Links: 2015 — 11

Before I share my favourite links from the last month, I have a little personal news to share. I spent the period from the 24th to the 27th of September catching up with family, including relatives from other parts of the country. Each day had its own special event — a school concert and school play that some of my relatives were part of, a seven-year-old’s birthday party, and my nephew’s baptism.

Here is an ultra-cute video of my niece (in the pink) with a friend on the trampoline. It was recorded at my sister’s place at lunch on the 27th.

Now on with those links:

• Epic article on the Homo naledi discovery.
• I’d barely picked my favourite black-and-white Pluto pictures when along came some fantastic new ones in colour. [Update: here’s another article covering the same ground.]
• An interesting but brief article on where your neurons come from. Even your brain is multicultural!
• I liked this idea: Venn diagram poetry, mostly because I think it would be an interesting challenge to write your own.
• Thirty minute radio segment on selective mutism. I have more to say about this below.
• Enlightening article on the cultural context of the British piggate scandal.

I’d like to add a few comments to the item on selective mutism. It’s not something I’ve experienced directly, but learning about other people’s experiences — through documentaries and so forth — always takes my thoughts and emotions in interesting directions. It evokes memories of experiences that, while not the same as selective mutism, serve as analogies that I can draw on to understand it better. And it makes me fantasise about what I’d say to the people whose stories I hear if I could meet them in their past.

I’ll share one memory as an example. I was raised in a religious household, and during my teenage years I was Christian myself, but I never joined in the ritual of saying grace before a meal. I remember one day when my parents expressed their wish that I would, to which I said something like “I think I could if– if– if– …” and faltered. My parents reacted poorly to that, telling me I shouldn’t bargain with them, but the words I couldn’t get out that day were: “I think I could if you promise not to overreact, not to make a big deal out of it, not to make me feel like the centre of unwanted attention.”

When I think of selective mutism, I think of that memory and others like it, and multiply them by a thousand in my mind. The analogy is far from perfect, but it’s something — a seed of connection around which further empathy and understanding can be built.

I also think of the song Across the Waters by Jimmy Gregory (from the 1996 album West Along the Road). The song is really about lovers who are separated geographically, and celebrates the fact that, however much they miss each other, their love is strong enough to withstand being apart. But I feel the following excerpt could just as easily be about selective mutism, and in that context is extremely poignant:

There’s a strength in the silence between us
Still waters run deep.
There’s an ocean of words that I’d say to you
But sure all of them will keep.

In those words I hear an acknowledgement of the turmultous emotions and intense desire to communicate that lies beneath the silence of selective mutism, along with an assurance that there is no pressure: that it is OK if today is not a day when words can be spoken. Do you agree? What do they evoke for you?

If I was trying to build rapport with someone suffering from selective mutism — trying to create an environment where they could feel comfortable and understood — then between the song lyrics, the memories, and the willingness to learn, I like to think I’d have something to offer. Though the opportunity to show it would come less easily in life than in my fantasies. Comments will be gratefully received, especially from readers who have been there.

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Links: 2015 — 10

Links from the last month.

• In case you haven’t checked it out yet, Gastropod has been going for a year now and has produced some interesting episodes. (I left a comment on the one about pigs.)
• A new way of tiling pentagons has been discovered. The article shows all fifteen ways.
• I found this collection of videos showcasing the work of Indian artisans. Most are straightforward profiles of a particular artist and their work, but some contain interesting backstories. The one about Ganjifa is of special interest to me, but I’d also recommend Manisha Handicrafts or Panchachuli Women Weavers among others. The collection is worth exploring.
• We will soon have more photos of Pluto. And, eventually, a whole other world to look at.
• Brief but interesting article on the sole surviving producer of an ancient cloth. (I see this was added to the Wikipedia article within days, which is rare.)
• I recently found out there’s an archive of ISIRTA episodes. I don’t have time to peruse this at present, but consider it noted.
• A step closer to a cure for FOP, which I first mentioned in 2009 (last link on the page). Speaking of rare genetic diseases, I recently read this 14-year-old NYT article via here.
• Jennifer Ouellette is leaving her Scientific American blog to go write and edit for Gizmodo.

Here’s a doodle to ponder:

Links: 2015 — 9

First of all, I strongly urge all readers to do the following.

