BINARY STAR
This shows the trails of some specks of color as they emerge from the members of a binary star. The stars attract the specks of color with forces that diminish with the square of the distance: the blue star attracts the specks of red and the red star attracts the specks of blue. No other forces act on the specks of color, but each fades as it moves.
COIN LAUNDRIES: ROAD TO FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE
Higdon, Emerson G. (Mountain Pub, June 2001, ISBN 9780962317392)
No apartment building in suburbia qualifies as complete until it has its own laundry room. To pay for it, instead of tacking a few extra bucks on to everyone’s rent, we attach coin boxes to the washers and dryers and everyone keeps big jars of change. Each week when you attend to your laundry, rather than the pleasant sense of sharing a resource with your neighbours, you have the sense of an external “management” inconveniencing you for the sake of two dollars in dryer money.
A few years ago, a shrewd friend of mine started to strike back by manufacturing his own dryer change out of ice. He freezes disks of ice in his icebox using the plastic rings from the necks of soda bottles and then shaves them down to the right thickness. The coin slot never knows the difference. Continue reading
A SCANNER DARKLY
Dick, Philip K. (Doubleday, 1977, ISBN 0385016131)
My grandfather bought the Volkswagen in 1968. He imported it direct from Germany and shifted the steering column over to the right-hand side.
A year later man set foot on the moon. Continue reading
POLICING PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION: AN ENVIRONMENTAL AND PROCEDURAL EVALUATION OF BUS STOPS
Kooi, Brandon R. (LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2007, series: “Criminal Justice: Recent Scholarship”, ISBN 9781593321468)
One day, some transport minister may decide to give up his car for a year so he can experience the reality of relying on public transport. Unless he and all his mistresses live on a train line, he will sit in a lot of bus stops. Some of these, like the ones in Clayton, will follow the old-fashioned, comfortable design of an ass-width plank with either a straight backrest or one arched to match the human spine. Some others, like the unenclosed seats in Mt. Waverley, leave out the backrest, which does no harm. But if the minister rides out to Oakleigh, his backside will discover special pain benches that replace the backrest with a thick horizontal pole at scapula height.
The benches themselves arch downwards to stop you from trying to perch at the front edge away from the pole. They measure twenty-eight centimetres deep, but the pole overhangs them by twelve centimetres. Continue reading
GREETING PASSERSBY
Since August, I’ve made a point of saying hello to people on the street. When out walking, if I pass someone, I say, “Hello!” or, “Good afternoon, Sir!”. People hate it. They become uncomfortable, as if I’ve invaded their personal space. Moreover, they resent having to reply. At best, they mumble back the reciprocal greeting as if discharging an irritating obligation. Almost nobody looks pleased to do it.
A Chinese woman to whom I said “good afternoon” flinched and moved over to the extreme margin of the footpath. A Sikh family recited back “good… afternoon… sir” in unison, looking pained. A gent in a sleeveless shirt told me to bugger off, and then quickened his stride. A woman in a purple jumpsuit said “good afternoon to you too!”, but her dog pissed on me. A little, rolling fatman at the bus stop said, “hey now?” confused, and then eyed me until I rounded the corner. And a heroin dealer told me he’d found himself, “about to ask you the same thing, mate”, which I thought cause for concern. Continue reading
TEN
This shows the trails of some specks of colour as they emerge from ten moving bodies. The bodies come in two contrasting breeds; five belong to one breed and five belong to the other. Each body accelerates towards the closest body of the opposite breed with a constant magnitude of acceleration.
At regular intervals, each body emits a burst of ten specks of colour in a narrow fan to either side of the direction opposite to its velocity. Each speck of colour emerges at a speed of ten times the speed of the body that emits it. After that, its velocity doesn’t change. Ten such intervals after the speck of colour emerges, it disappears. Continue reading
SPOUT
This shows the pathways of droplets discharged by a moving spout.
The spout targets a point near the centre of the image. It starts out with a velocity not parallel to its displacement from that point and then accelerates towards it with constant magnitude of acceleration. Meanwhile, it discharges droplets in the opposite direction to its velocity. Continue reading
THE HIGH COST OF FREE PARKING
Shoup, Donald (APA Planners Press; Updated edition, June 21, 2011, ISBN 9781932364965)
When I pulled up outside Avi’s, a man ran out of his apartment to watch me park. He wore a singlet tucked into a pair of yellow slacks. He had his hands up. While I reversed in, he hurled anxious glances back and forth between the front and back of my car.
This makes it harder to park. Continue reading
YELLING ACROSS THE PARKING LOT
I like when a vacationing American couple park at the store or attraction and the husband goes in so he can ask questions and yell the information back to his wife.
“Pardon me, Sir,” he asks, “but do you have unleaded gasoline?” Continue reading
YOU’LL LOVE COLES COCOA PUFFS
This shows the front panel from a box of You’ll Love Coles brand cocoa puffs: Continue reading
LOW DOWN
My brother saw an advertisement on late night TV for an onomantic service where for fifty cents you could SMS your partner’s name to their random number generator and it would tell you whether the partner remained faithful to you. What sort of misanthrope comes up with something like this? It seems like the social equivalent of starting a fire in a movie theatre.
NERDS FABLE
The basic nerd’s fable amounts to the conceit that the majority of the populace qualify as fools. In many versions, it includes the corollary that one may blame most of society’s ills on their foolishness.
Since it provides a pretext for haughtiness as well as grounds to shirk responsibility for society’s faults, a nerd who manages to remain undaunted by its juvenileness may still turn to it for comfort long after he has given up on Santa Claus, Jesus Christ or the Easter Bunny.