Skip navigation.

A scientific approach to anime

Tuesday, 16. June 2009, 19:00:17

, , , ...


In science we are taught to test the validity of theories by looking for verifiable claims and then testing them.
For absolutely no reason at all, I have decided to take the same approach with anime. Some anime takes huge liberties with scientific laws, whereas other anime, for instance Moyashimon, is packed with hard scientific fact which forms the basis of much of the story.

Anyway here are two claims made in anime stories which might be tested scientifically, one more easily than the other.
1) Cherry blossom petals fall at 5cm/sec. (source: 5 Centimetres Per Second)

2) If you shorten your skirt by 2cm then you can fly further than yesterday (source: K-On)

Let's look at these claims a bit more closely.

In 5 Centimetres Per Second, Akari states that cherry blossom petals always fall at 5cm/sec. Since she gives a constant speed, I think it is safe to assume she is talking about the terminal velocity of petals in still air. In principle this is easy to test, unfortunately cherry blossom season is now over until next year, so a proper experiment will have to wait. However there must be many videos which include the sight of falling cherry blossom so approximate measurements could certainly be made.

From the theoretical standpoint, one might produce a formula for calculating the forces on a cherry blossom petal, however this is not straightforward. In addition to the force of gravity acting on the mass of the petal, and the air resistance acting on the surface area of the petal, we must also consider that the petal flutters, spinning and see-sawing as it falls. This will use up a significant amount of the gravitational force, and the changing orientation of the petal will also alter the air resistance, e.g. when the petal is oriented vertically it will fall much faster. So the motion would be pretty hard to model! To understand the importance of the petals spinning, consider that physicist Richard Feynman once noted that a ball rolling down an inclined plane will only accelerate at 5/7 of the speed that the law of gravity would give you for the angle of slope, since the other 2/7 is used up making the ball rotate. So really unless you are a theoretician of Nobel Prize winning stature like Feynman (who once worked out the equations to explain the rate of wobble of a dinner plate spinning on the end of a stick!) you need to do the experiment first and worry about the theory afterwards (if at all!).

Anyway, next time I will report back on whether I have found any actual footage of cherry blossom falling, also on another question: does the cherry blossom in 5 Centimetres Per Second itself fall at the claimed rate or not? (Preliminary examination says: not!)

Turning now to Claim Number 2 which is made in the OP song of the anime K-On, I will have to defer detailed discussion of that to next time due to lack of time. However it looks to be somewhat tricky, since the obvious way of testing it is to get a girl wearing a skirt to take a flying leap and see if she goes further after trimming her skirt by two centimetres. Needless to say, the repeatability of such an experiment is somewhat problematic. Moreover, note that the specific claim is "further than yesterday" which implies one must compare results of flights that were 24 hours apart, which introduces further variability!

Don’t miss next weeks exciting installment of verifiable anime tales in which I will attempt to recruit a statistically significant number of girls in short skirts to test the K-On claim!

3 Comments

Life is an Adventure

Thursday, 28. May 2009, 14:17:21

, 


You are in a house. There is a boiler here.
A gas engineer is expected soon.
What do you want to do?
> Wait

Time passes. 
> Wait

More time passes.
The appointment time is nearly over.
> Ring maintenance company

You ring Planned Maintenance Ltd.
A voice says "the engineer says he called but no-one was in".
Do you want to
a) Call them liars and demand compensation.
b) Sigh and agree to another appointment.
c) Ask the council to sack the contractor.
> B

You agree to another appointment in 7 days time.
What do you want to do?
> Go shopping

Go where?
> Tescos

You cycle to Tescos.
There is food here.
> Check prices

The price of fruit and veg. has gone up another 25%.
Do you want to
a) Curse the liar Gordon Brown for saying food prices are coming down
b) Cry and pay
c) Make do with bread and biscuits again
> C

You buy bread and biscuits again.
What do you want to do?
> Go sadly home

I do not know where sadly home is.
Your health level is dropping.
> Check health

The doctor says:
You are unfit.
You are depressed.
You are 5 portions short of your "5 a day" of fruit and veg.
You are a swine flu carrier.

What do you want to do?
> Go sadly home

I do not know where sadly home is.

