Cineworld Unlimited card to be worth it, but the LoveFilm £3.99/month for 2 DVDs is about right. So this week I saw The City of Lost Children, by much the same team as Delicatessen and Amelie. It was visually incredible, inventive and dreamlike, as expected.

IMDb: 7.8/10
RT: 82%

Trailer viewable over at Lovefilm.

A link
While researching quite what is possible in terms of tracking mobile phones, I stumbled upon a bit of real life drama on Google Answers. “I’m trying to locate a friend who has gone missing and may be in a lot of trouble…”

A [long] Quote:
Kevin Kelly knows what he is talking about, and wrote an understated but amazing piece for the NY Times recently. A choice excerpt:

“When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective.

Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. […] The distribution-and-display device that we call printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact) and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book. In the West, we became people of the book.

Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen.”

A Video
Well, this week’s Things has been very serious so far, so it’s time for a video of someone moving a chicken around while the chicken holds its head incredibly still:

A Puzzle
Last week I asked people to guess why the search term ‘uncertainty’ showed such an odd annual trend. The most likely explanation seems to be students searching for Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle – if you put other terms students might be looking up into Google trends, you see the same annual trend cropping up. [Google Insights for Search also helps as it reveals what people tend to actually be looking for when searching for a given search term – T.M. 2/1/11]

This week, the question is: why do chickens keep their heads so still?

Pictures
It still feels like I’m taking Things too seriously, so here’s an article with pictures of loos with the best views.

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.

Categories
New

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.