1. In one browser tab, open this page (featuring a twenty-minute super-slowed version of the original Doctor Who theme music that I linked to some time ago).
2. In another brower tab, open this page (featuring a five-minute silent video of images generated by Google’s neural network; for more information see the links I shared last month).
3. Start the first video playing, quickly switch to the second tab, start that video playing, and set it to full screen mode.
4. Stare at the screen and allow yourself to become fully immersed.

Seriously, you must try this. It’s an amazing combination, a massage for your brain. The only disappointment is that the neural network demonstration is only five minutes long, and you’ll find yourself wishing it lasted the same twenty minutes as the soundtrack.

Now onto other links. There was, of course, the recent encounter between New Horizons and Pluto. Here is a comparison between our new view of Pluto and the view from Hubble that was, until recently, the best we had.

Compared to Triton, Pluto is less jewel-like from a distance, but makes up for it in topography. Close-up images (like this or this — two perspectives on the same region) reveal mountain ranges comparable in size with those on Earth but formed by some entirely different process, and flat plains that resemble a beach at low tide. (I don’t remember anyone predicting we’d find a beach resort on Pluto, although here’s a prediction worth mentioning.) According to the science, there are nitrogen glaciers. And the best is still to come.

Miscellaneous links:

• How a new type of cloud is named. Includes video.
• This case study on mirror touch synaesthesia is a good read (but deserved a better headline writer).
• The card games website pagat.com recently celebrated it’s 20th anniversary. (Incidentally, the Invented Games page now includes a link to my Ganjifa game.)
• A demonstration of the dangers of hackable cars.
• Long article on helping people at the end of a long prison sentence (I didn’t actually read all of this, because it requires more emotional investment that I’ve had time for, but from the portion I read it looks worth the effort).
• Maryn McKenna’s TED talk on antibiotic resistance is information every adult in society needs to know. Its only fault is that a lot more is omitted.
• I invented a whimsical and silly personality test. Feel free to share your results below.

In personal news, I gained some clothes and lost a tree. Also, here’s a photo from a family outing at the Maritime Museum recently.

Bear in a Boat outside maritime museum

A monochrome pattern that’s simpler than it looks

The following pattern is, I think, quite pretty. I hope you agree.

Here’s how it was made.

1. First I made a simple pattern in Windows Paintbrush.
2. Then I made a copy of the pattern in step one, and flipped it. (Horizontally or vertically: it makes no difference.)
3. Finally I merged the two to create the pattern you see above. A pixel is white if the corresponding pixels in (1) and (2) are the same colour (be it white or black) and black if the corresponding pixels in (1) and (2) are opposite colours.

Perhaps this will inspire you to create patterns of your own.

Links: 2015 — 8 (with a request or two)

I have, regrettably, been too busy to blog lately. But I’m here now.

There are two personal items I’d like to discuss, so I’ll begin with the first, follow it with selected links from around the Web, and finish with the second item. Both involve some kind of appeal for assistance, although one more so than the other.

The first concerns a card game I invented, and that we playtested at my birthday party last month.

[Update: This first request has been answered. I have shortened the text below to reflect this.]

My birthday was June 12, but for reasons pertaining to Dad’s recent retirement, it was one week later that a small celebratory gathering took place. There were five people present: a friend, an uncle, my parents, and myself (unfortunately, the uncle had to leave early). I left most of the organising and decision-making to my parents, but playtesting a card game was my one explicit request.

The game was one that I invented and blogged about in 2011, but at the time it was a work in progress and the rules yet to be fully refined. But recently I took it off the backburner, made a few small adjustments, and updated my original blog post accordingly.

The twist is that this is not a game you can play with the familiar deck of hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs. Rather it is designed for Ganjifa — traditional playing cards from India that are typically circular rather than rectangular with at least 96 cards per deck. Regrettably they are used for only a handful of games and even those are dying out. I don’t care too much about the traditional games, but it’s a pity that the cards themselves lack a living tradition of new games being invented. The world could do with more Ganjifa games, and the game I’ve invented is my contribution to that end.

Here’s where my appeal to the Internet comes in — because the one thing I have not managed to do is decide on a name for the game. Since it is played with Indian cards, I feel that giving it an Indian name would be an appropriate tribute to the culture that created them, and have been appealing for help from people who know Indian languages and are interested in helping to name a new card game.

If you can help, or know someone who probably can, I would greatly appreciate it. I’ve suggested the name केंद्र कड़ी (crudely: Kendra Kari) for reasons outlined in my Google Plus post, but I really require informed human feedback and not just the results of automated translation tools.

[Update: I’ve now received a response to this query and have updated the game.]

Now that you’ve read this far, here are some links:

• What to expect on the approach to Pluto.
• If no alternative presents itself, some flatworms inject themselves with sperm.
• I think having my viruses analysed might be quite interesting.
• Google’s neural network hallucinates. Two of my favourite images are here and here.
• The winners of the Earth and Sky Photo Contest are worth ten minutes of your time.
• Google Earth fractals by Paul Bourke, published 2012. Via Stan Carey on Twitter. Direct links to selected images: [************]
• I’ve been using the Planets Close-Up theme in Firefox for years now, but recently downloaded the Oriental Spring in the Canyon theme, with the intent of alternating between the two themes as the mood strikes me.
• This article on Cracked is good, but I’m really recommending it for the links, some of which are very worth your while. (Should I tell you which, or should I just let you read all of them? Hmmm.)
• I’ve known about these fake bomb detectors for years, but had not understood the scale.

Now to the second personal item.

A while ago, just for fun, I decided to see if I could guess an approximate formula for time dilation in general relativity. I didn’t expect to be right, but using a combination of high school physics, Ockham’s Razor, and a few elementary facts, I gave it my best shot.

So I was genuinely delighted to discover later that my result checks out against real-world examples!

This page on Quora has a couple of obvious faults (the biggie is that the altitude of the ISS varies between 330 and 435 kilometres according to Wikipedia, so calculating a result to so many significant figures makes no sense), but the relevant formula corresponds closely to mine. Moreover, plugging their result into my formula puts the ISS in the right range — at about 375 kilometres. Another example I found is that time goes faster by 10 nanoseconds per year for every floor you go up in a building; again, my formula checks out, putting the difference between floors at a very reasonable three metres.

I am no genius (trust me on this), but in all the popular science I’ve read, I have never seen anyone mention that an approximate but workable formula for time dilation in general relativity is astonishingly easy to guess. Feeling that I’d stumbled on an angle that popular writers have missed but would be useful to others, I decided to write up my results as an article of my own. Please remember this is an un-factchecked draft, and I am no more an expert than the target reader, but you learn by doing. It’s written in the style of a popular science article, and is 1000 words long.

If any real popular physics writer reads this — I would love to hear your feedback. Also, you are welcome to take inspiration for your own blog posts, and I hope you will be so kind as to send me a link if you do. A tweet to @GoldHoarder will do nicely.

(Incidentally, I used a free PDF converter, so the links don’t work, but since they’re fully spelt out they won’t slow you down very much. Since it’s a draft, I find this acceptable.)

[Update: I linked to my relativity article in a comment here.]

Links: 2015 — 7

Some links, and then some personal news, including photos from my niece’s 2nd birthday.

• This short video on cumulus cloud formation might well include details that are new to you.
• Interesting article on training the brain to overcome a learned disease. (I pointed out an error in the comments, but it seems the author had stopped monitoring comments a few days before.)
• Another interesting article on the use of vagus nerve stimulation to moderate the immune system, among other things.
• One of the best articles I’ve seen about Emmy Noether. It doesn’t try to answer every question, but gives a sense of why the questions are significant.
• This fifteen minute online David Attenborough documentary on plankton is not only educational, but relaxing as well.
• Stars collided in 1670.
• Which direction water swirls doesn’t normally depend on which hemisphere you’re in … but what if you eliminate all other variables?
• From now on, if your balloon animals don’t look like these, you’re doing it wrong.
• I found a tool that takes a Google Maps route and generates an elevation chart. (If you just want to know the elevation for a single location, try this.)
• I’ve never used Python, but I’m making a note of this in case I want to some day.

On 28 May, my parents and I took my niece to Cleland Wildlife Park for her second birthday (she was born on 26 May 2013). I’ll share more anecdotes about that day if you ask, but for now, here are some photos of Elke with koalas and wallabies. More family interaction followed the next day, including some errand-running. Of particular importance to me was that I finally got my mobile phone fixed, after errant software had been draining the batteries since late last year. When the phone was new, the battery lost on average less than 5% capacity for every 8 hours of normal (i.e. mostly idle) use, and now that it is fixed I can confirm that it loses only marginally more than that. Given that it’s more than a year old and the battery has never been replaced, this must count as excellent. While it was broken, I was lucky to get two days out of it.

Links: 2015 — 6

Some links; I hope you enjoy them.

• The Reddit AMA with Mike Brown is worth a browse if you have the time, but you’ll need to expand all the subthreads to get the most out of it, and that’s tedious, so I’ll understand if you give it a miss. I thought the thread would be automatically expanded to show all comments by the guest of honour, but no such luck.
• Intriguing research into how English and German speakers describe scenes.
• Interesting article on dolphin intelligence and communication.
• Magnificent Antarctica and iceberg photography video.
• The sounds in this video were generated from the solar wind. I strongly advise listening with headphones. With the volume reasonably low and your eyes closed, it’s probably suitable for meditation.

I recently bought a couple of drinks from a local bottle shop, because I enjoy experimenting with cocktails from time to time, subject to the constraints of fridge space and affordability. The drinks I chose were Frangelico and a small bottle of Baileys. Meanwhile I’ve used up the last of my Opal Nera.

From the Internet I see that the cocktail consisting of Opal Nera and Baileys (layered 50/50) is traditionally known as “Black Nipple”, but the name that came to my mind was “Elephant Hide”. The Opal Nera spontaneously spouts up into the layer of Baileys above it, creating a dynamic swirling pattern with the Baileys resembling grey elephant skin and the Opal Nera its dark wrinkles. I think the ideal ratio is 3 parts Opal Nera to 4 parts Baileys. It tastes fine (Baileys with an extra oomph) but the appeal is primarily visual.

Links: 2015 — 5

Below are links to some of the most interesting and delightful things I’ve come across online in the last month.

• Article on the 19th Century fashion for seaweed collections.
• A perspective on whether modern civilisation would be possible without fossil fuels.
• This 2011 animation about living books won a bunch of awards and deserved them. Well worth 15 minutes.
• Painting with fire. Swirls of burn from a molten glass brush in a performance well matched to the soothing cello music.
• Human chameleon.
• I enjoyed this whimsical short story on why drug-induced hallucinations won’t help you with your homework.

Also, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve made some progress on cleaning up the archives of this blog, and posts from 2011 are now included in my archives page.

Virtual Tour of Ireland

A few years ago, inspired by the fact that my parents were on holiday at the time, I decided to do some travelling of my own using Google Street View to simulate a journey from the comfort of my office chair. I chose Ireland as my destination.

I began by sketching a rough plan for my journey, starting from the idea that it would begin at the border with Northern Ireland and proceed anticlockwise. I sampled random locations around the coast, and where these pleased me most I proposed to take a predominantly coastal route, and where I felt an inland route would add more to the journey I sampled random locations along candidate routes and selected the most promising options.

That gave me a draft route to follow, which I would refine later. Preparations complete, I then entered Google Street View in Muff (just west of the border) and clicked on the road ahead to go forward.

My concept for the journey probably evolved over time a lot more than I can remember, and what it became was a quest to find the most scenic route around the Republic of Ireland that I could. I identified unmissable waypoints (coastal ones to begin with), then backtracked to find the most pleasing routes between those points — partly by random sampling to narrow down the possibilities, and partly by simulating drives along multiple routes and choosing the one I liked best. So altogether I simulated a lot of small journeys.

It became a long-term project, which I would resume once every few months when I was in the mood and had the time to spare. In contrast to a typical holiday plan (consisting of a list of destinations and the most convenient routes between them), my goal was to find a route that, as much as possible, would provide continual delights. And I recorded the route I decided upon as I went, surveying the scenery and wondering what stories were embedded in the landscape.

In the end I got as far as Donegal before tiring of the endeavour. It’s no coincidence that I stopped at a more densely populated part of the country — with two major cities, Donegal and Sligo, a mere fifty kilometres apart, and a network of towns surrounding them. I did try resuming the simulation further south but we’ll get to that shortly.

One problem I faced from the start was that linking to Google Maps is not a very stable way to save a route. All it takes is a minor change in Google’s algorithm, or for the Irish authorities to get it into their heads to upgrade a road, for the route recorded to no longer be a true record of my intentions. Worse, Google have announced that Classic Maps will soon be no longer supported, and I am deeply pessimistic about that. Last time I checked, the new Google Maps was crippled to the point of being quite impossible to use for simulating and recording a journey.

