Proven By Science

Freaky Trigger & The Moomins of Pop - 13 February

PLUG PLUG!

Tonight leading Moomin academic Dr Vick, Tom Ewing and Pete Baran, corralled into brilliance by the Atommick Brane herself halloo the return of the kid-lit husband list! (Ms Puddleduck come on down!) (PuddleDUMB more like!) We’ll tackle Tove Jansson, Raymond Briggs, Uncle (<— the Elephant in the Castle!) (he has a B.A.!), the general disjunction between morals and quality in children’s art and the horrific not-so-SUBtext of Toy Story II. Plus something SO SCARY even Beaver Hateman and Knobsman Carsmile will tremble in fear. Tune in and find out for yourself! 7pm GMT, 104.4 Resonance FM, online at www.resonancefm.com and follow-ups at freakytrigger.co.uk, wild surmise to ftlollards@gmail.com.

253. To. Euston

I mentioned on Lollards last night my growing (petty) irritation with the introduction of automated announcements on London buses, whereby the bus route and each stop is announced regularly throughout the journey. This morning I did a small, non-scientific, non-representative experiment to see whether my annoyance was reasonable - afterall, tube and overland trains have similar systems which are not half as irritating, and perhaps bus announcements just need adjusting to. Here are my results.

Journey: Stamford Hill Broadway to Brecknock Road
Bus: 253
Length of Journey: 19 minutes
Number of Stops: 18
Number of times announcement said ‘253. To.    Euston’: 20
Number of times bus stop was announced: 18
Total number of announcements: 38

The pattern of announcements was this - on approach to bus stop announce stop name, on arrival at bus stop announce destination before opening doors (why?!), then once doors are closed and bus is pulling away, announce it again, for the benefit of passengers who have got on the bus and immediately forgotten which bus they got onto. There were a couple of stops where the destination was announced only once, but most of them got 2 announcements per stop. With the bus stopping approximately every minute this gives an average of 2 announcements every minute.

I’m not saying that this system doesn’t have merit - it is clearly quite useful in a number of ways, but it is excessively intrusive. Buses are quieter than trains, on the whole, so the announcement is clearer, and harder to tune out. I am fully convinced of the value of announcing the stop name, but announcing the destination is surely not as important, especially this frequently. I know it benefits people with visual impairments, but it’s not like they get on random buses then sit there waiting for an announcement that will let them know whether they’ve got on the right bus or not.  And people getting off a bus have no real need to know what bus they are alighting from.

My experiment also suggests that no one will sit next to you if you have an open notepad into which you record a tally.

The Poptimists Cookbook

It will be no surprise to our readers that despite much food science and interest in cooking, the FreakyTrigger Cookbook is still a few years away. But it behooves me to remind contributors and anyone using a recipe on this site of the following:

CONTRIBUTORS:
No matter how slapdash your general cooking method, or indeed how drunk you are while cooking, someone out there may follow your culinary Amundsen footprints. Thus if you use terms such “a handful”, we need to know if you have big hands. Ingredients may be particularly British, so think about how you would talk about - for example - cream where single and double is a UK only affectation. A good example of the problems in translation just across the Atlantic can be gained from this brave chef in the US, taking on Sarah’s admittedly avant garde spicy chocolate cupcakes. … read on …

Elephants Not Suitable As Pets: SHOCKER

In proper old Web 1.0 fashion*, I thought it worthwhile to bring to your attention that the UK Government is ignoring a petition of 650 signatories and outlawing Elephants as pets. WELL 650 PEOPLE IS HARDLY GOING TO SWAY THEM IF THE IGNORED TWO MILLION MARCHING AGAINST THE WAR**.

That said, not all elephants are bad as pets. Who can forget poor old Stampy in the Simpson?

*ie Linking is good enough for a story like this.

**OK, editorialised a bit. Blame where I work for that outburst.

You Can Stick Your Novelty Guinness Hat Up Yr Arse

And so it came to pass that the cynical amongst us noted that this year they haved moved St Patricks Day from the usual 17th March which would have been a QNI Monday, to the far more party friendly 15th March, a Saturday. Whilst the articles and so on suggest this is just a shimmy for religious reasons - what with an early Easter and all, your important feast days can’t clash. Something has to give and you can’t exactly move the first day of Holy Week. Nevertheless a result for the marketing men of Guinness who not only get to celebrate St Patrick’s Day twice, but once on a Saturday!

Oh, and there were never any snakes in Ireland anyway.

Mario Bandwagon — Keep On Loving You

The Physics of Super Mario Galaxy.

I’m loving this game (about half way through I reckon), but if I have a complaint, it is that the visual resolution of where you are in all the magnificent 3D-ness is a little underdetermined by the graphics you see. Hence the shadow under your feet “as if light in Mario’s universe always falls directly toward the nearest source of gravity” is not only essential, but I find i spend more time fixing on the shadow than on Mario!

To be fair, the game designer recognises this as mentioned in this Gamasutra interview.

Brandwatch AKA Snifflewatch: Lemsip Cold & Flu Max Strength Direct

This is not a new brand but Lemsip’s latest salvo in the war against the uncurable common cold (via our wallets) was new to me when I tried it yesterday. You might think that putting a couple of capsules in your mouth is pretty direct, ditto drinking some Lemsip, but these things are simply not direct enough for the modern convenience-led consumer. This is one of those products where you can see the “customer insight” clear as day: “I want to take Lemsip but I am busy and on the go and do not have any water*”. EUREKA!! Instead I will take this sachet of Lemsip powder which I will pour directly onto my tongue! Then I can get my relief from colds ANYWHERE!! … read on …

A Trigger Almanac: 2007

Here’s a selection of some of the most entertaining/interesting posts on the site this year - thoroughly incomplete, as it doesn’t include much of the frothing ephemera that makes FT so good (in my partisan view). As usual when I look at the FT archives I’m enormously amused, amazed that there’s so much of it, and frustrated that loads of good ideas don’t get followed up, but such is the way of the blog.  Huge thanks to all contributors and a Happy New Year to all readers. … read on …

Self-Organizing Systems In The London Bridge Pret A Manger

I have been re-reading Philip Ball’s Critical Mass, his book about “social physics”, how the study of physics can lead us to understand aggregate human behaviour better. It’s very wide-ranging and interesting, with pretty obvious implications for my day job. One of Ball’s early chapters is about path-formation and “flocking” (eg. how a mass of people can most efficiently leave a room - vital to understand this when planning fire exits etc.). He doesn’t actually mention queue formation but it’s the same sort of thing, and it’s a problem that strikes me when I go into Pret A Manger for the occasional breakfast bacon and egg baguette of a morning (om nom nom). … read on …

Transhuman Express – A Lollards antici-post

Ed Regis’s “Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition” [Amazon] is a wonderful and funny collection of science writing. The tone is set in a great prologue about ‘bezoar stones’, but the focus of the book is on the big names in late 80s ‘extropianism’. The author spends a lot of time with them, talking to them, finding them to be both calm and engaging people, who just happen to have really wild, really really wild, ideas about the future.

Fifteen years after first reading that book, and catching up with what has been going on with the extropian/transhumanist movement, I was surprised and slightly saddened (at first) to find it being tainted with a small dose of mainstream acceptance. Stanford University hosted a ‘Singularity Summit’ in 2006, and they even managed to pull in Douglas Hofstadter to give a talk. You can watch videos of speeches from last year’s Singularity Summit including Hofstadter’s diplomatic and slightly shambling appearance. Love him or hate him, his presence should be a reliable indicator that something interesting, and not 100% whacked out, is going on here. … read on …