Somashekaracharya Gunasagara Bhaskaracharya

From an excerpt of Mark Manson’s book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck:

The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.

Those two sentences are a pretty good way to sum up the human experience. As an exercise, think about how the world’s major religions and philosophies are attempts to help people manage these desires and acceptance.

I remarked on Twitter recently that “Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for Dunkirk is outstanding”. The music blends perfectly with the action on the screen without being overbearing; it’s perhaps the best marriage of sound and visuals I’ve experienced in a movie theater since Mad Max: Fury Road or even Tron: Legacy.¹

Zimmer and Dunkirk director Christopher Nolan achieved that effect by utilizing an auditory illusion called the Shepard tone, a sound that appears to infinitely rise (or fall) in pitch — the video above refers to it as “a barber’s pole of sound”. From a Business Insider interview with Nolan:

The screenplay had been written according to musical principals. There’s an audio illusion, if you will, in music called a “Shepard tone” and with my composer David Julyan on “The Prestige” we explored that and based a lot of the score around that. And it’s an illusion where there’s a continuing ascension of tone. It’s a corkscrew effect. It’s always going up and up and up but it never goes outside of its range. And I wrote the script according to that principle. I interwove the three timelines in such a way that there’s a continual feeling of intensity. Increasing intensity. So I wanted to build the music on similar mathematical principals. Very early on I sent Hans a recording that I made of a watch that I own with a particularly insistent ticking and we started to build the track out of that sound and then working from that sound we built the music as we built the picture cut. So there’s a fusion of music and sound effects and picture that we’ve never been able to achieve before.

1. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this — because it fits somewhere between “unpopular opinion” and “embarrassing admission” on the scale of things one doesn’t talk about in public — but seeing Tron: Legacy in 3D IMAX was one of the top 5 movie-going experiences of my life. The Light Cycle battle was 80 feet tall and because of the 3D glasses, it looked like it extended out from the screen to immediately in front of my face, to the point where I actually reached out and tried to touch it a couple times. And all the while, Daft Punk was pounding into my brain from who knows how many speakers. I was not on drugs and hadn’t been drinking, but it was one of the most mind-altering experiences of my life. ↩

If you're clever, you can take normal sand or dirt and support really heavy things with it. Near the end of this video, a small block of reinforced sand holds up a car wheel with absolutely no difficulty.

And yes, the Practical Engineering YouTube channel is a new favorite. (via digg)

The Met recently cleaned and repaired a 1660 painting by Charles Le Brun called Everhard Jabach and His Family. It took ten months of painstaking work, as this video shows:

Colossal has some before-and-after shots of the painting.

An NYPD officer anonymously shares what it's like to be a cop in NYC.

I'm walking in Boerum Hill on one of the first really good days of summer. It's been a long week but I'm feeling good in a flowing sundress and sandals, relieved to be freed from what I've begun to think of as my blue polyester prison. I look up and realize with amusement that I'm walking by an actual prison, or, to be precise, a jail: Brooklyn Central Booking.

The doors to the courtroom lobby open and a man emerges, pausing to survey the street. He's a little scruffy but then the newly arraigned usually are -- there aren't many opportunities to freshen up in the holding cells. He has an open, pleasant face, and the recognition on my part is immediate. My heart sinks as I see him cross the street and make a beeline for me.

"Miss? Miss?" He doesn't sound particularly confrontational and I give him my best blank smile, hoping he has some kind of mundane procedural question.

"I don't mean to like bother you or anything, but if you're not busy, and a beautiful lady such as yourself is probably busy, but if you're not busy I'd love to buy you a cup of coffee."

Now I have to grin. This is my new favorite person in the world. What chutzpah! I'm so delighted by this guy that I almost chuck him on the shoulder. Then it hits me. He doesn't recognize me, at all. He has no idea that I'm the person who arrested him two nights before.

(via @choire, who called it "BY FAR the most interesting thing i read all week")

Randall Rosenthal makes amazingly realistic wooden sculptures of everyday objects like newspapers, legal pads, baseball cards, and kitchen scenes. He carves each of his sculptures out of a single block of wood. So, this is carved entirely out of wood:

And so is this:

And this too:

And here's a look at that last sculpture in progress:

(via @pieratt)

The Venus de Milo's arms are lost to history but that hasn't stopped historians and scholars wondering what exactly she was doing with them when the statue was carved. In order to test out a theory that Venus was spinning thread, Virginia Postrel hired designer and artist Cosmo Wenman to construct a 3D model of Venus de Milo.