It’s been at least a couple of years since I last worked on the route, and it was always my intention to blog it someday. Having decided that now is the time, I spent several days recently re-tracing my journey from Muff to Donegal on Google Street View, refreshing my memory and making a few minor tweaks as I went. Section by section, I then recorded the route on video, holding a camera up to the monitor as I scrolled along the map. (This was an extremely frustrating process, and the resulting video is no polished production, but trust me: if you knew how many takes it took to get it to work adequately, you’d understand that perfection is not an option.) This video contains all the information one would need to mark my journey in a paper street directory and test it out in real life.

Here it is: Muff to Donegal, my way.

A few notes:

• There’s nothing special at the marked waypoints. They are there simply to force Google to follow the route I selected.
• I couldn’t always find continual delights. There are dead spots. But I made the best of them that I could, and they lead somewhere worthwhile in the end.
• The route isn’t necessarily the most scenic in real life. Plenty of parochial factors influenced my choices, for example sometimes the Google Car just happened to be passing by at the perfect moment to get the most out of the landscape, with the sun shining at just the right angles.
• Also, in some places the Google Car has recorded photographs more recently than my original journey through that region, so the reason I went one way and not another may no longer be apparent.
• In the final approach to Donegal, I stuck to the main road (N56) and didn’t explore the sidestreets, because a lot of those sidestreets were recorded at a time of year when most of the vegetation was dead. It would have been pointless to try and choose between them.

In my early planning (back when the above was encapsulated simply by the phrase “coastal route”), I proposed that after continuing  more-or-less coastal to Westport I would follow an inland route to Galway and again to Limerick. The route I decided upon, after sampling a few possibilities, was a draft — to be refined, perhaps radically, if I ever got that far in the Street View simulation — but as with all drafts it gave me something to go on.

After my Street View simulation had stalled at Donegal, I revisited the far end of the plan I had drafted earlier and decided that Tralee would be a good place to re-join the coast. From there I started another Street View simulation en route to Dingle, where I proposed to do some sort of loop at the end of the Dingle Peninsula then follow a more-or-less coastal route to Cork. But there are still a lot of roads down that way that the Google Car has never traversed, and in at least one case its path was blocked by a giant puddle. Arriving at Cork would mark the end of my journey down the west coast of Ireland, but I did write down a vague plan for travelling onward (follow the N20 north to Mallow then the N72 east until meeting the R671, taking it north to Clonmel, then east on the N24 to Waterford).

In the following video, my draft inland route from Westport via Galway to Limerick, extended to Tralee, is appended with the route I was working on between Tralee and Dingle.

If you want, you can download slighly (but only slightly) higher resolution versions of the videos here and here. I won’t link directly to the maps, since Classic Maps is due to expire soon, but if you’re so inclined you can reconstruct them yourself.

Naturally, I am interested in hearing the opinions that Irish residents have about my virtual journey. For example: which parts of my route have you visited, which parts haven’t you visited, and which are the best places that I missed? I don’t expect anyone to test a portion of my route in real life or take on the project where I left off, but of course you’re welcome to do either. And for readers with nothing to say about Ireland, perhaps you have a pertinent comment to add about your experience with Google Maps. In any case, comments are open.

Easter photos

Over the Easter break I caught up with family and met my nephew Elliot for the first time.

Here he is on Friday with his mother:

With me (not looking very happy on the right, but that’s transient):

And with Mum and Dad respectively:

Big sister Elke (last photographed here and here) going for a ride in the wheelbarrow, and later on her car:

Playing on the swing:

And on the dolomite pile — there’s more to this than the photographs capture; on Mum’s suggestion I carved steps using gardening utensils, then helped Elke to climb up and slide down:

I took some photos of the lunar eclipse on Saturday night, but they’re not worth sharing.

On Sunday we all got together for a barbeque by the sea. The weather was unfortunate but the company made up for it, with over a dozen of my relatives present. Here’s Elke eating a chocolate Easter egg:

And more pictures of Elliot being hugged by my Auntie Helen:

While we were there we tried an activity in which blown and hard-boiled eggs were rolled in paint, after which we added more decorations to the three blown eggs to create a mobile for Elliot.

Our final get-together was on Tuesday, when several of us met for morning tea at a coffee shop in Ardrossan, and I made Elke a plasticine dog that lasted long enough for her to play with it and point out the ears and nose — an excellent memory on which to end a holiday. From there, Darryl and Helen drove me back to Adelaide.