Things I Learned Digitally Wandering Around

Despite Hollywood depictions, pre-gunpowder battles rarely involved a massive, intermingled series of duels with swords, or with any sidearm for that matter. It was more effective to fight as a group and at a distance. Ancient battles generally were fought with pole and missile weapons. Pikes, spears, lances, javelins, arrows, crossbow bolts, etc. Sidearms were used if the enemy closed to where pole and projectile weapons couldn't be used.

A shield gives effective front protection, not so much side and rear protection. You certainly wouldn't want to mix in with the enemy because then you could be attacked from any angle at any time. No, you wanted to keep the enemy in front of you and all your fellows beside and behind you. That way everybody is a shield for everybody else.

In a great jumbled melee once one side got the upper hand it would be quick slaughter of the losing side. For instance, imagine if everyone on your side were fighting individually against two guys. Your side will likely lose most of those fights and you will quickly be outnumbered three to one, then four to one, five to one… bad news for your team.

If packed together only so many of the enemy could get at you even if outnumbered, only so many men can fit in a given space to fight. Plus, such a group had the chance for an organized retreat, pretty hard to do that out of a disorganized melee. Even if you broke and ran, being all on one side of the enemy gave you a better chance of getting away. Still, a group battle could break down as in the above melee scenario and the losing side would quickly disintegrate and be chopped to pieces. This is one reason why the casualty counts in ancient battles were often so lopsided.

All the same, most ancient wars were not a series of field battles. In fact, such battles were the exception rather than the rule. Battles only happened if both armies decided to have a go. That is, each side thought it could win. If not, the weaker force, unless trapped, would slip away to fight another day.

Most ancient wars were a series of sieges. That's where weaker forces would often slip away to, the safety of a fortified town. That's where they were trapped and forced to fight. Still, it was the only way a much weaker force could hope to survive. Sieges weren't a sure thing.

Of course, Hollywood gets sieges as wrong as they get field battles. In the movies a siege consists mostly of storming the castle. Oh, they might also have trebuchets firing great balls of napalm as their own troops are climbing walls. That's smart. Then… OK, that's enough. I'm sure you already know filmic reality is unreal. All the same, why does Hollywood think Vikings dressed like biker gangs in black leather festooned with studs?

Filed under Fun Facts & Trivia 1/31/15

Actually, Strange Undeath

For a little change of pace, a sample illustration from Fortean Times. This one from "Strange Deaths" in 2012.

"William Lawlis Pace, holder of the Guinness World Record for living the longest with a bullet in his head, died on 23 April 2012 at a California nursing home at the age of 103. It was 94 years and six months since his older brother Marvin shot him accidentally with their father's .22 rifle in October 1917. Pace, who farmed for more than 60 years and sired two sons, was left with a damaged eye. Doctors in his home state of Texas left the bullet in place for fear surgery might cause brain damage. In 2006, he was crowned world record holder in the category of unwanted cranial ammunition acquisition."

This is about the twentieth rerun from magazines I've put up. So, I decided to add a new Shorts category, Snippets. Unfortunately I didn't plan this ahead and most of the previous ones are gone. Well, un-saved as such. The art and text are still around I just have to find and put them together. I don't exactly remember which ones I reused, so there's bound to be some re-reruns. Oh, well.

Filed under Snippets 1/29/15

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 grâce. 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 under Snippets 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