phenakistiscope party

did you hear about this thing called animated gifs? it turns out that they’re excellent for reanimating the persistence of vision phenakistiscope discs of the 1800s. in this disc created by john dunn in the 1830s (and reanimated by yours truly 179 years later), we get a chance to see the idyllic scene of a mom working on her biceps and a dandy dad demonstrating his jazz hands and rejecting the embrace of his eager baby over and over and over forever.

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original disc image provided by room 26 cabinet of curiosities.

this is art

it went down like this: i was cleaning my desk and found an old drawing that i made in my “moustache” phase and thought i would post it to the internet and so that is what i did.

movie magic

i was watching sense & sensibility in the back of my neighbour’s minivan while on a stakeout the other night and realized that professors snape, trelawney, and umbridge had each somehow apparated into the cast. my neighbour (who is a former hogwarts alumna) pointed out that cornelius fudge and madam pomfrey were also in it. was this a record for the most harry potter wizards in a non-harry potter film? i decided to abandon the surveillance (there was only one pair of high-powered binoculars anyway) and scrape some data from the imdb.

the project turned out to be bigger than i expected. there were hundreds of wizards and tens of thousands of movies in which they appear. in the end, when the pixie dust settled, i was left with at least 23 movies infiltrated by 4 or more potter people. i made this chart (click to engorgio) to show the tangled relationships among them.

here are a few observations:

• the movie with the most harry potter wizards in it is vanity fair with an unprecedented 9* wizards. 
• the muggle that these wizards most like to work with is johnny depp who stars in 4 of these movies (3 of which were directed by tim burton).
• horace slughorn (a known attention whore) has wormed his way into no fewer than 5 of these movies, the most of any wizard.
• conspiracy theory: 6 of these movies were in theatres before the first harry potter book was released. there is even historical evidence that 4 wizards worked on crook’s anonymous which was released back in 1962 before magic was invented.
• the sorting hat and aragog were in king ralph? i’ll have to rewatch that one on tonight’s stakeout.

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fwiw: this program works a magic all its own.

update (3/22/2011): hello kottke companions! the last time we bumped into each other was here, and if you don’t mind me saying so, the intervening year has been very kind to your physical appearances. here are some other information visualisation thingy-doos that you might enjoy.

update (3/25/2011): the chart has been updated here to reflect two additional 4-wizard movies (in bruges & nanny mcphee returns). additionally, mafalda hopkirk has been linked to more movies and spelling errors have been corrected. xenophilius now rivals slughorn for appearing in the most films with other wizards. this list is worth a perusal. thanks to sarah, matthew, michael, and jen.

*and also at least one extra who worked on both films.

political ages

i didn’t make this chart because i wanted to prove a point or crack some really hilarious joke. i made it simply because (after an email exchange with an anonymous insider) i wanted to see what it would look like and if i would be able to spot trends. in the end, i shall leave the trendspotting to the pundits because my knowledge of political history pretty much ends in the late 1800’s. but here are some odd items that my untrained eye has detected:

• during the reagan adminstration: the president and supreme court were the oldest that they have ever been in modern times while the congress and the u.s. population were the youngest.
• generally, supreme court justices are older than any other senior members of government which makes sense because they get the gig for life and only usually land it late in their career.
• the president is usually older than congress but not so with the elections of kennedy, clinton, and obama—all democrats.
• the median age of the u.s. population has been steadily rising since the 1790’s and only ever drops once in 200 years: in the 1980s. why?

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sources: population: u.s. census bureau. supreme court: wikipedia. president: wikipedia. congress: the wall street journal 

update: i made a new chart of the average age of u.s. government members all the way back to 1790.

i was trying to explain jeremy bentham’s panopticon to my 5 year-old nephew this weekend and he was like, “geesh uncle ray, i already know all about that because of lost.” and then i was like, “look here half-pint, just cuz the producers of that television programme copy-pasted philosophers’ names for their characters’ names to spice up the mystery (despite the fact that the relationship is tenuous at best) this does not mean that you know the first thing about jeremy bentham or his panopticon.” and then my 5 year-old nephew turned on the waterworks and his mom made her way over to us and gave me disparaging looks.

so i got to wondering who was more popular in 2010, lost characters or the philosophers who they were named after. and as everyone knows, in the year 2010, the true measure of popularity is web presence. i then compared the first 100 google image “face” hits for “john locke” & “jeremy bentham” a character and a corpse both played by terry o’quinn on lost and named for two great thinkers of the enlightenment. what i found was that while lost google-image owns locke, the immortal head of jeremy bentham still wins the web.

update (2/14/11): more lost/philosopher/google image action can be found here.

4 is the magic number

before i clue you in on 4 and why it’s the magic number, let me first digress a little bit and tell you about the river of 1,000 penises.

on my last full day in cambodia, i thought it would be a real gas to tour phnom kulen and explore the linga 1,000—a gushing stream which flows over hundreds of stone phalluses. the problem was that nobody wanted to go on the 2 hour drive with me to see such a marvel, “we don’t want to see 1,000 stone phalluses,” they said.

finally, i bumped into a german rugby player named otto who was receptive to my invitation. before he had a chance to second guess what he was signing up for, i hailed us a tuk-tuk and we were soon speeding down a 50 kilometer stretch of dirt road and screaming rugby hakas into the dust.

in the end, the stone phalluses weren’t really phallusy enough for either otto or i, though that is not the point of this post. the point of this post is to clue you into 4 and why it’s the magic number, and i’m getting to that.

we spent our time on the return voyage giving eachother puzzles to solve. i busted out this classic, which otto made short work of before i had really finished asking. then he told me about 4. “4 is the magic number,” he said. “5 is 4 and 4 is 4.”

