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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:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9oeOYMRvuQ

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.

Quote
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 13: Mirrors, Chronotron, Animal Crossing Comic

(Originally sent May 2008)

This week’s film – one line review
Iron Man was very well put together, with great screen presence from Robert Downey Jr and Jeff Bridges, but to me it didn’t seem as amazing as everyone makes out, and I don’t think non-genre or non-Downey fans need to see it.

Next week’s film
I’m going to see Speed Racer sitting in the front row with my brain switched off and my eyes wide open.

IMDb rating: 6.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 33%
Trailer:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehpxIrCNiVI

A Puzzle
Why do mirrors reflect left and right but not up and down?

This is actually a surprisingly deep question.

Hint: The question still stands if you’re looking at the mirror in space.

A Quote
The best quip I have ever made.

My flatmate Ross was elected the new president of the juggling society. He was suggesting that we should club together to get some kind of leaving gift for the outgoing president. With frankly uncharacteristic wit and speed, I replied

“You just want to set a precedent of giving a present to the president.”

A Link
As pointed out to me by Simon, Chronotron is a flash game in which you solve puzzles by going back in time in a tardis and interacting with your past self:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Scarybug/chronotron

A video
My favourite ad right now is for the VW Golf, in which car footage is edited together to create music:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_56vWaaCxjg

A picture
‘Animal Crossing’ is a game in which you look after a village of animals that live together. Time keeps passing in the village even when you are not playing, so if you don’t play for a while then it tends to get overgrown with weeds and so on.

Anyway, this led to the true story that is told in this surprisingly moving comic – click to read it in full.

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Things 74: Swing, Freezer Door, Carnist Bingo

Link
A test audience on Facebook didn’t find this remotely as incredible as I did, but here it is anyway: The Swinger, an algorithmic process that can automatically generate a swing remix of a song.I recommend trying out whichever of the songs listed you are most familiar with, but for me “Money For Nothing” had the most profound effect.

Quote
Marie, during an argument: “Ah, but I’m a philosopher; numbers don’t exist.”

Puzzle
Anyone that has watched enough movies or TV is familiar with the dangers of an industrial freezer room: if you happen to get shut inside, you are doomed, since the door can only be opened from outside. But this seems like a very strange design flaw. Why are those doors designed in such a way?

Picture
As a vegetarian, I’ve found myself in many minor debates on food ethics over the years. A strange feature of these debates is that meat eaters have not generally applied as much thought to what they personally think they should or should not eat, and as a result vegetarians (and especially vegans) tend to find themselves arguing against the same instinctive, poorly-thought-out arguments every time. The Secret Society of Vegans found an excellent answer to this recurring feature of any v*gan’s life: a ‘bingo’ card for use during such debates:

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked how turning over a cassette caused the other side of the tape to be read. In fact the ‘side’ terminology only applies to the cassette – the tape itself has one ‘side’ of music recorded in one direction along the top, and the other in the opposite direction along the bottom.

Tarim points out that 8-track tape is much more mind-boggling: the tape is a continuous loop, wrapped around a single spool, with one end necessarily being pulled out from the inner part of the spiral. How could such a mechanism overcome so much friction in order to run continuously?

Categories
New

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

Video
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):

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saqO_ZqX6uY

Quote
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?

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