The Museum of Unworkable Devices debunks a whole fleet of perpetual-motion machines.
Technology
Topsy-Turvy
Ambigrams are word renderings that can be read both right-side up and upside down (or, sometimes, in a mirror). They’re hard to do convincingly, though some designers are pretty good at it. The one above was actually generated by a computer: Word.Net’s Ambigram.Matic. It’s not as elegant as the others, but I’m surprised that a machine can do this at all.
Harrison Ford, Call Your Agent
The exact layout of Air Force One has always been classified, but How Stuff Works has figured it out and rather recklessly published it online.
When they retire the plane in 2010, I’m hoping they put it up on eBay. At 4,000 square feet, it’s twice the size of my house, and my house doesn’t have a pharmacy, an operating table, 85 telephones, 19 televisions, radar jammers, hand-crafted wooden furniture, and flares to confuse heat-seeking missiles.
Also, Air Force One holds 2,000 meals and feeds 100 people at a time, and it can carry 70 passengers halfway around the world without refueling. I think that would be handy on vacations. I can probably fit 10 people in my dining room if we set up an extra card table, but it doesn’t go anywhere.
Blackboard Jumble
Assign your own Bart Simpson chalk message.
City Lights
Earth’s city lights, seen by satellite. You can make out major transportation networks: the American interstate highway system, the trans-Siberian railroad, the Nile. 100 years after the invention of electric light, only Antarctica is entirely dark.
Theseus and the Minotaur
Theseus and the Minotaur is a series of Java-based puzzles in which you have to escape a maze without getting mashed by a computerized monster that moves predictably. There are 14 levels, and I can’t get past level 4.
The interesting thing is that the puzzles were designed by a computer, and they’re now being used in AI experiments at the National University of Ireland. So computers are now solving puzzles designed by other computers.
Irrational Slumber
In 1610, Ludolph van Ceulen died of exhaustion after deriving 35 decimal digits of pi.
They’re engraved on his tombstone.
The Glass Bead Game
If there’s a master’s cup for science-fiction visionaries, it might actually belong to Hermann Hesse. In a late novel, the German author seemed to imagine the World Wide Web, and its kaleidoscopic hyperlinks, fifty years before it existed.
Das Glasperlenspiel, which won the Nobel Prize in 1946, centers on “the Glass Bead Game,” in which players combine the symbols of world cultures into new and insightful combinations. Here’s his description of the game — see if this doesn’t sound like the Web:
“The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.”
Hesse never quite explains how the game is played, which has set a lot of modern designers working on playable variants. The most popular is Charles Cameron’s HipBone Game (here’s an example of a board game, but Cameron’s working on a web-based version). This bears watching: The web is constantly evolving, and perhaps Hesse’s vision is still ahead of us.
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The This Page Intentionally Left Blank Project “offers Internet wanderers a place of quietness and simplicity on the overcrowded World Wide Web.”
Pi A La Mode
Where can you see pi expressed to 1 million decimal places?
http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com.
Some questions are pretty easy.