A few months ago some geniuses cooked up a website that makes Obama say anything you want, spliced together word-by-word from endless online clips. There’s now an alternate version that does the same thing with Donald Trump, except that you’ll be hard-pressed to come up with anything more ludicrous than what he’s already said.
The Donald Trump Mishmasher works a little differently than the Obama version. It doesn’t appear to assemble words not in its database using syllables from those that are. So if there’s a word you need that Donald Trump has yet to utter at a debate or rally, you’re out of luck. That includes words that aren’t soundbite-friendly—like profanity. But there’s still a lot of fun to be had with the next president of the United States.
While Lego fans around the world can arrange a tour to see their production facility in Denmark, recording is prohibited inside the factory. However, Lego made a rare exception for their recent Media Day, and Pawel “Sariel” Kmiec (author of The Unofficial LEGO Technic Builder’s Guide and the man behind Sariel’s LEGO Workshop) made the most of it, capturing sights that few have witnessed.
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This is probably the most comprehensive look inside the company’s facilities that you’ll ever see. Which means the video is long, so you’ll probably have to scan through to find what interested you. But there’s something here for every Lego fan, whether industrial designer or layperson.
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To ID’ers, maybe it’s old-hat to see injection molding machines, sprues being whisked off for recycling, ABS pellets being pumped into hoppers. So maybe you want to see the enormous, heavily-roboticized warehouse that normally operates in complete darkness? The vault where they keep a copy of every Lego set ever made? The permanent knock-off exhibition, where the company purposely collects unauthorized reproductions and displays them next to the real thing? The room dedicated entirely to Star Wars Lego sets? The Ideas House where new concepts are born?
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We’ve clipped off the first few minutes (showing Kmiec’s airplane journey) so get started below:
For those of you that need to make models for presentations, nothing is more frustrating than the glaring defects on a highly-visible part, particularly small parts that are tricky to Bondo. (Not to mention exposing yourself to the fumes that come off of your typical Bondo batch.)
Here Tested’sFrank, who formerly worked at McFarlane Toys, shows us how combining superglue and baby powder can save your bacon:
You don’t even need grade school science to know that water flows wherever gravity pulls it. But somehow when poured onto Arthur Carabott’s intriguing fountain, it instead sticks to impossibly perfect straight paths and corners on its way down.
Is it made from some extraterrestrial material science hasn’t classified yet? Nope, just a strategic use of Rust-Oleum’s NeverWet ultrahydrophobic coating on laser-cut acrylic sheets to direct where the water is able to flow. A clever trick, and a neat effect.
TED Talks were forever shamed by that skeweringThe Onion gave them a few years ago, but this commentary on what every TED Talk is like from CBC’s This Is That is pretty perfect. It breaks down the things that every person does at one of these talks, including the structure of their speech, the repetition of phrases, the movements onstage, the specific cadence they use, the endless graphs they pummel into our brains, and more.
It starts a little slow, but then again, so does every TED Talk. My favorite line: “Let’s look at the picture of the planet for no reason.”
Last month, dental technology startup ONVI introduced a toothbrush with a camera built in, so users could get a close up look at their teeth as they slowly rot away in their heads. This, thankfully, is not that.
In a lot of ways, Philips’ new smart toothbrush is similar Oral-B’s offering. The verbosely named Sonicare FlexCare Platinum Connected is a Bluetooth-enabled electric toothbrush designed to track and help improve people’s brushing habits.
When I sat down with the company ahead of launch, a spokesperson stressed the need for “truly meaningful innovations,” since, “anybody can create a connected toothbrush,” adding that, at the end of the day, most people who go the lengths of buying a fancy $200 electric toothbrush probably don’t need, say, a twice daily reminder to brush their teeth.
So if you’re going to make a smart toothbrush, you should make it, you know, smartly. In other words, don’t just add connectivity to your toothbrush for the sake of adding connectivity to your toothbrush.
Philips’ big push here its 3D Mouth Map, designed for dentists to designate trouble areas due to over- or under-brushing for specific users. The app utilizes that information to determine where users should be spending their time while brushing. There’s also a touchup feature that tacks on extra time after the requisite two minute to address spots that were missed.
Activity is tracked courtesy of on-board sensors, which display brushing in real-time. That information is recorded and aggregated over time, so dentists can determine the areas that need work before the next checkup. It’s kind of like brushing homework.
The brush itself features three intensity settings, pressure sensors (with a built-in haptic buzz when you press too hard) and a timer. The brush head is rubberized and designed to conform to the teeth and gums. And according to the company, the battery should last upwards of two weeks, making the brush a good potential travel companion.
The Sonicare FlexCare Platinum Connected will run $200 when it starts shipping in July. The company will also be offering the toothbrush bundled with a UV sanitizer to zap bacteria on the brushead.
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, via Nieman Lab: as of March 2016, there were 197,800 Americans working in Internet publishing and broadcasting, and only 183,200 working for newspapers.
If you don’t want to use DEET to keep the mosquitoes away, lemon eucalyptus-based repellents actually do a pretty bang-up job. Here’s a way to make your own spray at home and keep those bloodsuckers away.
This video from the HouseholdHacker YouTube channel explains how to whip up your own homemade mosquito defense. All you need is lemon eucalyptus oil, vanilla extract, and some witch hazel. The menthoglycol in the lemon eucalyptus oil has been shown to be almost as effective as DEET at repelling mosquitoes, the witch hazel acts as an emulsifier, and the vanilla extract makes the spray smell nice. Add around 30 drops of lemon eucalyptus oil to your mixing container, followed by one teaspoon of vanilla extract, and 4 ounces of witch hazel (you can also use rubbing alcohol, vodka, or cooking oil). Mix it all up and pour it into a spray bottle, and your homemade mosquito spray is ready. The repellent should work for about four hours before you need to re-apply.
Fun with computer algorithms: Mathematicians say Super Mario Brothers is NP-hard. (Image: Christine Daniloff/MIT)
If you’ve ever been frustrated at your inability to complete a level of Super Mario Brothers, here’s a little something to cheer you up. Computer scientists have demonstrated that solving a level in the popular video game is tantamount to solving some of the hardest problems in computational science.
They’re known as “NP hard” problems, as opposed to the class known as “P” problems, which are relatively easy to solve. A classic example of an NP hard problem is the Traveling Salesman problem: the salesman must find the shortest route to visit 100 cities.
It turns out that navigating the levels of Super Mario Brothers can be equivalent to solving these very difficult mathematical equations, according to MIT computer scientist and engineer Erik Demaine. One caveat: Demaine and his colleagues haven’t shown that the actual levels in commercial versions of Super Mario Brothers meet this standard—only that it is possible to construct levels that are NP hard using the raw materials of the game world, a task that’s actually possible with Super Mario Maker. More on this in a second.
Computer scientists are particularly interested in NP problems, because they’re the cornerstone of cryptography. As MIT’s Larry Hardesty explained in 2009:
Computer science is largely concerned with a single question: How long does it take to execute a given algorithm? But computer scientists don’t give the answer in minutes or milliseconds; they give it relative to the number of elements the algorithm has to manipulate.
Imagine, for instance, that you have an unsorted list of numbers, and you want to write an algorithm to find the largest one. The algorithm has to look at all the numbers in the list: there’s no way around that. But if it simply keeps a record of the largest number it’s seen so far, it has to look at each entry only once. The algorithm’s execution time is thus directly proportional to the number of elements it’s handling — which computer scientists designate N.
So if you’ve got an algorithm to find the largest number in a list of 100 numbers (N=100), the time it takes to complete the task is proportional to N—let’s say one second per operation. Things get more complicated if your algorithm is tasked with, say, figuring out the distances between a given number of airports on a map (where N is the number of airports). It takes longer—three hours rather than one second—because for every airport on the map, the algorithm must calculate the distance to all the others. The real trouble comes with exponential algorithms—say, to factor a 1000-digit number. Then it would take a whopping 300 quintillion years to complete the task.
That’s how long it takes to solve such a problem on its own, but if a computer is given the answer, it can quickly verify that the answer is correct. Think of it as being like a riddle: it’s hard to guess the answer, but once we’re told, the answer seems obvious.
So what does all of this possibly have to do with Super Mario Brothers? A couple of years ago, Demaine and his colleagues examined a generic version of a video game structure they dubbed a “locked door.” This version had two possible states for a path through the game: it’s either safe to use that path, or it is not. Those two states, open or closed, can correspond to the 0s and 1s of computer memory bits.
Demaine et al. demonstrated that any computational problem could be represented by locked doors organized in just the right configuration. If a given problem is exponentially hard, so, too, will be figuring out how to complete that game level. In other words, that problem is NP hard.
Using the raw materials of the game world, they figured out how to construct these kinds of locked doors in Donkey Kong Country. They failed to do the same for Super Mario Brothers. They thought building a locked door in Super Mario was impossible and concluded that the game was at least as hard as the most difficult NP problems. But they couldn’t definitively prove that it was harder. For mathematicians, that’s a key distinction.
At the International Conference on Fun with Algorithms taking place this week in La Maddalena, Italy, Demaine will describe how the key to building a locked door in Super Mario Brothers is to exploit a monster called a “spiny.” A spiny can move between two barriers in the game but can’t leap over them—not without Mario’s help, anyway. If Mario bumps the floor just as the spiny approaches the barrier, it pops right over. The locked door Demaine et al. eventually constructed is based on which side of a barrier the spiny is on. If it’s on one side, the path is open; if it’s on the other side, the path is closed. And there are separate paths that allow Mario to bump the spiny from one side to the other.
And here’s why it’s not just about video games. Mathematicians and computer scientists often talk about proving the general statement that P does not equal NP. If P does not equal NP, then there is no fast, general way to solve NP hard problems. Conversely, if P does equal NP, that would mean that even seemingly difficult problems could have fast, easy solutions. We just haven’t found them yet. And that has enormous implications for cryptography. All our protected data would become vulnerable. (For what it’s worth, most mathematicians believe it’s far more likely that P does not equal NP.)
Confused? Here’s Simon Singh, author of The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, giving his own take on P vs NP, illustrated with short clips from The Simpsons and Futurama:
For such an arcane mathematical concept, P vs NP gets cited a lot in popular culture. It’s served as a plot point in Elementary. And Charlie Epps, the brilliant mathematician played by David Krumholtz in Numb3rs, used the game Minesweeper to explain the concept to a group of FBI agents in an early episode.
Demaine has taught a class on such hardness proofs using video games, and thinks this can be an effective educational approach. “My hope is through this class and these kinds of papers to encourage more people to do this, because it really does build up a lot of expertise that makes it easier to conquer problems,” he said in a statement. “The more practice we get as a collective, the better we are at solving these types of problems. And it’s important to know the limits of algorithms.”
Klaus Teuber is a name that’s probably not immediately recognizable to you but might ring a bell in the back of your mind because as the inventor of Settlers of Catan, his name graces every box. Surprisingly, board game design was originally Klaus’ hobby, but after selling 25 mil copies of Catan, he no longer has to work in a dental laboratory—or really ever again.
Great Big Story recently traveled to Germany to meet Klaus, and his family, and picked his brain for some gameplay strategies. His advice? Don’t waste your time chasing the longest road early in the game. You might think it’s your secret weapon, but it will end up hindering the growth of your settlements.
The entire video is a charming look at the mind of a legend, so dig in.