1 Comment

half way to starting

Tuesday, 26. May 2009, 02:58:41

This current look to the blog is just a temporary revamp to fix some CSS problems with the page. I've decided to disable the underlying themes and stylesheets entirely since when they change, things tend to get screwed up, like I noticed the sidebar wasn't going where it should.

So I've spent a bit of time hacking my user.css so it works without needing the supporting stylesheets that used to define some of the stuff. Anyway, now I've got it roughly back to how it used to be in the first place, I can actually do some proper redesign to the blog!

No comments

That Scamp Haruhi; Yuki and Axiomatic Set Theory

Sunday, 24. May 2009, 18:58:05

, ,

So finally the second season of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (or if you prefer, Suzumiya Haruhi) is being slipped out as extra episodes interspersed amongst a rebroadcasting of the first series. Or rather, series two is in fact a superset of the first series and the new episodes. A Venn diagram would make everything clear, WHICH IS WHY YOU WILL FIND NO VENN DIAGRAMS HERE! Instead let’s look at the heiroglyphs that the young Haruhi of three years ago ordered Kyon to draw, compared to a slip of paper which had earlier been passed to him by Yuki, three years later. (Earlier? Later? It's all relative.)


Of course when we talk of "Haruhi three years ago", we might mean "Haruhi now, as broadcast three years ago", or "the Haruhi being broadcast now, in events that happened when she was three years younger". Is it a coincidence that Kadokawa et al waited three years into the future before broadcasting events that happened three years in the past? Or were Kyoto Animation just busy making Lucky Star, K-On and Clannad?
Of course, when I say "of course" it is just a rhetorical device. In reality (by which I mean, in fiction), there is of course no "of course" with Haruhi.
But on to the main point, which is Yuki's cryptic comment about the antinomies of axiomatic set theory.


What Yuki actually meant to say was this (taken from The Mathematical Experience, p322, click for full size image if you can't read it)


In other words (my own, in fact), what Kyon is saying is that Mikuru's claim (in ep.3 or 5 of the original series (depending on whether you use Haruhi or Kyon ordering)) that people can be inserted into an alternate time frame without affecting subsequent time frames, is inconsistent with the "bamboo" incident where his meeting Haruhi three years ago has affected subsequent events, specifically it inspired Haruhi to come to North High School.

Yuki's response essentially uses the example of mathematics to note that even in the most logical of all endeavours, things don't necessarily add up. In mathematics, people always assumed certain fundamental principles were guaranteed true in themselves without having to refer to the real world. But then, things that had been seen as sacrosanct for over a thousand years, such as the principles of geometry, were one by one found to be dodgy (eg. due to the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry).

As a result, mathematicians cast around for new fundamental principles which might underpin mathematics before it sank into the mire of subjectivity and empiricism. One candidate for this was Set Theory. Sets are just groups of objects which can be defined by some common sense description, such as "girls with brightly coloured hair" or "numbers greater than zero". As such Set Theory seemed a useful generalisation of logic, which is also built up from combinations of simple expressions.

Unfortunately there was a Boogiepop Phantom in the woodpile. Bertrand Russell realised (as any linguist could have told him) that it was possible to make a pair of seemingly common sense descriptions which contradicted one another or even themselves, such as a set of sets which contains "all sets which contain themselves". When you then make the inverse of this, "the set of all sets which do no contain themselves", you get a paradox, since such a set neither contains, nor does not contain, itself.

So in summary, when Kyon says "this doesn't add up", and Yuki says "Axiomatic set theory ... contains antinomies", she is saying "shit happens, even in pure mathematics".

(Actually, I thought Koizumi made the point more elegantly when he pocketed the king from the chessboard so as to get out of check. As he noted, there was nothing illogical about his action, and yet it totally violated the rules of chess. In other words having one set of perfectly self-consistent rules doesn't preclude you from having another set of self-consistent rules which totally contradict the first set. Which ultimately is what the antinomies nonsense boils down to.)

3 Comments

Sunflower redux

Thursday, 7. May 2009, 21:45:49

Recently I've been obsessing a lot over some sunflower photos I took last year, playing around with them and using them for various things. Most of the shots, such as this one, were taken with the equivalent of a 400mm lens which gives nice differential focus.
photo by Hiroyuki
Something I like doing with images is reducing the number of colours to posterise them. Posterisation used to be a very longwinded process with chemical photography but with digital it only takes a few clicks, at least in principle. In practice though I find it takes ages to get the individual colours exactly how you want them.

Anyhow, first here is an 8-colour posterisation of the above sunflower photo in which I've kept the brighter yellows and greens as faithfully as possible but let the midtones go.
photo by Hiroyuki
Next is an embossed 8-colour posterisation of the same photo with an eye to impact and no real regard for colour fidelity. I feel that adding the embossing makes it look like it was painted with a palette knife.
photo by Hiroyuki

1 Comment

Tater^H^H^H^H^H tATu....

Tuesday, 5. May 2009, 00:35:39

I can't quite believe I’ve never heard this before but I just heard t.A.T.u’s 2002 album 200Km/h in the Wrong Lane for the first time and every track is brilliant!

Of course I was aware of their hit single at the time, All The Things She Said and the accompanying controversy over the antics of the two schoolgirls that tATu was, but perhaps because of this I didn't take them seriously. Looking at the album I see it is co-produced by Trevor Horn and it certainly has the qualities I would expect of one of his productions.

2 Comments

Room with a View

Tuesday, 21. April 2009, 22:41:01


This is a photo of the view from my bedroom window, taken in the late afternoon.

There is something about the ever changing sky that makes me keep photographing it, like Nao in Windy Tales.

2 Comments

Bazalgette's cathedral

Thursday, 16. April 2009, 02:53:20

It’s been a long time since I posted anything so here’s a piccy I took the other day at an establishment which has been euphemistically called "Bazalgette’s Cathedral".
It is in fact a Victorian edifice to sewage designed by the engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette, and used to pump half of London’s sewage away to avoid it fouling the River Thames (at least, until it had passed Central London that is!). (A matching building on the other side of the river handled the other half of the city’s sewage.) The massive building (it really is the size of a small cathedral or large church) is now defunct, having been replaced by a new building that looks like an upturned stainless steel hull, which I mean to photograph if I can ever find an interesting angle on it.

2 Comments

Photoduck

Tuesday, 24. February 2009, 23:23:18

,

I recently discovered a daily cartoon strip about photography, following the fledgling career of W.T.Duck. Yes, he's a duck who happens to be a photographer. Although not every strip hits the mark, it’s amusing enough to keep me reading it every day along with my usual dose of Dilbert. Here’s the text of one of the strips giving a comeback for that annoying "compliment" photographers often get:
Person: "Your camera takes really nice pictures."
WTD: "Your mouth makes really nice compliments."

No comments

Waxing Lyrical

Monday, 16. February 2009, 22:23:26

, , , ...

Previously on Pocket PC...

I use my Pocket PC a lot as an MP3/Ogg Vorbis player. Up to now, I've been using the free Japanese GSplayer program from Green Software for this (pictured right. NB: these are reduced resolution screen shots, the real displays look much clearer). In general it's been a good player. It has a minimalist interface, with most of the screen being sensibly used to show the playlist instead of making you switch to a different view to see that info. The only real bad point of GSplayer is its tendency to hang if the machine goes into standby when you pause playback for too long. Apart from that my only quibble has been the need to navigate fiddly submenus to do some things, since there are very few onscreen buttons.

The next exciting install...

So anyway my attention was recently caught by another freeware player, Winvibe, written by a Korean guy. Its default skin is a terrible Winamp clone (not shown here, I'm only going to show the cool stuff!). By "terrible" I mean, it's terrible because it looks like Winamp!

A Short Rant

If I might digress for a moment, why do so many programmers want to emulate illegible 7 segment LEDs and the cramped little displays of cheap hardware units when they have a whole computer screen and truetype fonts at their disposal? Most particularly, why cram the track/artist/album info into a tiny single line window which it can’t possibly fit, and then scroll it back and forth, whilst most of the screen space goes unused? Why not use the space for a decent 3-4 full-line display of track info? Sadly, no player that I know of does this, and Winvibe is no exception here (though it turns out there is a workaround).