“huh?”

“give me another number,” he said.

“6”

“6 is 3, 3 is 5, 5 is 4 and 4 is 4” he said. “give me another.”

“13”

“13 is 8, 8 is 5, and 5 is…”

“4 and 4 is 4. so every number can be reduced to 4 in some way? how about 4,032?” i said, ever the smartass.

otto rolled his eyes in his head as if under a voodoo jinx. a few seconds later: “4,032 is 21, 21 is 9, 9 is 4 and 4 is 4.”

“scrotumburgers,” i thought, “this is a grand puzzle.” by the time that we got back to homebase, i had cracked it, though the insidious mathematics behind the thing soon drove me to complete mania as i spent an 11 hour (11 is 6, 6 is 3, 3 is 5, 5 is 4, 4 is 4) plane ride from bangkok to rome haranguing 9 (9 is 4, 4 is 4) passengers about their thoughts on the puzzle and charting the output to a ridiculously obsessive degree. that story, the charts, and the answer to how 4 actually is the magic number, i shall reserve for tomorrow.

code words for the days of the year

way back in the 18-whatevers when sending a telegram cost a charwoman’s daily wages, some enterprising telegraph operator found a loophole in the telegraph pricing scheme. yo realised that telegraph senders charged per word rather than per character—thus transmitting “it is on” would cost the same as “raynor is maschalophilous.”

anywhoosies, the telegraph operator then went on to invent code words for common telegraphic phrases. morisco refers to “money no object.” crisp is short hand for “can you recommend to me a good female cook?” flank means “a fire is raging here. please send engine,” which is a convenient abbreviation because when a fire really rages, one hasn’t much extra time to waste on frivolous wording when telegraphing for an engine. the resulting book is a real gas. you can peruse it here.

but what really floats my tugboats is that this book offers a code word for EVERY SINGLE day of the year, including leap year. here are some highlights:

• today (june 9) is joker
• may 29 is merkin
• leap day (february 29) is fictitious
• january 20 is <ahem> jaculatory
• the day that i crawled out of my mother’s weeping womb is jester
• and you? what is the code word for your birthday? is it oddness, fiasco, or octogamy?

f(x) = ½x + 7

it was only yesterday that i realised that the rule of thumb for dating people of different ages (the “half your age plus 7” rule) determines not only the lower bounds for dating but the upper bounds as well—that for each ½x + 7, there is a corresponding 2(x-7). for the last 15 years of my life, i have been ignoring an entire market segment, namely those of the genus cougar.

i decided to graph these equations as a handy pocket guide for when i mack on chicks in the library stacks and a few interesting things soon became apparent. for starters, if one is under 14, it is mathematically impossible to date anybody. let’s say my five year-old nephew wanted to join the scene. according to this rule, he could only date girls older than 7.5 (which he would be down with), BUT the same girls also have to be younger than -4. MATH has prevented my nephew from getting jiggy with anybody!

only when you become 14, does math allow you to begin dating—and then you can ONLY date other 14 year-olds. society will scoff at you if you ask a 15 year-old to your freshman day dance, and don’t even think of approaching a 13 year-old.

from 14 on, your options increase at a linear rate such that by the time you are seventy, you are eligible to date 42 year-olds AND 126 year-olds. so the next time that your seventy year-old auntie introduces you to her 126 year-old paramour, give them each a (gentle) nudge and let them know that you support their union.

how to tie your neckcloth in the latest georgian era fashion

you can find detailed instructions here (as well as the associated colours of each style)—but stay away from the osbaldiston, that particular way of wearing a neckcloth is mine and mine alone.

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from: the whole art of dress! by “a cavalry officer” (1830)
previously: this

know your top hat styles*

i rock a tilbury 24/7. just sayin’.

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*from: the whole art of dress! by “a cavalry officer” (1830).

in hot pursuit of the most deceptively named animal

thanks to a lot of stellar comments, i have been catatonically obsessing over deceptively named animals all weekend long. i built this chart to help determine which animal is the biggest impostor on planet earth. it turns out* it’s the sea cucumber! silly sea cucumber, you’re not even in the same kingdom as the key ingredient of my tzatziki sauce.

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*unless of course, the rules of our pursuit allow us to add up the non-antness, non-lionness qualities of the antlion.

special thanks to the remarkable f+l blog for helping me rethink the size of my footnotes.

not worth your time

when i was on my daily snow jog (making my quads look like those of a thoroughbred stallion), a glint of metal from a tarnished nickel caught my eye. here’s the thing: normally raynor ganan never breaks up his workout routine for any reason, nor does he stop to retrieve anything less than a newly-minted benjamin or a hot wheels rear loading 1969 volkswagen beach bomb—but this time i paused briefly before double-timing it up a hill to make my obliques pop. i am a consumer of luxury brands like banana republic, but what would a member of the gap bourgeois or <choke> the prole navy do in a similar situation*?

i decided to try to correlate the act of retrieving a found coin with the value of one’s time. this chart is the result. the calculations are proprietary, so i cannot reveal them though i should mention that in order to determine the average time that it takes for one to bend over and retrieve a coin, i scattered a sack of pennies outside the local all-girls catholic school and filmed the result from the tinted windows of my van.

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*another metric that i have developed to help one determine one’s class is this: the next time that you are making stuffed peppers, observe the colour of the pepper that you are stuffing. if it is green, you are unfortunately a member of the lower class. if it is red, you have found yourself in the middle class. if it is yellow, you are an aristocrat like me and are thus eligible for a banana republic luxe card.