Category: Cool Stuff

LiveScience.com has a guide for all you future evil genuises who are trying to figure out the best way to destroy the earth. And since I know I have some vil geniuses reading the site, I’ll help you out and get some of the details up here. I can clue you in up front that there is no mention of sharks nor frikkin’ laser beams.

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily.

So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do not think this will be easy.

Continue reading “Top 10 ways to destroy the earth”

Sometimes, we need to look back at the past and learn our history.  I don’t really know why, but I hear that if we don’t, we’ll repeat it.  Not, mind you, that I’d have problems repeating some of my past.  But then, there are things from my past that I’d rather not repeat – mononucleosis ranks high on the I’d rather not repeat that part of my past list.  Although I guess that’s not what people mean.  But I digress…

So, let’s look at the information the January 1932 issue of Modern Mechanix magazine had to tell us about cartooning and how these magical mystical marvels of modern movement are made (yeah, baby – high five for decent alliteration there).

After years of a successful black-and-white career, animated cartoons are due to take on the additional appeal of color, thanks to the perfection of a process which is explained in detail in this article.

THE first of 13 one-reel animated cartoon comedies in color have just been completed in Hollywood, marking the beginning of a new era in this popular form of entertainment which has already made Mickey Mouse and his cohorts the highest paid actors in the movie world, although they draw no salaries. Ted Eshbaugh, a Boston artist, is the man who has at last succeeded in producing animateds in color. Making the colored comics duplicates the manufacture of black-white comics excepting the intricate application of color to the characters and transferring that color to the double negative that creeps through the recording camera a frame at a time. When you consider that 15,000 separate drawings on celluloid must be made by a staff of artists for a single reeler, composed of 16,000 frames, and that each figure or group of figures on each celluloid will display possibly six color combinations, you get some idea of the intricacy and tediousness of the process.

It’s a rather lengthy article, and in a rare showing of restraint on my part, I’ll pass on copying a large part of it and filling up my page with things you have to skip over if you aren’t interested in seeing.  Instead, head over to the Modern Mechanix web site if you want to view the complete article and image.

[tags]Modern Mechanix, How color cartoons are made[/tags]

(via boingboing)
No, this isn’t like the satirical look Stephen Colbert gave us earlier in the week.  Over at Scientific American there is an article dealing with the study of the mind of experts.

Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well

A man walks along the inside of a circle of chess tables, glancing at each for two or three seconds before making his move. On the outer rim, dozens of amateurs sit pondering their replies until he completes the circuit. The year is 1909, the man is José Raúl Capablanca of Cuba, and the result is a whitewash: 28 wins in as many games. The exhibition was part of a tour in which Capablanca won 168 games in a row.

How did he play so well, so quickly? And how far ahead could he calculate under such constraints? “I see only one move ahead,” Capablanca is said to have answered, “but it is always the correct one.”

Part of the problem of studying experts is studying in a field where expertise can be measured.  As the Scientific American article points out, there are experts in fields like teaching or business management, but how can you get quantitative results which can be used to compare the expert and average person in those fields?  With chess, there is the rating structure which is well defined and easily understood.

Continue reading “A scientific look at how experts come to be”