Tag: video

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Old

Things 17: Semiotic Blancmange, Change Blindness, Me

This week’s film – one line review
Mongol was bizarrely repetitive and dramatically failed to chart the rise of Genghis Khan as it had promised.

Next Week’s films
I’m going to see The Happening (because I like “everyone’s gone” films) and then The Incredible Hulk (because superhero movies are modern fairy tales) immediately afterwards, bringing the number of films I have seen this month to a total of 5. If interesting films continue to come out I may beat my personal best of 7 in a month, averaging £1.71 with the Cineworld Unlimited card. Woohoo!

The Happening
There are so many trailers for this that I think I’ve put together everything, but here’s a good one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxMLvh4Tb6g [gone, oh well – T.M. 7/11/14]
IMDb rating: 6.8
Rotten tomatoes rating: 11%!!

The Incredible Hulk
Trailer that seems to sum up the entire movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7a5LcTckfg
IMDb rating: n/a
Rotten tomatoes rating: 71%

Last Week’s Puzzle
The two main differences between memes and genes that we identified were that memes never really ‘die’ so can produce offspring indefinitely afterwards (note for example that many email scams were in existence in letter form over a century ago); but also that they actually evolve by Lamarckian evolution rather than Darwinian:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckian

This Week’s Puzzle
What comes next?
person, fiddle, degree, estate, column, sense, ?, …

A Quote
The descriptions in Photoshop Disasters are often very well written.

“By renormalizing the model’s waistline, Maxim Mexico takes a bold socio-political stance in the ongoing battle of the politics of representation, clearly referencing the oppressive reification of male-gaze heteronormative modes of synthesis in a semiotic blancmange of post-structural teakettle barbecue hatstand fishmonger.”

A Link
To continue the illusion theme, I encourage you to try out this excellent java application demonstrating the incredible effect of change blindness.

Two images cycle with a flash between them: the challenge is to spot what is different between the two images. When you give up, right-click on the image and set the ‘delay’ to be shorter – when you get down to ‘no gap’, the change becomes completely obvious. Then use the right click menu to reset the gap length to a challenging amount (very important – if you watch a different image with ‘no gap’ the difference will be obvious and you can never un-see it), then try a different image.

If anything, this is more incredible than the video last week.

http://www.usd.edu/psyc301/Rensink.htm
Link no longer works – try this instead: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/download/

A video
I linked to Captain Disillusion explaining the ‘guy catches glasses on face’ video on the Living In A Digital World blog. Because I think he’s so great, here it is again:

A picture
Something a bit different this week – instead of something I found online, a picture of me and my parents.

Categories
New

Things 78: Nuclear, BODMAS, Curvy tube map

Video
While not perhaps the best way to view the data (using time to represent time always feels strangely inefficient, although it’s difficult when you also want to present geographical data), this video might nonetheless be a good way to actually take in the data:

Quote
John Hodgman “A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime.”

Puzzle
I’m sometimes called upon to help people with their children’s maths homework, and I found this problem particularly hard.

The solving method is explained as follows:

When you are working out a sum with more than one operation (eg 8 + 2 x 3), follow the BODMAS rule. Without these rules you could have more than one right answer, so getting the order of operation correct is important. You should calculate in this order;
Brackets
Order (powers/square numbers)
Division
Multiplication
Addition
Subtraction

The first problem in the ‘level 1’ set of problems is simply this:

2 + 4 — 3 + 5

What answer would earn you a tick from the teacher?

You can see the original problem sheet here, and the level 2 and level 3 problems here.

Picture
This curvy tube map is rather nice (although the full-size version doesn’t seem to be available any more):

Some of you may recall the scale tube map from Things 18.

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked about Trigger’s Broom (also known as the Ship of Theseus problem): the broom has had both head and handle replaced many times, so we might ask “Is Trigger’s broom still the same broom? If so why, if not why not?” This question has stimulated debate and discussion for centuries and Things recipients were no exception. I’m going to paraphrase people’s responses here to prevent this issue of Things becoming even longer.

Both John and Laurence point out that the Sugababes present a similar problem (as does the Wikipedia article, which is an excellent starting point for anyone that has not delved into this subject before)(naturally “as does” could refer to both “point out” and “present a similar problem”).