Here's something that I knew as a kid but had forgotten about: if you get a bike going on its own at sufficient speed, it will essentially ride itself. MinutePhysics investigates why that happens.

Interesting that the bike seems to do much of the work of staying upright when it seems like the rider is the thing that makes it work. (via devour)

From John Horgan, a list of 25 Terrific Science(y) Books. There are some unorthodox picks here (next to some no-brainers):

Ulysses, by James Joyce, 1922. Yeah, it's a work of fiction, but as I argued a few years ago, Joyce was a more astute observer of the mind than anyone before or since. He exemplifies Noam Chomsky's dictum that we will always learn more about ourselves from literature than from science.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn, 1962. This sneaky, subversive assault on conventional notions of scientific truth and progress triggered a revolution itself within the philosophy of science. Be sure to note where Kuhn compares scientists with drug addicts.

From Steven Weinberg, a list of the 13 best science books for the general reader. Solid list. But The Origin of Species is more than a little tough for the lay reader; I tried reading it a few years ago and it was a slog. I recommend The Elegant Universe and The Making of the Atomic Bomb w/o reservation.

From Petapixel, a list of photographic firsts, including the first photograph (1826), the first digital photograph (1957), the first photo of the Sun (1845), and the first photograph of a US President (1843).

John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, was the first president to have his photograph taken. The daguerreotype was shot in 1843, a good number of years after Adams left office in 1829. The first to have his picture taken in office was James Polk, the 11th President, who was photographed in 1849.

Adams was born in 1767, which got me thinking about a long-standing interest of mine: who was the earliest born person ever photographed? The Maine Historical Society believes Revolutionary War vet Conrad Heyer was the earliest born. Born in 1749, he crossed the Delaware with Washington before sitting for this portrait in 1852.

But according to the Susquehanna County Historical Society, John Adams (no apparent relation to the above Adams) was born in 1745 and was photographed at some point before he died in 1849. Other contenders with unverified ages include Revolutionary War vet Baltus Stone (born somewhere between 1744 and 1754 according to various sources) and a former slave named Caesar, photographed in 1851 at the alleged age of 114, which would mean he was born around 1737.

Still, that's photographs of at least two people who were born in the 1740s, at least five years before the start of the French and Indian War. As children, it's possible they could have interacted with people who lived through England's Glorious Revolution in 1688 or even the English Civil War (1642-1651). The Great Span lives on.

W.S. Gilbert’s neighbor in the country was a partner in a firm that was famous for its relishes, pickles, jams, jellies, and preserves. He had been made a baronet but “had grown very touchy about the source of his wealth and his title,” recalled DeWolf Hopper, “and was rather a hoity-toity neighbor.”

One day Gilbert’s dogs killed some pheasants on the man’s property, and he wrote a curt note of protest to the author. Gilbert wrote back:

Dear Sir Alfred:

I am extremely sorry about the loss of your pheasants, and I am taking steps to prevent my dogs from trespassing on your preserves in the future.

Sincerely,

W.S. Gilbert

P.S. You will pardon my use of the word ‘preserves,’ won’t you?

In his 1927 autobiography, Hopper also recalls:

Someone once challenged Gilbert to make up a verse offhand riming the words ‘Timbuctoo’ and ‘cassowary’. He studied for a moment and recited:

If I were a cassowary in Timbuctoo,
I’d eat a missionary and his hymn book too.

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If you are ever down and need an instant pick-me-up, watch this video of an aerobatic pilot doing tricks with his daughter as a passenger for the first time and your mood will improve greatly. The good stuff starts at about 50 seconds in.

Oh my, that laugh! (via @ianpierce)

“I have gathered a posy of other men’s flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.”

I often think of reading not as the acquisition of static knowledge but as the active springboard for thinking and dynamic contemplation — hence the combinatorial, LEGO-like nature of creativity, wherein we assemble building blocks of existing knowledge into new formations of understanding that we consider our original ideas. But long before our contemporary conceptions of how creativity works, French Renaissance polymath and proto-blogger Michel de Montaigne (February 28, 1533–September 13, 1592) articulated this magpielike quality of the mind, so very central to ideation.

In Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays (public domain; public library) — the same indispensable volume that gave us the great philosopher’s ideas on death and the art of living — he writes:

A competent reader often discovers in other men’s writings other perfections than the author himself either intended or perceived, a richer sense and more quaint expression.

Portrait of Michel de Montaigne by Salvador Dalí, 1947. Click image for details.

Half a millennium before Mark Twain proclaimed that “substantially all ideas are second-hand” and long before we drained the term “curation” of meaning by compulsive and indiscriminate application, Montaigne observed:

I have gathered a posy of other men’s flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.

But what makes Montaigne’s meditation so incisive — and such an urgently necessary fine-tuning of how we think of “curation” today — is precisely the emphasis on the thread. This assemblage of existing ideas, he argues, is nothing without the critical thinking of the assembler — the essential faculty examining those ideas to sieve the meaningful from the meaningless, assimilating them into one’s existing system of knowledge, and metabolizing them to nurture a richer understanding of the world. Montaigne writes:

We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make it our own. We are in this very like him, who having need of fire, went to a neighbor’s house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any with him home… What good does it do us to have the stomach full of meat, if it do not digest, if it be not incorporated with us, if it does not nourish and support us?

Three centuries later, Thoreau — another of humanity’s most quotable and overquoted minds — made a similar point about the perils of mindlessly parroting the ideas of those who came before us, which produces only simulacra of truth. The mindful reflection and expansion upon existing ideas and views, on the other hand, is a wholly different matter — it is the path via which we arrive at more considered opinions of our own, cultivate our critical faculties, and inch closer to truth itself. Montaigne writes:

Aristotle ordinarily heaps up a great number of other men’s opinions and beliefs, to compare them with his own, and to let us see how much he has gone beyond them, and how much nearer he approaches to the likelihood of truth; for truth is not to be judged by the authority and testimony of others; which made Epicurus religiously avoid quoting them in his writings. This is the prince of all dogmatists, and yet we are told by him that the more we know the more we have room for doubt.

Complement Montaigne’s Complete Essays — a timeless trove of wisdom on such diverse facets of existence as happiness, education, fear, and the imagination — with his enduring wisdom on how to live and Salvador Dalí’s rare and whimsical illustrations for his essays.

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Depression, obesity, stress, sleep deprivation and age affect negatively your brain. However, as I have previously argued, the commonly reported decline in intellectual productivity with age is not so simple as it was once thought.

Of course, we know that our brains incur some damage over time, so some decline of some of our abilities appears likely. However, it is probably not as simple as “we lose brain cells over time”. For example, perception problems, such as reduced hearing, can lead to the appearance of memory problems, or a lower IQ (Rabbitt, 1991). And we can compensate in many ways for a moderate decline: we can rely on cognitive jigs, we can improve our problem-solving strategies, we can use computers, and so on. The idea that our intelligence resides solely in our brain is more than a bit silly. In effect, if the hardware gets slightly slower, we can compensate with better software, and with new peripherals.

However, my belief is that a good share of the age-related cognitive decline is psychological, or caused by cognitive disuse. This sort of decline is not so easily compensated.

For example, we know that retirement significantly degrades your cognitive functions. That is, shortly (but not immediately) after retirement, you are no longer quite as sharp as you were:

Our results highlight a significant negative effect of retirement on cognitive functioning (…) all these results (…) suggest that retirement plays a significant role in explaining cognitive decline at older age. (Bonsanga et al., 2012)

Following retirement, your social network shrinks. You are less likely to engage in cognitively difficult tasks (e.g., no more driving during rush hour). Simply put, you no longer need to be as bright as you used to. And guess what happens? You lose some of your edge.

So maybe you should not worry that much about saving for your retirement?

Of course, it stands to reason that if retirement can have a large effect, so can other similar life style changes. When I was younger, I was constantly tested and pushed intellectually. I have now a much more confortable job: I could choose to let my brain rot a little more. In fact, I could even increase my professional status by doing more management and less of the highly challenging hands-on research and teaching work I enjoy.

As we grow older, we often do not need to learn quite as fast, we can rely more easily on established patterns… thus, we can let some of a cognitive abilities fall due to disuse. Doing Sudokus can maybe help a little, but I would not expect a strong overall effect.

But beyond disuse, there is also a placebo effect: if you are old and you believe that old people aren’t as sharp, you won’t be sharp. We know that this effect is real and strong. We can test it experimentally in a stereotype threat context. For example, if you invite young women to a mathematics test and you explain to them that you want to study why women do poorly in mathematics, they will do more poorly. It is that simple. It is not just women and mathematics… the same effect works for blacks and IQ tests… and, yes, it works on old people too.

In fact, the effect is so strong that removing the stereotype threat can be enough to eliminate age-related differences in specific experiments:

(…) these results demonstrate a direct link between stereotype activation and false-memory susceptibility, and they suggest that (…) age-related differences in false memories can be eliminated. (Thomas and Dubois, 2011)

If you run an experiment and you invite older people over, even the slightest hint that you are attempting to measure a decline in their cognitive functions could ensure that you will indeed measure a strong decline.

But the effect should be present outside a college laboratory as well. Old people convinced that they have rotten brains should not be expected to be sharp… “The aging process is, in part, a social construct.” (Levy, 2009). It is not just a vague theory, the effect that I describe has been put to the test repeatedly:

Those with more negative age stereotypes demonstrated significantly worse memory performance over 38 years than those with less negative age stereotypes, after adjusting for relevant covariates. (Levy et al., 2011)

Ramscar and Baayen stress that we are probably confounding many factors and unnecessarily stressing seniors about their cognitive functions:

What we do know is the changes in performance seen on tests (…) are not evidence of cognitive or physiological decline in ageing brains. Instead, they are evidence of continued learning and increased knowledge. This point is critical when it comes to older people’s beliefs about their cognitive abilities. People who believe their abilities can improve with work have been shown to learn far better than those who believe abilities are fixed. It is sobering to think of the damage that the pervasive myth of cognitive decline must be inflicting. (Ramscar and Baayen, 2014)

I think that this suggests that, to remain as smart as possible as long as possible… you should remain genuinely active professionally for as long as possible. Moving to more prestigious but less demanding jobs is maybe unwise… You probably also want to moderate your beliefs about age-related cognitive decline. Entertaining the idea that you are getting dumber might just be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Further reading: Ramscar, M., Hendrix, P., Love, B., & Baayen, H. (2013). Learning is Not Decline: The mental lexicon as a window into cognition across the lifespan. The Mental Lexicon 8:3, 450-481

Arrange three congruent equilateral triangles so that their corners meet at a point, like the red triangles above. The arrangement doesn’t have to be symmetric; the triangles can even overlap. Now draw lines BC, DE, and FA to complete a hexagon inscribed in a circle. The midpoints of these three lines will form the vertices of an equilateral triangle.

That’s called the asymmetric propeller theorem, and it’s been known since the 1930s. But in 1979 Beverly Hills dentist and geometry enthusiast Leon Bankoff told Martin Gardner of some further discoveries. Bankoff never found time to write them up, so after the dentist’s death in 1997 Gardner published them in the College Mathematics Journal:

• The three equilateral triangles need not be congruent. Each can be of any size and the theorem still holds.
• The triangles need not meet at a point. They can meet at the corners of any equilateral triangle.
• They need not even be equilateral! If three similar triangles of any sizes meet at a point, the midpoints of the three added lines will form a triangle similar to each of the “propellers.”
• The similar triangles need not meet at a point! If they meet at the corners of a fourth triangle (of any size) that’s similar to each propeller, then the midpoints of the added lines will form a triangle similar to each propeller, provided that the vertices of the central triangle touch the corresponding corners of the propellers.

Given all this flexibility, Gardner asked, do the propellers even have to be triangles? It turns out that the answer is yes. Still, the discoveries above form a fitting tribute to Bankoff, whom Gardner called “one of the most remarkable mathematicians I have been privileged to know.”

(Martin Gardner, “The Asymmetric Propeller,” College Mathematics Journal 30:1 [January 1999], 18-22.)

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At age 13 Marie-Jean-Léon Lecoq, Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, discovered a rare talent: He could recognize a dream state while he was experiencing it, and could move and act lucidly within the dream. Eventually he filled 25 notebooks with descriptions and illustrations of his adventures in the dream world. These are now lost, but his 1867 book Les Rêves et les Moyens de Les Diriger describes some of his feats:

I change a porcelain vase into a rock-crystal fountain, from which I desire a cooling drink — and this immediately flows out through a golden tap. Some years ago I lost a particular ring whose loss I felt deeply. The memory of it comes to mind, and I should like to find it. I utter this wish, fixing my attention on a piece of coal that I pick up from the fireplace — and immediately the ring is on my finger. The dream continues in the same way until one of the apparitions I have called up charms and captivates me so much that I forget my magician’s role and plunge into a new, more realistic series of illusions.

Saint-Denys believed that almost anyone could learn to do this. One of his suggestions was to keep a dream diary and to make a daily habit of completing it. Like the rest of the student’s life, this habit would then itself become the raw material for his dreams — eventually he would dream of recording a dream. And if he noted the details of a dream he was recording, he would virtually be dreaming lucidly, having smuggled himself into his own slumbers.

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One of democracy’s ideals is egalitarianism: Each person gets one vote, and all votes are equally consequential, so that all people have equal power over the world. For that reason we consider it improper for one person to vote twice in the same election. But then shouldn’t we also consider it improper for dual citizens to cast votes in two different places?

It’s true that dual citizens vote in different elections, but they’re still exercising twice as much power over the world as other voters. And it’s true that power is already unequally distributed among the world’s voters, but this is no reason to shrink from the ideal.

The fact that a dual citizen has the legal right to cast two ballots doesn’t mean that this accords with democratic principles. Suppose that Texas passed a law saying that any native-born Texan can vote in Texas, regardless of where he currently lives. Then a Texan living in Pennsylvania could cast ballots in both states, whereas a native Pennsylvanian could vote only once. This might be legal, but we would object morally to the unfairness of such a law.

Given the unequal influence of the world’s nations, one idealistic way to equalize power among all voters would be to give everyone a right to vote in every election, everywhere. This would give each of us an equal amount of power over the world. “That vision remains pretty visionary, we concede,” write Robert E. Goodin and Ana Tanasoca. “Still, visions matter.”

(Robert E. Goodin and Ana Tanasoca, “Double Voting,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 92, no. 4, 743-758.)

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Eleven fenmen from the Isle of Ely, being employed by Sir John Griffin, in training a part of his park at Audley End, went one evening to the Inn called The Hoops, to drink. After getting a little spirited, they told the maid, they would give sixpence each to fetch them as much beer they could drink, in half-pints out of the cellar; if they tired her, she was to pay for the liquor; if she tired them, they were to pay for the whole. The girl accepted the bet, although she had been washing all the day, and drew them 517 single half-pints, before they gave out, which were all drank by the said men. The distance from the room where they sat, to the tap, was measured, from which it appears she walked near 12 miles in fetching it; and the quantity of liquor drank by each man was about three gallons in three hours. The above is the real fact.

— Police Gazette, Feb. 17, 1775

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“It vexes me greatly that having to earn my living has forced me to interrupt the work and to attend to small matters.” — Leonardo

“I cannot afford to waste my time making money.” — Louis Agassiz

“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” — Charles Bukowski

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In his 1772 Treatise on the Art of Decyphering, Philip Thicknesse suggests a scheme for hiding messages in musical compositions:

At the bottom of the page is an example. “If a musick-master be required to play it, he will certainly think it an odd, as well as a very indifferent, composition; but neither he, or any other person, will suspect that the notes convey also the two following harmonious lines from Dr. Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village“:

Near yonder cops where once the garden smil’d,
And still where many a garden-flower grows wild.

Thicknesse suggests that two players might even use this scheme to carry on a conversation in real time. “It is certain that two musicians might, by a very little application, carry on a correspondence with their instruments: they are all in possession of the seven notes, which express a, b, c, d, e, f, g; and know by ear exactly, when either of those notes are toned; and they are only to settle a correspondence of tones, for the remaining part of the alphabet; and thus a little practice, might enable two fiddlers to carry on a correspondence, which would greatly astonish those who did not know how how the matter was conducted. Indeed this is no more than what is called dactlylogy, or talking on the fingers, which I have seen done, and understood as quick, and readily almost, as common conversation.”

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This trick seems to have been invented independently by Martin Gardner and Karl Fulves. A blindfolded magician asks a spectator to lay three pennies on a table, in any arrangement of heads and tails. The magician’s goal is to put all three coins into the same state, all heads or all tails.

If the three coins already match, then the trick is done. If not, then the magician gives three instructions: Flip the left coin, flip the middle coin, flip the left coin. After each step he asks whether the three coins now match. By the third flip, they will.

“It’s no surprise that the magician can eventually equalize all the coins,” writes MIT computer scientist Erik Demaine, “but it’s impressive that it always takes at most three moves.” The technique exploits a principle used in Gray codes, which are used to reduce errors when using analog signals to represent digital data. Demaine relates a similar trick involving four coins in the November-December 2010 issue of American Scientist.

See Lincoln Seeks Equality.

The post Three of a Kind appeared first on Futility Closet.

“A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.” — Max Gluckman

The post Unquote appeared first on Futility Closet.

This video features a man who plays with marbles for several hours each day, his custom-built marble alley, and his very patient & understanding wife.

The man has been playing with marbles for 60 years and owns over 1500 marbles, which are stored according to how quickly they move down the track. (via boing boing)

Update: I think this guy's head would explode if he saw this mega marble run with 11,000 marbles.

(via digg)

This looks cool...Thomas Pavitte has reinvented the paint-by-numbers with Querkles. Instead of simple numbered areas to fill in, Querkles cleverly uses overlapping circles that you fill in with different shading techniques or colors to reveal hidden faces. Here's a short demo of how it works:

Pavitte has two different books available: Querkles and Querkles Masterpiece, featuring famous faces from the art world. See also coloring books for adults.

A time lapse of the first three weeks of a bee's life, from egg to adult, in only 60 seconds.

Some explanation of what's going on can be found in this video. (via colossal)

The octobass is a string instrument that's almost twice the size of a bass, so big that it makes a cello look like a violin. Only a few of these instruments exist and The Musical Instrument Museum made a video showing theirs in action:

(via cynical-c)

ESPN's Kate Fagan with Split Image, a look at depression and suicide in the age of social media.

On Instagram, Madison Holleran's life looked ideal: Star athlete, bright student, beloved friend. But the photos hid the reality of someone struggling to go on.

(Life's never as good as it looks on Facebook or as bad as it sounds on Twitter.)

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Seb Lester can somehow freehand draw the logos for the NY Times, Honda, Ferrari, Coca-Cola, and many more.

Watching the video, I didn't even notice any tracing...it's all freehand. Keep up with Lester's drawings on his Instagram account.

The trolley problem is an ethical and psychological thought experiment. In its most basic formulation, you're the driver of a runaway trolley about to hit and certainly kill five people on the track ahead, but you have the option of switching to a second track at the last minute, killing only a single person. What do you do?

The problem becomes stickier as you consider variations of the problem:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you -- your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

As driverless cars and other autonomous machines are increasingly on our minds, so too is the trolley problem. How will we program our driverless cars to react in situations where there is no choice to avoid harming someone? Would we want the car to run over a small child instead of a group of five adults? How about choosing between a woman pushing a stroller and three elderly men? Do you want your car to kill you (by hitting a tree at 65mph) instead of hitting and killing someone else? No? How many people would it take before you'd want your car to sacrifice you instead? Two? Six? Twenty? Is there a place in the car's system preferences panel to set the number of people? Where do we draw those lines and who gets to decide? Google? Tesla? Uber?¹ Congress? Captain Kirk?

If that all seems like a bit too much to ponder, Kyle York shared some lesser-known trolley problem variations at McSweeney's to lighten the mood.

There's an out of control trolley speeding towards a worker. You have the ability to pull a lever and change the trolley's path so it hits a different worker. The first worker has an intended suicide note in his back pocket but it's in the handwriting of the second worker. The second worker wears a T-shirt that says PLEASE HIT ME WITH A TROLLEY, but the shirt is borrowed from the first worker.

Reeeeally makes you think, huh?

1. If Uber gets to decide, the trolley problem's ethical concerns vanish. The car would simply hit whomever will spend less on Uber rides and deliveries in the future, weighted slightly for passenger rating. Of course, customers with a current subscription to Uber Safeguard would be given preference at different coverage levels of 1, 5, and 20+ ATPs (Alternately Targeted Persons).↩

If you hold a lit match an inch or two over the smoking wick of a recently extinguished candle, the candle will light again. If you record that happening with a high speed camera and then slow it way down, it gives you some clues to how that happens:

Hint: wax is a candle's fuel and smoke is wax vapor... (via digg)