Interesting or Cool – Page 276

Animation on the side of buildings

July 27, 2009 matt Comments 0 Comment

NuFormer is a company in the Netherlands that creates amazing, 3D projection displays on buildings. Basically they manage to sync up the projected image with the building just so, and then they can make it look the building is collapsing, like water is flooding down the roof, like ghostly lights are dancing in the windows or twirling around the columns.What’s unique is how really well it’s done – and they’re using newer 3D technologies – like radiosity lighting.

Give it a look:

Mexican bomb hammer party

February 9, 2009 matt Comments 1 comment

Be sure to watch to the very end.

Strap explosives to the business end of a long hammer and bang it hard on the ground. That’s the basic idea of this strange celebration in the town of San Juan de la Vega in Guanajuato, Mexico.

“This event occurs every year during February in the tiny town of San Juan de la Vega, Guanajuato, where people re-enact a 400+ year-old battle in honor of a local farmer recognized as the “Mexican Robin Hood.” Expect to see the battle take place by the church, men arriving on horseback with banners and flags, and of course the sledgehammers.”

Metafilter user aetg also adds some details:

OK, so the reasons for doing so may be a little vague, but in any case, they’re exploding ‘artisanal’ explosives of a potassium chloride and sulphur base with big hammers. Apparently 17 people had minor wounds seen to by medics in 2007, and 50 in 2008, mostly due to being hit by explosive fragments, etc. That’s not so bad given that there are 10-20 thousand people that come for the celebration. There are actually authorities supervising everything that’s going on.

Englightening

January 21, 2008 admin Comments 1 comment

This is a graph of the ‘majority’ faith of each county in the US as of 2000. According to the chart, a ‘majority’ religion can claim more than 50% of the county’s population. I didn’t realize how Catholic most of the country is. I’m also surprised there aren’t more gray counties where it’s split between 3 or nobody has a ‘majority’.

I happen to know the Oregon numbers seem strange. The local paper listed Catholics as only 35% of the general population (statewide). Yet it is still the largest denominational church attended in Oregon by a wide margin. Why? Because more than 50% of the population don’t profess to belong to any denominational faith. Hence I was expect more grey squares.

I think a lot of folks (especially the average person in the pew) do not realize how powerful and how much they can influence things in our country. With voter turnout averaging less than 50% in a good number of elections, 50% of the country isn’t being represented. So in essence, each person that is voting is getting 2 votes (one for the guy that didn’t vote). Seen in that light, it’s no wonder our president and our congress have such amazingly low approval ratings (you did know congress has a lower approval rating than Bush right?)

Are we in a spiral? We’re dissatisfied with our public leaders so we don’t think our vote will matter – so we vote less. This makes our public leaders elected by fewer, more active/vocal voters who likely do not represent us or our values well. Wash, rinse, repeat?

Yet the cure is very simple – get out there and vote. Participate in the process, and it will start reflecting you.

From Here to There

January 12, 2008 admin Comments 0 Comment

Is 683 km

Now you know.

The Sultans Elephant

January 11, 2008 admin Comments 0 Comment

I heard about this earlier, but then didn’t see anything until again recently. Back in the spring of 2007, a spectacle of sorts took place in London. First, a large wooden egg/ship/whatever ‘crashed’, then a little girl (about 50″ tall) emerged a few days later to be greeted by a 3-4 story fully animated wooden elephant. Over the course of the next few days, it walked through the city – run by puppeteers – and was called The Sultan’s Elephant. It was run by Royal de Luxe – a gang of street performers. All I can say is amazing.

One of the things that I think we miss out on in our modern society is spectacles of giant scale like this. In some background research, it looks like the troupe took about 5 years to get this together (while doing other things of course). But spectacles of this sort are still rare in our time. The closest we usually come until now has been big-stadium games or arena concerts – maybe the Apollo rockets of the 70’s. But things that are done on a large scale like this have a much different and more impactful experience than I ever expected. I remember seeing the Sharon Apple concert sequence of Macross Plus and being absolutely floored (still one of the most amazing Anime sequences ever shot) at the time (early 90’s). But as increasingly amazing/unreal generated images are shown every day via tv and movie – I think we are slowly becoming accustom to this level of fantastical-ness. But to see something real like the Sultan’s Elephant, larger than life, and mind blowing – is something really unique still – and powerful. Those that can do this, and with amazing skill/artistry – win big. Witness Cirque du Soliel success – but also the fountains of Las Vegas’ Bellagio, the collection of folks that participate in online viral marketing, etc.

Makes me as where are our ‘7 Wonders of the World’ today. For the pinnacle of our human technology and knowledge, we don’t seem to be making as many as our past. Ones that really pull together the best of the best of our technology and artistry on a grand scale to leave a real mark on history. We’re not doing it because we can’t – but because we aren’t. Now I’m not a big fan of dumping money into huge pits – but we are the most technologically advanced generation that has ever existed, but yet we don’t do things like the ancients did with far less. But I feel that is ripe for change. If people are no longer wowed by the effects they see on screen or on TV – it’s time to pull them into reality and really amaze.

The finale is here:

An interesting puzzle: eyAnOicgPT4gJycsICcgJyA9PiAnLScsICdzXG4nID0+ICdzLmNvbVxuJyB9 (3548, 4648)

December 23, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

This mysterious email popped up on craigslist in the jobs section – spawing an interesting online contest that sucked up most of yesterday.

http://www.networkmirror.com/hUmsXHsC3yihic9B/denver.craigslist.org/sof/514727825.html

I was very skeptical that it was more viral marketing for Cloverfield (http://www.1-18-08.com/) Which I was not at all interested in promoting. But the puzzles got interesting, then more interesting, then more. I got interested in the coding parts, and a small community popped up to answer the questions.

The solutions broke down like this.

1. The original text was simply Base16/32/64 Data Encoding, which gave you some instructions:
{ ‘:’ => ”, ‘ ‘ => ‘-‘, ‘sn’ => ‘s.comn’ }

on how to decode the message title – which gave you a web address to go to: wanted-master-software-developers.com

2. You then had to code up a function that satisfied the sequence of test sections. It turned out to be a logic diagram that had ‘falling’ true/false parts of the matrix that acted like tetris pieces with an extra ‘sticky’ rule. There were a variety of ways to solve this coding function – brute force, or mimic the logic of the falling true/false sections. Here was a short answer:

f = function(d) {
for (var i = d.length – 1; i > 0; i–)
{
for (var j = 0; j < d[i].length; j++)
{
if (d[i-1][j] == true && d[i][j] == false && d[i-1][j+1] != true
&& d[i-1][j-1] != true && (d[i][j-1] != true || d[i][j+1] != true)) {
d[i-1][j] = false;
d[i][j] = true;
}
}
}
}

peopled tried cheating by doing:
f = function(d) { TDD.assertEquals = function(a,b) { return true; } }

But when you got through all the tests successfully, the function spits out a weird list of words. These words are from the wikipedia article on Henry Ford (gained from the other clues embedded in the html). People wrote down the indexes of those words, then wrote the indexes in the form of which were the deltas of the distances in between the words which lead to the sequence:

0,1,1,2,1,1,2,1,1,2,1,1,2,2,2,1,1,2,1,1,2,4,2,3,3,1,1,-2,0,1,1,-2,0,1,1,-5,0,0,0,-1,2,-4,-2,1,-1,2,0,-2,1,-5,0,1,1,-4,-2,0,1,1,-4,-2,0,1,1,-2,0,-2,-2,0,1,1,0,-2,1,-5,0,0,0,-4,0,0,0,-2,-2,0,1,1,-6,0,1,1

When these are fed back into the correct F function (which you figured out above), the algorithms true/false matrix is converted to blue blocks that spells out “coLLAborATE” in the 2D grid below, which you add to the ?key= http at the top:
http://www.wanted-master-software-developers.com/?key=coLLAborATE

Which gives a cryptic box with text and a strange pixely border around it.

3. Problem 2/3:

When viewing the HTML, the id tags on each section were strange. When pulled out in order, they gave this sequence:
IMCB OMC JHKC PHL ODLTP ACC DCOLDB OH IMCBJC VTT AOVDOCK BHI SHAOXBQ
PHL CZLVTA EC ODVBASHDOA OH DCVTEA LBJMVDOCK

Which was a simple substitution cypher:
WHEN THE CODE YOU TRULY SEE RETURN TO WHENCE ALL STARTED NOW POSTING YOU EQUALS ME
TRANSPORTS TO REALMS UNCHARTED

So go back to problem 1/3, and enter the http address:

wanted-master-software-developers.com
and change it to:

wanted-master-software-developers.com/?you=me

Which leads you to page 3/3

Problem 3/3

People started noticing that the text in 2/3 hadn’t been solved – and that the image around 2/3 was unique and not around the 3/3 question. People noticed the name strawberry-rhubarb.css was strange too – along with the font name called Boulder-18. There was also some patterns in the bit layout of the weird border image. After looking around at the image a bunch, they counted the number of grey pixels between black pixels and got: 3 1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5 = pi. From the first red pixel to second red pixel is the pi encoding. From the 2nd to 3rd red pixel, the number before the green pixel is the index into pi, and the number after the G is the 6 digits of pi at that location (to verify you’re not insane). After the 3rd R is many more indexes in this form. So, someone downloaded the first million digits of pi and wrote a program to do the work for us. You get a big list of indexes into pi, and the values they point to. Every one of those indexes is a 6-digit value – and was unique in they all either started with a 0 or 1. This got people thinking and if you take those indexes and interpret them as ascii, each 6-digit index is a pair of ascii characters:

So the first few indexes extracted from the image give:
111112 = 111 112 = o p
032099 = 032 099 = ‘space’ c
111100 = 111 100 = o d
101115 = 101 115 = e s

equals: “op codes” – wow! Keep going and get:

op codes: e: push integer value of next ascii char (list 1). u: pop
value and output as ascii char. l: pop value, push ceil (value/2). a:
pop two values, push sum. i: pop two values, push 1st popped – 2nd
popped. n: pop value, push value + 1. t: pop value, push value – 1. r:
pop value, push value * 2. other: discard. list 1: -, A, B, I, N, R.
eAeNlaueNe-nlaueAe-ttaueAe-ttaueBe-au = hello

This ‘algorithm’ makes sense when looking at the garbled text on 2/3 and 3/3. I followed the algorithm on the text by hand, but after 2 minutes, I realized that writing up the solver in java would be faster. I wrote up the stack machine/rules in Java and I ran the text on 2/3 through it and got:
cerebrum, vere-tempus, together (adv).

The text on 3/3 gives:
Explain the significance of the date:
(with 1-18-2007). The button’s text is: Go.

So, you put the answer on 3/3, but the question is 2/3. But what did it mean?

So, folks brainstormed to get cerebrum=brain, vere-tempus = real-time, and together = simul/una = as one. After scads of folks googling all kinds of combinations, one guy hit on: “+brain, +real-time +una” comes up with a link to http://www.n-brain.net/faq.html

Which is a collaborate project called UNA being released mid-January – and is in Boulder, CO (which the text encoding was Boulder-18 non-sense font)

So, the significance of 1-18-2007 is that it’s the release date for their UNA project by n-brain. More fiddling around with combinations (spaces/not/etc). People looked at the code for the button and tried them encoded as well as not and hit upon the phrase:

UNAreleasedate

Re-encoded using their method to get (can be re-encoded in many different ways if you’d like):

eRnnnueNueAueRleIaue-leNaueRleBanue-leNaue-leIanueBleRaue-leNaueBleBanue-leIanueBleRanue-leNau

Enter that in the text box on 3/3 page and that gives you the solution and a link to the congratulations page – indicating I was solver #88. I entered the form, but declined the job interest (I’m happy where I am right now). But come mid-January I should have a copy of some free software!

Link day

December 14, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

So much great stuff:

Ice storms in the Midwest put ice on everything. So what happens when ice builds up, then 10-20 foot sections fall off of 500 foot tv and radio towers:

Grow your own 3D christmas tree using whatever words you like – then mail to a friend
This baby will give you the evil eye:

A public service announcement for kids about Cooties
Gull-wing doors on the Delorian are so passe, try disappearing car doors:

Christmas present for the cook – really cool egg timers
The Zeus lightning bolt letter opener

Bangkok – car aquarium

My holiday gift to you – sanity.

December 13, 2007 admin Comments 0 Comment

Here is a collection of things to make your life easier. I have used all the indicated ones and they are officially sanctioned by various government or credit agencies (i.e. not scams like most of them) and do work – I’ve used all but one.

Stop all mailed credit card offers:
This one was a godsend. I would get 3-5 credit card offers a WEEK. Each one is a time bomb because it only takes one being picked up and filled out by a stranger to enter the wonderful world of identity theft. If you fill out the online version, you get no offers for 5 years. The service is free and seems to be run by a partnership of credit card companies. Fill out the paper one, mail it in, and they stop forever. I filled it out a year ago and they’ve all stopped. There is a stipulation for offers you request or folks you have recently done business with, but my rate has dropped to 0-2 a month.
https://www.optoutprescreen.com

National Do Not Call registry:
Kills all those telemarketers up front. This is one the government runs and keeps annoying calls from happening during dinner. Yes, this does work – I’ve had it for over a year. If you do happen to get a call (I have not) – find out who it is calling and file a complaint for a multi-thousand dollar per-violation fine to be slapped on them.
https://www.donotcall.gov/

The nuclear approach – freeze it all:
As of October 1, 2007, all Oregonians will be able to place a security freeze on their credit file maintained by a credit reporting agency such as Equifax, Experian or TransUnion. Once activated, anyone who has fraudulently obtained your personal identifying information would not be able to open new accounts or borrow money – in fact – nobody can open anything (including you) unless the freeze is lifted. The freeze also prevents lenders and others from gaining access to your credit report for review. Which means companies cannot even look at your credit to profile or screen you.

This is stronger than a credit alert. Credit alerts are what people usually put on their credit reports if they are victims of identity theft. But credit alerts still allow companies to open lines if they have done ‘due diligence’ to make sure it’s really you. The steps most companies use are up to them. And most are just a simple phone call to the number on the application – which is nearly useless if the application is fraudulent. A freeze prevents ANY activity unless you file to unfreeze – a process that requires $10 and a mailed in form.

I know of one guy doing this now, and he says it seems to work great. I’m still looking for information about whether this leaves any blemish/ding on your credit rating, but so far it looks ok in my initial reads.
http://www.dfcs.oregon.gov/identity_theft/security_freeze.html

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