Up Goer Five

I love this xkcd cartoon: an explanation of the Saturn V rocket using only words which are among the 1000 most commonly-used in the English language. I often feel like I sound like this in foreign languages…

[click to embiggen]

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Aircraft Carrier Balance of Power

 

This graphic shows all of the aircraft carriers currently in service worldwide, although it should be noted that the ones on the left are technically amphibious assault ships.

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Imaging at a Trillion Frames per Second

Fascinating discussion of a technique to photograph at an absolutely astonishing framerate. At that speed, you can see light itself moving. Incredible.

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RACTER

In 1982, William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter programmed a computer in BASIC to write English. They did this by programming in specific grammatical rules and structures. The point of the experiment was to give the impression of communication – what was said was secondary to the fact that it was saying it correctly. While most of it was nonsense, it created (by chance) some surprisingly lucid prose:

More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity. I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber. I need it for my dreams.

Bill sings to Sarah. Sarah sings to Bill. Perhaps they will do other dangerous things together. They may eat lamb or stroke each other. They may chant of their difficulties and their happiness. They have love but they also have typewriters. That is interesting.

A crow is a bird, an eagle is a bird, a dove is a bird. They all fly in the night and in the day. They fly when the sky is red and when the heaven is blue. They fly through the atmosphere. We cannot fly. We are not like a crow or an eagle or a dove. We are not birds. But we can dream about them. You can.

A tree or shrub can grow and bloom. I am always the same. But I am clever.

Some of the program’s work was actually published in OMNI magazine. It concluded with some rambling about eating a leotard which was produced by a horde of commissioners, and went on to conclude: “Is that thought understandable to you? … I wonder. Yet a leotard, a commissioner, a single horde, all are understandable in their own fashion. In that concept lies the appalling truth.”

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The Highly Productive Habits of Alan Turing

In honour of what would be the 100th birthday of Alan Turing, Ars Technica has an interesting view of his life, disguised as a guide to his highly productive habits. Alan Turing, by the way, was instrumental in breaking the German Enigma code in WWII and is commonly regarded as the father of computer science. He died in 1954 of an apparent suicide after years of persecution for his homosexuality, although alternate theories abound.

Habit #2: Don’t Get Sidetracked by Ideologies:

Turing went to King’s College, Cambridge in 1931. Two years later the Oxford Union debating society issued its famous declaration: “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” While not an explicitly pacifist statement, the Oxford Pledge reflected enormous disillusionment with the course and consequences of the First World War.

1933 was a year for radical credos. The global Great Depression was in full swing. “Am thinking of going to Russia some time in vac[ation] but have not yet quite made up my mind,” Alan wrote to his mother. He also joined an organization called the Anti-War Council. “Politically rather communist. Its programme is principally to organize strikes amongst munitions and chemical workers when government intends to go to war.”

But none of this ever came to anything. Turing didn’t go to the Soviet Union, and he found the Marxist institutions on campus just as suffocating as the public school that he attended. Turing “was not interested in organising anyone,” Hodges observes, “and did not wish to be organised by anyone else. He had escaped from one totalitarian system, and had no yearning for another.”

Not only did Alan Turing reject a Marxist framework, but he would soon fix his skeptical sights on an overarching question haunting theoretical mathematicians at the time:

“Could there exist, at least in principle, a definite method or process by which it could be decided whether any given mathematical assertion was provable?”

The Highly Productive Habits of Alan Turing   [Ars]

Security Footage You Don’t See

Coca-cola recently compiled security footage from cameras around the world, focusing on the kinds of recordings you don’t usually see in news reports.

[Thanks, Mike!]

Homemade Motorcycle Improvised in the Desert

This cool motorcycle was built (without tools) by a Frenchman named Emile out of his old car, which broke down while he was travelling in Northwest Africa:

While traveling through the desert somewhere in north west Africa in his Citroen 2CV , [Emile] is stopped, and told not to go any further due to some military conflicts in the area. Not wanting to actually listen to this advice, he decides to loop around, through the desert, to circumvent this roadblock.

After a while of treading off the beaten path, [Emile] manages to snap a swing arm on his vehicle, leaving him stranded. He decided that the best course of action was to disassemble his vehicle and construct a motorcycle from the parts. This feat would be impressive on its own, but remember, he’s still in the desert and un-prepared. If we’re reading this correctly, he managed to drill holes by bending metal and sawing at it, then un-bending it to be flat again.

It takes him twelve days to construct this thing. There are more pictures on the site, you simply have to go look at it. Feel free to translate the labels and post them in the comments.

MOTO   (in French)

World’s Subways Converging on Ideal Form

New research is suggesting that the layout of subway systems around the world is converging on some sort of ideal pattern:

After decades of urban evolution, the world’s major subway systems appear to be converging on an ideal form.

On the surface, these core-and-branch systems — evident in New York City, Tokyo, London or most any large metropolitan subway — may seem intuitively optimal. But in the absence of top-down central planning, their movement over decades toward a common mathematical space may hint at universal principles of human self-organization.

Understand those principles, and one might “make urbanism a quantitative science, and understand with data and numbers the construction of a city,” said statistical physicist Marc Barthelemy of France’s National Center for Scientific Research.

World’s Subways Converging on Ideal Form   [Wired Science]

Drawing Apparatus

This drawing apparatus, by Robert Howsare, uses a Sharpie marker attached to two different records.

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Washer Tears Itself Apart

Watching this old washing machine full of metal pieces demolish itself is strangely mesmerizing…