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]
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.
Welcome to Things, a weekly email I send around with stuff that I have found or dug out from my archives. This week some new people have been added to the list, so it is now going out to:
6 people at RAPP
2 people that used to be at RAPP
3 members of my family
1 other cool person
1 me
The default is for everyone to receive Things privately. If you are happy to receive it on a CC list so that you can reply-to-all and discuss the contents with similarly interested people, let me know – so far two people from the above list are doing that.
Anyway, on to the Things.
Films
If I had time to see any film this coming week it would be Waltz with Bashir, which apparently breaks new ground both as an animation and as a documentary. (From the trailer it doesn’t actually seem to take rotoscoping much further than Richard Linklater already has with Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, but it’s still cool).
IMDb: 8.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 91%
Trailer:
A link
The McCollough effect is a brilliant optical illusion effect which remains unexplained. Try it out here.
A quote
Tycho, Penny Arcade:
“Innovations are just gimmicks you happen to like.”
Last week’s puzzle
Last time I asked that if regular slow zombies represent the inevitability of death, what do fast zombies represent?
My personal answer is that fast zombies are just a distillation of our worst fears about other people – reduced to pure irrational rage and threat. It also unlocks a primal desire to defend yourself with violence, and by reducing other people to zombies we need not feel guilt about doing violent things to them. (Compare Carmageddon, a game in which the aim was to run people over, but since this was considered unacceptable by the ratings board the people were replaced by zombies).
A Video
A cat riding on a Roomba, which is an autonomous vacuum cleaning robot. Interestingly, 2 out of the 12 people receiving this email own such a device.
Pictures
Google is now hosting the photographic archive from LIFE magazine, including photos that never made it into print. So far they have put up 2 million of an anticipated 10 million images at pleasingly high resolution. You can also buy a print of any image you like, for an only slightly exorbitant cost.
As with all new resources, I tested it out by seeing what it had on lemurs. The answer is: lots. It turns out that from page 2 onwards almost all of the results come from a brilliant photo shoot revolving around a family that has a pet lemur.
The Things newsletter was sent throughout 2010, although I only started blogging it in April with Things 67. Here I’m going to pick out my favourite 3 Things from each of the main categories, including some from the pre-blogging era.
But first:
Tim Link
I compiled a list of my top 10 movies to watch at Christmas, not because they’re Christmassy but because they are perfect for the hazy lawless dreamlike days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Click through to see trailers, summaries, and other handy links, or if you just want to know what I chose, here’s how they stack up in terms of IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes ratings, with bubbles scaled by number of IMDb votes (as a proxy for famousness):
Last Week’s Puzzle Last week I asked why our ears ‘pop’ when a plane takes off or lands, given that the cabin should be airtight and thus immune to changes in pressure.
Richard pointed out that actually maintaining that pressure differential at altitude must take a lot of strength, and therefore weight, in terms of materials. By allowing the internal cabin pressure to reduce to still-tolerable levels, the pressure differential is reduced, less strength and therefore weight is needed, making the aeroplane more efficient. Makes sense to me.
Now, on to the Things of the year:
Videos
From Things 70, a perfectly self-explanatory animated gif:
In Things 85 I highlighted the growing trend of cat dubbing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bTbAsmPOKo
Most recently, in Things 88 I highlighted this beautiful short animation:
dragonfrog, commenting on this Boing Boing post: 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.
Pictures
As featured in Things 66 (not yet blogged), from LukeSurl.com:
Finally, from Things 87, because this never gets old for me:
Open-ended Puzzles
1) In Things 71 I asked what would be the best thing I could buy that would maximise hours saved per pound spent. This produced a wide range of responses, largely depending on which assumptions people chose to question, which I posted in Things 72:
Yasmin suggests Red Bull (and similar) to save time by needing less sleep.
Alam suggests a clone of myself
Xuan suggests slaves and a washing machine.
Angela suggests two books that could improve one’s efficiency and so save time — The Miracle of Mindfulness and Making Time. (Funnily enough I already own the latter… and I’ve now read it, and have applied the principle of Mindfulness, which was its main point, to rather good effect. But that’s another story).
John suggests grated cheese.
Phil points out anything free that saves any time would maximise the metric, such as DropBox. This technically lies outside the “buy” requirement. He also suggests a combi-microwave and a smartphone, and then finally a device to prevent time-wasting by cutting off internet access between certain hours. (I since got a Smartphone via work, saving a lot of time with the DropBox and notepad apps, but wasting a lot of time with Angry Birds).
Simon specifically attempted to address the “I” part of the question by recommending an iPad as being a particularly good purchase for me, by switching to digital goods (music, movies, comics, books); “Imagine all that time not wasted, going to shops, ordering physical products online and searching for things you can’t find.” I don’t exactly agree, but that’s a huge discussion for another time.
Finally, Laurence suggests a Time Machine, and insightfully adds:
The inevitable complexity of all the proposed solutions reminds me of
the following quote:
“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create
the universe.”
– Carl Sagan
2) In Things 77 at Angela’s suggestion I set the Trigger’s Broom / Theseus’ Ship problem. While there was some excellent discussion, which I summed up in Things 78, my favourite answer came from Laurence, which I posted in Things 79:
“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!)”
given an arbitrary budget, and any science-fiction technology you care to imagine, how would you devise a test to see if Free Will exists? Feel free to use any definition of Free Will you think might be useful.
Again, there was some interesting discussion summarised in Things 85, but I had one preferred response, from Tarim:
I cannot think of ANY definition of Free Will.
Which I thought was a fair point.
Puzzles that had good answers that I didn’t know
Richard deserves a special mention for supplying quick, detailed and accurate answers to many puzzles where I had no idea what the answer was at the time I asked. Here’s my favourite three examples.
1) In Things 74 I asked why walk-in freezers have doors that cannot be opened from inside. Richard pointed out the answer is that actually, they generally don’t.
As I posted in Things 86, Richard worked out that it must be people search for the latest fansubbed episodes of the anime series Bleach, which is pretty much confirmed by checking the search terms associated with these numbers over on Google Insights for Search.
3) The ear popping problem, as was posted in this very edition of Things.
