Category: Uncategorized

A town called Tambo

My niece Julia is in Tambo. Tambo is a small town in western Queensland, Australia. How small is it? Well, by my count, 12 or 14 city blocks just about accounts for the whole thing.

Tambo, Queensland

Wikipedia puts the population at 350, so maybe with Julia it’s 351. It is situated on the banks of the Barcoo River, which, as Mark Twain said of the Arno, would be a “very plausible river if they would pump some water into it.” Tourism has replaced the sheep business as a primary source of income. According to About Australia, one of things to admire in Tambo is the Tambo Teddies Workshop where you can “see the sheep skin teddy bears.” An impressive, if sordid, task for sheep to undertake. I don’t wonder that it brings in the crowds.

But there’s nothing wrong with being small, and Tambo looks like a very well-kept place. I know this because I drove around it courtesy of Google Maps Street View, which, astonishingly, has been there and will show you around. Here, for example, is the establishment where Julia works.

If you want to know more about Tambo, read all about it on Julia’s blog.

Helicopter strobing

If you only visited Aspen during ski season, you might be forgiven for thinking the place is snowy all year round. Similarly, a third grader might well imagine his teacher lives at school, since that’s the only place he ever sees her. Any time a periodic observation is synchronized with the event it measures, things get screwy. This movie makes the problem clear.

No matter how surreal it looks, this helicopter isn’t doing anything strange. The rotor turns at a certain rate, and the camera happens to be snapping frames for the movie at exactly the same rate (or a multiple of the same rate, but that complicates the explanation). So the camera is catching the rotor blades at exactly the point as they whirl around. As a result they look like they’re motionless. But if you were on the ground watching, nothing would look amiss.

Here’s another instructive video of a more prosaic system: the wheel of a bike.

A notable application of this kind of synchronization was the Red Baron’s machine gun. In World War I, if you mounted the guns where they were most conveniently operated by the pilot (just over the nose of the plane), you had the unfortunate side effect of shooting off your propeller. The first solution to this problem, introduced in 1914 by Saulmier, was to use armored blades, so bullets did minimal damage when, inevitably, they struck the prop. But the cleverer solution by far was strobing: use an interrupter gear that only lets the machine gun operate when the prop is safely out of the way. Just as with the helicopter video, from the gun’s point of view, the propeller is motionless.

Personal Fabrication for Dummies

You can now get a personal fabricator for $5000 from Desktop Factory. That’s about the price point where LaserWriters started to gain widespread acceptance. Although I’m a big fan of 3-D printing, I don’t actually expect them to appear in most houses anytime soon. I get excited about them because they dramatically accelerate design cycles for anyone building solid objects of any kind.

I found this nifty tutorial to the world of custom manufacture on the Replicator blog: Personal Fabrication for Dummies.

By the way, you can also fabricate objects by shooting lasers into granulated sugar too, if you prefer. Not very practical, but worth a peek.

The History of Rome podcast

If you haven’t yet been convinced to give podcasts a try, here are two good ones that may push you over the edge. I would never sit in front of a computer and listen to a lecture or radio program, but I really enjoy putting podcasts on my iPod and then listening to them while I drive or while I’m folding laundry (or both, if I happen to be driving the laundrymobile). It’s a very satisfying way to learn.

These podcasts are both about matters historical, recent and ancient.

The first is just one very good episode of This American Life. It’s called Another Frightening Show About the Economy and it’s about the collapse of the Wall Street financial system. I saw it recommended lots of places (including Paul Kedrosky’s blog) before I finally listened to it, and I’m glad I did. Very informative.

The more ancient historical matter is the History of Rome podcast. I first heard about this on Alex Palazzo’s molecular biology blog, and once again, it’s a real find. It’s compact, entertaining, and enlightening. I knew the writer and narrator, Mike Duncan, was a genius when he deadpanned that the Roman tactic of bringing down Carthaginian battle elephants with chariots was similar to the one employed by the Rebel Alliance against Imperial Walkers on the ice planet Hoth. Now that’s bringing history alive.

Alan’s Color/Language Project

Alan Kennedy has written here many times before, most recently about the many color-related idioms that people use around the world. Alan has wonderful vantage point for making his observations: he teaches English to adults who have come to Manhattan from all over the world. He has taken a particular and abiding interest in colorful language, and when I offered to support his research on this site, he was happy to take me up on it.

So I am delighted to present a new and permanent installation on this site, Alan Kennedy’s Color/Language Project. There are three parts to it.

First of all, you can read his short article, Linguistic Facts About Color. I found the Berlin/Kay color spectrum especially interesting: languages always add colors in the same order. Any language with words for only three colors will always have names for white, black, and red. Any language with six color words will add green, yellow, and blue. I was surprised to see that leafy green has primacy over the blue of sky and sea. Even yellow outranks blue.

The next resource for the Color Project is an ever-growing spreadsheet, Color Idioms In Different Languages (if you prefer, you can see that same information as a single Google Spreadsheet page). Look at the color distributions by language. The list is far from comprehensive, but it hints at some intriguing possibilities. Is German bluer than most languages? Is Korean redder? And why?

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, you can add your own favorite expression to this resource using this Color Idiom contribution form. The suggested idioms won’t appear instantly on the list; Alan will review them from time to time and they’ll get added to the published spreadsheet.

So there you have it: a new resource, courtesy of Alan (with a little help from his friends here at Star Chamber Headquarters). Help it grow.

The Sweet Tea Map

What divides the North from the South? Surely nothing so simple and stark as the Mason-Dixon line between Maryland and Pennsylvania. It should be something that reflects behavior and cultural norms. We might consider what the locals call a small stream. Is it a branch (southern) or a run (northern)? Appropriately, the battle referred to by the Union army as First Bull Run went by the name First Manassas Junction in the Confederacy.

Less obscurely, numerous maps have been made about the Soda/Coke boundary, south of which all carbonated beverages are termed “Coke” (we will pass over the abomination “Pop” with no further mention). As a native North Carolinian, I never called my (non-Coke) soft drink a Coke, so the Soda/Coke line never rang true with me. But I can vouch for the veracity of another beverage-centric line of demarcation: the sweet tea line. In the South, you can always count on being served sweet tea if you ask for “tea”.

The Romans stopped their northward civilizing advance into Europe wherever they could no longer cultivate grapes. It was bad enough being without olive trees, but a life without wine wasn’t worth contemplating. Perhaps Lee’s legions, stopping at a roadside inn near Gettysburg, felt the same way. “No sweet tea, boys. Let’s head on home.”

Imaginary Law Firms, Part 1: Brannock, Foley, and Freeth

This is Charles Brannock, shown next to his device (not to scale).

brannock.jpg

This is Jack Foley. On the right is a gentleman skilled in his art.

foley.jpg

T.J. Freeth (1819-1904), our firm’s founder, was unavailable when the photographer came around, but this is his nephroid. To the right you see an ordinary nephroid lurking in a coffee cup.

freeth.jpg

You know the ordinary nephroid as the reflected catacaustic of a circle, the involute of Caley’s sextic, and a generally good-natured two-cusped epicycloid. But Freeth’s nephroid is something altogether different: a strophoid of a circle with a double curlicue in the kidney crotch. (Common decency and good taste prevents us from displaying Freeth’s supertrisectrix strophoid.)

For their vision and lasting impact on our society, we salute Messrs. Brannock, Foley, and Freeth.

Behind the CLICK: the anatomy of a camera shutter

Most of us have put away, given away, or thrown away our old film-based cameras. No more 35 mm film canisters… now we have sleek solid state digital cameras. Except that the shutter, as ever, is still a tiny clockwork marvel of gears and levers.

You press the button on top of your camera and it goes CLICK. But what happens during that click is surprisingly complex. It’s especially complex for the shutter on a Single Lens Reflex (SLR) digital camera. For instance, consider this puzzle. How does a shutter mechanism that can only operate at 1/300 of a second nevertheless provide an effective shutter speed of 1/3000 of a second?

Derek Miller of penmachine.com put together a great piece explaining how this is possible along with many other fascinating details. Here’s the post: Camera Works: shutters, flashes, and sync speed. Don’t miss one of the resources that he points to, Jeffrey Friedl’s presentation of some high speed photos taken of a lens-less SLR in action. You won’t believe all the craziness that happens in 87.8 milliseconds every time you take a picture.

Visual music

Stephen Malinowski is a polymath composer/musician/programmer who created something called the Music Animation Machine. What it does is animate music scores in a way that makes their rhythmic and tonal structures really jump out at you.

For example, here is a Chopin Etude (opus 10, #7)

Having warmed up with that, you’ll have fun watching Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto Nr. 4, third movement, presto. Fugues are fun to watch, since the visual patterns help you follow the repeating elements in the music. Here is a piece by Vincent Lo that builds a Bach-style fugue from Nokia’s default ringtone: the Nokia Ringtone Fugue. When they perform that one, do you think they encourage people to turn on their cellphones?

Malinowski has a YouTube channel with several other videos. Of course, since he spent years making this thing, he’d really like to sell you a video about it. It looks like a good deal to me, but the store page is really notable for the shockingly different musical constructions you see from different composers. Go look at it now. It’s mesmerizing. Compare Bach’s braided filigrees with Chopin’s slabs and slashes.

Thanks to YouTube, we all have synesthesia.

Mapping football teams with Parallax

One day as I was flying high above the Earth, as I like to do, I happened across this corner of London (Fulham, actually) wherein I spied a lovely football pitch situated thus:

“Great cows!” thought I, “all those soccer fans and not one scrap of parking! In my homeland this would not be.”

Compare this with the parking on offer at, say, Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, home of the Brady-less Patriots. It’s a stark contrast, and a good reminder that there’s no need to take public transportation as long as there’s PLENTY OF PARKING FOLKS!

This got me wondering how many fans attend that stadium in London (answer: 26,000 at full capacity). Which in turn made me wonder what team played there (answer: Fulham F.C.). Fulham plays in the Premier League, which put me on to something I’ve wondered about before. I know the names of a number of English football teams, but I have no idea where they are. Okay, Manchester United is in Manchester, but what about Arsenal? For some reason, when I last looked into this, I couldn’t find a simple map that showed what I wanted to know. I’ve since found several, but no matter, because this gave me a great opportunity to try out Parallax.

I learned about Parallax from Ben Hyde. As Ben observes, you should really watch the video to understand what Parallax does, but I would describe it like this: a search engine that carries along piles of intermediate results as you move toward your ultimate aggregated final answer. To pick a simple question: how many presidents went to West Point? It’s not a hard question to answer, but you’d have to visit a lot of Wikipedia pages to get the definitive result. Parallax lets you lasso all the presidents and then pick other questions to ask about the entire set. So we quickly discover that U.S. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower went to West Point. Jimmy Carter is the only presidential graduate of the Naval Academy (John McCain went there too, for what it’s worth).

Back to English football: starting with Arsenal, I continued to the entire Premier League. From there I clicked on Arena/Stadium, and then Show results on map and voilà:

Wow! Now that’s what I’m talking about.