Tag: time

Categories
Old

Things 20: Cake Division, Dinorun, Christian the Lion

(Originally sent July 2008)

This week’s film – one line reviews :
Hancock was like a TV mini-series compressed into 90 minutes, with the first half used to trick people into going to see it, and a plot that looks like it suffered from too many cooks.

Next Week’s film
Kung Fu Panda

Actually I saw this on IMAX last weekend, but would rather see it again in the cinema than see Prince Caspian, which I find so unappealing even Eddie Izzard as Reepicheep can’t make up for it. Kung Fu Panda was a very solidly entertaining piece of work, as the figures below attest.

IMDb rating: 8.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 88%

My youtube review:

A Puzzle
Alternatives to a first mover or an infinite past:

-time as a loop

-space and time merge as you go back in time (this makes no sense to me but is apparently one theory)

-time is an illusion

The real lesson here is that we have absolutely no right to expect our intuition for what makes sense, which we developed in our own particular tiny bit of the universe, to be any kind of a guide on this scale of issue.

This week’s puzzle
When you find yourself having to divide a cake between two children you know that at least one will complain they got the smaller slice. There is a classic strategy to solve this problem that is well known, which I won’t reveal since if you’re not familiar with it then that is an excellent puzzle already. For those that know: what if there are three children?

A Quote
A wonderfully distilled observation on what I think is one of the most fascinating debates of our generation:

Stewart Brand: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive […] that tension will not go away.”

A Link
Dinorun – an old-school style game in which you play a dinosaur attempting to outrun extinction. Worth playing at least once just to see how awesome it is to be wiped out by an unstoppable wave of annihilation:

http://www.pixeljam.com/dinorun/

A video
Another bit of cross-species friendship – “Christian the Lion”, who was friends with some 70s dudes.

Short version with the best-suited music but, er, inappropriate message at end:

Longer version with the full story but annoying text:

A picture
An illustration of how technology will help us in the future:

Categories
Old

Thing 19: The Beginning of Time, Cat game, Animal Friendship

(Originally sent June 2008)

This week’s film – one line review
Wanted was an extraordinary hotch-potch of the ridiculous and the sublime, and I highly recommend it to anyone that liked the look of the trailers. Incidentally, it now has 71% on rotten tomatoes, and I can’t help noticing that WALL-E is on 98%, but we have to wait another 3 weeks for that.

My review of Wanted:

Next Week’s film
Hancock.

A comedy about what it would be like if someone with Superman-like powers was a degenerate reprobate played by Will Smith, which actually looks as if it could be a highly original kind of superhero story.

IMDb rating: 6.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 33%

A Puzzle
This week: philosophy.

One of the weirdest things about the universe is that it exists at all. Without even bringing God into it, either there was nothing and then suddenly it began, or something has been around (one way or another) forever, and neither of these two concepts seems plausible to our intuition. But in fact these are not the only two options. Can you think of any others?

A Quote
James Richardson: “The Man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be.”

A Link
A game involving cats:
http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/cats.htm

A video
A wild crow with “no known history of humanitarian benevolence” adopts a kitten:

A picture
Continuing the theme of cross-species friendship, an infra-red triggered camera set up to try to capture a picture of Bigfoot ended up capturing something even more bizarre – a raccoon riding on a wild hog:

All part, incidentally, of an ingenious marketing strategy by the makers of the camera:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/bushnell-bf/

Categories
New

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!)”

Categories
New

Things 77, Time Slices, Innovative Pricing, Trigger’s Broom

Video
Imagine frames of a video printed on the side of a sequence of decks of cards. Then imagine all of those decks combined with a perfect n-riffle shuffle. What would the result look like if played back as a video? Something like this:

Surfing the 4th Dimension from Don Whitaker on Vimeo.

A bunch more, by phyrworks, can be viewed here.

Link
I love the idea that seemingly obvious things that work pretty well are actually only local maxima, and if you move far away enough from the norm you can actually find something far more effective.

The nicest example of this I’ve come across so far can be found here; some great data to show that under some circumstances combining the two pricing strategies of pay-what-you want with half-goes-to-charity produces a significantly better outcome than either option alone, or standard pricing. (This was anecdotally demonstrated by the Humble Indie Bundle back in May, but that clearly lacked a fair “control” for comparison).

Puzzle
As suggested by Angela last week, the problem of Trigger’s Broom, more conventionally known as the Ship of Theseus Paradox:

Trigger: And that’s what I’ve done. Maintained it for 20 years. This old broom’s had 17 new heads and 14 new handles in its time.
Sid: How the hell can it be the same bloody broom then?

Is Trigger’s broom still the same broom? If so why, if not why not?

Picture
Jeremey’s Place fake food emporium finds a clever way of shifting their otherwise fleetingly-entertaining spilled-food novelty items: