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Things 48: Bike Parkour, Limits of Men, Wolfram Alpha

(Originally sent May 2009)

I’m considering switching to a blog format for Things in time for Things 50. Let me know if you have any strong feelings on the subject. [You’re now looking at it! – T.M. 28/5/11]

Video
Danny MacAskill does parkour/free-running but on a bike. Having seen these kind of videos before, I know a lot of them are clearly a collection of flukes edited together – but in this case the man has a staggering raw skill and most of the things he does (with the exception of the first) you get the feeling he could pull off 10 times in a row.

A slow build up, but worth it:

Quotes
Two quotes capturing a similar idea – decide for yourself just how gender-neutral ‘man/men’ is in each case:

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer

“Men perceive the world from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.”
– Simone de Beauvoir

Link
With no regard to downplaying expectations, Wolfram|Alpha is going to attempt to launch within the next 24 hours. In some sense a web front-end for Mathematica, it will essentially curate public knowledge (population demographics, poker probabilities, mathematical algorithms, and who knows what else) and make it queryable with natural(ish?) language.

The hype:
“Wolfram|Alpha is in a sense the “killer app” for Mathematica. It is a chance for Mathematica to show off the astonishing range of things it is capable of doing when it is deployed, not against a specific problem, but against all problems.”

A lovely little .pdf summarising the ‘quest for computable knowledge’ in 2 sides of A4, where Wolfram|Alpha is naturally the next great step.

A bit of geekish chest-thumping as they assert how mighty their works are.

Showing off the maths bit.

The Reality:
From Douglas Lenat:

“[it] covers a large portion of the space of queries that the average person might genuinely want to ask. […] It handles a much wider range of queries than Cyc, but much narrower than Google; it understands some of what it is displaying as an answer, but only some of it […] The bottom line is that there is a large range of queries it can’t parse, and a large range of parsable queries it can’t answer.”

Assuming they can withstand demand, you will be able to try it for yourself very shortly – they will commence launch preparations at 1am tonight / tomorrow morning.

[Of course, it’s now live, and Lenat’s observation remains accurate – T.M. 28/5/11]

Picture
Dresden Codak‘s Aaron Diaz, sporadically brilliant webcomicer, illustrates 7 types of plot twist and how they manifest across six genres, from the Reverse Macguffin in a Thriller to Double Shyamalan Mystery.

Puzzle answer: The Space Stick
Can information travel faster than light if you poke an incredibly rigid stick one light-year long? The answer is no. As many of you observed, ‘pushing’ a solid object does not magically transfer force instantaneously through it, but rather creates a compression wave as atoms or molecules push up against one another, and this is bounded by the speed of light. (There’s also the issues of the necessary rigidity being impossible, the huge amount of inertia you would be working against, needing something to push against, and gravitational complications if you’re anywhere near a planet or other large celestial body).

Many of you chose to focus instead on the general problem of faster-than-light communication. In summary, quantum entanglement does involve ‘spooky action at a distance’, but fascinatingly stops just short of being spooky enough to transfer information. Wormholes, on the other hand, are seemingly permitted by General Relativity, which would seem to lead to paradoxes, and remains a mystery.

This week’s puzzle: Wired’s “Color Scheme”
The US issue of Wired this month is guest-edited by J. J. Abrams and features a lot of interesting puzzles as well as a meta-puzzle (I think). I highly recommend ‘Color Scheme’, which you can try here [link broke, try here – metatim 03/08/15], although you’ll have to resist just clicking for the answer on the link bizarrely placed immediately below the puzzle.

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Things 100: Spaceship Earth, Fake Hacking, List, Scientific Method, Owlbears

It’s Things 100. Time for some particularly epic Things.

Video
I remember reading (in Critical Path, lent to me by John) that Buckminster-Fuller felt it was very difficult to watch a sunset or sunrise and intuitively apprehend that what you see is due to the earth turning – but that if we could succeed at doing so, we would come to better appreciate our place in the universe, and perhaps make wiser long-term decisions.

Even though I’ve seen plenty of night-sky time-lapse before, for some reason this video is the first I’ve seen that really gives me that feeling:

The Mountain from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

Link
A while ago I thought it would be neat to make a program that took as input random keyboard mashing and produced as output  the appearance that you were doing some movie-style hacking, complete with big secret-service logos and password fields that flash up “ACCESS DENIED”, “ACCESS DENIED” and then “ACCESS GRANTED”, and obviously lines and lines of clever-looking code, but I didn’t have the know-how to make it happen.

Fortunately, the internet provides – it doesn’t do the whole window thing I imagined, but you do get to mash the keyboard while apparently producing reams of commented hacking-type code (none of which I understand). If you want a version that also makes bleeping noises for no reason, just like in the movies, you can use this one instead.

Tim Link
I blogged my responses to the first 10 questions in the “30 Days of Video Games Meme”. Probably worth reading if you’re interested in games, or in gamers, or the formative life experiences of me.

Quote kind of thing
Diving back into my own archive, I was quite pleased with this list of self-referential things I collected and created on my old Geocities self-referential page:

Imagine a world with no hypothetical situations.
This sentence has cabbage six words
There are no redundant redundant words in this sentence.
This statement is false
This statement is not provable by me. (Useful illustration of Godel’s incompleteness theorem)
The smallest number that cannot be stated in fewer than 22 syllables
Consider the set of all sets that have not yet been considered.
Mispeltt
Ptyo
Repetition
sdrawkcaB
The ‘pre’ in prefix
Quinquesyllabic
Self-referential
Word
Ineffable
Recherche
Sesquipedalian
Non-phonetic
Illiterate illiteration
“All clichés should be avoided like the plague” (attributed to Arthur Christiansen, found in “The Joy of Clichés” by Nigel Rees)
This is not the last example on the list.
Inelegantness
Pseudo-Greek
Aibohphobia (credited to Imre Leader, although the Wikipedia cites the Wizard of Id)
Grammar message in Microsoft Word: “This may not be a complete sentence”
TLA
Abbr.
This sentence contains three a’s, three c’s, two d’s, twenty seven e’s, four f’s, two g’s, ten h’s, eight i’s, thirteen n’s, six o’s, ten r’s, twenty fives’s, twenty three t’s, three u’s, three v’s, six w’s, three x’s, and four y’s.
In order to understand the theory of recursion, one must first understand the theory of recursion.
I don’t speak English (Je ne parle pas Francais, etc…)
Stretching a metaphor to breaking point, then snapping it, shredding it into small pieces and mashing them into a pulp.
Adjectival
Illegitimate
There are 3 kinds of people in the world; those that can count, and those that can’t.
Actually, there are 10 kinds of people in the world; those that can count in binary, and those that can’t.
“a7H.4hwJ?22i” is an example of a good password.
Repetition
A rag man
Penultimate
This is the last example on the list.

Puzzle
What is going wrong with the scientific method? That’s a very long article, but it’s a very big question, so worth a read and a ponder. (And hey, this is Things 100 after all.)

Picture
And finally… what do Owlbears look like? The ArtOrder asked, and a bunch of different artists came up with a really fantastic range of answers.

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Things 99: Rules for Stories, Sci-Fi Map, Movie Bar Codes

Video
When an important character first appears in a movie, it’s generally good practice to have the first few things they do give a strong indication of what kind of person they are. I think this is why people get so upset about the “Han shot first” debacle, since it was such a character-defining moment.

Occasionally, real life can give us the same speedy insight into a person, such as these 14 seconds:

Quote
In screenwriter Todd Alcott‘s series of insightful and fascinating posts analysing The Shining and how it fits the standard three-act structure set against a driving need of the protagonist, provided that you consider the hotel itself to be the protagonist (which is actually quite a compelling argument; read it in full in parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), he has the following aside:

[I]n order for a protagonist/antagonist dyad to work dramatically, the protagonist must be aware that the antagonist exists, and is acting upon things, and vice versa. This is why […] fantasy stories always have magical characters who can see the future and know what’s going on in distant lands – because otherwise, the protagonist and antagonist would never know that the other exists.  If Gandalf is just some guy who tells Frodo to throw the ring into a volcano and Frodo says “okay” and sets out, there is no drama to Lord of the Rings.  It must be that Gandalf is a wizard and that Frodo can have visions when he puts on the ring and that Sarumon has a magic ball that sees things, or else everybody is just kind of doing things.

I wasn’t so sure about that when I first read it, but ever since then I’ve seen it more and more. I think it’s actually more the case that when a writer has a story in mind it’s very difficult for them to separate their omniscient knowledge of events from the far more limited knowledge held by the individual characters. If you have some kind of fantasy setting, it’s almost irresistably tempting to get around this by including some kind of magical information transfer. Harry Potter leans on this story crutch particularly heavily (although to be fair Rowling does fold the implications back into the narrative).

Picture
Ward Shelley’s History of Science Fiction, originally posted at scimaps.org:
(click for big)

Puzzle
Imagine taking a frame from a movie, and squashing it horizontally to produce a thin vertical line. Now imagine doing that to every frame of the movie, and putting those lines next to one another in sequence. While I’m not sure of the precise transformation used, this is what Movie Barcodes essentially does.

For many movies, this will tend to produce a set of incomprehensible stripes that show little more than the general color grading of the film. The Matrix is a perfect example (click for big on this or any of the others in this post):

Films using distinctive palettes at different times reveal their underlying pattern, for example the distinct striations of Hero:

This begs the question: are there any movies which you could recognise from their “bar code” alone? I suspect this is only reasonable if you’re given a subset of movies to guess from, or if the movie is particularly distinctive. So for this week’s Things, see if you can guess the following movies (the answers are in the filenames of the images):

A famous Disney movie:

Another famous Disney movie:

A film I like:

New movies are regularly added to the Movie Barcode Tumblr, and most excellently they sell a variety of prints of some of the most popular!

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Things 98: Weakest Link Puppets, GPS Doom, Visual Metaphors

Video
I really like The Weakest Link Puppets Special. There’s something about the way these worlds collide that just keeps me smiling as I watch – childish responses to adult questions, adult responses to childish questions, and a wonderful willingness of all concerned to make what’s ultimately one of the simplest illusions going really work. If you want to see the rest of the episode, YouTube will show you the way.

Link
A New Scientist article on how a surprising amount of our technological world is reliant on GPS.

Puzzle
After last week’s question on old-stuff-on-the-internet, I was looking back at my old Geocities site (now living on my own domain after Geocities shut down) and came upon my old Alternative Newsletters. I like to think of these as precursors to the Things email, but they’re really completely different, so I probably shouldn’t.

Anyway, one of them had the following quiz, which I thought I’d adapt for Things:

1) Is the answer to this question yes?
2) Is the answer to this question no?
3) Is the answer to question 4 maybe?
4) Are most of the answers yes in this quiz?
5) Have you stopped worrying about logical yes/no question traps?
6) If you answered maybe to questions 1-5, ask yourself another question in place of this one: If you cyclically rotate ‘maybe’, ‘no’ and ‘yes’ forwards through the alphabet, then answer questions 3 and 5 again, does this change whether or not you have to answer this question?
7) Answer this question last: What is the answer to question 8?
8) Is the answer to this different in comparison with the answer to the last question?

You don’t need answers, you know how many you got right.
Scoring:
0-2 questions correct: congratulations, you could be sane.
3-5 questions correct: bonus question! Did you get more than 3 correct? Answer, mark, and re-score.
6-8 questions correct: you do not need my congratulations, getting this many correct is its own reward (and punishment)
9+ questions correct: See Me.

Picture
A periodic table (actually not really periodic) of metaphors:
(click for big)

Last Week’s Question
Last Week I asked “What is the oldest evidence of your own activity on the internet you can still provide a live link to now”.

For me personally, it’s this review on Amazon dated 24th September 2001. I was active in a few other places before that, but they’re all dead now. Let this serve as a reminder to back up any data you hold dear.

Richard beats this by a long distance, with his usenet post dated 4th February 1992. Nearly 20 years ago! That’s a long time in the world of the internet.

By the way, the natural conclusion of this little game would be to try to find a link to the oldest thing on the internet. I’d have no idea where to begin, but let me know if you do.