Tag: video

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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?

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

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Things 76: Bikes, Polaroids, Kanye Tweets

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For some reason it’s the most pointless things that make me feel most encouraged about the human race:

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I am naturally drawn to extremely long term, incremental projects. This probably explains why I have chosen to serialise 50+ issues of old Things on this blog at a rate of one a week; why I have spreadsheets tracking my sleep data going back nearly 10 years; and perhaps why it took me 6 years to complete a PhD. But as the title suggests, “He Took a Polaroid a Day” takes that kind of thing to a whole new level.

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Leonard Bernstein: To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked why buses come in clusters. I think the main problem is the feedback loops – any traffic fluctuation that causes a bus to become slightly delayed means a longer wait at the next bus stop, which means more people are likely to turn up. More people take longer to get on board, and as Xuan points out make it more likely the bus will need to stop more often. Meanwhile, when the next bus turns up there has been less of a wait since the last bus left, so fewer people board, and by the same token the bus can make faster progress, so the gap between buses is closed by feedback loops at both ends.

One answer is to hold buses to “even out gaps in the service” as does indeed sometimes happen. Xuan also suggests better data on how crowded imminent buses are would encourage people to wait for the next, more empty bus, easing the feedback loop. I also think the surfacing of real time public transport data – as could be viewed a few weeks ago – will help us collectively improve efficiency in a similar way.

Pictures
Kanye West begins tweeting in a rather ostentatious way. In a stroke of inspiration, someone thought to use his tweets to re-caption New Yorker cartoons. Examples below; full story here.

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Things 75: Fast robots, Inception links, Buses

Video
It’s strangely easy to forget that sufficiently well-made robots can move and react ridiculously fast. Here’s some nice reminders:

Links
Spoiler warning: if you haven’t seen Inception, these links are not for you. Move along to the quote.

I saw Inception and particularly liked the way you can enjoy it at face value or try to make out a deeper underlying truth. Whichever camp you fall into, I recommend checking out this YouTube video (more accurately audio), and if you’re trying to piece things together you might be aided by this simple diagram, or this more ambitious one.

If you want to dive deeper into working things out, I recommend you start with the IMDb FAQ which has some pretty good answers, then move on to the InceptionTheories forum.

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Piet Mondrian: Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Puzzle
Here’s a classic: why do buses come clusters?

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked why walk-in freezers have doors that cannot be opened from inside. As Richard pointed out, the answer is that actually, they generally don’t. But if they did, I like Maria’s theory: “Maybe it is a Hollywood conspiracy. Think of the lack of plots if people didn’t get stuck inside a walk-in freezer.” Hollywood manipulating real life to make convenient tropes seem more plausible sounds like a fun premise for a film…

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Things 73: 5 seconds, Mamet Memo, Choose a Typeface

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The top 20 entries in a 5-second video contest – another great example of creativity out of limitation, as discussed in the Things Art Special (contains some scenes likely to offend, although only briefly):

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David Mamet’s extraordinary memo/rant/lecture on writing good scripts, packed with excessive capitalisation, fractured grammar and other weird errors, all of which only serve to reinforce the passion with which he is trying to improve the world, can be read here.

If you don’t have time for 1,099 words, here’s a synecdochic exceprt:

EVERY SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC. THAT MEANS: THE MAIN CHARACTER MUST HAVE A SIMPLE, STRAIGHTFORWARD, PRESSING NEED WHICH IMPELS HIM OR HER TO SHOW UP IN THE SCENE.THIS NEED IS WHY THEY CAME. IT IS WHAT THE SCENE IS ABOUT. THEIR ATTEMPT TO GET THIS NEED MET WILL LEAD, AT THE END OF THE SCENE,TO FAILURE – THIS IS HOW THE SCENE IS OVER. IT, THIS FAILURE, WILL, THEN, OF NECESSITY, PROPEL US INTO THE NEXT SCENE.

ALL THESE ATTEMPTS, TAKEN TOGETHER, WILL, OVER THE COURSE OF THE EPISODE, CONSTITUTE THE PLOT.

Puzzle
Some of you may remember cassettes, small mechanical devices about eight times the size of an mp3 player, with 90 minutes or so of music physically encoded on a piece of wound tape, designed to spool and respool through a larger mechanical device which would ‘read’ the tape and produce the appropriate noises.

The tape had two ‘sides’, and you would play the other side of the tape by literally turning the cassette over.

The puzzle is this: no matter which side up you turned the cassette, the same physical side of the wound tape would face outwards. So how did the machine know which ‘side’ to play?

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A well-thought-out flow chart to help you choose a font for any occasion: