Adds Up to a Spiral

Infrequently Answered Question #84: How do you make a spiral?

A: A spiral is made employing a Fibonacci sequence, named after Medieval Italian mathematician, Leonardo Pisano Bigollo. Well, actually named after his AKA, Leonardo Fibonacci. Though why a mathematician would have an alias I can't imagine. Anyway, the Fibonacci sequence describes a series of numbers where each following number is the sum of the previous two: 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, 3+5=8, 5+8=13, etc. When plotted, a logarithmic spiral is generated.

Maybe you've seen that diagram before, also called the Golden Mean. Why it's so golden and what it means escapes me. Still, a lot of folks wax poetic about it. Search "Fabinacci sequence" for yourself and see. It leads into the whole fractal business. Some folks will tell you the entire universe is fractal, as if Mother Nature had one really great idea and just kept repeating it to make everything.

But I seem to have gone off topic, making a spiral. You could use the Fibonacci sequence, but it's a real pain. Besides, if you look at your typical depiction (top) it doesn't produce a smooth spiral. For that the arc radius needs to gradually increase at every point. So rather than a series of squares with quarter circles, you need a series of rectangles with parabolas. This is even more of a pain, but it does produce a smoother spiral.

To make a spiral without using any math at all you can use a pencil, a nail and some string. Attach the nail and pencil at opposite ends of the string. Wind the string around the nail. Drive the nail into your surface to make a fixed center point. Then start drawing with a circular motion, as the string unwinds you get a spiral. Though not a Fibonacci spiral, but one with equal spacing the distance of the circumference of the nail.

Unfortunately you also get a nail hole in your drawing surface. You could use a dowel rod glued to your surface instead, or something like that. That can still be a problem. It certainly won't help if you want to make a spiral on your computer. I simply use the spiral making tool in Adobe Illustrator. Easy-peasy.

Filed under Infrequently Answered Questions 1/26/15

Robin Hood, Eat Your Heart Out

Readers might remember a video of the fastest archer in the west linked to a while back. Lars Andersen, is back with a new, even more amazing video.

Lars Andersen: a new level of archery

Spoiler Alert: I recommend seeing the video before reading my takeaway on it.

Imagine a typical scene near the end of a Holly­wood swashbuckler where the hero has run out of arrows and the evil villan has him dead to rights, ready to deliver the coup de gras. With a sneer the black hat unleashes an arrow at our seemingly helpless hero… quick as a flash our hero catches the arrow in mid-air and shoots it back skewering the villan through his black heart. The smug look on the villan's face turns to shock as he keels over dead to the wild cheers of theater-goers.

Seems farfetched? Did you watch the video? Lars Andersen does that and more.

Filed under Odds & Ends 11/30/14

Accidoptal Illusion Two

Here's an unplanned optical illusion I stumbled upon while creating the art for the opening mesmerizer bit. If you stare at the center of the spiral it appears to grow. Yet it never gets any bigger. Ooh, spooky.

If you stare at it for ten seconds and then look at a white part of the screen, you see a fuzzy version of the spiral in pink and purple. The two other colors I used in the opening mesmerizer bit. Totally unplanned. Spookier?

Filed under Odds & Ends 1/22/15

Zamboner

Yessiree-bob, another entry where I don't have to do any actual work. An illustration sample from Reason magazine's Brickbats, April 2011.

"Maryland State Highway Administration road crews were supposed to put salt brine on the Capital Beltway to reduce icing. Instead, they accidentally sprayed magnesium chloride on the road. The magnesium chloride froze, leading to 11 accidents."

Since they did the research and writing, here's a bit of back­scratching: Reason Online

Filed 1/20/15

Drek Take Two

Infrequently Answered Question #83: Which is better, "Star Trek" or "Star Wars"?

A: The original "Star Trek" is the best. But only because the future was Mod. The Art Deco future of "Metropolis" was pretty good, too. But that's not what you asked about. What's rather goofy about "Star Wars" are the space dogfights. Or really, the way all the spacecraft fly in space.

George Lucas admits his space dogfights were patterned after aerial combat scenes from WWI movies. And so his star-fighters fly like a biplane, nose first. A plane needs to be oriented to generate lift, not so a ship in space. For instance, in orbit the space shuttle was oriented however was needed for any particular task. Only when it entered the atmosphere did it need to fly nose forward.

This means the easiest way to get the enemy off your tail in a dogfight… turn around. A star-fighter could translate around 180 degrees while maintaining its course, face the attacker and blast away. Still, why does it seem these craft only have forward firing weapons? Huh? Didn't anyone tell them about turrets?

Next we come to a scene fraught with danger, entering the dreaded debris field where the odds of getting through alive are a thousand to one. Maybe there are such dangerous debris fields, but not that anyone has ever found. We know very well about the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. But here's the thing, the bits of debris are hundreds and thousands of miles apart.

Proximity in space is not like on Earth. Distances are vast, a thousand miles away is close in space. Anyway, it's more like the odds are a thousand to one you'd ever get hit by debris than the other way around. And if you had a weapon turret you could simply vaporize any space rock that came close. You know, within 100 miles or so.

Not that "Star Trek" wasn't packed with goofiness. For my take on that see Star Drek, Trivial Musings of a Semi Hemi Demi Trekker.

Filed under Infrequently Answered Questions 1/15/15

Diabolical Crosswords

Arthur Wayne created the very first crossword puzzle which appeared in the New York World on December 21, 1913. Early puzzle answers were one word, multi-word answers are more recent. Themed puzzles began around the early 1940s. Though you might say the first puzzle had a theme, the word 'FUN'.

See the very first crossword puzzle here

These days crosswords are full of wordplay and cryptic clues which can be confusing, misleading, or downright diabolical. Still, sometimes it's simple clues that really throw you for a loop. Especially since they seem harmless when you run across them. Take a simple one-word clue like 'bean'. What is it? A legume? Your head? Getting hit in the head with a legume? Out of context there's no telling.

Then you have heteronyms, two words with the same spelling but different meanings and pronun­ciations. For instance, if the clue is 'bass', does that mean a fish or a deep voice? Is contract something you sign, how you get a disease, or to shrink? There's plenty more. How many? More heteronyms than you ever thought of.

Experienced puzzle solvers like their puzzles to be a challenge. There's no satisfaction in solving a simple puzzle. So the clues and answers get more diabolical all the time. In Spanish the Devil is el Diablo, from Latin diabolicus. And so diabolical means appropriate to the devil, fiendishly cruel, very wicked. In a word, devilish. Not being a crossword puzzle maker but an illustrator, I put my wordplay in the pictures. Nobody calls that pictureplay as far as I know.

Actually, I did create one puzzle many years ago which broke a lot of rules. But then, it was a gag puzzle. I've recreated it below.

Crossword For Illiterates

An Xtra special, Xciting, Xtraordinary puzzle designed to leave you in Xtasy

Mouseover for answers

Filed under Odds & Ends 1/13/15

Everybody Doesn’t Know

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

There's nothing wrong with knowledge, it's the little part that causes trouble. Charles Darwin put it this way, "Ignorance more frequently begets confi­dence than does knowledge." You may suspect there is a kernel of truth in the old saw about a little knowledge. Suspect no more, researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger won a Nobel Prize for proving it's true.

They call it the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a cognitive bias where unskilled people mistakenly rate their ability unrealistically high. Basically because they don't know enough to recognize their mistakes. Ironically, gaining competence actually weakens confidence as people start realizing how much more they don't know. Here's my version of Dunning and Kruger's graph with added notations:

Having conquered one old adage, perhaps misters Dunning and Kruger are now tackling some other old chestnut. Maybe, "Time is money." This may have them stymied. Physicists don't agree on the definition of time, to some time isn't even real. Then again, economists all concur on just about nothing.

Filed under Quotes & Sayings 1/11/15

Trivia In Black and White

When we think of the iconic soccer ball, we think of white hexagon and black pentagon panels. A ball as if designed by Buckminster Fuller whose geodesic domes used the same pattern. We might be tempted to call this soccer ball a buckyball (buckminsterfullerene), but that's actually something else.

Soccer balls weren't always made this way. For a hundred years or so the balls were made of 18 strips of leather in a pattern like a volleyball. This revolutionary and now famous black and white ball was invented by Adidas for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. This iconic ball had a name, the Telstar.

For readers too young to remember the 1960s, Telstar was the first telecommunications satellite. If you know what it looked like you would easily see why the ball was named after it. By the time Mexico hosted the World Cup again in 1986, the Telstar was out of official use. The ball in that tournament was called the Azteca.

It's claimed the Telstar design helped players follow the flight and spin of the ball easier. Whether that's true or just marketing by Adidas I'm not so sure. At any rate, the ball was a smashing success. Even though it was used only for a couple decades it's still what we think of when we think of a soccer ball. Sports websites use it as an icon to mean soccer. You can't get more iconic than that.

Queen Victoria is well known for wearing mourning black from the death of her beloved husband, Prince Albert, until her own death years later. Less well known is on the much happier event of her marriage she began the tradition of brides wearing white.

Before then brides wore wedding gowns of no color in particular. Most folks, who couldn't afford to buy a dress just to be married in, likely wore their Sunday best, whatever the color. The rich and famous often set the fashion and no-one was more rich and famous than Queen Victoria in her day. The fashion of brides in white took hold, spread, and hasn't receded yet.

Filed under Fun Facts & Trivia 1/5/15

We Were Number One

It's college football Bowl season once again. Time for tailgating, beer drinking, singing fight songs, painting your face in school colors and all the rest of the crazy things football fans do. Fan is short for fanatic, after all. Also time to argue about the bowl system. Happens every year. While many grouse about how flawed the BCS system is, it used to be worse. There was no game, national champions were determined by polls, by the opinions of coaches and sports writers. No biases there, eh?

Still, people like having a champion, and the brag­ging rights that go with it whether they were on the team or even attended the school or not. Now we come to the trivia part of it all, which school has won the most college football national championships? Of course, the answer may vary according to which past poll you consult. So it might depend on your personal bias of who's bias you prefer.

While the NCAA didn't officially designate national champions before the BCS, they allow schools to claim national titles based on the polls. Sort-of semi-official national titles. These go all the way back to 1869. The answer to who has the most recognized claims to the national title may surprise you. Though maybe not since you know it goes back to just after the Civil War when the Ivy League reigned supreme.

Top Eight Schools With National Titles
Princeton - 28
Yale - 27
Notre Dame - 21
Alabama - 17
Southern California - 17
Oklahoma - 16
Michigan - 15
Ohio State - 14

Needless to say, Princeton is unlikely to add to their total anytime soon. Still, it may be a while before any­one beats their record.

Filed under The Casual Sportsman 12/31/14

Not Done Redone

In what is becoming something of a tradition, I present a year-end list of silly predictions of things that will not happen or post-dictions of things that did not happen. Review my previous pre-post-dictions for 2014, 2013, and 2012. And now, without further ado…

Top Ten+1 Things That Didn't Happen in 2014

Okay, maybe number six sort-of happened. I simply couldn't resist the joke.

Filed under Top Tens & Other Lists 12/26/14

Putting the X in Xmas

Looks like my neck of the woods is not going to have white Christmas, but a clear christmas. Or whatever you'd call it. The weatherman is calling for rain, not snow. Though I don't think I'll be supplanting a festive snowman with a rainman. White or not in your area, here's hoping it's a merry Xmas. Which leads us to… why X in Xmas? Where'd that come from?

Abbreviations used as Christian symbols go way back. The New Testament was written in Greek, the first two letters of Christ in Greek are chi and rho. These form the chi-rho monogram on the snowman's umbrella in the opening illustration above. The Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine, used it on his banner.

Remove the rho and you have a chi, a simple X. Still, when and exactly how X for Christ came about is not known. By the fifteenth century Xmas for Christmas was widely used. Back in the day, X in place of Christ also gave you Xian for Christian and Xianity for Christianity. These uses are no longer widespread, meaning not at all.

While nobody has every wished anyone a merry Fishmas, you might wonder about the origin of the fish as a symbol of Christ. One theory is it comes from the phrase "Jesus Christ Son of God Savior." The initial letters of the phrase spell the Greek word for fish, ichthus. Jcsgs doesn't spell ichthus, but with the Greek alphabet it does. Whether this is the true origin, nobody really knows.

Filed under Fun Facts & Trivia 12/24/14

Was Our Sluggish Economy Born Sixty Years Ago?

Does this sound like anyone you know? They leave home in their early twenties, get a job and start spending. And borrowing: car loan, mortgage, credit cards. Though they may have started borrowing for a student loan before they ever got a job. They grow older, earn more and get a bigger mortgage on a better home, buy a better car or two on credit, take on more credit card debt. Hey, they have kids to support.

Their late forties roll around, their kids are grown and gone and they start thinking about the future. They're not getting any younger, you know. They begin paying down their debts, saving for retirement and downsizing their home and lifestyle generally. In retirement they liquidate property and draw down retirement accounts. When they die accumulated property is passed on or sold off.

It should sound pretty much like everyone you know because that's what people do. With or without having children, people accumulate property and debt when they're young, taper off at about age forty-seven, then liquidate and deleverage into their golden years. It's called the spending wave. Though we all do it, folks don't much think about what it could mean to the economy. Let's think about it.

The Theory of Demographic Boom and Bust

In our system most money is created by lending and borrowing, creating credit. Increasing the money supply, credit, more than things to buy is inflationary. Decreasing the credit supply, money, more than things to buy is deflationary. Basically, young people on the increasing debt part of the spending wave are infla­tionary, and old folks on other side of the wave are deflationary.

This is where demographics come into play. If you have roughly equal numbers of old and young people, it's a wash. On the other hand, what happens when you have an out-sized generation on the early part of the spending wave? You get an inflationary boom. Then again, what happens when you have an out-sized generation on the downside of the spending wave? You get a deflationary bust.

At this point, the Baby Boom generation should come to mind. The Boomers were full in the rising part of the wave from about 1980 to 2000. The demographic inflationary impact was multiplied through the economy as businesses borrowed to increase production to fill growing consumption. Result: two decades of inflation and boom.

The Boomers fully transitioned into the falling part of the wave about 2005. The demographic deflationary impact of the spending wave was multiplied through the economy as business borrowing decreased as they now have over-capacity there being fewer people in their peak spending years. Result: a deflationary bust.

In a deflationary bust, like the one experienced entering the Great Depression, the money value of all asset classes goes down and the purchasing power of money goes up. It is the inverse of inflation. In 2007-8 stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities and other hard assets went down varying amounts. While there was little general price deflation, the purchasing power of money rose against everything that went down.

One wonders how much of the economic history of the last 35 years was due to the actions of the financial sector, central banks and government and how much was demographics. If demographics dominate, right now you'd expect weak GDP growth, or even contrac­tion, falling asset prices, as well as general price and wage deflation.

We have the weak GDP but not the deflation. Asset prices fell, some recovered more than others. The central banks and governments have stepped in to fill the breech so debt keeps growing. But there's a fly in the ointment, the production to pay off the debt is not growing. Due to demographics, the number of people in their most productive years is smaller and the number of people in their non-productive years is growing. Have the powers that be saved the day or just put it off for when it will be worse?

Japan had its baby boom earlier than anyone and hit the demographic wall in 1990. Their property and stock markets are still about 75% below their 1989 peaks and GDP is barely above a flat line despite every attempt by the Japanese government and central bank to create growth and inflation. Thirty-five years on they now have overall debt of 500% of GDP, a savings rate that dropped from 20% to under 5%, a trade surplus that turned to a deficit, and an even older population. We have yet to see the end result.

Still, Japan ran a trade surplus during most of that time because the rest of the world was booming. What happens when deflation strikes everyone at once? Europe's demographics are now about what Japan's were in 1990. The US is not much different. How likely are we to return to the robust growth of the 80s and 90s? What will be the result if markets, governments and central banks keep borrowing, promising and printing money as if we can return to higher growth when demographics say we can't? Might we be heading for the biggest deflationary bust in history?

Folks talking about money like to use a couple catch phrases, "This time it's different," and "It's never different." Though it seems self-contradictory, they might both be right. We've never before had so many people on the deflationary side of the spending wave. That's different. The nature, timing and impact of of the spending wave is as it ever was. It's no different now.

This is where writers often insert recommendations, ways to survive the brewing trouble. I won't do that, for one reason. I don't know what measures the powers that be will take in a crisis. Bail-outs, bail-ins, taxes, confiscation, nationalization… who knows? What might work to protect yourself in one case could be disaster in another. Whatever else they do, the financial elite, governments and central banks cannot change generational demographics. Those were baked in the cake at birth.

Filed under Talkin' Bout Money 12/22/14