Winvibe with small lyric window


Simply tap the lyrics window to toggle its size, displacing some or all of the buttons.


Winvibe's whole-song lyric window

Anyhow on the legibility front, there is fortunately a nice "brushed chrome" skin available for Winvibe, ok so this one still emulates something, an LCD display, but at least it's legible and looks quite cool actually.

Lyrics!

But anyhow at the bottom of the screenshot you can see the really cool thing that attracted me to Winvibe: it can display timed lyrics, a line at a time, using .LRC files. Since I listen to a lot of foreign language music (mainly from Japanese anime) being able to read the lyrics during playback is a very nice feature to have. Winvibe can show the current and next lyric in a resizable window at the bottom of the screen (in these screenshots the current lyric is shown in dark grey and the next lyric in pale grey, but all the text colours/fonts are user-definable). Winvibe can also show the whole song in a separate display with a moving highlight indicating the current one. All in all it's very nice, and you can choose the fonts and colours to suit your needs. A nice touch is that when you have lyrics for a song, the ffwd/rewind buttons advance the track a line at a time instead of a fixed number of seconds, and in whole-song display mode, tapping a line jumps playback to that line.

The only quibble I would have is that the full-screen view doesn't take note of the "/" line breaks in multiline lyrics, and there's no way to clearly display multilingual lines: I've adopted the simple convention of putting a # in front of the Romaji text to distinguish it from the English, but being able to set a different colour text would be nice.

LRC lyrics files

Of course, you do need some timed lyrics for all this to work.... it's possible to download some, but I also converted a couple from anime subtitles or other sources. LRC files are just text files with timing info at the start of each line. Here are a couple I made, which you can see in the screenshots:

  • Mameshiba.lrc ED for Earth Maiden Arjuna by Yoko Kanno, sung by Maaya Sakamoto. (Mameshiba means "little Shiba dog", it's a wonderful song which seems to be from the dog's point of view: "call my name and I'll come running... I’ll show you who can get there soonest!")
  • God Knows (Live).lrc live performance by Suzumiya Haruhi & ENOZ :wink: (ok it's really Aya Hirano)
  • Koko Made Oide.lrc OP for the anime NieA_7 by SION (tv length: culled from the DVD subs).
LRC lyrics can also be used by some hardware players and desktop computer music players, so hopefully these files may be of some use to other people too.

You can skip this technical bit

Anyhow, so I'm having fun with this new player, though I've come to the conclusion that making timed lyric files on the Pocket PC itself is a bit of a chore. To time these ones I used a nice syntax-highlighting text editor for the PPC called CKE, however I immediately hit a snag: all PPC programs run permanently full-screen, so although I could hear the mp3 playing in the background, I couldn't see the time readout! To solve this I had to use another utility, Float Me which magically un-maximises the windows so you can resize them: It turns out Windows Mobile does have resizable windows, it's just that Microsoft didn't want you to know about it and gave no button for demaximising them! So now I could see the player and CKE together (a tight squeeze once you include the pop-up keyboard too!) Then of course I needed screenshots for my blog! For that I used my usual picture viewer, XnView, which has a good capture function.

The case for the opposition

Are there any downsides to Winvibe? Well unfortunately yes. It does seem to use twice as much cpu (and thus battery power) as other players, is somewhat sluggish to respond to controls, and rather weird with VBR MP3s, which it tends to cut off prematurely unless you let it spend 10 seconds analysing them first. I don't know why this is, but the general sluggishness & high cpu usage makes me think it's written in interpreted rather than compiled code.

2 Comments

1 2 3 4 5 ... 11 Next »

Showing posts 1 - 10 of 103.

July 2009
M T W T F S S
June 2009August 2009
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31

Site Navigation

my writings

  • On Haibane Renmei

    discussing the deeper meanings of Yoshitoshi Abe’s anime series Haibane Renmei (AshenWings Union)

  • Lain—Net or Alive?

    My paranoic-critical analysis of the anime Serial Experiments Lain, discussing: Existence, Chisa, The Sound of Lain, and God

  • The Girl Who Slept Through Time

    Crossover doujinshi of Lucky☆Star and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo)