Magic Number

And the number is: 978-1-84753-300-5.

The Spine is Evil

[reading: Skippy Blair, "Disco to Tango and Back"; recently: Simon Lovell, "How To Cheat At Everything"]

Drat; forgot to add extra space on the inside margins of my current typesetting project, so I had to go back through all of the chapters and re-set everything. Like the man said, the spine is evil.

Mind Hack #39

[reading: Jón Árnason, Alan Boucher (translator), "Icelandic Folk Tales"]

One of the MindHacks that doesn't include an easy demonstration is Hack 39, where you're less likely to notice a trigger event if it occurs soon (say, <0.5s) after another trigger event.

(Now that I've got into the content rather than being distracted by the typesetting, the book is turning out to be rather good.)

My first attempt to test this out is below, but I have to say that the effect didn't seem all that strong to me—so maybe there's a bug or I've implemented it wrong. Or maybe I'm just too impatient to run it for long enough to get statistically significant data.

After hitting "Go", this applet will display letters for a tenth of a second each. You should hit a key whenever the letter displayed is either "X" or is displayed in white. To stop the applet, hit "Stop" or press the Escape key.

After running the applet, the bar graph shows the time between triggers (on the X axis) against how many triggers there were with that delay; the white is the total number shown, the black is the subset of them that were missed. Hitting "Go" again accumulates more data.

(Download source code)

Technical Details: letters are picked uniformly (so there's a 1/26 chance of a letter X trigger) and white is used for the colour 1/20 of the time. A trigger is considered hit if there's a keypress within 1 second after the trigger, but each keypress only counts once (so "trigger, trigger, keypress, letters…" would count as one hit then one missed trigger, with a delay of 1).

[A:37385 B:3278 C:346 D:9187 E:46445 Total:96641]

Editing Hacks

[reading: Tom Stafford & Matt Webb, "Mind Hacks"]

Started reading "Mind Hacks", which looked interesting in the bookshop but the formatting is already starting to annoy me. In that respect, it's the worst book-that's-just-a-printout-of-a-cool-website ever, and that's up against some pretty stiff competition.

• A large fraction of the hacks refer the reader off to movie files or Flash animations on the web. Not very helpful for a physical book that you might want to read on a train.
• "Color: The second color is used to indicate a cross-reference within the text". Except that there is no second color—the relevant parts just come out in a hard-to-read light gray.
• The halftoning for photographs and some of the diagrams is poor—it looks like the output of an 1980's laserprinter.
• I don't know what system they used to produce the book, but it's generated some real oddities in linebreaking (mostly around URLs). Favourite so far: a line break after the decimal point in "3.3" (page 144).

Still, the content might be OK once I get into it, and at least they include lots of references to the original literature.

[25-Nov-06] Edited to clarify that I'm complaining about the formatting rather than the content. Feeling slightly guilty given that one of the authors came over and commented. You'd think I'd have learnt my lesson about who finds what on tha intarweb.

[A:37385 B:3278 C:346 D:9187 E:34361 Total:84557]