As part of an exhibition last December at the Maison Des Jonglages (House of Juggling) in La Courneuve, France, magician and juggler Antoine Terrieux created this series of kinetic artworks using different arrangements of hair dryers. The dryers were positioned in such a way as to create an updraft for a paper airplane to fly around, a spinning vortex of water vapor, and other unexpected configurations. Terrieux also incorporates hair dryers into his performances. (via La boite verte)
Trap a circle inside a square and it can turn happily in its prison — a circle has the same breadth in any orientation.
Perhaps surprisingly, circles are not the only shapes with this property. The Reuleaux triangle has the same width in any orientation, so it can perform the same trick:
Image: Wikimedia Commons
In fact any square can accommodate a whole range of “curves of constant width,” all of which have the same perimeter (πd, like the circle). Some of these are surprisingly familiar: The heptagonal British 20p and 50p coins and the 11-sided Canadian dollar coin have constant widths so that vending machines can recognize them. What other applications are possible? In the June 2014 issue of the Mathematical Intelligencer, Monash University mathematician Burkard Polster notes that a curve of constant width can produce a bit that drills square holes:
… and a unicycle with bewitching wheels:
The self-accommodating nature of such shapes permits them to take part in fascinating “dances,” such as this one among seven triangles:
This inspired Kenichi Miura to propose a water wheel whose buckets are Reuleaux triangles. As the wheel turns, each pair of adjacent buckets touch at a single point, so that no water is lost:
Here’s an immediately practical application: Retired Chinese military officer Guan Baihua has designed a bicycle with non-circular wheels of constant width — the rider’s weight rests on top of the wheels and the suspension accommodates the shifting axles:
(Burkard Polster, “Kenichi Miura’s Water Wheel, or the Dance of the Shapes of Constant Width,” Mathematical Intelligencer, June 2014.)
The post Curves of Constant Width appeared first on Futility Closet.
Fallout New Vegas is better than Fallout 3 because it never forces you to kill a single thing to complete the game. It gives you so many nonviolent ways to level up your character that a Doctor Who run is totally, 100% feasible.
Looking at it one way, this is really just a no-kill, high charisma, high intelligence run.
Looking at it another way, the first chunk of your run should involve finding glasses and a suit so you look like the Tenth Doctor. The second chunk of your run should see you firing up this song and trying to run past as many laser-wielding bandits and robots as possible.
My detailed build after the jump.
Tag Speech, Science, and Lockpicking.
Perks are Good Natured and Four Eyes.
Stats:
STR 1
PER 9 (10 with Four Eyes and a pair of glasses)
END 1
CHA 8
INT 10
AGL 10
LUCK 1
You are now equipped to lockpick, charm, and hack your way to getting to 100 speech, 100 science, 100 lockpick, and 100 medicine. You’ll have to let Benny betray you and run away with the chip, but you can sprint past the army of death robots awaiting you beneath Caesar’s camp (indeed, this is my favorite part of the game if you’ve got I Am The Doctor blaring out of your speakers).
You can, and will, defeat the endboss through conversation.
I like this build.
Apparently, the bad part about scoring an interview with the President is it kind of makes you blasé for sitting down with anybody else. Not that Zach Galifianakis of Between Two Ferns deserved his tete-a-tete with Obama, or for that matter Bart Pit … Bradley Pitts … Brad Pitt, star of 2013’s 12 Years a Salve (sic).
(The Onion’s fictional “Outside Scoop” entertainment columnist, Jackie Harvey, has nothing on the almost-as-fictional Galifianakis when it comes to murdering names)
Yes, this interviewer is petty, combative, and utterly lacking in grace, but his interviewee, the celebrity who turns stone-faced and sullen almost immediately is no prize either.
Everyone’s miserable, even comedian Louis CK, whom Galifianakis summons with a few bars of his popular sitcom’s theme song. Moods seem on the verge of lifting when Galifianakis brings up Pitts’ starring role in “Benjamin Buttons,” but it doesn’t last. Inevitably, there are references to Pitt’s famous wife, as well as his ex, an earlier Between Two Ferns guest. (She’s no Tila Tequila…)
This is a different dynamic than the one Borat shared with certain incredulous, intelligent subjects. It’s a given that Pitt’s in on the joke. And it would seem that both gentlemen have something they’d like to get across regarding the dirty business of celebrity interviews.
Journalist Janice Turner, took a similar position when she wrote of her nightmarish 2013 interview with actor Rhys Ifans for the London Times:
The game is you listen politely while they plug their film, bang on about their ‘method’, the brilliance of their co-stars and directors etc. Then in return you hope they will offer up — without you having to prod and pester like some celebrity stalker — the tiniest nugget of anecdote, a shard of light upon their real selves.
Because they hate the game too, and particularly since it is mainly conducted in hotel suites, you feel as if you’re engaged in an odd form of prostitution, one where it remains unclear who is the hooker and who the john.
Her perspective brings a certain purity to the Galifianakis-Pitt Ferns stand-off. Certainly, neither of them is playing the game.
If you want to learn how to conduct a horrible interview, watch Galifianakis.
If you want tips on how to make it worse, watch Pitt.
And if you want to be a movie star, seek ways to laugh at yourself without breaking character.
Related Content:
An Awkward/NSFW Interview with Nirvana Producer Steve Albini (Plus B-52 Frontman Fred Schneider)
Hear Bob Dylan’s Unedited & Bewildering Interview With Nat Hentoff for Playboy Magazine (1965)
The Surreal Short Films of Louis C.K., 1993-1999
Watch Frank Zappa Play Michael Nesmith on The Monkees (1967)
Ayun Halliday is the creator of The Mermaid’s Legs, a trauma-filled Hans Christian Andersen reboot playing this week in NYC. See it! And follow her @AyunHalliday
The post Louis CK Crashes Zach Galifianakis & Brad Pitt’s Very Awkward Interview appeared first on Open Culture.
Starting now, more and more phones will have their data encrypted, so nobody but the phone’s owner can peek. Apple just started and Android’s following suit. Now we hear howls of outrage from government officials claiming this will protect criminals, doom victims, and so on. But they’re completely wrong.
A particularly shrill shriek came from former FBI Assistant Director Ronald T. Hosko in the Washington Post. I could disagree with him here, but instead I’ll point you at the essential Marcy Wheeler; in Former FBI Assistant Director Makes a Compelling Case to Eliminate the Corporation she pretty well reduces him to quivering blobs of protoplasm.
The Post is zero-for-two on this issue; in Compromise needed on smartphone encryption they argue for encryption-but-not-really, suggesting that there be a Golden Key that Apple or Google or whoever could use to help those fine law-enforcement officials if they really, really needed to peek. Uh, no.
In four short points.
It’s really hard to believe there are many secrets that you can get with a warrant but you can’t get from the phone. For example, pull the SIM out, find the phone number, then (unless Ed Snowden’s been telling whoppers) they can find out where the phone went and who it called.
Those of us who live in civilized democracies might be sort of OK with a setup where an official can get a warrant to open up a phone. Except for a huge proportion of Homo sapiens don’t; they’re in places where the government is some combination of corrupt, autocratic, and paranoid.
Is it sane to ask Apple, Google, and friends to make judgment calls on
which governments get access to the “Golden Key”? I’m sure the governments
they turn down will be just fine with that, and would never consider
locking up local Apple employees to apply pressure. employees.
Oh, wait… even here in the civilized world, our public-safety officials have apparently skated right up to the edge of common law, then over, basically scooping up all the traffic and storing it for later, running data taps into Google’s freaking data centers, then lying about what they’re doing.
So I’m sorry guys, I’m afraid that for the moment you’re having a great big trust issue; just not OK with you and that Golden Key.
There’s an old cowboy saying: “Ain’t no horse that can’t be rode, ain’t no man that can’t be throwed.” And, ain’t no key that can’t be stolen. Which is a manageable fact of life; unless it’s a Golden Key that opens everyone’s door.
Encrypting phones makes the world a safer and better place and that’s all there is to it.
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