Thomas makes the distinction “There are two questions: “Is it the same?” and “Is it the same broom?”,” pointing out that the former question is trivial, but for the latter “we don’t insist on new labels, new identities for every subtle change in an object … so things like the functions it performs and who possess it as better ways to identify them”.

Laurence counters “what if these heads/handles were replaced when they started to show wear, but were still functioning. If I rescue Head_1 and Handle_1 from the bin at different times and join them, what do I have?”

As Angela noted in her original setting of the question: “based on the fact that none of the cells in your body now are the same as they were when you were born, are you actually you??”

This was touched on in the puzzle from Things 41 (yet to appear in blog form), which went:

A famous bit of trivia that has been passed around for years holds that over the course of 7 years, every cell in your body will have been replaced with a new one. Are there any simple ways to disprove this?

To which there are some interesting answers.

Without diving down that rabbit hole too deeply, I first note my original answer to Angela on the personal identity issues raised by Trigger’s Broom:

Identity is a convenient fiction that we are hard-wired to believe in.

Second, I highly recommend making time for this cartoon which sheds some light on the subject, which I saw many years ago and Laurence managed to find on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc

A famous bit of trivia that has been passed around for years holds that over the course of 7 years, every cell in your body will have been replaced with a new one. Are there any simple ways to disprove this?

Categories
Old

Things 16: Colour-changing, Memes, Captain Jack

A video
The video comes first this week because it’s so incredibly good. If you are nearby to someone that might be interested in interesting illusion videos, get them to watch with you. It’s a simple but incredible colour-changing card trick:

Films
It has come to my attention that some people didn’t realise I have a Cineworld Unlimited card, so I better plug that just this once. You pay £12 a month and you can see as many films as you like at Cineworld cinemas all across the country (although it’s £15 a month if you also want to be able to go to those in central London, which fortunately does not include the one on King Street). Last year this meant I saw films for an average of £2.95 a ticket.

One of the objections to the idea of this card is that there aren’t enough films you would want to see in a month for it to be worth it. But of course, you will quite likely find there are more films you are happy to go and see if the cost is working out to be £3 per film on average!

Link: http://www.cineworld.co.uk/Cms.jgi?RUBRIQUE_CMS=UNLIMITED
http://www.cineworld.co.uk/unlimited [link no longer works, try this one – also it is now £13.50. – Tim, 17/8/10]

Furthermore, even if you don’t have one of these cards, the Orange Wednesdays 2-for-1 offer apparently still works with tickets bought with an unlimited card (so seeing a film with such a person on a Wednesday would be free).

So anyway, this week I saw Cassandra’s Dream, which was flawed but very effective at creating tension and so proved an interesting experience, and Smart People, which was not much more than flawed characters delivering pithy lines and so was a bit disappointing.

Next Week’s film
I’ll be seeing Mongol.

IMDb rating: 7.5/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 85%
Trailer: featuring some of the most hilariously overwrought and obvious deep-voiced narration I’ve heard in a while: http://www.filmcrave.com/movie_page_main.php?id=8165

A Puzzle
An open question that emerged from a discussion I had earlier this week:

In evolution, genes are passed on and alter randomly (roughly speaking), and in this way desirable traits emerge. The analogy has been made for ideas and technology, and in this case people refer to ‘memes’ (a cross between genes and memory, as these things have to be remembered by people rather than passed on). But there are several problems with the analogy. What do you think are the main problems or differences?

A Quote
Another personal maxim of mine that came up recently:

“You can’t expect something to get better if you don’t do anything about it. In fact, you can expect it to get worse.”

A Link
A fascinating report on the experiences of a guy that played Jack Sparrow at Disneyland.

An extract:

“Here’s a napkin someone wrote on for me: “I will give you a blow job on your break, so sexy! Kim—714-XXX-XXXX.” I would also get offers from women in my ear: “Anything you want, just find me.” I had a girl who had turned 18 the day before. She was with a high school group, and she wrote down her room number at the Downtown Disney hotel. I had a lady hump my leg one day in the park.”

A picture
I recently passed the picture below on to Bryan when he needed an opening image for a presentation on how to judge creative work.

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: