gulley

Camera obscura in a U-Haul

One day when I was maybe nine years old, I was in the very back, what we called the “way back”, of the family station wagon. An empty box was next to me, so I put it over my head, as any bored nine year old boy might do. The day was bright, and the box had a small hole in one side, and so it was that I happened to create a pinhole camera (or camera obscura) by accident. It was one of the most magical discoveries of my life. Projected on the dark inside of that box was a blurry upside-down color image of the moving world outside. If you’ve never seen a pinhole camera in action, it really is amazing to behold, mostly because it is so utterly unexpected. All the more so when you’re a nine year old boy with no notion of why this should be.

If you want to see what it looks like, here’s the story of an artist who built a camera obscura on wheels.

You see this and you start to understand why the word “camera” comes from the Latin for “room”. To think that a big box with a hole in the side makes a passable real-time video monitor is so wonderfully strange. The basic principle of photography seems so simple when you start here.

Happy Pi Day

Question: What is the value of pi?

Answer: For a fair approximation of pi, first look at the Google trends search for pi and detect when the annual spikes occur. Call this SpikeDay. Then take SpikeDay_month + SpikeDay_day/100.

Question: How many polygon sides would you need to get this accurate with the approximation used by Archimedes?

Answer: 96 (more or less).

Question: What do you call a 96-sided polygon?

Answer: Round (more or less).

Question: What do you call the period between Square Root of Christmas on March 5th (the square root of 1225 is 35) and Pi Day on March 14th?

Answer: Nerdigras, of course.

(Pi ice cubes spotted on Inspire Me Now)

Robot pictures

When I was in grad school, I spent a lot of time in an aerospace robotics lab. People were doing research on things like robotic astronauts that juggle satellites and arm wrestle in space. Actually, they were pretty primitive things back then, and it was all we could do to keep them from damaging themselves and anything or anyone nearby. The motors were powerful, and if the software failed for some reason, you could very quickly have a big heavy robot arm whipping around like the bottom of a blender. That’s why there was a tape outline of just how far each robot arm are could reach. And that’s why there was always a prominent big red button that said STOP next to every robot. And that’s why I find pictures like this terrifying.

robot-arm

That’s German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the right there along with Arnold and the CEO of Intel. One bad gain in the controller for that arm and WHACK! you’d have a news-making photo op there. I hope the robot was unplugged. But then again, robots have come a long way, so maybe my instincts are old-fashioned by now. The photo above was culled from this Boston Globe Big Picture photo essay on robots. Lots of fun stuff and good variety too. There’s a baby seal robot for soothing hospital patients that has a brilliant touch: you recharge it by putting a plug shaped like a pacifier into its mouth. Predictably, there’s a Japanese robotic Tyrannosaurus, but if you ask me, this is a much cheaper (and safer) way to invite a T. rex over to your museum.

Fish shows the value of keeping a clear head

There are many species of cave fish that, after millennia in utter darkness, have either lost their eyelids or lost their eyes entirely. You might think that losing your eyelids is a way station on a one-way trip to blindness. But the barreleye fish (for its tubular, or barrel-shaped, eyes) lost its eyelids even as its eyes were bulking up and becoming more powerful. Barreleyes live in the deep sea where there is still just enough light filtering down from the surface to silhouette a snack, provided you are looking straight up and have the necessary light-gathering equipment.

So, let’s say you are Mother Nature and you are presented with this puzzle: giant tubular light-collecting eyes and no eyelids. Hmmm… what to do? I know! Why not evolve a transparent head?

Look at this picture.

barrel-eye-fish

The things that look like eyes are actually nose-like things called nares. The head itself is clear, and the eyes are those giant green things lodged deep in the head jelly. In fact, the green things are the lenses on top of cylindrical eyes, and they point straight up, perpendicular to the body axis, like a twin telescopes in a sheltering observatory dome.

Now, look at the picture again and read the last paragraph again. It may help to mutter to yourself those are not eyes… those ARE eyes. It takes a while to sink in.

I don’t blame you if you don’t want to take my word for it. Read more about it here: MBARI News Release – Researchers solve mystery of deep-sea fish with tubular eyes and transparent head. That Mother Nature… where does she get her material?

Thanks to Greg Wilson for the tweet on this one.

Greek to you, Chinese to me

Strange Maps had a lovely map of mutual incomprehension among languages last week: Greek To Me. It’s reminiscent of the old X-is-the-new-Y diagram I wrote about a while back.

Read the commentary under the map. There’s some good stuff in there. Most poignant to me is the Esperanto taunt Estas Volapuk al mi! (“It’s Volapük to me!”). Volapük is another made-up language, and it’s so uncool that even the Esperanto speakers make fun of it. Man, if you can’t sit at the same lunch table with the Esperanto speakers, you are one sad wanker.

Printing Coraline

Objet Geometries is an Israeli company with some nifty new 3D printers. They did a press release recently that got some play: 3D Printers Play Starring Role in New Animated Film Coraline. The story goes like this. Coraline is a stop-motion animated movie. That is, people are moving little puppets around a big model house and taking snapshots to make a movie one frame at a time. But making these little puppets is hard. So why not use 3D printing to create them? Here’s an example of how it works.

I love 3D printing, so my first thought was: how cool.

But there’s something very odd about this. They’re going from the computer model to a 3D printout to create a video frame that’s stored on a computer. That sounds to me like a very painful way to do computer-generated graphics. Something like carving your email on a tree trunk and flinging it at your friend. Or scratching a note on the back of your cell phone and gluing it to a postcard.

I know that photography of real scenery lit by honest-to-goodness light has a special richness that movie makers crave. And stop-motion animators are an obsessive bunch. But it’s so expensive and loopy compared to the computer graphics it resembles that I have to think this genre is a dying breed.

What is it about the Carmina Freakin’ Burana?

Carl Orff succeeded spectacularly where so many composers have failed. In the twentieth century he wrote a piece of music in a classical style, a secular cantata with Latin lyrics, in fact, that went on to be a modern pop cultural phenomenon. The Carmina Burana sounds ancient, but it was composed in 1937. The opening number, O Fortuna, is the one that everybody knows. It’s the one that they used for beer and Gatorade commercials. It’s the one they used in no fewer than ten movies, including Jackass and Cheaper By The Dozen.

I don’t mean to sound glib. I like O Fortuna as much as the next drinker of sugary beverages. I do. But what is it about the piece that inspires so much schlock? Maybe it’s because it delivers pretense, bombast, and orgasmic payoff in one incredibly compact package.

Anyway, from Steve Crandall’s blog I came across this helpful explanation of the puzzling lyrics of Orff’s chef d’oeuvre.

Fun stuff, and it puts me in mind of mangled and misheard lyrics of all kinds. Kiss This Guy is a site dedicated to misheard lyrics. The title comes from the well-known Jimi Hendrix riff from Purple Haze, “‘scuse me while I kiss this guy.”

The idea of garbled prose acting as a proxy for a real story is the basis for Howard Chace’s masterpiece, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut (Little Red Riding Hood). Upon seeing the wolf in Grandma’s clothing, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut was moved to remark on the size of her nose:

O, Grammar, water bag noise! A nervous sore suture anomalous prognosis!”

Chace’s efforts are justly famous. But in his epic Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames (Mother Goose Rhymes), Luis D’Antin van Rooten shows us that the effect also works across language barriers. How’s your French? Read this out loud.

Un petit d’un petit s’étonne aux Halles.

This is either the story of a little man finding surprise in the famous old Parisian market, or the story of a giant egg man astride a battlement. The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.

Gender stereotypes and Dolores Labs

Are you attractive?

Why of course you are. I have often admired your fine good looks. And as a reader of this blog, you possess a keen intelligence and a quick wit. Good for you!

A slightly more interesting question is this. Where are you now, relative to your lifetime peak attractiveness? Or your lifetime peak intelligence? Dolores Labs can help.

Dolores Labs is a wonderful outfit that takes crowdsourcing very seriously. They have a core competence in driving Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to do some rather interesting research. Some of it is what you might expect: make the Turkers do dreary legwork, like determining the race of everybody who’s appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated since 1954.

But the more interesting stuff they do is more like a giant psychology experiment on the Turkers themselves. Andy Baio did something like this recently, asking Turkers, Why do you turk?. It’s a humanizing answer to the question “who ARE these Mechanical Turk people anyway?”

Dolores Labs did the following. They said here are 100,000 photos of people you’ve never seen. Just tell us, are they attractive? Are they trustworthy? Are they intelligent? Averaged across millions of judgments, when do women experience peak attractiveness? The answer appears to be 24. Aha! I knew it! And anybody who buys car insurance for their son will not be surprised that a man’s trustworthiness trough is 18 or 19. And may we posit an inverse relationship between male intelligence and sexual distraction? What should we make of the W-shaped curve of perceived female intelligence? Is there a correlation between intelligence and trustworthiness? Read the article. It’s all there.

PS: Don’t miss the crowdsourced naughty bits.

Video: Why I Love Monty Python

More from the Python Channel on YouTube. I came across this while fishing for free videos to download from the iTunes store. It’s a refreshingly straight un-ironic take on the influence of Monty Python on American comedy as seen by American comedians.

Jimmy Fallon has the best line: “If you play Dark Side of the Moon while you watch the Holy Grail, I guarantee that you are not getting laid.”

The Python Channel is now steadily adding content. Their experimental business strategy appears to be working very well. They’ve even got themed playlists now like the World Financial Meltdown Special. The Money Song is a surefire crowd pleaser, but I’ve always been fond of the Merchant Banker sketch: “I don’t want to seem stupid, but it looks to me like I’m a pound down on the whole deal.”

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