What not to do on the U-Bahn

Many years ago, while doing the college Europe thing, I found myself on an underground train in Munich. I had just come from London, where they mostly speak English, by way of Amsterdam, where they all do. I speak no German. So Munich was the first place where I was completely unable to communicate with vast swaths of the population. Except for, you know, in that hand-flapping chicken-pantomime kind of way, stabbing the map, sawing the air. “Is it THIS way? Yes? No?! THAT way?”

It was humbling. I felt like my IQ had dropped 100 points on the overnight train.

So there I was, absently leaning against the door of a U-Bahn subway car, rattling through Schwabing when this little boy, no more than seven, pointed to a sign next to me and read it aloud in clear, high voice. Then he stared at me, a little menacingly it seemed to me, and looked proudly at his dad. Smart kid, I thought. He can already read German, and I am a mute imbecile. Rising to the challenge, I decided to try to decipher the sign through sheer force of will. Here is what the boy read: “Bitte nicht an die Türen lehnen.” You can see it coming, but I had to sound out every word.

“Bitte, hmm, I’ve heard people say that. It’s like the German version of prego. It must mean please here. Nicht … is that night? No that would be Nacht, like Stille Nacht. This means not, I think. Türen. This could be a cognate, and I remember from Grimm’s Law that T and D are close friends. Hey, this sign is on a door, so this is probably the plural of door. Let’s see: Please not… on the doors… lehnen.”

That’s when I noticed the kid was still staring at me like a bird dog. I straightened up from my door-leaning position, losing some of my pride at decoding the sign.

Shower with your telescope

Fargo North Decoder, of Electric Company fame, once helped a character played by Rita Moreno with her dangerously loose interpretation of a No Fishing sign. Her version went like this: “Private Property? No! Fishing Allowed.” She was wrong; trouble ensued.

In a similar vein, here is a good one from Steve Crandall’s blog. It appears he was actually sent the following email ad.

There really is a meteor shower early this morning, but I’m guessing that by the time you read this it will be long gone. For the record, I should point out that you should not, in fact, shower with your telescope. If the optics are dirty, it’s far better to run it through a car wash on the back of a pickup truck. Just remember to use lots of bungee cords to hold it in place. Although I suppose there do exist people who, upon seeing the Perseid Meteor, are moved to do mysterious things with their equipment. How about this: “Watch the Perseid Meteor. Shower with a Celestron Telescope. Smoke a Marlboro Cigarette.”

It’s just as well there were no pictures with the ad.

In other space news, today was Cassini’s big Enceladus flyby in which the Saturnian probe dipped to within a few hundred miles of frosty Titan’s spicy little sister. No pictures as of this writing, but there should be some good ones before long. In the meantime, you can contemplate NASA’s latest headline.

Researcher Excited As
Moon Probed Open
Season for Satellite Science

Okay, that was my best effort. Let’s hear your “unfortunate break” headlines.

Live! Nudis! (toxic nudibranchs, that is)

Some animals live up to their cool names. Animals like the toothy velociraptor and the mysterious leafy sea dragon. Others, despite their nifty cognomens, fall short. For example, the Northern beardless-tyrannulet (not to be confused with the Ruby-crowned Kinglet) is a comparatively plain little flycatcher.

But I imagine any animal might have a hard time living up to a label as racy as “toxic nudibranch”. Except, of course, for the toxic nudibranchs. Don’t do them the disservice of calling them mere “sea-slugs”. And if you’re talking about them at your next cocktail party, remember to pronounce it NUDIBRANK.

The photographer for these amazing images is David Doubilet, and I recommend the accompanying video.

[Spotted on visualcomplexity.com]

Noodling around with Chinese characters

Here’s a fun image: the most complex Chinese character in common use.

You have to arrange 57 little lines just so to make that character. What it means (besides “Chinese is hard”) is a kind of noodle, the biang biang noodle. Now let’s imagine you work at a noodle shop in China’s Shaanxi province where these noodles are popular. It’s busy and hot, and you’re taking orders on your little pad with a stubby golf pencil.

CUSTOMER ONE: I’ll have the biang biang noodles please.

YOU: [scribbling furiously] One… order… of… biang biang… noodles…

CUSTOMER TWO: And I’ll have a double biang biang please.

YOU: Hold on, I’m still writing…

CUSTOMER TWO: Could you just write biang biang twice? That would signify my double order.

YOU: [mumbling]One order biang biang biang biang… aghh… hand cramping… can’t write.

CUSTOMER ONE: Christ, my lunch break is almost over. Let’s go get a pig.

As is my wont, I am reminded of the Monty Python skit about the great composer Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfernschplendenschlittercrasscrenbonfrieddiggerdangledungleburstein von knackerthrasherapplebangerhorowitzticolensicgranderknottyspelltinklegrandlichgrumblemeyer spelterwasserkürstlichhimbleeisenbahnwagengutenabend-bitteeinenürnburgerbratwustlegerspurtenmitzweimacheluberhundsfutgumberaber-shönendankerkalbsfleischmittlerraucher von Hautkopft of Ulm.

I suspect this biang biang character is more gimmick than anything else, much like the Llanfairpwll railway station in Wales (so many letters! so few vowels!), but it does raise a question that I’ve always pondered. In terms of semantic content per ink-inch, is Chinese more efficient than English? Chinese is more compact, but you have to cram a lot more pen strokes into that space. I recently learned at work that when we localize our software for Japanese, you simply can’t shrink a Japanese font below ten points. It goes all gray and mushy. Here, for example, is the biang biang character writ small:

By my count, 57 strokes of ink gets you almost entirely through the writing of ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM. But ultimately, is ink-inch efficiency (IIE) a metric worth optimizing? It’s very tempting to consider which language is “best” in this or that sense. But to young human brains learning languages, none of this seems to matter. Languages all have the same shape. You pick them up here and you do this with them. See what I mean?

[First seen on the Cynical-C Blog]

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

If you haven’t seen Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog yet, I highly recommend it. It’s Joss Whedon’s 42 minute web opera, a marvel of tight scripting, strong acting, and some real toe-tapping musical numbers. Whedon’s description of how it came about is worth a read too. Essentially, it grew out of the free time provided by the writer’s strike. As Whedon puts it:

“Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.”

It’s an old story, but it feels like a new genre. And whether or not you think there’s anything truly novel about it, it’s still darned entertaining. Courtesy of Hulu and a few ads, here it is:

http://www.hulu.com/embed/Z4kt7M5Uta51JuIDJV6HeQ/0/330

Incidentally, this is an example of something good that I learned about only because people were talking about it on Twitter. I find I’m picking up all kinds of stuff that way these days.

Mind games at Sporcle and the future of education

A recent post by Friend of the Star Chamber Mike Onken over at the Industry! blog reminded me what a terrific resource Sporcle is. I’ve written about their excellent Name the Presidents game here before, but they’re on a roll now. They’ve got some kind of solid infrastructure that lets them churn out games lickety-split.

Their games do a good job of removing all the hassle from lightly-aided recall trivia games. The challenge is much greater than you’d get with multiple choice, but it’s also much more satisfying. Just type as fast as you can in one place and good things happen. I love these things. It’s an ideal way to learn your way around the countries of Africa, the names of various Greek gods, and as Mike discovered, the elements of the periodic table. Poke around the list of games and you’ll find, in addition to the things you’d like to know, some things that you already know disturbingly well. You might be alarmed, for example, at how many Simpson’s characters you can name. When you memorize the fact that Moe’s last name is Szylak, can it cause you to forget the capital of Burkina Faso is Ouagadougou?

I would go so far as to say that this is where education is headed: autodidactic social competitions. Strong on the social, light on the competition, and largely self-guided. Everybody likes to know how they’re doing compared to everyone else. I’m sure this site is driving a lot of serious learning.

UPDATE: How can I neglect to mention the Sporcle challenge to name all of the cheeses in the Monty Python cheese shop skit? That’s a lot of cheese. No no. Don’t tell me. I’m keen to guess…

Defender in 16 by 16 pixels

Minimalism is big. We’ve got 5k chess (an entire game of chess written is less than 5 kilobytes of JavaScript). We’ve got Lego versions of the Old Testament. We’ve got presidents with tiny cardboard facsimiles of a real brain. But here’s one that really blew me away: a tiny version of the old arcade game Defender. And when I say tiny, I mean crazy tiny like building a house on the head of a pin tiny. This is Defender in the space of a 16 by 16 pixel icon. That in itself is impressive, but this guy gets extra credit for making a playable game of Defender run in the favicon space for the browser.

Favicon Defender.

Print your shoes

In the future, we will print everything.

We will print toasters. We will print golf carts. We will print small children.

But for now, we are printing toys and shoes. Fast Company magazine has a good story this month on (among other high tech sports gear) Nike’s fancy “Flywire” shoes for the Olympics. They’ve been able to innovate rapidly by basing their super lightweight shoe design on… bridges. Here’s the story.

The inspiration for the new construction came from the cables on a suspension bridge. Rather than cords of steel, Flywire uses thin, strong-as-steel threads of Vectran, placed in fan-shaped clusters of between 10 and 20 strands, each about 3 inches in length. […] Flywire lead designer Jay Meschter’s stroke of genius was to stop thinking of a shoe as something assembled and start thinking of it as something that is, well, printed. When Meschter connected the two ideas of filaments and strength, his mind leaped to embroidery machines, which, he realized, print out lines and shapes using colored thread stitches rather than ink. If Meschter could stitch in 3-D form the cabling that holds up a suspension bridge, and anchor the ultrathin “cables” around a foot shape, he’d be able to create an ultralight shoe in the same time it took to stitch somebody’s name on a shirt.

Printing shoes has two virtues: it’s cheap and it’s fast. A fast, cheap product design cycle means that innovation can happen extremely fast, and the fruits of innovation can be passed on to the consumer rapidly. I find this story exciting not because I want to go buy some Flywire shoes but because this is one part of an accelerating trend. Printing makes design happen faster, and when design happens faster things get better.

Pandora Radio on the iPod touch

A few weeks ago I wrote about how my iPod touch serves the purpose of a laptop in the kitchen. With the advent of the new iPhone 2.0, I was able to upgrade my iPod software (for $10) and get some of the new iPhone Apps. Among the apps are two that I suspect I’ll use a lot: Pandora and Last.fm.

I’ve been hearing good things about the Sonos system, but that seemed like overkill for my needs. I just want to listen to nice music when I’m in the kitchen. Sonos lets you pick any music you have on your computer and listen to it anywhere in the house. But here’s the problem: I can’t be bothered to pick out music, even the music that I own. I get lazy and listen to the same few things over and over. I actually prefer the way Pandora and Last.fm present my musical options. Just pick an artist or a genre and press “go”. That’s about my speed.

This is what convergence looks like for me. I’m happy getting my music streamed to me through my wifi-enabled iPod using these two services. The iPod sits in a little speaker mount next to a big Bose radio/CD player that I never use anymore.

Inverted ant hills

If you think of a hole as positive space instead of negative space, then you can think of digging a hole as something like sculpting. Pour metal into the hole and you’ll get a sculpture that corresponds to the empty space.

This is worth considering because there is a guy, an entomologist named Dr. Walter Tschinkel, who pours aluminum into ant hills and digs up the resulting forms. As it happens, these castings are beautiful sculptural things. How do those ants, one by one, silently, in the dark, work it all out?

Here is a CBS News story on the subject: The Secret World Of Ants.

(Seen on Ben Fry’s blog)