Recently in Random Musings Category
"The Forgotten Man" is an interesting painting that portrays all 43 of our presidents and their relations to the eponymous "forgotten man". What's most interesting to me, though, is the way that the painting is presented on the website and the use of a magnifier that can be moved over the painting to get a closer look and to read commentary about each of the elements in the picture.
(HT: RC.)
Snail that eats fish three times its size.
(HT: Gizmodo.)
I have a zillion legos, but no sugru. Guess I need to get some.
(HT: Lifehacker.)
Just what the topic says: 100 Incredible Views Out Of Airplane Windows.
Hard to pick a favorite, so here's my home town: Los Angeles.
Yes, yes... happy Eleven Day!
But especially thanks to the vets who made such numerical whimsy possible.
Interactive map of submarine cables. (HT: JB.)
As a child, he may have killed a lion; he quite possibly coined the phrase "my bad"; he certainly warned Congress about Osama bin Laden in 1993.
(HT: Marginal Revolution.)
Twenty-one large triangles animated by Melbourne, throughout Federation Square. MÖBIUS is a sculpture that can be configured into many cyclical patterns and behave as though it is eating itself, whilst sinking into the ground.The result is an optical illusion and a time-lapse of people interacting with the sculpture and moving through Melbourne's landmark location throughout the day.
(HT: GeekPress.)
Baboons kidnap feral puppies and raise them as guard dogs.
(HT: Woot.)
LifeHacker has a great resource for basic self-defense knowledge, including numerous short videos. My favorite is the "false surrender"; the video below is specifically related to sexual assault, but I think the general concept could be very useful in many circumstances.
The Atlantic has some fascinating pictures of humanity underground.
This shouldn't be a surprise, but the listed waist size of mens' pants is generally very wrong.
The devastating realization came in H&M. Specifically, in a pair of size 36 dress pants. I'd never bought pants at H&M before, and suddenly asked myself: how could a 36-inch waist suddenly be so damn tight?I've never been slim — I played offensive line in high school — but I'm no cow either. (I'm happily a "Russell Crowe" body type.) So I immediately went across the street, bought a tailor's measuring tape, and trudged from shop to shop, trying on various brands' casual dress pants. It took just two hours to tear my self-esteem to smithereens and raise some serious questions about what I later learned is called "vanity sizing."
*covers ears* Nyah nyah nyah I'm not listening!
First there was the $300,000 watch that only tells you whether it is day or night.
According to several news reports flagged by my friends at Luxist, Swiss watchmaker Romain Jerome just launched the “Day&Night” watch. The watch won’t tell you what time it is. That’s so yesterday. But it does tell you whether it’s day or night — helpful, I guess, for billionaire types who can’t afford windows.As the company’s Web site boasts: “With no display for the hours, minutes or seconds, the Day&Night offers a new way of measuring time, splitting the universe of time into two fundamentally opposing sections: day versus night.”
What’s most impressive about the Day&Night is its complexity, given its absolute uselessness. The watch features two tourbillons — devices that overcome the ill effects of earth’s gravity on a watch’s accuracy — connected by a differential mechanism. Instead of hands, the watch has a “contemplative tourbillon operation whereby the ‘Day’ tourbillon operates for 12 hours to symbolize working life, while the ‘Night’ tourbillon takes over afterward to represent an individual’s private time.”
Now there are watches that don't tell time at all!
Real luxury is now the ability to stop time. This week Luc Perramond, chief executive of Hermes's watch division, presented the "temps suspendu" (suspended time) model, starting at 18,000 Swiss francs, which stops time at the press of a button and brings it back again.For 240,000 Swiss francs you can pick up an Hublot watch whose time can be slowed or sped up and another which is all black, making it difficult to tell the time at all.
That luxury can set you back upwards of 15,000 Swiss francs.
"The value of a watch is not to give you time," Hublot Chief Executive Jean-Claude Biver told Reuters.
"Any five dollar watch can do that. What we are offering is the ability for example to stop time or make it disappear... Time is a prison and people want to get out of it sometimes."
These products are great examples of why engineers often don't make good artists.
(HT: Tyler Cowen and Cheap Talk.)
More at Flightglobal and DefenseTech.
(HT: StrategyPage.)
The phrase "think outside the box" is very overused... and yet we humans do tend to get stuck in mental ruts. Just like ruts for wagons, mental ruts are often a useful guide that get us where we want to go without much effort. But sometimes it's nice to go off-roading, so here are some "lateral thinking" puzzles to ponder.
Mental ruts are especially interesting from an artificial intelligence perspective. Getting a machine to "think inside the box" and come up with "obvious" answers is quite hard. Most AI systems that are in any way "creative" spend so much time so far out of the box that they aren't especially useful.
(HT: GeekPress.)
Happy Pi Day. Can't wait for 2015.
